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Carbon Rangers/Ecozoic Times
Volume 11 No. 11

December, 2018

What Are Signs of Hope?
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Dear Reader,
This December 2018 edition comes out in January 2019.  Apologies for being late.  Blessings for a peaceful 2019.

We have had some disappointment recently in Katowice at the climate talks.  COP24 ended with some minor progress and we were hoping for a clear path to ramp up the ambition of the Paris Climate Agreement.  Governments are not going to achieve even the modest goals of the Paris accord on reducing carbon outputs.  It is more important now than before to see that we cannot depend on governments to address the climate crisis.  We need to do this "Great Work " as people of Earth together.  When someone asks now , "What can I do as an individual with such a global challenge?  A good answer is, "stop being an individual" and join a larger group of committed persons to make a bigger impact.  Yes, continue to reduce, reuse, recycle and eat less meat and use less plastic;  but look around and find out what groups are working near you.  Find your issue.  Lock in your passion and get going.  To change everything we need everyone.  

I am starting  off with a very fine set of ideas from the Washington Post,  a newspaper based in the US capitol.  The opinion piece mentions Drawdown, the 100 best ideas for carbon reduction, which was highlighted in Carbon Rangers a few months ago. I put the link to Drawdown in the final panel below and there is also a link here.

I have also included a long section from Future Crunch on good news they have gathered up this year, especially in conservation victories.  For example, the 2008 Mountain Gorilla population was estimated to be around 680 individuals, but 2018 estimates show that it has increased to over 1,000 individuals, the highest figure ever recorded for the subspecies.The photo (Credit: Carine06/flikr) of mother and infant gorillas in the banner above is from  Future Crunch.

Oceans have been doing better in a few places.   Belize, Chile, the Philippines have good news.  Donald Brown writes thoughtfully on the ethical outlines of the  climate crisis.  Keefe Keely, offers a longer piece on farmers and how they are essential in this struggle despite diminishment of small farms everywhere.  We have a glimpse also of how one family in California is addressing the plastics challenge.   In a podcast link, Gavin Van Horn writes from Chicago to show us the links from urban centers to the local environment.   Bill McKibben, in an encouraging interview from the fall,  gets another chance to speak in the final portion of this New Year Carbon Rangers.  
 
Please check the insights from Thomas Berry and also a piece from Pope Francis in Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home. These wise leaders show us their deep appreciation for the work of creation.

Let me hear from you if you have ideas for improving the Carbon Rangers.
Email: kcawley1@mac.com


Cordially,
Br. Kevin

Websites to visit:
Edmund Rice International  
http://edmundriceinternational.org/jpic/

Thomas Berry Forum for Ecological Dialogue at Iona
http://www.iona.edu/About/Iona-in-Community/The-Thomas-Berry-Forum-for-Ecological-Dialogue.aspx

How We Can Combat Climate Change.
The World Has Until 2030 To Drastically Cut Our Emissions. Where Do We Begin?

from The Washington Post
 
Last year’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sounded the alarm: The world has until 2030 to implement “rapid and far-reaching” changes to our energy, infrastructure and industrial systems to avoid 2 degrees Celsius of warming, which could be catastrophic. But the scale of the challenge can appear so overwhelming that it’s hard to know where to start. The Post asked activists, politicians and researchers for climate policy ideas that offer hope. Radical change from one state, or even the whole United States, won’t address climate change on its own, but taking these actions could help start the planet down a path toward a better future.
11 policy ideas to protect the planet

Read More.


