BIPED on the Blue Ball-- 3rd Edition out this week!

The third edition of Biped on the Blue Ball [The Supposed-Sapiens Who Laughed at the Dodo] will be coming out before the end of this week, with a soft-launching scheduled during the session this Friday of the 242nd session of the 20-year-old Kamayan para sa Kalikasan monthly environmental forum at Kamayan-EDSA. The first and second editions, both with some international circulation, were published in 1990 and 2000, respectively.
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. The "Author's Notes" item for this new edition follows below:
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THIS is the third edition of BIPED On the Blue Ball, published in time for the commemoration of Earth Day 2010, on the 20th anniversary of the first edition published as “A Filipino’s contribution to the commemoration of Earth Day on April 22, 1990.” Copies of the first edition were distributed to representatives of about 50 countries at the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, through the kindness of Jim Paredes, the author’s close friend, and Green Earth Movement (Philippines) founder and president.
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. The second edition carries updated inform-ation in its footnotes, culled from the very informative issues of the Daily Grist magazine of the Earth Day international network and from research done for the author by his dearly beloved friend, the former Prof. Anna Ma. S. Torres, then head of the Environment Planning and Management department of Miriam College in Quezon City, Philippines. She was the one who inspired the author to add to the ending of the original two very important elements: first, the framework of Deep Ecology including love and respect for all elements of our living habitat; and second, a touch of optimism, especially at the ending part.
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. The present edition focuses on the current planetwide environmental crisis: “global warming” caused by human activities that have increased the volume of such “greenhouse gases” as carbon dioxide, and raising likewise the temperatures of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans, all enough to melt large sections of what was for millennia simply undisturbed solid ice, and enough to threaten all coastal areas with permanent inundation, with the expected record rise in the sea levels relative to coastal areas around the various continents.
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. Top scientists of the world have documented precise measurements of greenhouse gas emissions and indicated maximum tolerable levels of further increase to avoid the perilous approach to the point of globally fatal irreversibility. Communities and governments across the world have come, or have at least been going through the motions of coming, to a consensus on what Humankind as a whole has to do to avert a final disaster. But although not at all lacking in the protocols of proper formal discourse among countries, there has been the cons-picuous absence of the spirit of earnest dialogue, with many poor and “developing” countries finding good reason to be frantic for a real search for solutions in terms of mitigation and adaptation, while a few but extremely powerful others either want to completely escape responsibility for the critical state of affairs or are even looking for logical excuses for their “business-as-usual” positions. At the recent debacle at Copenhagen, the United States pulled out from its star-spangled magical tophat a “Copenhagen Accord” that was merely noted but not approved by the countries’ delegations.
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. Still seeking to keep away a pessimistic total darkness view of the future, the author adds a “cryptic message” from the “Prophets of Profits,” that throws a bolt of realization on our Major Tom character, with the implied imminent consequence of spreading to enlighten more and more people for a shining shaft of optimism.
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. The website http://love-life.faithweb.com/biped.htm, which carries the entire 2nd edition will soon carry this 3rd edition, with subsequent notes, explanations and feedback.
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--ding reyes
subic, zambales
april 12, 2010

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