Ecology Is the Meaning of Life

Naturally evolved ecosystems are marvels that make Earth habitable, yet sadly they and all life are threatened

By Dr. Glen Barry, EcoInternet, http://EcoInternet.org/

Miraculous Nature

Ultimately, all humanity and all life have is the biosphere, the thin layer of life just above and below Earth’s surface, composed of ancient, miraculously evolved natural ecosystems. The natural Earth is a marvel – a complex coupling of species within ecosystems, whereby life begets life.

Ecology is far more than the study of life and its environment. The word is used here as a synonym for ecosystems – the vibrant connections that emerge between species across scales, which cumulatively make life on Earth possible.

Nature is far, far more than pretty plants and animals. Ecosystems make Earth habitable, providing water, food, air, shelter, and more – everything that we need and desire to live well. In naturally evolved ecosystems, from genes to individual organisms and species, to ecosystems and everything else in between, each living being present fulfills a niche which sustains itself, its neighbors, and the whole.

All species uniquely express evolutionary brilliance and have a purpose, a reason for being, a right to exist, and are necessary to maintain life’s full potential. From the lowly worm to soaring eagles, to the human race – all naturally evolved life has value and relies upon all the rest. Even seemingly noxious disease organisms and man-eating predators have a role to play in maintaining ecological balance.

The Earth as a whole is a living organism, similar biologically to a cell, plant, animal, or ecosystem. Yet sadly, she is being murdered by industrial human growth at the expense of ecosystems. Past certain planetary boundary conditions, like any life, Earth can die.

Without large intact ecosystems, Earth becomes uninhabitable. The vibrant mélange of life found in natural ecosystems is godlike in its all-embracing nurturing. Ecology is the meaning of life.

Ecosystem Collapse

Humankind’s demand for resources and growth overwhelms nature, our steady diminishment of ecosystems abruptly changes climate, and this is collapsing the biosphere. Global ecosystems – water, air, food, forests, oceans, wetlands, and more – are collapsing and dying under the burden of human industrial and population growth.

Human destruction of natural ecosystems and disintegrating climatic integrity are already past critical thresholds. Humanity (meaning each of us) can’t dump filth into air, defecate into water, kill and diminish natural vegetation, plunder oceans, and expect a habitable Earth and decent lives. Abrupt climate change is indicative of much broader decline, both ecological and social – habitat loss, water shortages, inequitable overconsumption, dead oceans, nationalistic injustice, and industrial agriculture – that threatens life itself.

Comforts of modern life for some come at the expense of utterly decimating natural ecosystems required to sustain life; such comforts cannot last. Mass chaos and death are sure to ensue. No one will survive abrupt climate change, ecosystem loss, and biosphere collapse.

Ecosystems are being wantonly liquidated based upon the myth that we can grow forever. Yet we know perpetual exponential economic growth is impossible on a finite planet. Humanity is systematically dismantling Earth’s environmental life support systems, and at most a few more decades of industrial growth will be inevitably followed by ecosystem and biosphere collapse.

The human family is epically failing to protect and restore ecosystems and reduce greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to avert global ecosystem collapse, achieve ecological sustainability, and enjoy universal well-being forever. The brutal manner in which humankind treats Earth, other species, and each other makes a mockery of claims of being civilized. At our worst, we have become out-of-control vermin destroying our own habitat for momentary pleasure.

The human family is in ecological overshoot, having exceeded Earth’s carrying capacity, and is pulling down all species and the biosphere with us, as Earth’s life collapses into nothingness. There is no easy way out, as together we face an end to ecology, and thus life itself.

Sustainability Solutions Exist

Workable solutions to climate change and broad-based environmental decline exist; they include ending fossil fuels, protecting and restoring ecosystems, agro-ecological food production, reducing population and inequity, and establishing a steady state economy. Plainly, however, such a transition is not going to be easy. Solutions to avert global ecosystem collapse will be disruptive. Yet there is no alternative if together humanity is to survive and enjoy well-being within Earth’s ecological boundaries.

Industrial growth at the expense of ecosystems and climate must end as soon as possible. For human and all life’s survival and well-being, intact ecosystems must remain the context for human endeavors. Huge potential exists to further develop organic, permaculture based agro-ecological systems for growing our food. Ultimately, we are all challenged to create something of worth from our hands and minds working on the land, based upon regenerating and nurturing ecosystems, for our daily sustenance.

