Archive for November, 2025

“The climate crisis is tied to the ways fossil fuels are baked into our lives, belongings, and occupations. It thrives on how our fractured societies justify the mistreatment of ourselves and our resources.” —Extinction Rebellion

Scientists are raising the alarm that the global impact of humanity’s relentless push against Nature’s integrity will drive our species over the precipice as is already happening for many of the other life forms. The famed biologist E.O. Wilson put it succinctly: “The human impact on biodiversity…is an attack on ourselves.” He expressed doubt that humans would survive for more than a few months if we continue to eradicate our insect populations. We are afraid of insects and unwarrantedly pesticide them to death, but love the honey that bees provide us with.

Although Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring became the launchpad for action against the destruction of Nature through the use of pesticides 60-plus years ago, her book is not considered mandatory reading in schools and might even be part of the ritual of book prohibitions that festers throughout many US school systems. At the same time, herbicides and pesticides are an ever-increasing multi-billion-dollar ecocidal industry.

Is it any wonder that the well-known word “Anthropocene,” which denotes the predatory ascent of humans over all ecological systems as well as our climate through industrial society’s commodification of Nature, is now joined by other words that describe humanity’s destructive preoccupation since the Holocene?

Increasingly Wilson’s term “Eremocene” (the age of loneliness) fits our predicament, as humankind over this century sends thousands of species to their extinction, leaving us with far fewer fellow Earthly creatures and ultimately leading to our doom.

The Plantationocene speaks of the runaway colonization of the planet’s forests, such as in the Amazon for industrial cattle farming or expanding agribusinesses for soya bean production, in Indonesia for palm oil monoculture, or in Canada’s boreal forests, which have been converted into the enormous polluter that is the Alberta tar sands. In fact, for many historians the word “civilization” can no longer characterize or be the narrator of a shift away from mindless obsessed capitalism, as civilization and colonialism have been inextricably linked for too long and there are too many negative consequences associated with both.

Then there is the Pyrocene: the age of unstoppable wildfires unquestionably caused by fossil fuels.

The list goes on.

Our epoch has created the age of solastalgia, which is a homesickness that permeates societies without our leaving our homes: the memories of a better place where we have lived. “Solastalgia” describes a dread for where our beloved local spaces will eventually rupture to, or, even more encompassing, for the slow untangling fate of the Earth’s biosphere. Glenn Albrecht, writing in The Conversation, warned: “Either we face a pandemic of solastalgia and related negative psychoterratic syndromes as a result of the havoc created by unsustainable development and climate change, or we use our intelligence and creativity to give rise to a world where our positive psychoterratic emotions can thrive.” https://tinyurl.com/home-anxiety

The word “psychoterratic” joins two ideas: “psyche,” for the mind and soul, and “terra,” for the Earth. The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh defines psychoterratic syndromes as “mental health conditions caused by the impact of environmental change and disasters on individuals. Examples include eco-anxiety, ecological grief (eco-grief), solastalgia, and climate trauma.” https://tinyurl.com/earth-with-mental-health The younger generations in particular feel trapped in a spiral of ecological unraveling.

However, positive Earth emotions and feelings expressed as biophilia, topophilia, ecophilia and eutierria can be embraced and be a beacon to balance and overcome seemingly insurmountable crises. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan described topophilia as the love of place and landscape. Wilson used the term “biophilia” to describe humankind’s innate love for Nature and other species, such that emotion counters the exploitative relationship with Nature, as does ecophilia, which can cure ecophobia.

The word ”eutierria” builds on biophilia, as it describes a deep connection and a dismantling of barriers with Nature in one’s consciousness, thereby creating a good and positive feeling of oneness with the Earth and its life forces. This feeling is one where the separation between self and the rest of Nature disappears and peace and connectedness pervade our consciousness. When the human—Nature relationship is immediate and mutually engaging (symbiotic), we experience an emotional state of eutierria, which contrasts with dread and eco-anxiety.

