A human being is part of the whole, called by us, the universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical-delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.

---Albert Einstein, 1954

Wes Nisker 
The Evolution Sutra

"From so simple an origin, through the process of gradual selection of infinitesimal changes, endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been evolved."  - Charles Darwin

The old gods are dead or dying and people everywhere are searching, asking: What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being? - Joseph Campbell 
      
There is no longer any doubt that the scientific story of evolution is true, at least among those who have a relatively large forebrain. So now we can begin to worship the story, embracing evolution as our new creation myth. Besides, we are due for an upgrade of our metaphysics. Haven’t we lived long enough believing that our essential self is somehow disconnected from this body, or atoms, or materiality, whatever that happens to be. We’ve also gone long enough believing that our purpose and salvation lie somewhere outside of the life we are now living. 
      
Those beliefs are now dysfunctional. They take the divine away from the earth and place it in some other realm, robbing life of its due reverence. Our major religions have come to regard Earth as little more than a training planet, a place where we come to learn a few lessons, or burn off some karma, or get saved by some messiah or another. The general hope is that once we’re done on this funky old sphere we can go off to a better place, where we truly belong, and be in another life living happily ever after. We will be going “home.”

It would serve us better to bring our spiritual attention back to the Earth. If we could feel ourselves as part of the life of this planet, we might take better care of our environment. If we bring our sense of the divine to this earthly existence, we might even find more joy in living, however briefly, here and now. 
 
For now, our understanding of evolution still lies rusting in our neo-cortex. We need ways to revere the story: make ritual around it; give it song and dance; internalize it. We need to mine evolution for its spiritual gold, learning our new role in the grand scheme of things. 
      
In fact, the story of evolution can offer us everything we traditionally seek from religion: a basis for morality, humility, meaning, purpose, a message of self-liberation, and as much awe and wonder as any bible. Let’s stop looking upward in prayer and gratitude for this or that, and instead direct our gaze downward at the Earth and all around us, to celebrate Nature, the instrument of our creation, and the closest and most obvious source of all our gifts.
      
When modern ecologists and neo-pagans search for a symbol for wholeness and health, they come back to the ancient goddess, Mother Earth, Mother Nature, the Greek’s Gaia. Only today she starts as a “hypothesis,” and must trickle down from her rebirth as scientific postulate to become sacralized by the people’s shamans. - Theodore Roszak

Hello Earthling
      
The story of evolution tells us that we are part of the history of life on this planet, making our primary identity that of “earthling.” (Of course, if we discover life in other galaxies we might have to become galaxy identified, which would make us “Milky Wayans.”) You can feel your earthling nature inside your body, which is composed of “all natural” earth ingredients. Just rub your upper and lower teeth together for a moment and feel the hardness of your bones. They are made out of minerals found in the Earth – calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium – all mysteriously molded together into your skeleton. Can you feel that you are a piece of Earth walking on Earth? It is though we are Earth sprouts that somehow gained a lot of mobility.
 
Meanwhile, about 75% of your body is liquid, and most of that liquid has the same chemical consistency as the oceans. You literally sweat and cry seawater. It’s as if the ocean splashed up on shore and eventually walked away. When you think about it, where else could our bodies have come from but the Earth and it’s seas? You are certified organic. 

Not only are we made out of Earth and ocean, we have been shaped by them. Your legs and feet, fingers and thumbs, this upright posture and big brain, even your instincts, emotions and thoughts -- all are the result of life adapting to elemental demands. Remember that for a couple billion years of life on this planet there were no legs or feet simply because there was no land to walk around on. Legs were of no use. 
      
As we consider our body, we might reflect on the fact that the most critical steps in its creation can be correlated with major environmental change. Scientists believe that upheavals of land masses nearly six hundred million years ago triggered the "Cambrian Explosion"-- also known as the “Big Birth” (biology's Big Bang) -- which marks the first appearance of many forms of life, including multi-cellular animals with skeleton-like structures. Vertebrates like us.
      
Over the course of three and a half billion years volcanoes erupted, continents bumped into each other, ice ages came and went, and life kept figuring out new ways to live, growing new appendages, plumage, camouflage, new ways of sensing, eating and moving. Nature is the sculptor, carving and coaxing all life forms into being. Nature is the artist, and we are the art.    
 
Mountains' walking is just like human walking. Accordingly, do not doubt mountains' walking even though it does not look the same as human walking. You should penetrate these words. If you doubt mountains' walking, you do not know your own walking. - Dogen: Mountains and Waters Sutra

Geologic events have molded us. A meteor crashing to earth sixty-five million years ago has been linked to atmospheric changes that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, allowing for the subsequent evolution of larger mammals, present company included. The dinosaurs toppled over, and there we were, the ones who nurse their young -- the hairy ones.

Bonobo (Pygmy Chimpanzee) mother and child: 6-8 million years ago, our Hominid evolutionary lineage diverged from the one that gave rise to the two Chimpanzee species. About 1.6% of our DNA differs from theirs. Most of that is 'redundant', so the differences are ina small fraction of 1.6%  -Ed. 

More recent geologic and atmospheric events are associated with the emergence of our species, Homo sapiens. Twelve to fifteen million years ago the land mass of Africa was dramatically altered by tectonic forces, producing the Great Rift Valley which erected an east-west barrier to the existing animal populations. As a result, the common ancestor of humans and apes was divided, and each group began evolving under different conditions. They got the jungle and we got the savannah.

Suddenly our human ancestors had no trees to live in or escape into, and boy, it must have been scary. The savannah was full of lions and tigers and hyenas ready to pounce and gobble you up, so you desperately try to see out over the tall grasses, but you really aren’t big enough. So what do you do? You stand up on two legs. Bi-pedalism may have partially been born of fear.
 
The ice ages are now recognized as a major force in the emergence of Homo sapiens. Scientists believe that our family of Hominidae came into existence during the colder weather of the late Miocene, seven millions years ago, and our genus Homo, along with those of cattle and gazelles came into existence during another cooling period two and one half million years ago, the late Pliocene. Our tremendous human energy and ingenuity may have a lot to do with the fact that we were cold. Consciousness and the opposable thumb may have originally been designed as tools for shoveling snow.

We, mankind, arose amidst the wandering of the ice and marched with it. We are in some sense shaped by it, as it has shaped the stones. Perhaps our very fondness for the building of stone alignments, dolmens, and pyramids reveals unconsciously an ancient heritage from the ice itself, the earth shaper. - Loren Eisley

And just think of it, my earthling friends, here we are spinning around on the Earth's axis at about 1,000 miles an hour. Meanwhile, the Earth is spinning around the sun at about 66 thousand miles an hour, and the entire solar system is spinning though the Milky Way Galaxy at a million miles an hour toward a point in space that astronomers call the Great Attracter. Yea, baby! And everything attracted to the Great Attractor is moving at about 800 thousand miles an hour toward a super cluster of galaxies called the Shapely Attractor. Whoa, earthlings, this mother ship Gaia is moving fast! And you don't even have to hold on. Because the Earth is holding on to you, like the dear mother she is, embracing you with her strong arms of gravity. Even black guys can't jump all that far off the Earth. We are on the Earth and of the Earth. It is the true “rock of ages.” It is the Milky Way’s little biosphere project, and everybody’s `hood.
 
So let’s offer praise and reverence to the home planet. We could turn Earth Day into a major international holiday, and maybe even celebrate an “Earth day” every month, on full moon. (The moon is also a child of the Earth, and helps keep our oceans waving and our orbit stable.) Earth days are not just a call to “do something” to heal our damaged eco-systems, but more of a spiritual exercise, a time to celebrate all life, regardless of kingdom, phyla, or species: regardless of colour of skin, feathers, fur, flowers, leaves or bark. Earth days will be a time to reflect on our connection to this planet, and to embrace our basic identity as earthlings.
      

The Divine DNA

There is a simple grandeur in this view of life with its powers of growth, assimilation, and reproduction, being originally breathed into matter under one or a few forms, and that while this, our planet has gone circling on according to fixed laws, and land and water, in a cycle of changes, have gone on replacing each other, so that from so simple an origin, through the process of gradual selection of infinitesimal changes, endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been evolved. - Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, final paragraph
           
One of the most important lessons we can learn from evolution is that we are related to all that lives, and to all that has ever lived. Once we begin to include ourselves in the story we are no longer on an individual journey, but have joined that grand procession of “endless forms most beautiful and wonderful.” Instead of being the singular focus of all creation we are now at one with all creation. It’s an excellent trade-off. 
      
When we join the evolution story our family suddenly increases by a million, million fold. Almost as deep as being blood-related, we are all cell-related, and the proof is in the pudding, and in this case the pudding is the plasma, and inside of it lies the secret of all living things—the DNA.
Have you seen a strand of DNA? It looks like a slinky with a purpose. It would make an excellent religious symbol, with its two identical halves and elegant spiral shape: the logo of life. It is ready for the evolution artists to adorn and embellish. 
      
From the funkiest fungus to the most nothingness bacteria, to the ordinary grass that grows all around, to the great cats and big-brained humans, even the weeds and mosquitoes--all beings grow out of the information contained in the double-helix. This is the stuff that seems to separate life from non-life; that turns ordinary matter into replicating plasma. It is the physical manifestation of spiritus mundi: the holy ghost, the eternal Tao. 

