Category: Climate Acceptance

ghosts

On By ©️K.T. 2025In anthropocene, autumn, Capitalism, climate, Climate Acceptance, Climate Chaos, Climate Collapse, Colonization, Crone, crone chronicles, Crone Consciousness, Death, Dendronglow, dying, Earth, Earth hospice, Earthling, earthlings, ecocide, Funerary, Genocide, ghosts, Hospice, kin, Lament, Lamentations, Life, Life and Death, liminal, mourning, october, Poem, poetry, Sixth Mass Extinction, WarLeave a comment

if you’re seeing this, you’re alive,

though dying — no matter your age, health, relative safety, relative comfortability —

on this living, though suffering and actively dying, planet

Earthlings and Earth together in a protracted hospice

right now, in these brief years, these grief years,

we are the “ever-living ghosts of what once was”

a “was” that most all of us alive this morning have never known as lived experience — save for the untouched tribes — 10,000 Uncontacted Peoples — 10,000 unsystematized, “uncivilized”

and the Ocean, and the few, still-standing Ancient One Trees; the untouched Desert, and the Mountains — even the youngest of them — The Tetons and The Himalayas, know what it “was” to be alive.

we are mere ghosts, walking dead.

Continue reading “ghosts” →

“The crew compartment’s breaking up”

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Climate Acceptance, Climate Chaos, Climate Collapse, Crone Consciousness, Earth hospice, Earthling, earthlings, ecocide, exposition, Funerary, Hospice, Lament, Lamentations, Life and Death, music, planetary hospice, Song, Songs, Space Shuttle ColumbiaLeave a comment

John Roderick wrote the above line and repeats it seven times(!) in his song, “The Commander Thinks Aloud”— about the Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster that happened February 1, 2003

and, if I’m not careful, I will start to cry during the first verse


The Commander Thinks Aloud

Boys and girls in cars
Dogs and birds on lawns
From here I can touch the sun


Put your jackets on
I feel we're being born
The Tropic of Capricorn is below


We stall above the pole
Still your face is young
As we feel our weight return


A trail of shooting stars
The horses call the storm
Because the air contains the Charge


The radio is on
And Houston knows the score
Can you feel it, we're almost home

The crew compartment's breaking up
The crew compartment's breaking up
The crew compartment's breaking up
The crew compartment's breaking up
(This is all I wanted to bring home)

The crew compartment's breaking up
(This is all I wanted to bring home)

The crew compartment's breaking up
(This is all I wanted to bring home)

The crew compartment's breaking up
This is all I wanted to bring home to you

Songwriter: John Roderick, The Long Winters


The Commander Thinks Aloud lyrics © Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd., Rough Trade Publishing

this song — since the very first time i (belatedly) heard and learned about it on the Song Exploder podcast in 2016 — became an instant melancholic metaphor-lamentation for me, even while retaining it’s very visceral and intended meaning —

at first, for the climate chaos we face on our communal spaceship — Spaceship Earth,

as in, “hey, do you realize we’re floating in space?” — then, why are we [deliberately] destroying the crew compartment?

and

for our lives — for the simplicity that is both stolen and lost

in the daily struggle — of and against exploitation, repression and oppression; in the daily drama of our dis/mis/mal contentment; in the daily, unnecessary grasping, striving, amassing and hoarding — whether for – or of, wealth, land, power, influence, reputation, career, fame, control or privilege —

or, in orbiting the Earth in a shuttle or space station or landing on the Moon in a spacecraft — when we could’ve just been human beings caretaking of this Eden and of each other.

and personally,

Continue reading ““The crew compartment’s breaking up”” →

Earthling in Planetary Hospice: the 9/11 closure of North American airspace: climate scientists observe the great Catch-22 — the Aerosol [De]Masking Effect

On By ©️K.T. 2025In 9/11, Aerosol Demasking, Aerosol Masking Effect, Capitalism, Climate Acceptance, Climate Chaos, Climate Collapse, Earth hospice, Earthling, earthlings, Global Dimming, planetary hospice, September 11thLeave a comment

“To deliberately believe in lies while knowing they are false.”

The US accounts for more than a third of the expansion of global oil and gas production planned by mid-century, despite its claims of climate leadership, research has found.

Canada and Russia have the next biggest expansion plans, calculated based on how much carbon dioxide is likely to be produced from new developments, followed by Iran, China and Brazil. The United Arab Emirates, which is to host the annual UN climate summit this year, Cop28 in Dubai in November, is seventh on the list.

