hmpf

If you're anywhere near Washington, this is a good (read: meaningful) thing to do on February 17.

Why? Because numbers matter. Both in the sense elaborated here, and in the sense of "crowds".

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/03/24/451239/manmade-climate-change-accelerated-in-2001-2010-world-meteorological-organization-reports/

What to do, what to do... where's the damn movement gone? I don't have the energy (nor the skills) to start organising my own! But there doesn't seem to be anything going on at the moment with which I could just tag along. No GP group either, where I live (and anyway, even they kind of aren't focusing on this at the moment, from what I can see - at least not in Germany). No Transition Town initiative here, either.

Need to do a thorough web search, I guess. There have to be pockets of activism, somewhere.

http://www.youtube.com/user/UMNIonE#p/u/0/QkkKZgKmdP4

And another, on just one aspect:

http://www.youtube.com/user/UMNIonE#p/u/3/F1IWkbU0SG4

Really makes me wanna give up on this whole "looking for a fulltime job" thing, go back to university, and study something that MATTERS.

JOB APPLICATIONS!
COMPUTER TROUBLE!
GREENPEACE STUFF!

Hey, how cool. All the things that are stressing me out a bit at the moment have exactly the same number of characters (if you count spaces, too ETA: Err, and if you don't count spaces, as well. *sheepish*)

But, yeah. Why is my life always *too full* of stuff to do? Why? WHY???

I'd like to have some time for writing, jewellery making, and friends, please.

Hello sleepless night. :-(

The good news is I'm slowly edging closer to LJ-land again, mentally. That is, I'm beginning to overcome the strange, great reluctance I always feel after an extended absence. I'll probably start dropping in randomly at various people's journals in the next few days. No proper catching up yet, though, because there's still other things that need sorting out before that.

Also worth noting:

- I haven't looked very energetically for a job yet. I feel kind of guilty about that, but on the other hand, I do think I needed the time to decompress.

- I was nominated for an award for my MA thesis without noticing. (I didn't win, but it's still pretty amazing. And kind of hilarious/embarrassing that I didn't know. The notification must have been among the thousands of mails I still haven't sorted...)

- Two weeks ago I made my first attempt to 'join' Greenpeace. (You don't really join them, you just volunteer your time with the local group. So far I've only been to an introductory meeting thingy, but I plan to keep it up. I'm not sure Greenpeace is the right organisation for me, but until I find another, they'll have to do. ;-))

- Level building is going great. Here's a preview: Pretty pictures! - This is quite possibly the most relaxing form of creative endeavour I've ever discovered. Unlike most of my other creative outlets, with level building I can just sort of... completely let the right hemisphere take over. It's like a trance. It's euphorising!

- Oh, hey - if you would like to play a tiny little - finished - practice level I made: Right click and save. As with the recs I posted earlier, you're going to need the Knytt Stories software to play this, of course. Oh, and the level is an environmental, i.e. there are no challenges or enemies in there. The worst that can happen to you is falling into the sea.

to the readers of this LJ (though, really, I have no duty to provide content that people like; everyone's free to stop reading me, after all) for having turned into a gloom-and-doom person over the last six months. Actually, of course, this is not an entirely new development; I've been extremely 'concerned' for a while. But in May 2008 Mark Lynas's book Six Degrees galvanised me, not quite into radical action yet, but definitely into reading more widely and more deeply on the topic of climate change (and environmental destruction in general), and some of that reading ended up here, as a link or as a gloomy post. It's hard to avoid that, as nearly all of my reading made me more and more alarmed.

I actually do not mean to sound as demotivating as I probably sound to most of you. I am not demotivated. My mother frequently takes issue with me and my views, arguing that one needs, essentially, an approach that will make people feel good if one wants to bring about social change. She responds well to ideas that we can shop our way out of this, by just adjusting our shopping habits a bit towards more ethical, greener products etc. (although she does not really shop very ethically or green. She just likes the idea.) She thinks we should aim to change society without changing society.

The thing is, I don't believe we can shop our way out of this, and I don't believe there is any 'feel good', incremental way of changing the world. If we had decades to effect the necessary changes, maybe. But we don't have decades, we have years, at best. Which means that we need truly radical approaches - and while I do think that a truly radically different society would actually allow many people a much happier life than the current one, and so ultimately result in a situation that *will* 'make people feel good', I don't think that we will get there with baby steps that don't discomfort or frighten anyone.

