“I was born dead,” remarks Julia Butterfly Hill, almost in passing.

“Literally?” I ask.

Yes — she in fact needed to be resuscitated upon birth. Perhaps that’s one key to understanding how she, at age 23, was able to find the clarity and courage to occupy a California Redwood named Luna for over two years.

It was that experience that raised her consciousness regarding her consumption habits. After all, as she says, the people bringing her supplies risked arrest and potential harm; she had to be mindful of every detail.

Now, Julia is a free ranging activist, tackling social justice and environmental issues, and traveling the world giving workshops and holding conversations.

I’m sitting with Julia in Indianapolis at a small gathering of environmental activists. The people around this table struggle daily with the conundrum of fighting for the environment in a world where it seems too few people care. And even if enough people did care and big change happened fast, isn’t it too late anyway?

Julia doesn’t obsess over these sorts of questions and so she’s a drink of cool clear water to an apocalyptic zealot like me.

“Doesn’t it just drive you crazy how people behave?” someone asks.

Julia laughs. It’s one of the first things you notice about this 34-year-old woman. Her laugh.

She responds that she doesn’t worry so much about the “unconscious people, it’s the supposedly conscious people who are full of contradictions” — like environmentalist gatherings that don’t have recyclables.

But don’t get started on the subject of recycling.

Recycling, she says, is just a way to “make us feel better” about consuming in the first place.

“We’re addicted to comfort,” she says. Few are willing to challenge their personal status quo – whether it’s to put themselves in danger of arrest or harm, or to cut back on their lifestyle, or to skip taking a vacation this year.

She doesn’t admonish the comfort-addicted among us, though. Instead, she laughs again, her brown hair falling into her eyes. My eyes move to her t-shirt, with words Mother Earth.

Not everybody “can be on the front lines,” she says. Not everyone can put their bodies on the line.

The key to activism?

Loving action = fierce love.

Julia doesn’t operate out of anger or fear, but out of love. She says she began her sit in Luna out of “grief for what was happening to the Redwoods.” But that grief morphed into love. Love for the earth. Love for humanity.

That love for humanity makes her a shifting target for both those in opposition to her as well as environmental groups who wish she was as angry as they.

She’s able to parry that opposition by transcending traditional dichotomies.

“But how do we get people to care about our issues?” someone asks.

Julia ponders a moment, then answers: “By finding out what they care about.”

The “good stories” are out there, she maintains. Stories where people get together and make their neighborhood a better place — for example, the City Repair Project that started in Portland, Oregon, and has spread across the country.

Late in the gathering she wonders aloud if the carbon imprint of flying to Indianapolis and driving to this event was worth it. “I might have done more good by staying away,” she says.

We don’t agree, of course, having drunk the cool clear water of Julia’s clarity. And heard her laugh, over and over.

But I get the point. The more conscious you are about your consumption habits, the more you start to question every single decision.

“I’m in service not because the world’s in peril,” she says in closing. “I’m in service because it’s what I want to do.” — Jim

Julia’s blog can be found at: http://juliabutterflyhill.wordpress.com/

I’m no fun at parties anymore.

I’m like that guy whose only conversational gambit is to talk about the Spassky-Fisher match of 1973. Or the geek who has discovered SecondLife or WorldOfWarcraft. Or the airhead, who only wants to talk about celebrities, and other virtual worlds.

Or more to the point, that guy who has recently converted, and sees everything through the lens of the revealed.

In my case, that lens is cascading, endless bad news about species collapse, environmental collapse, peak oil and gas and phosphorus, toxic breaches and endocrine disruptions, and climate warming leading to ocean acidification. It’s the human-made horrors of the last century.

Because of what Jim and I are doing here, we are required, by our self-stated commitment, to be The ApocoDocs. We have to filter the news about the five apocalyptic scenarios, as well as finding stories of Recovery.

Sure, we make fun of all the news items, and make silly quizzes — that’s the gimmick, to get readers to pay attention by being entertained — and it’s kind of a hoot to be snarky about stuff that scares the shit out of me.

