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Obama-raum and the New Southern Strategy

In a stunning revelation yesterday, Rush Limbaugh revealed the suspicion that the Obama Administration has directed the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health, to develop a...

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USGS: Mercury in EVERY fish in EVERY stream tested

The USGS released a report last week that is quite stunning in its implications. The major findings from USGS Mercury in Stream Ecosystem studies of 291 stream systems across the US are that...

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Now or Later?: Logs, Coal, even Healthcare

Humans have been trained by our DNA, our evolutionary imperatives, our technology, and our commercial culture, to pay attention to "now." Video games, political distraction, even intoxication --...

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Questioning the culture of Science

This will be a mulling, musing diary, rather than one positing a stance; asking more questions than providing answers. I was driving in Canada last Sunday, listening to the fabulous CBC. I was...

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Punctuation Police: It's not "it's," it's "its"

In Devilstower's otherwise majesterially beautiful This Corporate Life, a review of a marvelous book promoting a key reality about society, I noticed a great instance of the problematic punctuation...

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Watching predators collapse

Two stories in the last week really chilled me: the likely collapse of the grizzlies in Canada, and the likely starvation of walruses in Alaska. Scared the hell out of me, because of what else I've...

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I'm an expert -- wait, no, I'm an amateur re environmental collapse

I had the delightful, horrific, and satisfying experience today of discovering that I'm an amateur. Over the last two plus years, I've read easily more than 15,000 news stories on the converging...

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Credulous Rubes: the wingnut marketplace

Duh. I've finally twigged on why the right-wing noise machine has such volume, and makes so much money. It's because advertisers -- on wingnut radio, television, and Web -- want access to credulous...

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CO2 *reverse* -- what would it look like?

Because my buddy of 30 years and I have been watching and bequipping "environmental collapse" stories for two years, we have learned that there's a fairly predictable trajectory of the Truly Scary...

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The burden of knowledge

I've discovered I can't talk to my wife, my kids, or my friends about what it is I now know. Surprisingly, I can talk to my 80-year-old Mom, but that's about it. I spend an hour or two a day -- and...

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The "Promise Economy" and the status quo

For more than a decade now, the almost-poetic tonalities of "The Promise Economy" have resonated in my head, as I've watched that economy evolve. "The Promise Economy," as I see it, is the economy of...

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Burns, Haggis, environmental reconstruction, and metaphors

Haggis is a dish served on a long plate. It inserts sheeps' lungs, organs, and spices into the sheep's stomach, bakes appropriately, and is provided to a "Robert Burns night" group (with or without...

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Damn we're good at it.

What other species has changed the chemistry of the oceans and the atmosphere and the biosphere, in only a couple hundred years? What other living critter has so successfully transformed entire...

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Geoengineering vs. Superengineering

A wide array of geoengineering 'solutions' to the catastrophic rise in atmospheric CO2 have been proposed recently: automated cloud ships plying the oceans spraying fine mist into the air; jillions of...

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Ook and Eek Eat Up the World

We humans have a deep tradition, one that goes back to our earliest days, huddled around the fire, trading Ook and Eek jokes. That tradition is "use it up and then move on." The problem, of course, is...

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Scientist: 'There's still time' to save the oceans

This morning, as I generally do, I was scanning and searching out news on our burgeoning environmental collapse. News to make a tweetish quip about, trying to infuse some humor into what is a quite...

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I never write about HCR

My gig is environmental collapse. What the hell am I talking HCR for? But hearing Obama's words: But we also know what the future will look like if we don’t act – if we let this opportunity pass for...

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Beck and Survival Seeds: unintentionally correct

The laughter about the Survival Seed Scam and the "Crisis Garden" promotions of one of Glenn Beck's advertisers -- seeds in sealed cans that can be buried so they're not confiscated by the evil...

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Scary predators

Since Ook and Eek were sitting around the fire grunting about how to kill that cave bear, predators have instilled fear in humans. Killing scary predators seems like rational policy. Wolves and sharks...

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Saving the economy by burning it

I've been mad about this for days. The UN's CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) meeting in Doha is again demonstrating -- not unlike the travesty of the Copenhagen climate...

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TransitionTowns, Resilience, and Community

Last night I went to an initial Transition Towns meeting in a nearby town of 10,000. Transition Towns is a loosely organized movement to help local communities build a vision that helps it respond to a...

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The Banality of Evil; the Banality of Waste

Tonight I made myself a make-do meal at a friend's house, where I'm staying mostly alone, during an extended visit to Washington DC. But that make-do meal became tinged -- almost became metaphoric --...

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Full Godwin, complicity, and ECSTASY

My diaries are often dark and foreboding, mapping the elements of impending ecosystem and economic collapse, in the hope that they can help inform the prioritization of policy attitudes within the DK...

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Oil Disaster as Metaphor

Some are calling it a "river of oil" now, instead of an oil spill. "Spill" makes it sound like the oil rig exploded, then "spilled" some oil, which is now creeping toward the coast. Instead, the broken...

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Gulf Gusher -- how bad can it be?

The news media, unsurprisingly, generally tell the news, not the implications. They don't want to get hyperventilating -- that's not what journalists do, after all -- they just report. Consequently,...

