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JOIN THE CROWD IN SUPPORTING A FILM ABOUT CLIMATE RESILIENCE among Women in Katakhali, Bangladesh:
A Kickstarter Project by the U.S. based Blangladeshi women artist and film maker, Monica Bose and Nandita Ahmed.
Monica Bose, based in Washington DC, is a visual and performance artist with family roots in Katakhali.
You can see Monica perform in Mt. Ranier, Maryland.
Here is the direct message from Monica and Nadita:
A three-page article called “Storytelling with Saris” has just come out in Annanya, a leading women’s magazine in Bangladesh.
The article is in Bengali and starts with the following quote: “The village is changing from the inside. The women of the village are now enlightened, self-confident, and empowered. There is much that we can learn from them.” I actually heard about the article when I called one of the women in Katakhali the other day. She told me that they had read the article and were very excited. I am pleased that the article is in Bengali so that the women of Katakhali can read it and be proud of their achievements! (It is essentially an expanded Bengali version of a writeup that appeared earlier in the Independent in English.)
On another note, Cyclone Mahasan came through coastal Bangladesh last week and hit Katakhali as a downgraded wind/rain storm. Everyone took shelter in the Samhati health clinic and survived. There was extensive damage to crops and trees, and many of the tin roofs on houses blew off — Samhati will help with repairs as needed.
Please do contribute to our Storytelling with Saris campaign as much as possible. Do try to pledge by this Friday May 24 at noon –that will be our one week mark since the launch and it is critical for us to have lots of support by then so that we get noticed on Kickstarter. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/740602660/her-words-storytelling-with-saris If you have already contributed, we really appreciate your support and ask that you please tell two friends and ask them to contribute. If we can multiply the current funding by three, we can reach $7,500 or be 75% of the way there!
Thank you all very much.
Warm regards,
Monica and Nandita
(and our four new interns, Erica and Kerin in DC, Elin in Wellesley, MA/Jaipur, India, and Nadia in Toronoto, Canada!)
Monica Jahan Bose
2017 Belmont Road, NW
Washington, DC 20009, USA
Good-bye Graduate. It’s a plastic world no longer.
Ecovative will change our world. Plastics derived from hydrocarbons will be obsolete. No more indestructible plastic blowing in the wind, getting caught in trees, whirling down streams and into the great gyre of the Pacific.
WINNER OF THE PICNIC GREEN CHALLENGE in 2008, ECOVATIVE promises to blast us into a new era of mycelium packaging — that’s fungus grown into specifically designed molds to cushion just about anything that needs to be shipped. The substance makes an excellent insulator too.
Congratulations, Eben and Gavin! and kudos also to the mycologist, Sue Van Hook.
If 97% of scientists agree that anthropogenic forces are creating climate change, then why does nearly half the U.S. population express doubt about this?
We used to chalk it up to the Koch brothers and oil industry disinformation, but check out the Thrive Movement and their slick Youtube video at Thrivemovement.org.
The ThriveMovement film plunges you headlong into conspiracy theory. It’s a vast, complicated narrative that spins out overly nearly two hours of film. Highlights include:
- New Energy could be freely available to everyone, except the oil companies and banks have colluded with government to kill the scientists and inventors who have created these marvelous energy producing devices.
- The bankers are seeking absolute totalitarian control over the whole globe.
- This New World Order will be sustained by international taxation.
- carbon taxes and other payments for climate change mitigation are an insidious part of this growing totalitarian control.
- Climate Change is a hoax designed to enslave us to the Banker-Totalitarian masters of the globe
This film, made by Foster and Kimberly Gamble (of the Proctor and Gamble fortune) opens into a vast sub-culture of conspiracy theorists that is thriving in the U.S. and elsewhere.
David Icke features in the film. He’s the guy who thinks the world is really ruled by reptilian aliens. Icke connects to Cathy O’Brien, who is apparently delusional rather than merely pandering and opportunistic. O’Brien makes her living selling books and giving talks about the criminal governmental figures served by mind-controlled sex slaves. O’Brien claims to know this because, she says, she and her daughter were sexually enslaved via a CIA mind-control program called MK Ultra. Those allegedly abusing her range from Gerald Ford to Dick Cheney, Senator Robert Byrd, and Hilary Clinton. This plays as real in Hollywood, where in 2009 Roseanne Barr introduced her at a benefit event.
