Witch-hunting with Jesús

"Can you provide a definition for the word “woman?” — Sen. Marsha Blackburn to Supreme Court nominee Jackson "

Looking up the background of Alicia Garcia-Falgueras, I immediately fell in love. Garcia-Falgueras is a neuroscientist in Amsterdam whose 46 publications probe the connection between musical composition and the brain structures of composers, the potential for brain injury among Spanish kitesurfers, Hula Hoop fitness and centripetal force, and dressing, fashion, and sex differences in history. For instance, her Fashion in Cadiz in 1812: male and female dress in the early Romantic period or her El herreruelo o ferreruelo en el Quijote y en otras obras de la literatura áurea, looking at capes and male skirts in Don Quixote and in other works of the golden literature in the context of flamboyant cross-dressing.

What interested me more about Dr. Alicia was her post-doc work at Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience where she has teamed with one of the world’s preeminent researchers on biological assignment of genitalia, Dr. Dick F. Swaab (no joke). Garcia-Falgueras and Swaab published a landmark study in neuroscience in the journal, Functional Neurology, that I will return to presently.

Country Roads

Reentering the United States after a couple years living in a country whose constitution bars discrimination based on sexual orientation, I had not expected the debate here to be at such a fever pitch. While skipping through the FM radio channels on a drive through rural Tennessee, I learned that nearly 240 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were filed in the first quarter of 2022, 154 of those targeting transgender people and others going after “woke” schoolteachers. Homophobia has always run deep in the Bible Belt, but this 240 number was up from from just 41 in the year before I left, so Republican depravity has definitely been trending up in my absence. Since the start of 2021, 11 states have written trans sports bans into law. Arizona has proposed the third-highest total of anti-LGBTQ bills so far this year, 17, behind Iowa and Tennessee. 

“The authors of these bills and the dark money groups pushing for them do not want it to be possible to be a trans kid in this country,” said Gillian Branstetter, a longtime trans advocate and the press secretary for women’s advocacy group the National Women’s Law Center. “They’re responding to trans kids as if they were responding to a contagion.”

—Mustafa Akyol, The New York Times

In 2015, Obama appointed the first-ever special envoy for LGBTQ+ rights to coordinate U.S. diplomacy on the matter. He also appointed five openly gay men to serve as ambassadors. I recall attending a reception in Havana for the openly gay Norwegian Ambassador and his Cuban partner. In 2017 Ireland elected its first openly gay prime minister, followed soon after by the election of Serbia’s first openly lesbian and first female prime minister. For contrast, President Cobblepot tweeted a ban on military service for transgenders and rolled back health-care rights and guarantees for TQ+ patients. His administration launched the Commission on Unalienable Rights, which threatened LGBTQ+ and women’s rights under the guise of religious liberty and ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people, affecting services such as foster care and adoption, refugee assistance, and HIV prevention. Almost on queue, Russia passed a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in 2020.

Right to be Queer

Despite the United Nations recognition of human rights on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity since 2007, or European countries extending protection under Article 21 of the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European Commission in 2020 denying funding to member states that do not respect LGBTQ+ rights or fail to prosecute homophobic hate crimes, a third of the world—seventy countries—continue to criminalize homosexual activity, and in twelve countries adults who engage in consensual same-sex acts can still face the death penalty. Iran regularly executes LGBTQ+, sometimes by beheading.  But it is not just the Middle East. Homosexual activity remains a criminal offense in 35 of the 54 sovereign states of the Commonwealth of Nations. It is legal in only 19. Two Commonwealth countries, Brunei and Northern Nigeria, impose the death penalty. Punishment does not even require a country. Non-state actors like the Islamic State or some Latin cartel gangs are equal opportunity executioners without borders.

We do not have the right or opportunity to force states, but we can start a really good conversation to work with them so they understand the economic issues in relations to human rights and make the change.

— Patricia Scotland, Commonwealth Secretary-General

Even where same-sex sexual activity is not illegal, officials often overlook abuse and murder of LGBTQ+ individuals perpetrated by law enforcement officers, militant groups, street gangs, and even family members of the victim in so-called “honor killings” or rape as a way of “undoing” a gender identity. In some Catholic- and Muslim-majority states with a history of authoritarianism, thumping the Bible or Quran is used to justify horrendous acts of abuse. In Central America, LGBTQ+ people face structural discrimination, persecution, and are more susceptible to homicide, hence the recent surge of LGBTQ+ people seeking asylum in other countries. A US survey found that half of trans and nonbinary youths — seriously considered suicide within the prior year.

Where was Jesus?

Where did Jesus stand on queer rights? Biblical scholars will say he defined them according to Genesis 2:24: “For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh” (Matt. 19:5 ; Mark 10:7–8) and from that evangelicals conclude Jesus affirmed the covenanted union of one man and one woman as the only normative expression of human sexuality. There are many problems with this logic including the factual absence of an historic Jesus; scriptural revision by Dark Age monks laboring under Papal Edict; and changed conditions, including better science.