As the seed substance of the entire biota, I think the DNA deserves some spiritual attention. We could start with its name, “deoxyribonucleic acid,” which is much too cold and clinical. I have created a new acronym, and I suggest that from now on, whenever you read or hear the three letters DNA, think “Divine Natural Abundance.” 

The DNA also carries with it a powerful message of self-liberation, because as scientists unravel the codes, we discover that we are not so particular and individual. Consider the fact that your personal DNA is 99.99% identical to the DNA of every other human being. In other words, the instructions for building and maintaining you are almost exactly the same as the instructions for building and maintaining me, the Dalai Lama, George Bush, Oprah, Julia Roberts, Jack the Ripper, and the Buddha.  Our individual looks, personality and I.Q. are just a thin layer of paint over the basic human design. We are over 99% the same. “Can’t we all just get along.”

Meanwhile, over 98% of our DNA is the same as that of the great apes, and even more shocking is the fact that we share about 90% of our DNA with mice! But we don’t have fur or tails, and not only can we run a maze, we can build one. So why is our DNA code so similar to mice? The answer is because it takes most of our DNA -- that enormous library full of information inside each of us -- just to create a basic mammal. It took billions of years for nature to learn how to build a good skeletal structure, circulatory and nervous system, and those designs are at the core of who we are. 
      
DNA also connects us to the slimier side of life. The Victorians were shocked at Darwin’s suggestion that we are related to apes, but they would faint dead away to hear that we share nearly 60% of our living instructions with worms. Indeed, we owe a lot to the worms of the world, who were the first creatures to develop spines: they virtually invented our phyla of vertebrates! And do we ever thank them?  No, we put hooks through them and use them as bait. 
      
The DNA lesson in humility goes even deeper with the revelation that we share about 50% of our DNA with…yeast! Yes, the stuff that makes the dough rise. But that discovery also raises an important spiritual question for those who believe in an eternal soul -- does the yeast have a soul? Does each individual yeast cell have a soul? I mean, if we are going to declare ourselves divine, then what about the slime? And if we don’t consider the slime divine, then where do we draw the line? Do mushrooms get a soul? How about mollusks? Daisies? Crab grass?
      
A t-shirt created by a bunch of scientists at the University of California conveys the same message, “We share 25% of our DNA with bananas. Get over yourself!” Our species could certainly use some humility, but the message of DNA does not necessarily put us down. It doesn’t deny our divinity -- it just denies our exclusive divinity. Everything that lives contains the seeds of Divine Natural Abundance.

Nucleosome: the repeating unit of DNA and regulatory proteins that packs the genomes of  all multicellular life-forms into the nucleus of each cell. Nucleosomes are folded through a series of higher order structures into a chromosome. - Ed. 

Survive or Die

The story of evolution teaches us the laws by which we must live, and the first commandment is to stay alive. More specifically, the first commandment is to make sure that your information stays alive, your particular instruction manual, your imprimature, so to speak. That is the number one imperative of every living being, including every single one of the trillions of cells inside of us. And yet, the notion that we are driven by the survival instinct is traditionally cast in evil. As if you should be caring more about some DNA other than your own.

So it was that a storm of outrage followed the publication of Richard Dawkin's book The Selfish Gene, whose title seems like a taunt to both the bible thumpers and the humanists. He was simply relating the findings of modern biologists who are telling us that our behavior is largely governed by genes who only want to replicate themselves. 
      
So don’t blame yourself if most of your thoughts are about you. Even if your genes are selfish, it’s not your fault. Blame it on your genes. It’s evolution’s fault. Nature wants it this way. And for good reason: Life needed to be deeply programmed with the determination to continue or it might have died out at the first sign of hardship. The anerobic bacteria who began to choke on their own waste may have just given up rather than morph into beings who lived on oxygen. Life had to be pumped up with the desire to live, down to the most basic molecules, or else living beings might never have gone to the trouble to become multi-celled, let alone to have figured out higher mathematics. 
      
So rather than cast the survival imperative as evil or brutish, maybe we should celebrate it. If we could only see living beings as a single entity, or at least part of the same experiment, then the selfish gene can be seen as noble, glorious, even worthy of reverence. It is no longer regarded as selfish for its own sake, but for the sake of life itself. We should all be singing the praises of the selfish gene and toasting its insistence on living. 

Your Mama is a Germ

Why should we think that the universe was made for us? A better case can be made that the world was created for the lowly bacteria. Single celled bacteria are the most successful of all life forms, having lasted for three and a half billion years, surviving all the great species extinctions and still thriving, uncountable trillions of them, teeming everywhere, covering everything. In fact, billions of bacteria are living their individual little lives inside of your mouth right now. Maybe they even have houses in there, churches and roads -- a whole civilization between your cheeks! There is some speculation that bacteria invented humans as moving feedlots. Inside of us they get room and board as well as a tour of the neighborhood.
      
But, you ask, could the bacteria be created in God’s image? Why not? I can imagine God in the shape of a single-celled being: like a little round ying-yang symbol. God as a drop of protoplasm pulsing with life, with a permeable see-through membrane. God, the Great Germinator.
      
Whether or not they are the crown of creation, bacteria are incredibly successful, and one reason is because they reproduce by just dividing-- they don’t have to take each other out to dinner first. The little bacterium just pulls its DNA evenly across its body, and then splits itself into two.     
Maybe to a bacterium that splitting-in-two behavior feels good like sex, and that’s why bacteria divide so often. Is it something akin to masturbation? 

Too bad we humans can’t go back to dividing as a means of reproduction. Of course, it would be traumatic to think of losing half of yourself, but on the other hand, dividing would double your chances for a happy life. And then quadruple them, etc…Another reason to believe that life was created for bacteria’s is the fact that they aren’t programmed to grow old and die. Bacteria can be killed but they don’t die naturally, which brings us to a major turning point in the life of the planet – death.

The bacteria themselves were doing quite fine for well over a billion and a half years, having a leisurely time floating around in the Archean seas. Then one fateful day (epoch), at some auspicious moment (era), the bacteria began to merge with each other, and started to combine their little packets of DNA. Blame it on love, or at least, attraction. Okay, it was a marriage of convenience. The merging of two cells usually took place when it was useful for the survival of both—“You’ve got a little flagella to move yourself around, and I’m growing some eyes, so let’s get together and we’ll be sittin’ on top of the food chain!” After some time, the cells that joined together became a whole new life form, a multi-celled being, who was now carrying information and instructions from two different DNA sources. Since two packets of Divine Natural Abundance are more inventive than one, the new microbes began incorporating other useful creatures into themselves, and eventually had to start putting their overflowing library of DNA into a completely separate body. There was no more room in the cell.
 
So, “Ta-da!” Sex was invented as a way of putting great amounts of DNA together into a separate new organism, leaving lots of room for variation and complexity. It must have been very exciting for the first few couples, suddenly discovering those thrilling sensations of having sex. Try to imagine two proud microbes, mama and papa -- you’ve seen them on the Petri dish -- looking at their little baby microbe saying, “Isn’t it cute! Look at it twitch!” But there was a catch, as usual. Once the mama and papa microbe got their DNA into a separate new body, it was no longer necessary for them to stick around forever. Their information had been passed on (life is information!). So the mama and papa microbe eventually became programmed to grow old and die. What happened, to put it bluntly, is that life traded sex for death.
   
Now there’s a choice for you. Would you rather live forever without sex, or have sex and die? Of course the question is ridiculous, because we have no choice in the matter. It was only through a phenomenal number of DNA combinations, through sex, over the long course of biological history, that life grew into a being complex enough that it can even contemplate the choice, or begin to understand it’s own origins. In order to become the smart-ass creatures we are today we had to have both—sex and death. (Not to mention the fact that if there had been no death, earthlings would have run out of room a long time ago.)
      
At least now we know enough to acknowledge the bacteria and microbes as the parents of us all. And it’s time to give them their props. Let’s offer a deep bow to the smallest but not the least among us, the brilliant and innovative progenitors who invented sex, mobility, oxygen breathing -- all sorts of fun things. BACTERIA! MICROBES! Without them there would be no Adam and Eve. They were the first to be alive.


  
A  "missing link" in human evolution, Australopithecenes lived from 4 to 1.5 mya in south and east Africa. Their limb proportions, teeth and brain sizes were intermediate between chimpanzees and humans. Donald Johanson discovered  40% of the 3.2 million year old skeleton of a young female in Ethiopia. His team often played a Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, (from the album Sgt. Pepper) at the time, and thus his celebrated paleo-anthropological find came by her name, Lucy. -Ed.

New Animal on the Block

Drive all blames into one.  - Tibetan Buddhist saying

Friends, do you want to find forgiveness? Then place yourself in the story of evolution. If you believe in sin, or that you are seriously flawed as a human being, or that all human beings are similarly flawed, then sink yourself into deep time, into the history of life, and you will see that none of us is to blame. We are all saved, forgiven, absolved! Can I get a witness? 
      
If we see ourselves in the story of evolution we realize that we are not our fault. We did not invent ourselves. We were created out of the shape-shifting stream of life as it danced with ever-changing Earth conditions and natural phenomena. We did not chose our particular type of consciousness or our instincts for love or for killing, any more than we chose our thumbs.
      