O’Brien’s pornographically detailed memoir, Trance: Formation of America is in its fourteenth printing. It combines lurid details of sexual abuse, pedophilia, and forced prostitution, with an indictment of top federal officials as criminal abusers of children. The mind control O’Brien claims to have suffered, is allegedly going to be deployed against all Americans. One vehicle for this is federal control over elementary education.
Science does not really stand a chance against this pornographically enthralling conspiracy theory.
Wake up, people, the living world is dying all around you!
As I write about elsewhere, the challenge of governing climate change has proven itself far too difficult for the world’s leaders. Could sea urchins provide the much sought after tech-fix?
The BBC report on how sea urchins use nickel to convert CO2 into shells and spines points to a process that humans might be able to duplicate and scale up via an affordable process.
Calcium carbonate is the product of the absorbed CO2. Harmless and potentially useful.
It is a simple “tech fix”. That is all that is needed to correct the imbalances wrought by climate change. I heard this hubris first at a conference at Georgetown University back in 2003. But the temptation is strong. There is potential for huge profits for some. And it seems such a convenient escape hatch, given the political difficulties of reducig green house gas emissions. Oil, gas, and coal will not go without a fight. Indeed, they seem to be winning the fight to stay.
And so, geoengineering is upon us with the act of a rogue businessman seeding the pacific ocean with iron.
Naomi Klein writing in the New York Times tells us that geoengineering destroys forever the natural refuge from the messy world of human affairs.
The situation does not seem so absolute to me. This is more like an add-on. It is one more hybrid on top of all the others. We use lasik to fix our defective eyes, psycho-pharmaceuticals to fix defective minds, blue pills for defective desire, invitro fertilization and surrogate wombs for those couples who cannot get sperm and egg to unite productively, screens to fix our boredom with our accessible time-space dimension, and genetics to change crops. We humans have been engineering landscapes since the dawn of agriculture.
Engineering the weather is not so very different from these other technologies. And like all others: it is a means of profit, it serves those who can pay for it, and it will be subject to error.
This is not a new monster, but an old one grown more complicated.
This post is from the website of U.C. Berkeley professor, John Harte. If only solving climate change were fundamentally about science and sound policy, and not so much about economic interests and politics.
About the Book
What is global warming? What are its consequences, left unchecked? How do we solve it?
Written as a concise primer for everyone – interested citizens, policymakers, students – “Cool the Earth, Save the Economy” answers these and other important questions about the greatest challenge facing mankind. This challenge, the climate crisis, must be solved as soon as possible because the longer we wait, the more severe the consequences will be for all of us.
This challenge, the climate crisis, must be solved as soon as possible because the longer we wait, the more severe and ruinously expensive the consequences will be for all of us. The book’s main focus is how to solve the climate crisis. The book:
- presents a feasible plan to reduce current annual US carbon emissions by 75% by the year 2030;
- proposes an innovative policy [See the EASY Plan & Policy.] without carbon sequestration, ethanol, expanded nuclear power, a carbon tax, and cap and trade;
- reviews and assesses alternative approaches and technologies.
How much will the plan cost? How easy can it be? The answers will surprise you.
Download it now, and start reading!
About the Authors
Prof. John Harte of the University of California at Berkeley has won numerous awards and honors as an ecologist and an established environmental scientist and author. He and his work have been featured in Mother Jones, on the Bill Moyer’s show, NPR’s Marketplace and Science Friday, and elsewhere. His most recent award was a George Polk prize in journalism in 2006 for his work on the Early Signs Project. His book, Consider a Spherical Cow: A Course in Environmental Problem Solving, published initially in 1985, continues to be a widely used, classic textbook in the field of environmental science.
Besides co-authoring the online book Cool the Earth, Save the Economy, Mary Ellen Harte Ph.D produces the weekly series, the Climate Change Report Podcasts. Since 1999, she has produced and hosted a weekly summer radio program, Nature Notes, about natural history in the Colorado Rockies. She is the first author of the Huffingtonpost blog series, Addressing Climate Change with John, and has worked as a consultant on various environmental projects and publications for him for decades. As a professional biologist her diagnostic digital images of flora have appeared in various online and offline media. Previous professional experience includes degrees, research and publications in marine science.
