Word for Nature

All good things are wild and free

Vanessa — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:33:11 +0000

This is by graphic designer Andrew Neuhue.

ACES hardly acceptable climate legislation

Vanessa — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:48:58 +0000

This a message I’m copying directly from an email I received today from Greenpeace’s Deputy Campaigns director.

“The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) bill has been so heavily influenced by the coal and oil industries, that Greenpeace now opposes the bill.

President Obama vowed to “restore science to its rightful place” in his inaugural address, yet ACES all but ignores the science.

Here’s what’s WRONG with the legislation:

The Nobel-prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that to avoid the worst climate impacts such as intense droughts, super charged hurricanes and increased heat waves, the U.S. and other industrialized countries must cut their emissions by 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020. This bill, as it’s currently written, only calls for a 4% reduction by 2020. And there’s very little chance those targets will be improved.
These weak targets are made even worse by 2 billion tons per year of allowable offsets. Offsets allow polluters to put off for more than a decade real cuts in their emissions The offsets are so high that they will exceed the actual pollution reductions required until at least 2026 — that’s time we don’t have!
Coal-fired power plants are the single largest source of global warming pollution in the U.S. In order to tackle climate change, we need to begin phasing out coal immediately. But instead of phasing-out coal plants, ACES will actually encourage the growth of a new generation of coal-fired plants! To add insult to injury, tens of billions of taxpayer dollars would be spent on the myth of carbon capture and sequestration — an untested and unproven technology that is decades away from full-scale deployment even by the most optimistic estimates.
Worst of all, ACES will actually remove the President’s existing authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act—an authority that was recently reaffirmed by the Supreme Court. Now that the House has proven that it won’t step up and stop global warming, President Obama’s power to regulate greenhouse gases is our greatest hope.”

Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are the only organizations I know of that oppose the bill. They know very well that coal industries have successfully crafted the Waxman-Markey bill into what they feel may satisfy Americans as climate legislation while gaining for themselves as much time and freedom to pollute as possible.

I’m very confused at why Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas opposed the bill so strongly because of shortcomings, counterproductiveness, and its removal of the EPA’s authority on air quality, and then a few hours later decided to vote yes. I can see why he would be upset by some of the republicans outrightly denying global warming, but that hardly seems to be a reason for voting for a bill that could end up being a set back.

The worse part of ACES, as stated above, is the removal of President Obama’s recently reaffirmed power to regulate greenhouse gases. I want to know why this bill would even include the effort to strip President Obama of this authority. I can’t think of any other reason than the fact that those who have so strongly influenced this bill and are reaping the benefits of this pollution-based economy know that the President wants stronger legislation. In his opening speech today at the Markup of ACES, Congressman Rick Boucher said,

“The Supreme Court ended the debate on whether there would be controls when it effectively mandated three years ago that the Environmental Protection Agency regulate greenhouse gas emissions unless the Congress regulates first.Virtually all interested parties, from the coal industry and electric utilities to the environmental community would prefer that Congress adopt the regulations rather than have them be adopted by the EPA.”

I think that it’s pretty obvious that most in the “environmental communtiy” want Congress to adopt regulations before the President has to as a last resort. There still seems to me to be no justified reason to take this authority away from the President and I would like to see this effort explained beyond this vague statement.

2009 Campus Progress National Conference

Vanessa — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:01:49 +0000

I am really excited about this conference. Van Jones and Bill Clinton are going to be keynote speakers! Van Jones’ speech at Powershift ’09 was amazing, and now that he’s Obama’s green jobs adviser I’m excited to hear his perspective from this angle. I can’t say I’m too familiar with the work of the Clinton Foundation but I’ll definitely be reading up on what they’ve been up to between now and July 7th. The general agenda for the conference is as follows..

Tuesday, July 7, 2009
• Campus Progress and Campus Camp Wellstone Grassroots Training Day
• Campus Progress Journalism in Action Day

Wednesday, July 8, 2009
• Campus Progress National Conference

Thursday, July 9, 2009
• Campus Progress and The Nation Youth Journalism Conference
• Campus Progress Youth Lobby Day

For the last day of the conference you have to choose between going to The Nation Youth Journalism Conference or the Youth Lobby Day. I chose the journalism conference because it’s something I’m considering as a career, but I wish I could go to the YLD too. I’ve only lobbied once, but it was a really great experience and I definitely plan on doing it again. The journalism conference is going to address the future of journalism as well as the tools it takes to make it. Some really great editors, publishers, journalists and multimedia journalists will be there!

So….if you are awesome and not too old, you should apply to this conference!

http://fs6.formsite.com/CampusProgress/2009application/index.html

Tweet for peace

Vanessa — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:32:19 +0000

I was moved by all those who’ve been tagging #IranElection on Twitter and keeping us all in the know from a grassroots pov. Power to the people in Iran! The amount of videos being uploaded onto youtube from celphones is remarkable, too. This is what Van Jones was talking about when he told us to use technology as a tool and not a toy. It is so, so scarily powerful! I don’t know how often I will be updating mine but I’ll be following others and getting updates on my phone from all over the world. Yay twitter!

Beirut=Love

Vanessa — Tue, 19 May 2009 04:13:19 +0000

Trees

Vanessa — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:21:53 +0000

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the forces of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals it’s death wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk, in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal tress grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought. I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labour is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts. Trees have long thoughts, long breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

© Hermann Hesse.

From Wandering by Hermann Hesse. Published by Picador. 1972.

Question

Vanessa — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:01:02 +0000

“If money is just an idea, why don’t we just idea ourselves out of this mess?”

-Liz Ludan

Hypnosis

Vanessa — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:17:02 +0000

Hypnosis was introduced by an Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer (hence ‘mesmerized’). The term ‘hypnosis’ comes from the Greek god of sleep, although hypnosis is very different from sleep. I’m particularly fascinated by the use of hypnosis in the place of an anesthetic drugs in medical and dental surgery. For those who react unfavorably to anesthetic drugs and have developed a tolerance to painkilling opiates, with an open mind, hypnosis can be a great substitute. Under hypnotic suggestion to feel no unpleasantness during surgery, the human brain has the ability to block out sensations of pain. In this situation, painful stimuli enact high arousal in the temporal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for body sensations, while the frontal cortex, the area responsive to unpleasant emotions, remains unaroused. A professional hypnotist is helpful of course, but hypnotists cannot be succesful without the willingness and cooperation of the individual. We don’t think of ourselves as having the ability to free our minds from physical pain without the help of drugs. Is that not miraculous? The mind is a malleable force of limitless potential..

For dreamers

Vanessa — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:30:52 +0000

The dreamers are the saviours of the world. As the visible world is sustained by the invisible, so men, through all their trials and sins and sordid vocations, are nourished by the beautiful visions of their solitary dreamers. Humanity cannot forget its dreamers; it cannot let their ideals fade and die; it lives in them; it knows them as the realities which they shall one day see and know. Composer, sculptor, painter, poet, prophet, sage, these are the makers of the after-world, the architects of heaven. The world is beautiful because they have lived; without them, labouring humanity would perish.

…He who cherishes a beautiful vision, a lofty ideal in his heart, will one day realize it. Columbus cherished a vision of another world, and he discovered it; Copernicus fostered the vision of a multiplicity of worlds and a wider universe, and he revealed it; Buddha beheld the vision of a spiritual world of stainless beauty and perfect peace, and he entered into it.

Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all, heavenly environment; of these, if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built.

…Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your Vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your Ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.

-James Allen, As a man thinketh

For the love of water

Vanessa — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 09:47:26 +0000