Playing God: 4 Geoengineering Projects Doomed To Fail While Polluting The Earth

Nov 5, 2013 by MARCO TORRES

Playing God: 4 Geoengineering Projects Doomed To Fail While Polluting The Earth

Geoengineering technologies are the stuff of Hollywood catastrophe flicks. It seems scientists want to play God with our climate and nothing will stop them. Researchers have recommended sending out a giant glass sunshade into space to reflect light; the eruption of artificial volcanoes, or spraying of sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere; dissolving mountains and putting remains in the sea; and, least dramatically, perhaps, filing the ocean with iron filings to stimulate algae blooms. Here are 4 geoengineering projects doomed to fail while they pollute our Earth.

"People are right to be revolted and alarmed," says Matthew Watson, the head of the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (Spice) team. "That's a good thing. It should not sound easy. If we do this, it will be the clearest indication we have failed as planetary stewards. It will be a desperate thing to do."

Critics of geoengineering claim the government started modifying the environment years ago, through chemtrails. Critics have been mocked as conspiracy theorists, however the concern is shared by rational scientists and experts as well as many environmental activists, for reasons that stretch back to the Vietnam War.

Between 1967 and 1972, the US air force carried out "Operation Popeye", the first use of weather as an instrument of war. Almost 3,000 flights were sent into the skies above the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where planes seeded clouds with silver iodide particles, causing storms and extending the monsoon season. "Popeye" turned the strategic pass into a bog -- and appalled the international community. In 1977, the Enmod (Environmental Modification Convention) treaty outlawed weather warfare.

"The UN General Setting up must dust it down," points out Jim Thomas of the ETC group, a company that advocates maintainable development. The action team on Disintegration, Modern technology and Concentration views any kind of technological best option to climate modification as a "harmful interruption", taking focus away from typical CO2 decrease methods, such as replenishable energy resources. A "postponement needs to be called" on research, even in the lab, he says.

Except on that critical factor, the line between underwriters of geoengineering and those that want it prohibited is amazingly slim. While a handful of experts assume we should geoengineer or encounter catastrophe, they form a minority. Geoengineering is "the wrong answer", states Flavor's Matthew Watson, who blogs as the Hesitant Geoengineer.

From computer system modelling, many researchers know exactly how wrong geoengineering initiatives are. Spraying large amounts of sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere would, for instance, obscure the visibility of the sun's rays and affect all life on Earth. Rainfall patterns could also go haywire, the ozone layer could break up. Dump iron filings into the sea and you might well kill off swathes of marine life. There are far too many risks that exceed the benefits of controlling a climate which many scientists don't even believe is a problem anymore. It's a natural course for the Earth and all claims regarding global warming have been exaggerated for political gain.

4 GEOENGINEERING PROJECTS DOOMED TO FAIL

1. STRATOSPHERIC AEROSOLS

The Technology: Scientists are already trying to stop the sun's rays and heat from reaching the Earth's atmosphere by reflecting some of the sun's rays back into space using aerosals. They've been called chemtrails, aerial spraying, aerosol emissions, cirrus clouds, among many other terms. The largest reports come from Canada and U.S. but it happens all over the world including countries such as France, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom among many others. Thousands of planes spray chemicals, salt or other particulates into our atmosphere in an attempt to curb global warming (so they say).

How Scientists Want to Play God: The release of chemicals or particulates, like highly polluting sulfur have been discussed for almost a decade by many scientists worldwide waiting in the wings for funding. They want to add more small reflecting particles in the upper part of the atmosphere (the stratosphere which is located between 15 and 50 kilometers above the Earth’s surface). The goal is that these stratospheric aerosols will be engineered to migrate to particular regions (e.g. over the arctic) or to rise above the stratosphere. A CFR geo-engineering meeting summary document from 1999 (PDF pages 12,13,14) also categorically stated that the ultimate goal under “A technology strategy for global warming” is the implementation of a global Carbon Tax. So they want to play God and tax man at the same time.

Why it Won't Work: This is among the riskiest and most ridiculous of global warming fixes. Global weather patterns could be drastically affected. Artificial weather modification can impact all of us by reducing water supplies, changing agricultural crop production cycles, reducing crop production, and water availability. Since most experimental weather modification programs use chemicals released into the atmosphere the public could be subjected increasingly toxic or unknown substances that could adversely impact agricultural crops and trees. If we artificially change the growing seasons, our pollinators like bees and birds (many now in sharp decline across the United States), may not survive, leaving many flowers, native plants, agricultural and trees crops that are not pollinated. Native grasses, plants, trees, and agricultural losses could be devastated not only in the United States but on a worldwide basis.

2. SPACE REFLECTORS

The Technology: Scientists would assembling a giant glass sunshade in space then firing it into orbit to reflect a small proportion of the sun's rays, according to astronomer Roger Angel. 

How Scientists Want to Play God: Scientists claim a reduction of just 2 percent in sunlight reaching the Earth would make warming more manageable.

Why it Won't Work: Asteroids, primarily. Glass discs would be vulnerable to space debris, and maintenance of a "space umbrella" requires time, expertise and money. Any attempts to control the exterior perimeter of the Earth through God-like intervention in space reflectors is an exercise in futility since any type of technology, regardless of how advanced, would never withstand the strength of even small asteroids and space debris which would essentially render these reflectors useless.

