Tom Atlee writes: A wise person has perspective. They can see the big picture without
losing sight of the small. They can see the part without losing sight
of the whole. They understand the partnerships of day and night, good
and bad, the known and the unknown. They have observed how it all fits
together, including their own limitations and immense ignorance - and
that realization makes them humble, insightful and flexible. They are
free to creatively see and respond to what’s actually around them.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference.”This famous “Serenity Prayer” arises out of, and nurtures, wisdom.

Can communities be wise?

Interestingly, a community of people
(whether a group, a company, a town or a nation) is better equipped to
be wise than an individual. This is true despite the fact most of the
communities we live in or with are clearly foolish, small-minded,
unconscious and/or destructive. Truly wise communities (some of which
operate on millennia-old traditions) are seldom seen or publicized by
our civilization, preoccupied as it is with bustling off to its own
demise.

As individuals, we are inherently more limited than a community.
Although we can consult books and friends and critics, in the end we
are limited to our own single perspective. We are, alas, only one
person, looking at the world from one place, one history, one pattern
of knowing.

A community, on the other hand, can see things through many eyes,
many histories, many ways of knowing. The question is whether it
dismisses or creatively utilizes and integrates that diversity. (05/22/08)
more…

Bill Moyers writes: Democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be
running out of luck. The reigning presumption about the American
experience, as the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has written, is grounded
in the idea of progress, the conviction that the present is “better”than the past and the future will bring even more improvement. For all
of its shortcomings, we keep telling ourselves, “The system works.”

Now
all bets are off. We have fallen under the spell of money, faction, and
fear, and the great American experience in creating a different future
together has been subjugated to individual cunning in the pursuit of
wealth and power -and to the claims of empire, with its ravenous
demands and stuporous distractions. A sense of political impotence
pervades the country — a mass resignation defined by Goodwyn as
“believing the dogma of ‘democracy’ on a superficial public level but
not believing it privately.” We hold elections, knowing they are
unlikely to bring the corporate state under popular control. There is
considerable vigor at local levels, but it has not been translated into
new vistas of social possibility or the political will to address our
most intractable challenges. Hope no longer seems the operative dynamic
of America, and without hope we lose the talent and drive to cooperate
in the shaping of our destiny.

The earth we share as our common
gift, to be passed on in good condition to our children’s children, is
being despoiled. Private wealth is growing as public needs increase
apace. Our Constitution is perilously close to being consigned to the
valley of the shadow of death, betrayed by a powerful cabal of
secrecy-obsessed authoritarians. Terms like “liberty” and “individual
freedom” invoked by generations of Americans who battled to widen the
1787 promise to “promote the general welfare” have been perverted to
create a government primarily dedicated to the welfare of the state and
the political class that runs it. Yes, Virginia, there is a class war
and ordinary people are losing it. It isn’t necessary to be a Jeremiah
crying aloud to a sinful Jerusalem that the Lord is about to afflict
them for their sins of idolatry, or Cassandra, making a nuisance of
herself as she wanders around King Priam’s palace grounds wailing “The
Greeks are coming.” Or Socrates, the gadfly, stinging the rump of power
with jabs of truth. Or even Paul Revere, if horses were still in
fashion. You need only be a reporter with your eyes open to see what’s
happening to our democracy. I have been lucky enough to spend my adult
life as a journalist, acquiring a priceless education in the ways of
the world, actually getting paid to practice one of my craft’s
essential imperatives: connect the dots. (05/22/08)
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John Timpane writes: Call it a change of plan. Across the nation, the price of gasoline is sending more and more Americans to public transit.

This ridership surge points up three things: (1) These millions of new riders can do it. Most of them always could have.
They just didn’t. (2): We’re not at the end of car culture yet . . .
that’s a few generations off . . . but (3) it’s clear, in
not-quite-hindsight, that the U.S. car culture does not work.

Meanwhile, more people are parking the car and hopping on the train
or bus. Just ask the people at SEPTA. Director of public affairs
Richard Maloney says: “It’s been a steady upward curve for the last 18
months, 14 percent growth in that time and 24 percent in the last three
years, driven primarily by gasoline prices.” Growth is greatest, he
says, in regional rail, among suburban communities, and among people
with long car commutes.

On the eastern side of the Delaware, New Jersey Transit’s
Trenton-to-Camden River Line had its best-ever quarter ended in
September, averaging a record 7,900 riders a day, and followed that
with another record quarter through December. And the Delaware River
Port Authority says ridership on the PATCO High-Speed Line is up 7
percent from a year ago.

All of which fits a big national pattern. According to a May 10 New
York Times survey, metro Minneapolis, Dallas, Seattle, and San
Francisco all are seeing ridership spikes, with big gains both where
public transit is long-established (New York, Boston) and where it is
comparatively new (Houston, Charlotte, N.C.).

Clarence W. Marsella, chief executive of the Denver Regional
Transportation District, told the Times that gasoline prices had
brought on a “tipping point” regarding ridership. Maybe so. Or is this
just momentary, and once we get used to higher prices, we’ll backslide
into former habits?I can imagine a reasonable objection: “The car
culture doesn’t work? The car has made our lives possible! It has made
this country great, made contemporary life what it is today. Life
without cars - without the unquestioned right to personal mobility at
will - is unimaginable. You couldn’t have the suburbs without the auto.
Didn’t Frank Lloyd Wright design his modern suburbs based on the car?
And Levittown . . .”

