Category: Environment

Environment

No More Advertisements

on November 22, 2018

Hi All,

After reading a young bloggers recent post, I decided to disable Word Ads on my site. How could I in good faith continue to write about our wasteful lifestyles and promote sustainable living while ads for things that people clearly don’t ‘need’ were being displayed at the end of each of my posts? That irony left me feeling hollow.

So, for me, turning off all ads is the right decision. Mind you, I’m far from being wealthy and I’m still looking for ways to produce income, but I’d rather make a living strictly based on my skill-set than from gimmicky advertising.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my friends and family in the USA, and to all those everywhere who are thankful for having the human essentials of food, clothing and shelter. There are so many in our world who are in flux as refugees and who have nothing more than the clothes on their backs. For them, my greatest hope is an end to their suffering and more stable and prosperous lives in the future.

peace~henry

CultureEnvironment

Has Modernity Failed Us?

on November 18, 2018

Surrounded by desert, the ancient Egyptians depended on their intimate knowledge of the Nile River’s ever changing flow for survival. The river’s natural flood cycles fertilized the land and made it suitable for growing crops. The Nile is shown here as it flows through present-day Luxor, the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes. Photo Credit: Henry Lewis

I’m obsessed with history and archaeology. For me, there’s a fascinating mystique that surrounds the exploration of advanced ancient cultures from the early Egyptians and Sumerians to the later New World Mayas and Incas. One thing they all had in common was a deep respect for the natural world that sustained them.

Try to imagine the innate knowledge ancient humans once possessed; the kind of skills and oneness with nature that was required for groups to navigate their way from one continent to another during the last Ice Age. These early explorers depended more on their knowledge of and continuity with nature than on the primitive technologies that were available at that time. Where is such intuition today?

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CultureEnvironment

Making a Commitment to Sustainability

on October 27, 2018

“Climate change probably represents the biggest threat to human health over the next 10 or 20 years.”

Ashish Jha, Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.

The term ‘sustainability’ has been bandied around in academic circles and popular culture for decades, possibly to such an extent that it’s simply become another buzzword to be ignored. Google ‘sustainability’ and the Oxford Dictionary will offer the following:

Even the example sentences offered by the trusted source above reflect the contradictions inherent in the way we interpret sustainability and rationalize the consumer choices we make on a daily basis. On the one hand, we want ‘sustainable’ economic growth and all the material goodies it brings. On the other hand, we expect to breathe clean air, drink pure water and be able to build our houses safely on the edge of vast oceans.

Are these two scenarios mutually exclusive? Is it really possible to maintain current Western standards of living without endangering the health of our planet and the very existence of our species?

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Environment

Humanity’s self-destruction

on March 18, 2018

The death of cosmologist Stephen Hawking earlier this year made me sad on so many levels. A proponent of technological advancement without losing sight of our common humanity, Hawking was the most critical of critical thinkers, constantly questioning our perceptions of the universe and humanity’s place within it.

In the 2017 BBC documentary series “Expedition New Earth,” Professor Hawking gave a dire warning and shocked many by stating that the threats posed by global warming, over-population, epidemics, nuclear weapons, and overdue asteroid strikes made it necessary to establish human colonies on other planets within the next 100 years in  order to preserve the human species.

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EnvironmentPolitics

A new Dark Age in America

on December 22, 2017
By further revealing his administration’s incredibly backward looking energy policy, Donald Trump has once again made it clear that he’s only concerned about maintaining the status quo. In an effort to cement wealth in the hands of an elite few, he and his minions are seeking to give away even more taxpayer dollars to the corporate robber barons, especially in the field of energy.

Troglodytes like Trump still seem stuck in the Iron Age while many of the USA’s largest and most profitable industries have radically changed…

Antiquated policies that reward and support the oil, gas and dirty-burning coal industries at the expense of emerging energy-producing technologies will, over the long term, create fewer American jobs, make the US more energy-dependent and continue contributing to the warming of a planet that’s seriously close to its ecological tipping point.

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EnvironmentNature

Nature’s Fury

on September 24, 2017
Nature is what we all have in common~Wendell Berry
The summer of 2017 has been one for the record books as far as natural disasters are concerned. I spent two weeks visiting friends in Seattle and was greeted by smoke-filled air each day due to wildfires that were raging out of control in British Columbia, Washington and Oregon.
Next, I returned to the Southeastern USA just in time to witness the arrival of multiple record-breaking hurricanes that had churned their way across the Atlantic.
And then over the past few days, I’ve been intently following the post-earthquake rescues in my adopted home of Mexico.

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