Global Environment and Politics

The US government should be selling “Climate Bonds”.
I think they are selling ‘Trump Bonds’ instead.

Cheers

Yeah Roger, I am SO depressed at this outlaw administration that trashes our environmental laws.

I joined the “Climate Reality Leadership Corps” headed by former VP Al Gore. I’ll do 3 days of training March 8 – 10 then be committed to 10 actions per year in support of their goals of climate education. Hey, at least I’m trying.

Scary thing is that for THE LAST 800,000 YEARS them Co2 in the atmosphere was 300 PPM.  NOW its 409 ppM (2016). That’s a 30% increase in far less time than the last warm-up! YA think we’re in trouble? YA think the Aussie PM is changing his tune?  Maybe even theBrazilian president?

But the Trump administration habits own ideas. Burn the Picassos to warm the house, right?

I call sprawl and development the Chris Columbus pox.  Whole Native American cultures and their ecosystems were wiped out.  Just think how they must’ve felt to see their landscape ruined.  If we feel bad now about what’s happening, well, we’re about 500 years late to the party.

“If we feel bad now about what’s happening, well, we’re about 500 years late to the party.”

Or 500 years early.

I wonder how much of the now extinct North American megafauna felt about the waves of strange and violent bipeds crossing from Beringia…

Sapiens:  Wreaking havoc for ~200,000 years.

Craig: Sure, we’ve been causing extinctions and eco-system havoc for millennia.  And the few hundred Asians who came to North America in the pre-passport days may have mucked things up as much as the next few million who arrived from Europe (because all those large and tasty critters were unprepared for them, as opposed to generally nastier African fauna which I suspect is nastier BECAUSE they’ve dealt with our ancestors for longer).

But digging up carbon that’s been sequestered for 60 million years to 300 million years and releasing it over a few decades?  That’s unique to the 20th and 21st century.  (Yeah, it started in the 1800s, but at 1% the current rate).

Tipi,

Yep, the undocumented European immigrants of the 1600, 1700s really screwed over the locals, but the extent of indigenous people’s modifying their environment, pre-Contact, is not widely understood.  I’m currently reading 1491 whose central thesis is: academics now know how large and intensive North and South American civilizations were but because school textbooks haven’t changed their narrative, the public is unaware of how some calendars, mathematics, astronomy, architecture, land-forming, and huge public-works projects were as advanced in the Americas as they were anywhere else.  “Guns, germs, and steel” and a God you’d die for, were such powerful forces that within a few generations, all that was forgotten and if you never think to look for evidence of large, past civilizations, you’re not going to find and report it.

“Sapiens”

How we ever had the audacity to add that descriptor to our special name is beyond me.

Sciens might better describe our true aptitude, sapiens not so much.

I bought and read 1491 when it came out about 5 years ago. I was struck by the estimated population of indigenous Americans at the time of first contact with the Spanish, which is now thought to have been around one hundred million…much more than was believed before. The author says that smallpox was even more devastating than realized, sweeping across North and South America in a veritable firestorm before the white man was even able to see all of the pre Columbian Native Americans. As most everyone knows, Indians had no natural immunity to smallpox like Europeans had developed. It is now believed that there were Amazon cities bigger than anything encountered in Central America.

The largest pre Columbian culture in what is now the US was the Cahokia mound builders around St Louis. Environmental degradation is now thought to be the demise of the maize growing culture.

Native Americans used fire to shape their environment in a huge way. Much of the Eastern woodlands were maintained somewhat like parks where there were many huge trees with not much small growth in between.