Maybe a return to Truth and Traditions will get the Earth to change its mind:
Following a recent series of disastrous floods along the Mississippi River and destructive tornadoes across much of the United States—as well as a year of even deadlier natural catastrophes all over the world—the Earth said its options for strongly implying that it no longer wants human beings living on it have basically been exhausted.
But in the wake of the financial crisis, they [ideas and initiatives in socially and environmentally responsible economics] have proliferated and earned a surprising amount of support—and not only among the usual suspects on the left. As the threat of a global climate crisis grows increasingly dire and the nation sinks deeper into an economic slump for which conventional wisdom offers no adequate remedies, more and more Americans are coming to realize that it is time to begin defining, demanding and organizing to build a new-economy movement.
And:
At the cutting edge of experimentation are the growing number of egalitarian, and often green, worker-owned cooperatives. Hundreds of “social enterprises” that use profits for environmental, social or community-serving goals are also expanding rapidly. In many communities urban agricultural efforts have made common cause with groups concerned about healthy nonprocessed food.
BERLIN (AP) — Germany’s coalition government agreed early Monday to shut down all the country’s nuclear power plants by 2022, the environment minister said, making it the first major industrialized power to go nuclear-free since the Japanese disaster.
via Germany to abandon nuclear power by 2022 – USATODAY.com.
Dear Rep. Chris Murphy:
Representative Edward Markey (D-MA) is introducing new legislation – the Nuclear Power Plant Safety Act of 2011.
As your constituent, I am writing to urge you to co-sponsor his bill to ensure a safer future for all Americans. Rep. Markey said:
A nuclear disaster could happen here in America just as it has in Japan, our technological equal. This legislation will ensure that the lessons to be learned from the nuclear meltdown in Japan are incorporated into U.S. regulations to ensure the safety of our nuclear power plants in the United States.
As these catastrophic events have unfolded, it has become clear that the meltdown did not occur primarily because of earthquake-related damage; rather, it occurred because of a prolonged loss of electricity to the reactor cores and their spent nuclear fuel pools. Such events could be caused not just by earthquakes or tsunamis, but by severe storms, terrorist attacks or other events.
The Nuclear Power Plant Safety Act of 2011 will impose a moratorium on ALL new reactor licenses, reactor designs or license extensions until new safety requirements are in place.
If you or your staff have questions or need more information – or if you would like to cosponsor the legislation, please contact Dr. Michal Freedhoff of Markey’s staff at 202-225-2836.
Yours truly,
Charlie Keil
PS: People in Connecticut will be chernobylized and fukushima’d by Indian Point, geologically the most dangerous nuke plant in America! There are plants on fault lines in California that are less likely to “blow” or go “china syndrome” than Indian Point. Haven’t heard you say one mumblin word about the dangers of Indian Point. Do you know which way the wind blows most of the time? From the West to the East?
Don’t think I will vote for a Senator or a Congressman who doesn’t know which way the wind blows.
WASHINGTON – The closest nuclear power plant to tornado-ravaged Joplin, Mo., was singled out weeks before the storm for being vulnerable to twisters.
via ‘Tornado Alley’ reactor not fully twister-proof – Yahoo! News.
Surprise, surprise! How many US nuclear reactors will be in the way of major storms in the next 3 months, 6 months, year?
Of the 65,000 metric tons of highly radioactive spent fuel generated by U.S. reactors, about 75 percent is kept in cooling pools. According to Robert Alvarez, a senior policy advisor in the U.S. Department of Energy in the Clinton administration and co-author of the report, those pools were not designed for the amount of fuel — or the level of radiation — they are holding and are vulnerable to the type of events that crippled the Fukushima plant in Japan in April.
That is to say, the US nuclear establishment – industrialists, businessmen, politicians, and bureaucrats – poses a catastrophic risk to the nation.
via Yale Environment 360: U.S. Spent Nuclear Fuel Pools Pose Catastrophic Risks, Report Claims.
More generally, how can the internet strengthen a small community, and how weaken it?
i think for the first time we can really imagine staying at home in a local economy and still being a part of the larger world. there’s no longer the need to choose between staying by your roots and ‘going out in the world to make something of yourself.
via The Daily Riptonite: Bill McKibben, Riptonite, on communities and climate change: part 3.
Are we looking at a major cultural change?
Green has gone mainstream. Not too long ago, just a small group of deep green consumers existed. Today, 83% of consumers (Source: Natural Marketing Institute, 2009) – representing four generations, Baby Boomers, Millennials, Gen Ys and Gen Zs – are some shade of green. Each in their own way, these generations are quickly transforming what used to be a fringe market that appealed to a faction of eco-hippies is now a bona fide $290 billion industry ranging from organic foods to hybrid cars, ecotourism to green home furnishings.
O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul.S. T. Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp”
Chet Wickwire was one of the most remarkable men I’ve known. He was Chaplain of The Johns Hopkins University in the third quarter of the last century. It’s in that capacity that I came to know him. He was central to both the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements of the 1960s and 1970s; he established a tutorial program that worked with inner city children, and he organized a wide variety of programs that benefited Johns Hopkins students and the local community. I worked for him as a program assistant for two or three years in the early 1970s.
One day during a meeting in his office – it may have been the weekly staff meeting – someone pointed out a possibly injured bee on the floor. My impulse – this is what I thought – was simply to kill it and throw the body into the trash. Chet’s was different. He gently picked the bee up and set it on the window sill. It then flew away.
That simple act of kindness, to a mere insect, impressed me deeply. Every time I think to kill an insect, I think of Chet and the bee. Sometimes I refrain and do what little I can to help the insect along, though often enough I kill the insect. But not without a twinge of guilt and angst, which is distinct from any disgust over contact with squishy insect guts.
But why was Chet unwilling to kill the bee? It is, after all, only an animal, and a rather lowly one at that? The only reasonable answer to that question is that he respected the bee as a living being. And if you ask: Why that? Well, is that not a reasonable why for an adult human being to act?
Just how are we to conduct our relations with other living beings? What degree of respect do we accord to their life? The answers to those questions, of course, vary from one culture to another. One concern here – it’s lurking in the background – is that the answer of the industrialized West, the agribusiness factory farming West is: None. None at all. No respect for other life forms. Is that answer anything less than a suicide pact?
Let me retell a story about my cousin Sue. She was born in the city and raised in the suburbs. But in her mid-30s or so she moved to the country and married a veterinarian. She began to raise sheep, not as pets, but as a source of wool to be spun into thread which she would then weave into cloth. When the sheep reached a certain age, she would take them to the butcher and, a day later, she and her husband would stock their freezer with mutton.
Despite the fact that these sheep are not pets, taking them to be butchered was not easy. Nor was their first meal comprised of mutton from sheep they’d raised. I’m told that when Sue and her husband sat down to that meal they were rather glum and sat there in silence, eating nothing. Then Sue said “baaa” in imitation of a sheep, they laughed, and began eating.
Why am I NOT surprised?
TOKYO — Emergency vents that American officials have said would prevent devastating hydrogen explosions at nuclear plants in the United States were put to the test in Japan — and failed to work, according to experts and officials with the company that operates the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant.
via Reactor Vents That Failed in Japan Are Used in U.S. – NYTimes.com.
Truth and Traditions 