by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday; or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons; or that dancing around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”? Why are these “solutions” not sufficient? But most importantly, what can be done instead to actually stop the murder of our Planet?
While “personal solutions” have some effect, even the smallest things, but they will not really change anything unless we are, all together, prepared to change the system. It does not matter how “green” and environmentally-friendly you may make your lifestyle capitalism will still remain unsustainable. Thus system change that is required for the world to become a better place where people and the Planet count and not (just) money.
When it comes to climate change the question we also have to ask ourselves if why is the emphasis placed so much on the word “carbon” and everything almost is, even when it is pollution in the form of soot, and such, all called carbon, in the latter instance “brown carbon”. So, why? Because carbon has become a tradeable commodity, so to speak, with modern day indulgences, called carbon certificates and such. That does not make it right; the opposite rather. So, in other words, are we being sold somewhat of a falsehood or at least a half-truth?
The Hippies, who often today are being belittled, warned us already in the 1970s about pollution and what we were doing to the Planet by doing what we were doing. The message still stands for it is pollution that has been the culprit and is the culprit, industrial pollution and the pollution from vehicles, from the burning of fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas.
Many people today seem to forget that in around that same time of the Hippies scientists were telling us that the world was going to be hit by a new ice age and that we were going to end up with glaciers all over the place and to some extent the very same signs that then were claimed to be the signs of global warming were cited; the expansion of the Sahara and the Sahel, and books were written about it and movies made.
Fact is that the Earth is going through some kind of climatic upheaval but despite the fact that everyone – or almost everyone – is jumping up and down in triangles claiming carbon-dioxide and other “greenhouse” gasses being the culprit such changes are not something new. And, no, the last changes did not happen millions of years ago; they happened around a thousand years ago, and it would appear as if there is an almost 500 year cycle from cold to warm to cold, etc.
When the Romans were in Britain they grew grapes in this country, apparently almost as far north as Hadrian's Wall, for the making of wine. Then, and more for reasons of climatic change than anything else, in the early fifth century they just packed up and left.
Some centuries later the Vikings settled on a large island that they called Greenland and unless they were all seriously colorblind the “green” part of the word should be a giveaway. The island was covered in forests and meadows.
In the tenth century the son of the Viking chieftain of Greenland, one Leif Eriksson, arrived on the Labrador coast and, according to records, was presented with sweet black grapes by the local inhabitants. But less than hundred years later the Vikings seem to have abandoned Greenland for climatic reasons.
In the sixteenth century frost fairs were held on the Thames with the river, apparently, frozen to almost its total depth. The cold time seems to have then carried on, more or less, as far as winters are concerned, because some of the summers seem to have been very hot and dry at some times during King Henry VIII time, until about the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when it started to get warmer, incrementally, to where we are today.
While some of the climatic upheaval, or climate change, today is due, no doubt, to what we have been doing, in the name of progress and profit, to the Planet, some of it, probably around fifty percent, or even more, is due to the cycles the Earth seems to be going through on a more or less regular basis.
What we are facing at this very moment also is an Earth axis shift, which the powers-that-be claimed to be a shift of the magnetic north pole, and this will impact on the changes even more than anything. The magnetic north pole, by the way, cannot shift or move, at least not according what we were taught when I was a little younger, as it is located, according to what were taught, on an island off the north coast of Canada. In know that Wikipedia and other “sources” today claim it to be different but I am not buying that.
If the Earth axis is tilting, or even if it is that the magnetic field of the Planet is changing, this will have an impact on the likes of the Gulf Stream, the Jet Stream and many other weather and climate phenomena, and no matter how much we cut “carbon” it will not make much of a difference. That is not to say that we should not reduce or eliminate pollution of the air, the water and the soil, etc. we should and we must. But we must, along with this, also prepare to adapt to the changes and prepare.
But this is not going to happen in the current political and economic system where everything is run by some hidden agendas that just do not make sense to anyone who is prepared to think for him- or herself. The great problem is, though, that many, the great majority in fact, it would appear, are not prepared to think for themselves and want to leave that all to the politicians, the very same who have gotten us into much of the mess in the first place in many instances.
We have to be and create the changes that we want and need and the models for a new society, community by community and area by area and while there are many things that can be done on a individual basis others may and do require a community to do them.
There are some things, as said, that we can do on our own, and those can also be done on a larger scale, such as withdrawing our support for the current system; refusing to partake in the wild consumerism that we are being encouraged to partake in; and others. Creating the new models of the society that we would want, however, can only be done in a group, in a community, in a village, and therefore we must find like-minded folks to work together with.
© 2017
For the solar and wind industries in the United States, it has been a long-held dream: to produce energy at a cost equal to conventional sources like coal and 
Edwin Chota was killed in the forest he had fought to protect.
CHATTING WITH DAVID BRANDT outside his barn on a sunny June morning, I wonder if he doesn't look too much like a farmer—what a casting director might call "too on the nose." He's a beefy man in bib overalls, a plaid shirt, and well-worn boots, with short, gray-streaked hair peeking out from a trucker hat over a round, unlined face ruddy from the sun.
