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VIII. Earth Earns: An Open Participatory Earthropocene to Astropocene CoCreative Future

A. The Old World: Its Archaic, Polar, War Torn, Rapacious Critical Life Support Condition

Perkins, Sid. Sudden Chill. Science News. February 3, 2007. The danger exists that even a limited nuclear exchange, such as between India and Pakistan, could still precipitate a global weather calamity. The amount of combustible material in a large city like Bangalore, along with other mutually destroyed urban areas, could spew so much ash into the atmosphere as to darken and cool the whole planet.

That a nuclear winter could be triggered by a regional war is particularly ironic, adds Stephen Schneider, a climate scientist at Stanford University. A few decades ago, people were afraid that an all-out nuclear war between superpowers would trigger a climate catastrophe. Today, the United States and Russia could simply end up as helpless bystanders – who would nevertheless be left out in the cold. (74)

Pitoski, Dino, et al.. The Complex Network Patterns of Human Migration at Different Geographical Scales: Network Science meets Regression Analysis. arXiv:2310.14922. University of Rijeka, Croatia and Maastricht University, the Netherlands computer scientists deftly apply these latest nonlinear dynamical theories to achieve, as not before, implicate mathematical explanations for even these enforced movements driven by dire conflict or weather causes. A similar Eastern European project would be Motifs in earthquake networks: Romania, Italy, United States of America by Gabriel Tiberiu and Alexandru Nicolin-Żaczek in Physica A for October, 2023. Some good news might be the very idea of insightful abilities like this could provide a novel depth of understandings and guidance in desperate need.

Migration's influence in shaping population dynamics due to climate and population crises exposes its crucial role in upholding societal cohesion. This study delves into two distinctive areas: the "why" basis, which identifies the factors driving migration by regression models which span economic, demographic, geographic, cultural, and political phases; and the "how" aspect, which views migration routes by way of network complexity. Our work presents a comprehensive overview of recent research, highlighting gaps in each field and their interconnectedness. (Excerpt)

To conclude, we take this study to be of good value in terms of revealing the gaps within and between Migration Studies and Network Science applied to human migration. At this point, while migration is perhaps still a manageable phenomenon, the policymakers may incorporate the knowledge on migration patterns to finally start building policies that will handle migration which is destined to intensify, and have an impact on all societal aspects, in the very near future. (20)

Polgreen, Lydia. In a Report From a Distant Border, I Glimpsed Our Brutal Future. New York Times. August 24, 2023. (As I write, F16s roar overhead from Westover AFB.) An African American opinion journalist comments on the massacre noted below as an ominous sign as violent, tribal, environmental forces drive such tragic movements. In regard, we restate a basic intent of this now PediaPedia Earthica resource website to try to enter, outline and document the advent of a salutary, wumanwise dispensation to save the rare bioplanet and a better for future children

Once in a while, some single thing manages to encapsulate all that feels terrible about our world today. For me, this week, it was a bone-chilling report from Human Rights Watch documenting how Saudi border guards had killed hundreds — perhaps thousands — of Ethiopians seeking to cross from Yemen into Saudi Arabia.

“If I’m elected president, we’re going to end Trump’s assault on the dignity of immigrant communities,” Biden said in his acceptance speech at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. I am certain that President Biden believed these words. His administration is playing the hand it has been dealt. But as the events in the Saudi desert illustrate, this century is going to be nasty, brutish and long.

Porter, Eduardo. Planet-Cooling Technology May Be Earth’s Only Hope. New York Times. April 5, 2017. We enter this article among thousands to record the mounting distress that global climate has reached as a state of increasingly rapid, catastrophic change. Its basis is a Forum on U.S. Solar Geoengineering Research held in Washington in March which tried to gain some bearings and reasonable response.

Posner, Richard. Catastrophe: Risk and Response. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. A methodical working through the four main classes of potential terminal disasters: natural such as pandemics and asteroids, technology out of control, inordinate exhaustion of resources with a side effect of global climate change, and deliberate nuclear warfare, bioterrorism, and other niceties of a world civilization unable to realize its organic unity and purpose.

Rashid, Harunur, et al, eds. Abrupt Climate Change. Washington, DC: American Geophysical Union, 2011. With coeditors Leonid Polyak and Ellen Mosley-Thompson at the Byrd Polar Research Center, Ohio State University, the proceedings of the APU 2009 Chapman Conference on mechanisms, millennial time scales, and extreme impacts of a global weather system with a long history of suddenly shifting to a new, unpredictable set point.