 

Another Year Of Hard-Fought Wins In Conservation.   From Future Crunch

1. The Kofan people of Sinangoe, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, won
on a landmark legal battle to protect the headwaters of the Aguarico River, nullifying 52 mining concessions and freeing up more than 32,000 hectares of primary rainforest. Amazon Frontlines
2. Following China’s ban on ivory last year, 90% of Chinese support it, ivory demand has dropped by almost half, and poaching rates are falling in places like KenyaWWF
3. The population of wild tigers in Nepal was found to have nearly doubled in the last nine years, thanks to efforts by conservationists and increased funding for protected areas. Independent
4. Deforestation in Indonesia fell by 60%, as a result of a ban on clearing peatlands, new educational campaigns and better law enforcement. Ecowatch
5. The United Nations said that the ozone hole would be fully healed over the Arctic and the northern hemisphere by the 2030s, and in the rest of the world by 2060. Gizmodo
6. $10 billion (the largest amount ever for ocean conservation) was committed in Bali this year for the protection of 14 million square kilometres of the world’s oceans. MongaBay
7. In California, the world’s smallest fox was removed from the Endangered Species List, the fastest recovery of any mammal under the Endangered Species Act. Conservaca
8. In 2018, after more than ten years of debate, 140 nations agreed to begin negotiations on a historic “Paris Agreement for the Ocean,” the first-ever international treaty to stop overfishing and protect life in the high seas. National Geographic
9. Niger revealed that it has planted 200 million new trees in three decades, the largest positive transformation of the environment in African history. Guardian
10. Spain said it would create a new marine wildlife reserve for the migrations of whales and dolphins in the Mediterranean and will prohibit all future fossil fuels exploration in the area. Associated Press
11. Following ‘visionary’ steps by Belize, UNESCO removed the Belize Barrier Reef, the second largest in the world, from its list of endangered World Heritage Sites. BBC
12. Colombia officially expanded the Serranía de Chiribiquete (also known as The Cosmic Village of the Jaguars) to 4.3 million hectares, making it the largest protected tropical rainforest national park in the world. WWF
 
Note on the above from Future Crunch: All  of these 12 stories first appeared in our fortnightly email newsletter. If you’re interested in getting more news like this in 2019, you can subscribe for free right here


 

5 Reasons To Feel Hopeful About The Oceans In 2019

This year, the United Kingdom called for 30% of the oceans to be protected within the next decade. But, even without this announcement, many nations took major steps towards protecting their coastlines. Argentina established two new marine parks that together cover the same area as the nation of Hungary. Similarly, the government of the Seychelles instituted two marine parks whose cumulative size is similar to that of Great Britain. New Caledonia, a French territory near Australia, announced four new marine protected areas intended to protect coral reefs and almost 11,000 square miles of ocean. And, South Africa recently established 20 new marine protected areas along its coasts. Although the severity and quality of these protections differs among such efforts, improving these measures is certainly a step towards better marine conservation.

Source Link: 5 Reasons To Feel Hopeful About The Oceans In 2019


 

Watch: 2018 Victories For The Oceans
Link: https://oceana.org/blog/watch-2018-victories-oceans
 

Oceana stands for oceans every day around the world. In 2018, our efforts made waves. From Chile to the Philippines to Brazil, we’ve protected habitat and fisheries, and the people and wildlife that depend on them. Every year, we win more of the fight to protect the world’s oceans. We’ll never give up, and we couldn’t do this work without you.


Back to Blog


 

 
Ethics and Climate | Donald Brown

Source: Ethics and Climate | Donald Brown

On October 8, 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a Special Report on limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial temperatures.  This  report, along with several additional recent scientific studies published in the last few months, including a paper published by the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences on July 21, 2018, Trajectories of  the Earth System in the Anthropocene by Steffen et. al., and a paper published in mid-August of this year in Nature Communications by Anthony et. al., 21st-Century Modeled Permafrost Carbon Emissions Accelerated by Abrupt Thaw Beneath, lead to the conclusion that the international community is facing an urgent existential crisis that threatens life on Earth. Preventing this catastrophe now requires the entire international community at all levels of government (i.e., national, state, regional, and local) to engage immediately in an unprecedented effort to rapidly reduce GHG emissions to net zero in the next few decades.   Read More.