I think the situation is desperate. I think we need something very much like a revolution. I don't see how I can talk about these two facts without sounding a bit 'extreme', and depressing to anyone whose usual news diet is based on the conventional media, where the shocking, world-shaking news that come in nearly every week now are buried as tiny, ten-line articles on page three of the weekly science supplement. I've been on a 'conventional media news diet' for two months now, thanks to being cut off from the internet, and I'm feeling its deleterious effect keenly when I go back online, check a random environmental news site, and feel a great shock at basically every other news item there. These sites are full of news that should be on the front pages of newspapers worldwide - news from, I should emphasise, reliable sources - press releases from big national and international science organisations, departments of reknowned universities, even government agencies. Yet these news barely reach a public that doesn't seek them out on specialised sites.

It's like the conventional news media and the environmental news sites report from two entirely different planets. Unfortunately I can find no serious reason to believe that it is the conventional media, and not the environmental sites, that are reporting from the real world. (I'll need to do another post, sometime soon, about the reasons why I believe the 'doomsayers' here. They're actually very rational reasons, although I am aware that believing anyone who proclaims existential threats is frequently seen as irrational per se. But more on that in some other post, later.)

So. Basically, what I'm trying to say, in my rambling way (I'm writing this on the fly, at work, very much in a hurry), is that I've been living in something like a parallel universe for the past six months, a universe where we live under an imminent existential threat, but unfortunately there are lots of signs to indicate that that 'parallel universe' is the real world. And, having come to that kind of conclusion, it's hard - no, impossible - not to talk about this stuff here occasionally. I haven't figured out how to do this in a motivating and constructive way yet; I hope I will, eventually. I don't think things are completely hopeless, but I do think we - all of us, not just the professionally concerned etc. - need to recognise clearly how dire the situation is, because only that will enable us to act adequately to the situation.

Arrgh. Damn. I have to sign off. Sorry, this is a bit crap. Probably I shouldn't post it. But then, this is LJ, which means rambling is par for the course...

This is what I just posted to a thread on boingboing:

Seems to me as if the only truly reasonable reaction to this is, for each of us, to turn our lives around so as to reduce our personal emissions *as much as possible*, *right now* - and start to get politically active so as to get society to adopt that course, as well.

Of course, that's for a definition of 'reasonable' which is based on two assumptions:

1.) The survival of civilisation/humans/life on earth is a priority that overrides individual desires for unnecessary luxuries. (I'm not equating the three things separated by slashes in the previous sentence, btw - I'm just listing them in the order of likelihood of their being threatened.)

2.) In a complex system which we do not fully understand, we should not be too ready to declare that 'it's over' and 'we're screwed'. As long as there are factors that aren't understood, there is hope. This means that giving up now is unreasonable, because only by giving up (and, by implication, continuing our lives the 'business as usual' way as long as it's still possible) do we condemn ourselves with *absolute* certainty.

**

Links:

I've posted most of these before, but here they are again, collected in one handy post for easier clicking. Discussion is still going on in the comments, so it pays to check back occasionally.

Green blogosphere:

http://climateprogress.org/2008/09/23/has-runaway-climate-change-begun/

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008702.html

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/9/24/111531/839

Newspapers:

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/exclusive-the-methane-time-bomb-938932.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/23/climatechange.scienceofclimatechange1?gusrc=rss&feed=environment

Addendum:

Nice animated movie explaining positive feedback loops and tipping points:

http://wakeupfreakout.org/

WTF, people? - Yes, 'stop flying' means *you*, too! (No doubt that makes me an EVUL ECO-NAZI who wants to deprive people of the well-deserved, meagre joys of their stressful lives, and probably all just because I'm jealous I can't afford expensive holidays myself. Or, as my mother puts it: "We just can't *live* the kind of limited life that *you* live!" - Though, to be fair, my parents' preferred mode of holiday is the bike tour, so they're pretty near ecological paragons in that respect. Our points of conflict are more along the lines of food, i.e. the need, or, in their view, the unimaginable deprivation, of reducing meat and, even more importantly, fish consumption.)

Oceans

Change Everything

Addendum:

For the Germans on my flist:

Meet me here next saturday! ;-)

Addendum 2:

I can provide you a place to sleep, too. Contact me here or by e-mail.