VIII. Earth Earns: An Open CoCreative Earthropocene to Astropocene PediaVerse

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

Pearce, Fred. Doomsday Scenario. New Scientist. November 22, 2003. The environmental effects of last two centuries of the “Anthropocene” era are now having a precipitous global impact. Expectation of a gentle warming are misplaced. The quite real danger is that sudden and irreversible climate change will make the planet much less inhabitable for humans. An integrated Earth Observation System is noted which hopes to study and understand what is going in time.

Pearce, Fred. When the Rivers Run Dry: Water – the Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. A British journalist reports that local and global water maintenance and husbandry is the critical, decisive factor in years to come with regard to a livable human habitat and survival. A survey article by FP, The Parched Planet, appeared in the February 25, 2006 issue of the New Scientist.

Pearce, Fred. With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007. Our myopic, what-me-worry, mindset sees only a gradual warming of a few degrees over the next century, easily met by technical fixes. The actual scientific fact which needs a strident voice is that our biosphere is on the verge of an abrupt, catastrophic resetting of the global system to either a warmer or cooler state. Earth is a critically poised complex system, as Al Gore presciently wrote 15 years ago, which is now oscillating wildly out of control due to human impacts and may suddenly reset itself. The result will be not milder winters in the wealthy north, but erratic weather patterns which threaten the future fate of civilization. To climate expert Jim Hansen, for example, earth could become “another planet” not fit for human habitation.

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.

Ripple, William, et al. The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth.. Bioscience. October, 2024. Fourteen senior environmental scholars on three continents including Michael Mann, Naomi Oreskes and Johan Rockstrom provide a latest trenchant, critical condition report, as time runs out. Comprehensive sections such as Recent trends in planetary vital signs, Global greenhouse gases and temperature, Oceans and ice and Climate change as a social justice issue sound a clarion call.

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.

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