Central Minnesota Political

About 4,000 activists associated with the German environmental group Ende Gelände stormed an open pit coal mine  near the city of  Viersen in Germany . The action was part of a series of actions, called Future Fridays, that bring together activists from Germany and neighboring countries. According  to Ende Gelände this weeks actions brought together more then 40,000 activists across Germany.  The news site Common Dreams reports that the group that stormed the coal mine shut the mining operations  down. Common Dreams also reports that another group closed rail road tracks leading to a coal fire power plant associated with the mine. You can read the Common Dreams story, and see some photos here   https://tinyurl.com/y4tf9sem The  Ende Gelände  website is in German, English, and French. You can learn more about their activities here   https://www.ende-gelaende.org/en/ Tim Central Minnesota Political

We had a visitor this week who wanted to learn about our sheep grazing methods. We showed her how our managed intensive grazing build up soil carbon.We told her that by storing large amounts of carbon in the soil we were, in our small way, helping to prevent flooding and to mitigate the chaos caused by climate change. I told her that, for us, climate change still seemed somewhat like an abstraction. Sure, there seem to be increasingly powerful storms and, on average, winters are less cold. But our climate is generally very resilient. Thus, we are not profoundly affected by the increasingly chaotic climate in many parts of the world. Neither disappearing sea ice nor rising sea levels, to point to two serious consequences of climate chaos, seem more than just vaguely troubling. Two recently published articles made it very clear to me how very lucky, at least for  now, we Minnesotans are. Publishers Weekly magazine interviewed Barry Lopez about his new book Horizon ...

"In a scathing rebuke to the elite capitalists and politicians who largely control the global economic and energy systems, Mexico's newly-appointed environment secretary on Wednesday pointed a stern finger at the " parasitic and predatory neoliberals " for being the key culprits behind the planetary climate crisis," writes Common Dreams. You can read the entire article here   https://tinyurl.com/y2da85u5 Tim Central Minnesota Political