Common Dreams is currently hosting a self-congratulatory little article by Jane Etherington about how bourgeois suburbanites can make a "positive impact" on the environment by drying clothes on clotheslines instead of burning energy in dryers, and in response to my predictably sarcastic comment, someone asked me for a better "solution" than Ms. Etherington's pitiful, white-bread environmentalism.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any “solutions,” no matter how radical, and neither does anyone else. It’s a testament to the nullity of public debate on this issue that anyone can even ask about “solutions,” as if we were still living in 1964, when there was still a chance to avoid catastrophic degradation of the environment.

What we can do now is give future generations a little hope for partial recovery, and even this relatively modest aim would require a radical commitment equally repulsive to liberals, conservatives, and virtually everyone else except a few shock-troops from ELF and anti-whaling pirates from GreenPeace.

I am sorely disappointed. The celebrated “Tour de France” has become a sprint for a drug-testing-urine stained yellow jersey. American baseball seems more pharmaceutical than fantastic, and you’d get lousy odds that basketball referees are still entirely trustworthy. And the epitome of “pure sport”, the Olympics, has morphed into a five star marketing tool for Pfizer, Eli Lilly and GlaxoSmithKline. Sport for the sheer joy of competition has staked its final existence on the humble playing field of the Wallaston County Primary School, in Natwich, Cheshire, England.

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For the past few weeks news sources have talked about the dangerous influence alternative fuels have on our cost of food.

Yesterday’s news about the Interior Department’s finally listing polar bears as a threatened species seemed to cause hardly a ripple on the pond of public concern. And why should it at a time many are suffering from “concern fatigue.” Some are expending so much mental energy on the Democratic presidential primaries that they have heart for little else. Even wars, the economy, and a global food crisis have taken a temporary backseat to concern about the cataclysmic natural disasters in Myanmar and China.

A recent Gallup Poll showed that Americans perceived polluted drinking water as more of a threat than climate change, with 53% saying that they worried "a great deal" about it and 37% expressing the same level of concern over global warming. Gallup noted that pollution of drinking water has been a major concern since 1990.

The slaughter of cougars, wolves, coyotes, and other carnivores, has been common in North America since colonists arrived nearly four centuries ago. Today, the war on carnivores continues. The U.S government alone kills over three million animals, including 100,000 carnivores. Animals are poisoned, trapped, snared, beheaded, clubbed, shot from the air, and gassed in their dens.

There was an interesting piece in the Fashion section of the NYTimes this Sunday that is a little weird but it gets into some pretty fun stuff. The piece follows a kid from Brooklyn who is hell bent on becoming an organic farmer. Trucker hats, Carhartts, and Pabst were the fashion but now some are putting the heart behind the fashion and finding the funk in farming.

For those who are too young to remember, early miners had a cage in their mines inhabited by canaries as an insurance policy against an explosion caused by methane gas or other deadly toxin(s) that could endanger their mine. The canary had small lungs and was particularly susceptible to these gasses, so if you noticed the canary had died or was acting sickly, it was time to high-tail it out of the mine until the problem could be fixed. If only our problem was that simple, because with us, it's more than a canary dying, and other than migrating to other worlds which is decades or more away, man is destined to stay on earth and gradually witness the "canaries" of all types dying by the millions.

Custer's Pipeline & Genocide Denial

As the fires in Southern California continue to rage, consuming thousands of homes, tens of thousands of acres of land and displacing nearly a million residents, it may help to better understand how the winds in this region have historically made these natural disasters worse than they would otherwise be. And also to see how this circulatory phenomenon affects the coastal marine ecosystem.

There are many ways to take action to change the world's heedless path toward the precipice of Catastrophic Climate Change (and Peak Oil, Peak Water, etc ...). We can act as individuals, families, communities, businesses, nations ... And, we can foster action by others through our own actions ... directly and indirectly.

When it comes to the easiest first steps toward a better relationship with the environment, for the rich developed world, two easy actions have real impact and start the path toward real change: replacing incadescents with compact fluorescent bulbs and using canvas bags.

As for the second, here is a video that is worth watching and helping go viral.