So in the story of evolution we are absolved of our supposed sins, the original one as well as all those we have copied. Mother Nature forgives us because we have no choice but to be who we are, and also because we are still such a young species, and know not what we do. 

We are, in fact, a brand new kind of animal. (I hope you aren’t offended by being called an animal. In some contexts you love the designation. “You animal, you!”) Our eminent scientists classify us as animals for very good biological reasons, but most of us refuse the designation. You’ll find evidence of our collective denial at any café or supermarket where there is a sign in the window saying “No Animals Allowed.” Humans walk right in! 
 
But we are a brand new kind of animal, and just figuring out that we are one. The body that you and I inherited breaks away from the rest of our primate crowd only about five million years ago -- just yesterday in biological time. That’s when the Great Rift Valley was created in Africa and our ancestors had to go from the trees of the jungle to live in the tall grasses of the savannah. It must have been as difficult as first learning how to live on land. Among those who began to hang out on the ground was an ape-woman who the scientists have named “Lucy,” considered to be the mother of us all. Can we therefore presume that the father of us all was “Ricky?”

After living on the ground for a while our ancestors began making crude stone tools, and became a sub-species of human who we now call Homo habilis, or “handyman.” The “handyman” started standing upright more often, probably to fix a leaky roof, and after a while we seemed to like it so much that soon our ancestors became what we now call Homo erectus or “upright” humans. And we’re not talking morality here. In fact, standing up put our sexual organs right out front for everyone to see, and no doubt that led directly to the invention of the loincloth. Four-legged animals don’t have to worry about clothing because their private parts are hidden by their stance. Once we stood up we exhibited full-frontal nudity.

Standing up not only brought us shame, it also brought us pride. I have a theory, fully uncorroborated, that the upright stance elevated our heads too far off the ground, and that’s precisely when we started feeling remote from the earth. We also started looking down at other creatures. We thought the crawlers weren’t as good as those who walk. Our upright stance may have also contributed to our belief that we came from some other realm. With our heads lifted high, we thought we were above it all.      

Most important, according to evolutionary biologists, standing up seems to have triggered a rapid increase in brain size. You would think that the exact opposite would happen, and that standing up would cause our feet to swell instead. But that’s not what happened. Here’s the theory: standing up left our hands free, and after a while we realized that we could use them to hold and manipulate objects. So we started using tools -- spears, axes, chopsticks – and that required far more brain connections to co-ordinate the more precise movements of our hands and fingers. So a feedback loop was created: better hands, bigger brains, bigger brains, better hands. Pretty smart, Mother Nature. Worthy of a deep bow.
 
Standing upright also left our arms free to carry our stuff around with us, and after a few million years we started migrating out of Africa. Nobody knows exactly why we left, but I suspect it was to look for Chinese food. At the time our brains were only half the size they are today, otherwise we would have been smart enough to just send out for Chinese food. Anyway, we started wandering around the planet, and got caught in an ice age or two, and that may be one reason our brains kept growing — we had to think hard and fast how to stay warm. Of course, it would have been easiest just to grow a heavy coat of fur, but at the time our brains just weren’t big enough to figure that out. So instead of a fur coat we grew a bigger brain and learned how to make fire. Then we started huddling around that fire and telling stories about ourselves. Stories like this one about evolution.

Wes ("Scoop") Nisker (b.1942) is an author, radio commentator, comedian, and teacher of Insight Meditation. A longtime fixture on San Francisco radio station KFOG, he coined the catchphrase, "If you don't like the news ... go out and make some of your own," which he used as the title for his first book. His subsequent books include Buddha's Nature and Crazy Wisdom Saves the World Again - Handbook for a Spiritual Revolution. The poet Gary Snyder described Nisker's work as, "the foolishness of the real...This is good medicine." 

 

 

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2010CORRUPTION IN WASHINGTON IS SMOTHERING OUR FUTUREBy Johann Hari

For over a century, the U.S. has slowly put some limits - too few, too feeble - on how much corporations can bribe, bully or intimidate politicians. Now, they have beeb burned up away in one whoosh. The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations can suddenly run political adverts during an election campaign - and there is absolutely no limit on how many, or how much they can spend. So if you anger Goldman Sachs by supporting legislation to break up the too-big-to-fail banks, you will smack into a wall of 24/7 ads exposing your every flaw. If you displease Exxon-Mobil by supporting legislation to deal with global warming, you will now be hit by a tsunami of advertising saying you are opposed to jobs and The American Way. If you rile the defence contractors by opposing the gargantuan war budget, you will face a smear-campaign calling you Soft on Terror.

Representative Alan Grayson says: "It basically institutionalizes and legalizes bribery on the largest scale imaginable. Corporations will now be able to reward the politicians that play ball with them - and beat to death the politicians that don't... You won't even hear any more about the Senator from Kansas. It'll be the Senator from General Electric or the Senator from Microsoft." In 2008, Exxon Mobil made profits of $85bn. So if they dedicated just 10 percent to backing a President who would serve their interests, they would have $8.5bn to spend - more than every candidate for President and every candidate for Senate spent at the last election. And that's just one corporation.

To understand the impact this will have, you need to grasp how smaller sums of corporate money have already hijacked American democracy. Let's look at a case that is simple and immediate and every American can see in front of them: healthcare. The United States is the only major industrialized democracy that doesn't guarantee healthcare for all its citizens. The result is that, according to a detailed study by Harvard University, some 45,000 Americans die needlessly every year. That's equivalent to 15 9/11s every year, or two Haitian earthquakes every decade.

This isn't because the American people like it this way. Gallup has found in polls for a decade now that two-thirds believe the government should guarantee care for every American: they are as good and decent and concerned for each other as any European. No: it is because private insurance companies make a fortune today out of a system that doesn't cover the profit-less poor, and can turn away the sickest people as "uninsurable". So they pay for politicians to keep the system broken. They fund the election campaigns of politicians on both sides of the aisle, and in return, those politicians veto any system that doesn't serve their paymasters. Look for example at Joe Lieberman, the former Democratic candidate for Vice-President. He has taken $448,066 in campaign contributions from private healthcare companies while his wife has raked in $2m as one of their chief lobbyists, and he has loyally blocked any attempt in the Senate to break the stranglehold of the health insurance companies and broaden coverage.

The US political system now operates within a corporate cage. If you want to run for office, you have to take corporate cash - and so you have to serve corporate interests. Corporations are often blatant in their corruption: it's not unusual for them to give to both competing candidates in a Senate race, to ensure all sides are indebted to them. This runs so deep that Congressman James Clyburn says the US has become a "corpocracy." It has reached the point that lobbyists now often write the country's laws. Not metaphorically; literally. The former Republican congressman Walter Jones spoke out in disgust in 2006 when he found that drug company lobbyists were actually authoring the words of the Medicare prescription bill, and puppet-politicians were simply nodding it through.

But what happens if politicians are serving the short-term profit-hunger of corporations, and not the public interest? You only have to look at the shuttered shops outside your window for the answer. The banks were rapidly deregulated from the Eighties through the Noughties because their lobbyists paid politicians on all sides, and demanded their payback in rolled-back rules and tossed-away laws. As Senator Dick Durbin says simply: "The banks own the Senate," so they had to obey. The result was that the banks made staggering profits - and were immediately rescued when they smashed the world economy. The only people who paid for it were the public, all over the world.

It is this corruption that has prevented Barack Obama from achieving anything substantial in his first year in office. How do you reregulate the banks, if the Senate is owned by Wall Street? How do you launch a rapid transition away from oil and coal to wind and solar, if the fossil fuel industry owns Congress? How do you break with a grab-the-oil foreign policy if Big Oil provides the invitation that gets you into the party of American politics?

His attempt at healthcare reform is dying because he thought he could only get through the Senate a system that the giant healthcare corporations and drug companies pre-approved. So he promised to keep the ban on bringing cheap drugs down from Canada, he pledged not to bargain over prices, and he dumped the idea of having a public option that would make sure ordinary Americans could actually afford it. The result was a Quasimodo healthcare proposal so feeble and misshapen that even the people of Massachusetts turned away in disgust.

Yet the corporations that caused this crisis are now being given yet more power. Bizarrely, the Supreme Court has decided that corporations are "persons", so they have the "right" to speak during elections. But corporations are not people. Should they have the right to bear arms, or to vote? It would make as much sense. They are a legal fiction, invented by the state - and they can be fairly regulated to stop them devouring their creator. This is the same Supreme Court that ruled that the detainees at Guantanomo Bay are not "persons" under the constitution and are deserving of basic protections. A court that says a living breathing human is less of a "person" than Lockheed Martin has gone badly awry.

Obama now faces two paths - the Clinton road, or the FDR highway. After he lost his healthcare battle, Clinton decided to simply serve the corporate interests totally. He is the one who carried out the biggest roll-back of banking laws, and saw the largest explosion of inequality since the 1920s. Some of Obama's advisors are now nudging him down that path: the pledge for an appalling anti-Keynesian spending freeze on social programmes for the next three years to pay down the deficit is one of their triumphs.

