Before the Flood- A Documentary That Could Rewrite History

     Watching Before the Flood on National Geographic, a climate change documentary by Leonardo DiCaprio.  It is on commercial free right now, and will be/is available free on ITunes, Google Plus, YouTube and Netflix.  It will also be on again at 10:46 p.m. today on National Geographic.  I will be posting on this following the documentary on Twitter, Facebook, and Blogger.  For those who still cannot watch it and for the purposes of creating a positive discussion about climate change regardless, I will be going over the documentary in a comprehensive way.  That means what it talks about, it conclusions, it meaning for and relevancy to our lives.  I will have my own content being generated on climate change in the next two weeks, in the bow wake of the rapidly approaching United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, including a YouTube video about the pivotal nature of ensuring the UNFCCC takes the right action, makes the right rulings about how to mitigate climate change and adapt to what we already have in the pipeline (pun intended), and ensure that solutions are implemented afterwards following the UNFCCC.  In attempts to attend the UNFCCC (also known as COP 22). I made a video for a contest to win a spot for youth participation, which can be found on my YouTube for Life in the Anthropocene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90CkXVF-Q8M.  In the next, I will have a video about the importance of, the nature of, and the intricacies of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.  Stay tuned!

Update and Moving Forward: It's Time to Get Down to/Back to Business

 

       Alright, it's time to get down to business (and, yes, cue Mulan's "I'll Make A Man Out of You"!)   Anyway, I haven't been writing for this blog a lot as my days have been pretty full catching up on things back home after Hawai'i.  I've been back for a month and three days. things were off the walls.  Only in the last week have things truly calmed down back to a manageable level, but much of the peak craziness was for the first two and a half weeks.

     As for myself, I've been doing pretty well.  Tired, but well.  I've been tired ever since prepping for, and especially since getting back from Hawai'i.  I can't believe I've been back for just over a month. I've seen some old friends, some blasts from the past, and caught up with them, had a friend get married and bunch of other stuff come my way.   Been settling in to my new lifestyle/working on making that new lifestyle that was inspired by my time in Hawai'i, looking for a new job, been working on my career interests and quite a few personal hobbies/life goals and tasks.  And I will continue working on that and keep updates on my blog as I go.  Those will be future posts/YouTube videos. Today, I am going to devote some time to working on the baseline status of this blog and just clarifying its immediate future.

     Now that things are back to "not bouncing of the walls like Taz" crazy trying to keep up with all my various tasks, I can devote some focus to the this blog.  It's time I write about my experiences.  It's time I make content about my experiences related to this blog.  It's my time to write about my time in Hawai'i.  It's  high time for it to be my to write about my life and what I've learned along the way.  And I have a TON of awesome content I can't wait to share about what I have learned in preparation for this blog, what I learned while in Hawai'i and what I continue to be inspired to learn as a result of going there, and what I continue to learn as a result of and for this blog!  It's gonna be pretty packed in arranging it all and it'll be a pretty wild ride! I have cultural stuff to cover from my time with the indigenous of Hawai'i, there's social developments/making connections I made I want to go over, inspirational ideological concepts and theories, events to discuss, new ideas to research more and introduce to my readers, political on-goings to assess and analyze, solutions to problems to research/discuss/find/implement.   All in all I am pretty excited about it and it's hard to not get too overexcited!  Check yourself before you wreck yourself, you know?  Regardless, I have a butt-load of work ahead and I wouldn't have it any other way.  I know I can do it, and I'm certainly not getting more time! The time for me to begin making the best of my life started and didn't build the life I wanted years ago and now its time to make sure that does not continue to be the case.  There is no more time to waste.

   The time when I should've been taking this blog at full speed was nearly 2 years ago and, while that time and timing has passed it is time to focus on the present and the future. I did not have enough of the essential pieces of my life put together to fulfill this blog's potential.  But that moment is gone.  This moment is what matters.