3. OCEAN FERTILIZATION

The Technology: Dropping iron filings into the ocean could theoretically generate blooms of carbon-absorbing plankton. The plankton then take in CO2 at the surface, then carry it with them as they drift to the ocean floor after death, creating "carbon sinks".

How Scientists Want to Play God: Scientists think that they can optimally fertilize the ocean (artificially) to help restore lost/threatened ecosystems. They theoretically assume iron infusions could preferentially favor certain species and alter surface ecosystems even though they have no evidence on the overall impact since the effects are unknown.

Why it Won't Work: Population explosions of aquatic life that disturb the food chain may impact many wildlife populations. This has already been shown to lead to an unnatural imbalance between fish, whales and jellyfish. A 2010 study showed that iron enrichment stimulates toxic diatom production in high-nitrate, low-chlorophyll areas which, the authors argue, raises "serious concerns over the net benefit and sustainability of large-scale iron fertilizations". It takes a long time for comparatively little effect, and the impact on marine life could be devastating. Where plankton blooms in contained water sources, fish can suffocate. Fertilising the oceans would also marginally acidify them.

4. ARTIFICIAL TREES

The Technology: Advanced technology already exists to extract CO2 from the air. Klaus Lackner of the Columbia University Earth Institute has developed machinery that would replace a tree and extract 1,000 times more CO2 a day from the atmosphere than a natural tree. 

How Scientists Want to Play God: Scientists think that building these artificial tree systems around the world could replace nature's blueprint with a more advanced form of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere.

Why it Won't Work: 1) High cost: direct air-capture measures like this would cost a minimum of $600 per tonne of CO2 removed. 2) The effects of removing 1000 times more CO2 out of the atmosphere than natural trees could have a detrimental effect on ecosystems and upset he homeostatic equilibrium of these systems which may dramatically affect the food chain.

Global Dimming

Comparing Israeli sunlight records from the 1950s with current ones, Dr Stanhill was astonished to find a large fall in solar radiation.

"There was a staggering 22% drop in the sunlight, and that really amazed me." Intrigued, he searched records from all around the world, and found the same story almost everywhere he looked.

Sunlight was falling by 10% over the USA, nearly 30% in parts of the former Soviet Union, and even by 16% in parts of the British Isles.

Although the effect varied greatly from place to place, overall the decline amounted to one to two per cent globally every decade between the 1950s and the 1990s.

Dr Stanhill called it "global dimming", but his research, published in 2001, met a sceptical response from other scientists.

It was only recently, when his conclusions were confirmed by Australian scientists using a completely different method to estimate solar radiation, that climate scientists at last woke up to the reality of global dimming.

This visible air pollution created by geoengineering reflects sunlight back into space, preventing it reaching the surface. But the pollution also changes the optical properties of clouds. 

Because the particles seed the formation of water droplets, polluted clouds contain a larger number of droplets than unpolluted clouds.

Recent research shows that this makes them more reflective than they would otherwise be, again reflecting the Sun's rays back into space.

Scientists are now worried that dimming, by shielding the oceans from the full power of the Sun, may be disrupting the pattern of the world's rainfall.

There are suggestions that dimming was behind the droughts in sub-Saharan Africa which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the 1970s and 80s.

Others have speculated that the UN's depopulation plan (Agenda 21) is using geoengineering as one of its most effective platforms.

There are disturbing hints the same thing may be happening today in Asia, home to half the world's population. 

"My main concern is global dimming is also having a detrimental impact on the Asian monsoon," says Professor Veerhabhadran Ramanathan, professor of climate and atmospheric sciences at the University of California, San Diego. "We are talking about billions of people."

The Industrial-Military Complex For Complete Weather Control Against Global Warming

HAARP is a large 180 antennae grid that projects powerful electromagnetic pulses to heat a specific point in the earth's ionosphere. This has the effect of creating electromagnetic frequencies that can be bounced back to earth at desired locations, causing major disruption to weather and geophysical elements, even deep underground. Up to 3.6 billion watts can be generated by HAARP, heating the ionosphere to over 50 000 degrees and “lifting a 30 square kilometre area of the ionosphere, thereby changing localised pressure systems or even altering the route of jet streams.”

The Case Orange report cites evidence that Raytheon could develop the capacity to “exercise a form of complete “weather control”, a situation bearing a marked similarity to the Monsanto corporation's stated ambition “to control the food chain.” It is noteworthy that there are currently more than 500 ‘climate ready’ genetically modified plant gene patents awaiting licensing approvals in Washington and Brussels. ‘Climate Ready’ GM seeds and plants are promised by their creators to be capable of producing a crop under both flood and drought conditions.

The human rights and environmental watchdog 'ETC Group' describes the atmospheric geoengineering developments as follows: “The roll-out of 'Plan B' (a reference to the use of geoengineering if other efforts to curtail emissions should be deemed ineffective) is being skilfully executed: Prominent high level panels sponsored by prestige groups, a spate of peer-reviewed articles in science journals and a line up of panicked politicians in northern countries, nodding nervously in agreement as scientists testify about the “need to research Plan B.”