But there is another way. Franklin Roosevelt began his Presidency trying to appease corporate interests - but he faced huge uproar and disgust at home when it became clear this left ordinary Americans stranded in the fog of a depression. He switched course. He turned his anger on "the malefactors of great wealth" and bragged: "I welcome the hatred... of the economic royalists." He launched a programme of redistributing power from the corporations back towards the people, and put in place tough regulations that prevented economic disaster and spiralling inequality for three generations.

There were rare flashes of what Franklin Delano Obama would look like in his reaction to the Supreme Court decision. He said: "It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies, and other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americas." But he has spent far more time coddling those interests than taking them on. The great pressure of strikes and protests put on FDR hasn't yet arisen from a public dissipated into hopelessness by an appalling media that convinces them they are powerless and should wait passively for a Messiah.

Very little positive change can happen in the U.S. until they clear out the temple of American democracy. In the State of the Union, Obama spent one minute on this problem, and proposed restrictions on lobbyists - but that's only the tiniest of baby steps. He evaded the bigger issue. If Americans want a democratic system, they have to pay for it - and that means fair state funding for political candidates. Candidates are essential for the system to work: you may as well begrudge paying for the polling booths, or the lever you pull. At the same time, the Supreme Court needs to be confronted: when the Court tried to stymie the New Deal, FDR tried to pack it with justices on the side of the people. Obama needs to be pressured by Americans to be as radical in democratizing the Land of the Fee.

None of the crises facing us all - from the global banking system to global warming - can be dealt with if a tiny number of super-rich corporations have a veto over every inch of progress. If Obama flunks this challenge now, he may as well put the US government on eBay and sell it to the highest bidder. How would we spot the difference?

To join the campaign to democratize the United States of America, clickhere.
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent.POSTED BY ECOLOGICAL BUDDHISM AT 4:11 PMOlder PostHomeBUDDHIST DECLARATION ON CLIMATE CHANGESign the Buddhist DeclarationJanuary 2010Count of signatories -
7000 from over 100 countries(incl. 70 Buddhist teachers
of all traditions). The documentand signatories were presented
to world leaders at the COP-15
conference by the U.N.
Environment Programme.Given the Copenhagen outcome,
the Declaration remains open
for signing.
THE VIEW

The time has surely come when we must speak out as Buddhists,with firm views of harmony as the Tao.
I suggest that it is also time for us to take ourselves in hand…This would be engaged Buddhism where the Sangha is not merely parallel to the forms of conventional society and not merely metaphysical in its universality…This greater Sangha is, moreover, not merely Buddhist. It is possible to identify an eclectic religious revolution that is already underway, one towhich we can lend our energies.
—Robert Aitken Roshi

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Peter Sinclair & Felix Kramer

2010: Year of the Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle

Soon we'll be driving safe, affordable, highway-capable plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) and all-electric vehicles (EVs) from the world's major carmakers and some brash start-up companies. The first cars will arrive in selected markets this year. Next year, people in many states, provinces and countries will finally be able to simply go into dealer showrooms and buy them. Some sceptics, engulfed by the reality of industry progress, now fall back to ask, "Will any but the early adopters buy them?" Of course, it's too soon to tell. We expect that plug-ins' comparative advantages and social benefits combined with initial subsidies will eventually lead to their full competitiveness on features and price, broad market penetration, and eventual dominance.

This year, in the early-adopter state of California, we can replace our Toyota Prius aftermarket PHEV conversion with a new PHEV such as the Chevy Volt. For local driving, we'll likely replace our Toyota Camry HEV with a 100-mile-range EV such as the Nissan LEAF or CODA sedan. Check out the PHEV listing at http://www.calcars.org/carmakers.html and Plug In America's tracker athttp://www.pluginamerica.org/plug-in-vehicle-tracker.html .

The auto industry's giant marketing machines will help immeasurably in putting plug-in cars as drivers' next choice. Already, it's often no longer necessary to explain "plug-in hybrid" to most people. Instead we ask, "Have you've seen ads for the Chevy Volt?" Then we say "That's a PHEV." Then, if they want, we explain how they work and their benefits! Here's Peter Sinclair's video... 

We still have to combat misinformation

In a world where stray comments gain instant  credibility and mindshare, we see periodic campaigns and isolated efforts to raise questions about vehicle electrification. We still encounter those who think it's business-as-usual for fossil fuels while we wait for some "technology breakthroughs" or vast infrastructure. In fact, plug-ins, built with today's batteries, charging mainly at home at night, can arrive as fast as carmakers can build them. We still hear from those who, intentionally or not, mistakenly position the strategy to "displace petroleum with electricity" as a competitor instead of a complement to essential efforts to conserve by improving conventional vehicles' efficiency and reducing their use. We haven't heard the last from advocates who propose vast expansions of liquid/gaseous fuels -- natural gas, biofuels or hydrogen fuel cells -- as alternatives rather than supplements to electricity.


We've barely encountered the first volleys from fossil fuel suppliers

Taken together, these companies are by far the world's most powerful industry. They're also the most destructive and deadly, factoring in all the consequences of extraction, production, transportation and combustion, plus the impact on every nation's public and private-sector integrity, economy, and national security. With so many stakeholders waiting for any hiccup, false start or overstatement, we all need to be ready to defend our strategy, whose strengths are predicated on "solutions good enough to get started," a transformed cleantech economy, and electricity's fundamental advantages: "cleaner, cheaper, and domestic." 

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Andrew HarveySacred Activism

Globe in classroom, New Orleans by Chris Jordan from "In Katrina's Wake" (2005)

I believe we are heading into the eye of a perfect storm, which threatens the human race and a great deal of nature. I think it is extremely important that we all stop denying just how dangerous, insane and savage this perfect storm of crises is, and just what it means for all of us and the world. I think you know what those crises are. There is a holocaust going on that the doomsayers had predicted. There is a retreat among many of the major religions into fundamentalism, which disorders our unity. There is the domination of a kind of corporate magnate who is brutal and addicted to power, exploitation and greed. The mass media, largely owned by corporations, is filling our minds with violence, trash and celebrity trivia, at the very moment where you and I need to be inspired, galvanized and given the authentic information.

There is a lifestyle, which you and I both live, hectic, driven and multi-tasking, which makes it almost impossible for even the most well-meaning of us to have the kind of pleasure and peace in which to hear the voice of the soul that could guide us. When you bring all of these crises together, and factor in the population explosion, what we are looking at is a perfect storm of interrelated crises that are all manifestations of a selective force - human self. This human self has lost the most fundamental connection of all, the connection with the sacred nature of creation and of life. I think it is very important that we all wake up fast, because all those who are not awake now are going to be, very soon. The crisis is not going to relent and it is going to get very much fiercer very soon.

I believe this storm of crises is an evolutionary possibility of unprecendented intensity. It gives us the opportunity to gaze into the mirror of our destiny, and to see very clearly, that unless you and I evolve to the next level of putting our deepest principles and holiest compassion and greatest passion for life into direct, clear. radical action on every level, we will simply not survive. This great death we are living, that we are manifesting out of addiction, greed, extraordinary apathy and fantastic lack of concern for life is also potentially the birth canal of an unprecedented birth. A chastened, humbled humanity, opened at last by tragedy, awakened by the knowledge of the shadow may really claim our innate, sacred consciousness, start acting from our heart and turn apocalypse into grace, nightmare into opportunity, redeem terrible tragedy by gathering together on a massive scale to transform the world.

This crisis is the equivalent on a global scale of a crisis that a mystic goes through at a certain moment on the path. In Christian mysticism it is called the 'Dark Night of the Soul'. In the metaphysical systems of Mahayana Buddhism, it is the shattering of the false or created self. Can humanity see this immense consciousness as a God-sent, God-given, God-ordained opportunity to unlearn all our dangerous attainments? If humanity could settle in the deep ground of divine inspiration and learn how to go through the shattering ordeal with authentic grace, authentic commitment to transformation, then not only will we survive, but humanity will be transformed and born into an authentic divine nature, through the death of the collective false self that is manifesting this great death and wrecking everything. What is there in us that can birth a divine humanity, transformed by tragedy, illumined by shattering knowledge and transfigured by divine grace? What force can give us the power to turn this devastating situation around?

Four years after my teacher Father Bede Griffiths died, I had a dream in which he showed me two rivers. One was a river of fire going toward the sea. The other was a river of even more intense fire. They met at the sea in a glorious, radiant, divine explosion of energy. I heard a voice saying, "These two rivers are the two noblest forces of the human psyche. They are the river of the mystic's passion for God and the river of the activist's passion for justice. When these two rivers meet, a third fire is born that is ordained to transform everything. It the fire of divine compassion and love in action."

The vision gave me a term Sacred Activism and in honour of that I wrote a book. If you believe, as I do, that we are facing extreme danger together with extreme opportunity, I ask you in the name of Buddha to get up at three o'clock in the morning someday soon, surround yourself with the peace of God in whichever way you understand it, and ask youself one question. Which of all the causes in this beleaguered, damaged world breaks my heart the most? Please dare to ask yourself this question, and dare to listen to what your heart says to you. If you do, your heart will reveal to you a sacred mission that belongs just to you, and that will be the deepest and most radiant voice of your soul. You will be given at that moment, an injunction and a direction. What you can do then is to join with other people with a similar heartbreak, and work together in your local community, to do something real about what it is that you advocate in yourself.

