Dear Friends,

We are thrilled to invite your organization to participate in this year's Peace Day Global Broadcast - Building Peace Through Sustainability.  Held annually on September 21st, the United Nations International Day of Peace, the Peace Day Global Broadcast is a 24 Hour Internet, TV, and Radio event that showcases the efforts of organizations, like your own, working to preserve the planet and improve the living conditions of people worldwide through the achievement of the UN Millennium Development Goals.

The Peace Day Global Brodcast is organized by www.PeaceDay.TV; a collaboration between Culture of Peace Initiaitve, Unity Foundation, Peace Portal, and ShockRa Entertainment.

Established by U.N. resolution in 1982,  "Peace Day" has grown to include millions of people around the world who participate in all kinds of events, both large and small. Since its inception, the International Day of Peace has been a focal point for Peace-building organizations to educate and advocate on behalf of the solutions they offer to the world community.

In the past few years, it’s been a day of global ceasefire, having tremendous impact on the lives of millions of children who’ve been immunized, had food delivered, and received educational supplies. Increasingly, Peace Day is being adopted as a day to unite the world community in addressing the most urgent issues of our time: climate change, the environment, hunger & poverty, social justice, & human rights.

The Peace Day Broadcast is a means to further connect individuals with groups and educate people around the world.

Your participation will help us achieve these goals. There are several different levels at which you may choose to participate that include; providing content about your organization's work, allowing live feeds from the events you may be planning, promoting the event, sponsorship, or sharing the www.PeaceDay.TV community website.

GOALS

SOLUTIONS

Trees For Life

 

One Laptop Per Child

PlayPump Water Solutions

Rocket Stove

We invite you join the movement, contribute, and promote the important work of your organization. 

Your kind consideration of our request is greatly appreciated.  Please feel free to contact us for more information or to discuss how you can participate in the "PEACE DAY" 2010 Global Internet Broadcast.

Sincerely,

- Stephen Fantl - stephen@peaceday.tv  541-306-6467

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." 

 

 

The Message is Clear in the 11th Hour, Home and many other wonderful text and Movies.

Act now or suffer the consequence.
After listening to a great and very conscious individuals, I realized that passion is the key,
the sum of their message is inner change and self correctness is the start.
Without that simple change will not be any improvements.

It is funny, I always thought that earth is part of a living thing. and for a living thing to exist it needs to be govern and protect its self.
there are many diseases that harm Humans and other microbes that evolved to protect the host. the question is "What Are We"
a microbe that harm, it does it not knowing that is it a microbe, it just does, from body to body it jumps around looking for a new host to concur.
Some Microbes has evolved to protect its host, it knows without consciousness that it depends on it.   
 
Imagine that we are the microbe that does not realize that we are the destructive ones.
whether we know it or not we have this great urge to leave earth to other planets thinking that we are bettering our self.
we don’t know any better.

The Human definition of the word Pure is "free from anything that taints, impairs, infects, perfect; faultless.; clear pure water or air"
Humans have felt, implemented, created and decided to use a word "Pure" in their own relative daily living.
My definition of pure is simply "a non Human contamination or influence"
The elements that we think we know are pure. flawless is the Sun, Perfect is our universe.

Maybe Earth's only defense or immune  system has always been to shed its self from life by way of Ice Age. So are we Going to an Ice Age?
 
Where do we go from here? How can we shed the scum of our greed from our heart and clean our self from the claws of injustice.
The future of Earth is up to the minds that understand what life IS.
What is life? Are we ready NOW to evolve and protect our host.

It will take years to change, I think the Gate has Opened to the wonderful thinking,
The 11th Hour and others are few steps to Change.
 