We each must nurture a sense of enoughness, realizing more isn’t always better, particularly if it undermines our natural habitat, and thus our ability to persist.

It is not too late to embrace an ecology ethic. But the longer we wait, the more limited our options. Despite pernicious trends in ecological decline – and allowing for the possibility of a deep resiliency to the Earth System of which we are unaware – out of love of life, we owe it to Earth, kindred species, and kids everywhere to try everything possible to save being.

Growth in industry, population, consumption, and inequity cannot be maintained. Together we must reach a steady state economy whereby natural capital is replenished, not diminished. Through measures like educating all girls and providing birth control to all, we must urgently pursue reductions in human population, the most basic human impact upon the climate and ecosystems, or the biosphere collapses.

Ignorance and superstition must be banished through education and promoting a love of truth, justice, knowledge, wisdom, and fairness.

For capitalism to have any future and avoid social, ecological, and economic collapse on a dead planet, it must learn to price external costs and environmental risk now, while rejecting its obsession with growth as the ultimate measure of well-being. Otherwise industrial capitalism will have to be replaced soon just so most may survive, let alone thrive.

Alternatives exist that are fair and reward hard work, but sadly we find it easier to consider the end of life on Earth, rather than embrace essential social change.

For human survival and well-being, committing acts of ecocide that destroy ecosystems must somehow be made unacceptable, and this must be enforced. The environment movement must make more of an effort to communicate the complexity of ecological crises, their profound risk, and these and other sufficient solutions – while resolutely rejecting and outing greenwash that legitimates ecocidal activities.

The green movement must also move beyond awareness-raising stunts and build a broad-based movement to seize power and to implement the ecological policies necessary to sustain being.
Only total societal reorganization away from destroying ecosystems and burning fossil fuels can save Earth and humanity. Either humanity finds a way together to implement difficult ecological policies to end fossil fuels, protect ecosystems, and achieve a steady-state economy – or it is the end. No measures except indiscriminate terrorism targeting innocents can be off the table in efforts to together protect ecology.

Hope in Ecosystems

Today free your mind and senses to see ecology everywhere, in everything you do, and the myriad ways it suffers from human hubris, indifference, ignorance, and overuse.

As long as together we still breathe, there is hope we can sustain Earth, but realistically the state of ecosystems and the biosphere is grim and worsening. We must start in haste, today, to build the world that is possible and needed.

Love of other peoples and species, nature, truth, justice, and equity are the only lasting basis of global ecological sustainability and show the only effective way forward to avoid final ecosystem collapse.
For a sustainable, decent future we must go back to the land, stop burning fossil fuels, and nurture ecosystems and one another.

We are one human family with inalienable rights and duties to freedom, work, equity, peace, justice, and sustained ecology. Profound inequity, ecological collapse, persistent injustice, nationalistic perma-war, superstition, and ignorance when faced with truth – all are sicknesses that mar human potential and will prove fatal.

Together the human family either learns to live well together within intact ecosystems and without fossil fuels or faces a period of profound suffering, followed by biosphere collapse and the end of being. Together we could end the current system’s elite rule, inequity, injustice, and gross ecological negligence at any time. Either we act together soon, courageously, on the basis of truthful ecological knowledge, or else each of us alone faces misery and a final apocalyptic global ecological collapse.

Ecology is the meaning of life. Truth, justice, equity, and sustainability are the ideals whereby ecology can be maintained. Let’s make it so.

Who Invented Blogging? Dr. Glen Barry First Blogger Since 1993

The homepage of Forests.org's Forest Protection Blog as it appeared in 1996 courtesy of the Wayback Machine

Who Invented Blogging

The Forest Protection Blog at http://forests.org/ had until recently been continuously on the web since January 1995, and was the first blog ever. It is now being updated and transferred to http://EcoInternet.org/ to use the latest blogging tools. Dr. Glen Barry developed the tool to protect old-growth forests, and his ongoing efforts since 1989 to harness the Internet for environmental conservation have been described as visionary, resulting in massive old-growth forest protection victories and other ecological sustainability outcomes. A blog is defined as commentary upon other linked Internet sources, with entries listed reverse chronologically.

