The-Problem:-Civilization

By Tom Murphy / Do the Math Whenever I suggest that humans might be better off living in a mode much closer to our original ecological context as small-band immediate-return hunter-gatherers, some heads inevitably explode, inviting a torrent of pushback. I have learned from my own head-exploding experiences that the phenomenon traces to a condition of multiple immediate reactions stumbling over each other as they vie for expression at the same time. The neurological traffic jam leaves us speechless—or stammering—as our brain sorts out who goes first. ...

Editor’s note: Want to try lab-grown salmon? The US just approved it. Who needs wild salmon. By Colin Todhunter / COUNTERCURRENTS Sainsbury’s is one of the ‘big six’ supermarkets in the UK. In 2019, it released its Future of Food report. It is not merely a misguided attempt at forecasting future trends and habits; it reads more like a manifesto for corporate control and technocratic tyranny disguised as ‘progress’. This document epitomises everything wrong with the industrial food system’s vision for our future. It represents a dystopian roadmap to a world where our most fundamental connection to nature and culture — our food — is hijacked by corporate interests and mediated through a maze of unnecessary and potentially harmful technologies. ...

Editor’s note: The folly of controlling the rivers. “What will those who come after us think of us? Will they envy us that we saw butterflies and mockingbirds, penguins and little brown bats?” - Derrick Jensen Or will they despise us because we built dams which kill butterflies and mockingbirds, penguins and little brown bats? China Starts Construction on World’s Largest Hydropower Dam Brazil & China move ahead on 3,000-km railway crossing the Amazon ...

Editor’s note: When you invent nuclear energy (nukes) you invent radioactive waste Some proponents of nuclear energy refuse to give up on the technology. They blame the decline in nuclear energy and the high costs and long construction periods on the characteristics of older reactor designs, arguing that alternative designs will rescue nuclear energy from its woes. In recent years, the alternatives most often advertised are small modular (nuclear) reactors—SMRs for short. These are designed to generate between 10 and 300 megawatts of power, much less than the 1,000–1,600 megawatts that reactors being built today are designed to produce. ...

Editor’s note: The International Day for Biodiversity was celebrated on May 22, which commemorates the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity, a global treaty. What lessons have we learned from undoing past harms and conserving biodiversity for our planet’s future? Global efforts to restore forests are gathering pace, driven by promises of combating climate change, conserving biodiversity and improving livelihoods. Yet a recent review published in Nature Reviews Biodiversity warns that the biodiversity gains from these initiatives are often overstated — and sometimes absent altogether. ...

How Electricity was (and is) Sold to America By Elisabeth Robson / RadFemBiophilia’s Newsletter In 1915, General Electric released a silent promotional film titled The Home Electrical offering a glimpse into a gleaming, frictionless future. The film walks viewers through a model electric home: lights flicked on at the wall, meals cooked without fire, laundry cleaned without soap and muscle. A young wife smiles as she moves effortlessly through her day, assisted by gadgets that promised to eliminate drudgery and dirt. This was not a documentary—it was a vision, a fantasy, a sales pitch. At the time, only a small fraction of American households had electricity at all, and nearly 90% of rural families still relied on oil lamps, wood stoves, hand pumps, and washboards. But the message was clear: to be modern was to be electric—and anything less was a kind of failure. ...

Editor’s note: Brownsville, Texas - “ Element Fuels has received the necessary permitting to construct and operate a refinery capable of producing in excess of 160,000 barrels, or approximately 6.7 million gallons, per day of finished gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel,” said Founder and Co-CEO John Calce. “A permit for a greenfield refinery of this size, scope, and functionality has not been granted in the United States since the 1970’s. This speaks to the innovative approaches we are taking to address climate and sustainability concerns in cleaner, greener ways that are new to the refinery space.” ...

Editor’s note: “The 2025 Queensland floods refer to significant flooding that impacted the northeast Australian state of Queensland in late January, early February, into March and April 2025. The disaster resulted in at least two fatalities from flooding, 31 fatalities from a disease outbreak and prompted mass evacuation orders in Queensland’s coastal regions.” According to flood gauges, the enormous body of water has surpassed the 1974 event, widely considered the largest flood in Queensland history. But it was still sitting within the floodplain, Sheldon says, just “reaching the edges” of where people thought it would go. ...

Editor’s note: “What if you could save the climate while continuing to pollute it?” If that sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. But corporations across the globe are increasingly trying to answer this question with the same shady financial tool: carbon offsets. To understand what’s going on with the carbon market, it’s important to know the terms(term-oil), vocabulary and organizations involved. For starters, a carbon credit is different from a carbon offset. A carbon credit represents a metric ton of carbon dioxide or the equivalent of other climate-warming gases kept out of the atmosphere. If a company (or individual, or country) uses that credit to compensate for its emissions — perhaps on the way to a claim of reduced net emissions — it becomes an offset. ...

Editor’s note: “A new report from Harvard’s Electricity Law Initiative says unless something changes, all U.S. consumers will pay billions of dollars to build new power plants to serve Big Tech. Data centers are forecast to account for up to 12% of all U.S. electricity demand by 2028. They currently use about 4% of all electricity. Historically, costs for new power plants, power lines and other infrastructure is paid for by all customers under the belief that everyone benefits from those investments. ...