Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

~ Carl Sagan

by Rex Weyler
Deep Green, March 2009

Deforestation contributes to global warming. Rising earth temperatures kill forests. Dying forests release more carbon. Atmospheric carbon increases planet temperatures.

This cycle of forest collapse represents a critical feedback loop that will likely drive warming for centuries, change life cycles on Earth in general, and usher in a sweeping transformation of human civilization.

Worldwide forest destruction – due to logging, human habitat sprawl, and clearing for crops such as soybeans and palm oil – continues at a net loss of about 15 million hectares each year. Many cleared forests are burned on the site. Meanwhile, forests die or grow slower due to global warming. Declining forests absorb less CO2 and release more carbon.

Drought, heat, and fires

Drought and heat are making forests more susceptible to insects and fire. David Gilbert, with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia will publish a study this year that shows forests have less biomass and increased mortality in warmer earth conditions.

Due to warmer temperatures, bark beetles have attacked boreal forests in the US, Canada and Russia, killing mature trees and making forests vulnerable to fire. Carbon, sequestered by forests over centuries, can be released in a few days by wildfires, as experienced in southern Australia in recent years. Fires are increasing worldwide and now contribute about a third as much atmospheric carbon as burning fossil fuels. Read the complete Post.

Campbell River Mirror

January 29, 2009 12:00 PM

I am writing this article to shine some light on what the NDP and their psuedo-enviromentalist bought-and-paid-for associates are doing in their attempts to discredit First Nations involvement in run-of-river development projects.

Real environmentalist organizations should ask for a First Nation perspective on the facts (as they have many times in the past) before embracing the fear-mongering hysteria being perpetuated by the NDP and unions as it tarnishes their credibility as stewards of the land.

I have personally attended several of these NDP so-called “public meetings” (they would not let me speak at one) on run of river issues, two of which were in Campbell River and one was with Rafe Mair in attendance.

It was a “million dollar” experience I would not pay a nickel to do again. I now know these people will say or do anything to get in control of your tax dollars.

Truth and facts do not even enter into their blathering as they are only concerned with promoting their political agenda. Read the complete Post.

VANCOUVER (January 29th, 2009) – A one-minute animated film made by a group of Vancouver filmmakers won the year-end “2008 People’s Choice Award” in the Friends of the Earth One-Minute Film Competition. Winners were announced in London, England by Friends of the Earth, an international organization seeking to inspire solutions to environmental problems.

Viewers from around the world voted for How to Boil a Frog as their favorite 60-second film among the top 10 entries shown online.  This “cheeky animation of a frog incensed by the world hotting up due to climate change” was written and produced by North Vancouver filmmaker, Jon Cooksey.  Cooksey has won a lunch in London with one of the judges, Trainspotting Producer Andrew MacDonald.  In describing the film, MacDonald said, “The animation How to Boil a Frog is professionally made and fun – it pulls viewers in and gets them thinking about climate change through its original entertaining style.”

How To Boil a Frog tells the story of Lou, a South American tree frog, who appears to be enjoying a Jacuzzi, until we see that he is the proverbial boiling frog, and the heat source is a burning Earth. Lou tastes the planet, and discovers the source of this global warming:  oil, factories, and cars. He yanks out the offending fossil-fuelled culprits, and bounces away on a happier planet.

Read the complete Post.

Join us for our monthly Vancouver Peak Oil Meetup.
All are welcome.

When: January 23, 2009 7:00 PM

Where: KAYA Knowledgeable Aboriginal Youth Association
#200 – 2019 Dundas Steet
Vancouver , BC V5L 2B6
(604) 254 – 5513

The Knowledgeable Aboriginal Youth Association (KAYA) presents “Vital Knowledge 2″ the second instalment in a series of film screenings and forums dedicated to educating youth on important world issues. In collaboration with the Vancouver Peak Oil Group, Vital Knowledge 2 will screen a selection from “A Crude Awakening” followed by an open discussion.

