environment

Lovejoy in Copenhagen

Upon mention of the Copenhagen Summit, it’s hard to avoid recalling “Homer the Heretic” (9F01). Reverend Lovejoy quotes the Lamentations of Jeremiah dwelling on “rivers of burning sulfur” and several other visions of sizzling flesh while the congregation sits freezing literally trapped in church thanks to a faulty furnace, actually relishing the ominous images. I wonder if the outcome of the Summit would have varied if they had celebrated it in Dallol.

Can I lie to my child?

At the age of twelve, Severn Cullis-Suzuki shocked partakers at the Earth Summit in Brazil in 1992. This video just came to my attention recently, even though it’s been online for over a year or so. (You can read the transcript here.)

Bob Marley’s emblematic “No woman, no cry” comes to mind, especially at the end — “everything’s gonna be all right.” Is it? Cullis-Suzuki wonders out loud if those words still carry, if we can still say that to our children — “it’s not the end of the world,” she goes on. And that was 16 years ago…

Can I lie to my child?

Bruno is dead

For weeks, environmentalists, the press, the home where he was raised in Italy speculated, hypothesized and searched for the missing “rampaging” Bruno. Germany hadn’t seen a bear in its realms since 1835. Some farmers got upset over their losses in poultry and sheep. Others claimed that he had scratched their cars. Germans consider their cars shrines, so that was no less than sacrilege.

Recently, a Finnish team was after its tracks. This weekend, the Bavarian government authorized hunters to shoot the bear on sight. When the order was signed (the German government doesn’t work on Sundays), the bear was already dead…

I must admit when I heard the news this morning on the radio, I had to weep for the death of hope for brown bears in a world where we have made all species, including our own, foreign and unworthy.

Long live Bruno, aka JJ1.

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