All Humans are Family
Earth is Our Mother
What this country needs is another good dose of socialism.
Dungeness River Flow Status
Flow continues to decrease from recent rain storm on September 3.
Updated September 7, 2026
CRUELTY
Posted August 29, 2026
Cruelty
It’s been a year and a half since the Trump regime gutted the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) agency. One of the consequences of this was the cut-off of humanitarian aid for areas of rural Afghanistan. This cut-off of aid has had devastating consequences for the health of this population, and especially cruel consequences for mothers and their starving small children and lack of necessary medical care. This medical care was being provided by USAID and American generosity.
Here are images from a PBS Newshour Report, dated August 25, on this situation.
Images of sick and starving children in this area.
And what is our State Department concerned about? Keeping US funds out of the hands of terror groups.
The State Department also cited a March 2025 inspector general's report on Afghanistan that said aid groups -- quote -- "needed to strengthen agreements with public international organizations to ensure that U.S. funds are not diverted to terror groups."
Presumably these rural Afghan terrorists who were investigated in this report.
More Cruelty
Shift the focus to Gaza and another PBS Newshour report. Note: PBS Newshour has a reputation for being non-partisan and editorially “moderate” in its reporting. However, some of its reports are quite stark and hard-hitting.
This NewsHour story aired on August 27, is a report about young people, trying to grow up in their devastated homeland in Gaza. Some teenagers are taking to surfing in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea on surfboards that are older than they are. Israel prohibits the import of surfboards into Gaza.
This story also shows a young Gaza boy, missing a leg, who builds a kite and then takes it out and flies it. Kite flying in Gaza is hazardous because the IDF may mistake kite flying for a hostile intent to fly explosives into Israel. In some cases, kite fliers have been targeted and killed. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/gazas-traumatized-youth-search-for-glimmers-of-hope-in-devastated-homeland
Many families live in tent cities next to the devastated buildings that used to be their homes. Who knows how many of these children, struggling to create lives for themselves, will be haunted by PTSD for the rest of their lives?
Art inspired by the Gaza experience.
Meanwhile, on the seacoast of Tel Aviv:
Photo credit: Wikipedia
This contrast is mind boggling and obscene. What kind of species are humans?
Towards a Sustainable Future
Posted August 29, 2026
Towards a Sustainable Future
It’s easy to focus on the bad news.
Let’s turn to some of the good news.
There are people and organizations around the world who are aware of the need to address the problems of overshoot and move towards a Sustainable Future.
The following is just a short list of people and organizations that I have become aware of in the past few years.
The United Nations and the Goals for Sustainable Development
The leading advocate is Dr. Jeffrey Sachs at Columbia University –
Here is one of his latest books in which he and other authors point out how the ethics of the world’s major religions support the moral principles behind achieving sustainable development.
Here is another of Dr. Jeffrey Sachs’s recent books. This book covers the basics of the concept of sustainable development. He mentions the overshoot situation that requires us to transition to sustainable development. The book also covers the basic concepts and goals of sustainable development as put forth by the United Nations. The book should be regarded as the primer for anyone wishing to understand what sustainable development is all about.
Columbia University actively engages with the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through academic research, student groups like the Sustainable Development Goals Student Hub, and campus initiatives like Plan 2030. The university houses bodies like the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which helps track global progress on these targets. [1, 2, 3]
The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals
- Goal 1: No Poverty
- Goal 2: Zero Hunger
- Goal 3: Good Health and Well-being
- Goal 4: Quality Education
- Goal 5: Gender Equality
- Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitation
- Goal 7: Affordable and Clean Energy
- Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
- Goal 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
- Goal 10: Reduced Inequality
- Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
- Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production
- Goal 13: Climate Action
- Goal 14: Life Below Water
- Goal 15: Life on Land
- Goal 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
- Goal 17: Partnerships for the Goals [1]
The Tellus Institute
Another person and organization I have just recently come across are Paul Raskin and the Tellus Institute. https://tellus.org/about/people/paul-raskin/
Dr. Raskin earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Columbia University in 1970. In 1976 he founded the Tellus Institute, https://tellus.org/ , which is focused on what he calls the Great Transition.
An associated website is labeled The Great Transition Initiative that is focused on moving towards a Sustainable Future. https://greattransition.org/ There are a number of authors and experts featured on this website.
Paul Raskin has written an essay which is basic to the Great Transition idea, called “Journey to Earthland”. https://cusp.ac.uk/themes/p/journey-to-earthland/
This essay is a challenging but rewarding read. In this essay, he maps out several possible paths for humanity going forward. There is a negative outcome which he calls “Fortress World”, a future based on a human cultural and behavioral regression in reaction to overshoot. But he also sketches out in detail a much more positive possible future based on multinationalism, Resacralization of Nature and cooperation, resulting in a positive outcome which he labels “EarthLand”.