Rady Ananda states at the end of his paper: “Case Orange ties-in a 1996 report by top military personnel in the US entitled “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025” with details such as government spraying schedules, chemical orders, correct nomenclature used in airline operation manuals and calls for geoengineering by economists, to support its notion of “heavy involvement of governments at top level in climate control projects.” Ananda continues: “Owning the Weather in 2025 provides a specific time line for the use of En Mod technologies in cooperation with the Weather Modification Association, a business-government group promoting the 'beneficial' (my emphasis) uses of environmental modification:

2000-2025 Use chemicals for atmospheric seeding by civilian (as well as military) aviation

2004 Create smart clouds through nanotechnology, with exponential increase from 2010

2005 Introduce carbon black dust.”

The UN Enlisted In Geoengineering Military Combat Against Climate

In 2007, The World Meteorological Organisation (of the United Nations) published a statement that included “Guidelines for Planning of Weather Modification Activities.” This document clearly implicates the UN in plans to conduct aerosol spraying activities on a wide scale.

In a section of the Case Orange report dealing with 'the bare necessities of geoengineering through cloud generation for the survival of the planet' the authors state: “Our investigation team comes to the conclusion that climate control programs, controlled by the military but approved by governments, are silently implemented in order to avoid the worst case scenario they obviously do not want. The two basic instruments are temperature control through the generation of artificial clouds and manipulation of the ionosphere through ionosphere heaters.

“Both remain basically military combat systems with the option to go into the offensive if deemed necessary. However, since several ionospheric heaters are installed at various places around the globe, one can assume that there is wide cooperation between governments in order to reach climate targets by 2025: controlling the weather and the planet.”

The spraying schemes seem to be organised in a logical pattern so that the whole of Europe is covered in a 3 day period. Coloured maps of Europe indicate when each regime is to take place.

In the report's section entitled “Recommendations”, the authors state: “Persistent chemtrails have a devastating impact on eco-systems on this planet and to quality of life in general.” The authors call for the full disclosure of the current En Mod activities to the public, as well as for all civil aviation laws to be abided by.

Moratorium On Geoengineering Activities Led Nowhere

In response to policy interest in geoengineering as a means to control climate, a sub-committee of the United Nations Convention of Biodiversity proposed, in May 2010, a moratorium on geoengineering activities. This proposal was heard at the Tenth Conference of Parties to the UN Convention of Biodiversity in Nagoya, Japan but no outcome on curbing geoengineering initiatives were concluded.

The Case Orange report further states that the US permits open air testing of chemical and biological weapons, which overrides the civil law mentioned earlier in this article. The authors paraphrase the permissive law thus: “The Secretary of Defense may conduct tests and experiments involving the use of chemical and biological agents on civilian populations.” It seems that ‘national security’ concerns can be used by the President to overrule environmental and public health considerations. Is the same true in Europe?

Other significant reports include an important paper by Dr Ilya Perlingieri, entitled “The Consequences of Toxic Metals and Chemical Aerosols on Human Health”. She states: “Over the past decade, independent testing of Chemtrails around the country have shown a dangerous, extremely poisonous brew that includes: barium, nano-aluminium coated fibreglass (known as CHAFF), radioactive thorium, cadmium, chromium, nickel, dessicated blood, mould spores, yellow fungal mycotoxins, ethylene dibromide and polymer fibres. Barium can be compared to the toxicity of arsenic and is known to adversely affect the heart. Aluminium has a history of damaging brain function.”

Sources:

bbc.co.uk

i-sis.org.uk

independent.co.uk

preventdisease.com

Marco Torres is a research specialist, writer and consumer advocate for healthy lifestyles. He holds degrees in Public Health and Environmental Science and is a professional speaker on topics such as disease prevention, environmental toxins and health policy.

Atmospheric Geoengineering - What in the World Are They Spraying?

The Consciousness Revolution By Graham Hancock

The Consciousness Revolution
By Graham Hancock

By Graham Hancock

Here's the full text of the article Russell Brand kindly invited me to contribute to last week's issue of the New Statesman. The article, entitled The War on Consciousness, had to be shortened to fit the space available in the magazine, but I reproduce the complete unedited text here.

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Consciousness is one of the great mysteries of science – perhaps the greatest mystery. We all know we have it, when we think, when we dream, when we savour tastes and aromas, when we hear a great symphony, when we fall in love, and it is surely the most intimate, the most sapient, the most personal part of ourselves. Yet no one can really claim to have understood and explained it completely. There’s no doubt it’s associated with the brain in some way but the nature of that association is far from clear. In particular how do these three pounds of material stuff inside our skulls allow us to have experiences?

Professor David Chalmers of the Australian National University has dubbed this the “hard problem” of consciousness; but many scientists, particularly those (still in the majority) who are philosophically inclined to believe that all phenomena can be reduced to material interactions, deny that any problem exists. To them it seems self-evident that physical processes within the stuff of the brain produce consciousness rather in the way that a generator produces electricity – i.e. consciousness is an “epiphenomenon” of brain activity. And they see it as equally obvious that there cannot be such things as conscious survival of death or out-of-body experiences since both consciousness and experience are confined to the brain and must die when the brain dies.