What about Islam? ISIS claims the Prophet Muhammad said gays "should be thrown from tremendous height then stoned.” In actually, there is nothing of the kind in the hadiths (sayings of Muhammed). However, the Old Testament, or Torah, clearly decrees that homosexuals “are to be put to death” (which is why an ultra-Orthodox Jew stabbed a teenage girl to death at a Gay Rights parade in Jerusalem in 2017).

At the heart of the Islamic view on homosexuality lies the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, which is narrated in the Quran, too. According to scripture, the Prophet Lot had warned his people of “immorality,” for they did “approach men with desire, instead of women.” In return, the people warned by Lot tried to expel their prophet from the city, and even tried to sexually abuse the angels who came down to Lot in the guise of men. Consequently, God destroyed the people of Lot with a colossal natural disaster, only to save the prophet and a few fellow believers.

—Mustafa Akyol, The New York Times

Did the people of Lot receive divine punishment for being homosexual, or for attacking Lot and his heavenly guests? Was the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah divine punishment or an extreme weather event? Is that (theoretical) historical event really the reason for today’s gay death penalties across the Islamic world? Seriously?

There is a bottomless hunger for the misery of trans kids.

—Gillian Bransetter

Which brings me back to my affection for Alicia Garcia-Falgueras and Dick Swaab. Their multi-year research used doppler fetoscope scans, surveys of galanin neurons in the intermediate nucleus of the hypothalamus and thionin staining of amniotic fluid samples in different groups of fetuses to view gender identity and hormonal changes through pregnancy. They performed follow-ups to adulthood that included external surveys of various groups—control male (M) and female (F) groups, male-to-female transsexuals (MtF), castrated males (CAS), premenopausal women (Pre-men), postmenopausal women (Post-men) and miscellaneous LGBTQ+ (gender dysphoric) subjects as old as eighty. Here is their conclusion:

The process of sexual differentiation of the brain brings about permanent changes in brain structures and functions via interactions of the developing neurons with the environment, understood in its widest sense. The environment of a developing neuron is formed by the surrounding nerve cells and the child’s circulating hormones, as well as the hormones, nutrients, medication and other chemical substances from the mother and the environment that enter the fetal circulation via the placenta. All these factors may have a lasting effect on the sexual differentiation of the brain.

The testicles and ovaries develop in the sixth week of pregnancy. This occurs under the influence of a cascade of genes, starting with the sex-determining gene on the Y chromosome (SRY). The production of testosterone by a boy’s testes is necessary for sexual differentiation of the sexual organs between weeks 6 and 12 of pregnancy. The peripheral conversion of testosterone into dihydrotestosterone is essential for the formation of a boy’s penis, prostate and scrotum. Instead, the development of the female sexual organs in the womb is based primarily on the absence of androgens.

Once the differentiation of the sexual organs into male or female is settled, the next thing that is differentiated is the brain, under the influence, mainly, of sex hormones or the developing brain cells. The changes (permanent) brought about in this stage have organizing effects; later, during puberty, the brain circuits that developed in the womb are activated by sex hormones.

***

The human fetal brain develops in the male direction through a direct action of testosterone and in the female direction through the absence of this hormone. During the intrauterine period, gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender), sexual orientation, cognition, aggression and other behaviors are programmed in the brain in a sexually differentiated way.

Sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy, whereas sexual differentiation of the brain starts in the second half of pregnancy. This means that in the event of an ambiguous sex at birth, the degree of masculinization of the genitals may not reflect the degree of masculinization of the brain.

Our observations on reversed sex differences in the brains of transsexual people support the idea that transsexuality is based on an opposite sexual differentiation of i) sexual organs during the first couple of months of pregnancy and ii) the brain in the second half of pregnancy. There is no proof that the social environment after birth has an effect on the development of gender or sexual orientation, while the possible effects on sexual differentiation of the brain by endocrine disrupters in the environment and in medicines given to the pregnant mother should be investigated.

Neurobiological research on sexual orientation and gender identity in humans is only just gathering momentum, but the evidence shows that humans have a vast array of brain differences, related not only to gender, but also to sexual orientation. There is a need for further multidisciplinary research….

In a separate paper published in 2019, the authors elaborate further:

In the past decennia, our understanding of the sexual differentiation of the mammalian brain has dramatically changed. The simple model according to which testosterone masculinizes the brain of males away from a default female form, was replaced with a complex scenario, according to which sex effects on the brain of both females and males are exerted by genetic, hormonal, and environmental factors. These factors act via multiple partly independent mechanisms that may vary according to internal and external factors. These observations led to the “mosaic” hypothesis—the expectation of high variability in the degree of “maleness”/“femaleness” of different features within a single brain.