Regarding the Earth: Ecological Vision in Word and Image
4th ASLEC-ANZ Biennial Conference
in association with RMIT and Monash Universities
August 31 to September 2, 2012
Following on from ‘Sounding the Earth: Music, Language, and Acoustic Ecology’ (Launceston, 2010), the 2012 ASLEC-ANZ conference, co-hosted by RMIT and Monash Universities, continues an ecological exploration of the senses with a focus on vision. Papers will consider the ecological implications of different ways of perceiving, imagining, valuing and representing Earth, whether understood as planet, place or collective, comprising a multiplicity of more-than-human entities, agencies and processes. The Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture (Australia-New Zealand) is a multi-disciplinary organisation, and the conference will include contributions from a wide range of research fields, including ecophilosophy, environmental history, cultural geography, religion and ecology, science studies and art history, as well as ecocritical literary and cultural studies.
The conference will open with a public forum at RMIT on ‘Re-Imagining the Global: Culture and Climate Change’ on Friday evening, 31st August, at which Ursula Heise and Tim Morton will also be speaking.
Selected papers will be published in a special edition of the new journal AJE (Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology).
Keynote Speakers
- Professor Ursula Heise (UC Stanford)
- Professor Timothy Morton (UC Davis)
Plenary Speakers
- Darryn McEvoy (RMIT U)
- Harry Nankin (RMIT U)
- Clive Hamilton (Charles Sturt University)
- Adeline Johns-Putra (U of Exeter)
- Freya Mathews (La Trobe U)
- Linda Williams (RMIT U)
Program
Final program and abstracts are now available. Download them below:
Download final program (PDF format)
Download abstracts (PDF format)
Download conference streams document (PDF format)
The World Bank gives and the World Bank takes away. With respect to climate change, the World Bank is funding the expansion of coal-fired power plants in India and China that will vastly increase the rate of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere. The World Bank also funds so-called climate change mitigation and adaptation programs. What the WB does with its super-sized right hand it hides from the dwarfed, green left hand.
In similar fashion, reports from the World Bank are often full of useful information, which is then not used much at all as projects are pursued. K.M. Norgaard’s “Cognitive and Behavioral Challenges in Responding to Climate Change” might have taken the executive offices of Bank officials as its field of investigation. Instead, Norgaard’s earnest inquiry is, like climate change, global in scope. But its focus on average individuals’ inaction in the face of the threat of climate change seems odd given the powerful interests that have opposed political action to address green house gas emissions.
Nov. 23, 2009
Communications professionals employ sophisticated analysis of image, word, attitude and action. The professionals at Environmental Communication Network have started a blog on environmental communication and culture called Indications. The posts so far entertain with the wide variety of materials posted. The Sierra Club’s video, coal is too dirty even for college, shines with unexpected ineptitude. World Wildlife Fund Canada’s witty like goad to change provokes a chuckle. Watching super models strip for climate change? Does it prompt you to get active? The photographs of artists Chris Jordan and Edward Burtynksy are stunning — which might or might not be good at provoking action.
 Chris Jordan's photo of baby albatross starved to death with a full stomach of plastic. 
Creating a culture of environmental activism via images is rather different from, say, creating a generation of smokers or coke drinkers. In our remediated society, is the image of green enough to create a green reality? Can images of enviro-destruction inspire?
Nov. 23, 2009
Science is being claimed by media culture in this hullabaloo of the hacked emails. Pro-climate change scientists are confident that their emails reveal little other than normal scientific chatter about opposing researchers whose work they disdain.
Anti-climate change forces allied to powerful oil and gas industries are feared to be plotting a huge PR coup based on snippets of emails interpreted in the most insinuating manner possible. So far my favorite post articulating this orchestrated pr onslaught is Ike Soleman’s comment (#79) on the Real Climate site.
The anti-climate change pr campaign is “a desperate, last-ditch tactic by fanatics who have lost the rational debate” opines George Marshall in a commentary in The Guardian . George Marshall, who founded and directs projects at the Climate Outreach and Information Network fears that climate scientists are too wedded to their rational, scientific arguments and cannot compete in the spinmeister contests of today’s media.
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