Yet other scientists with equally impressive credentials are not so sure and are increasingly willing to consider a very different analogy – namely that the relationship of consciousness to the brain may be less like the relationship of the generator to the electricity it produces and more like the relationship of the TV signal to the TV set. In that case when the TV set is destroyed – dead – the signal still continues. Nothing in the present state of knowledge of neuroscience rules this revolutionary possibility out. True, if you damage certain areas of the brain certain areas of consciousness are compromised, but this does not prove that those areas of the brain generate the relevant areas of consciousness. If you were to damage certain areas of your TV set the picture would deteriorate or vanish but the TV signal would remain intact.

We are, in other words, confronted by at least as much mystery as fact around the subject of consciousness and this being the case we should remember that what seems obvious and self-evident to one generation may not seem at all obvious or self-evident to the next. For hundreds of years it was obvious and self-evident to the greatest human minds that the sun moved around the earth – one need only look to the sky, they said, to see the truth of this proposition. Indeed those who maintained the revolutionary view that the earth moved around the sun faced the Inquisition and death by burning at the stake. Yet as it turned out the revolutionaries were right and orthodoxy was terribly, ridiculously wrong.

The same may well prove to be true with the mystery of consciousness. Yes, it does seem obvious and self-evident that the brain produces it (the generator analogy), but this is a deduction from incomplete data and categorically NOT yet an established and irrefutable fact. New discoveries may force materialist science to rescind this theory in favour of something more like the TV analogy in which the brain comes to be understood as a transceiver rather than as a generator of consciousness and in which consciousness is recognized as fundamentally “non-local” in nature – perhaps even as one of the basic driving forces of the universe. At the very least we should withhold judgment on this “hard problem” until more evidence is in and view with suspicion those who hold dogmatic and ideological views about the nature of consciousness.

It’s at this point that the whole seemingly academic issue becomes intensely political and current because modern technological society idealises and is monopolistically focused on only one state of consciousness – the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness that makes us efficient producers and consumers of material goods and services. At the same time our society seeks to police and control a wide range of other “altered” states of consciousness on the basis of the unproven proposition that consciousness is generated by the brain.

I refer here to the so-called “war on drugs” which is really better understood as a war on consciousness and which maintains, supposedly in the interests of society, that we as adults do not have the right or maturity to make sovereign decisions about our own consciousness and about the states of consciousness we wish to explore and embrace. This extraordinary imposition on adult cognitive liberty is justified by the idea that our brain activity, disturbed by drugs, will adversely impact our behaviour towards others. Yet anyone who pauses to think seriously for even a moment must realize that we already have adequate laws that govern adverse behaviour towards others and that the real purpose of the “war on drugs” must therefore be to bear down on consciousness itself.

Confirmation that this is so came from the last British Labour government. It declared that its drug policy would be based on scientific evidence yet in 2009 it sacked Professor David Nutt, Chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, for stating the simple statistical fact that cannabis is less dangerous (in terms of measured “harms”) than tobacco and alcohol and that ecstasy is less dangerous than horse-riding. Clearly what was at play here were ideological issues of great importance to the powers that be. And this is an ideology that sticks stubbornly in place regardless of changes in the complexion of the government of the day. The present Conservative-Liberal coalition remains just as adamant in its enforcement of the so-called war on drugs as its Labour predecessor, and continues in the name of this “war” to pour public money – our money – into large, armed, drug-enforcement bureaucracies which are entitled to break down our doors at dead of night, invade our homes, ruin our reputations and put us behind bars.

All of this, we have been persuaded, is in our own interests. Yet if we as adults are not free to make sovereign decisions – right or wrong – about our own consciousness, that most intimate, that most sapient, that most personal part of ourselves, then in what useful sense can we be said to be free at all? And how are we to begin to take real and meaningful responsibility for all the other aspects of our lives when our governments seek to disenfranchise us from this most fundamental of all human rights and responsibilities?

In this connection it is interesting to note that our society has no objection to altering consciousness per se. On the contrary many consciousness-altering drugs, such as Prozac, Seroxat, Ritalin and alcohol, are either massively over-prescribed or freely available today, and make huge fortunes for their manufacturers, but remain entirely legal despite causing obvious harms. Could this be because such legal drugs do not alter consciousness in ways that threaten the monopolistic dominance of the alert problem-solving state of consciousness, while a good number of illegal drugs, such as cannabis, LSD, DMT and psilocybin, do?

There is a revolution in the making here, and what is at stake transcends the case for cognitive liberty as an essential and inalienable adult human right. If it turns out that the brain is not a generator but a transceiver of consciousness then we must consider some little-known scientific research that points to a seemingly outlandish possibility, namely that a particular category of illegal drugs, the hallucinogens such as LSD, DMT and psilocybin, may alter the receiver wavelength of the brain and allow us to gain contact with intelligent non-material entities, “light beings”, “spirits”, “machine elves” (as Terence McKenna called them) – perhaps even the inhabitants of other dimensions. This possibility is regarded as plain fact by shamans in hunter-gatherer societies who for thousands of years have made use of visionary plants and fungi to enter and interact with what they construe as the “spirit world”. Intriguingly it was also specifically envisaged by Dr Rick Strassman, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico, following his ground-breaking research with human volunteers and DMT carried out in the 1990’s – a project that produced findings with shattering implications for our understanding of the nature of reality. For further information on Strassman’s revolutionary work see his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule.

