CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #87, AUGUST 8, 2022
Robert Hunziker. “Greenland Threatens.”
Winona LaDuke. To Be A Water Protector: The Rise of the Windigoo Slayers.
John Bellamy Foster. “Be moderate…we only want THE EARTH!”
Coastal Cities Adaptation
“Greenland Threatens” Editor. mronline.org (7-22-22).Originally published: Countercurrents on July 20, 2022 by Robert Hunziker (more by Countercurrents) (Posted Jul 21, 2022). Climate Change, Ecology, EnvironmentGlobalNewswireGreenland
[Conclusion of the article]:
Meanwhile, according to NASA: Greenland and Antarctica are losing three times as much ice each year as they did in the 1990s.
Years of warnings about dangers of excessive fossil fuel CO2 emissions have not moved the needle. Fossil fuels today account for 75-80% of the energy mix, same as 50 years ago. And, according to the International Energy Agency, fossil fuel companies plan on $1.5T of new production between now and 2030.
With warnings galore of dangers of global warming, even The Economist felt compelled to carry an article Aug. 25, 2020: “The Greenland Ice Sheet has Melted Past the Point of no Return”:
The ice loss, they think, is now so great that it has triggered an irreversible feedback loop: the sheet will keep melting, even if all climate-warming emissions are miraculously curtailed. This is bad news for coastal cities.
The Economist article was two years ago, one year before the unusual rain incident at Summit Station, which was a big time wake up call. Yet, the planet’s biggest threat remains worse than ever. Alas, at some point in time global warming warning articles, like this one, will become meaningless. Gurgle!
Winona LaDuke. To Be A Water Protector: The Rise of the Windigoo Slayers. Spotted Horse P, 2020. Amy Shaw. Review in The Catholic Worker (Jan.-Feb. 2022)
“Winona LaDuke’s most recent book takes aim at what she calls late stage Windigoo capitalism. The Windigoo (or wétiko) [i.e. a large number of humans, mainly men] is a cannibal, consumed with insatiable greed, a terrifying subject of legend but also something very real and present in humans to this day. The Windigoo is the colonizer, the exploiter, the slaver, the murderer, the destroyer of both the environment and human culture. Rejecting the notion that such evil [global rape of women, land, peoples, rivers, forests, air, animals] amounts simply to ‘bad choices some men make,’ Jack D. Forbes’s 1979 book Columbus and Other Cannibals described a genuine disease. ‘This wétiko psychosis is the greatest epidemic sickness known to man. . . .LaDuke is similarly blunt when addressing the violence. . .perpetrated by a pipeline’s hundreds of man camps. . . .”
John Bellamy Foster. “Be moderate…we only want THE EARTH!”
Mronline.org (7-22-22).
We have to recognize that there is a pathway forward for humanity, but that the capitalist world system, and today’s governments that are largely subservient to corporations and the wealthy, are blocking that pathway, simply because it requires revolutionary-scale socioecological change.