   While I still have a long way to go and am catching up to where I wanted to be at this point in my life.  I've been trying to fit it in and my efforts, through a variety of influencing forces, have meant this blog has fallen short of what I want out of it and what it can be.  I cannot wait anymore and that cannot continue if I am to be a positive influence on the world I live in.  And speaking of no time to waste, the whole globe, of which I have only directly witnessed a small portion of colossal systemic occurrences, is enveloped in complete individual, social, political, cultural, moral, economic, and ecological chaos that is near or just beyond crippling totality.  The human race, and the world as a result of our actions today, yesterday and for our whole history as a species, is completely out of whack.  Left alone, it will continue to spiral uncontrollably and, likely very soon, become catastrophically irreversible.

     But we can do something about and there has never been a better time as there has been a positive shift in the human race that has opened up the opportunities to be able to get it right.  Circumstances are aligning to change path.  It doesn't mean it will go right, unless we are aware of just how badly it can and, under the current trajectory, likely will get.  A perfect example of that is what's going on with the North Dakota Access Pipeline and the Native American tribes trying to halt its progress/have it rerouted so it doesn't threaten their land, the water of the Missouri River and the lives that all depend upon it.  They are putting up a fight that many denizens of the continent descended from European cultures either didn't start, gave up on too early, were too dissuaded by the power of the industries and government to feel empowered to do do anything, or stopped fighting because of the sheer might of those who desire the destruction.  The Native Americans are proof that we can throw a wrench into the industrial monolithic economy that, as currently managed and carried out, threatens all life on the planet, including those who are cared for by this planet and yet support it destruction without being conscious of either reality.  But the Native Americans are doing it.  And they cannot do it alone.  It is time to bolster their efforts with our own, to halt and reverse this process of degradation, destruction, diminishment, demoralization, devaluation, and superficial reductionism and simplification.  And that's just one example.  There's a whole civilization worth layered on top of all that has led to this from civilizations and people's past.  But we can do this and prevent our, at current, inevitable demise.  We can stop digging our own grave.

   It likely won't happen automatically like how the degradation of everything all across the planet going thousands of years back in time has been at the hands of humans.  Therefore the course correction for global human civilization must be an intentional, thoughtful, and mindful process that we are only going to get one chance, most likely, to have things turn around.  And soon even that window will close.  Just look at what's going on in the news, the reports of the Syrian Civil War continuing to escalate and expand, the tumultuous nature of the U.S. political campaign leading up to the 2016 election, the climate and ecological chaos being reported all over the world, from the severe damage from bleaching done to the Great Barrier Reef this year, more than has ever been witnessed before and is unprecedented in recent geologic history to the weird migrations of Caspian terns to Alaska being reported online (the link to my reference and source is here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/23/terns-migration-alaska).  Enough was enough passed centuries ago.  It's well beyond that now.  It's more like "enough has happened that it's at the point of breaking the back of everything."

     Thus, the time to prevent it from going the final fatal step or to drag it back from having just tipped over the edge has either come or must be established to emerge very soon.  It's time for me to start contributing the effort to accomplish that and much, much more.  I may not succeed given that it has SO MUCH momentum at this point and I am one person that cannot outweigh the impact of most of the population of humans mostly adding to the situation, despite that the opportunity to improve as humans and stop adding that stress has improved, even as the global situation continues to deteriorate under its own momentum.    But I am going to give it my all.  I'm going to give it more than my all.  I"m going to find new ways to give it my all and find new meaning as to what it takes to give it my all.  Anyway, I'm not going to get into too much detail about it this time because that's not what this post is for.  It's a topic for the next post, specifically what's listed above in this paragraph.  Until next time!  It should be 2-5 days until the next post because I have to organize it, write it and edit it on top of other normal elements of my day.  And so we go!

Hawai'i Adventure Beginnings

Hello, everyone! This is my first video of something I have done that is practical to this blog. It marks the start of my journey to Hawai'i just before I met up with a group of young people engaged in trying to protect our biosphere following the 2016 International Union for the Conservation of Nature's World Conservation Congress. There will be more to come as this promises to be quite an adventure!  This beginning video is going to be followed by the video about the ending of my trip so there will be more to come!