Best Regards
Sam Chamas
 
 www.wrapwind.com

I am Richard ROBINSON an independent eco activist from Erode district a small town in the state of Tamil Nadu INDIA, since my infancy I found myself attached deeply towards nature and species this further led me to learn while I walked, without knowing those scientific facts and terminologies, I started from mimicking to the black bird’s ringing, which I lately studied as Asian Koel (Eudynamys Scolopacea) and the imitation I did was bird Ringing and birding, And along with my friends we started to plant trees, further after years in 2004 and likeminded naturalists we formed a non profit organization named JEEVAKARUNYA TRUST, with a motto to Train and implement youth In Sustainable Development work promoting environmental, ecological and humanitarian values and importance,

 

And now, still learning educating and training the younger generation’s to involve individually and collectively in all eco-development activities and decision makings  I have individually conducted hundreds of seminars and converted them to eco-actions,

24 hour x 7 days Snake Rescues along with a trained team,

Free seminars, slid shows and movie for the all local and surrounded educational institutions,

Conservation based weed removal action for Tribal livelihood development trainings

Clean renewable energy solar lamp implementation to rural and tribal those not accessed with power,

And many innovative initiatives like craft from the plant lantana camera which is considered as a weed destroying native forest and farm lands, GREEN CROSS eco action clubs, and more to bring a change in the un-mind full living of the most populace   even though we find very tuff and hard to move every step without any support, I believe that we can make it, I also swear that what ever happens I am not going to quit my duty towards nature, of conserving the only home at least in this 11 hour... 

 

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. 

Empathic Civilization Rethinking Human Nature in the Biosphere Era

By Jeremy Rifkin

In James Cameron's beautiful new film Avatar, the planet Pandora and its empathic wisdom culture are exemplified by the teachings of Neytiri, above - Editor.

Two spectacular failures, separated by only 18 months, marked the end of the modern era. In July 2008, the price of oil on world markets peaked at $147/ barrel, inflation soared, the price of everything from food to gasoline skyrocketed, and the global economic engine shut off. Growing demand in the developed nations, as well as in China, India, and other emerging economies, for diminishing fossil fuels precipitated the crisis. Purchasing power plummeted and the global economy collapsed. That was the earthquake that tore asunder the industrial age built on and propelled by fossil fuels. The failure of the financial markets two months later was merely the aftershock. The fossil fuel energies that make up the industrial way of life are sunsetting and the industrial infrastructure is now on life support.

In December 2009, world leaders from 192 countries assembled in Copenhagen to address the question of how to handle the accumulated entropy bill of the fossil fuel based industrial revolution-the spent C02 that is heating up the planet and careening the earth into a catastrophic shift in climate. After years of preparation, the negotiations broke down and world leaders were unable to reach a formal accord.

Neither had the world's political or business leaders anticipated the economic debacle of July 2008, nor were they able to cobble together a sufficient plan for economic recovery in the months since. They were equally inept at addressing the issue of climate change, despite the fact that the scientific community warns that is poses the greatest threat to our species in its history, that we are running out of time, and that we may even be facing the prospect of our own extinction.

The problem runs deeper than the issue of finding new ways to regulate the market or imposing legally binding global green house gas emission reduction targets. The real crisis lies in the set of assumptions about human nature that governs the behavior of world leaders--assumptions that were spawned during the Enlightenment more than 200 years ago at the dawn of the modern market economy and the emergence of the nation state era.

The Enlightenment thinkers--John Locke, Adam Smith, Marquis de Condorcet et. al.--took umbrage with the Medieval Christian world view that saw human nature as fallen and depraved and that looked to salvation in the next world through God's grace. They preferred to cast their lot with the idea that human beings' essential nature is rational, detached, autonomous, acquisitive and utilitarian and argued that individual salvation lies in unlimited material progress here on Earth.

The Enlightenment notions about human nature were reflected in the newly minted nation-state whose raison d'être was to protect private property relations and stimulate market forces as well as act as a surrogate of the collective self-interest of the citizenry in the international arena. Like individuals, nation-states were considered to be autonomous agents embroiled in a relentless battle with other sovereign nations in the pursuit of material gains.

It was these very assumptions that provided the philosophical underpinnings for a geopolitical frame of reference that accompanied the first and second industrial revolutions in the 19th and 20th centuries. These beliefs about human nature came to the fore in the aftermath of the global economic meltdown and in the boisterous and acrimonious confrontations in the meeting rooms in Copenhagen, with potentially disastrous consequences for the future of humanity and the planet.

If human nature is as the Enlightenment philosophers claimed, then we are likely doomed. It is impossible to imagine how we might create a sustainable global economy and restore the biosphere to health if each and every one of us is, at the core of our biology, an autonomous agent and a self-centered and materialistic being.

