Animal production is the leading cause of climate change today.
The world is facing a pivotal moment in its history. Humans are on the brink of a “game over” situation, as NASA scientists have said if the US government moves forward on the Keystone pipeline. There is no going back and the world as we know it cannot be saved if drilling the Canadian tar sands goes forward. Part of me believes that…
And now the consequences are indeed here, and they’re getting worse. Are they really irreversible yet? I honestly don’t know. Would it be irresponsible to gamble on not trying to reverse, or at least mitigate them? I think yes.
“… “I’m taking action because I feel desperate,” said U.S. climate scientist Peter Kalmus, who along with several others locked himself to the front door of a JPMorgan Chase building in Los Angeles. A recent report found that the financial giant is the biggest private funder of oil and gas initiatives in the world.
“It’s the 11th hour in terms of Earth breakdown, and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity,” Kalmus continued. “World leaders are still expanding the fossil fuel industry as fast as they can, but this is insane. The science clearly indicates that everything we hold dear is at risk, including even civilization itself and the wonderful, beautiful, cosmically precious life on this planet. I actually don’t get how any scientist who understands this could possibly stay on the sidelines at this point.” …”
Every single denialist depends on the idea that big brother government and climate scientists are on the same side so how do they even begin to fit this into their delusion?
natgeo Photo by @cristinamittermeier // Can you guess what is wrong with this penguin? We spent a month in Antarctica on assignment for @natgeo and it was not until the second week that I realized we had not seen snow once. Every day, however, we experienced several hours of incessant rain. As temperatures warm in Antarctica, the weather regime is changing from snow to rain. In the past, the penguin colony would be covered in snow but now, it is a large, muddy mess. Baby penguins are covered in fluffy down and they can easily preen themselves when it snows. When they get muddy and wet, their down loses its insulation ability and as temperatures drop at night, they become hypothermic and die. As the debate on weather or not to protect the Antarctic Peninsula starts to play out, I hope that the members of the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), who will be voting on this issue are inspired to protect it for all humanity. #Followmeat@cristinamittermeier and follow the conversation at @Sea_legacy
Especially today, it is literally about turning all your lights off. It’s earth hour at 8.30 pm your local time. Living in the dark for one hour is a message that you care about our planet. But turning everything off you don’t need at the moment is something important every day. So much energy is wasted by tv’s nobody’s looking at or lights in rooms with no one in it.
Bamboo grows very fast, so it is the perfect material for an item that needs to be replaced every three month. Unlike plastic. A plastic toothbrush is used for a couple of weeks and then stays on this planet for several hundred years, since it will not biodegrade. That makes no sense. Switch to bamboo. Plus: You can just burry the old brushes in the backyard.
Not everybody has the chance to, but if you have the option to change your power supplier, do so. It might seem obvious, but people underestimate the power we have. We can vote with our dollars for the world we want to live in. Also, check what company is behind the green power supplier of your choice and try to find one who is not part of a big coal or fracking company.
This is an easy one: Carry around a set of cutlery in your everyday bag. You can use an outdoor camping set or just go with your normal forks, spoons or sticks. Whenever your eating out anywhere in a place that doesn’t offer reusable cutlery, just use your own and skip the plastic. You can just put them in the dishwasher when you are back home and save a ton of plastic.
EARTHLING /ərTHliNG/ noun: an inhabitant of the Earth.
The term Earthling is holistically inclusive—it reflects our similarities, not our differences. We call ourselves Earthlings because we are of the same species, living on the same planet.
“… “I’m taking action because I feel desperate,” said U.S. climate scientist Peter Kalmus, who along with several others locked himself to the front door of a JPMorgan Chase building in Los Angeles. A recent report found that the financial giant is the biggest private funder of oil and gas initiatives in the world.
“It’s the 11th hour in terms of Earth breakdown, and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity,” Kalmus continued. “World leaders are still expanding the fossil fuel industry as fast as they can, but this is insane. The science clearly indicates that everything we hold dear is at risk, including even civilization itself and the wonderful, beautiful, cosmically precious life on this planet. I actually don’t get how any scientist who understands this could possibly stay on the sidelines at this point.” …”
Corporate media will not cover the climate crisis.
With over 125 million views in the month (roughly) since it was released, Lil Dicky’s music video Earth certainly is getting quite a bit of attention, especially (or so I’m told) in the tweenager/young-teenager crowd. The video draws on a wealth of big-name star power, profanity (although there is a “clean” version for children with 16 million views), and humor to convey its “globalized” pro-Earth/pro-Environmental message to a younger audience, before ending with a message about global warming and the twelve-year deadline, with a link to take action through WeLoveTheEarth.org. While there are certainly quite a few issues one might take with the song lyrics and visual representation, what I want to explore are not only the limitations implicit in this approach (namely a very Global North/Ameri-centric “globalized” imaginary, an obscuring of capitalist/corporate responsibility for climate change in favor of a neoliberal individual actions model, a maintaining of the Human/Nature binary, and a focus on a young audience when older demographics are perhaps more in need of convincing), but also the strengths of this approach and why, perhaps, it may be useful to step back and let these “meme-friendly” call-to-arms proliferate, rather than critiquing imperfect representations to death.
Ultimately, because I can see both how strong both the limitations and possibilities to these various approaches are, I am undecided on what the “correct” course of action may be. I recognize that the stakes are higher in this for some than for others–both in the sense that lack of action disproportionately is affecting certain communities, who therefore are more invested in results over perfect representation, as well as the way that because of the disproportionate effects of inaction, certain communities may find it less viable to overlook (and therefore further obscure) these inequalities; because of this, I am certainly not in any position to draw firm conclusions, and what follows is intended to be an exploration which I hope will invite a broader conversation.
