Leaf blower

1) A gasoline-powered rake.

2) A device that lifts pollutants such as lead into the air where they are inhaled by sapiens and other animals.

3) A device used to remove a source of fertility (leaves) from the soil and plants below.

The leaf blower, with its cost and high energy use, shows the extent to which the practice and principle of thrift, so important to humans in prior ages, was abandoned as both a practice and a value. However, the greatest example of the abandonment of thrift may be the daily use of single use plastics (such as plastic grocery bags or take-out food containers).

Choices

What can you do? Here are some choices that are available to you.

1) Share this definition, and these ideas, with others.

2) Use a rake or let the leaves stay where they are so they can fertilize the soil, guard the plants below them from frost and support important microorganisms.

Beliefs

1) Beliefs are ideas held without question even when evidence exists that shows that the idea is false or incorrect.

2) A set of claims or ideas sapiens use to form their identity.

3) A rigid position unsupported by the facts; another word for nonsense.

4) A claim given to circular logic: “It’s true because I believe it.”

An intelligent person has knowledge. An unintelligent one has beliefs.

A belief is a closed system. It is immune to new information. It is not subject to change and is resistant to logic and evidence. The holders of beliefs claim them as a type of knowledge but refuse to subject these beliefs to any scrutiny or the challenges that everything that is called knowledge must face.

The process used in the acquisition of knowledge—information, suppositions, evidence, hypothesis, counterarguments, the openness to the discovery new information in the future—are all avoided by the individual with a belief. For instance, the scientific method is the best procedure for the testing of claims. But beliefs resist the scientific method as the hypothesis and the conclusion are always the same regardless of the evidence.

The resilience of beliefs in the face of facts are one of the reasons sapiens are so slow to respond to the dangers posed by the looming environmental threats.

Deforestation

1) A rapid decline in the planet’s oxygen production capacity and the destruction of both ecosystems and the species that inhabit them; the removal of a major component of the planet’s living systems.

2) A type of habitat destruction that results in a decrease in the species diversity.

3) A common practice of the industrial agriculture system and one fostered by a) the limited liability protections given to corporations and b) the logic of financial statements, which is indifferent to losses born by others.

See the speed at which deforestation can occur with current technology.

Deforestation leads to oxygen loss
TheNewLanguage.Org

Sophist

1) A person willing and able to be an advocate for any claim, regardless of the merit of the claim.

2) A person hired by a company to hold a view that advances the company’s interests.

3) A person who subordinates the facts and their own convictions to the interests of the company that hired them.

Corporate lawyers and people in advertising are sophists. Such people are hired to advance ideas and claims which may be at odds, prior to the payment, with what they believe and which may be at odds with the facts.

Q: “What view will you hold today?”

A: “It depends on who’s paying me.”

A sophist can and is willing to advocate any idea or claim. But there are many ideas and claims that are not profitable to advocate (such as trees are important to ecosystems) and therefore funds are not allocated to advance these claims. However, others claims—such as those that give a company access to resources and those that allow companies to pollute—are not only profitable but fundamental to a company’s operations.

In corporate law and advertising, the sophists are hired to advocate the claims of corporations. When they select a claim to advance it is only because it is in their vested interest to do so. If the claim is accepted by the public or by legislatures then company will be allowed to strip a resource from an ecosystem, pollute or avoid liability. This reduces costs for the corporation and increase profits. Because it is in the interests of corporations to gain access to resources as inexpensively as possible and to push the costs of pollution its operations produce, they hire sophists to defend those practices, conceal them, mislead the public about them, or argue that these practices are beneficial to us.

EXAMPLE

One example of the work of sophists are the television commercials claiming that natural gas is good for the environment when in fact CO2 concentrations are already causing the extinction of many species. Another example of the work of sophists are those lawyers representing the coal company who challenged the Clean Power Act, which sought to reduce CO2 emissions, at the Supreme Court.

CHRONOLOGY

A company selects a claim  >  a sophist is hired  >  the sophist finds the best way to persuade others of that claims  >  the sophist presents that argument to the public (via the media) or the courts or via lobbying of legislators  >  the argument is accepted as a fact  >  the decisions and behavior of public change accordingly  >  ecosystems bear the consequence of those actions and behaviors.

LANGUAGE

It is unique to humans to be able to propose an idea that is in opposition to the laws of evolution or that harms ecosystems or construct an idea in contradiction of the laws of physics, chemistry and biology.

Habitat Destruction

1) An extreme pressure on a species that often results in its extinction; a recipe for extinction.

