Tribalism, as Harvey Whitehouse explains in his feature article, “Rise of the Teratribe” (New Scientist, June 22, 2024), has been a fundamental cohesive force in the making of human societies. “A visceral sense of oneness with the group” is a force that psychologists and anthropologists call “identity fusion”. It makes us into the social units that then function for our individual and collective survival.
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The Quadra Project – Deep Water
When we think about environmentalism, we tend not to consider the oceans because we don’t live on or in them, and they are just there as they have always been, defining the edge of the land that we occupy. Of course, oceans provide us with most of our fish, but in the popular understanding, they are mostly experienced as vast spaces of waves and wet that separate the faraway continents that we visit. So we tend to give much more importance to landscapes that we occupy. And because we live within the thin layer of air that girdles the globe, weather is also a concern to us. But we generally don’t consider that much of our climate and weather is determined by what happens in the oceans.
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The Quadra Project – Pure Consciousness
What is pure consciousness? In simplistic terms, it seems to be awareness of awareness. That is, it is not an awareness of the content of awareness such as being conscious of fish or trees or ideas, but an awareness of the awareness itself. As such, it would seem to be a distancing from the content of awareness—of the things that we think about—to the awareness itself. This detached awareness from experiences and ideas would give us the perspective to assess the substance of our thinking, to give us special insights into how we think, and perhaps more appropriately, to allow us to assess how we behave.
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The Quadra Project: Hot Food Prices
Regardless of all other factors, higher global temperatures alone will cause an increase in the price of food in the range of 0.9% to 3.2% per year, a price that will add between 0.3% and 1.2% per annum to inflation, according to a study by Maximilian Kotz from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, done in collaboration with the European Central Bank (“Food Is Costing More Due to Climate Change—Prices Will Keep Rising”, New Scientist, March 30, 2024).
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The Quadra Project – The Climate Costs of Russian’s War
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a military and an environmental disaster. A team of researchers has made an effort to measure the climate impacts of the first two years of the war initiated by Russia (Michael LePage, “Russia Faces a $32 Billion Climate Bill”, New Scientist, June 22, 2024). Vladimir Putin’s failed “special military operation” has now stretched into a protracted conflict, with horrendous consequences not only for the planet’s ecology but for the global community of nations. The latter should be briefly noted, for it, too, is sobering.
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