Unless you’re brave enough to consider the reality of our global environmental situation, don’t read this. Confronting it is not a matter of being pessimistic or optimistic, but of being realistic—of assessing what we’re doing on our planet, what we want to avoid, what we want to accomplish, and what we can do both collectively and individually to have a more promising future. In one more year we will have reached a quarter of the way to 2100, and we are well on our way to creating conditions that we will either applaud or bemoan.
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The Quadra Project: Polycrisis
A new word, “polycrisis”, has entered the vocabulary of ecologists, particularly those scientists who are monitoring the health of the entire planet. Some of these scientists are uncomfortable with the word, arguing that it is an alarmist term. They believe that we have various crises, in the plural, but they are not indicative of the widespread description that is implicit in such a cataclysmic term as polycrisis. Some historians say that what we are experiencing “is just history happening.”
Thomas Homer-Dixon, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the relationship between ecology and human behaviour, argues that such a term as polycrisis is an apt description of what is actually happening on our planet, and it is the result of multiple factors. The word, he says, was first coined in the 1990s at the World Economic Forum to describe the “tangled mess of problems” that seemed to be occurring—“pandemic, war, climate extremes, energy shortages, inflation, rising authoritarianism, and the like.” The term, however, proved useful.
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The Quadra Project: Living in the Metaverse
The beginning of trouble can be linked to the advent of television. The first hint of a problem that has now grown out of control was identified in 1961 by Newton Minow, the leader of a Federal Communications Commission that was authorized to report to President John F. Kennedy on the effects of television on the personal and social psychology of Americans. Minow’s executive summary described a medium that was filled with “a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.” Minow concluded that TV was creating “a vast wasteland” in which an alternate reality of entertainment was disconnecting Americans from the actual world in which they lived.
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Nancy Beach vs the Property Assessment Review Panel
The opinions that follow are those of the person expressing them and not necessarily shared by Cortes Currents, or Cortes Radio.
The following submission was made by Nancy Beach.
After dealing with BC assessment for 17 years or more, in regard to my small farm on Salt Spring Island, I have come to the conclusion that:
- Farm assessments should be administered by the Ministry of Agriculture, not the Ministry of Housing.
- The system for assessing farm status needs to be overhauled. It should not be lumped in with assessing the values of residential properties.
- Farmers should be given adequate time to present and debate their cases.
- More people who care about farms should sit on the board of the Property Assessment Appeal Board (PAAB), and the panel of the Property Assessment Review Panel (PARP).’
- PARP plan panel members making decisions concerning farms should be well educated about the farm regulations number. Pabst should not charge for their services.
- BC Farmers need an organization to represent them, represent themselves and help defend their interests before the B. C. Assessment when necessary.
The Quadra Project – Social Media P 4 of 4
Environmentalists have become acutely concerned about the physical state of our planet, but a related concern should be the psychological state that we occupy as human beings living in a milieu of digital information. This is an issue that has recently entered prominence because of a number of factors: the propaganda justifying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the possible meddling of China and Russia in American and Canadian elections, and the pervasive effects of social media on the attitudes and behaviour of people who are exposed to and influenced by it. We can’t solve any problem, environmental or otherwise, if we are not connected to reality.
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