The late Joanna Macy proposed The Great Turning as a positive pathway through the Age of Unraveling, which is characterized by ecological collapse and societal fragmentation. The Great Turning represents a fundamental shift away from a civilization that depletes to a way of life that nourishes. Bioregionalism, inter-generational dialogues, profound cultural spirituality, deep ecology movements, cooperative economies, renewable energy micro-grids and watershed restoration projects will lead the way past fancy names towards a powerful human—Nature relationship. Macy said: “The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on that path for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves, and to the future we can still create.” Taking action, according to Macy, leads to efforts to slow down damage to the Earth and its beings, including policy changes, legal battles, and resistance to destructive systems. https://tinyurl.com/Macy-turning

The long journey home is possible.

Humans, in order to survive, must go beyond the Anthropocene. Imagine the Symbiocene. The Symbiocene connects all beings in a harmonious interaction with all life. https://tinyurl.com/symbiotic-planet

Humanity is without question at a crossroads. It remains to be seen whether a young generation will radically depart from the industrial capitalist vision that has prevailed. It has no choice if it is to survive and prosper.

Meanwhile, for your delectation this upcoming Halloween, take a scary look at some of our watery neighbours. To see them is to love them and be thankful that they exist on Earth. https://tinyurl.com/deep-sea-creatures

“The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5C in the next few years. And that going above 1.5C has devastating consequences. Some of these devastating consequences are tipping points, be it in the Amazon, be it in Greenland, or western Antarctica or the coral reefs.” 

—António Guterres, UN Secretary General 

By bluntly stating what is at stake prior to the UN conference on climate change, and the failure of the Paris 2015 conference’s aspiration to stop a global temperature rise of 1.5 Celsius, António Guterres is publicly demanding that next week’s gathering of nations in Belém, Brazil vigorously negotiate in good faith to curb further lapses of climate action. 

This will not be easily achieved, particularly since billionaire Bill Gates recently threw a wrench into COP30 negotiations by declaring that while climate concerns are real, the world should—bizarrely—separate the impact of climate realities such as intensified droughts and floods from ongoing work that raises the levels of health and overall economic prosperity of the poorest people. Climate-carbon mitigation technology will come in due time, Gates proclaimed.

Suggesting that we must choose either climate programmes or poverty alleviation is a false dichotomy. Gates says, “Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.” Has he not watched with horror what has happened to the Caribbean island of Jamaica as a consequence of Hurricane Melissa and rising ocean temperatures, or Vietnam receiving 5 feet of rain recently in 24 hours? Health is directly impacted by climate. 

Gates’ term “Green Premium” means, in his own words, “the difference in cost between a product that involves emitting carbon and an alternative that doesn’t.” To bring that premium to zero, as for example electric vehicles costing the same as internal combustion vehicles and thus eliminating the extra cost—the “green premium”—of buying an electric one, will initiate a far better prospect for climate stability because the electric car pollutes far less. Until that happens, self-proclaimed “climate activist” Gates believes we must prioritize general poverty issues and cool our heels until green technology costs the same as the old fossil fuel technologies. He says, “This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives… But remember that climate change is not the biggest threat to the lives and livelihoods of people in poor countries, and it won’t be in the future.” https://www.gatesnotes.com/ 

Yet the opposite is true: it is precisely the unprecedented temperature increase in the last 100 years that is preventing people in the poorest countries from transitioning to a better future. Colonialism’s handmaiden, fossil fuel, frustrates people’s aspirations for a just society. 