The Last Little Schoolhouse in Texas

Today, if a high school or college biology teacher in Texas were to use a textbook printed after 2009 that mentions the mosaic pattern of gender assignment or informs her class that sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy, whereas sexual differentiation of the brain starts in the second half of pregnancy and that hormonal misassignment in that second half is not uncommon, perhaps 10 percent of the time, she could be jailed. The new "don't say gay" law echos a similar bill passed in 2005 when Texas attempted to outlaw gay marriage and civil unions but inadvertently ended up banning all marriages. That had to be quietly repealed. The 2022 bill, which is now being modeled by many other jurisdictions, is so broadly defined that it effectively bans all discussion of gender and sexuality, including that of heteronormative relationships and biological sex.

As a result, parents are being informed by high school principals and elementary teachers that to avoid arrest, from now on, their children will no longer be referred to with gendered pronouns but instead the neutral "they" or “them," and that all discussion or mention of subjects that potentially refer to sexuality will be banned from school, including heterosexual relationships and families. Texas teachers are carefully following the law by avoiding all mention of gender and sexuality issues. What may be more challenging will be what to do at kindergarten about prince/princess stories, bible stories and later girls/boys locker rooms/restrooms, and gendered dress codes. Texas courts should be quite busy for some years to come. 

None of which will stop the harassment, assaults and murders. Pause to think of that on May 17, the International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia. That date was chosen in recognition of the day, in 1990, when the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from the Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems.

For the ten percent or more of children —all 700 million of you— whose gender hormone assignments in third trimester did not match sex organ assignments in your first trimester, through no fault of your own, just a roll of the dice, I hope you will locate your identity wherever it falls along the mosaic of possibilities. I hope you can live a long and joyful life, unharmed by idiots like Marsha Blackburn. If that is not happening, think about relocating to México.

References:

Akyol, Mustafa, What Does Islam Say About Being Gay? The New York Times, July 28, 2015 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/opinion/mustafa-akyol-what-does-islam-say-about-being-gay.html

Arnold, AP . 2012. The end of gonad-centric sex determination in mammals. Trends Genet 28:55–61.

Blackless, M, Charuvastra, A, Derryck, A, Fausto-Sterling, A, Lauzanne, K, Lee, E. 2000. How sexually dimorphic are we? Review and synthesis. Am J Hum Biol 12:151–66.

FAIR Education Act Implementation Coalition, 2021. LGBTQ Rights Timeline in American History, https://www.lgbtqhistory.org/lgbt-rights-timeline-in-american-history/

Mendos, Lucas Ramón 2019. State-Sponsored Homophobia 13th Ed., ilga.org

Swaab, D.F. and Garcia-Falgueras, A., 2009. Sexual differentiation of the human brain in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation. Functional Neurology 24(1): 17-28 

____________________________

The Green Road

Towns, villages and cities in the Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, ​they must rest by day so they can travel by night. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project "The Green Road." 

The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery, seed, and to erect greenhouses. 

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

____________________________

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #ReGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

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Climate's Red Forest

"We are only just beginning to see what damage our dalliance with the Anthropocene has wrought."

Among the reveals of the IPCC’s latest climate report is a look at where the scientific consensus erred in its previous reports. Surprising to many have been the admissions about how misplaced was the IPCC’s earlier faith in nuclear power.

Beyond Nuclear reports:

Not surprisingly, nuclear power is exposed as the boondoggle it is. IPCC estimates nuclear has less potential for curbing climate change than either shifting humans to a healthy diet, or reducing methane from oil and gas.

The IPCC report states,

Large contributions with costs less than USD$20/tCO2-eq-1 come from solar and wind energy, energy efficiency improvements, reduced conversion of natural ecosystems, and CH4 emissions reductions [coal mining, oil and gas, waste].

By comparison, nuclear has grown in cost and diminished in deliverables spectacularly. The problems that plagued it 20 years ago plague it still, and to those can now be added being utterly unsuited for heat waves, wildfires, war-zones, coastlines, downstream of dams, aircraft or drone collisions, and anywhere there is passing interest in bomb-making or radwaste smugging to that end.

Here is a chart I compiled, simplified from one that appears in the report:

It is unclear from the report if front end fuel chain costs for mining and milling of uranium, transportation, fuel fabrication, or mine tailing cleanup of sites are included in the assessment of carbon footprint or costings. 99% of the greenhouse gas emissions occur not from the reactors themselves but from the fuel cycle, including some very potent fluorocarbons used in gas centrifuge fuel enrichment.

Starved of investment (once bitten, twice shy), nuclear operators have been going back to formerly captive regulatory bodies to keep the old plants running on bubble gum and sealing wax until at least some of the enormous construction and yet unknown decommissioning costs can be recovered. But there is a new sheriff in town. The NRC Commissioners voted on February 24, 2022 to rescind the second round of 20-year license renewals for nearly a dozen U.S. reactors. NRC said if utilities want a 60-80 year operating life, they had better first provide an updated environmental analysis going out to the 2050s and beyond. Under Trump there was no requirement to consider worst case extreme weather events, sea level rise, dam failures, wildfires or other elements of the accelerating climate crisis.

