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Rolla Peace News December 4, 2018 |
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Dear Friends: http://tomsager.org/Peaceletters/peaceletter120418.html In this newsletter is: 1. NOON VIGIL FOR PEACE: THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2018 2. BERNIE SANDERS FOR PRESIDENT! 3. THE MISFIT MATHEMATICIAN (Tom's column, http://tomsager.org) The Web of Life Unravels 1. NOON VIGIL FOR PEACE: THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2018 We vigil for peace in front of the Rolla Post Office, THIS THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6, FROM NOON TO 1:00 PM (and most subsequent Thursdays until peace is established). Please try to join us. The temperature is predicted to be in the 30s. If you do not feel comfortable standing with us in front of the Post Office, please consider driving by and showing your support for our message by honking your horn and flashing a peace sign. 2. BERNIE SANDERS FOR PRESIDENT! The one thing that has kept a lot of anti-war activists from wholeheartedly supporting Bernie Sanders is his apparent reluctance to publicly call out the warmongers and/or make the connection between war and the destruction of the planet. It's obvious from many comments he has made over the past couple of years that he is aware of this connection, and is in favor of ending war, but he has not seemed to want to come out and state it unequivocally and publicly. At the Sanders Institute Town Hall gathering Monday night, Bernie came out with a statement that comes close: “Instead of spending well over a trillion dollars on weapons of destruction to figure out how we kill each other, think about making that investment in transforming our energy system. Think about how we can bring the entire world together in common cause.” Many of the progressives and climate activists present are pressuring Bernie to run for president in 2020, and he is considering it, if not committed to running. Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece, said “Let me convey a message from all of us in Europe, for all those comrades of yours that are now struggling to reclaim our cities, our world, our environment: We need Bernie Sanders to run for president!” It's a fact that of all the possible candidates the Democrats have proposed, not one has the heart and soul commitment to the welfare of all humanity that Bernie Sanders has shown. And not one is willing to give the climate crisis the focus and the commitment needed if we are to survive as a species. 3. THE MISFIT MATHEMATICIAN (Tom's column, http://tomsager.org) THE WEB OF LIFE UNRAVELS The University-Industrial Complex has really been caught napping. While the University-Industrial complex has been busy developing more and more sophisticated ways of killing insects, it took a small German society of insect enthusiasts to document the disappearance of perhaps 3/4 of our flying insects, the so-called “Insect Apocalypse,”. This includes not only honey bees and butterflies, but flies and mosquitoes as well. I've run across multiple articles on the work of the volunteer-run Krefeld insect society, but this article by Brooke Jarvis in the New York Times Magazine speaks loudest to me.“Look for what's missing. ... Few are able to see what isn't there.” —Donald Rumsfeld Insects are an important part of the web of life. In one German nature reserve near Düsseldorf their numbers have fallen by over 75%. Likely much of the world is also experiencing similar declines. Flying insects provide food for frogs, birds and bats which provide sustenance up the food chain. They may provide other known and unknown services to the Web of Life as well. Jarvis notes: “One result of their loss is what’s known as trophic cascade, the unraveling of an ecosystem’s fabric as prey populations boom and crash and the various levels of the food web no longer keep each other in check. These places are emptier, impoverished in a thousand subtle ways.” It's like the shirt I'm wearing. One little hole I may not notice. Several more holes and the fabric begins to fray. More holes and I'm walking around naked from the waist up. That seems to be what's happening to our environment. It's becoming so full of holes that soon it will no longer provide us with the support we need. Brad Lister, who has noted similar changes in Puerto Rico, remarks, “Nature’s resilient, but we’re pushing her to such extremes that eventually it will cause a collapse of the system.” There does not appear to be any one single cause for this biological impoverishment — the usual culprits are insecticides, herbicides, climate change, habitat destruction, etc. Jarvis compares this to death by a thousand cuts. I suspect another cause as well — electromagnetic radiation, like the radiation generated by millions and millions of tiny cell phones and other similar devices. It is only recently that people have started to carry devices that generate electromagnetic radiation with them constantly and it has only been recently that declines in flying insects have become so noticeable. Cell phones are a diffuse source of radiation, in contrast to broadcast media which provides a point source. The two are qualitatively different. They may well provide different stresses on our environment. Circumstantial evidence? Yes. But definitely worth checking out. I like to brag that I am one of the very few left who do not own a cell phone. If my conjecture holds, I'll also add that I am just doing my part to preserve the Web of Life. Meanwhile....As the world prepares for more and more war, and corporations prepare to do more and more violence to the Earth, our environment continues to unravel. Like North America, Australia is battling horrendous fires and floods this year. There is no longer a fine line between natural disasters and human-induced disasters. They blend seamlessly into one another. It is no longer a matter of preserving what is left. If we are to survive as a species, we must think about re-creating what has been lost. Here is a message from the Waorani of the Amazon forest, brought to us by Nemonte Nenquimo, whose name means Many Stars. Nenquimo notes, “the company doesn’t see the forest. They don’t see us. They see what they want to see. They see oil wells where we see gardens. They see money where we see life.” We should be nurturing the few hunter-gatherers left among us, like the survival of our species depends upon them — because it does. As the Web of Life unravels and “civilizations” collapse, hunter-gatherers may be all that remains of the human race. Rolla Peace News is distributed by email once a week on Tuesday evenings (except on rare occasions) and is posted on the web at http://tomsager.org (click on Grassroots Rolla: at the top of rightmost column). If you don't wish to get notices of peace events in the Rolla area, let me know and I'll take you off this list. If you want to be added to this list, let me know. Wage peace, Helen helenm (at) fidnet.com |