Categories
environment

Climate Emergency

The concept of cascading complexity in matters of Global Existential Threat is quite substantially and far beyond any contemporary regulatory aptitude or ideology and party-agnostic political will to engage it with requisite urgency and at required scale. It is simultaneously not at all political and yet suffers from an endless adversarial bickering as the articulation […]

Categories
environment

The Universe is Alive and Creative

Notice from the arc and trajectory of flow that it is adaptive, dynamic and as a complex, open system in constant flux quite uncannily similar to a living entity. This is one among many instances of dynamical systems that indicate in their reflexive growth and endless iterative creativity that what might appear to be an […]

Categories
environment

Toxic Air Pollution in India

In the world of diplomacy, India may be remembered for its last-minute push to downgrade coal language at this year’s climate talks. Scientific American, November 16, 2021 More children are in hospital with breathing problems as pollution levels remain dangerously high in New Delhi, doctors warned on Wednesday, and the government shut five power stations […]

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environment

COP26: Word Games

Observing the President of COP26 stifling emotion as he apologised for the shortfalls of the limited agreement obtained at this critically important conference, I find myself reflecting on the words being variously wielded and warped on such a Global stage. There are two primary games of symbolic communication (i.e. language) at work in these large […]

Categories
environment

Jeff Bezos’ Environmental Philanthropy

Context: COP26: Bezos pledges $2bn for restoring nature Yes, thanks Jeff, but it is likely going to cost several orders of magnitude more than that to even begin to effect substantive systemic change. It is something of an unresolvable existential irony that it is precisely the system(s) of value and wealth that we so viscerally […]

Categories
environment

Unity, Sustainability, Cartography

Context: Mapping for a sustainable world Reflection: Whenever cartography is mentioned, I am reminded of the Tom Stoppard play in which Guildenstern asserts England as “just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?” Question: Granted that science and rational analysis (as much as constructive disagreement) depends quite implicitly upon metrics, measurements, differences and distances as the constitutive […]

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environment

Symmetry of Nature: An African Fluid Dynamical Topography Map

Beautiful. Natural systems here approximating to optimal functions for energy dispersion (as fluid dynamics) relative to a topography and geography (as much as geology) that they then proceed to reflexively shape and mold. It is no coincidence that the pinnacle of technological sophistication converges on nature’s own approximations. In this case – note how the […]

Categories
environment

Climate Disunity

The conspicuous absence of Global unity on climate change is horrifying and, notwithstanding that if human beings do anything particularly well in gestalt it is to perpetuate an endemic disagreement and adversarial dissonance that optimally and endlessly reproduces itself through and as us, you would think that the one thing we might at least all […]

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environment

Half-wits and Sycophants: Environmental Mismanagement

Our shared global environmental responsibility is implicit. Notice, however, that the extent to which  care for environment constitutively and foundationally is care for self is occluded by a particular – one might say spectacular – naivete born of best-guess and generally blind approximation to existential self-interest. A technologically-mediated civilisation-scale individuated, interpersonal and collective subjectivity breaks […]

Categories
environment

Heat Dome

Context: The Guardian view on the heat dome – burning through the models These events are truly worrying. What we often do not see, and perhaps by the very nature of cognition and the language(s) through which we reason and communicate, is that there is a unified, globally-integrated system of autocatalytic feedback at work here. […]

Categories
environment

Unbreaking the World

Context: Scientist: Extent of DDT dumping in Pacific is ‘staggering’ As a species and (such as it is) a Global civilisation, we surf on the breaking waves of short term advantage while incessantly displacing cost and complexity into the future as “someone else’s problem”. In contexts such as this instance of toxic envenomation of an […]

Categories
environment Philosophy

Dead Heat: Climate

Context: Climate change: 2020 in a dead heat for world’s warmest year Climate change has been off the radar for a while, it seems and while the shit-show and train-wreck of 2020 rolls on into 2021, there are some things which seem painfully obvious to me but which also, for whatever reason, seem to be […]