Moreover, the new sheriff announced April 5 that he had uncovered “multiple violations of federal law committed by the agency and the industry in the Subsequent License Renewal review process,” (emphasis mine) and would need to address those before considering renewals in the future. There are significant “technical knowledge gaps” in understanding how the materials in reactor systems, structures and components (particularly the large irreplaceable concrete containments and embrittled reactor pressure vessels) respond over 80 years of nuclear bombardment and ground subsidence.

The NRC and the nuclear industry must now also reset and recalculate the environment analyses that previous Commissions had used to grant “generic” approvals based on antiquated 1996 data.

In the first decade of the new millennia there were a rash of claims about small modular reactors, thorium breeders, or molten salt systems that could never melt down. These “advanced” or “second-generation” reactors advertised they would address climate change in a so-called “nuclear renaissance” with large investments from Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and other wealthy backers with no background in health physics. Just like the “Clean Coal” and “Synthetic Gasoline” fantasies, those projects have all but completely collapsed in suspensions, cancellations and abandonment. Those that remain are propped up by megabucks from taxpayers, hobbyists and dabblers.

The Ukraine invasion brought these designs into sharp focus after Russian troops overran the site of the Chernobyl disaster and made camp in the “Red Forest,” so named for the radiation damage to its trees. “Hey, look!” said the generals, “There is a giant gap in the Ukrainian line. Let’s go through there!” Only after they had kicked up enough dust to produce acute radiation sickness were the troops evacuated to die somewhere else, bleeding from every orifice.

The IPCC report states that:

Most of the countries which might introduce nuclear power in the future for their climate change mitigation benefits do not envision developing their own full fuel cycle, significantly reducing any risks that might be linked to proliferation.

That statement is nonsensical because the plutonium and U-233 of greatest interest to bomb-makers is kept on site in swimming pools to cool for decades after being burnt. Moreover, some “advanced” reactors like Gates’s TerraPower Natrium Small Modular Reactor use cheaper, low-enriched uranium that then can become bomb-grade plutonium cores for nuclear weapons—with serious proliferation implications. Somali pirates taking possession of Gates’ nuclear yacht could become overnight millionaires.

This past week Wired ran a story titled, “35 Years Later, Studies Show a Silver Lining From Chernobyl.” It described a recent study that purportedly found that radiation exposure didn’t genetically harm future generations. What the article ignored is something health physicists have understood since Müeller’s experiments with fruit flies and X-rays in the 1930s — the kind of double-break DNA and recombination that occurs following exposure to even very low doses of ionizing radiation (indeed, more at lower doses than at higher because the germ cells survive to reproduce) causes genetic mutations that typically express only a few percent in each generation. True, the Chernobyl children had only fractionally more genetic abnormalities (ie: elevated morbidity and early mortality) than an “unexposed” control group. But Müeller found increased death and disease still present after 30 generations. We are less than two lifetimes removed from Marie Curie, the Radium Dial Painters, the Hiroshima Hibukusha, the Nevada Downwinders and the Bikini Islanders. We have only just begun to see what damage our dalliance with the friendly atom has wrought.

Reading a New York Times story on atrocities in Ukraine, my eyes were drawn to a street scene where the murder of a civilian was caught by aerial drone footage. What struck me was not the drama of the moment, but how all the high rise buildings were blackened and gutted yet the single family houses were relatively untouched. The scene recalled for me how US armor had moved through the streets of Falujah under instructions to fire one depleted uranium round into every house, and that so much uranium dust accumulated in Falujah that the sunsets turned green. That horror show included many squid-like babies. Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and other senior US officials were all found guilty for their actions in Iraq and Afghanistan by the War Crimes Commission in 2012.

“We have no plan to arrest them,” commissioner Musa Bin Ismail told Vice in 2012.

They will be haunted all their lives by the fact that they're war criminals who have murdered countless people and affected countless lives through their acts and policy while in office. Their lives will be unsettling, full of regret and the feeling of guilt, punctuated with long stretches of sorrow and unabated sadness. They will die with disgruntled souls.

Rumsfeld died in 2021, unable to the leave the United States because of outstanding war crime arrest warrants in Germany and France, and the prospect of spending his final years imprisoned in Spandau. Depleted uranium ordnance is being shipped from NATO arsenals into Ukraine as I write this.

Don’t mistake this rant for my giving a pass to coal, which produces radioactive emissions from mines, tailings piles, piles and smokestacks, causing millions of deaths in unsuspecting populations. Radioactivity is not the only toxin produced by coal plants and oil refineries, so a fossil fuel cycle is potentially as murderous and is the nuclear fuel cycle. Sabine Hossenfelder describes that neatly in her 20 minute class.

In an article on Direct Air Capture for Bloomberg Green, Nathaniel Bullard wrote:

In 1976 Amory Lovins, the cofounder and chairman emeritus of energy think tank RMI, wrote a short but significant essay about U.S. energy’s future. In it, he contrasted the current — and expected — system of massive power plants and complex engineering as the “hard path” to the future. The alternative is a “soft path” that relies on “smaller, far simpler supply systems entailing vastly shorter development and construction time, and on smaller, less sophisticated management systems.”  