Recent discoveries in brain science and child development, however, are forcing us to rethink these long-held shibboleths about human nature. Biologists and cognitive neuroscientists are discovering mirror-neurons--the so-called empathy neurons--that allow human beings and other species to feel and experience another's situation as if it were one's own. We are, it appears, the most social of animals and seek intimate participation and companionship with our fellows.

Social scientists, in turn, are beginning to reexamine human history from an empathic lens and, in the process, discovering previously hidden strands of the human narrative which suggests that human evolution is measured not only by the expansion of power over nature, but also by the intensification and extension of empathy to more diverse others across broader temporal and spatial domains. The growing scientific evidence that we are a fundamentally empathic species has profound and far-reaching consequences for society, and may well determine our fate as a species.

What is required now is nothing less than a leap to global empathic consciousness and in less than a generation if we are to resurrect the global economy and revitalize the biosphere. The question becomes this: what is the mechanism that allows empathic sensitivity to mature and consciousness to expand through history?

Avatar is a powerful metaphor for the human collective unconscious at this time of
planetary emergency - a point overlooked by many  'intellectual' critics - Editor 

The pivotal turning points in human consciousness occur when new energy regimes converge with new communications revolutions, creating new economic eras. The new communications revolutions become the command and control mechanisms for structuring, organizing and managing more complex civilizations that the new energy regimes make possible. For example, in the early modern age, print communication became the means to organize and manage the technologies, organizations, and infrastructure of the coal, steam, and rail revolution. It would have been impossible to administer the first industrial revolution using script and codex.

Communication revolutions not only manage new, more complex energy regimes, but also change human consciousness in the process. Forager/hunter societies relied on oral communications and their consciousness was mythologically constructed. The great hydraulic agricultural civilizations were, for the most part, organized around script communication and steeped in theological consciousness. The first industrial revolution of the 19th century was managed by print communication and ushered in ideological consciousness. Electronic communication became the command and control mechanism for arranging the second industrial revolution in the 20th century and spawned psychological consciousness.

Each more sophisticated communication revolution brings together more diverse people in increasingly more expansive and varied social networks. Oral communication has only limited temporal and spatial reach while script, print and electronic communications each extend the range and depth of human social interaction.

By extending the central nervous system of each individual and the society as a whole, communication revolutions provide an evermore inclusive playing field for empathy to mature and consciousness to expand. For example, during the period of the great hydraulic agricultural civilizations characterized by script and theological consciousness, empathic sensitivity broadened from tribal blood ties to associational ties based on common religious affiliation. Jews came to empathize with Jews, Christians with Christians, Muslims with Muslims, etc. In the first industrial revolution characterized by print and ideological consciousness, empathic sensibility extended to national borders, with Americans empathizing with Americans, Germans with Germans, Japanese with Japanese and so on. In the second industrial revolution, characterized by electronic communication and psychological consciousness, individuals began to identify with like-minded others.

Today, we are on the cusp of another historic convergence of energy and communication--a third industrial revolution--that could extend empathic sensibility to the biosphere itself and all of life on Earth. The distributed Internet revolution is coming together with distributed renewable energies, making possible a sustainable, post-carbon economy that is both globally connected and locally managed.

In the 21st century, hundreds of millions--and eventually billions--of human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local, regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet. The open source sharing of energy, like open source sharing of information, will give rise to collaborative energy spaces--not unlike the collaborative social spaces that currently exist on the Internet.

When every family and business comes to take responsibility for its own small swath of the biosphere by harnessing renewable energy and sharing it with millions of others on smart power grids that stretch across continents, we become intimately interconnected at the most basic level of earthly existence by jointly stewarding the energy that bathes the planet and sustains all of life.

The new distributed communication revolution not only organizes distributed renewable energies, but also changes human consciousness. The information communication technologies (ICT) revolution is quickly extending the central nervous system of billions of human beings and connecting the human race across time and space, allowing empathy to flourish on a global scale, for the first time in history.

Whether in fact we will begin to empathize as a species will depend on how we use the new distributed communication medium. While distributed communications technologies-and, soon, distributed renewable energies - are connecting the human race, what is so shocking is that no one has offered much of a reason as to why we ought to be connected. We talk breathlessly about access and inclusion in a global communications network but speak little of exactly why we want to communicate with one another on such a planetary scale. What's sorely missing is an overarching reason that billions of human beings should be increasingly connected. Toward what end?

