Extinction bankers
Applauding
Earth System
Passing bell.
Terrorsome!
$6 Trillion
Scandalous
Fossil fuel subsidies.
Coal King
Gautam Adani
Third
Largest bank account,
$137.4 billion,
Madly stoking furnaces!
In recent conservation news, Captain Paul Watson, Founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society resigned in late July, 2022 from the organization he created and has fiercely led for close to half a century. A lifelong Environmental Activist, Watson founded Sea Shepherd in 1977 and has dedicated his life to the preservation and protection of biodiversity of oceans and marine life.
Throughout the years Sea Shepherd has made global headlines for its innovative tactics to stop illegal poaching and end wildlife slaughter in the world’s oceans. The #1 Animal Planet TV series Whale Wars gained worldwide recognition for the organization’s relentless campaign to end Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean: a victory that earned Watson international eco-celebrity status.
Watson’s recent decision comes after the USA Board of Directors has decided to turn away from the organization’s fundamental mission and motto to defend, conserve, and protect marine wildlife species and habitat through frontline direct action campaigns. Abandoning Watson’s core values, vision and the critical issues he and his crews have been bravely confronting for decades on the high seas, Sea Shepherd USA will shift its focus to elite, donor funded, scientific-based research endeavors.
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So after 40 years of “tough on crime,” it’s come to this. In addition to the military-industrial complex, we have the penal system / financial complex as something to worry about. We now have perverse incentives in place to continue the expansion of incarceration as the answer to all of our societal problems. It makes perfect sense to keep building new facilities whose sole purpose is to enrich the corporate investors, who enable governments to pretend they are addressing their crime problems by locking up miscreants for longer sentences. All in the name of being tough on crime, which politicians love to tout to their voters.
In the October 15 issue of Science Magazine, there’s an outstanding summary of current research and trends in the social sciences regarding incarceration in the US. They show how the past 40 years of tough on crime has ignored secular trends on reduced crime rates (yes, homicide rates for the last couple of years have gone up). Instead, the incarceration rate keeps going up, and we are building a class of people who find it impossible to function in society after they are released from prison.
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Sixty avaricious banks,
Subsidised profiteering,
Accelerating global heating,
Post Paris Agreement,
Twenty sixteen,
$4.6 trillion funding,
Megapetroleum projects,
Extinction bankers!
Seven years a trillion dollars,
Cutthroat business levelling Mother,
Twenty-five thousand banks,
Rinsed pressed laundered,
Planetary extinction fast-tracked!
One hundred fifty-two billion illegal log dollars,
Transcontinental oragnised FAT crime,
Lotta bank paper annually,
Gleeful pensions shareholders directors,
Homeless wildlife deadly silence,
Mother’s imperative climate stabilising native forest obliterated!
For forty-six wonderful years,
Spot on fluke thrilled us,
Awesome mysterious humpback kin,
Glacier Bay Sitka Sound,
Magdalena Escarpment Sea of Cortez.
Stranded lifeless Killisnoo Island,
Way too young to leave!
Superb oxygen-maker carbon-storer,
May thee seafloor enrich,
Gone but not forgotten.
Fishers fluke scarred,
Wretched pain fraught,
Planet-destroying horrid industry,
Fishing bone cutting entanglement gear,
Forever poisons rubbish marine debris.
Second largest brains orcas,
Twofold human adults,
Black/white largest prevalent dolphins,
Stunning sonar echolocation,
Pinpoint golf ball hundred-metre
split second!
Transient pack hunters,
Roaming oceans,
Sharks sealions porpoises,
Minke Gray calves,
Residents hug coastlines,
Herding balling devouring herring.
‘takayna/Tarkine inimitable oxygen gem,
Largest Southern temperate water-making
temple,
Purest planetary air,
Opulent Aboriginal heritage,
Indispensable climate stabaliser!
Chinese MMG heavy metal miners,
Ransacking church toxic tailings,
MP Sussan Ley’s blessings,
Pumpin’ poisons atop Pieman River,
Desecrating cherished rainforest,
Hideous biological annihilation!
Destroying rare Tasmanian masked owls,
Forest guardians harken nightly,
“Hoot . . . hoot, Save our Ship!”,
Now or never Australians,
Defend Mother’s sacredness,
Noblest direct-action campaign!
Cyanobacteria three point five billion years,
Oversufficiency oxygenated ozone shield,
Great forests four hundred million years,
Ocean plush green mats bacteria,
Gratitude Mother earthly oxygen orb!
Littlest photosynthetic organism,
Teeny bacteria largest oxygen surface,
Prochlorococcus planetary oxygen twenty
per cent exhaler,
More than Amazon, Congo, Indo/Malayan
rainforests combined,
Indebtedness beloved Mother Earth!
Unforgive us for we know!
Four legged friends’ co-evolvers,
You guided hunted protected us,
We turned dreadfully evilhearted.
Holier-than-thou learned hatred greed meanness.
We careened shockingly unmerciful,
‘Twasn’t oil trillion subsidies enough?
Matricide Athabasca MacKenzie naphthenic benzene tarred rivers,
Parks delisted boreal temples’ years steamed three hundred fifty degrees.
Tyrannical Jason Kenney, Premier Alberta,
Savagely eradicating wolfly kin.
Minus fifty degrees Siberian berezhlivyy,
Ancient Gmelin larches, Siberian dwarf pines,
Nana willows, balsam poplars,
Tenacious festina lente,
Timeless, noble yet vulnerable.
Gold, silver, black gold fever!
Magadan Oblast, Yano-Kolyma,
Goltsovoye, Natalka,
Omusskchansky Coal Cluster mines,
Eureka! Riches galore.
Oldest North American feathered friends,
Bigger than ducks, longer, thicker necks than grebes,
Splendiferous sculpted aquatic bodies,
Land walking nah,
Lifetime in water, save mating, nesting ashore.
