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The Green Patriarch: Bartholomew
This is a powerful film on a true spiritual leader who fully grasps the significance of the current moment for the future of humanity and Creation, and who is working behind the scenes to change the way humanity relates to Earth and Nature. (watch The Green Patriarch)

E.O.Wilson: "The world is full of amateurs: gifted amateurs, devoted amateurs... Anybody can pick up information in interesting places, find new species or rediscover what was thought to be a vanished species, or some new biological fact about a species already known, and can provide that right into The Encyclopedia of Life."
NYTimes' David Pogue interview with E.O.Wilson: transcript


Watch a video about E.O. Wilson and the birth of the Encyclopedia of Life project.

Encyclopedia of Life Podcast:
One Species at a Time
The Encyclopedia of Life has been growing rapidly since E.O.Wilson first imagined the project in 2003. It is indeed rapidly developing as the indispensable media-rich database of earth's species, with already 400,000 species pages, and growing numbers of contributors all over the world. There is now a new Learning and Education area where you can for instance develop your own multimedia regional field guides, or listen to and download the EoL's excellent series of podcasts, One Species at a Time.

In Defense of Food
Michael Pollan discusses his latest book, "In Defense of Food"- (watch videos)

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Ecoversity is an open-source environmental website promoting ecological awareness, understanding, knowledge and responsibility. Ecoversity.org has over 2,000 active links and over 1,000 videos available with information on tools, practices and skills for sustainable living. Ecoversity's mission is educating the world for a healthy, prosperous and sustainable future for all of the biosphere. We welcome your input and participation.

2011 Year in Review
2011 will be remembered especially for 3 things: the disaster in Fukushima, which is ongoing, the widespread occurrences of costly severe weather events, and a worldwide revolt against the status quo.
Radiation from Fukushima, still being released, has caused an estimated 14-18,000 deaths in the United States, while a radioactive debris 'island' twice the size of Texas is currently crossing the Pacific toward North America.
But it was severe weather outbreaks, ultimately caused by CO2 pollution and the resultant climate disruption, that accompanied every month of the year somewhere on the planet. The intense downpours, high winds, heavy storms, drought and wildfires, predicted already a decade ago by climatologists, caused record damage and loss of life around the world. In the US alone, there were 14 billion-dollar weather related disasters in 2011. In spite of this, the Climate Conference in Durban South Africa, (COP17) was able only to agree to agree on a carbon emissions regime by 2015, for implementation by 2020. Conferees would say in private that 'the process' was saved, but not the climate. We are told that the target of maximum 2°C. increase is now out of reach, and that we'll see something closer to 3°C. or more, which would be disastrous. And that's where it stands now- we're looking at, in the best of cases, a lost decade of inaction, and it's the decade we cannot afford to lose; carbon emissions in 2010 were the highest on record, and accelerating.
Against this backdrop of the failure of governmental authorities and corporate elites to act to protect the health of the planet and the security of human civilization, we see rebellion against the status quo arising all across the world, in the revolts of the Arab Spring, the indignados in Europe, and the Occupy movement in America; also in India, Russia, and China.
2012 is shaping up to be a year of overlapping crises, political, economic, military, and yes, climatological. By the end of the next year, if we haven't been zapped by Niburu, or a death beam from the galactic center, the status quo will have been severely shaken up. The result may be a further power grab by corporate powers over the wealth and resources of the planet; maybe, hopefully, there will also be a breakout of new currents of thought and action with a new frame to address our situation here on Earth.
NASA last week announced it has begun detecting terrestrial planets in habitable zones around nearby stars. This is good news, because if we don't change the way we do everything here on Earth, we will need several new planets to accommodate our profligate species. These planets however, are many light-years from Earth. Which will happen sooner, that we become sustainable here on Earth, or that we develop light-speed travel and carry several billion of us to a new world?