More than four decades later the IPCC is clear that while the soft path is scaling rapidly, the hard path still will be needed to solve hard problems.

I am not so sure about that. Lovins’ calculations still hold the unstoppable inertia of a Moore’s Law.

As the Trinity mushroom cloud rose ominously into the sky over Alamogordo at 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time on July 16, 1945, Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The quote comes from Krishna telling Arjuna that his fate is to progress through four states—desire or lust; wealth; the desire for righteousness or dharma; and the final state of total liberation, or moksha, in which the distinction of life from death becomes meaningless. Krishna tells Arjuna he should neither mourn nor rejoice over what fate has in store, but should be sublimely unattached to results of his actions. Oppenheimer, in contrast, never reconciled himself to what had occurred. Later in life he said the quote meant that “physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

The Rev Dr. Stephen Thompson, a Sanskrit scholar, told a Wired reporter:

Oppenheimer, it can be inferred, never believed that the people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki would not suffer. While he carried out his work dutifully, he could never accept that this could liberate him from the cycle of life and death.

There are good ways out of the climate crisis and terrible ways. The good ways—exemplified by the ecovillage on the cover of the IPCC report—will make life infinitely better for all who come after. The bad ways—the destroyer of worlds—will only make our future far worse.

 

---

The Green Road

Towns, villages and cities in the Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, ​they must rest by day so they can travel by night. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project "The Green Road." 

The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery, seed, and to erect greenhouses. 

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

__________________________

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #ReGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

The Age of Climate Limits

"Science has given us a three year deadline to end growth as we know it."

 

The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) consists of contributions from each of the three IPCC Working Groups and a Synthesis Report, which integrates all the reports produced in the 10-year cycle. While “net-zero by 2050” is a slogan that gives everyone permission to slack off, the latest and final working group report released this week puts the challenge into sharper focus: carbon emissions must peak by 2025. We are three and one half years from the End of Growth. We then enter the long awaited Age of Limits. Will we do it? Former UNFCCC President Christiana Figueres sounds like she is scolding an unruly teenager:

I’m lacking words for this…. What is suicidal is our inability to take the decisions and enact the behavioral changes that we perfectly well can in order to align our planet with the Paris Agreement. That’s the problem. There is nothing new that any report can tell us about what we should be doing. The gap that we identified years ago is not closing; in fact, it’s enlarging. That’s the news. It’s tragic.

Scornful daddy António Guterres, UN secretary-general, said the kid was a “file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world.”

Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels.

Working Group Three

To briefly recap, Working Group I’s report was a “where we are” in climate science. WG2’s was “what we can expect.” When the WG2 report landed in March it got buried behind the ongoing pandemic and the war in Ukraine but essentially said we can expect the worst if we keep on this track. If that happens, we cannot adapt, and we won’t survive. WG3’s report, the one worth waiting for, is “what we need to do, urgently, in order to survive.” The 3676-page report covers:

• Socio-economic scenarios, modeling and transitions at the global, regional, national and local scales including integrated assessment approaches.
• Energy systems including supply and energy demand sectors (e.g., industry, transport, buildings).
• Mitigation responses in agriculture, forestry, land use and waste.
• Consumption patterns, human behavior and greenhouse gas emissions, including economic, psychological, sociological and cultural aspects.
• Policies, agreements and instruments at the international, national and subnational levels, including those at the city level.
• Technology innovation, transfer and deployment.
• Financial analysis for each for each response options.

The first thing you notice about the report is that the cover is a photo from the Eastwhins neighborhood in the Findhorn ecovillage. Superinsulated co-housing apartments adjoin each other, facing the equator, topped with solar PV and water heaters, rain barrels, and an integrated sunspace/greenhouse fronted by an outdoor raised bed garden, a paved biking/walking trail for home deliveries, a common green, and bicycles. It is not an artist’s rendition. That particular ecovillage is in the far North of Scotland with a long, dark winter, but it could as easily be Ecovillage at Ithaca, Seiben Linden in Germany, Earthsong in Auckland, or ten thousand similar places. This we have done since the UN opened the chapter on the climate emergency at the Stockholm Earth Summit in 1972.

If Covid taught us anything, it was that the status quo is a frail construct. It can vanish in an instant, or at least over the course of a few weeks. This is what the people in Ukraine witnessed, at least one by a hail of machine gun fire as he bicycled to the grocery. It is what happened to those in Lismore and Byron Bay who saw their homes rain bombed underwater to the rooftops for the second time in a month, or to those who watched their lifetime possessions vanish in wildfires of scale and speed no one had imagined possible. The shock of sudden change is how a two-year (and soon to be longer) pandemic convinced so many to leave their professional careers and switch to a different life path rather than go back to what they had been doing before. We have been shaken from dreary normalcy and been made aware of how precarious the world of our making has become, and how we could be spending our days in more meaningful pursuits.

Many think the solution to climate change is public education. I don’t. I think people know. Most just don’t want to admit it, or do anything, unless they have to.