The only feeble explanations thus far offered are to share information, be entertained, advance commercial exchange and speed the globalization of the economy. All the above, while relevant, nonetheless seem insufficient to justify why nearly seven billion human beings should be connected and mutually embedded in a globalized society. The idea of even a billion individual connections, absent any overall unifying purpose, seems a colossal waste of human energy. More important, making global connections without any real transcendent purpose risks a narrowing rather than an expanding of human consciousness. But what if our distributed global communication networks were put to the task of helping us re-participate in deep communion with the common biosphere that sustains all of our lives?

 
In Avatar, the Pandoran Na'avi are all left-handed, as would be expected for a right (brain) hemisphere-dominant culture. This reflects to the neurological crossover whereby the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body and vice-versa. Left-hemisphere dominance is characteristic of our current self-destructive human culture: the subconscious mind has been forced into a defensive position, and crucial human survival instincts have been relegated into it. - Editor  

The biosphere is the narrow band that extends some forty miles from the ocean floor to outer space where living creatures and the Earth's geochemical processes interact to sustain each other. We are learning that the biosphere functions like an indivisible organism. It is the continuous symbiotic relationships between every living creature and between living creatures and the geochemical processes that ensure the survival of the planetary organism and the individual species that live within its biospheric envelope. If every human life, the species as a whole, and all other life-forms are entwined with one another and with the geochemistry of the planet in a rich and complex choreography that sustains life itself, then we are all dependent on and responsible for the health of the whole organism. Carrying out that responsibility means living out our individual lives in our neighborhoods and communities in ways that promote the general well-being of the larger biosphere within which we dwell. The Third Industrial Revolution offers just such an opportunity.

If we can harness our empathic sensibility to establish a new global ethic that recognizes and acts to harmonize the many relationships that make up the life-sustaining forces of the planet, we will have moved beyond the detached, self-interested and utilitarian philosophical assumptions that accompanied national markets and nation state governance and into a new era of biosphere consciousness. We leave the old world of geopolitics behind and enter into a new world of biosphere politics, with new forms of governance emerging to accompany our new biosphere awareness.

The Third Industrial Revolution and the new era of distributed capitalism allow us to sculpt a new approach to globalization, this time emphasizing continentalization from the bottom up. Because renewable energies are more or less equally distributed around the world, every region is potentially amply endowed with the power it needs to be relatively self-sufficient and sustainable in its lifestyle, while at the same time interconnected via smart grids to other regions across countries and continents.

When every community is locally empowered, both figuratively and literally, it can engage directly in regional, transnational, continental, and limited global trade without the severe restrictions that are imposed by the geopolitics that oversee elite fossil fuels and uranium energy distribution.
Continentalization is already bringing with it a new form of governance. The nation-state, which grew up alongside the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, and provided the regulatory mechanism for managing an energy regime whose reach was the geosphere, is ill suited for a Third Industrial Revolution whose domain is the biosphere. Distributed renewable energies generated locally and regionally and shared openly--peer to peer--across vast contiguous land masses connected by intelligent utility networks and smart logistics and supply chains favor a seamless network of governing institutions that span entire continents.

The European Union is the first continental governing institution of the Third Industrial Revolution era. The EU is already beginning to put in place the infrastructure for a European-wide energy regime, along with the codes, regulations, and standards to effectively operate a seamless transport, communications, and energy grid that will stretch from the Irish Sea to the doorsteps of Russia by midcentury. Asian, African, and Latin American continental political unions are also in the making and will likely be the premier governing institutions on their respective continents by 2050.

In this new era of distributed energy, governing institutions will more resemble the workings of the ecosystems they manage. Just as habitats function within ecosystems, and ecosystems within the biosphere in a web of interrelationships, governing institutions will similarly function in a collaborative network of relationships with localities, regions, and nations all embedded within the continent as a whole. This new complex political organism operates like the biosphere it attends, synergistically and reciprocally. This is biosphere politics.

The new biosphere politics transcends traditional right/left distinctions so characteristic of the geopolitics of the modern market economy and nation-state era. The new divide is generational and contrasts the traditional top-down model of structuring family life, education, commerce, and governance with a younger generation whose thinking is more relational and distributed, whose nature is more collaborative and cosmopolitan, and whose work and social spaces favor open-source commons. For the Internet generation, "quality of life" becomes as important as individual opportunity in fashioning a new dream for the 21st century.