Reed, Betsy, ed.. Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism and Terror. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002. With the resurgence of intolerance in the Muslim world, throughout South Asia, and also in Christian countries, the brutalization of women is actually on the increase. Yet the path to peace begs for feminine values of conciliation, non-violence and community. Many papers address empowerment, literacy, justice and activism.

Robock, Alan and Owen Brian Toon. Local Nuclear War, Global Suffering. Scientific American. January, 2010. With the Cold War between the United States and Russia largely over, we were thought to be safe from its grave threat of a “nuclear winter” by a planet shrouded by debris from a full or large exchange. However these environmental scientists contend that with so many nuclear states popping up, even a regional war such as between India and Pakistan could still so disrupt the planetary atmosphere as to cause such a catastrophe for the biosphere.

Sagan, Scott. A Call for Global Nuclear Disarmament. Nature. 487/30, 2012. A Stanford University political scientist, who has been sounding this alarm for two decades, warns of a new cycle of clandestine proliferation, that we really ought to recognize, address and resolve. I don’t know if there is a relation, but I remember hearing Carl Sagan speak eloquently in the 1980s about nuclear winter, which in the 1990s was thought to be mostly abated. Again in these 2010s, ever bent on Armageddon, male monkeys with atomic arsenals can’t stop fighting over tribe and turf until all is ashes.

Sale, Peter. Our Dying Planet: An Ecologist's View of the Crisis We Face. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Due in September, (the book not demise) a University of Windsor ecologist laments what appears to be, if not immediately remediated, an inexorable, precipitous decline and senescence of Earth’s life and human support systems. An example is fisheries, both for their own survival, and that of people. But an insidious cause, one might add, might be our cultural vacuity and loss of a nerve and will to live. This subject edition could be bracketed between two other 2011 UCP books: David Deamer’s First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began which alludes to an intrinsic drive and direction, and The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions. by Alex Rosenberg, Duke University philosophy chair, which buys into the pointless physics and aimless evolution view so as to praise a “nice nihilism.”

Coral reefs are on track to become the first ecosystem actually eliminated from the planet. So says leading ecologist Peter F. Sale in this crash course on the state of the planet. Sale draws from his own extensive work on coral reefs, and from recent research by other ecologists, to explore the many ways we are changing the earth and to explain why it matters. Weaving into the narrative his own firsthand field experiences around the world, Sale brings ecology alive while giving a solid understanding of the science at work behind today’s pressing environmental issues. He delves into topics including overfishing, deforestation, biodiversity loss, use of fossil fuels, population growth, and climate change while discussing the real consequences of our growing ecological footprint. Most important, this passionately written book emphasizes that a gloom-and-doom scenario is not inevitable, and as Sale explores alternative paths, he considers the ways in which science can help us realize a better future. (Publisher)

Schell, Jonathan. Genesis in Reverse. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. January/February, 2007. The author of the 1982 classic tract against nuclear war The Fate of the Earth decries that a quarter century later a real threat remains not from superpowers but through an insidious spread of armaments with the same terminal consequence. Moreover, this article leads off a special issue called Approaching Midnight. The Doomsday Clock this journal set in place after WWII has now been advanced from seven to five minutes before twelve in response not only to rogue weaponry but a host of apocalyptic climate, technological, political, and religious perils. Martin Rees, Freeman Dyson, Sam Keen, Stephen Schneider, Tony Hallam, and others weigh in with trenchant commentaries. Schell concludes that only a profoundly new palliative social vision will turn the tide.

Schell, Jonathan. The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. Some 25 years after The Fate of the Earth, and 70 years after the release of the atomic genie, Schell is compelled to restate his case. Rather than two superpowers, today nuclear technology is morphing and proliferating to rogue, disenfranchised groups, large and small, while first world nations rearm with next generation designs and deployment. All efforts at environmental sustainability will be for naught unless such this rampant weapons addiction is shown to be the death wish it is, and a 21st century culture of life can flourish. In the quote, Schell compares global warming to this terminal threat.

The two perils have a great deal in common. Both are the fruits of swollen human power – in the one case, the destructive power of war; in the other, the productive power of fossil-fuel energy. Both put stakes on the table of a magnitude never present before in human decision making. Both threaten life on a planetary scale. Both require a fully global response. Anyone concerned by the one should be concerned with the other. It would be a shame to save the Earth from slowly warming only to burn it up in an instant in a nuclear war. (7)

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