I talk about this vision of sacred activism widely, and I am also involved in a way of grounding it in the world called Networks of Grace. These networks are going to be cells of six to twelve people gathered around a heartbreak, or a profession, or a passion, dedicating in their local communities to start a grassroots, radical revolution of the third power; Love in Action. It is the only way we will get a chance for it to work. If we wait for corporations to transform our situation, we will wait until the last tree is burnt down. If we wait for politicians to have a major spiritual transformation and suddenly give millions away and start feeding the poor, we will be waiting for the last animal to disappear. This revolution of the soul in action depends upon you and me. We are getting real about the tragedy of where we are now, the opportunity of where we can go, and the heartbreak you and I feel. When we get real about these things, we are impelled to come together in networks of grace and do something about it. 

The above is the transcript of a talk by mystical scholar, poet & translator Andrew Harvey at the NYC launch of Bhikkhu Bodhi's Buddhist Global Relief project 

Climate Science 2009A Summary by Joe Romm
www.climateprogress.org

2009 was the year the scientific literature caught up with what top scientists have said privately for years. Key aspects of our climate are changing faster than expected. If we stay on our current emissions path, we face incalculable catastrophe.In 2009, the scientific literature caught up with the expert grapevine. Many predicted impacts of human-caused climate change are indeed occurring much faster than anybody expected, and all across the planet — particularly ice melt.
If we stay anywhere near our current emissions path, we are facing incalculable catastrophes by century’s end, including rapid sea level rise, massive wildfires, widespread dust-bowlification, large oceanic dead zones, and 9°F warming. Much of it will be all but irreversible for centuries. The consequences for human health and well being are going to be extreme. 

That’s not a  surprise to anybody who has talked to leading climate scientists in recent years. But it's a scientific reality only about 2% of people fully grasp. Here, then, I will review the past year of peer-reviewed climate science literature.

Heat-trapping greenhouse gases are at unprecedented levels, and the paleoclimate record suggests that even slightly higher levels are untenable:

* World carbon dioxide levels jumped 2.3 ppm in 2008. 
* CO2 levels are the highest for 15 million years, when it was up to10°F warmer and seas were up to 120 feet higher.
* World Meteorological Organization & NOAA; 2000-2009 was hottest decade on record.
* Antarctica has warmed significantly over past 50 years 
* EAST Antarctica is losing mass, and may soon contribute significantly to sea-level rise. 
* Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is pervasive & enduring.
* A major Antarctic glacier is being lost at accelerating exponential rate like nothing else in the natural world.
* The North Pole is poised to be largely ice-free by 2020.* Bolivia’s 18,000 year-old Chacaltaya glacier completely disappeared. 
* The world’s glaciers shrank for the 18th successive year. 

Given this unexpectedly fast ice melt, seas level rises will be much higher & faster than previously thought:

* Sea levels may rise 3 times faster than IPCC estimated, hitting 6 feet by 2100. 
* Faster Greenland ice sheet melting could raise U.S. East Coast sea levels >6 feet by 2100. 
* West Antarctic ice sheet collapse would be catastrophic for U.S. coasts. 

Dangerous positive carbon-cycle feedbacks threaten to amplify human-caused GHG effects:

* “Clouds Now A Big, Bad Player in Global Warming” — an amplifying feedback. 
* So many amplifying methane feedbacks; so little time to stop them all. 
* Global warming is killing U.S. trees, another dangerous carbon-cycle feedback. 

High emissions levels + positive feedbacks = climate catastrophe:

* M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F 
* Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over inland U.S. by 2090 — and that 's just business as usual!” 
* Ocean dead zones to expand and “remain for thousands of years” 
* The worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories are being realised” — 1000 ppm 
* Climate change expected to increase Western wildfire burn area as much as 175% by 2050 
* Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe 

Seriously bad news for human health and welfare:

* The Lancet : Cutting greenhouse gas emissions has major direct health benefits 
* NRC: Fossil fuels cost the U.S. $120 billion/year 
* "Global Warming Is A Medical Emergency”
* Half world’s population could face climate-driven food crisis by 2100 

The time to act is most certainly now. 

Let's end this summary with the best piece of scientific news; one that suggests it is not too damn late to act! A NOAA-led study found we have not yet activated strong climate feedbacks from permafrost and methane hydrates. So far that most dangerous of all feedbacks — Arctic and tundra methane releases — does not appear to have been fatally triggered.

The anti-science crowd use smoke and mirrors to distract as many people as possible, but the rest of us need to listen to the science and keep our eyes on the prize — reversing greenhouse gas emissions trends as quickly and rapidly as possible.      
In 2009, Time Magazine named American physicist and climate expert Joe Romm one of itsHeroes of the Environment. The son of a newspaper editor, he is now the Web's most influential blogger in the field of climate and energy. Romm gained his PhD from MIT. When working for the Rockefeller Foundation, he identified energy & climate change as 'sleeper issues' that would dominate the coming decades. He then became assistant secretary at the Clinton Department of Energy. His 2006 book on global warming, Hell & High Water, is essential reading in the field. 

Consumer Culture vs the Biosphere

by Eric Assadourian

Chris Jordan & Sarah Waller: Tuna 2009. The artwork depicts 20,500 tuna, the number taken from the world's oceans every 15 minutes.

In the 2009 documentary "The Age of Stupid", a fictional historian who is possibly the last man on Earth looks at archival film footage from 2008 and contemplates the last years in which humanity could have saved itself from global ecological collapse. “Why didn’t we save ourselves when we had the chance?” Were we just being stupid? Or was it that “on some level we weren’t sure that we were worth saving?” The answer has little to do with humans being stupid or self-destructive but everything to do with culture.

Human beings are embedded in cultural systems, are shaped and constrained by their cultures, and for the most part act only within the cultural realities of their lives. The cultural norms, symbols, values, and traditions a person grows up with become “natural.” Thus, asking people who live in consumer cultures to curb consumption is akin to asking them to stop breathing—they can do it for a moment, but then, gasping, they will inhale again. Driving cars, flying in planes, having large homes, using air conditioning…these are not decadent choices but simply natural parts of life—according to the cultural norms present in a growing number of consumer cultures in the world. Yet while they seem natural to people who are part of those cultural realities, these patterns are neither sustainable nor innate manifestations of human nature. They developed over several centuries and today are actively being reinforced and spread to millions of people in developing countries.

Preventing the collapse of human civilization requires nothing less than total transformation of dominant cultural patterns. This transformation would reject consumerism—a cultural orientation that leads people to find meaning, contentment, and acceptance through what they consume—as taboo and establish in its place a new cultural framework centred on sustainability. In the process, a revamped understanding of “natural” would emerge: it would mean individual and societal choices that cause minimal ecological damage or, better yet, that restore the biosphere to health. Such a shift—something more fundamental than adoption of the new technologies or government policies regarded as key drivers of a shift to sustainable societies—would radically reshape the way people understand and act in the world.

Transforming cultures will require decades of effort in which cultural pioneers—those who can step out of their cultural realities enough to critically examine them—work tirelessly to redirect key culture-shaping institutions: education, business, government, and the media, as well as social movements and long-standing human traditions. Harnessing these drivers of cultural change will be critical if humanity is to survive and thrive for centuries and millennia to come and prove that we are indeed “worth saving.”

The Unsustainability of Current Consumption Patterns

In 2006, people around the world spent $30.5 trillion on goods and services. These expenditures included basic necessities like food and shelter, but as discretionary incomes rose, people spent more on consumer goods—from richer foods and larger homes to televisions, cars, computers, and air travel. In 2008 alone, people around the world purchased 68 million cars, 85 million refrigerators, 297 million computers, and 1.2 billion mobile phones  Consumption has grown dramatically over the past five decades, up 28 percent from the $23.9 trillion spent in 1996 and up sixfold from the $4.9 trillion spent in 1960 (2008 dollar values). Some of this increase comes from the growth in population, but human numbers only grew by a factor of 2.2 between 1960 and 2006. Thus consumption expenditures per person still almost tripled.

As consumption has risen, more fossil fuels, minerals, and metals have been mined from the earth, more trees have been cut down, and more land has been plowed to grow food (often to feed livestock as people at higher income levels started to eat more meat). Between 1950 and 2005, for example, metals production grew sixfold, oil consumption eightfold, and natural gas consumption 14-fold. In total, 60 billion tons of resources are now extracted annually—about 50 percent more than just 30 years ago. Today, the average European uses 43 kilograms of resources daily, and the average American uses 88 kilograms. All in all, the world extracts the equivalent of 112 Empire State Buildings from the Earth every single day.

The exploitation of these resources to maintain ever higher levels of consumption has put increasing pressure on Earth’s systems and in the process has dramatically disrupted the ecological systems on which humanity and countless other species depend. The Ecological Footprint Indicator, which compares humanity’s ecological impact with the amount of productive land and sea area available to supply key ecosystem services, shows that humanity now uses the resources and services of 1.3 Earths. In other words, people are using about a third more of Earth’s capacity than is available, undermining the resilience of the very ecosystems on which we depend.