Dr. Glen Barry, the inventor of blogging, explains "the real innovation in blogging is citizen commentary upon other web content as a recognized form of self-expression. The blog format of expressing yourself, as you link to other expression, exponentially enables free speech and thought. A free Internet is central to a just, equitable, and sustainable human future." While many others began to harness the Internet similarly in the late 1990s, often as personal diaries, the Forest Conservation Blog predates them by a few years, and was thus also the first political blog.

-->> Continue Reading

Ecocide Is Not Development; Love and Ecology Are the Answer

Earth's ecosystems are collapsing, human and all species' habitats are being lost, and our one shared biosphere is failing and dying. Love of other peoples and species and of nature, truth, justice, and equity are the only lasting basis for global ecological sustainability.

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” – Krishnamurti

“Truth matters. Freedom matters. Justice matters. Ecology matters. Peace matters. Compassion matters. Knowledge matters. Love matters. We should all try to matter by serving such ideals.” – Dr. Glen Barry

By Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet
Earth Meanders come from Earth's Newsdesk

Earth is alive – just like the biological patterns found in cells, species, individual organisms, and ecosystems; only at a different scale – and thus can die if boundary conditions for health are exceeded. The biosphere [search] – Earth's thin mantle of life – is collapsing and dying, as ecosystems and climate are being murdered by human industrial growth. Such ecocidal madness, called "development," is hailed as the goal for society when in fact it is ecocide, and can only end in utter social, economic, and ecological collapse. Industrial human development destroys natural ecosystems necessary to maintain a habitable Earth.

Burning fossil fuels and clearing natural ecosystems are industrial ecocide, the furthest thing possible from "development" or any meaningful and lasting human advancement. The global ecological system is being overrun by human industrial growth, which is ravaging ecosystems upon which all life depends. Runaway human exponential growth systematically strips our habitat of life-giving species and ecosystems, and then it fouls and poisons whatever remains.

The problem with climate change and ecosystem loss is that we think we have time, when in fact the biosphere is already well into collapse. The evidence is pouring in that climate change, biodiversity extinction, and terrestrial ecosystem loss already exceed thresholds whereby the biosphere is collapsing. Humanity is already in mid-death swoon, pulling down the biosphere as it annihilates itself, kindred species, and shared habitat. Humanity is like a disease on the planet, consuming life-giving habitats and treating nature as resources to liquidate and consume, after which there can only be collapse and mass death.

Humanity’s wild careening towards apocalyptic global ecosystem collapse is caused by, and is causing, the rise of new fascist and violent governments. The global environment and freedom are collapsing and dying in tandem as the industrial growth machine liquidates ecosystems in the doomed attempt to keep up with the material demands of burgeoning population and the ruling elites’ overconsumption. To maintain the mirage of advancement from ecosystem liquidation, governments strip away liberties and impose fascism, obstructing the necessary social change to sustain ecology.

True peace is not the absence of conflict as enslaved and needlessly dying at your own hand. Peace is rights, equity, justice, jobs, ecological sustainability for which people sometimes must fight. Only a prudent, well-considered revolutionary change of governance that is minimally violent or nonviolent can stop the cycle of big nanny, corporatist government razing the Earth for a few decades of further irrational ecocide.

Continue reading "EARTH MEANDERS: Ecocide Is Not Development; Love and Ecology Are the Answer" »

The Fascist State of America

#IStandWithEdwardSnowden because free nations don't spy on and murder their citizens. Democracies don't terrorize sovereign nations and their peoples with torture, false imprisonment, and drone-based perma-war. It is time to stand up against the oil oligarchy’s police state that is stifling social change required to achieve universal human rights, justice, equity, and global ecological sustainability.