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New Northwest Passage: eco-lyrics on Stan Rogers

Stan Rogers' Northwest Passage -- an achingly beautiful song about striving and glory and loss -- is nearly anthemic to Canadians. If you're American, you may have heard it as well. If you haven't, a...

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Sacrificing Amsterdam

No, not sacrificing the city -- sacrificing my time in Amsterdam. I made a very difficult decision yesterday. I'm fortunate to have become, over a couple of decades, a fairly big fish in certain small...

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After the shores turn black and begin to stink

Help me out here, amateur and professional economists. We have been hearing that the Gulf Gusher damage may be "beyond human comprehension." The carnage is iceberg-like, with the hidden undersurface...

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Gulf gusher: a sort of requiem

The oil and gas rush out of the pipe: a force we believed we could master. The oil explodes into droplets, then reforms into gobs, then into droplets once again. The oil rushes, then relaxes, and...

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Even worse: shallow oil pipelines in dying wetlands

So I'm mesmerized in horror, watching the hypnotic gush of the live feed. I'm groaning over the ocean life that will die unnoticed in the deep, after ingesting toxic dispersants and more-toxic oil. I'm...

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eco-PANIQuiz for June 21-27: Funning the horror

Though provided weekly on our site, I only occasionally post these Pre-Apocalypse News and Information Quizzes here. But there are some good ones this week, which you might enjoy.

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One year, two years ago in ecocollapse

I recently worked up a "see one year ago, two years ago" gizmo for the news story database underlying our "humoring the horror of environmental collapse" website. What's perhaps most alarming is how...

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eco-PANIQuiz for week ending July 4: Laughing at danger

This week's Pre-Apocalypse News and Information Quiz might provide a bit of levity on this Monday. If you can't laugh, you can't learn. Did you hear the one about ballast water in the Mediterranean,...

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On the death of 17 chickens

Last night, we got the call from our nearish neighbor, who has the specially modified nail gun that shoots blunt force trauma at 80 psi. It was late afternoon -- "how about tonight?" she said. We were...

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Eco-PANIQuiz for week ending Aug 8: GMOs, Toads, CO2, and Dams

As I've done other times, I'm reposting our weekly quiz -- some funny and scary stories during the last week. Enjoy!

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Chortling the end of the world: this week's PANIQuiz

It was a tough week in Tomorrowland, where everyone is above average, because the averages keep plummeting "faster than expected." For a bit of Monday fun -- and for those 6 billion or so not paying...

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Expensive, inconvenient, and scratchy: solutions are easy

In response to a comment in a recent post of mine, I replied, "I think lots of us know what we have to do -- change radically -- but far too few are actually doing it. Problems abound, but so do...

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26 square miles of toxic cloud

and wait -- there's more! 22 miles long, 1.2 miles wide and 650 feet tall -- about 60 stories -- 3000 feet underwater! That's no plume, that's a massive toxic cloud that shows no sign of abating. BP's...

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Bioaccumulation: the gift that keeps on giving

Bioaccumulation. It's what's for dinner. And lunch, and breakfast. Its danger depends a bit on whether you're flora or fauna, insect or mammal, baby or oldster -- and, of course, what you've...

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Rolling the dice with evolution

A new study by J. Alroy, just published in Science (subscription required for full text), has been getting some reporting by other sources. It's mildly entitled "The Shifting Balance of Diversity Among...

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350 eco-collapse jokes by 10/10/10 -- are you kidding?

When we heard about 350.org's 10/10/10 project a couple of months ago, we struggled to find one that was appropriate to our own project. Last week we had an epiphany, and we've launched an 11th-hour...

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Today the rain fell

Today the rain fell and the small barn roof was the timpani in the symphony of the rain Today the rain fell and the big barn roof thrummed like a thousand marching hobnail boots.

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Politics: The Fashion Section (humor)

This season's in thing? Aggressive stance! It's not just a win, with extra-wide shoulders, very specific codpieces, and bald-man big-package whiteness, it's also causing conflagration on the catwalks....

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DDOS of WikiLeaks indicative of vast US hack

Correct me if I'm wrong, please. DDOS -- Distributed Denial of Service -- is what's been hammering WikiLeaks the last couple of days. That's when kajillions of requests for a server's webpage bombard a...

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"everything we do from now on matters."

As I've been doing daily for more than three years, this morning I was collecting news items documenting the ongoing environmental collapse (and adding punchlines) for the site I coedit. I ran across a...

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Another chance with revolution

I watched -- and worked in the aftermath of -- the collapse of the Soviet empire in '89, '90, 91. I tried to encourage, at the time, through my tenuous links in politics and policy, a dramatic response...

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A Modest Environmental Proposal

In light of the long-term environmental consequences of fossil energy extraction (whether that be hydraulic fracturing, tar sands, mountaintop mining, offshore drilling), and the cost of protecting...

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dot-connecting, then and now

As we close in on the 10th anniversary of our national, idiotic swerve into terror incognita, a land where fear was the currency used to buy off rationality, I'm reminded of the dots that weren't...

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So very Cosmopolitan

As an earnest and o-so-serious investigator of the ongoing environmental collapse, noted by few and bemoaned by only-a-few-more, I've recently realized that confronting the converging emergencies of...

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Thanks, Hillary

I have little doubt that Hillary Clinton was fundamentally involved in the Saudi Arabian announcement today that women will be "allowed" to vote, hold office, and serve on advisory panels:...

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