To construct that “fun,” Jim and I spend an aggregate hour or so each day, selecting the news stories we want to showcase — because there’s far more out there than we could include. And to be true ApocoDocs, we also have to know the background, understand the context, and be able to make informed predictions and judgments.

Today I read, for “fun,” a few chapters from the gorgeous, astonishing publication called Sustaining Life, from Oxford Univ. Press, which includes gems like:

The herbacide atrazine, widely used in the United States (~75 million pounds are applied each year) but banned in seven European Union countries, has been shown to change the sex of Leopard Frogs (Rana pipiens) and to slow their gonadal development at levels of only 0.1 parts per billion, a concentration that is found in rainwater essentially everywhere in the United States.

This fragile, collapsing, feedback-looping, it’s-so-much-worse-than-we-thought world is the world as it is. I am looking at the world through the lens of the revealed.

I saw the Obama/Clinton rivalry only through this lens: who might have a chance in hell of enlisting the world in the struggle to save itself?

I see the “threat of terrorism” through this lens as a paltry, puny, gnat of a problem, in comparison with overfishing, ocean acidification, and environmental toxification.

I see the recession we’re in as only another goddamn barrier to recovery, since there’s less money to spend on what matters: halting the spread of mercury and other heavy metals far and wide, through coal mining and burning.

I see the continuing rise of gas prices only through this lens (even as it bites me in the wallet), because the only way we will reduce our CO₂ emissions is if it’s too costly not to — and if economic depression means we get energy efficient, then it’s a step in the right direction.

I see every plastic bag, every disposable lighter, every discarded bit of diaphonous wrap through this lens: in the carcasses of albatross chicks, having had it disgorged into their gullets by their parents as “food.”

I see every container ship through this lens: the ballast water they bring and dump inevitably contains alien species, some of which become invasive, and kill off the native species — an endless, continuous stream of ecosystem damage from place to place.

I like to think that this newfound zealotry helps me understand the perspective of other zealots: Islamic fundamentalists, anti-abortion militants, rooters for Armageddon, neoconservatives, fascists, Earth Liberation Frontists, Ayn Randians, Scientologists, and all the other glazed-eyed true believers. When it all makes sense through the new lens, we then frame the rest of the world through those glasses.

And like any zealot, I’m of course convinced that my zealotry is more right than anyone else’s, because I have the facts of science on my side. I can say “my fifty years of rational, empirical, evidence-based thinking has led me to conclude….”

I can say “take a look at this, and this, and this, and this…”

But it doesn’t make me any more fun at parties.

O wretched lens, through which I must now see.

Whether the next president is Obama or (cringe) McCain, quite apart from rebuilding the charred ethical wasteland of the Administrative branch of government, coping with the ruins of the housing market and its effects on the economy, and dealing with the aortic congestion caused by ever-increasing energy prices, he will be facing complex, system-wide, slow-motion apocalypses that will span his presidency.

Among them, collapsing ecosystems:

So what’s Plan Bee? [London Guardian, Sun, May 25, 2008]

Over 50 percent of oceanic shark species threatened with extinction [Aquatic Conservation, via EurekAlert, Fri, May 23, 2008]

Biodiversity Loss Puts People At Risk: World Wildlife Fund [World Wildlife Fund via ScienceDaily, Wed, May 21, 2008]

Climate ‘accelerating bird loss’ [BBC, Tue, May 20, 2008]

UN Experts To Say 2010 Biodiversity Target Elusive [Planet Ark via Reuters, Mon, May 19, 2008]

‘Frightening’ future must be avoided to retain the integrity of planet we share [The Scotsman, Sat, May 17, 2008]

Window Of Opportunity For Restoring Oaks Small, New Study Finds [USDA Forest Survey, via ScienceDaily, Fri, May 16, 2008] More information is available on the Species Collapse scenario

And, declining resources worldwide:

Get used to high food costs, water shortages [Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Wed, May 28, 2008]

Oil crisis triggers fevered scramble for the world’s seabed [London Daily Telegraph, Tue, May 27, 2008]