COP17 Durban, South Africa
December 15. COP17 has ended, with an agreement to agree - in 2015, on a framework for carbon emissions reduction which would come into force in 2020.
"The decisions adopted here fall well short of what is needed. It's high time governments stopped catering to the needs of corporate polluters, and started acting to protect people." -Alden Meyer, Union of Concerned Scientists.
The Climate Action Tracker project, a joint scientific effort of the German non-profit Climate Analytics and the renewable energy consultancy EcoFys, issued a statement on Sunday declaring that despite the Durban agreement, the world remained on track to see well over a 3-degrees Celsius rise in average temperatures by the end of the century. Such an outcome could mean a possible "dieback" of the Amazon rainforest, destruction of coral reefs, loss of Greenland ice sheets and other effects. (report)

Dec 9. Bloomberg Business Week reports "China, the U.S. and India, the three biggest polluters, maintained resistance to a time line leading to the next agreement on global warming, threatening efforts to keep alive the only limits on fossil fuel emissions."
"The crunch now is between two powerful coalitions - the U.S., China, and India pushing for nothing to be decided until after 2020, and the EU, the islands and Least Developed Countries on the other hand, pushing for a Durban legal mandate to kick off treaty negotiations right away."- Mark Lynas, Maldives (more)

In the first week of December temperatures in Northern New Mexico plunged to single digits while Los Angeles was wracked by record Santa Anna winds exceeding 100 mph, uprooting trees and damaging hundreds of buildings. A week later, with the COP 17 Climate Conference underway in Durban, South Africa, Scotland is closed down by a record low-pressure storm with winds over 160 mph.
And Scotland's wasn't the only weather disaster running concurrently with the Climate Conference: Brad Johnson at Think Progress lists eight of them, from The Scotland 'weather-bomb' to killer floods in Kenya, and the torrential rains that hit Durban itself, killing 10.
Johnson notes:
"This year's climate devastation has shattered records. There have been 14 billion-dollar climate disasters in the United States alone, causing damages cost at least $53 billion. The floods in Thailand were that nation's worst ever. 'Weather-related catastrophes in Asia have more than tripled over the last 30 years,' Munich Re reports. 'In China alone, weather-related disasters have more than quadrupled since 1980.' Despite the exponentially growing damages fueled by exponentially growing carbon pollution, the world's top polluters - China and the United States - have insisted that new steps to cut carbon won't happen before 2020."

Noam Chomsky calls this "some kind of lethal insanity" in a Dec 7 piece for In These Times.
"To gain perspective on what's happening in the world, it's sometimes useful to adopt the stance of intelligent extraterrestrial observers viewing the strange doings on Earth. They would be watching in wonder as the richest and most powerful country in world history now leads the lemmings cheerfully off the cliff." (Marching Off the Cliff)

There's reason for the new tone of alarm. On December 4th, the Global Carbon Project confirmed that carbon emissions worldwide had jumped 5.9% in 2010, the biggest increase ever, and worse than the IPCC's worse-case scenario. In the US, emissions rose by 4%. In China, by 10.4%. (the details of this study are interesting- read more here)

And there's James Hansen, announcing that new paleoclimate findings show even the targeted 2° C. increase will already spell disaster. . .
"Hansen concluded with a message to negotiators at the current climate talks in Durban, South Africa. If the world begins reducing CO2 emissions by 6 percent a year starting in 2012, Hansen said, atmospheric levels can return to the 'safe' level of 350 ppm that he and others have long called for. 'If the world waits until 2020 to begin,' he noted, 'it will need to reduce CO2 by 15 percent a year to reach 350 ppm. We are out of time.' "-Mark Fischetti, Scientific American Blogs

Related:

Climate change may happen more quickly than expected
In an article published Dec 15 in the journal Nature, a survey of 41 international experts led by University of Florida ecologist Edward Schuur shows models created to estimate global warming may have underestimated the magnitude of carbon emissions from permafrost over the next century. Its effect on climate change is projected to be 2.5 times greater than models predicted, partly because of the amount of methane released in permafrost, or frozen soil. (read more)

Margie Alt, Executive Director Environmental America, 12/9:
"In the Wake of Durban and the Hottest Decade on Record: The Way Forward on Global Warming"

SREX IPCC: Special Report:
Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation
"Climate change associated with human activity is responsible for a portion of the extreme weather patterns unfolding across the globe and will likely intensify in the decades ahead, says a report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Increased frequency of high temperature and precipitation are among the weather patterns changes the world can expect, the report warns."- NYTimes, Nov 19 / View SREX report

Meanwhile, pipeline or not, new and costly efforts are vigorously underway to find more hydrocarbons to burn in the South China Sea, the Arctic circle, Siberia, Gulf of Mexico, Alaska. . .