The transition to biosphere consciousness has already begun. All over the world, a younger generation is beginning to realize that one's daily consumption of energy and other resources ultimately affects the lives of every other human being and every other creature that inhabits the Earth.

The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth. But our rush to universal empathic connectivity is running up against a rapidly accelerating entropic juggernaut in the form of climate change. Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?

 

Jeremy Rifkin, founder & president of the Foundation On Economic Trends is an economist, writer, public speaker and activist. He is the bestselling author of 18 books on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, workforce, society and the environment. He has advised the European Commission, European Parliament, and leaders of Spain, Germany, Portugal and France on issues related to the economy, climate change, and energy security. He is the principal architect of the Third Industrial Revolution (a long-term economic sustainability plan) addressing the triple challenge of the global economic crisis, energy security, and climate change. This article was adapted from his new book 'The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis'; image choice & legends  by J. Stanley

Lester Brown's Plan B 4.0 
Mobilizing to Save Civilization

Update, October 2009, courtesy of www.earth-policy.org

U.S. Headed for Massive Decline in Carbon Emissions

For years now, many members of Congress have insisted that cutting carbon emissions was difficult, if not impossible. It is not. During the two years since 2007, carbon emissions have dropped 9 percent. While part of this drop is from the recession, part of it is also from efficiency gains and from replacing coal with natural gas, wind, solar, and geothermal energy.

The United States has ended a century of rising carbon emissions and has now entered a new energy era, one of declining emissions. Peak carbon is now history. What had appeared to be hopelessly difficult is happening at amazing speed.

For a country where oil and coal use have been growing for more than a century, the fall since 2007 is startling. In 2008, oil use dropped 5 percent, coal 1 percent, and carbon emissions by 3 percent. Estimates for 2009, based on U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) data for the first nine months, show oil use down by another 5 percent. Coal is set to fall by 10 percent. Carbon emissions from burning all fossil fuels dropped 9 percent over the two years.

 

Beyond the cuts already made, there are further massive reductions in the policy pipeline. Prominent among them are stronger automobile fuel-economy standards, higher appliance efficiency standards, and financial incentives supporting the large-scale development of wind, solar, and geothermal energy.

Efforts to reduce fossil fuel use are under way at every level of government—national, state, and city—as well as in corporations, utilities, and universities. And millions of climate-conscious, cost-cutting Americans are altering their lifestyles to reduce energy use.

For its part, the federal government—the largest U.S. energy consumer, with some 500,000 buildings and 600,000 vehicles—announced in early October 2009 that it is setting its own carbon-cutting goals. These include reducing vehicle fleet fuel use 30 percent by 2020, recycling at least 50 percent of waste by 2015, and buying environmentally responsible products. 

Electricity use is falling partly because of gains in efficiency. The potential for further cuts is evident in the wide variation in energy efficiency among states. The Rocky Mountain Institute calculates that if the 40 least-efficient states were to reach the electrical efficiency of the 10 most-efficient ones, national electricity use would be reduced by one third. This would allow the equivalent of 62 percent of the country's 617 coal-fired power plants to be closed.

Actions are being taken to realize this potential. For several years DOE failed to write the regulations needed to implement appliance efficiency legislation that Congress had already passed. Within days of taking office, President Obama instructed the agency to write the regulations needed to realize these potentially vast efficiency gains as soon as possible. 

The energy efficiency revolution that is now under way will transform everything from lighting to transportation. With lighting, for example, shifting from incandescent bulbs to the newer light-emitting diodes (LEDs), combined with motion sensors to turn lights off in unoccupied spaces, can cut electricity use by more than 90 percent. Los Angeles, for example, is replacing its 140,000 street lights with LEDs—and cutting electricity and maintenance costs by $10 million per year.

The carbon-cutting movement is gaining momentum on many fronts. In July, the Sierra Club—coordinator of the national anti-coal campaign—announced the hundredth cancellation of a proposed plant since 2001. This battle is leading to a de facto moratorium on new coal plants. Despite the coal industry's $45-million annual budget to promote "clean coal," utilities are giving up on coal and starting to close plants. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), with 11 coal plants (average age 47 years) and a court order to install over $1 billion worth of pollution controls, is considering closing its plant near Rogersville, Tennessee, along with the six oldest units out of eight in its Stevenson, Alabama, plant. 