2) The displacement of species due to the destruction of ecosystems that results from seeing land as a commodity to be exploited.

3) The logical result of the belief in the primacy of human beings over the planet (and other species) and the labeling of land as a commodity or a good to be transacted in a marketplace.

Climate-driven conflicts

War, killing, migration and social instability fueled by droughts, floods, storms, and other climate change-fueled weather events.

Example: Unusual and multi-year droughts are a factor behind the violence in Afghanistan, Syria and Kenya. The droughts in these countries have made it difficult or impossible for farmers to grow crops or raise livestock, and have made it difficult to survive in these areas. Increasingly, the U.S. Pentagon sees climate change as posing one of the most serious security threats as it is expected to cause increased violence abroad, an increase in the spread of infectious diseases and an increase in terrorism.

Biodynamic Farmer

1) A steward of the land; an environmentalist.

2) A student of the workings and interactions in an ecosystem and its insects, plants, animals and microorganisms; a person who shapes their behaviors to complement—as opposed to fight against or destroy—the workings of a habitat and ecosystem.

3) A person who understands the interactions between the microorganisms in the soil and the plants that grow in it—and understands the impact of his or her actions on the ecosystem.

4) A person dedicated to the health and vitality of the soil and the microorganism and bacteria found in it and which together contributes to the soils ability to grow food.

5) A person who understands how to improve the fertility of the soil without the application of factory fertilizers; a steward of the planet’s soil; a person who understands that soil fertility and quality is important for sustaining life on the planet.

6) A person who sees the insects, microorganisms, grazers as all complementing his efforts to grow food; a person who sees these things as being necessary to a habit.

This understanding stands in contrast to the views and practices of industrial-scale growers and conventional industrial agribusinesses who do not wish to complement and cooperate with existing systems and species on land being used to grow food and do not see soil as possessing a web of insects and microorganisms that allow plants to absorb nutrients. Industrial-scale growers—and the practices they employ—are the enemies of habits and the species who occupy them.

Practices of biodynamic farmers include crop diversification, the minimization of soil inputs obtained outside the farm, the fostering of species biodiversity, the growing of perennials, the use of cover crops and nitrogen fixing crops, growing crops appropriate to the existing soil conditions and climate, and the avoidance of monocultures and pesticides, herbicides or other factory soil amendments.

Complacency

1) A condition among sapiens that results when the beliefs, fears and rewards behind the formation of the status quo are more emotionally salient than the warnings that the continuation of the status quo will result in harms to them or others.

2) A state of inaction accompanied by feelings of satisfaction, feelings which may require the dismissal or avoidance of information by the complacent individual.

3) An individual’s denial of the role they play in the degradation of ecosystems.

For example, many enjoy feelings of satisfaction about their lives despite the continued dumping of CO2 waste into the atmosphere. These pleasant feelings discourage individuals from taking action against this dumping of CO2 (which may eventually cause the collapse of oxygen production, the collapse of certain food chains and shrinking land mass).

Limited Liability

1) Limited liability is a guarantee of regularly occurring manmade disasters (such the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf Of Mexico or the methane gas containment breach in Southern California) as well as systematic destruction of ecosystems (for example, deforestation, pollution of rivers and oceans from industrial farming, pollution of the atmosphere). It is a way to assign the costs of damage caused by the company to the public.

2) It is a legal protection that allow companies evade responsibility for environmental destruction and encourages companies to assign a value of zero to ecosystems and all elements of the biosphere (such as the atmosphere or any publicly owned lands) not owned by the company.

3) A scheme by which companies can avoid bearing full responsibility for its actions. Because a company can avoid responsibility for damaged caused by an oil spill or the pollution of an underground aquifer, for example, companies have a very strong incentive to take extreme risks.

4) A way for companies to shift the burden of a risk from the company to the public. It is one of the many devices companies uses to push costs for harms it causes away from the company.

Limited liability is a way to shift the burden and cost of a catastrophe away from the company responsible for it and away from that company’s shareholders and place that burden on those costs on ecosystems and the people and other living things that inhabit them.

Limited liability laws were passed before it was possible for a company to cause an earthquake (by pumping wastewater from fracking into the ground) or manufacture a chemical that could kill microorganisms in the soil and cause birth defects in a variety of species—and before chemical plants were so large that a fire could destroy miles of land in the vicinity. The notion of limited liability was conceived when the scale of a mishap was relatively small and when massive man-made environmental catastrophes were unheard of.