Two Degrees of Disaster
"Two years ago, at a meeting in Copenhagen, world leaders agreed on the goal of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius, or roughly three and a half degrees Fahrenheit. The so-called Copenhagen Accord, which Barack Obama personally helped negotiate, contained no mechanism for meeting this goal, so even though the President called it a 'meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough', many others questioned whether it was worth the proverbial paper it was printed on. Unfortunately, it now seems, the many others had a point."
Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, (2006), The New Yorker, Nov 11, 2011

IEA warns world headed for irreversible climate change in five years
"The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be "lost for ever", according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure."
International Energy Agency Report: Four degrees and beyond

Puncturing the Pipeline
Bill McKibben on the Keystone postponement and hopes for a green Obama at Tom's Dispatch

Dec 15 Update: The GOP has tacked on to the payroll tax extension bill a measure to override the president's decision to delay the Keystone XL decision.

Here's Bill McKibben on the dirty dealings in Washington:
What stinks in D.C.
"When the battle is out in the open when people are hearing from scientists explaining that heavily tapping the Canadian tar sands would mean it was 'essentially game over' for the climate we have a chance to prevail. But when the action disappears behind closed doors in Congress, money rules." (read article)

Capitalism vs. the Climate
Naomi Klein November 9, 2011 The Nation.
". . . This uneasy silence has persisted through the end of the hottest decade in recorded history and yet another summer of freak natural disasters and record-breaking heat worldwide. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is rushing to make multibillion-dollar investments in new infrastructure to extract oil, natural gas and coal from some of the dirtiest and highest-risk sources on the continent (the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline being only the highest-profile example). In the Alberta tar sands, in the Beaufort Sea, in the gas fields of Pennsylvania and the coalfields of Wyoming and Montana, the industry is betting big that the climate movement is as good as dead.
"If the carbon these projects are poised to suck out is released into the atmosphere, the chance of triggering catastrophic climate change will increase dramatically (mining the oil in the Alberta tar sands alone, says NASAs James Hansen, would be 'essentially game over' for the climate)."

Naomi Klein's Inconvenient Climate Conclusions
December 7. NYT DotEarth's Andrew Revkin does a Q & A with Naomi Klein about her article "Capitalism vs. The Climate" (see above)

Nature is the 99%, too
"The economy is built on the idea of relentless growth, which is an environmental and health disaster for all but the 1%. . . Degrading the planet's operating systems to bolster the bottom line is foolish and reckless. It hurts us all. No less important, it's unfair. The 1 per cent profit, while the rest of us cough and cope." Chip Ward writing at Tom Dispatch

Heat and Drought, USA, 2011
Almost 9,000 daily records were broken or tied in July, including 2,755 highest maximum temperatures during the day, and more worryingly, from a climatological perspective, 6,171 highest nighttime lows. (Ref: Susan Kraemer, Clean Technica)
From July 2 to August 10, Dallas saw 40 straight days of temperatures at or above 100° (the record was 42 days in 1980). There were six days of record-breaking highs, with the hottest at 110°. Dallas set a new record for the all time warmest low temperature at 86°, and that mark was hit three times. Temperatures reached a record-breaking 116° at Medicine Lodge, Kansas, breaking the old record of 114°.
Aridification In Progress
Robin Young of "Here and Now" interviews Alex Prud'homme, the author of "The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century", on the coming water crisis, the current Southwest 'drought' (actually, it's part of a long-term 'aridification'), and what we might do to avoid the worst.
(listen to audio interview)

