Let The Trees Rest In The Forests
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Gustav Klimt The Park 1909 Dr. D feels his own golden age coming on. It’s just a bit dark gold. Nothing a good polish can’t help, I’m su
[See the full post at: Let The Trees Rest In The Forests]My stomach is full.
I am not hungry.
I am worry free.
Tomorrow, I will be able to feed myself.Therefore, I have the luxury of being able to contemplate your words/thoughts/presentation.
“…grow plants and make the bees happy …”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivory_tower
The term ivory tower, From the 19th century, it has been used to designate an environment of intellectual pursuit disconnected from the practical concerns of everyday life. In American English usage it is also used as shorthand for academia or the university.“A lifeboat cannot save the ship, you know. It can hardly save itself.”
“What’s best for me is best for all.” In what context? In that of exchange-belief-based culture? Then, no, it’s not best for all. In life, as for all other species, without such a global dysfunctional belief? Then, yes (with some lingering caveats), because “Do what thou will” when thou can’t leverage the profit motive for oppression, exploitation, manipulation, and fear mongering.
Dr D
I find it ironic that you write so eloquently about nature and then defend Trump. The current administration is pursuing environmental policies that only accelerate decline and extinction. Pure unapologetic greed.
I plant hundreds of stems every year, as the trees native to this area die off from the effects of climate change. We try to keep up with accelerating phyto-migration and only fall further behind. Yet, we still plant. We still start tree seeds that (if they survive) won’t be mature for at least 100 years after I’m dead. We still bury tons of carbon.
Our wild bird population is less than 20% of what it was only a few years ago. Monsanto and their death squads are winning. Hail Trump. Hail Pruitt. Hail Zinke.I am (thankfully) unfamiliar with any of the wealthy celebrities you mention. Frankly, they are not important. Elite Democrats are not important. Trump is merely a useful stooge. The insets, birds and trees are dying. THAT is important. I must go plant. Fode debimus.
Radioactive glass project in the middle east
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass
The most familiar, and historically the oldest, types of glass are “silicate glasses” based on the chemical compound silica (silicon dioxide, or quartz), the primary constituent of sand.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_steal
“Thou shalt not steal” is one of the Ten Commandments[1] of the Torah (and by extension the Old Testament), which are widely understood as moral imperatives by legal scholars, Jewish scholars, Catholic scholars, and Post-Reformation scholars.[2]… nuclear documentation on bomb making from Iran and prove that you did steal it on TV.
MoFlora,
Yours is a contradiction in terms that’s not fair to Dr. D. If you ask me. Trump may have ‘extreme’ views on nature, but he had no influence at all on its decline prior to his presidency. Not signing Paris is a good idea for all the wrong reasons, because it’s a deal signed by a bunch of zillionaires looking to make money off of people’s fears.
Trump is on the wrong side for sure, but that’s still the same side that Obama, Merkel, Mike Bloomberg, Bill Gates and all of the other smooth talking liars are on. At least Trump’s not smooth. But that’s the only difference, really.
Has the police been sent to arrest Netanyahu for stealing?
Does everyone think that its okay to interfere in Iran?Yep!
Yesterday is gone.Zerosum,
It’s called a preemptive strike. It appears that my neighbor might be trying to kill me. I must destroy his weapons. If I kill him and his family in the process–oh well.
Ilargi
Under the Trump administration environmental decline has accelerated. We see the effects every day. They are proud of it. We work with land management agencies whose personnel are in despair. This is worse than under Clinton, Bush or Obama. This is our work. We see this.
This is not a question of who is”smooth”. This is not the Obama administration with different hair. The worst polluters have free reign now. They are Trump’s masters. This is far more important than what some rapper has to say about politics.
Of course Trump had no great role in environmental decline before he took office. I did not say he did. However he is shooting to be the “greatest polluter ever”.I made no mention of the Paris Accord which I also consider to be a corporate/banker masturbatory elitist fantasy. And, I certainly am not defending Obama, Bush or any other shills of the elite.
I always look forward to reading Dr D and I certainly meant no offense to him – and I don’t believe I was being unfair.
You cover many topics that I do not feel qualified to comment on. The intensifying war on the environment is, however, a topic that I am surrounded by every day.