TVA is not alone. Altogether, some 22 coal-fired power plants in 12 states are being replaced by wind farms, natural gas plants, wood chip plants, or efficiency gains. Many more are likely to close as public pressure to clean up the air and to cut carbon emissions intensifies. Shifting from coal to natural gas cuts carbon emissions by roughly half. Shifting to wind, solar, and geothermal energy drops them to zero. 

State governments are getting behind renewables big time. Thirty-four states have adopted renewable portfolio standards to produce a larger share of their electricity from renewable sources over the next decade or so. Among the more populous states, the renewable standard is 24 percent in New York, 25 percent in Illinois, and 33 percent in California.

While coal plants are closing, wind farms are multiplying. In 2008, a total of 102 wind farms came online, providing more than 8,400 megawatts of generating capacity. Forty-nine wind farms were completed in the first half of 2009 and 57 more are under construction. More important, some 300,000 megawatts of wind projects (think 300 coal plants) are awaiting access to the grid. 

U.S. solar cell installations are growing at 40 percent a year. With new incentives, this rapid growth in rooftop installations on homes, shopping malls, and factories should continue. In addition, some 15 large solar thermal power plants that use mirrors to concentrate sunlight and generate electricity are planned in California, Arizona, and Nevada. A new heat-storage technology that enables the plants to continue generating power for up to six hours past sundown helps explain this boom.

For many years, U.S. geothermal energy was confined largely to the huge Geysers project north of San Francisco, with 850 megawatts of generating capacity. Now the United States, with 132 geothermal power plants under development, is experiencing a geothermal renaissance.

After their century-long love-affair with the car, Americans are turning to mass transit. There is hardly a U.S. city that is not either building new light rail, subways, or express bus lines or upgrading and expanding existing ones.

As motorists turn to public transit, and also to bicycles, the U.S. car fleet is shrinking. The estimated scrappage of 14 million cars in 2009 will exceed new sales of 10 million by 4 million, shrinking the fleet 2 percent in one year. This shrinkage will likely continue for a few years. 

Oil use and imports are both declining. This will continue as the new fuel economy standards raise the fuel efficiency of new cars 42 percent and light trucks 25 percent by 2016. And since 42 percent of the diesel fuel burned in the rail freight sector is used to haul coal, falling coal use means falling diesel fuel use.

But the big gains in fuel efficiency will come with the shift to plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars. Not only are electric motors three times more efficient than gasoline engines, but they also enable cars to run on wind power at a gasoline-equivalent cost of 75¢ a gallon. Almost every major car maker will soon be selling plug-in hybrids, electric cars, or both. 

In this new energy era carbon emissions are declining and they will likely continue to do so because of policies already on the books. We are headed in the right direction. We do not yet know how much we can cut carbon emissions because we are just beginning to make a serious effort. Whether we can move fast enough to avoid catastrophic climate change remains to be seen.

Earth Policy Institute has made Plan B 4.0 available for downloading 
free of charge from its Web site, www.earth-policy.org

WOW! Bill McKibben's 350.org International Day of Climate Action was a huge success. According to their website people in 181 countries came together for the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet's history. At over 5200 events around the world, people gathered to call for strong action and bold leadership on the climate crisis.

I have just spent the last hour marveling over all the phenomenal pictures and videos that people sent in from all over the world. Check them out HERE.

There were several events planned in my area of Phoenix, Arizona like climbing up a mountain with Arizona State University students and bike rides. My husband and I met up on Thursday, October 22nd with some local members of 1Sky to take a 350.org photo in Old Town Scottsdale by the big LOVE sculpture in the park to signify our love of home, community, and our planet. Here is our picture.

We were in the park for about an hour taking photos and of course people walking by would question us about what we were doing. I had printed up small cards with what 350.org is all about and what it means. So when asked I would just pull out a card from my pocket and give it to them.

