Climate Change is Killing the Desert (audio)

Xochitl, Amber Larson, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; A Martinez, Alex Cohen (Take Two/SCPR)

Sunset, Joshua Tree Nat'l Park, Boy Scout Trail head, 5-29-14 (Richard Lui/The Desert Sun)

The future of California and the American Southwest unless we stop corporate radiers

    

It's not getting hotter just less cool, more chaotic

Nearly all of the Joshua trees in Joshua Tree National Forest could disappear in a few decades because of climate change.

 

It's hard to imagine that in the deserts of the American Southwest, a few degrees hotter can drastically affect a place that's already very dry.

Many predictions of rising worldwide temperatures [most of them conservative underestimates] often conjure up images of swelling shorelines flooding beachfront homes and towns like Manhattan and Malibu because of shrinking polar ice caps.

The high Buddhist desert of Ladakh, India in the Himalayas, behind Mt. Everest, here overlooking the lamasery of Tsemo Gompa in the capital of Leh (SylvainBrajeul/flickr.com)

 

(Geoengineeringwatch.org) "Climate engineering" is weather modifcation/warfare that means the collapse of civilization. Look up. Those lines and ugly haze come from "chemtrails."

 

Himalayan desert behind Everest, Zanskar river

But Ian James, environment reporter for The Desert Sun, wrote a three-part investigation on how climate change could drastically affect the flora (plants), fauna (animals), and people (humans and other humanoids like the earthbound-devas or nature spirits and the dreaded djinn) of this arid wilderness.

 

Desert mesa, American Southwest drying up

"Basically in the desert there's very little humidity in the air," said James on Take Two.

"That lack of humidity in the air, in the soil, in the whole region makes it so the hotter temperatures don't have that one other element to bump up against that would make it a little less intense." LISTEN: AUDIO (9:20)

  

Berkeley may use gas pump warnings about global warming

[Increase] awareness. "Chances are a consumer dismissive of climate change won’t notice the label," Brooks said. "The person concerned about climate change will read the label...It acts as a reinforcement...

 

How the insurance industry sees climate change

...America, on the threat climate change posed to the $2-trillion... Climate change: A June 17 Op-Ed... steps to prevent losses related to climate change. Farmers has withdrawn the lawsuits...

 

Tale of passenger pigeon extinction may have had natural twist

(Geoffrey Mohan) The authors wondered how climate and food might have affected the passenger pigeon... it also revealed sharp year-to-year changes in acorn production that could have affected... over the last million years, based on climate, food, and other factors, the authors...

• DVD: Climate Engineering
• Desert Sun: "Joshua trees losing ground"
• Desert Sun: "Struggle for survival"
• Desert Sun: "Vanishing Water" (desertsun.com)
• Island nation bans commercial fishing in part of Pacific

• The US-planned ISIS insurgency continues in Iraq
• SoCal vets express frustration with unrest in Iraq
• Close Calls: Hikers survive Grand Canyon rock slide
• Vast reservoir of water deep below Earth's surface
• Man charged with molesting 5 kids may have other victims
• Searching for Sasquatch in Virginia (southwesttimes.com)
• No worries. We'll just leave California and get On The Road

I'm a Mexican Buddhist...in LA/LA Land (video)

Crystal Quintero, Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly (Part 2)

"LA/LA"? Welcome to LA LA Land: Los Angeles, Latin America (sweetnrawme.com)

If I were Frieda Kahlo

LOS ANGELES, Latin America - The Getty is preparing to launch an art exhibit that accentuates the embarrassment of artistic riches we have in Los Angeles, which not everyone realizes is in Latin America.

It is for a lot of reasons. Not only did it used to be Mexico until European Invaders during U.S. War on the Spanish annexed it like Ukraine, it is again predominantly Latin American.

Buddhists discovered America before Columbus

Although Asians are the fastest growing ethnicity in the U.S., more Latinas and Latinos live in California than any other group.

Most are not Mexican Buddhists anymore, but a lot are. And it's amazing to find out that there is a connection between the Native Americans, First Nations people, and Mexicans (Aztecs, Maya or Mayans, Toltecs, Olmecs, Incas, and many others) from neighboring Mexico, Mesoamerica, and Central America.
 

The famous "Mayan Calendar" is Aztec

It will be a long time before that information goes mainstream.

But it takes awhile for the truth to surface. In 1885 Edward P. Vining published the facts about inglorious Columbus and the Afghan Buddhist missionaries, led by the Chinese Buddhist monk Hwui Shan (Hui Shen), who arrived in America in the 5th century. America is the Fusang they discovered. So everyone will have to settle for the Getty's Pacific Standard Time 2017.

• Buddhism arrived in Mexico before Christianity
• The 1%: London has the most billionaires followed by Moscow and NY
• L.A. makes list of richest cities behind San Francisco
• The Chinese discovered America (Hendon Harris)

Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA

Getty Foundation (getty.edu)

TheGetty and the Getty Foundation: Art and Art History in Los Angeles (getty.edu)

If I were a leftist Aztec warrior marching through the streets of Los Angeles (latimes.com)

 
In the fall of 2011 Los Angeles celebrated the launch of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, an unprecedented collaboration of arts institutions across Southern California joining together to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene.
 

If I were Irish-Mexican like Peter (as Che)*

Yet it was 230 years earlier, in 1781, that the city of Los Angeles itself was born when El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles [de Porciúncula] was founded as part of New Spain. [A pueblo like that of the Puebloan Buddhists!]

Thus, while Los Angeles [the "City of Angels"] often represents the vanguard of contemporary culture in the United States, it is at the same time a Latin American city of long duration.