The report draws together the connection between reversing climate change and achieving the UN’s sustainable development goals. To put an ecovillage image at the center of the visioning process sent a powerful message.

Even more significant than the cover art was the final paragraph in the conclusion section of the 3676-page report. In the considered opinion of the 1000+ top climate scientists, what the world needs most is ecologically aware and socially innovative experimental communities that network with each other and provide educational outreach and positive examples of a better world.

Indeed, transitions require an examination of the role of values, attitudes, beliefs and the structures that shape behaviour, as well as the dynamics of social movements and education at multiple levels. Likewise, technological and social innovation both play an important role in enabling transitions, highlighting the importance of multi-institutional and multi-stakeholder actors building institutional support networks, facilitating collaboration between sectors and actors, and promoting learning and social change.

Systems-oriented approaches, which holistically address the intersections among climate, water and energy (for instance), have significant potential to reveal and help avoid trade-offs, foster experimentation, and deliver a range of co-benefits on the path towards sustainable development.

Strategies to Repair the Climate

To paraphrase the IPCC report, ecovillages (and also Cool Labs):

• Examine values, attitudes, beliefs and the structures that shape behavior
• Employ the dynamics of social movements
• Reform the pedagogies of education at multiple levels
• Use technological and social innovation to enable transitions
• Stress the importance of multi-institutional and multi-stakeholder actors
• Build institutional support networks
• Facilitate collaboration between sectors and actors
• Promote learning and social change
• Favor systems-oriented approaches which holistically address the intersections and relationships of seemingly separate elements
• Reveal and help avoid trade-offs
• Foster experimentation; and
• Deliver a range of co-benefits on the path towards [sustainable] regenerative development.

The report could not have set the agenda any better.

If humanity still needs a climate strategy, I think these thousand scientists, finally reaching their difficult 150-hour marathon consensus in the early hours of Monday morning, provided it. Our effort must address the existential issue of our era: changing our cultural habits and deciding to live as if there will still be a tomorrow.

We could stop there, but if you are a glutton for punishment there is more. Here are some things the IPCC got wrong:

• “Unabated” coal must be “completely” phased out by 2050. The “U” word is inserted at the insistence of coal producers (Joe Manchin, N. Modi, V. Putin) who still believe “clean coal” is a real thing. Instead, all coal should be phased out by 2025.
• IPCC still forecasts that economic growth, coming on the back of ever growing energy supply, will continue into the indefinite future. There is little recognition of the caloric return of different energy types, EROIE, or rare mineral depletion — technocornucopian bias.
• The Carbon Budget. Going all the way back to AR-1, IPCC has followed the chimera of a carbon budget that would allow underdeveloping countries (India, Nigeria, etc) to make up for the lost ground stolen by the overdeveloped nations in the 19th century by continuing to emit — and grow emissions annually — long after everyone else is forced to curtail. Originally the budget was 450 ppm, but when it was realized that would take us to 3 to 5 degrees warming, it was cut to 350, and then replaced with the 2 degree goal. This report says “a significant but very small carbon budget remains” to limit warming to 1.5°. It says the path to limit warming to 1.5° is extremely narrow, therefore this small budget should be used only by hard-to-decarbonize sectors, like steel mills, maritime shipping and airlines. This is preposterous! Even if all emissions stopped tomorrow, Earth would continue to warm. The budget concept is based on the flawed premise that if India were given 20 more years of Russian coal and gas every Indian will be living like a Swede or Dane does today, driving a Tesla and wintering in Ibiza. This is dangerous nonsense and should have been discarded long ago. We are already over budget and building huge stockpiles of atmospheric of carbon that must be removed at unknowable expense.
• Natural climate solutions — biochar, carbon farming, agroforestry, land use changes and the like — are consistently undervalued (all can be cost negative, ie: profitable, if managed in a regenerative fashion) and excluded from the predictive models — while high tech solutions like BECCS, DACCS, and CCU are overvalued (they will cost trillions and rely on unremitting energy inputs) but included in the predictive models. The former consistently surprise by overperforming expectations. The latter consistently disappoint. And yet the IPCC refuses to admit it is betting its whole inheritance on the wrong horse.
• For instance, while the value of biochar for Carbon Dioxide Removal has been elevated from 1.4 GtCO2/y potential to 6.6 GtCO2/y, that number is almost entirely based upon soil applications, with a slight nod to animal feed and water filtration. As I pointed out in my formal critique a year ago when the IPCC invited me to be a reviewer, the non-agricultural applications for biochar have 10x the drawdown potential, profitability and speed of deployment. I offered BURN and its hundreds of current references, but that was not mentioned. Paul Hawkens’ Drawdown (2017) was referenced but his more accurate biochar recalculation in Regeneration (2020) was overlooked.

• A word search on “pets,” “dogs,” “cats,” and “ornamental fish” came up blank. The report estimates with high confidence that shifts to sustainable healthy diets have a “technical potential” to reduce emissions by 3.6 GtCO2e, with a range of 0.5 to 8 GtCO2e but says nothing about the carbon footprint of pets and pet food. Big blind spot. Creature comfort seems to be a taboo subject.
• IPCC forecasts nuclear will expand 70% above 2019 by 2030 and 305% by 2050. Besides being economic fantasy, this demonstrates the callous willingness of engineers to burn future children to produce light, heat, and steam. It is unconscionable.