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Related:
Please also see Graham's article The War On Consciousness: The Talk That Gave TED Indigestion 

Surviving Death, a short documentary about Near Death Experience - NDE

SIGNS OF CHANGE

Humanity is Waking Up to the Intelligence of Nature

October 2, 2013 | By WakingTimes | 10 Replies

Paul Lenda, Guest

There’s a heightening level of awareness within the human race with regards to nature and all that is contained within it. Everything from the discoveries of the rudiments of language in monkeys, metacognition in dolphins, self-awareness of elephants, the ability for animals to tell “right” from “wrong”, to the creation and extension of the bills of rights for animals and plants by countries such as Switzerland and Ecuador, as well as the acknowledgment of dolphins as being non-human persons.

There’s a growing awareness by humanity that nature and its inhabitants are not as primitive and simple as it may have been believed to be the case in the past. With this growing awareness, comes growing understanding of the unity that humanity has with the environment within which it exists. This sense of unity with nature is not something new and indeed has been the primary position of awareness for many societies in existence before their industrialization.

In today’s post-modern societies, there is a resurgence of that connection with the biosphere and interconnected organism that is the planet and all that exists within its domain. As more discoveries are made, greater awareness shines down on humanity’s collective consciousness and thereby, allowing us to evolve the transpersonal consciousness to a level where the ego is no longer the dominator of the Self.

Science can be a wonderful thing. It can prove without a doubt what may have been suggested in times past, but was not completely understood as being the absolute truth, which always left a bit of doubt or confusion. However, with continuous scientific discoveries occurring all the time, it is of great fortune that we are able to attain substantial data and knowledge concerning the environment and all that it encompasses.

With these new discoveries, it is being quite apparent that humans have mistakenly been ignorant and arrogant concerning the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms with respect to their levels of sophistication, evolution, consciousness, and awareness. If we were to start looking at the mineral kingdom, much can be seen from recently-made discoveries.

 

Of course, there has been such an influx of findings that they would be able to fill up an entire book. However, just a few will be looked at in order to demonstrate the point at hand. All of the discoveries and findings mentioned within this article have been announced publicly within the last few years.

Rocks have been looked at as generally non-living, inanimate, unconscious, and completely devoid of any life-like characteristics, even though everything in nature possesses self-organization. However, stunning new evidence shows the incredible diversity of crystals and minerals after the rise of life on this planet and points to the reality that rocks, like plants and animals, have been evolving all this time, and we did not even realize it until now. This idea is being called “mineral evolution,” which is the concept that many of the our planet’s rocks, minerals and crystals are dynamic species which emerged and transformed over time.

Of course, the evolution of the mineral kingdom is not exactly the same as the evolution of the plant and animal kingdoms, since minerals do not mutate, reproduce or complete like other living organisms, at least to our knowledge. However, the vast variety and abundance of all the various minerals on Earth have changed quite dramatically over the 4.5+ billion years of Earth’s past. US geologist Robert Hazen, who led the research team for this finding, said that “for at least 2.5 billion years, and possibly since the emergence of life, Earth’s mineralogy has evolved in parallel with biology.”

This should not be too big of a surprise to us, however. It makes quite a bit of sense that evolution is all-encompassing…everything from our consciousness, to galaxies, to rocks. Everything is in a constant state of be-ing and become-ing, and the condition that the various aspects of Reality are static does not find much underlying evidence. It looks more and more as if Reality is dynamic and extropic in nature.

Stepping out of the mineral kingdom, we make our way to the plant kingdom. Although it has been known for quite some time that the rainforests of the world act as lungs for the planet, it has recently been discovered that they act as a heart as well. What this implies is that not only are rainforests giant carbon sinks of the planet (acting as lungs), but they may also be responsible for moving many of the weather patterns that we see all around the globe (just as the physical heart moves blood throughout the entire body).

The new study researching this subject suggests that rainforests, such as the ones in Africa and South America, create winds that circulate water around the planet. It is known that more than half the rainfall in rainforests evaporates and recirculates, which then keeps the upper air moist. New findings show that rainforests are also moving the air around them, which also has the effect of moving the water around.

It turns out that as important as plants and trees are to ensure that there is enough clean oxygen for all sentient beings on the plante to thrive and survive, they are now acknowledged as being even more important by affecting the very weather patterns of our biosphere.

Perhaps as a response to the various discoveries concerning the plant kingdom, there have been governments across the planet that have taken it upon themselves to become trailblazers in the area of plant and ecosystem rights. This higher awareness has been most recently demonstrated in the countries of Switzerland and Ecuador.

In the case of Switzerland, the Swiss Government’s Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology has come to the consensus that plants have rights and that they have to be treated appropriately. Making our way to Ecuador, we can see that the country has changed its constitution to say that nature has “the right to the maintenance and regeneration of its vital cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.” The basis of these rights “change the status of ecosystems from being regarded as property under the law to being recognized as rights-bearing entities.”