By Dr. Glen Barry

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin

“If living unfreely but comfortably is something you are willing to accept… it is going to get worse with the next generation… The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The greatest fear I have for the outcome of these disclosures is that nothing will change… [that people] won’t be willing to stand up and take the risks to fight. I am not afraid, because this is the choice I've made.” – Edward Snowden

The Bush administration "puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide." – Candidate Barack Obama 2007

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." – George Orwell

“With American spying and drone perma-war we are witnessing the end of democracy, the failure of a fragile experiment that governments are derived from the people.” – Dr. Glen Barry

“We the People" are not enemies of the state and deserve and need to know what our government is doing. The truth matters – particularly when human freedom is at stake, and our shared environment is collapsing, with both at risk of being lost forever. America’s civil liberties have been trampled on, and sadly, most don’t seem to care, failing to understand the full implications of big brother’s ascendancy. Defending freedom from government tyranny is not a left-or-right, conservative-or-liberal matter; it is the difference between right and wrong, truth and lies, liberty and enslavement, life and death.

Edward Snowden has revealed the extent to which America has become a total surveillance police state – with wholesale spying upon its own citizens – adding to revelations since 9/11 of the murder of U.S. citizens as well as torture, indefinite detention, and pursuit of drone perma-war, terrorizing entire nations. All of these acts are occurring upon the basis of suspicion alone – without due legal process, violating international law and the U.S. Constitution – in an unprecedented expansion of government powers in the name of a war on terror, when in fact they are being used to control dissent and access oil.

President Barack Obama is a profound epic failure, in many ways worse than Über-fascist Bush, just a new black face on the American oil oligarchy’s long history of tyranny and warmongering. What a feeble, sellout, murdering, cynical disappointment Barack Obama has turned out to be. After killing a million Arabs and Muslims, Bush policies continued with vigor under Obama, has the U.S. avenged 9/11 yet? Or does America need to spy, torture, falsely imprison, and wage perma-war for years longer? Perhaps forever?

America is poised upon the precipice of becoming a totalitarian police state overseeing final global environmental collapse. As America is at risk of becoming a third-rate police state, all lovers of liberty – from the Tea Party to progressives – must come together to resist oppression, remain free, embrace justice and equity for all, and sustain our shared global environment. One can feel a libertarian–progressive alliance building to stop big nanny government from enslaving us while destroying our environment. A commitment to Green Liberty is the human family’s only path to sustained well-being.

What has America become? It is well past time the U.S. re-examines its incautious, militaristic and totalitarian response to 9/11 and re-embraces liberty, justice, and freedom. The US corporate owned government threatens global liberty and human rights; making global equity, justice, and sustainability impossible. Big nanny government is in bed with the oil oligarchy and corporate elite to threaten American and global liberty and ecosystems.

What other unethical, illegal, violent and unauthorized acts have the U.S. government carried out in secret to keep us "safe"? 9/11 trauma does NOT justify spying, torture, murder, and perma-war – along with corporate rule – the textbook definition of fascism. Real Americans that honor the constitution and American values don't spy upon, torture and murder their own citizens. And they don’t wage perma-war terrorizing others. Rather, they gracefully understand that minimizing the frequency and withstanding occasional acts of random terror is the price of freedom.

America folded like wet towel after 9/11 crimes - lashing out militaristically, murdering hundreds of thousands of innocents, as it needlessly gave up Yankee liberties acquired over hundreds of years in what had been the biggest expansion of political freedoms ever. Instead the United States should be engaging with the world to address justifiable grievances, weaning itself from its oil addiction, demobilizing the military and police state, and building international criminal courts to charge and imprison terrorists.

Do we want the Executive branch of government to know every detail of each citizen’s life? Never has a government been granted powers that don’t end up being expanded upon and misused. The slippery slope of good intentions guarantees that spying as a shortcut for security means dissidents, oddballs, artists, and ordinary citizens that threaten the political and economic elite will be targeted next. The military-industrial-Congressional complex has morphed to include the National Security Agency and Homeland Security’s fascist state of perma-war and spying.

What Presidents Obama, Bush, and Clinton have done to rollback civil liberties may not seem so terrible to some at first sight, but what will subsequent Presidents do with these powers to spy, torture, imprison, and murder at will? What further will be lost the next time criminal terrorists strike? President Barack Obama took our hunger for hope and change, and gave us a totalitarian police state in what can only be characterized as an epic failure, a grand bait and switch, that is the most recent fascist coup waged upon American liberty.

A truly great nation refuses to falsely trade liberty for security, which assures neither, and only enslaves you in pervasive terror.