Here is what they got right:

• Watching the breathtaking speed of the solar and wind build-out and price drop since the last report, the IPCC admitted it had gotten that wrong: “future energy transitions may occur more quickly than those in the past.”
• They also admit that nuclear energy and clean coal technology, the darlings of earlier reports, have been “slower than…anticipated.”
• It is beyond dispute now that reversing climate change will be far less expensive (and futile) than trying to live with it, or trying to tame nuclear fusion.
• “Decommissioning and reduced utilization of existing fossil fuel installations in the power sector as well as cancellation of new installations are required to align future CO2 emissions from the power sector with projections in these pathways.” Stranded investment must happen. Live with it, Joe Manchin, Marsha Blackburn and Charles Koch.
• “Bioenergy and BECCS are found to pose a risk to biodiversity, water, soil, air quality, resilience, livelihoods and food security.”
• Global CO2 emissions must peak “at the latest before 2025” and then fall to 48% below 2019 levels by 2030, then 84% below by 2050.
• The central impediment is not lack of solutions but human behavior, much of which is hard wired. What could expedite shifts would be “novel narratives” in the media and entertainment industry to “help to break away from the established values, discourses and the status quo.” For example: portray plant-based diets as healthy and natural; portray climate resisters as normal and climate polluters as regressive or evil (e.g.: Icelandic film: Woman at War).
• For the first time, there is a chapter on “demand-side,” including diets and consumption patterns. Strapline: sustainable food systems that provide healthy diets for all are within reach. Healthy habitats — rural, periurban, or urban — are within reach. There is a better world waiting.

Making the wrong choice now will end the human experiment. If you doubt that, look up Will Steffen or Kevin Anderson on YouTube.

Christiana Figueres finishes:

Here’s my optimistic piece. This report will remind us once again that the cancer can very well become terminal, but is not terminal yet. It’s the “yet” that I would like to emphasize.

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 THE GREEN ROAD

Towns, villages and cities in the Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, ​they must rest by day so they can travel by night. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”

The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery, seed, and to erect greenhouses.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

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The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #ReGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

Sevareid's Law: A Neo-Luddite Manifesto

"The chief cause of problems is solutions"

Eric Sevareid was an American author, journalist and TV anchorman from 1939 to 1977, rightfully lauded with Emmy and Peabody Awards. J. Edgar Hoover thought he was a communist because he was an anti-ROTC protester in high school, anti-fascist during the Spanish Civil War, and helped raise funds to support Hollywood celebrities appearing before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947. That painted him pink enough to earn an FBI tail.

One of the quotes most associated with him is now called Sevareid’s Law: “The chief cause of problems is solutions.” (CBS Evening News, December 29, 1970)

This comes up in discussions crossing many subjects — military responses to aggression, population control and reversing climate change.

Many people who think of themselves as scientists or critical thinkers identify the criticality and utility of the scientific method and take that as their lodestone. They neglect the limits science imposes upon itself by being necessarily reductive and compartmentalized. Its outer boundaries of inquiry are smaller than its problem space.

Charles Kettering famously said that a problem fully understood is half solved. The corollary to that is, unfortunately, that a problem not understood is actually unsolvable.

It is ironic that as the discussion of human potential and holistic health has evolved to trying to see ourselves as full humans in rich relationships with our micro- and macro-biomes, even using holistic sense-making, we still limit problem definitions and problem solving to narrow specificity. We’ve become wind-tunnel modelers and paper clip maximizers.

This deficiency becomes catastrophic when we attempt to grapple with existential challenges such as climate change or nuclear disarmament. The way we solve problems almost inevitably causes additional problems that usually leave us worse off than where we began.

If we define a problem in a narrow way our solution to that narrow problem can end up harming something outside the frame. We solve for energy by building nukes but not for cancers and birth defects that will occur for hundreds of generations after they are mothballed. We see the cut-off of oil supplies from Russia raising prices at the pump, but rather than scale down private cars or switch to mass transit, we raise domestic oil production and rush to take sanctions off Venezuela. That screws the environment by accelerating climate change. It pads the wallets of fracked gas and shale oil investors, widening income disparity and the class cold war. It postpones decarbonization, giving the fossil industries another big win. It places Venezuela, a Bush-era Russia-collapse test case, back into the cross-hairs of geopolitics and further reduces their sovereignty.

The war in Ukraine is not the reason the US consumes 20 million barrels of oil per day and the EU consumes 15. Overconsumption is not fixed by finding new sources of oil.