In 2005 the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a comprehensive review of scientific  research that involved 1,360 experts from 95 countries, reinforced these findings. It found that some 60% of ecosystem services—climate regulation, provision of fresh water, waste treatment, food from fisheries and many other services—were being degraded or used unsustainably. The findings were so unsettling that the MA Board warned:

Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.

The shifts in one particular ecosystem service—climate regulation—are especially disturbing. After remaining at stable levels for the past 1,000 years at about 280 parts per million, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are now at 385 parts per million, driven by a growing human population consuming ever more fossil fuels, eating more meat, and converting more land to agriculture and urban areas. A 2009 study that used the Integrated Global Systems Model of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that unless significant action is taken soon, median temperature increases would be 5.1 degrees Celsius by 2100, more than twice as much as the model had projected in 2003. In other words, policy alone will not be enough. A dramatic shift in the very design of human societies will be essential. 

These projected levels of temperature change mean the odds would be great that ocean levels would increase by two or more meters due to the partial melting of Greenland or W. Antarctic ice sheets, which in turn would cause massive coastal flooding and submerge entire island nations. The one sixth of the world who depend on glacier or snowmelt-fed rivers for water would face extreme water scarcity. Vast swaths of the Amazon forest would become savanna, coral reefs would die, and many of the world’s most vulnerable fisheries would collapse. All of this would translate into major political and social disruptions—with environmental refugees projected to reach up to 1 billion by 2050.

Climate change is just one of the many symptoms of excessive consumption levels. Air pollution, the average loss of 7 million hectares of forests per year, soil erosion, the annual production of over 100 million tons of hazardous waste, abusive labour practices driven by the desire to produce more and cheaper consumer goods, obesity, increasing time stress—the list could go on and on. All these problems are often treated separately, even as many of their roots trace back to current consumption patterns.

According to a study by Stephen Pacala, the world’s richest 500 million people (roughly 7% of the world’s population) are currently responsible for 50% of its carbon dioxide emissions, while the poorest 3 billion are responsible for just 6%. These numbers should not be surprising, for it is the rich who have the largest homes, drive cars, jet around the world, use large amounts of electricity, eat more meat and processed foods, and buy more stuff—all of which has significant ecological impact. In 2006, the 65 high-income countries where consumerism is most dominant accounted for 78% of consumption expenditures but just 16% percent of world population. People in the United States alone spent $9.7 trillion on consumption that year—about $32,400 per person—accounting for 32% of global expenditures with only 5% of global population. It is these countries that most urgently need to redirect their consumption patterns, as the planet cannot handle such high levels of consumption.

Indeed, if everyone lived like Americans, Earth could sustain only 1.4 billion people. At slightly lower consumption levels, though still high, the planet could support 2.1 billion people. But even at middle-income levels—the equivalent of what people in Jordan or Thailand earn on average today—Earth can sustain fewer people than are alive today. These numbers convey a reality that few want to confront: in today’s world of 6.8 billion, modern consumption patterns—even at relatively basic levels—are simply not sustainable. Add to this the fact that population is projected to grow by another 2.3 billion by 2050 and even with effective strategies to curb growth will probably still grow by at least another 1.1 billion before peaking.

It therefore becomes clear that while shifting technologies and stabilizing population will be essential in creating sustainable societies, neither will succeed without considerable changes in consumption patterns, including reducing the use of certain goods such as cars and airplanes. Habits that are firmly set—from where people live to what they eat—will need to be altered, and in many cases simplified or minimized. These are not changes people will want to make, since their current patterns are comfortable and feel “natural,” because of sustained, methodical efforts to make them feel just that way. Indeed, human behaviors central to modern cultural identities and economic systems are not choices that are fully in consumers’ control. They are systematically reinforced by the increasingly dominant cultural paradigm of consumerism.

 
Chris Jordan's Midway: Message from the Gyre, 2009, a photographs of an albatross chick on Midway Atoll in the N. Pacific. Nestings are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food for their young. On this diet of human trash, tens of thousands of chicks die yearly of starvation, toxicity, and choking. 

     .   
Consumerism Across Cultures

To understand what consumerism is, first it is necessary to understand what culture is. Culture is not simply the arts, or values, or belief systems. Rather, it is all of these elements—values, beliefs, customs, traditions, symbols, norms, and institutions—combining to create overarching frames that shape how humans perceive reality. Cultures, as broader systems, arise out of the complex interactions of many different elements of social behaviors and guide humans at actors and institutions and by the participants in the cultures themselves.

Today the cultural paradigm that is dominant in many parts of the world and across many cultural systems is consumerism. It is a cultural pattern that leads people to find meaning, contentment, and acceptance primarily through the consumption of goods and services. While this takes different forms in different cultures, consumerism leads people everywhere to associate high consumption levels with well-being and success. Ironically though, research shows that consuming more does not necessarily mean a better individual quality of life. Consumerism has now so fully worked its way into human cultures that it is sometimes hard to even recognize it as a cultural construction. It simply seems to be natural. But in fact the elements of cultures—language and symbols, norms and traditions, values and institutions—have been profoundly transformed by consumerism in societies around the world. Indeed, “consumer” is often used interchangeably with "person" in the 10 most commonly used languages of the world.

Consider symbols—what anthropologist Leslie White once described as “the origin and basis of human behaviour.” In most countries today people are exposed to hundreds if not thousands of consumerist symbols every day. Logos, jingles, slogans, spokespersons, mascots—all these symbols of different brands routinely bombard people, influencing behaviour even at unconscious levels. Many people today recognize these consumerist symbols more easily than they do common wildlife an almost invisible level. They are the sum of all “social processes that make the artificial (or human-constructed) seem natural.” It is these social processes that shape people’s realities. Most of what seems “natural” to people is actually cultural. Ultimately, while human behaviour is rooted in evolution and physiology, it is guided primarily by the cultural systems people are born into.
 
One norm of particular interest is diet. It now seems natural to eat highly sweetened, highly processed foods. Children from a very early age are exposed to candy, sweetened cereals, and other unhealthy but highly profitable and highly advertised foods—a shift that has had a dramatic impact on global obesity rates. Today, fast-food vendors and soda machines are found even in schools, shaping children’s dietary norms from a young age and in turn reinforcing and perpetuating these norms throughout societies.

There is strong evidence that higher levels of consumption do not significantly increase the quality of life beyond a certain point, and they may even reduce it. First, psychological evidence suggests that it is close relationships, a meaningful life, economic security, and health that contribute most to well-being. While there are marked improvements in happiness when people at low levels of income earn more (as their economic security improves and their range of opportunities grows), as incomes increase this extra earning power converts less effectively into increased happiness. In part, this may stem from people’s tendency to habituate to the consumption level they are exposed to. Even products around only a short time quickly become viewed as necessities. Half of Americans now think they must have a mobile phone, and one third see a high-speed Internet connection as essential.

A high-consumption lifestyle can also have many side effects that do not improve wellbeing, from increased work stress and debt to more illness and a greater risk of death. Each year roughly half of all deaths worldwide are caused by cancers, cardiovascular and lung diseases, diabetes, and auto accidents. Many of these deaths are caused or at least largely influenced by individual consumption choices such as smoking, being sedentary, eating too few fruits and vegetables, and being overweight. Today 1.6 billion people around the world are overweight or obese, lowering their quality of life and shortening their lives, for the obese, by 3 to 10 years on average.

Traditions—the most ritualized and deeply rooted aspects of cultures—are also now shaped by consumerism, which is now deeply embedded in how people observe rituals. Choosing to celebrate rituals in a simple manner can be a difficult choice to make, whether because of norms, family pressure, or advertising influence. Christmas demonstrates this point well. While for Christians this day marks the birth of Jesus, for many people the holiday is more oriented around Santa Claus, gift giving, and feasting. A 2008 survey on Christmas spending in 18 countries found that individuals spent hundreds of dollars on gifts and hundreds more on socializing and food. Increasingly, even many non-Christians celebrate Christmas as a time to exchange gifts. In Japan, Christmas is a big holiday, even though only 2% of the population is Christian.

Chris Jordan: Barbie Dolls, 2008 depicts 32,000 Barbies, equal to the number of elective 
breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the U.S. 

Institutional Roots of Consumerism

By the early 1900s, a consumerist orientation had become increasingly embedded in many of the dominant societal institutions of many cultures—from businesses and governments to the media and education. And in the latter half of the century, new innovations like television, sophisticated advertising techniques, trans-national corporations, franchises, and the Internet helped institutions to spread consumerism across the planet. Arguably, the strongest driver of this cultural shift has been business interests. On a diverse set of fronts, businesses found ways to coax more consumption out of people. Credit was liberalized, for instance, with installment payments, and the credit card was promoted heavily in the United States, which led to an almost 11-fold increase in consumer credit between 1945 and 1960. Products were designed to have short lives or to go out of style quickly. Workers were encouraged to take pay raises rather than more time off, increasing their disposable incomes.

Perhaps the biggest business tool for stoking consumption is marketing. Global advertising expenditures hit $643 billion in 2008, and in countries like China and India they are growing at 10% per year. In the United States, the average “consumer” sees or hears hundreds of advertisements every day and from an early age learns to associate products with positive imagery and messages.