Now I must go and try and do something about it – however small and insignificant my efforts may be.
Keep up the good work.
You are so eloquently making my point for me, that we have reached a point of not thinking, of being triggered as we are trained. What part of “Trump is a jerk,” “I wouldn’t give [credit] to him,” “I can’t give a medal for stopping a war that never should have existed,” and “[Trump] even now lie[s] about” looks like defending Trump? Can you see that as a demonstration that if I don’t promote that “Trump is the sum total of all evil throughout time and space” that I must therefore be a Trump supporter and also by extension love everything he loves, promote everything he promotes? What man, what politician before was ever held to such standards? We could never vote for any — no not one, for none have been found righteous before our God of the Ideological Purity Test, yes?
That is the definition of illogic, the false dichotomy of all-or-nothing thinking that pervades the world today, and yet half the nation has been conditioned to kill the other half over it. As all politicians are men, and all men have opinions, it is guaranteed that I disagree with every politician ever made whether I voted for him or not. If you’ve ever voted, you have made this compromise yourself. Yet this does not apply when you add the word “Trump” to the sentence, or “Putin” “Israel” or whatever the fashion; when the magic word is used, men are no longer equal, and due process does not apply. Surely we must change this habit or else you, there in your room, must kill me, here in my room, for the good of all humanity. Alternatively, we could just have different opinions, different perspectives on how to accomplish what are essentially very similar goals.
We disagree with people at work, with the Unitarian Universalist Church (they’re not inclusive enough), and even with our children and the people we marry. Yet with this one guy, be it Trump or Hillary or whatever, if we agree with a single thing, we agree with all, and you can know that about me while I’m half-basting Trump as a pugnacious jerk who is lying to the public when we so desperately need truth. How did you come to say such a thing?
The views on ecology are more complex as well, for have you seen any environmental policy difference between Democrats and Republicans over the last 50 years? If anything, the most signature legislation was by Teddy Roosevelt focusing national attention and creating national parks and Richard Nixon who put in the single – and perhaps only — real environmental law with the EPA and Endangered Species Act. Not ironically, they were Republicans, because so often history is written by “experts” who make things the opposite of what happened. There’s a lot of crossfire in the Kanye West (a wealthy rapper) dust up, where they are discussing how Republicans, who sacrificed 800,000 Americans to end slavery, also were the only reason Civil Rights were passed over the staunch objection of the likes of rumored KKK member Governor Thurmond and the Dixiecrats. And although real history is complicated, it doesn’t matter: no one remembers, no one cares. Today it’s canon, common knowledge, that this never happened. The Democratic Party, founded by slave owner Andrew Jackson, was never the party of the Jim Crow south for 100 postwar years. Never happened. The Republican Party, founded by Lincoln’s split against accepting legal slavery (complicated) and sacrificed 1 in 10 men, has actually always been the racist party. The party that stopped rivers from burning in Ohio and saved the bald eagle from extinction has actually always been the party that is FOR rivers burning and dead eagles and so on. The truth doesn’t matter, only the stories we tell. And no one looks, although it’s a click away on wikipedia.
The truth is complicated, filled with nothing but fallible men who contradict themselves like the rest of us, where one-time political gain somehow becomes permanent, and long, well-meaning attempts come to nothing. Where wars are started despite themselves and won on historical accident, then recorded erroneously by failed and partisan men. Did Columbus discover America? Yes/no/depends on what you mean. As adults, this is the world we live in, not an easy world of faultless superheroes and villains who were just born evil.
And so with Trump. You expected a granola-crunching pacifist of demure retiring nature was going to take down the world’s largest war machine that has murdered 6 million people in last 30 years, allegedly including whistleblowers, generals, Congressmen, and Presidents? Or is that guy more likely to be a bare-knuckle street brawler who shrugs off five assassination attempts, marries a divorced woman, beats a guy on the floor of Congress with his cane, opens the White House to a whiskey bash, and wakes up ready to fight with anyone? And if he is that type, is he the type to love all men and sing kumbaya? Unfortunately, no. Each man is only one way and not all ways, although we have many pressing social needs at any time. So we have a man at war with the CIA and not Mansanto at the moment. Maybe later, who knows?