Agreed. All true. Car culture got us where we wanted when we wanted
- for five generations. Much has been spectacular, beyond what could
have been dreamed 100 years ago.

How, then, can I say that car culture doesn’t work? Because the cost
to individual and communal life, and to the environment, has been too
high. And the bill is just now coming due. (05/22/08)
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Wall Street Journal — The world’s premier energy monitor is preparing a sharp downward
revision of its oil-supply forecast, a shift that reflects deepening
pessimism over whether oil companies can keep abreast of booming demand.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency is in the middle of a large
study of the condition of world’s top oil fields. Its findings won’t be
released until November, but the bottom line is already clear: Future
crude-oil supplies could be far tighter than previously thought.

The IEA has predicted for several years that crude-oil supplies will
arc gently upward to keep pace with rising demand, topping 116 million
barrels …

The decision to rigorously survey supply — instead of just demand,
as in the past — reflects an increasing fear within the agency and
elsewhere that oil-producing regions aren’t on track to meet future
needs.

… The IEA’s pessimism over future supplies has been building for
some time. Last summer, the agency warned that OPEC’s spare capacity
could shrink “to minimal levels by 2012.” In November, it said its
analysis of projects known to be in the works suggested that the world
could face a shortfall by 2015 of as much as 12.5 million barrels a
day, unless there was a sharp drop in expected demand. The current IEA
work aims to tally the range of investments and projects under way to
boost production from the fields in question to get a clearer sense of
what to expect in production flows.

“This is very important, because the IEA is treated as the world’s
only serious independent guardian of energy data and forecasts,” says
Edward Morse, chief energy economist at Lehman Brothers. Examining the
state of the world’s big oil fields could prod their owners into
unaccustomed transparency, he says. (05/22/08)
more…

BBC Biological Crimes — For many years, Nepal has been widely regarded as a conservation success.

But now it is emerging as an international transit point for illegal wildlife goods, particularly those being moved between India and China.

Sandwiched between the two Asian giants, Nepal has devoted nearly 20% of its land to national parks and protected areas that have conserved endangered animal and plant species.

But outside such preserved areas, highways and mountain trails are increasingly becoming transit routes for wildlife traffickers, conservationists and officials say.

“The amount of wildlife goods seized in the recent past really tells us
that Nepal is indeed a transit point,” says Prasanna Yonjan of Wildlife
Conservation Nepal, an organisation that has helped authorities catch
many traffickers and poachers.

“We know Nepal is a conduit for the international market, particularly
the Orient. Most of the goods seized here are not products from Nepal
but from down south, particularly India, Bangladesh and perhaps also
from Bhutan.”

The superintendent of police, Devendra Subedi, who heads the crime
branch in the capital, Kathmandu, says illegal wildlife trafficking has
become a part of organised crime. …

Conservationists say poaching has completely wiped out tigers in
Siraska National Park in the Indian state of Rajasthan. A recent study
showed that the total tiger population in India has declined from about
3,000 a few years ago to about 1,500 today. (05/22/08)
more…

BBC Biological Science — More than half of the world’s ocean-going sharks are at risk of extinction, a new analysis concludes.

Specialists with IUCN (formerly the World Conservation Union) found that 11 species are on the high-risk list, with five more showing signs of decline. Sharks are particularly affected by over-fishing as they reproduce slowly.

The scientists are calling for global catch limits, an end to the practice of removing fins, and measures to minimise incidental catches (bycatch).

“There’s this idea that because these are widely ranging species,
they’re more resilient to fishing pressure,” said Sonja Fordham, deputy
chair of the IUCN Shark Specialist Group (SSG) and policy director for
the Shark Alliance conservation group. In fact they’re becoming species of serious concern because
there are no international catch limits for sharks. There are intense
fisheries on the oceans, and they remain pretty much unprotected.”

The SSG assessed data on the 21 species of sharks and their
close cousins, the rays, that swim in upper portions of the open ocean
where they are exposed to fishing fleets.

Of the 21, one - the giant devilray - is assessed as Endangered, and 10 are Vulnerable. A further five are listed as Near Threatened. …

The main threat to sharks is fishing, both accidental and targeted.

“They used to be taken as bycatch by boats targeting tuna and swordfish,” said Ms Fordham. “But now as those species are declining we’re seeing more fishermen targeting sharks. Porbeagle and shortfin mako are targeted for fins and meat; species like blue shark are likely to be finned, but particularly in Europe we’re seeing more blue shark being landed.”

Several of the bodies that regulate fisheries in international waters - the Regional Fisheries Management Organisations (RFMOs) - have set up measures to curb shark finning, but there are different standards in place, a situation that enables fishermen to work around the regulations. As East Asian economies boom, conservation groups say the market for fins is increasing.

“Fishery managers and regional, national and international officials have a real obligation to improve this situation,” commented Nicholas Dulvy from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, the report’s lead author. “But it doesn’t have to be like this. With sufficient public support and resulting political will, we can turn the tide.” (05/22/08)
more…