Out of Limbo: On that Hawai'i Vibe

            Well, I’ve been in Hawai’i about a week and we are over half-way through the Earth Works Art and Music Tour and I can’t believe that it has been that long.  We’ve been going so crazy and hopping all over Hawaii (well, Oahu actually) doing awesome things, meeting awesome people, connecting in unique and meaningful ways and participating in opportunities of a lifetime that all too many people can only dream of and yet should be experienced by all and its all come together so quickly and suddenly that I can barely keep up with it all.  Not even a month ago I didn’t know about the Earth Works Tour and shortly before that I didn’t even know about the events that would lead me to find the tour and the people it has brought me too.  I’m so glad I decided to do this and the connections I’ve made and experiences I’ve had I not only want to last my whole life, I think they are going to change my whole life. 

I’m having a blast with this group of people, the Young Protected Area Leaders and have never felt so accepted and part of group before and been able to be at one with myself.  It’s been so rapid the change in circumstance and experiences that I’m going to be processing this for the next few months.  I’m so glad I came here!  It has reignited my life and has provided so much inspiration and meaning in the form of people, places and activities that I can’t wait to share it!  It was exactly what I need to jump start my blog via all its rich material, experiences and the content I can generate from it regarding the culture I’ve experienced, the principles and ideas to add to my blog, the perspective from new ideas and foreign concepts I’ve experienced and what I’ve learned about myself rather than searching (aka slogging) for online material that is not my own experience that I can extract meaning from and force it to conform to my blog.  That has definitely been something that has been lacking in my blog and this tour has opened wide open once again.  That has been the real blessing of this tour, the opportunity it has provided to be at one with myself and what is going on around me and within me, my strengths, weaknesses, inconsistencies, nuances and contingencies and to feel the flow of energy and life within me and to tap into and release my creative energy.

For once I am not worrying about all these little distractions and can just focus on what is immediately in front of me and just be in the moment.   I pulled this together so quickly that I didn’t have time to fret about every little detail and had to leave many things up to chance out of pure time constraint necessity that I would’ve otherwise fretted over out of conditioning or been talked into fretting over and it has taught me much about myself.  And that brings me to how I got into coming to Hawai’i.

Just like I said above, not a month and a half ago, did I even know about any of these opportunities nor that these people existed let alone that I would be participating in them.  Just a week ago I was I working in a Teavana store with a group of people I greatly enjoyed being around but was not living for myself or doing what I wanted out of life and I was miserable with myself for it.  All that has changed since I came on this trip after learning about the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s World Conservation Congress via Facebook, which took place in Hawai’i between September 1^st and 10^th, all of which I missed out on because of two Teavana.  And that’s how it started and what led to me being in Hawai’i right now, all of which will have to wait until next time because I am about to leave the location I am in which has Wi-fi.  Aloha!

Beginnings: Getting Out of Limbo

It’s been a year and 3 months since I graduated from the University of New England with my Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences and Environmental Science.  And in that year I have been taking a long break, exhausted by completing the demands of a double major in four years, in order to reassess my life, both where it stands and where it is going.  I am astonished to find that much of what I thought about my life is not what I believed it to be, nor are many facets of life where I want them to be, and many of the things that I wanted out of life have not progressed as desired.  I am not where I need to be in too many ways.  For the last year I’ve been working in a job that I enjoy but is keeping me comfortably in life stasis.  The words an acquaintance from UNE put on social media resonate with me in that respect (which are paraphrased here for privacy).  In their words they, “have taken a second job, this one full time, in order to pay off student loans” and it is keeping them pretty busy since they are still working at another job, expressing a desire that they “still want a job in their field in the near future” and that the second job is a necessary step to improve one thing that will allow for the improvement of others.  It ended with “I hope everything starts working out better for me soon. I am sick of living in limbo,”.

I couldn’t feel more in sync with that attitude.  While it is not completely the same as the situation I have (loans for example have long been worked out and paid for without me having to worry about it, for which I do feel guilty as that is advantage and privilege that very few amongst my generation possess) I understand completely how this person feels.  I came back home to work on feeling less held back to achieving my goals and to find a way around, to surmount or remove the obstacles that were preventing me from surmounting the obstacles to my goals.  And I have progressed in that direction.  But I’m done with being stuck in stasis, even if I make progress regardless of that and enjoy the time I have spent with the people in that stasis and am grateful for that time and appreciate the relationships I have formed and friends gained despite being rooted in limbo.  I’m done hitting too many dead ends, having too many dead-end outcomes and too many dead-end conversations.  I’m restless and bored of not working on my career, my life, myself and being the most positive person I can be with a positive impact upon this world in the process.  I’m done being stuck in limbo.