Okay so let me start with a rundown of the limitations; while there are several points I’m making here, I am honestly going to try to keep each as succinct as possible because I think these may be more obvious than the benefits (that being said, I’m more than happy to delve into these points further if anyone has any questions or feels they do need to be made more visible). First, lets look at the “globalized” imaginary. The song’s chorus goes:
Earth, it is our planet (It’s our planet) We love the Earth (We love the Earth), it is our home (Home) We love the Earth, it is our planet (It is our planet) We love the Earth, it is our home We love the Earth
Other lines include “We love you, India/Africa/the Chinese,” the humorous “We forgive you, Germany,” and “C'mon everybody, I know we’re not all the same / But we’re living on the same Earth.” These lines simultaneously call for a globalized action, while also imagining a) that something quasi-globalized already exists and b) that “differences” are the reason we have not fully come together. Frederick Cooper has an amazing article which I highly recommend called “What Is the Concept of Globalization Good for? An African Historian’s Perspective,” and one of his arguments which is especially relevant here is that “a ‘globalizing’ language stood alongside a structure of domination and exploitation that was lumpy in the extreme” (204). What does it mean, in this context, to say “we love the Earth,” let alone “we love you, India/Africa/China”? Listing Global South nations which often bare the brunt of capitalist/colonialist industrial exploitation might be intended to acknowledge the uneven effects global warming has on marginalized communities (what Rob Nixon has termed “slow violence”); but then why is Germany on the list (other than for the comedic effect), and more importantly who is the “we” who “loves” these nations, and what does that “love” amount to? I think constantly of Elizabeth Catte’s comment in What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, that she felt paranoid traveling for academic conferences that she would bring the smell of the coal industry with her, and give herself away as someone who wasn’t worth not being poisoned. Love is a beautiful idea to invoke, but do “we” “love” the Global South enough to stop poisoning “them”? And what about the poor in the Global North?
The lack of definition of “we” contributes to my second problem with the song/video: while I do not mean to undermine the absolute value individual actions have towards improving the environment, the opening of the song focuses on litter and the fumes exuded by personal vehicles. There is no direct reference to the kinds of waste and pollution created by corporations.
Thirdly, the lyrics contain a laundry list of humorous animal descriptions such as “Hi, I’m a baboon I’m like a man, just less advanced and my anus is huge.” While obviously intended to be funny, these descriptions reify the Human/Animal and Human/Nature divide and contribute to binary logics. One of the criticisms of the “Anthropocene” narrative is that it seperates “humanity” from “nature” in ways which obscure the entanglement actually involved in environmental networks. This is not in any way to imply that human actions and systems are not responsible for global warming (whether you put the blame on humanity in general as in the Anthropocene or specific individuals acting through capitalism as in the Capitalocene there is no denying that climate crisis is happening because of human action); rather, the problem here is that it this binary attempts to imagine a separateness between humans and nature which is not useful in addressing climate change, because it obscures the intricacy of interaction and allows us to vastly oversimplify what we see as viable solutions.
Finally, the video and lyrics are clearly intended to draw in a younger demographic, and yet polls have shown that there is an age gap in concern about climate change which trends towards younger populations.
That being said, let’s look at why this video may be a good and necessary thing, despite the potential drawbacks. First, even though younger people tend to already believe in and be more concerned about climate change than older folks, studies have shown that children change their parents’ minds about climate change, so convincing children/teens to care about climate change and to talk about it with their parents does have a measurable impact on the opinions of older adults. This leads to why the humorous lyrics and video may be particularly useful, despite the problematics outlined above. At this moment in time, social media and memes in particular are a particularly powerful political weapon. Mother Jones recently ran an article titled ““The Left Can’t Meme”: How Right-Wing Groups Are Training the Next Generation of Social Media Warriors” which outlines the role memes have played in perpetuating conservative and far-right thought and manifesting conservative/far-right desires. Memes are “cheap, subversive, and designed to provoke an emotional response, memes are a disruptive form of information guerrilla warfare.” Another article discussing “The Evolution of Political Internet Memes” argues that “memes are likely to gain more importance in a post-text future. Younger generations are shifting more and more to visual platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat. Images are therefore more likely shape their views on politics and politicians.” For these reasons, a song/music video such as Earth which is likely to draw in a large audience of kids/teens due to star power (everyone from Justin Bieber to Halsey to Kevin Hart makes an appearance), humor, and catchy tune is likely to make an impact on children and therefore their parents. Furthering this point, the website linked at the end of the music video presents itself in a far more professional manner–this is what parents are more likely to be looking at (and potentially donating to, and taking advice from) than the song itself.
So again, I’m not sure whether this benefit outweighs the oversimplifications presented through the lyrics/video but I do think they’re worth considering, and I absolutely invite further conversation on this matter. Do we need to follow the conservative meme-model of making politics more easily legible/accessible? Or does this model further obscure the struggles of marginalized folks and render invisible issues that need to be brought to light and challenged? Is there a (better) way to balance this?
NASA’sinteractiveImages of Change gallery “features images of different locations on planet Earth, showing change over time periods ranging from centuries to days. Some of these effects are related to climate change, some are not. Some document the effects of urbanization, or the ravage of natural hazards such as fires and floods. All show our planet in a state of flux.”
