Category: Earth versus World

World vs Earth …

Back into the Ooze
Back into the Ooze 2019
by Rita de Heer

Climate change is a World-versus-Earth problem, I heard the other day.

Apparently people still don’t know how completely dependent on Earth our World is. The dragon will pass us by, and with a flick of its flaming tongue, or tail, will drag us with it into the inferno.

Earth is a planet that supports Life and is an inseparable part of it.

World is the human culture, the where and the what that we build and extract and dig and superimpose on the soil, that thinnest of layers between us and bed-rock.

The same bed-rock that we can not survive on without the natural services provided by sunlight, water, air, and soil. Is that really so hard to understand?

Air? Another thin thin layer. Above us. Blue where and when the Earth continues its work. A disgusting tan yellow where we think we have improved our lives. Where industry and wrong-living coughs out smoke and smog, dust and death. Dragons.

Water. Oh my people, Ocean is in so much trouble. We warm it. We degrade it. We dynamite and pillage, we fill it with cast-off refuse, we leak oil and bilge waters, spread disease and alien creatures, and still we expect whales, pristine rain, sparkling springs and sweet lakes of fresh water.

Life is the miracle that has become, and grown, and evolved over unimaginable distances and stretches of time. Life is the lives that by the millions have come and have gone, like stitches over and under, through the fabric of time.

We sapiens, living for ten or twenty thousand generations and perhaps two more, will dive under and also be gone.

Anxiety Rears its Head

David Gangur’s Stormy Sunset

So I read an article about World War III, how it’s already begun. I respect Stan Grant, the author, for his integrity so don’t find the content suspicious. Link included below for your interest. But the content of this article just aggregates with all the other anxiety-inducing news I’ve read since the Northern NSW floods.

I have an anxiety disorder and owe it to myself to not to step back onto the anxiety/immune system problems/inflammation treadmill after all the work I’ve done to get off it. I realize that to dampen down my increasing agitation, I need to back off from negative social media sensationalizing world problems.

I’m already doing what I can in relation to the primary challenge of our times–extreme climate change– and can’t do anything about the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. From this point on, I won’t be writing any letters to politicians, and I won’t be re-posting frightening, Earth-shattering scenarios.

I will be scrolling past all organizations asking for donations. I have my charities and will stick by them. I may post about real-world efforts towards mitigation, when and where I find them. I will continue to blog about science, art, story telling and story making, music and all the other things that tickle my fancy.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-10/russia-invasion-ukraine-rumblings-world-war-three-decades-ago/100977334?utm_source=abc_news_web&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_web&utm_content=link

TV: Muster Dogs

trailer: https://iview.abc.net.au/video/MP2147H010C00GN1

The four part program is the kind of reality TV that starts with a litter of puppies. It’s informative as well as good fun. The human handlers have been picked for their variety of work situation for their dogs to grow up in, and their personality and probable bonding with the pups.

The ‘plot’ is that five puppies of great breeding stock are transformed into working dogs in one year! When normally the training is up to three years. The question is, can it be done?

Last night I watched Parts 1 and 2 and saw the puppies transformed into 6 months old triers. Five passed their assessments easily, one having a few troubles including another dog in its pack having to be taken to the vet for snake-bite.

With over three thousand working dogs in Australia, muster dogs helping to manage cattle, goats, alpacas, sheep and even poultry is a reality in this country. Several of the people taking part in this ABC (Australia) series once mustered with humans-on-horseback, humans-on-motorbikes, and helicopter. Now working with up to twenty dogs, they say they’ll never go back.

The animals being managed are quieter, calmer, and not nervous and skittish. Mustering with dogs is time-saving, can be done in one day and can be done without a lot of forward planning such as needed with more people or machinery. Dogs are cheaper to run than helicopters and machinery, and a lot more love-able. Dogs are more sustainable and environmentally friendly as they are not as hard on the land as both horses and machinery.

It’s a great show! Can be seen on ABC iView.

Have a look at the trailer: https://iview.abc.net.au/video/MP2147H010C00GN1

‘Plan B’

Low-hanging stratocumulus sunset over Mullumbimby, Northern NSW

Plan B is where you go when Plan A evaporates.

It’s sobering to see a map of where climate activists hang out and where they do not. Just go to https://350.org/ and you will see the sad fact of the matter.

Plan A has been evaporating… I doubt that anyone in the science of it still believes the world can claw back to less than 2 degrees warming and therefore that much more, more violent weather. Probably we are already in that bracket.

And now there’s a war looming. Even if it does end up being posturing, millions of units of extra exhaust gases will have been pumped into the atmosphere to get the elements of the threat to the Ukraine borders.

It’s still winter up there in the northern hemisphere. Would a severe cold snap stop proceedings?

Can hope.

Intertwined: 3

Moonrise Seaweed Company

When I get news of a project that, if it can get up, will help resolve some of the global problems our society has got us into, I get my hopes up that we can scrabble back from the brink.

But only if most of us support the few who have it in them to think up, design, test their concept and then finance it. That’s where the majority of us can help.

So there’s this one, Moonrise Seaweed Company. A promising initiative by two ocean lovers that will help save kelp and other seaweeds, help fix carbon dioxide in a natural way and will pay for itself with the products being developed.

Have a look at the products already offered as rewards for the different pledges. Now imagine a doubling and tripling of output. Have a look at the campaign. Break into the piggy bank that you keep to help negate climate change and help this project get up and running.

Short link: http://kck.st/3qUsbEk

Intertwined?

Days 4-7 of Inktober 2021, a cultural practice by Rita de Heer

Just how intertwined are we, with Nature?

Here, in this cultural practice of applying pigments to paper, pasting scraps to paper bound in book-form, and drawing over the top with an ink pen made of petrol-based polymer filled with petrol-based ink?

Not much at all. Because cultural practices are part of what we do in the World, right?

Pigments are powdered clays, lichens and mosses, madders and goldenrods, rust, verdigris, pewter and gold. Some of Nature’s bounty.

Bound with gums, latex, and oils.

En-tubed, slopped into pots, or dried in patties.

[Sold, which is a whole other story.]

Livened with water … the best is straight from the deep ground, unadulterated with unnatural chemicals such as chlorine and fluorides.

Applied to papers linens, canvas, parchments; wood panels, bone, and teeth; applied to stone.

Using brushes made of bunching the tail hairs of a myriad of different furry animals, as well as threads drawn from petroleum products such as nylon, rayon, polyesters: all of them products of the sun’s action on eon-old vegetation when you go right to the origin.

Air drying is preferable but takes a long time, so people who can’t wait use hair-dryers that often use a variation on the theme, electricity stoked with coal.

[If framed, that’s another story]

We are intertwined.