Daniel Schmachtenberger, in a podcasted interview, said:

In any problem-solving process, you have to say, “Do we understand the etiology of the problem and the problem embedding landscape?” meaning not just this problem and those sets of metrics, but the other things it’s connected to, well enough that our solution is addressing what caused the problem. [You are] addressing the intrinsics of the problem and not externalizing harm to adjacent things and so on. And you’ve got to separate there is a kind of first second-person part of that and a third-person part — what are the things we value that we care about that can’t be measured? And then maybe we can measure things that correlate but it’s ultimately a value [judgment]. And then, “What is the third person sense-making about what is actually happening,” and [what is] the forecasting of what would be the effect of a particular action?

And so there’s different epistemologies that you apply to kind of third-person sense-making to forecasting and to second-person values generation, and so we have to take the partial sense-making that lots of people have and lots of groups have and be able to vet it to verify faults and then synthesize. And then we also do values generation that way — “Okay, so you’re mainly focused on the environment, you’re mainly focused on the economy, you’re mainly focused on national security; why does that thing matter? Okay. now let’s separate your desire for national security from your strategy because your strategy requires the environment. Let’s separate your value on the environment from your [national security] strategy because it involves the economy.”

Let’s just say we care about the environment. What are the key things that have to be paid attention to? … maybe there’s some assumptions that we can get rid of … because you weren’t looking at the rest of it. But if we put all those values together and then say is there is a better synergistic satisfier that addresses all of those values, one that’s a really key part that is radically under-addressed in most any kind of system of governance. And that can be decomposed so we can do it in parts but then recompose with thought on holism. But now that needs people that are oriented to that plus it also needs systems that are capable of doing that. Who’s going to build the systems and people that understand them? Which is why it has to start with people and … culture first.

The way to introduce engineering minds to quantum entanglement with vanishingly multidimensional and sublimely interconnected ecosystems is not to simplify and further narrow problems definitions — admit it, we all do that — but to introduce greater levels complexity, such as with 12 metrics for each of 17 goals, or some such, which is what is now being called ESG (ecological, social, and governance) auditing. It’s a start, I suppose.

Or, we could just read up on Crazy Horse, Kondiaronk and Quanah Parker and grasp how they viewed the human relationship to the natural world. The Autobiography of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk, Embracing the Traditions of his Nation was published in 1833, five years before the author expired at age 70 or 71. Among the stories the great Sauk chief related was how his people had lived in the Mississippi Valley in the centuries before Europeans arrived.

Many of the indigenous peoples in North America had built model societies, not all identical, some with features we might find abhorrent and others we might value. Their ultimate proof of fitness was that they sustained not only the two-leggeds but soils, forests, lakes, rivers and bounteous biodiversity.

Black Hawk describes Rock Island as “the best island on the Mississippi” and for a long time the resort of young people during the summer — sort of like summer camp. “It was our garden (like the white people have near to their big villages),” he wrote, “which supplied us with strawberries, blackberries, gooseberries, plums, apples, and nuts of different kinds; and its waters supplied us with fine fish, being situated in the rapids of the river. In my early life, I spent many happy days on this island.”

Today that island is buried under the concrete blanket of Moline, Illinois.

 

The Sauk shared mile-long cornfields running parallel along the river with their neighbors, the Foxes. Both groups pastured their horses on the rich bluegrass waving in the wind on an uncultivated prairie.

We always had plenty — our children never cried with hunger, nor our people were ever in want. Here our village had stood for more than a hundred years, during all which time we were the undisputed possessors of the valley of the Mississippi, from the Ouisconsin to the Portage des Sioux, near the mouth of the Missouri, being about seven hundred miles in length.

In season the Sauk would move to a winter village, packing up their portable homes and moving all their goods and possessions on horse travois. They would hunt and trap and return to their summer village loaded with furs to trade. The scale of their population was in balance with the regenerative capacities of the land they occupied. It was sustainable, but more importantly it was regenerative of all parts of the ecology of which it was a participant.

In the parlance of the engineer mind — or what Charles Mann termed “wizards” — the future lies not in Rock Island as it was, but in a futuristic, Blade Runner Moline designed by artificial intelligence. Setting aside the E and S aspects of that design, the G aspect (governance) demands that it be governed by behavioral control systems of complexity well beyond the mental acuity of the average citizen. We’ll need, say the wizards, the sort of AI intervention we’ve seen in social media advertising, updated to solve for bad behavior.

Hovering over this discussion is the ghost of Eric Sevareid.

I make no secret that I favor Black Hawk’s utopia to the wizards’ dystopia. I would favor that even if it meant giving up the internet the way Japan gave up gunpowder and reverted to the sword from 1543 to 1879. I’d choose CI — collective intelligence — over AI.

Nature provides a pre-processed general intelligence that both individual and collective intelligence processes can access. It governs wisely from a deep dataset. Whether we unpack it, as some will, or stand back with a sense of reverence and awe, we should all feel safe within its bosom. Safer by far than trusting to the wisdom of technology-fetishistic apes who are no better equipped than crows, easily mesmerized by shiny objects.

 

__________________

Towns, villages and cities in the Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, ​they must rest by day so they can travel by night. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”

The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery, seed, and to erect greenhouses.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

 _______________________

 

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #ReGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app