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    Re: 'Emergency on Planet Earth' - XR Scientists present the case for rebellion Archived Message

    Posted by Ian M on August 30, 2020, 5:59 pm, in reply to "Re: 'Emergency on Planet Earth' - XR Scientists present the case for rebellion"

    'I actually think biodiversity loss or, rather, mass extinction of species is the real issue.' - agreed, I think that at base is the defining feature of the civilised society/ies: theft of the 'wealth' accumulated in the innumerable other species that inhabited the land before it was cleared to make way for domesticated plants, animals and humans, in whose biomass all that wealth is now concentrated, swelling our populations at the expense of all the diminished, refugee or extinct wildlife which had predominated for millions of years beforehand. There's even a metric for it which I may have mentioned before: Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP), NPP being a measure of the primary energy photosynthesised from sunlight by all the plants on the planet, forming the base of the food web. Estimates vary but it seems to be between 20% and 40% of this hoovered up directly into the capitalist/civilised economic systems, see this summary: https://editors.eol.org/eoearth/wiki/Global_human_appropriation_of_net_primary_production_(HANPP)

    'Humanity’s impact on the biosphere’s (Global human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP)) structures (e.g., land cover) and functioning (e.g., biogeochemical cycles) is considerable. It exceeds natural variability in many cases. Sanderson and others have classified up to 83% of the global terrestrial biosphere as being under direct human influence, based on geographic proxies such as human population density, settlements, roads, agriculture and the like; another study, by Hannah et al., estimates that about 36% of the Earth’s bioproductive surface is “entirely dominated by man”.'

    Yes, prevention of CC is way too late considering the +/- 40 year timelag of emissions manifesting as warming. But for some the conversation was always going to be about 'mitigation and adaptation' because they've got too much invested in the economic system to consider stopping it altogether. Now we've just got to 'build resilience in our communities' to take the Inevitable on the chin when it comes, and accept the fact that govts are going to leave us to it because they took all our money and handed it out to their rich buddies. Meanwhile is anybody going to do something about the industries that are continuing to pump carbon into the atmosphere potentially making the planet completely uninhabitable? XR still seem to think that corporate sociopathy is amenable to changes driven by democratic decision-making via the much-vaunted citizen's assemblies. This to me suggests that most have not grasped the full extent of the problem and the deep roots of the urges driving the destruction of the living planet. Or they have, but they're still trying to do what they can by playing nicely along with the rules (rules laid down by that same sociopathic system). Though for sure it's an improvement over the standard NGO model that has been such an abject failure all this time...

    cheers,
    I

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