Clearly, if advertising were not effective, businesses would not spend 1% of the gross world product to sell their wares, as they do. But they are right: studies have demonstrated that advertising indeed encourages certain behaviours and that children, who have difficulty distinguishing between TV advertising and content,  are particularly susceptible. In addition to direct advertising, product placement —intentionally showing products in television programs or movies so that they are positively associated with characters—is a growing practice. Companies spent $3.5 billion placing their products strategically in 2004 in the United States, four times the amount spent 15 years earlier.

The media are a second major societal institution that plays a driving role in stimulating consumerism, and not just as a vehicle for marketing. The media are a powerful tool for transmitting cultural symbols, norms, customs, myths, and stories. As Duane Elgin, author and media activist, explains: “To control a society, you don’t need to control its courts, you don’t need to control its armies, all you need to do is control its stories. And it’s television and Madison Avenue that is telling us most of the stories most of the time to most of the people.”  Between television, movies, and increasingly the Internet, the media are a dominant form of leisure time activity. In 2006, some 83% of the world’s population had access to television and 21% had access to the Internet. In countries that belong to the OECD, 95% of households have at least one television, and people watch about three to four hours a day on average. Add to this the two to three hours spent online each day, plus radio broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, and the 8 billion movie tickets sold annually worldwide, and it becomes clear that media exposure consumes anywhere from a third to half of people’s waking day in large parts of the world.

During those hours, much of media output reinforces consumer norms and promotes materialistic aspirations, whether directly by extolling the high-consumption lives of celebrities and the wealthy or more subtly through stories that reinforce the belief that happiness comes from being better off financially,from buying the newest consumer gadget or fashion accessory, and so on. There is clear evidence that media exposure has an impact on norms, values, and preferences. Social modelling studies have found connections between such exposure and violence, smoking, reproductive norms, and various unhealthy behaviours.

Government often reinforces the consumerist orientation. Promoting consumer behaviour happens in myriad ways—perhaps most famously in 2001 when George W. Bush and several other western leaders encouraged their citizens to go out and shop after the terrorist attacks. But it also happens more systemically. Subsidies for particular industries—especially the transportation and energy sectors, where cheap oil or electricity has ripple effects throughout the economy—also work to stoke consumption. And to the extent that manufacturers are not required to internalize the environmental and social costs of production—when pollution of air or water is unregulated, for example—the cost of goods is artificially low, stimulating their use. Between these subsidies and externalities, total support of polluting business interests was $1.9 trillion in 2001. Government actions can also be driven by regulatory capture, when special interests wield undue influence over regulators. In 2008, that influence could be observed in the United States through the $3.9 billion spent on campaign donations by business interests and the $2.8 billion they spent to lobby policymakers.

A clear example of official stimulation of consumption came in the 1940s when governments started to actively promote consumption as a vehicle for development. For example, the U.S., which came out of World War II relatively unscathed, had mobilized a massive war-time economy—one that was poised to recede now that the war was over. Intentionally stimulating high levels of consumption was seen as a good solution to address this (especially with the memory of the Great Depression still raw). Victor Lebow explained in 1955:

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions in consumption.

Today, this same attitude toward consumption has spread far beyond the U.S. and is the leading policy of many of the world’s governments. As the global economic recession accelerated in 2009, wealthy countries did not see this as an opportunity to shift to a sustainable “no-growth” economy—essential if they are to rein in carbon emissions—but instead primed national economies with $2.8 trillion of new government stimulus packages, only a small percentage of which focused on green initiatives.

Finally, education plays a powerful role in cultivating consumerism. As with governments, in part this is because education seems to be increasingly susceptible to business influence. Yet perhaps the greatest critique of schools is that they represent a huge missed opportunity to combat consumerism and to educate students about its effects on people and the environment. Few schools teach media literacy to help students critically interpret marketing; few teach or model proper nutrition, even while providing access to unhealthy or unsustainable consumer products; and few teach a basic understanding of the ecological sciences—specifically that the human species is not unique but in fact just as dependent on a functioning Earth system for its survival as every other species. The lack of integration of this basic knowledge into the school curriculum, coupled with repeated exposure to consumer goods and advertising and with leisure time focused in large part on television, helps reinforce the unrealistic idea that humans are separate from Earth and the illusion that perpetual increases in consumption are ecologically possible and even valuable.

Eric Assadourian is a senior researcher at Worldwatch Institute and Project Director ofState of the World 2010. The above is an edited synopsis based on his article The Rise & Fall of Consumer Cultures  which WWI has available for downloading as a PDF here.

Getting Past the Urgency Trap

by Sara Robinson

Overturned truck in the 9th Ward, New Orleans-- from Chris Jordan's powerful exhibition,
In Katrina's  Wake - Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster  (2005).
The picture might also be seen as a metaphor for the Copenhagen conference. Social
futurist Sara Robinson takes a long view that recognizes 6 steps in any major change. 
We are, she states, collectively only half-way through the process of big and deep social 
change in relation to the climate crisis.

Climate activists are expressing enormous disappointment about everything left undone at Copenhagen. There was overwhelming urgency to get a strong global agreement to get the laggards off their butts and launch the structural reformations most of us know were needed need to fix the problem. A lot of us loaded all our highest hopes onto this one conference, wanting desperately to believe that this would finally be the moment the long-awaited Grand Transformation would occur.

But the hard truth of the matter is this: change of this magnitude never happens with a single conference, a single treaty, or even a single disaster. The structural changes required to get us off carbon and onto a truly sustainable footing challenge economic assumptions that humans have lived by for a couple of thousand years. Change that wide and deep will be the work of an entire century, maybe two. (If we’re smart and lucky, our grandchildren may live to see it mostly done.) All of us are well aware of the precarious time crunch we’re under here; but humans change only as fast as they change, and forcing the issue isn’t likely to help. We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and we’re not going to get out of it in one dazzling planetary stroke of universal enlightenment, either.

The good news: big, deep changes like this one tend to proceed in a fairly predictable order. If we understand the whole arc of that process, we can have a little more patience with where we are, and think a little more strategically about what comes next. Various theorists on the subject of change disagree on the number of stages in the process—but they all describe more or less the same progression. For our purposes, we can think of it in six stages:

Stage One begins when a small subgroup of people realizes that there’s a problem, and then figures out just what that problem is. In this case, it was the climate scientists who noticed the first hints of a problem over a century ago, and spent the next several decades accumulating overwhelming evidence that it was a monster threat that couldn’t be ignored.

Stage Two is in many ways the very hardest one: getting everybody else in the group to see the problem, admit it’s a problem, and agree that it needs to be fixed.  Note that there are no solutions proffered at this stage; right now, you’re just getting people to crack their minds open wide enough to accept the present truth and future implications of the matter.

This battle for hearts and minds is never a small victory—and those of us in the fight for climate change have already substantially won it. The deniers keep trying to take it away from us; but like the tobacco companies in the 1960s, they’re on the defensive and in the minority now, and they’re well aware that time is not on their side. Creating a broad global consensus around the basic idea that climate disruption is happening and needs to be addressed was one of the longest, hardest, most important battles of the whole revolution, and it’s very nearly over. Just getting to this point has been an enormous global victory for the movement, and we deserve to let ourselves claim it and savour it.

From here, it’s on to Stage Three, in which the group tries to see if tweaks to the existing system will fix the problem. This is where we are now: what’s came out of Copenhagen; in essence, a laundry list of tweaks.

This isn’t an irrational step. After all, as we go through life solving problems, tweaking something does in fact fix things better than 90 percent of the time. It’s very natural for people—especially people who are more change-averse than your average climate activist, which is about 90 percent of everybody—to comfort themselves with the belief that we just need to do a little of this, a little of that, and it’ll all be better.

We are now at Stage Three not just with climate change, but the economy too. Everybody knows we need change; not everybody understands yet just how thorough the overhaul is going to have to be. And large-scale change won’t happen until they figure it out themselves, on their own time, in their own way.

There is no avoiding this stage of the process. It’s frustrating for the foresighted people who’ve already figured out that mere tweaks aren’t going to do it this time; but the bitter truth is that there’s no way through this stage but through it. You cannot skip steps, and you cannot rush people through their process. Everybody’s got to go through all of them, on their own schedule.

Change agents have two clear choices here: enter the discussion, engage the crowd, and position themselves as clear, calm, credible leaders on the issue; or get out too far ahead of the laggards and whine at them to catch up. The latter strategy pretty much guarantees that they’ll only resent you—and later on, when they get finally serious about change, your name won’t be on the list of credible people who are qualified to make the really transformative decisions. No matter how much you know about the subject, you won’t be at the table when the ultimate choices finally get made—which leaves those choices in the hands of people who want to shape the future for their own ends. Over the long haul, failure to exercise a little restraint and gentle patience while people are catching up almost always carries potentially fatal credibility costs on the back end.

As we approach the end of Stage Three, the process begins to accelerate rapidly, as people’s heightened awareness of the problem makes them more willing to connect external events to the climate change issue.

Stage Four will be a reckoning, still to come (but almost certainly closer than anyone currently expects) that proves beyond arguable doubt that those hoped-for small tweaks have not been enough, and that the only remaining option is an immediate and thorough overhaul of the whole system. This is the tipping-point event that moves the whole population through several stages in the space of a few days or weeks, catching everybody up (or at least a critical mass of everybody—you need at least 70% of the population really on board by this point) and levelling the field for change.