Fiona Harvey, Environment Editor, The Guardian, September 12, 2023

Damned² :

Damned if we do; damned even faster if we stop.

the grounding and ground-stoppage of aircraft and closure of US airspace on September 11, 2001

The thin wisps of condensation that trail jet airliners have a significant influence on the climate, according to scientists who studied U.S. skies during a rare interruption in national air traffic after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Richard Stenger for CNN, August 8, 2002

only the immediate cessation of industrial
civilization could’ve saved us – 50, 80 or more years ago, that is /

but now, we are dependent on industrial civilization for everything including the Catch-22 conundrum of the Aerosol Masking Effect aka “global dimming” //

the “aerosol masking effect” where pollutant aerosols emitted into Earth’s atmosphere by human industrial activity reflect the Sun’s heat and mitigate the rise in global average temperature and artificially “cool” the planet —

but here’s the rub: as we draw down industrial activity – with falsely fantastical greener energy alternatives and “cleaner” industrial operations, we lose that artificial benefit and global temperatures will rise even more and faster because of the opposite effects of global brightening or demasking (colloquially known as: The McPherson Paradox for Prof. Guy McPherson, guymcpherson.com) ///

if the World’s population begins to understand that the aerosol and particulate pollution from some of the worst industries and practices — those that also emit the greenhouse gases that cause global heating, fuel climate chaos and drive ecological destruction and collapse — is also simultaneously and artificially cooling the planet — keeping global temperatures lower than what they actually would be

— and that the warming effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere last centuries or decades longer than the near instantaneous effects of aerosol demasking, 

Changes to our atmosphere associated with reactive gases (gases that undergo chemical reactions) like ozone and ozone-forming chemicals like nitrous oxides, are relatively short-lived. Carbon dioxide is a different animal, however. Once it’s added to the atmosphere, it hangs around, for a long time: between 300 to 1,000 years. Thus, as humans change the atmosphere by emitting carbon dioxide, those changes will endure on the timescale of many human lives.

Alan Buis, “The Atmosphere: Getting a Handle on Carbon Dioxide”, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab

maybe then, they will realize — there is no time for hope — only hospice.

Continue reading “Earthling in Planetary Hospice: the 9/11 closure of North American airspace: climate scientists observe the great Catch-22 — the Aerosol [De]Masking Effect” →

Earthling in Planetary Hospice: climate acceptance versus climate doomerism

On By ©️K.T. 2025In climate, Climate Acceptance, Climate Chaos, Climate Collapse, Crone, Crone Consciousness, Earth hospice, Earthling, earthlings, ecocide, Hospice, planetary hospiceLeave a comment

Rebecca Solnit of The Guardian in late July penned a piece which misrepresents climate acceptance, realism and planetary hospice solely as a harmful defeatism and doomerism.

Renaee Churches wrote an important and thoughtful response that will not reach an audience as large as Solnit’s, and is excerpted below:

We have already lost the climate battle and it is stories or opinions like the one above, that are preventing others from grasping this, and stopping us from taking the kinds of collective adaptive responses appropriate on a local and global scale.

The not-too-late framing is a dangerous one. It means people are prepared to wait for global elites to roll out the energy transition, to deploy such ‘solutions’ as carbon capture technologies, or other flawed techno fixes, aimed at making those elites wealthy, while not stopping the baked in warming that is already here and accelerating. It is only when we finally break through the not-too-late taboo that we will begin the work in earnest of adaptation to reduce suffering as much as we can.

We need to normalise talk about collapse and have a broad, society-wide, honest discussion about how we can respond. These discussions are already happening behind closed doors by the Militaries of the world, by Insurance Agencies, and the Financial Sector elites. So we don’t need more writers like Solnit advising the masses to effectively keep calm and carry on. Rather we need a clear-eyed look at the reality of our situation — as a failing global industrial civilisation.

Then together, as ordinary people, we can adjust, grieve and determine how best to navigate the great unravelling as it continues to play out in our lives.

Renaee Churches, Medium

this is my response to Solnit’s piece, which will reach even fewer people:

Climate acceptance and Planetary Hospice involve the refusal to endorse,
and the honesty to resist, further extraction from and destruction of the Earth and injuries to indigenous and marginalized communities of People across the World and to the remaining, marginally or tenuously stable or life-supportive swaths or pockets of wildlife, forests, tundra, deserts, wetlands, lakes, rivers
and ocean.

Continue reading “Earthling in Planetary Hospice: climate acceptance versus climate doomerism” →