CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, AUG 29, 2023 https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/only-idiots-believe-the-us-is-protecting?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email The Economist has taken a keen interest in Australia lately, which if you know anything about The Economist is something you never want to see happen to your country. Two articles published in the last few days by the notorious propaganda outlet have celebrated the fact that Australia appears to be the […]
Park rangers in a white pickup truck rammed a makeshift barrier to which members of the climate campaign group Seven Circles had chained themselves following a standoff with angry drivers trying to enter the festival.
The rangers emerged from their trucks with sirens blaring and guns drawn, ordering the activists onto the ground and manhandling several into handcuffs after they failed to comply quickly enough.
In a video of the incident posted to social media, one demonstrator can be heard shrieking and sobbing “we’re nonviolent!” while another makes a half-hearted attempt to evade capture by denying involvement with the protest.
The rangers can be heard informing the demonstrators they are “trespassing on tribal land.” Several were reportedly taken into custody. The roadblock, located between the tiny town of Gerlach and Burning Man’s temporary purpose-built metropolis Black Rock City, prevented cars from passing in either direction on a road already notorious for traffic during the opening days of the festival. The event brings 80,000 people to the Black Rock Desert for a week of dancing, themed camps, events, and by some accounts, copious drug use.
In a video shot earlier on Sunday, the protesters dare angry drivers to “call the cops” as the festivalgoers’ efforts to fold up the barrier are stymied by activists chaining themselves to it.
Seven Circles claimed the protest was meant to draw attention to “capitalism’s inability to address climate’s ecological breakdown” and the “popularization of Burning Man among affluent people who do not live the stated values of Burning Man, resulting in the commodification of the event.”
The festival’s goals of being carbon-negative by 2030 are not sufficient, the group said in a statement on Sunday.
However, the event’s most affluent guests often enter via private jet rather than driving the long, hot road through the desert, landing at an airfield set up specifically to accommodate these high-rollers.
Dedicated to the spirit of “radical self-reliance,” the Burning Man Project bans the use of currency inside festival gates and requires attendees to bring whatever they need for the week. The festival’s “leave no trace” rule requires attendees to take all their trash out of the desert with them when the party is over, an edict which is not always followed.
Trash collected at Burning Man Festival
In January, the festival organization sued the federal Bureau of Land Management for allegedly violating environmental laws by approving a massive geothermal energy project less than a mile from Gerlach.
The company behind the project countered by touting geothermal’s green-energy bona fides and attacking Burning Man for the “copious amounts of fossil fuels” its annual gathering consumes
This post is an introduction to the revolutionary book Regenesis . No pdf yet but its available on Kindle at US$ 4.99
Farming is the world’s greatest cause of environmental destruction—and the one we are least prepared to talk about.
We criticize urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land.
We have plowed, fenced, and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go hungry and the price of food is rising faster than ever.
Now the food system itself is beginning to falter. But, as George Monbiot shows us in this brilliant, bracingly original new book, we can resolve the biggest of our dilemmas and feed the world without devouring the planet.
Regenesis is a breathtaking vision of a new future for food and for humanity. Drawing on astonishing advances in soil ecology, Monbiot reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming.
He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower revolutionizing our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from plows and poisons; to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow protein and fat.
Together, they show how the tiniest life forms could help us make peace with the planet, restore its living systems, and replace the age of extinction with an age of regenesis.
……Of the cases Monbiot considers in Regenesis, three stand out because he seems to think they represent models that work, or will work. These three could be seen as his proposal, his three-legged stool to support a sustainable food supply.
One of these is a vegetable farm in England, run by a man named Tolly;
Third are perennial varieties of rice and wheat (those we’ve eaten heretofore, which is to say since the Neolithic, are all annuals), grasses which set down deep roots and have friendlier relationships with soil, water, pests and variable weather.
The Free 