The Guardian newspaper covers climate regularly and reported recently on a study from respected medical journal The Lancet: “Rising global heat is now killing one person a minute around the world, a major report on the health impact of the climate crisis has revealed. It says the world’s addiction to fossil fuels also causes toxic air pollution, wildfires and the spread of diseases such as dengue fever, and millions each year are dying owing to the failure to tackle global heating.” https://tinyurl.com/person-dies-each-minute

Why bother listening to the opinions of billionaires? asks long-term writer and climate activist Bill McKibben in a devastating rebuttal to Gates’ assertions.These billionaires take all the oxygen out of the scientific discussions on climate change or biodiversity loss. McKibben accused Gates of playing into Trump’s climate denial narrative. Indeed, Trump thanked Gates for exposing the “climate hoax”, even though Gates never claimed that climate science was spurious. 

McKibben isn’t alone in denouncing Gates’ essay or its publication just before COP 30. “Despite his efforts to make clear that he takes climate change seriously, his words are bound to be misused by those who would like nothing more than to destroy efforts to deal with climate change,” says Michael Oppenheimer, director of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment at Princeton University. 

For decades people have mumbled that governments and individuals will change their pro-oil and gas policies once there are uncontested catastrophic events linked to climate disruption. The spiel goes like this: “What we unfortunately need to turn around this iceberg-directed Titanic-like disaster called climate breakdown is to have local disasters that hit us really hard and then we will be true believers and change our ways. When the roofs are torn off and a neighbourhood is decimated even the frequent flyer will get off the flight and not take a cruise ship.” 

It hasn’t happened, because a litany of destruction hasn’t made us change course. I suppose what always peeves me the most is that the so-called instructive catastrophe always takes place in someone else’s town to teach a rich population brutal climate lessons but needn’t inflict their home with suffering. Sacrifice the next village to make the story point, and maybe this is the point: the 10% richest people (us) refuse to help those populations that are getting hit by real-life floods and sea-level rises. Ask the residents of Miquelon about rooting up their entire village to higher ground. An article titled “How do you move a village? Residents of France’s last outpost in North America try to outrun the sea” says it all. https://tinyurl.com/French-islands

Brazilian diplomat André Aranha Corrêa do Lago will preside over COP30, which runs from November 10 to 21 and will be preceded by the heads of state climate summit on November 6 and 7. (It’s still uncertain whether Mark Carney will attend. Trump, it goes without saying, will have nothing to do with it.) Lago laments: “There is a new kind of opposition to climate action. We are facing a discredit of climate policies. I don’t think we are facing climate denial… It’s not a scientific denial, it’s an economic denial.” This brashness is vividly exposed in Trump’s slash and burn tactics to rid all regulatory impediments that get in the way of profits.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are increasing at alarming rates. Given that, it doesn’t help that the Brazilian state oil company, Petrobras, has been given a permit for exploratory drilling off the Amazonia coast. “The approval is an act of sabotage against the COP and undermines the climate leadership claimed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,” says Climate Observatory, a network of environmental organizations from Brazilian civil society.

The UN Emissions Gap Report, which came out this week, compares what countries have acted on and what they must do to lower their fossil fuel emissions and concludes that their achievements have been woefully inadequate. The report is bleak: a 2.8C rise above pre-industrial emissions is forecast unless rich nations in particular drastically revamp their carbon emissions goals. 

The Union of Concerned Scientists had this to say: “Years of grossly insufficient action from richer nations and continued climate deception and obstruction by fossil fuel interests are directly responsible for bringing us here.” It should be added that for rich nations this includes their citizens’ obsession with jetting off to places like the Galápagos Islands or Costa Rica to ponder Nature’s abundance while the world burns.

To learn what we can expect at COP30, see https://unfccc.int/cop30 Included on the website are UN reports showing that nations are forging ahead to limit their greenhouse gas emissions. In two weekswe will have a better idea whether this is just one more conference on climate that plays the world for a fool and the hundreds of lobbyists sent to Belém, Brazil go home satisfied the world is open as ever for business as usual, or whether nations will overturn 30 years of inaction to seize their citizens’ right to a healthy Earth.

We can be sure that there will be a strong presence in Belém of people keen to hold the COP to account. Saturday, November 15 is a Global Day of Action. Climate protests will be taking place around the world.