His first step was to ditch the word civilisation, a term he argues is really propaganda by rulers. “When you look at the near east, China, Mesoamerica or the Andes, where the first kingdoms and empires arose, you don’t see civilised conduct, you see war, patriarchy and human sacrifice,” he says. This was a form of evolutionary backsliding from the egalitarian and mobile hunter-gatherer societies which shared tools and culture widely and survived for hundreds of thousands of years. “Instead, we started to resemble the hierarchies of chimpanzees and the harems of gorillas.”

Instead Kemp uses the term Goliaths to describe kingdoms and empires, meaning a society built on domination, such as the Roman empire: state over citizen, rich over poor, master over slave and men over women. He says that, like the biblical warrior slain by David’s slingshot, Goliaths began in the bronze age, were steeped in violence and often surprisingly fragile.

Throughout the 20th Century, humanity demanded more and more land leading to the loss of vast areas of natural forest and grassland. Today, around half the world's land is farmed, used to grow crops or graze animals.

However, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), global agricultural land use peaked in the early 2000s and has been slowly falling ever since. Around the world, farmland is being replaced by grasslands, trees and bush. Wild animals are returning to abandoned pasturelands in areas they had once dominated.

Reaching "peak agricultural land" does not mean the problem of deforestation is solved. Growing demand for products like beef, soy, cocoa and palm oil has put increasing pressure on land across South America, South East Asia and Africa. In the last decade, the world lost an area of tropical forest twice the size of Spain.

Still, acre-for-acre across the world there has been yet more farmland abandonment, driven by reforestation in Europe and North America and the abandonment of pastures in Australia and Central Asia.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27377775

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/1251170

Canada's record-breaking 2023 wildfires exposed more than 350 million people in North America and Europe to air pollution that likely contributed to tens of thousands of deaths, according to new estimates published Wednesday.

And voters keep voting for politcans to extract more fossil fuels and make this worse. ..

FA and FO I guess.

Four African countries are set to run out of vital emergency food supplies in the next three months, putting the lives of millions of malnourished children at risk, new research has found.

The analysis, which was carried out by the charity Save the Children and shared exclusively with The Independent, were described as “unthinkable” by Moazzam Malik, CEO for Save the Children UK.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/1247073

Charleston is one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities – and one of the most flood-prone. As climate change prompts sea levels to rise and storms to grow more intense, this historic city has become a warning bell for what’s to come along America’s coasts:

WTF ? Is this sheer stupidity something citizens are proud of ?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/41953366

Archived

A group of 87 Russian scientists has called on President Vladimir Putin to block a controversial bill that would allow clear-cut logging along the shores of Lake Baikal, the Kommersant business newspaper reported Tuesday, citing their collective letter.

The government reportedly signed off on long-stalled amendments this summer, allowing so-called sanitary logging in the area around Baikal — a practice meant to curb damage from fires, pests and other threats. Scientists say they repeatedly raised objections during two years of debate but were ignored.

In July, two environmental protection committees in Russia’s lower-house State Duma demanded that the bill be reworked before lawmakers scheduled votes on passing the amendments.

In their letter, the group of scientists warned Putin that the measure could encourage arson of healthy forests for profit, destabilize soil and pollute the UNESCO-protected lake. They said allowing the removal of felled wood from Baikal’s protected area would effectively commercialize its forests, while artificial reforestation could worsen erosion and wash nutrients into the water.

The letter also criticizes provisions that would allow the construction of tourism infrastructure across more than 4,000 hectares (10,000 acres) of the protected area and remove Baikal’s water protection zone from its ecological buffer. That, the scientists warn, would open shoreline land to development.

[...]

Experts [are] warning that heavy machinery, soil runoff and “forest amnesty” rules will damage Baikal’s ecosystem. They say the bill’s opaque system for reclassifying land risks prioritizes development over conservation.

UNESCO, which granted Baikal World Heritage status in 1996, earlier this year raised concerns over the “uncertain legal protection” of the lake. A Change.org petition against the bill has been signed by more than 115,000 people.

Sweden's indigenous Sami fear they will lose their livelihood and culture if plans go ahead to mine a large rare earths deposit located on their traditional reindeer grazing grounds in the far north.

India’s farmers have already faced mounting hardship, with millions saddled with high debts, low incomes and heavy crop losses in the face of increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather conditions brought on by the climate crisis.

For days, farmers in the Indian state of Punjab watched the pounding monsoon rains fall and the rivers rise with mounting apprehension. By Wednesday, many woke to find their fears realised as the worst floods in more than three decades ravaged their farms and decimated their livelihoods.

Hundreds of thousands of acres of bright green rice paddies – due to be harvested imminently – as well as crops of cotton and sugar cane were left destroyed as they became fully submerged in more than five feet of muddy brown flood waters. The bodies of drowned cattle littered the ground.

This crisis has not been India’s alone. Across the border, in Pakistan’s agriculture-heavy province also called Punjab, the devastation caused by floods has been even more catastrophic, with almost 2 million people evacuated and about 4,000 villages submerged in flood waters.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/41826094

Archived

"Based on current [satellite] images, the area [of the slick] already measures 350 square kilometers. In my entire career, I’ve never seen such an extensive film of pollution on the sea. The film remains quite thick for this type of petroleum product. This means that the slick currently contains at least 10 metric tons of petroleum products. It’s located west of Anapa, with a small chance of some reaching the shore north of Anapa. The slick is moving toward Crimea, but for now it’s passing south of the Kerch Strait." -- Sergei Statichny, remote sensing expert at Russia’s Marine Rescue Service, according to pro-Kremlin agency TASS

On Tuesday 16 September, a Guardian panel of experts will be looking to answer questions about the forces driving the pushback against a greener world.

We want to hear from our readers globally as not everyone can make the live event. Send in your climate crisis questions and we will put a selection of them to our panel on the day.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/1229313

Professor Jason Hickel argues that the mindless pursuit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth isn’t just a bad thing, but is leading humanity to catastrophe

cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/49371785

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27033031

For the first time, a study maps safe areas that can practically be used for underground carbon storage, and estimates that using them all would only cut warming by 0.7°C. The result is almost ten times lower than previous estimates of around 6°C,

So much for CCS.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27011354

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27008855

President Donald Trump looks to go global with his “drill, baby, drill” approach. Reports indicate that he is not only working to halt America’s transition away from fossil fuels but also applying pressure on other nations to retreat from their climate pledges and consume more coal, oil and gas.

According to The New York Times, while aligned with Republicans in Congress to dismantle support for renewable energy and electric vehicles at home, the Trump administration is said to be deploying tariffs, trade deals and diplomatic threats abroad to push more fossil fuel-based development.

Trump has already spoken against alternative sources of power generation, claiming that wind energy is destroying nations and urging them to return to fossil fuels. His rhetoric, combined with policy moves, pointed towards a strategy of reshaping global energy priorities in favour of oil and gas.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/26979905

U.S. cities are facing a growing threat that goes beyond hot weather or hazy air. New research from the University of Oklahoma reveals that "compound events"—periods when heat wave conditions coincide with high air pollution levels—are becoming more frequent and intense in urban areas across the United States.