Midwest’s message: Hands off our lakes [Chicago Tribune, Tue, May 27, 2008]

Poor soil lowers world’s production of food [Ventura County Star, Sun, May 25, 2008]

Drought turning futures to dust [Houston Chronicle, Sun, May 25, 2008]

Shell ’selling suicide’ by preferring tar sands to wind [Guardian (UK), Thu, May 22, 2008]

Famine Looms as Wars Rend Horn of Africa [New York Times, Sat, May 17, 2008]

More information is available on the Resource Depletion scenario

And, Climate Chaos:

Large Methane Release Could Cause Abrupt Climate Change As Happened 635 Million Years Ago [University of California - Riverside via ScienceDaily, Fri, May 30, 2008]

White House issues climate report 4 years late [Associated Press, Thu, May 29, 2008]

Scientists warn of rising Pacific Coast acidity [The New York Times via Associated Press, Wed, May 28, 2008]

G8 meet sidesteps midterm gas cuts [The Japan Times, Mon, May 26, 2008]

Billions wasted on UN climate programme [London Guardian, Mon, May 26, 2008]

Tufts global warming study eyes cost of doing nothing [Houston Chronicle, Sun, May 25, 2008] More information is available on the Climate Chaos scenario

AND he will be dealing with the tremendous economic upheaval of these and other apocalyptic (yet realistic) scenarios of grinding, slow-motion, systemic collapses over the next decade.

These realities need to be addressed by the candidates in the coming months — because these are the issues that will make a real difference to our children and grandchildren.

There are also signs of hope, here and there:

Green Firms Rewarded By Financial Markets [Strategic Management Journal, Thu, May 29, 2008]

New study finds most North Pacific humpback whale populations rebounding [NOAA, via EurekAlert, Fri, May 23, 2008]

Oregano oil works as well as synthetic insecticides to tackle common beetle pest [Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, Fri, May 23, 2008]

Simple, Low-cost Carbon Filter Removes 90 Percent Of Carbon Dioxide From Smokestack Gases [American Chemical Society via ScienceDaily, Wed, May 21, 2008]

US Changes Course, Bans Drilling In Arctic Wetland [Planet Ark via Reuters, Mon, May 19, 2008]

Recovery plan kills species’ foe, thins fire-prone forests [Redding News, Sat, May 17, 2008]

Prince Charles urges forest logging halt [The Post (Pakistan), Fri, May 16, 2008]More information is available on this Recovery scenario

We need to see thoughtful, reasoned, rational acknowledgement of the sacrifices required by these last few party generations, if we are to have any hope of ending the next decade with a world remotely recognizable as related to how we live today.

So what did the residents of Fort Bragg do — to help figure out a new way to clean up their dioxin problem? They invited Paul Stamets to speak.

I first encountered Stamets at the 2006 Bioneers gathering in Marin County. This annual event gathers all sorts of amazing scientists, social justice activists, and forward-thinking folks. Through plenary speeches and workshops and panels and dance parties, people share their ideas and success stories about healing the planet.

Stamets may not be the most dynamic speaker ever, but in his plenary speech, he presented a host of ways that mycoremediation can help heal the planet. Mycoremediation — a new word to me at the time — is remediation through the use of mushrooms.

Some of it is so fanciful you think you’ve fallen down the rabbit hole with Dorothy, to mix a cultural metaphor. In fact, he delivered his speech sporting a cool looking hat made entirely from mushrooms.

Check all the great ideas and books that Stamets offers at http://www.fungi.com

And check out www.bioneers.org

This year’s Bioneers conference is Oct. 17-19. Maybe see you there.

Jim

I just watched an ad promoting the RoundUp Pump — or something like that — a device that you pump up, and then simply pull the trigger and stream out “kill.”

The competition in the ad is between a hand-sprayer, and the Pump. “5 minutes of continuous spray” they say. They show the weeds growing between concrete. The hand-sprayer loses, with a cramp. The Pump wins, killing off driveway weeds.