With torture, spying, murder, and perma-war the U.S. government – the President, Congress, and courts – has abused the constitution and is no longer legitimate. From this point forward, it is only a hop, skip and a jump to an iron fisted Authoritarian dictatorship. The entire American and global citizenry is now assumed to be guilty and monitored for evidence on the assumption that everyone is a terrorist until proven innocent.

Something has gone terribly wrong with the American project – the greatest expansion of liberty and well-being in history (albeit that always existed upon a shaky economic and ecological basis). Meaningless American political rhetoric’s reference to liberty, exceptionalism, and equality are at odds with the reality of spying and murdering in the name of security. At this juncture in America's ongoing transformation into a police state, it is essential that all lovers of liberty from tea party to progressives come together to resist oppression.

Edward Snowden is an American patriot further revealing the extent to which America has become a fascist police state that spies, tortures, murders, and wages perma-war to keep us "safe". His observation that “"the government has granted itself power it is not entitled” is spot-on. Whistle-blowers against militarism, civil liberty abuses, and ecocide are global heroes – and acting upon their courageous disclosures – provide humanity’s last chance for a just, free, equitable and sustainable future.

A technological security state has been established that fundamentally threatens civil liberties and environmental sustainability. The necessary protest and regime change required to address fossil fuel addiction and abrupt climate change – and other social change necessary to bring about a just, equitable, sustainable, and universally free world - are being violently suppressed by the police state, as social change of any sort that threatens the unjust status quo is labeled terrorism.

Who protects us from the government? America has become a two party fascist state. President Obama's message of progressive hope has collapsed into a totalitarian nightmare – as the government he leads spies on and murders its own citizens; while torturing, falsely imprisoning, and waging drone based perma-war terrorizing innocents. Critics are harassed by the IRS, as the media is bullied into silence. This failed Presidency has further laid the groundwork for final collapse of US liberty under the guise of security, while ignoring immediate threats posed by abrupt climate change and ecosystem collapse.

President Barack Obama's drone perma-war is terrorism, traumatizing innocent populations, murdering thousands to keep the oil flowing, and America over-consuming its unfair share of global resources. The lack of major terrorist attacks since 9/11 is due more to the small number and weakness of terrorist whackos, than the incautious military and anti-democratic response.

Now that President Barack Obama has set the precedent that Presidents can murder U.S. citizens without trial, what can we expect from successors? Given the steady erosion of civil liberties by Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama; how long until drones circle U.S. cities murdering citizens on suspicion alone? It's not as unlikely as it may once have seemed.

Social media and the Internet in general fundamentally threaten the system of coercion and misinformation upon which the ruling oligarchy depend to stifle dissent in order to continue to plunder the planet. That is why President Obama and many other petty dictators worldwide seek to monitor and control it.

Until now the Chinese government has set the standard for repressive, tyrannical, and ecocidal regimes. Now it is clear that when President Obama and Chinese President Xi next meet, they can compare and share citizen spying and repression tools, ways to avoid cutting emissions to urgently limit abrupt climate change, and how best to control and murder opponents of the police state.

Collapsing ecosystems and the inability of the perpetual growth paradigm to meet ever growing population’s consumption desires are leading to fascism to prop up the system. A free and un-wire tapped Internet is key to humanity's chance to remain free, achieve equity and justice, and avoid global ecosystem collapse. In an age of Democratic police states – where speaking freely and calling for regime change are thought crimes – it is hard to imagine a way to full spectrum sustainability sufficient to avoid ecosystem collapse.

There is NEVER any justification in a democratic society to spy on, torture, murder, or wage perma-war upon citizens and sovereign nations to keep us “safe”. Free speech and privacy are human rights that must be made universal and defended at all cost. Without the liberty required to change governments as necessary, there is no path to avoid global ecosystem collapse.

The United States must repeal the Patriot act and other post-911 rollbacks of civil liberties, dismantle the nascent police state including the NSA, stop spying upon and murdering citizens, end the state of perma-war terrorizing the world while killing innocents, and address the real and immediate security threat to us all of abrupt climate change and ecosystem collapse. Otherwise there is going to be a revolution.

America must never give up its freedom because of terrorists, inside and out of government. It is time for the U.S. and world to recommit to justice, liberty, peace, ecological sustainability, and the rule of law.