The good news is that by the time you get this far along, everybody who matters really understands the issues at stake, accepts that tweaks won’t do it, and can visualize the kind of structural change that’s needed. The earlier stages have mentally and emotionally prepared them to drop their last remaining resistance, and move ahead with solutions that are truly revolutionary. And those experts who haven’t squandered their authority by whining and bitching their way through Stage Three emerge here as the natural leaders of that revolution.

In Stage Five, the changes happen—a process that almost always also changes you forever. We may be the foresighted ones, and the natural leaders; but there’s a lot that happens at this stage that can’t possibly be foreseen. We must be prepared to have a lot of our cherished beliefs and core assumptions melted away in the heat of the transformation. Some of our dreams will be incinerated, too. But others will come true beyond anything we could have imagined, due to opportunities we never could have anticipated. Such is the nature of the process.

Stage Six is the wrap-up phase. The revolution is over, the change is mostly accomplished (though the little tweaks and upgrades will go on for a long while), the newly rebuilt systems are coming online, and the new regime becomes the new normal.  If it’s done well, people feel good about what happened—or, at least, are fairly well convinced that they’re better off than they would have been without the change.

Given the current climate, it’s tempting to deride this perspective as “incrementalism,” which has become an 'epithet du jour'. But everything we know about change says that the deep civilizational shifts we’re looking for will not happen any other way.

There are other forces at work, too. Climate change has turned into a generational issue that pits older people, who are deeply economically and emotionally invested in the status quo, against younger generations who are convinced that the status quo is untenable and that their own futures depend on creating something new. With every passing year, the power and influence of those younger generations grows, increasing the momentum behind the push for change. At the same time, climate-related events are going to increase; and as the change cycle spins forward, people are going to become more willing to identify them as such.

We have to trust the process, and understand where we are in it. The forces are gathering, and the process is accelerating—it’s just not easy to see the deep currents yet, because they’re still well below the surface. While it’s tempting to see Copenhagen as only a lost Chance, it’s probably more accurate to view it as the first of a series of efforts that are going to come faster and thicker now as that generational momentum and general understanding of the issues continue to build.

Copenhagen, for better or worse, was still the next step forward, and we’ll accept it with greater equanimity if we accept that the resulting tweaks are a natural and necessary phase the world’s more conventional thinkers have to work their way past before they’ll accept the need for a more wholesale transformation. If we’re serious about leading on this issue, we need to take the long view—which means respectfully meeting people where they are, and then gently bringing them along through the next stage, then the next, then the next. That’s what real leaders do.

Sara Robinson is a social futurist with special interests in the role religion, culture, and other cognitive frameworks play in the way individuals and societies imagine the future and choose their strategies for approaching and managing change; and especially how personal and social fears are used—or overcome—to alter the change equation. She is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future with expertise in trend analysis, scenario development, futures research, social change theory, systems thinking, strategic planning, journalism and long-range planning. 

The Past Decade Has Been 
The Hottest On Record 

Smoke clouds from Station Wildfire rise above Haines Canyon, Tujunga,
CA - August 29th 2009. 

The first decade of the twenty-first century was the hottest since recordkeeping began in 1880. With an average global temperature of 14.52 degrees Celsius (58.1 degrees Fahrenheit), this decade was 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than any previous decade. The year 2005 was the hottest on record, while 2007 and 2009 tied for second hottest. In fact, 9 of the 10 warmest years on record occurred in the past decade.

Temperature rise has accelerated in recent decades. The earth’s temperature is now 0.8 degrees Celsius (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than it was in the first decade of the twentieth century, and two-thirds of that increase has taken place since 1970.

Even with these seemingly small increases in global temperature, natural systems are already starting to respond, as evidenced by melting ice sheets and glaciers, shifting weather patterns, and changes in the timing of seasonal events. If temperatures continue to rise on their current trajectory, by the end of the century they will have left the narrow range in which human civilization has developed and flourished.

Though temperatures are rising around the globe, some areas are warming faster than others, with the greatest warming taking place in the Arctic. Paleoclimate records from Arctic lakes, tree rings, and ice cores reveal that the past decade was the warmest of the past two millennia. Warming is amplified in the Arctic for a number of reasons, including the loss of the region’s extensive snow and ice cover: as temperatures rise and light-reflecting ice melts, it is replaced by darker water, which absorbs more energy from the sun, thereby accelerating warming. In parts of the Arctic, average annual temperatures have increased by as much as 2–3 degrees Celsius (3.6–5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) since the 1950s. In 2007, Arctic summer sea ice shrank to its lowest extent on record, leaving the Northwest Passage completely ice-free for the first time in human memory. Then 2008 and 2009 brought the second and third lowest extent of Arctic summer ice on record.

The earth’s temperature is determined by a number of factors. One major influence is the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). This cycle, which involves large shifts in atmospheric and ocean temperatures over the tropical Pacific, has two phases: El Niño, which typically raises average global temperature, and La Niña, which lowers it. Year-to-year temperature variations are also influenced by the amount of energy the earth receives from the sun: increases in solar activity tend to raise global temperatures, while decreases in solar activity lower them.

These natural cycles alone, however, fail to explain the temperature patterns of the last decade. While the strongest El Niño of the century pushed 1998 temperatures up to their then-record high, temperatures in the hottest year (2005) did not receive a boost from El Niño. And 2007 was tied for second hottest year on record, despite the development of a cooling La Niña. Furthermore, while global temperatures have been climbing to record heights, incoming solar energy has in fact been declining since the beginning of the decade. In early 2009, solar activity reached its lowest level in a century.

Rather than ENSO cycles or variations in solar irradiance, human-induced warming from heat-trapping greenhouse gases has become the dominant climate influence. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen rapidly since the start of the Industrial Revolution, climbing from 280 parts per million (ppm) in the late eighteenth century to 387 ppm today. Researchers recently reported that the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were this high was roughly 15 million years ago, when sea level was 25–40 meters (80 to 130 feet) higher, and temperatures were approximately 3–6 degrees Celsius warmer.

The risks posed by rising global temperature are widespread. As the atmosphere warms, mountain glaciers that provide water to over a billion people are melting. Melting ice sheets and thermal expansion of oceans raise sea levels, threatening coastal populations. Increasing temperatures bring decreasing crop yields, putting world food supplies at risk. And ecosystems worldwide are irrevocably altered, placing large numbers of species at risk of extinction.

Higher global temperatures also bring with them more frequent and severe extreme weather events. Over the past few decades, scientists have noted an increase in hot extremes and a decrease in cold extremes across the globe. As temperatures rise further, heat waves will become more frequent and intense. Longer and more severe droughts will take place over wider areas; an upsurge in global drought since the 1970s, associated with higher temperatures, has already been observed. At the same time, as temperatures rise, the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere increases, leading to more intense storms and flooding in areas that are already wet.

The past decade saw many record-breaking extreme weather events, providing examples of the kinds of incidents expected to become more frequent with global warming. In the summer of 2003, Europe experienced an intense heat wave that led to over 52,000 deaths. In the United States, where daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last 10 years, persistent drought plagued parts of the South and West for much of the second half of the decade. A 2006 heat wave affecting the West and Midwest was blamed for 140 deaths in California.

The combination of high temperatures and drought makes a dangerous recipe for wildfire; indeed, 2006 and 2007 saw the worst fire seasons on record in the United States. A similar combination led to disaster in southeastern Australia in early 2009: on what is now known as Black Saturday, intense, rapidly spreading bushfires killed 173 people and burned over a million acres.

Other areas have experienced unusually heavy rains and flooding over the past decade. Record flooding hit Central Europe in 2002, causing over 100 deaths and forcing 450,000 people to evacuate. In summer 2007, the worst flooding in 60 years in England and Wales killed nine people and caused billions of dollars worth of damage; that May to July period was the wettest in the region since recordkeeping began in 1766. In 2008, extensive flooding occurred in several parts of the African continent; Algeria saw its worst floods in a century, while Zimbabwe’s floods were its worst on record.

As temperatures rise, warmer oceans provide more energy to feed tropical storms. The past few decades have seen an increase in the frequency of the most severe hurricanes, and researchers have identified rising sea surface temperatures as the primary cause. The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was the worst on record, with 27 named storms, 15 of which were classified as hurricanes—including Hurricane Katrina, which caused over 1,300 deaths and $125 billion in financial losses.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body of over 2,500 scientists, released its Fourth Assessment Report, in which it called the recent warming of the globe “unequivocal.” The report projected a rise in average global temperature of 1.1–6.4 degrees Celsius (2–11 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. Based on the most recent scientific assessments, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow at their current pace, the temperature rise by the end of the century will likely reach or exceed the upper end of these projections. Already, effects of increasing temperatures such as accelerating ice melt and sea level rise are outpacing the IPCC’s predictions of just three years ago. Without significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, global temperature will rise dramatically by the end of the century, creating a world that looks vastly different from the one we know today.

This is a policy release from Earth Policy Institute, one of our preferred sources for up-to-date information with integrity. It was written by Amy Heinzerling, & the Global Temperature Index data are from NASA.. EPI is directed by Lester R. Brown and is dedicated to planning a sustainable future, as well as providing a roadmap of how to get from here to there.