And I think of that chemical, draining off the driveway, going into the waterway. And think about what that chemical — designed to kill plants — might do when it drains away. It’s designed to kill. Or, diluted, weaken.

Yeah, dilution. Yeah, it’s only one driveway.

But it’s also “yeah, I’m going to spray this bit of continuing death onto the world, so I don’t have to lean over.”

Weeds? It’s only nature trying to re-integrate with us. Surely we can lean over, and pull up the weed, instead of spraying continuing death. Heck, plant it back where you don’t mind it being — it’ll feel better. But jeez, as part of recovery, we have to start changing the idea that we can just pound on weeds — of any kind — with chemicals, without damaging everything else too.

From Wildlife Conservation Society:
“A long-term study by the Wildlife Conservation Society, the BioDiversity Research Institute, and other organizations has found and confirmed that environmental mercury–much of which comes from human-generated emissions–is impacting both the health and reproductive success of common loons in the Northeast.”

Pretty much…everything I posted today could have been under the heading of “Species Collapse,” but then you might have come upon our homepage and thought there was a bug (or endangered bug) in the system because of the repetition of the species collapse symbol.

So I mixed it up, because I’ve learned over the months of doing this site that if I don’t, I’ll get overwhelmed.

Let’s take today’s findings one story at a time.

1) Polar bears’ status as threatened is being delayed by the Interior.

2) Eels are declining

3) Next, I found this loon story and decided I had to search for good news just to keep my spirits up. So I found the good news that a giant wind farm is being constructed in Southern California.

Of course, I forgot for that moment that the one real problem with wind energy is that birds are kind of brainless and fly into them and sliced and diced or simply bludgeoned to death.

4) so then I found the giant oyster story– a natural for our Biome Breach scenario — and sure enough it was a classic tale of a human intervention creating an invasive species situation.

5) having interpolated a couple of non-species collapse stories, I returned to my loon story.

Late in that story, I find this quote: “This study demonstrates how top predators such as common loons can be used as the proverbial ‘canaries-in-the-coalmine’ for pollutants that concern humans as well,” said David C. Evers of the BioDiversity Research Institute and lead author of the study. “Our findings can be used to facilitate national and global decisions for regulating mercury emissions from coal-burning plants and other sources.”

There’s that metaphor again: canary in the coalmine, one we’ve been using for bats in the northeast and pteropods in the Atlantic and…

It seems chillingly true that the planet is being divided into the haves and the have nots. On one end, the endangered species: the polar bears, the eels, the loons, the bats, the pteropods, the eastern hemlock, the honey bees and … on the other end, the oysters and rats and jellyfish and cane toads and even the Asian harlequin ladybird….

Biomes are breached, species collapse, climate is changed, metaphors proliferate like … well, like oysters and rats and rabbits and cane toads.

Let’s just declare the human species as threatened or endangered. That may be the wake up call we need.

Jim

I have been obsessing about the bat problem — the un-hibernating bats in New York and Vermont, flying out of the caves to a wintry landscape because they’re starving to death, littering the snow around their hiberniums.

And I think I realized today the reason for the obsession:

Bats ‘R’ us.

We’ve been sleepwalking through the last fifty years — mentally hibernating while the evidence piles up around us of what we’re doing to our world — and we’re just now waking up. We’re opening our eyes, and realizing that something’s wrong. We’re sick, we’re poisoned, we’re hungry, and the fat stores are about used up.

Normally, we’d just go out and get some more land, conquer another civilization, pump another aquafir, find some more solutions — it’s worked every other time for humankind, right?

We had a great autumn, eating twice our body weight of the world. We flew around with abandon, delighted in the evening sky.

But now, we’re realizing that a lot of what we ate was toxic. That our resistances are down, and all isn’t quite how it should be. And we’re waking up from our hibernation, realizing that we may have screwed it all up over the last fifty years.

And there’s not much but snow, out there.

Here’s the problem: we have developed, over the last fifty years, a belief that we can transgress with impunity.