The idea of plants having a degree of consciousness is very well documented, and so it is not unreasonable for a government to come up with such a conclusion in respect to the plant kingdom. However, the perceptions of humans are not always quick to shift and change. It is demonstrations such as these which show that there is indeed a higher awareness being experienced by humanity with relation to its biosphere neighbors.

Emerging out of the plant kingdom and into the animal kingdom, a myriad of recent discoveries exemplify humanity’s growing awareness of the sophistication and higher level of be-ing at which animals exist. The latest and most well-known finding is concerning dolphins. Dolphins have been perceived as being very intelligent beings for at least several thousand years. In ancient Greece, it was punishable by death to kill or harm a dolphin.

Much mythology revolves around dolphins. However, concerning the scientific data being research and analyzed, it has been found without doubt that human language and dolphin movement patterns show similarities in brevity. The law of brevity in human language, according to which the most frequently-used words tend to be the shortest, extends to dolphins, as well as other animal species. It was observed that when dolphins move on the surface of the water, they tend to make the simplest movements, in the same way that humans tend to use words comprised of fewer letters when they are speaking or writing.

Perhaps it is discoveries such as these and others that are altering the positions of awareness that humanity has concerning dolphins to the point where they are being described by scientsts as being non-human persons and, as a result, should be treated as such. Dolphins are recognized as being the most intelligent beings on our planet, after humans. The signs are numerous, such as: the anatomical research showing that dolphin brains have many key features associated with high intelligence; and studies showing that dolphins have distinct personalities, strong sense of self, and the ability to think about the future. Dolphins are also cultural animals, which means that new types of behavior can be quickly picked up by one dolphin from another.

There’s a heightening level of awareness within the human race with regards to nature and all that is contained within it. Everything from the discoveries of the rudiments of language in monkeys, metacognition in dolphins, self-awareness of elephants, the ability for animals to tell “right” from “wrong”, to the creation and extension of the bills of rights for animals and plants by countries such as Switzerland and Ecuador, as well as the acknowledgment of dolphins as being non-human persons.
There’s a growing awareness by humanity that nature and its inhabitants are not as primitive and simple as it may have been believed to be the case in the past. With this growing awareness, comes growing understanding of the unity that humanity has with the environment within which it exists. This sense of unity with nature is not something new and indeed has been the primary position of awareness for many societies in existence before their industrialization.

In today’s post-modern societies, there is a resurgence of that connection with the biosphere and interconnected organism that is the planet and all that exists within its domain. As more discoveries are made, greater awareness shines down on humanity’s collective consciousness and thereby, allowing us to evolve the transpersonal consciousness to a level where the ego is no longer the dominator of the Self.
Science can be a wonderful thing. It can prove without a doubt what may have been suggested in times past, but was not completely understood as being the absolute truth, which always left a bit of doubt or confusion. However, with continuous scientific discoveries occurring all the time, it is of great fortune that we are able to attain substantial data and knowledge concerning the environment and all that it encompasses.

With these new discoveries, it is being quite apparent that humans have mistakenly been ignorant and arrogant concerning the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms with respect to their levels of sophistication, evolution, consciousness, and awareness. If we were to start looking at the mineral kingdom, much can be seen from recently-made discoveries.

Of course, there has been such an influx of findings that they would be able to fill up an entire book. However, just a few will be looked at in order to demonstrate the point at hand. All of the discoveries and findings mentioned within this article have been announced publicly within the last few years.
Rocks have been looked at as generally non-living, inanimate, unconscious, and completely devoid of any life-like characteristics, even though everything in nature possesses self-organization. However, stunning new evidence shows the incredible diversity of crystals and minerals after the rise of life on this planet and points to the reality that rocks, like plants and animals, have been evolving all this time, and we did not even realize it until now. This idea is being called “mineral evolution,” which is the concept that many of the our planet’s rocks, minerals and crystals are dynamic species which emerged and transformed over time.

Of course, the evolution of the mineral kingdom is not exactly the same as the evolution of the plant and animal kingdoms, since minerals do not mutate, reproduce or complete like other living organisms, at least to our knowledge. However, the vast variety and abundance of all the various minerals on Earth have changed quite dramatically over the 4.5+ billion years of Earth’s past. US geologist Robert Hazen, who led the research team for this finding, said that “for at least 2.5 billion years, and possibly since the emergence of life, Earth’s mineralogy has evolved in parallel with biology.”
This should not be too big of a surprise to us, however. It makes quite a bit of sense that evolution is all-encompassing…everything from our consciousness, to galaxies, to rocks. Everything is in a constant state of be-ing and become-ing, and the condition that the various aspects of Reality are static does not find much underlying evidence. It looks more and more as if Reality is dynamic and extropic in nature.
Stepping out of the mineral kingdom, we make our way to the plant kingdom. Although it has been known for quite some time that the rainforests of the world act as lungs for the planet, it has recently been discovered that they act as a heart as well. What this implies is that not only are rainforests giant carbon sinks of the planet (acting as lungs), but they may also be responsible for moving many of the weather patterns that we see all around the globe (just as the physical heart moves blood throughout the entire body).
The new study researching this subject suggests that rainforests, such as the ones in Africa and South America, create winds that circulate water around the planet. It is known that more than half the rainfall in rainforests evaporates and recirculates, which then keeps the upper air moist. New findings show that rainforests are also moving the air around them, which also has the effect of moving the water around.
It turns out that as important as plants and trees are to ensure that there is enough clean oxygen for all sentient beings on the plante to thrive and survive, they are now acknowledged as being even more important by affecting the very weather patterns of our biosphere.