 

If I went to BofA or KA

Today, nearly half of the population of Los Angeles has roots in Latin America, contributing to Southern California as a lively center of artistic production and a natural nexus of cultural creativity between North and South. 

 

In recent years a number of exhibitions in the Americas and Europe have offered an introduction to the original and varied heritage of Latin America and the Latin American diaspora.

Now there is an opportunity for a broader and deeper examination of this art through a renewed collaboration by the Pacific Standard Time partners. In the process, Southern California will play a significant role in the research and presentation of Latin American art. More

Buddhism was in Mexico before Christianity (PRI video)

• Awake the Nation: United We Stand across USA
• *VIDEO: Peter Griffin is Mexican ("Family Guy")
• CARTOON: "Family Guy" addresses U.S. racism
• RADIO LAB: The best show on public radio
• Ontario police kill man, Mother's Day party surprise
• We either execute them or send them to prison for life
• Winds cause flight problems at Los Angeles airport
• Warm, windy Mother's Day preview of SoCal weather to come
• VIDEO: Shelly Sterling will 'absolutely' fight to keep Clippers

Losing Zen Buddhist activist Matthiessen (NPR)

Pat Macpherson, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Weekend Edition Sunday (NPR, April 6, 2014)

Bhumi/Gaia is a precious thing, nurturing and full of intelligence (NASA/colourbox.com)

 

Zen (counterpointpress.com)

Author Peter Muryo Matthiessen has died in New York at the age of 86 from acute myeloid leukemia. He was a novelist and naturalist, who wrote 33 books, among his best-known being The Snow Leopard and the novels Far Tortuga and At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was made into a Hollywood film.

He is the only writer to ever win the National Book Award in the categories of Fiction (for Shadow Country) and General Nonfiction (for The Snow Leopard, which also won for Contemporary Thought). 

 

He was also a political activist, a Buddhist teacher, co-founder of The Paris Review and, briefly, a spy.

 

In his first nonfiction book, Matthiessen staked out the territory he would revisit the rest of his life -- the destruction of nature and natural peoples at the hands of humankind. Wilderness in America, published in 1959, is a history of the extinction of animal and bird species in North America:

Species appear, and left behind by a changing earth, they disappear forever, and there is a certain solace in the inexorable. But until man, the highest predator, evolved, the process of extinction was a slow one. No species but man, so far as is known, unaided by circumstance or climactic change, has ever extinguished another.

Wilderness in America led to a series of assignments from The New Yorker that in turn led to a series of books....

 

Matthiessen traveled to New Guinea in 1961 with Michael Rockefeller, who disappeared and may have been the victim of headhunters (or so the legend goes). He wrote about trips to Africa, the Himalayas, South America, and Antarctica. 

 

But he said he never intended to write nonfiction. "Fiction is my first love, and that's the way I began," he said. "And frankly, when I began nonfiction, I did it for money."

 

McKay Jenkins, the author of The Peter Matthiessen Reader and several nature books, says that's astonishing. "That's kind of like Babe Ruth wanting to be remembered as a pitcher," Jenkins says. "Matthiessen is held in such high regard as a nonfiction writer by nonfiction writers that they sometimes say, 'How is it possible that this guy can be such a virtuoso fiction writer, and give his equally substantial body of nonfiction work such short shrift?' Because all the rest of us are trying to do what we can to mimic his nonfiction work."

 

Matthiessen was remarkable in a lot of ways. He was born in Manhattan in 1927 to a wealthy family. After a stint in the Navy, he attended Yale, where he began writing short stories -- and where one of his professors recruited him into the CIA [like someone somewhere did Barry Obama, Johnny Kerry, Bush Sr., Karl(yle) Rove, Dick Cheney...and the even the fleeing Dalai Lama. The Company gets around.]

In 1953, Matthiessen co-founded what would become one of the most important literary magazines of the 20th Century, The Paris Review. But he did it as a cover for his CIA activities -- the only adventure in his long life that he said he ever regretted.

 

"I was a spy," he said. "When I went in there, it was the end of the Cold War -- Russia was a great menace out there in the distance. It was considered very patriotic to join the CIA. I didn't know my politics were going to veer leftward, and that I would really come to despise the CIA."

 

Matthiessen's politics led to a lifelong career as an activist. He wrote books about union [American farmworker] organizer Cesar Chavez, the American Indian Movement...

 

After Matthiessen's second wife, Deborah, died of cancer in 1972, he embraced Zen Buddhism and eventually became a priest and teacher. In his 1978 book, The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen wrote about a spiritual journey in the remote mountains of Nepal, and the impossibility of capturing experience in words:

The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind, but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day. LISTEN

Peter Muryo Matthiessen [was] a two-time winner of the National Book Award, a longtime Zen practitioner, and Bernie Glassman’s first Dharma successor. He [was] an active Zen teacher in Sagaponack, New York.

• Unlocking the mysteries of the Earth (BBC)
  The BBC's Nick Higham talks to Dr. James Lovelock, the author of Rough Ride to the Future, which predicts the Earth's future…
• Gaia creator rows back on climate
  …the Earth was like. But in a hundred million years, it sank back to normal." Dr. Lovelock is the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, which posits that…

• The Way of the Knife: Mark Mazzetti on KPFA today
• The Way of the Knife: Life in the CIA (or Why just spy when you can kill like an independent mercenary army for multinational capitalist corporations?)
• AUDIO: A nonbeliever tries to make sense of the visions she had as a teen (Barbara Ehrenreich on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, WWHY/NPR)
• When life gives you raspberries, make pie!