To those who are left reading this it’s time for me to stop living in limbo.  It’s time for this blog to stop living in limbo after its nearly year and a half hiatus so I could get through my finals at the end of senior year, rest and recuperate and then remove the obstacles that barred my own progress, both those put up for me and by me.  I’m done with and tired with stasis and stagnation in my life, in my interests and in the world I see around me.  It’s making me more than tired; it’s making me sick; sick at heart, sick at mind and sick at body.  It plagues my conscience day in and day out that I’m not doing what I was put on this Earth to do and fulfilling my life’s purpose.  And that’s continuing to happen to so many other people in the world that it has become the norm, even if there has been a minor shift and a continued drive to shift away from that, and it needs to become the exception.  And I have to start being that much needed new norm, ironically by being an exception, if I want it to become the norm as a whole.   The time is now and I have to start now and really I needed to start long ago, even though, personally, it would’ve been the wrong time for me.

And if we don’t start now, we may never get the chance to start again.  In the one year and 3 months since I’ve been out of action, taking some necessary time from the exhausting experience of tertiary education, I am astonished at how far the world has slipped closer towards permanently self-perpetuating chaos.  Climate change consequences have just entered a scary new phase and its curtain raiser has come to the point that I am worried that it has either passed the point of no return or the momentum to take it there is almost strong enough to be unstoppable.  What with the floods in Louisiana being the result of a series of 500 year storms that has killed 11 people, the heat waves baking the Middle East, the number of towns and cities in my home area under severe drought having increased by 420% in one week following only receiving half our normal rainfall, Antarctica hitting 400 ppm of CO₂ in the atmosphere and it melting at a terrifying rate, the continued pressure to develop fossil fuel infrastructure amidst all this, and the social and political upheaval around the world, such as the emergence of ISIS as a global force or the Venezuelan sociopolitical/economic upheaval heavily centered around food prices and the combined impact of the Olympic Games and its own inherent problems stemming from a powerful elite living and performing at the behest of a much poorer majority, it is clear that the problems that have gone unaddressed, ignored, hidden or intentionally put aside for centuries and millennia that have been increasing in breadth and depth in the name of greed and corruption driven profit are now poised to overwhelm everything we know and love and what makes life worth living as well as take away all of that and the chance to ever have that again.  It is time to act.  It was time to act long ago, definitively, whether we knew it or not.   Now it is definitely time, and many of us know it.   The questions is, do enough of us have access to the resources, information and understanding to “know” enough that we act on it?  That is what remains to be seen.  And I plan on doing something, everything I can, about it.  The Earth is fracturing and cracking under the oppressive weight of humanity and humanity is going down with it at an ever faster pace.  And still the governments of the world and their collective response to this emergency remain sidetracked or distracted into looking away from the issues or gripped by partisan gridlock, especially here in the U.S., thus letting and allowing the situation to slide towards oblivion.

But that’s what this blog is for.  That’s what Life in the Anthropocene is all about.  It’s a blog about “the issues, obstacles and challenges associated with the early part of the 21^st century”, which will exceed all the other challenges that have come before in human history.   The time to step up to the plate, the last time, is NOW.  It is a blog meant to help all of us on our human journey of realizing our full potential and progressing as individuals seeking self-realization, wisdom, happiness and peace so that we might continue to have a livable, sustainable future for all humans and the precious life forms that share this planet, especially in this time.  Over the course of the next century, most of which I have a reasonably good chance of living through, humanity’s past history and present decisions will determine our future existence, for better, worse or both, for our species and for all life.  Life in the Anthropocene is a blog for the Human Condition in the Human Era.  I intend to have it serve as a guide to, and as a forum for discussing and understanding, the challenges and responsibilities of our time associated with a human dominated world and to utilize it to accomplish exactly what I outline below.