We can transgress countries (viz. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and countless minor incursions in between). We can transgress economies (viz. the World Bank, the IMF, the overdevelopment industry [see Confessions of an Economic Hit Man], and countless economic incursions). We can transgress privacy (viz. the credit system, “homeland security,” and grocery-store cards that give us a discount so they can track our every purchase).

We can transgress science (viz. the well-financed “oh gosh there’s doubt” about climate impacts of massive output of CO2, when there was little real doubt among real scientists). We can transgress representative government (viz. the bush administration’s executive hegemony, over the last six years).

But worst of all is that for fifty years and more — one could argue that it’s built into our DNA — we have believed that we could transgress Nature with impunity.

What I’ve been seeing, over the last few months of attending to the Apoc scenarios, to distill it for this site, has truly terrified me. We have imagined that we were kings of the world. We have imagined that we could do no wrong, that any business was good business, that the world would take whatever we could mete out.

We were wrong. We should have known better, but of course we didn’t want to know.

It’s been fun, these last decades. I’ve just turned 50, and have had five decades of relative opulance and luxury. We didn’t have to worry about carbon footprints, or climate collapse. We didn’t have to think about what we were doing to the rainforests by eating a Big Mac. We didn’t have to wonder if there’d be wildflowers, much less most grocery produce, in five years, if the bees die off.

We didn’t worry about the pthalates in plastic. About dead zones. About ocean acidification. About mercury in what fish are left. About untethered genetic modification for profit.

All we had to worry about was nuclear war, which was just a rumble in the distance.

We are now facing facts that make it clear that, to have a viable civilization in fifteen years, we have to make radical change, faster than any of us want.

We are stuck with this. We, my generation and all above and below it, must recognize that a dramatic restructuring of priorities, and of our willingness to transgress, is required. That’s a lot of what the PostApocology site is about — trying to make it clear how far we’ve transgressed, in so many ways.

If we don’t make dramatic change, then we will be restructured anyway, just less orderly, and with more violence.

Because the shit will hit the fan. Our transgressions have caught up with us. We have to start shifting today, if we are to have any hope of having a good tomorrow.

From AP News:
The French government on Saturday suspended the use of genetically modified corn crops in France while it awaits EU approval for a full ban. The order formalized France’s announcement Jan. 11 that it would suspend cultivation of Monsanto’s MON810, the seed for the only type of genetically modified corn now allowed in the country.

This good news regarding GM corn — increasingly recognized as something with limited utility, unexpected consequences, and uncertain dangers — is tempered by bad news from Brazil:

One of the varieties authorized was a pest-resistant crop called MON 810 by its maker, the US biotech company Monsanto, and marketed under the names Guardian and YieldGard.

It was officially banned in France last weekend amid concerns that it could have an effect on insects, a species of earthworm and micro-organisms. (from AFP: Brazil authorizes genetically modified crops)

Hard to locate much background on the politics, at least online, especially regarding the Brazilian choice. If anyone has background, do post, please.

The PostApocaDocs were relatively agnostic about GM corn, and GM in general — until we learned of “Gene Flow,” which is part of the dance of plants in nature.

One concern associated with genetic engineering is “gene flow”–that is, the movement of genes from one organism to another. As a part of their normal reproductive cycle, plants transmit their DNA to other compatible plants via pollen. Genes from fields of crop plants can be transmitted by pollination to plants in the same or other fields, or in some cases even to other closely-related non-crop plants. (from Cornell Public Information, Horizontal Gene Transfer)

We also paid attention to the way in which most GM experiments are undertaken — frequently a shotgun, random-chance way of literally shooting shards of DNA into cells, and then seeing what happens. This may explain some of the “unintended consequences.”

In the end, we have concluded that until much better scientific understanding of GM crops on the consequences on human and non-human life, we should take the industries’ blandishments regarding the benefits with a pound of salt. And we should have much better oversight.

Shouldn’t we have the EPA paying close, close attention to human and environmental health, kind of like the FDA, for this sort of thing, independent of the multibillions involved?