Filed under: Deep Green, Greenpeace, Stop climate change | Tags: Ecological Psycology, Ecology, Rex Weyler
The Ecology Symbol. The symbol was a combination of the letters "E" and "O" taken from the words "Environment" and "Organism", respectively.
As a global community, we often appear as a dysfunctional family. We bicker constantly, the strong abuse the weak, and alleged leaders behave like addicts, unwilling to change the destructive habits that are destroying our home. As in any abusive relationship, the powerful proclaim a taboo against protest and vilify those who cry out as the crazy ones.
Ten million people in our human family starve to death every year. Children serve as slaves and wither in factories, making trinkets for the rich. On top of this horrific injustice, we daily devastate the only source of real wealth: the Earth itself. We lose fertile soil, discharge CO2 into the atmosphere, scatter toxins, turn grasslands into desert and create islands of plastic garbage in the sea.
Our governments and captains of industry shrug off the signs of dysfunction, and promise to ‘change’, to become ‘more sustainable’, like the alcoholic parent who promises to reform, but never does. Marketing geniuses dress up business-as-usual in a ‘green’ disguise – printing pictures of the Earth on plastic containers of detergent – to ease our worries. The sanctioned voices of the status quo assure us that all is well. As rivers die and species vanish, some in our global family watch in horror, others in denial.
Filed under: Greenpeace, Life at work, Stop climate change | Tags: Activism, Countdown to Copenhagen, Ecology, greenpeacebuzz, Philippines, United Nations, World Environment Day
I didn’t realize that a year has already passed since we commorated last year’s World Environment Day (WED) , in Iloilo City, where we launched the Climate Defenders Camp to gather support against the coal expansionist push by the government.
Filed under: Deep Green, Stop climate change | Tags: Deep Green, Ecology, Global Warming, Rex Weyler
Global warming is a symptom of human overshoot: the consumption and waste that exceeds the biophysical capacity of the Earth. If we attempt to reduce the fever, but ignore the disease, we will, at best, extend the suffering.
Global economic systems crash not only because of greed, fraud and toxic assets, but because those systems rest on fallacies about the natural world. The Ponzi scams and derivatives swindles of international bankers are no substitute for real economy: the living ecological systems, energy, soils, minerals, forests, and seas.
Filed under: Deep Green, Greenpeace, Stop climate change | Tags: Climate chagne, Ecology, Inconveniet Truth, Population, Rex Weyler
In 1972, Ben and Dorothy Metcalfe from the budding Greenpeace Foundation in Canada attended the world’s first UN Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm, where they succeeded in putting nuclear bomb tests on the agenda with the help of Australia and Japan. However, one critical issue failed to make the agenda of this historic meeting: human population.
In the 1980s, fishermen caught the last wild Beluga sturgeon from the Sea of Azov, source of prized caviar, and wild sturgeon in the Caspian Sea failed to reproduce. The sturgeon catch plunged by 95 percent, and the cost of caviar soared. Such extraordinary price growth is known as “hyperinflation,” or as economist Eric Sprott says, “the caviar syndrome.”
Filed under: Deep Green, Greenpeace, Greenpeace Core Values | Tags: Deep Ecology, Ecology, Green theory, Greenpeace History, philosophy, Rex Weyler
Going Deeper
Since the late Pleistocene, 100,000 years ago, when a few thousand Homo sapiens poked around Africa, Asia, and the Mediterranean, human population has doubled 22 times. We have one more such doubling left, and that’s it. Human population will likely level off at 10 to 14 billion sometime around 2100, exceeding the Earth’s carrying capacity. Mass human starvations are already underway in degraded environments.
Filed under: Deep Green, Greenpeace | Tags: Consumption, Ecology, Economics, Philisophy, Population, Rex Weyler
Lord of the Fruit Flies
History shows that human society can change if some moral force (civil rights, women’s rights) challenges convention. However, before we can be optimistic about solving the environmental crisis, we must be realistic. Otherwise, our confidence is delusional.
Filed under: Deep Green, Greenpeace, Greenpeace Core Values | Tags: Bearing Witness, Direct Action, Ecology, Greenpeace, Greenwash, History, philosophy, Quakers, Rex Weyler
When the first Greenpeace boat sailed across the Gulf of Alaska in 1971 toward the U.S. nuclear test site in the Aleutian Islands, the crew and their supporters in Canada had no idea that the campaign would launch a global organization. Irving Stowe, Quaker leader of the Don’t Make a Wave Committee that launched the campaign, belonged to a dozen such groups and believed that after a campaign the group should disband. His idea of keeping things simple and grassroots has merit, but as we know, that’s not how things turned out.
Greenpeace Southeast Asia 