This is for the planet and humanity.
The natural world is undergoing a crisis unlike any seen since humans evolved 200,000 years ago. Simultaneous and mutually interacting threats to life abound–an extinction crisis that many scientists already call the sixth mass extinction in earth’s history, rapidly accelerating and potentially catastrophic climate change, disintegration of ice sheets that regulate planetary weather systems and impact ocean currents, transformation and deterioration of coral reefs and life in the ocean generally, and relentless habitat destruction on land and sea. These and other predominantly man-made phenomena, mainly brought on since the industrial revolution and capitalist development, threaten to cause the unraveling of the fabric of life.
At the same time, and in connection-in fact coming from the same source, the same system-, humanity and especially the poorest of humanity, who are most concentrated in the poorest countries- faces the brutal horrors of war, starvation, mass forced migrations, cruel racism and national oppression, developing fascism (most dangerously now from the Trump regime in the U.S.), worldwide subjugation of women, and increasing suffering and the threat from the unraveling of the natural world.
Never before has the threat to existence been greater. Yet never before has the potential for a truly much better world been more needed or possible. We as people, and the collective natural life of earth’s species- need a new world- where the earth and its natural systems are not only preserved, protected and enhanced, but cherished- and where human beings thrive as one people together as a global community.
This blog will seek to bring to light the story of this developing situation, with focus on nature and the environment, to expose the truth about threats to our future, indict the causes of this, to help breath life into struggles to defend nature and humans, and to help push forward and generate hope and inspiration to bring into being a completely , radically different and better world. We need a world where human beings continually learn more about each other and the natural world in a scientific way but also one filled with spirit and love-for nature and each other.
I plan to feature short comments, stories as well as occasionally more in depth pieces. I also hope to help bring alive here some the voices of scientists who are investigating these phenomena, as well as people on the frontlines who are impacted by them and struggling for the future. And here too there will be personal stories, observations, experiences, reflections, and maybe poetry- highlighting the struggle and the rawness- but also the beauty and the wonder of nature.
Bio
Curtis Johnson is a freelance journalist and research scientist. He has written on the climate crisis, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the threats to pollinators and overall extinction crisis, and the all-out assault on environmental rules, scientists, and agencies now occurring under the Trump regime, and other topics.
For the Planet and Humanity 