The Post Carbon Institute
Then there is the Post Carbon Institute, which is a fairly substantial and comprehensive organization focused on making the transition to a sustainable future which is generally labeled as our “Post Carbon Future”.https://www.postcarbon.org/
There is an associated very informative website labelled Resilience which is well stocked with articles and authors discussing the problem of overshoot and the transition to a sustainable future. https://www.resilience.org/
The Post Carbon Institute has 5 main issue areas that they are focused on.
1. The Big Picture, which is a basic introduction to the concept of overshoot and its hazards.
- The Great Unraveling https://www.postcarbon.org/publications/welcome-to-the-great-unraveling/ is a lengthy report on environmental and social breakdown being caused by overshoot. This report is an excellent explanation of what’s really going on, for those who feel that everything is falling apart. This report was a game changer for me, allowing me to put everything: climate change, American polarization, increased warfare and limits to growth into one comprehensive and rational context.
- The rational response to this environmental and cultural unraveling is to adapt a response of resilience – local resilience. https://www.postcarbon.org/issue/resilience/ The basics of resilience are discussed here. 4. Of course, one of the most important goals of making the transition to sustainability is to transition off of fossil fuels, which is the cause of climate change and a large contributor to the entire overshoot crisis. https://www.postcarbon.org/issue/energy/ . 5. And finally, last but not least, is the Limits to Growth topic, https://www.postcarbon.org/issue/limits/, based on the famous book, Limits to Growth, published in 1972. That book is proving to be one of the most accurate predictions of the course of humanity in the last 50 years.
There are two main significant authors associated with the Post Carbon Institute that I have followed and read. These are William Rees, of British Columbia and the late Richard Heinberg.
The late Richard Heinberg co-authored the Great Unraveling report. He has authored a number of books, two of which I have read and recommend:
The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality, (2011) https://newsociety.com/book/the-end-of-growth/
Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival (2021)https://newsociety.com/book/power/
William Rees, a professor emeritus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, Canada has also been influential to my thinking. https://www.postcarbon.org/our-people/william-rees/
William Rees introduced me to the concept of ecological economics, which is now a valid academic pursuit. Traditional economics used to be divorced from our ecological environment. This separation doesn’t work anymore and Dr. Rees has joined the two pursuits together. Sustainable economics must take into account not only the well being of the environment, but also the well being of the entire humanity.
This is the organization and the book that started it all for me. Limits to Growth is a book which published the results of original research at MIT back in the early 70’s conducted by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers & William Behrens. This research was sponsored by the Club of Rome. This book caused an uproar when it was first published, and that uproar still persists today. I read this book shortly after it came out and it grabbed my attention. A 30-year update came out in about 2002, which updated the original.
The Club of Rome, https://www.clubofrome.org/ , of course, has moved quite a ways beyond that original publication, sponsoring a number of publications and projects since then. This organization is involved in all kinds of activities all around the world, working towards a sustainable future.
Michael Dowd and the Great Story
When I was first exploring the topic of overshoot, I encountered the late Michael Dowd on YouTube and viewed a number of his videos. At the time I was unaware that he was a Christian minister. His videos introduced me to the whole concept of Overshoot and the existential crisis that humanity is in. This was “Overshoot 101” for me.
Reverend Dowd was an “evolutionary Christian”, even though that sounds like an oxymoron. He believed and taught that authentic Christianity and empirical science were compatible concepts. For some readers, Michael Dowd can bridge the seemingly impossible gap between Christianity and empirical science.
The Great Story
This is a set of videos I watched that introduced me to the concepts of ecological overshoot
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcAlqMeyeaW_WR1kmhvI13bf2mNWbmltd
Here is the Post-doom website that was set up by Michael Dowd. It’s
Overshoot – William Catton
This book, along with “Limits to Growth” were game changers for me. While “Limits to Growth” detailed the technical details of the limits to ecological growth, Catton’s book, “Overshoot” discusses in detail the human and cultural aspects presented by humanity’s ecological overshoot crisis.
William Catton was, among other positions, a professor at our own University of Washington during his long career. William R. Catton Jr. - Wikipedia He was an influential scholar in uniting two academic disciplines: human behavior and culture into the discipline of ecology. In 1980, he published his influential book, “Overshoot”. He pulled no punches in this book. He warned that humans had already overshot the ecological carrying capacity of the planet. He dismantled more than one myth of continued unlimited economic growth and urged his readers to come to grips with a more difficult future that lies ahead. In order to come to grips with this new reality, humans will have to change their culture and how they think about themselves and their environment. This book was a game changer for Michael Dowd as mentioned above.
For those readers who want to get a good grip on the ecological crises that we are in the middle of, how we got here and how we must respond, I recommend this book as well as “Limits to Growth” as must-read primers.
Postscript:
It’s tempting sometimes, after getting a firm rational understanding of our grim situation, to give in to doom and throw up our hands. Humans, though, possess another very powerful quality: self awareness. We humans have the power to choose. If we can choose to transcend our biological natures and choose a better future for ourselves, our posterity and the planet itself.