I need to, as well as other individuals, cultures, nations and the human species as a whole all around the world, start progressing towards a happier existence and creating that existence by bringing about and working on the shift toward a more sustainable future that preserves biodiversity, enhances human well-being, respects finite planetary resources and biophysical boundaries and restores cultural diversity.  And I want to help lead the way.  If we don’t start living our lives and being happy with them, our choices, our career, our legacy, our relationships, and our time here on Earth, there won’t be anything left to be happy about.  We need to start living in balance with the Earth more, respecting what nature provides and appreciating it for all its beauty or it will no longer be able to provide, to sustain such beauty, and there will be nothing left to appreciate.

We should’ve started long ago.  But we cannot go back into the past.  There is only the moment and the moment after that.  And, at this moment, right now, we stand on the precipice of it potentially not mattering anyway because the situation may take on a process of permanent self-perpetuation that we truly cannot stop.  Our world isn’t just dying; it’s breathing its last breath.   But it’s not dead yet; I say we give it some serious CPR.

What with all that’s going on the world, we are in the first year of what should be considered a global state of emergency.   And yet the status quo, stasis, and “business as usual” is not only still present, it is stronger than ever and being used to argue that we are doomed anyway specifically because humanity has inflicted the most damaging manifestations of the attitudes that assure this terminal outcome by default in the first place.  As the first species to be unhappy with our own nature/what nature made us into, the nature of the world around us, and what nature provided/our role in nature, what are we going to do when there is far less about the nature of the world to be happy about because there’s nothing left to provide life and nothing left to live for or fight for because we didn’t live and fight for that life in the first place?  I’d wager were going to do some pretty awful things and that’s a massive understatement/terrifying thought as a person familiar with the broad strokes of the last 50,0000-1 million years of human history and activity on this planet.

The Earth has given us everything and it has and continued to do so as we continue to progressively inflict more damage at an ever faster pace with every passing year, risking its neck to heal our human unhappiness. The planet is now entering a beginning phase where it can no longer sustain the demands upon it combined with the forced destruction upon natural systems caused by humans.  Instead, it is time to risk our necks for the Earth that has been so kind to us.  It is time to dive for the rope that humanity has just snapped by straining it with the weight of our demands, so the whole world doesn’t go off the cliff.  I am diving for it and pulling my weight to keep the world from going over.  

But that’s not my question with this post.  My question is, what is everyone else going to do?  Continue on in limbo, stuck in stasis, perpetuating “business as usual” and status quo?  Or are we going to get our rears in gear and pull our act together as individuals, cities, countries, nations and as a world to save us from the destruction we are bringing upon ourselves?  Or are we going to let everything slide for the last time?  What with the worldwide chaos that has enveloped the globe, such as the aforementioned global glacial/ice cap melting, severe New England drought, devastating Louisiana flooding, deadly wildfires in the U.S. west, political upheaval in Venezuela and the ballooning in ISIS, as well as the planet-wide ongoing deaths of corals, plus the announcement  that sea level rise has just accelerated and we almost certainly have put ourselves on track to blow past the 1.5⁰C of warming since pre-industrial times, we have probably just broken the back of Earth’s systems and without immediate, widespread fundamental measures in contrast to the ways of the past we will take the last fatal, terminal step to our own demise.  How much further is this going to go before we all decide to wake up to and tackle the severity, scale, depth, and spread of the problem?  It is a testament to the collective, civilization-wide blindness that has led to the global sociopolitical, ecological, economic, and cultural crisis we find ourselves in that we only realize how far the drop is and how long the way down is after falling off the cliff and being forced to hang on by our fingernails.   I for one will not allow it to slip any further without pulling all the stops on my part.

            We still have a beautiful, biodiverse, plentiful world full of good people and good things worth saving that can provide us all with a wonderful, enjoyable, pleasurable existence for humans and all life forms.  But that will not continue for much longer if we continue to treat it with abuse, neglect, and punishment.  Even if you, my readers, start right now en masse (as in like right after reading this post) to aid in this crisis and we start making the life decisions and forming the personal attitudes and cultural momentum to counteract this process, we’re probably just barely going to avoid the worst of it by the skin of our teeth.  Personally, I will not accept allowing this to happen on my watch no matter how many other people choose the other option that defaults us to our doom.  I think its high time, and that the true time came long ago, to begin to move away from this path.  It is time to create a world of greater compassion, understanding, kindness, sensitivity and well-being because this is a crisis of a deficit of all those and much more.  So, here we go.  Are you with me?