Part submarine, part fighter jet,
Long open water runways,
Pattering into wind across watery faces,
Head down, hunched back, nose of jet.
Powerful wingbeats, impressive 112kph aeronautics.
Credulity, naiveté, vanity, confidence,
Irresponsibility, greed, planet-killing.
Men, money, power, immortalise,
The long game, high stakes, illusions.
Name your price? More!
Unctuous fossil fuel conmen seep assuredly,
Mustn’t leave anyone without,
Such slithery goop duplicity bathed.
Asphyxiating pollution, black gold drying up,
Price ever-rising, people alert.
Oppressive deathful hideous heat,
Combusting subsidised fossil fuels, wood pellets,
palm oil be damned.
Fire Age dire, so strange, past irrelevant,
No-narrative, no-analogue tomorrow.
So immense unimaginable coming upheavals,
Inherited knowledge arc, past to future, broken.
No precedent forthcoming,
Impossible to triangulate accumulated wisdom.
A future never known.
Hale diminutive warm-blooded hummingbirds,
Joyful, bathing, fearless, 80kph speedsters,
Heard before seen, iridescent metallics.
Brush-tipped tongues French kiss flowers,
One thousand to two thousand sexy daily osculations.
Rolling shoulder joints, wingtip figure eights,
Two hundred beats per second, the perfect hoverer.
Altering wing angle, forward, backward, sideways,
Enthralling upside-down airborne acrobatics, finesse.
Practise. Forty million years. Stupendous!
Highest animal oxygen requirements,
Nine thin-walled air sacs,
Supreme lung gas volume.
Three hundred breaths per minute rest,
Five hundred breaths per minute flight.
Copious nectar rich water, 160 per cent body weight, daily.
Gnats, flies, aphids, beetles,
Delectable spider silk-wrapped prey, proteinaceous insects!
Overnight food cache, crop satiates caloric needs,
Autumn gorge doubles body weight.
Sailing a twenty-seven hundred kilometre-migration!
Fulltime Pacific Northwest residents, Anna’s.
Unexampled Arctic climate storms frostbiting, deadly.
Lifeless looking miraculously still alive!
Urban rescuers warm feeders thrice daily,
Recipe in hand: one thumb sugar, four fingers water.
Blest be ye fine feathered friends!
#UnearthlyWails
#ZeroCombustionEconomy2030
#GoVegan
#RefuseStuff
#BoycottChineseGoods
#RefusePlastics
#WalkMore
#ForestBathing
#LoveNature
#LoveIsTheSolution
#GenZEmergency
Reese Halter is a bees/trees/seas defender.
His latest book is GenZ Emergency.
Email: HalterBooks@gmail.com for your autographed copy.
In Australia, order from the Bob Brown Foundation by emailing: Contact@BobBrown.org.au
If you’re like me and was coming of age when the first Matrix dropped in 1999, this was more than just a film. It was a paradigm shifting experience. From the storyline – a reality bending what-if, to special effects never before seen on the big screen, and a theme that would later lead me to question the very existence I knew which – is still evident today, in my adult career as a journalist. It was complete with the perfect pairing of angry, thought-proving, tracks from Rage Against the Machine.
SPOILER ALERTS!
By now, most of you have probably seen at least the first of the original Matrix trilogy. But if you haven’t – I suggest you stop reading now.
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O greatest long distance earthly wanderers,
Travelling limits of seemingly limitless seas.
Superlative endurance, Olympians of the sky,
Extreme in size, Royal’s tip-to-tip 3.5 metres.
Hale wise airborne centurions!
Light as a feather, lifetime at sea,
Furthermost range, pure gliders, windiest oceans.
Lifting force to air resistance astoundingly 40:1.
One hundred and twenty-thousand kilometres annually,
Eleven million eight-hundred thousand kilometres lifespan!
Before year 2020, what does not kill me makes me stronger. After the year 2020, it mutates and tries again. Freedom in the Unites States means you can choose to die if you wish. You have the right to refuse to wear a mask, and the organizations that you visit have the right to refuse you entry into their property if you decline to wear said mask. The reason these organizations have the right to refuse your entry is because you do not have the right to infect other people. When your rights impose a risk to other citizens, it becomes a societal problem.
Historically, free speech in the United States has seen limitations. You cannot shout “fire” in a crowded theatre. Free speech ends when it threatens lives of other citizens. Citizens have been tried for manslaughter when they urged other citizens to kill themselves. The great thing about the United States is that you may listen and follow the advice, no matter how naïve, of other citizens. If that advice results in your demise, then the mistake is yours, a decision you are free to make.
You may believe that you have the right to consume intoxicants and operate a vehicle, but if your behavior threatens the safety of other citizens, that right impinges on other citizens who have the right to be protected from your behavior. As a citizen, you have the right to refuse vaccination, which in some cases, has cost people their lives. Social media has become saturated with uncredentialed self-proclaimed “experts” who have found numerous reasons why you shouldn’t be vaccinated. These experts have reasons too long to discuss in this essay. Statistically speaking, there is, and I will not deny it, a small amount of risk if you get vaccinated, since the vaccine has not been tested on millions of people, but that risk is very, very small.
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Welcome to Witsuwit’en territory!
Keepers of the great watershed Widzin Kwah,
Generations immemorial honouring yin tah, earth.
Land living, breathing beings, intelligent creatures,
Respect, understand, harmony, the natural world.
Mysterious adventurers, epic long-distance voyagers,
We landlubbers marvel at your Royal Highnesses.
Marbled gray, sleek tapered head, streamlined robust body,
A dozen knuckles supporting eighty thousand pounds,
Barnacles, sea lice, ecosystems within gray’s ecosystem. Hallelujah!