Perhaps as a response to the various discoveries concerning the plant kingdom, there have been governments across the planet that have taken it upon themselves to become trailblazers in the area of plant and ecosystem rights. This higher awareness has been most recently demonstrated in the countries of Switzerland and Ecuador.

In the case of Switzerland, the Swiss Government’s Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology has come to the consensus that plants have rights and that they have to be treated appropriately. Making our way to Ecuador, we can see that the country has changed its constitution to say that nature has “the right to the maintenance and regeneration of its vital cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.” The basis of these rights “change the status of ecosystems from being regarded as property under the law to being recognized as rights-bearing entities.”

The idea of plants having a degree of consciousness is very well documented, and so it is not unreasonable for a government to come up with such a conclusion in respect to the plant kingdom. However, the perceptions of humans are not always quick to shift and change. It is demonstrations such as these which show that there is indeed a higher awareness being experienced by humanity with relation to its biosphere neighbors.

Emerging out of the plant kingdom and into the animal kingdom, a myriad of recent discoveries exemplify humanity’s growing awareness of the sophistication and higher level of be-ing at which animals exist. The latest and most well-known finding is concerning dolphins. Dolphins have been perceived as being very intelligent beings for at least several thousand years. In ancient Greece, it was punishable by death to kill or harm a dolphin.

Much mythology revolves around dolphins. However, concerning the scientific data being research and analyzed, it has been found without doubt that human language and dolphin movement patterns show similarities in brevity. The law of brevity in human language, according to which the most frequently-used words tend to be the shortest, extends to dolphins, as well as other animal species. It was observed that when dolphins move on the surface of the water, they tend to make the simplest movements, in the same way that humans tend to use words comprised of fewer letters when they are speaking or writing.

Perhaps it is discoveries such as these and others that are altering the positions of awareness that humanity has concerning dolphins to the point where they are being described by scientsts as being non-human persons and, as a result, should be treated as such. Dolphins are recognized as being the most intelligent beings on our planet, after humans. The signs are numerous, such as: the anatomical research showing that dolphin brains have many key features associated with high intelligence; and studies showing that dolphins have distinct personalities, strong sense of self, and the ability to think about the future. Dolphins are also cultural animals, which means that new types of behavior can be quickly picked up by one dolphin from another.

More stunning research has discovered that dolphins, as well as other animals such as macaque monkeys, have shown to have conscious metacognition. There is a growing amount of evidence that animals share functional parallels with human conscious metacognition. Metacognition is essentially the ability to reflect upon, monitor or regulate various states of mind, and, although this was once considered solely the domain of humans, it is now seen as evident in some animals as well. J. David Smith, Ph.D., a comparative psychologist who has conducted a study on this topic, has concluded that “metacognition rivals language and tool use in its potential to establish important continuities or discontinuities between human and animal minds.”

Metacognition aside, animals are also now known to possess self-awareness. First seen in gorillas and then later in elephants and dolphins, self-awareness is no longer solely recognized as being the domain of the human being. When most animals see themselves in a mirror, they will interpret what they see as another animal, possibly a threat, and may attack the image or be scared away. After a while, the animals habituate and ignore the reflected image entirely. However, an animal that is self-aware will recognize the image as its own reflection, which is something that requires a degree of abstract thought and cognitive association.

As fascinating as these things may be, new research has discovered that several species of animals, such as monkeys, wolves, coyotes, elephants, chimpanzees, rodents, bats, and whales, have a sense of what is called “morality”, in that they are able to subjectively tell “right” from “wrong”. In a series of studies, scientists have found that monkeys and apes can make judgments about fairness, offer altruistic help and empathize when a fellow animal is ill or in a difficult situation. The existence of a conscience is also apparent, and remembering obligations also exists. Even when there is no obvious reward for an an altruistic action, chimpanzees were still observed as willing to help others. The conclusion of this observation led to the statement by one of the researchers that “chimpanzees spontaneously help both humans and each other in carefully controlled tests.”

Perhaps the most interesting point in this discovery is that everything else being equal, animals such as chimpanzees prefer to reward a companion together with themselves rather than just themselves alone. The act of giving by the monkeys is self-rewarding and can be said as being a demonstration of the interconnected consciousness of monkeys, just as humans, within their interconnected transpersonal consciousness, will experience the same effect. As the old adage goes: what you do to another, you do to/for yourself.

Language among animals is the one final demonstration, at least in this article, of the elevated level of consciousness and be-ing in other aspects of nature. It has been recently found that the rudiments of language exist among monkeys. Certain monkeys that have been studied have been seen to combine the same calls in different ways, using rules of grammar that turn sound into language. Alban Lemasson, a primatologist at the University of Rennes in France, has stated that “this is the first evidence we have in animal communication that they can combine, in a semantic way, different calls to create a new message.”