In my opinion, if he got the AGW carbon-credits through (which China and India won’t participate), he might save the forests but he would cause the deaths of a few hundred thousand men in the transition, so we could be mad at him about that instead. Politics is tradeoffs. Life is tradeoffs. And always we have too little information to choose wisely, and will always, always be wrong. So chance gives us a candidate and we each pick the least-bad one on the basis of which demands we find most urgent. And so for better or worse we Americans did the same again this time. That wasn’t the preference of half the people, but that doesn’t make it stupid either.
Why are we at the center of this? We’re just one bankrupt country with a crippled military and GDP probably more the size of Brazil than the E.U. Why does this one idiot matter so much? We’ve had idiots going way back, people who’ve done far more harm to the economy, started far more wars, and been less liked and more divisive. Did you catch Jefferson calling Adams a “hermaphroditical character, which has [not] the force and firmness of a man,” or when the Vice President shot the Treasury Secretary in cold blood? That time we nuked 2 civilian cities of a surrendering nation? How about that time a President used white phosphorus and depleted uranium or droned 3,000 civilians including U.S. citizens abroad? How do lousy tweets and a weak EPA director compare over these 200 or 20 years?
We do the best we can, and I don’t know which nation you are from, but I’m sure I could bring up similar examples for you: Austria, Australia, Austin, anywhere on the globe. You and me too for “There is none righteous, no, not one: there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are altogether become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.” And that’s a pretty humbling thought here, facing our consequences, facing our karma in a country on the brink of collapse and civil war, that what we deserve goes back not a year, not two years, but 100 years or more. Let us just fix one thing – like the CIA or Korea before you bring up how much we haven’t fixed. We’ll be lucky to accomplish even that without a second Civil War and losing another 800,000 or 8,000,000 men. It’s not theoretical: we’re losing over 42,000 civilians a year now in areas like mine — as much as the Vietnam War, more than the refugees, more than are lost in Greece — and it needs to stop. Which would you pick? I’ll have the seeds and shovels ready for them, but for some, planting trees is a thing that may have to wait.
Dr D
Your insult notwithstanding, I think about these issues – especially the collapsing environment – constantly. I didn’t comment to get into an argument about your interpretation of American history – or your opinion of my supposed gullibility. As I stated, I do not feel that I have anything to contribute on most issues that you and Ilargi write about. I read you to learn. However, 50 years of doing environmental work and getting my hands dirty every day planting, growing, culling, harvesting and generally being a nuisance gives me a perspective that I believe most of your readers do not have.Trump isa useful stooge – for all sides. I believe that if Clinton had been elected many of the issues you write about would still be going to hell. The geo-political morass would be as bad or worse. The same goes for most social and economic problems. However, the easy issue for her to score points with the limousine liberals would have been the environment. Big treaties for big corporations and big government. Meanwhile, the empire would still be going to hell. Democrats are not the answer.
US environmental policy was largely bi-partisan through the 1970s. That changed with the Reagan (“You’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen them all”) administration.
And, yes I can point to one significant environmental victory for the good guys that happened in the Obama administration. It would never be allowed to happen in the Trump admin. I will only use this one example because, although I’m aware of others, we worked for years to make this one happen. It is not the result of my believing anyone else’s story of our history.
Look up the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage act. A coalition of ranchers (conservatives) Native Americans, conservationists, sportsmen and the USDA Forest Service and BLM worked for over 7 years to save a very important hunk of real estate, stretching for over 150 miles, which borders the Bob Marshall Wilderness and Glacier National Park. This is the only place left in the lower 48 where grizzlies still come out of the mountains on to the plains. The act was passed in 2014. Without the legislation the Front would be covered with fracking rigs. Coalition building worked.
You ask why one idiot matters so much. Scott Pruitt has stated he wants to eliminate the EPA after he dismantles all environmental regulation. He is working on it. Zinke is rolling back protections on public land that have been in place for decades. It matters. Kids are dying from pollution. The birds are gone. Monsanto poisons the food supply. It matters.
Now my coffee is cold and I must go finish planting some walnut seedlings I started last year. I need to turn the carrot bed and I have to butcher a rooster for stew.
Please consider that people who disagree with you may not be brainwashed idiots.
Keep up the good work. Fode debimus
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