 


Pope Francis: Laudato Si:  On Care for Our Common Home

 

On many concrete questions, the Church has no reason to offer a definitive opinion; she knows that honest debate must be encouraged among experts, while respecting divergent views. But we need only take a frank look at the facts to see that our common home is falling into serious disrepair. Hope would have us recognize that there is always a way out, that we can always redirect our steps, that we can always do something to solve our problems. Still, we can see signs that things are now reaching a breaking point, due to the rapid pace of change and degradation; these are evident in large-scale natural disasters as well as social and even financial crises, for the world’s problems cannot be analyzed or explained in isolation. There are regions now at high risk and, aside from all doomsday predictions, the present world system is certainly unsustainable from a number of points of view, for we have stopped thinking about the goals of human activity. “If we scan the regions of our planet, we immediately see that humanity has disappointed God’s expectations”.(61) .  (Italics added.)


REVISITING A GEOGRAPHY OF HOPE
by Keefe Keeley, Co-Executive Director, Savanna Institute
https://www.humansandnature.org/
 

…Globally, soil holds more carbon than atmosphere and biosphere combined. Let that sink in. The carbon, that is. Increasing the global soil carbon stocks an average of 0.4 percent yearly would be enough to offset all increase in atmospheric carbon stocks due to human activity.[4]An initiative called the 4 per 1000, which is based on this idea and launched at the COP 21 and as part of the Lima-Paris Action Plan, is underdeveloped and woefully unsung, but the message is clear: We need farmers to keep more carbon on their farms. Read More.


My Family Is Going Plastic-Free In January. At Least, We're Going To Try
Link is here.  by Jill Replogle

My husband and I decided our family of four should try to quit single-use plastic for a month starting Jan. 1, 2019. It's our modest experiment in measuring our ability to opt out of what's become a massive, global pollution problem.

I've never made a New Year's resolution that required so much advanced planning. We made the decision a few months ago and we've been talking about and researching it ever since.

What will we use for trash bags? Where will we get tortillas? And tofu? Can we convince the deli counter worker at the supermarket to weigh and sell us cheese in tupperware we'll bring with us? How are we going to remember to keep all that tupperware in the car?

Plastic seems to cover, contain and cushion everything! And as diligent as we may think we are about recycling, only 9 percent of all plastic produced in the U.S. gets recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.


 

Podcast: Coyotes, Hawks, and Minks- in Chicago
On the Down to Earth podcast, author Gavin Van Horn reflects on the relationship between the city and the land surrounding it—and how we can each play a role in rewilding and cultivating our corner of land, no matter how small. 
Listen to the interview.


 

Thomas Berry
1914-2009
 

“What is needed is a new pattern of rapport with the planet. Here we come to the critical transformation needed in the emotional, aesthetic, spiritual, and religious orders of life. Only a change that profound in human consciousness can remedy the deep cultural pathology manifest in such destructive behavior. Such change is not possible, however, so long as we fail to appreciate the planet that provides us with a world abundant in the volume and variety of food for our nourishment, a world exquisite in supplying beauty of form, sweetness of taste, delicate fragrances for our enjoyment, and exciting challenges for us to overcome with skill and action. The poets and artists can help restore this sense of rapport with the natural world. It is this renewed sense of reciprocity with nature, in all of its complexity and remarkable beauty, that can help provide the psychic and spiritual energies necessary for the work ahead.” (Thomas Berry, “Alienation,” in The Sacred Universe, 48).


Audio: Bill Mckibben On The Climate Movements That Give Him Hope By Mike Gaworecki 11/27/2018] Mongabay Publications
Listen Here.
- On this episode, Bill McKibben discusses the climate movements that could spur the world to action and help us avert the worst impacts of global warming.
- You might think that the upcoming Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) would be closely followed by Bill McKibben. But McKibben is not looking to the upcoming COP, taking place in Poland next week, to make much progress in the world’s attempts to combat climate change.
- McKibben joins the Mongabay Newscast to discuss why he thinks these international climate efforts have run out of steam, the climate movements that give him hope, and what’s at stake if we don’t find a way to check global warming.


 

Drawdown Update
NBC News interviewed Vice President of Operations and Engagement Crystal Chissell on the “6 Ways Ordinary People Can Prevent Climate Change, According to Researchers and Advocates.” The article is one of our most viewed and shared posts on Facebook.










 
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