As it stands, it seems that humans are no longer the sole users of language in the sophisticated manner in which we use it. Although nowhere as complex as the syntax of human beings, monkey calls are more advanced and complex than we have ever previously been aware.

All these discoveries have occurred within a few years and are demonstrative of the incredibly accelerated rise in awareness that humanity is experiencing with respect to the level of consciousness of the various aspects of nature, as well as how primitive nature and all its various aspects seemed to be in times past. There is an awakening to a more intelligent nature than has ever been previously acknowledged. This is a step towards a new age in which humans and the rest of nature will hopefully have a more symbiotic and unifying relationship, and more respect will be given to the environment. Baby steps, for sure, but baby steps towards a positive future, nonetheless.

About the Author

Paul Lenda is a conscious evolution guide, author of The Creation of a Consciousness Shift, and co-founder of SHIFT>, a social community focused on anchoring in the new paradigm and assisting the positive transformation of humanity. With the drive to be aware of and experience the wider horizon of Reality, Paul has developed an extensive background in the spiritual and transformative elements of life; one that is both knowledge and experienced-based. Visit his website www.shift.is, follow him on Twitter or visit the Shift Facebook community.

This article is offered under Creative Commons license. It’s okay to republish it anywhere as long as attribution bio is included and all links remain intact.

More stunning research has discovered that dolphins, as well as other animals such as macaque monkeys, have shown to have conscious metacognition. There is a growing amount of evidence that animals share functional parallels with human conscious metacognition. Metacognition is essentially the ability to reflect upon, monitor or regulate various states of mind, and, although this was once considered solely the domain of humans, it is now seen as evident in some animals as well. J. David Smith, Ph.D., a comparative psychologist who has conducted a study on this topic, has concluded that “metacognition rivals language and tool use in its potential to establish important continuities or discontinuities between human and animal minds.”

Metacognition aside, animals are also now known to possess self-awareness. First seen in gorillas and then later in elephants and dolphins, self-awareness is no longer solely recognized as being the domain of the human being. When most animals see themselves in a mirror, they will interpret what they see as another animal, possibly a threat, and may attack the image or be scared away. After a while, the animals habituate and ignore the reflected image entirely. However, an animal that is self-aware will recognize the image as its own reflection, which is something that requires a degree of abstract thought and cognitive association.

As fascinating as these things may be, new research has discovered that several species of animals, such as monkeys, wolves, coyotes, elephants, chimpanzees, rodents, bats, and whales, have a sense of what is called “morality”, in that they are able to subjectively tell “right” from “wrong”. In a series of studies, scientists have found that monkeys and apes can make judgments about fairness, offer altruistic help and empathize when a fellow animal is ill or in a difficult situation. The existence of a conscience is also apparent, and remembering obligations also exists. Even when there is no obvious reward for an an altruistic action, chimpanzees were still observed as willing to help others. The conclusion of this observation led to the statement by one of the researchers that “chimpanzees spontaneously help both humans and each other in carefully controlled tests.”

Perhaps the most interesting point in this discovery is that everything else being equal, animals such as chimpanzees prefer to reward a companion together with themselves rather than just themselves alone. The act of giving by the monkeys is self-rewarding and can be said as being a demonstration of the interconnected consciousness of monkeys, just as humans, within their interconnected transpersonal consciousness, will experience the same effect. As the old adage goes: what you do to another, you do to/for yourself.

Language among animals is the one final demonstration, at least in this article, of the elevated level of consciousness and be-ing in other aspects of nature. It has been recently found that the rudiments of language exist among monkeys. Certain monkeys that have been studied have been seen to combine the same calls in different ways, using rules of grammar that turn sound into language. Alban Lemasson, a primatologist at the University of Rennes in France, has stated that “this is the first evidence we have in animal communication that they can combine, in a semantic way, different calls to create a new message.”

As it stands, it seems that humans are no longer the sole users of language in the sophisticated manner in which we use it. Although nowhere as complex as the syntax of human beings, monkey calls are more advanced and complex than we have ever previously been aware.

All these discoveries have occurred within a few years and are demonstrative of the incredibly accelerated rise in awareness that humanity is experiencing with respect to the level of consciousness of the various aspects of nature, as well as how primitive nature and all its various aspects seemed to be in times past. There is an awakening to a more intelligent nature than has ever been previously acknowledged. This is a step towards a new age in which humans and the rest of nature will hopefully have a more symbiotic and unifying relationship, and more respect will be given to the environment. Baby steps, for sure, but baby steps towards a positive future, nonetheless.

About the Author

Paul Lenda is a conscious evolution guide, author of The Creation of a Consciousness Shift, and co-founder of SHIFT>, a social community focused on anchoring in the new paradigm and assisting the positive transformation of humanity. With the drive to be aware of and experience the wider horizon of Reality, Paul has developed an extensive background in the spiritual and transformative elements of life; one that is both knowledge and experienced-based. Visit his website www.shift.is, follow him on Twitter or visit the Shift Facebook community.

This article is offered under Creative Commons license. It’s okay to republish it anywhere as long as attribution bio is included and all links remain intact.