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    @John Monro, re that conversation further down: Greta's not speaking panic, you think? I thought Archived Message

    Posted by Rhisiart Gwilym on October 20, 2019, 10:21 am

    that her message has been one long shout of "People, wake up! It's VERY urgent! Panic, panic, panic!!'

    Well, if it serves to shake the issue into the forefront of public consciousness, I'm all for it. Go at it hell-for-leather Gret! But isn't the assertion that 'We've only got about a decade left to do something effective!' a fairly classic TEOTWAWKI panic-shout of the - recurring - Chicken Little kind; virtually none of which ever seem to come to pass, in the event... Pretty certainly climate-shift is going to change the world as we've known it hitherto. But the end? Er - don't think so.

    We are waking up, I think. Unwillingly, but it's happening. The frightening weather events are a help in this respect. (For example, NAmerican arable farmers have lost something like HALF their crops this year, because of flooding and unseasonable cold. That sort of thing straightens-out denialist self-indulgence pronto!) There are still many things which can be done to lessen the impact of the chaos. But - key point - there is NO cutoff date, after which all further remedial responses will be useless. They'll always be useful. Like the mass tree-plantings, some of them will spring from the changing human perception of the over-riding importance of the matter. Other useful responses will be of the Gaian negative-feedback sort (lots of those available in Her armoury), and not reliant on any human cooperation to work. They're evolved-in to the nature of the life process on this planet. And as before so in future: these large-scale natural geophysical and geo-biological responses will go at their own time and pace, on their own triggering, regardless of panicky human impatience. We really need to get rid of the 'man-the-master-of-all-things delusion', and recognise how much more ungovernably powerful are geophysical/biological processes than we are - or will ever be. It doesn't seem to me that hom sap has - or will ever have - the means to wipe this planet clear of life. We're just fated never to be that powerful - thank god! We just need to dump the techytechy-progressforever-to-Startrekky-Vulcan delusion from our body of ruling myths. 'Stay at home on planet Earth and give loving service to the Great Mother' is a much better myth, and a much more reality-observing one.

    But just to look at a couple of hopeful trends in human attitudes as well: Besides the obviously-increasing interest in re-forestation as a sound response, it's also heartening to see the flooding of stock-farmers into the new/ancient practices of natural grazing methods, as promoted by people like Allan Savory, which are spreading everywhere that people run flocks on range-land; methods which mimic the behaviour of wild grazing herds on wild, unmanaged-by-humans grasslands.

    In both of these wholly-healthy, and growing movements, there is also the growing realisation that it's not just the trees and the other photosynthesing aerials which are important - though they are - but the huge soil communities of which the green plants are the upper aerials, doing their food-creating stuff in the sunlight, for the benefit of the entire community, both above and below ground: the soil, with its aerials, is a massive, living carbon-sequestration sink. As long as these vast assemblages of living creatures are doing well, then they're also doing Gaia's active-management feed-back work, to keep conditions within the tolerable band where life can thrive - some kind of life, that is; but always subject to evolutionary change, whenever there are empty niches to be filled. There will be no stopping that process whilst life persists on this planet; the constant pageant of extinction and replacement of species, which seems to be the fate of all creatures here - presumably including us eventually.

    These seem to me to be reasons not to panic - but to damn' well get to work; especially on our own personal lives, where we have our best chance of making an actually useful contribution. And yes, back the activist movements energetically too, at the same time, every way that we can. And keep the gangster-capitalist gics' snouts out of the trough whilst we're at it! Their agenda is not ours.

    Cheers John!

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