A Crude Awakening , produced and directed by award-winning European journalists and filmmakers Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack, tells the story of how our civilization’s addiction to oil puts it on a collision course with geology. Compelling, intelligent, and highly entertaining, the film visits with the world’s top experts and comes to a startling, but logical conclusion – our industrial society, built on cheap and readily available oil, must be completely re-imagined and overhauled.

If the changes affect your plans to attend, please take a moment to update your RSVP. (You can RSVP “No” or “Maybe” as well as “Yes”.)

You can always get in touch with Brennan Wauters through the “Contact Organizer” link on Meetup.

Terrific library of free short videos courtesy of the show brought to you by Metro Vancouver – check out their site!

A Talk By Peter Newman, Professor of Sustainability, Curtin University, Australia.

Friday, January 9, 2009
5:30 – 7:00 p.m.
Room 1400
SFU Vancouver – 515 West Hastings St.

Peter Newman and Tim Beatley have written two new books, one on Resilient Cities, the other on Green Urbanism Down Under. They are on a North American tour in January beginning in Vancouver as it was here that the gestation of the Resilient Cities book began. Peter will speak about how cities are under threat from the financial crash and especially need to avoid pushing solutions such as road building and urban sprawl that were only responsible for the sub-prime meltdown. A new approach to urban development needs to be forged out of the down-turn that can at the same time enable cities to respond to the deep challenge of peak oil and climate change. Some hopeful directions will be outlined based on cities from around the world, including cities down-under.

Dear Friends and Colleagues

As many of your know, I was among a group of young environmentalists who travelled Alberta by bike in 2007 attempting to wrap their head around one of biggest industrial mega-projects in the world: the Alberta tar sands. We went from one small town to the next, meeting with the locals and asking one question: how has the tar sands boom impacted your life? The 3-week long bike trip was a fact finding mission, a story telling adventure and a life-changing experience for all involved.

The culmination of that trip is the recent release of a book entitled Journey To The Tar Sands (www.tothetarsands.ca) co-authored by 12 of the cyclists, as well as a feature-length documentary (www.tothetarsandsfilm.ca) which was recently featured at the Calgary International Film Festival.

I have been keen to share the stories that we heard and experienced in Alberta with others here at home. So I am particularly excited to say that we have been able to bring a screening of the film and the official BC launch of the book to the North Shore as part of a national tour. Please consider yourself invited to the event, which will take place on Monday Jan 19th, from 7pm to approximately 9pm at the Kay Meek Centre in West Vancouver (http://www.kaymeekcentre.com/). I have attached a poster and I would appreciate your help in inviting others and spreading the word. A similar event is also being planned for Jan 20th at UBC if you know anyone who might be interested in that.

The film is rated PG and recommended for people of all ages who are interested in any of the following: youth activism, cycling, Alberta, the oil industry, journalism, storytelling, First Nation issues, labour issues, food, social justice, grassroots organizing, personal change, group living, climate change, the environment, the economy, and saving the world!

Hope to see you there.

Aftab

Canada’s vast forests, once huge absorbers of greenhouse gases, now add to problem
By Howard Witt | Chicago Tribune correspondent
January 2, 2009
Original article

VPO Note: a perfect example of Overshoot. The only good solution to this symptom of the real problem is reduction of human population and consumption.

VANCOUVER — As relentlessly bad as the news about global warming seems to be, with ice at the poles melting faster than scientists had predicted and world temperatures rising higher than expected, there was at least a reservoir of hope stored here in Canada’s vast forests.

The country’s 1.2 million square miles of trees have been dubbed the “lungs of the planet” by ecologists because they account for more than 7 percent of Earth’s total forest lands. They could always be depended upon to suck in vast quantities of carbon dioxide, naturally cleansing the world of much of the harmful heat-trapping gas.

But not anymore. Read the complete Post.