Carbon Emissions Reach Record High in 2010; 2°C limit may now be unattainable.
CO2 emission figures for 2010 have been released by the International Energy Agency, and have caused considerable worry among the world's climatologists. After a slight dip in 2009 due to the worldwide recession, climate emissions for 2010 jumped above those of 2008 to a new record level of 30.6 gigatons. At this rate of increase, there is considerable pessimism that we can limit the planetary temperature increase to 2 degrees in the coming decades. (Worst Ever Carbon Emissions Leave Climate on the Brink- Guardian UK) (IEA: Prospect of limiting the global increase in temperature to 2°C is getting bleaker)

What's worse, there seems to be vastly more effort going into finding yet more sources of fossil fuel than ramping up an alternative renewable energy infrastructure. This is a kind of self-destructive madness on the part of our civilization, since every ton of carbon injected into the atmosphere brings us that much closer to not only a warmer Earth, but a potential runaway greenhouse effect. James Hansen has said, "I've come to conclude that if we burn all reserves of oil, gas and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty."
But that seems to be precisely where we are heading- Here is Bill McKibben speaking with Chris Hedges:
"This year the Obama administration has to decide whether it will grant a permit or not for this giant pipeline to run from the tar sands of Alberta down to the refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. That is like a 1,500-mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet. We have to figure out how to keep that from happening. The Obama administration, very sadly, a couple of months ago opened 750 million tons of western coal under federal land for mining. That was a disgrace. But they still have to figure out how to get it to port so they can ship it to China, which is where the market for it is. We are trying hard to keep that from happening." (ref)
"This significant increase in CO2 emissions and the locking in of future emissions due to infrastructure investments represent a serious setback to our hopes of limiting the global rise in temperature to no more than 2°C." - Dr Fatih Birol, IEA Chief Economist (ref IEA)

Recent Developments in Religion and Ecology
A while back we posted an excerpt from a film about an inspiring man, the Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople. The 'Green Patriarch', as Bartholomew is known, has been working quietly for years to reawaken a sense of responsibility for Earth's nature within the Christian tradition. Here we look at some other voices in this field, notably the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology and the legacy of Thomas Berry. (see videos)

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Beekeeping Course Cancelled
Ecoversity will not be offering the beekeeping course this year. For more info, see our Beekeeping page

New at Biomagic:

The Fracking Industry's War on Truth   - Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Here Comes The Sun
Paul Krugman, NYTimes Nov 7
"Lets face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar.
So what you need to know is that nothing you hear from these people is true. Fracking is not a dream come true; solar is now cost-effective. Here comes the sun, if were willing to let it in."

Japan quake, tsunami, multiple meltdowns: see our recent updates and resources here.

Alert: "Imprelis" herbicide
"The recently approved herbicide called Imprelis [DuPont], widely used by landscapers because it was thought to be environmentally friendly, has emerged as the leading suspect in the deaths of thousands of Norway spruces, eastern white pines and other trees on lawns and golf courses across the country."(story NYTimes)

Affiliated Blogs:
Biomagic
Monday's Poem
Jeff Harbour
Vortex-Eco
Heraclitus Report

DeChristopher Sentence: 2 Yrs.

"This is not going away. At this point of unimaginable threats on the horizon, this is what hope looks like. In these times of a morally bankrupt government that has sold out its principles, this is what patriotism looks like. With countless lives on the line, this is what love looks like, and it will only grow. The choice you are making today is what side are you on." - Tim DeChristopher speaking to the court at his sentencing.
Read the complete statement at the Biomagic blog
Listen to Robert Davis of Grist discussing the sentence and implications with Sam Sedar:

Record Tornado Onslaught
500 dead; over one thousand tornadoes in April-May. Parts of Tuscaloosa Alabama and Joplin Missouri are leveled by F4 and F5 'multivortex' storms. This is the biggest tornado assault in three quarters of a century, and now there are lots of cellphones, so we have some amazing video: tornadoes: videos and updates

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