After the photos were taken some of the group went on for a bike ride, but my husband and I went to the Scottsdale ArtWalk where the local art galleries open their doors to the public and show off their work. This particular ArtWalk was a Taste of Art ArtWalk where you could sample food and wine as you stroll and look at art. So we opted out of the long bike ride in order to eat, drink wine and look at art which is more to our liking. (lol) I kept my 350.org gear on while at the ArtWalk and of course I was asked numerous times what does 350 mean, so I would whip out one of those printed cards and hand it to them. I had printed up 24 cards and only came home with three.

When you are in love with your home, and I don't mean your house, but where you live, for me it's the glorious Sonoran Desert, then you are always happy to support any organization that wants to protect it and keep it pristine, beautiful and healthy.

 

I am a member of the Global Coherence Initiative which is a science-based initiative to unite millions of people in heart-focused care and intention to shift global consciousness from instability and discord to balance, cooperation and enduring peace.

The Global Coherence Initiative is designed to help individuals and groups work together, synchronistically and strategically to increase the impact of their efforts to create positive global change.

Together we will:

1) Increase personal coherence for the benefit of ourselves and the planet
2) Help shift the planetary consciousness baseline from self-centeredness to wholeness care
3) Increase connection and social harmony
4) Empower our ability to navigate through global changes with less stress and more ease
5) Empower environmental responsibility and stewardship of the planet

This project has been initiated because millions of people sense that this is an extraordinary time; that a paradigm shift of human consciousness is now under way; that we are at the crossroads of change and must move toward the healing of ourselves and our planet. Many people are feeling a strong desire to help change our present and future conditions and are looking for ways to use their heart, spirit-aligned wisdom and care to make a meaningful difference.

The Global Coherence Initiative is one of many care and compassion initiatives taking place on the planet. Each year, an increasing number of groups and online communities are radiating compassion and care to the planet in these times of need. We and others feel that these collective heart-based initiatives, rather than being a trend, represent the proactive consciousness platform of the future, in which individuals and communities take responsibility for shaping a new world by increasing love, care and compassion for the global whole.

I recently volunteered to participate in a 6-month GCI Interconnectedness Study on the relationship between human consciousness, Earth’s energetic activity and other planetary factors. (I have a lot of free time on my hands these days, lol) Anyway, I do receive e-mail alerts and I thought I would pass this one on to the members of this community. This alert is about the upcoming International Day of Peace.

Envisioning the Peaceful World You Want to Live In
"For the International Day of Peace, September 21, align with the spirit of all who are sending prayers, meditations and positive intentions for world peace."

Creation starts with thought, desire and imagination….the same as desiring a new house, job, etc. Thoughts, desires and imagination create an energetic blueprint for what we want; then taking action steps towards our goal helps to create the building blocks for intentions to manifest.

In honor of International Peace Day, let’s take five minutes a day (or what’s convenient for you) to envision the world as we would want it to be: A world that respects individual human rights and authentic communication, has balanced, conscious leadership and compassionate governing systems worldwide, values the preservation of resources, has love and respect for animals and environmental balance. A world that provides food, pure water, shelter and world peace for all. Create your own additions and remember to enrich your vision with genuine feelings from your heart’s desire so as to give it life. Close with a moment of gratitude and the request that whatever manifests only be the highest best for the whole."  

UPDATE:  HeartMath in honor of International Peace Day, Sept. 21st, created a beautiful video called At the Heart of Peace. You can watch it HERE.

Love is the New Religion (The Spiritual Conspiracy) by Brian Piergrossi

I was first introduced to this poem on 11th Hour expert Wallace J. Nichols website who blogged about this poem back in June. Since then the author Brian Piergrossi has made a video to go along with his poem.

This video contains a series of images, with a voice-over of author Brian Piergrossi reading the poem from his book The Big Glow, along with background native tribal music.

This poem has struck a nerve in the human consciousness and, over the last few months, has now been spontaneously forwarded, via emails and blogs, to tens of thousands of people around the world by various titles.

It is becoming the catalyst... the rallying cry around the planet.

This poem in video form, however, has the chance to make an even larger impact in bringing us together toward the world we want to create.

If it inspires you...if it makes you realize that your dreams are shared with others around the world then please pass it on.

Together lets create the world of our dreams.

Please take a few minutes from your day to watch this video.    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mndsMqz54aA&feature=player_embedde