Our natural world is disappearing before our eyes. We have to save it | George Monbiot

It felt as disorienting as forgetting my pin number. I stared at the caterpillar, unable to attach a name to it. I don’t think my mental powers are fading: I still possess an eerie capacity to recall facts and figures and memorise long screeds of text. This is a specific loss. As a child and young adult, I delighted in being able to identify almost any wild plant or animal. And now it has gone. This ability has shrivelled from disuse: I can no longer identify them because I can no longer find them.

 Illustration by Nate Kitch

Perhaps this forgetfulness is protective. I have been averting my eyes. Because I cannot bear to see what we have done to nature, I no longer see nature itself; otherwise, the speed of loss would be unendurable. The collapse can be witnessed from one year to the next. The swift decline of the swift (down 25% in five years) is marked by the loss of the wild screams that, until very recently, filled the skies above my house. My ambition to see the seabird colonies of Shetland and St Kilda has been replaced by the intention never to visit those islands during the breeding season: I could not bear to see the empty cliffs, where populations have crashed by some 90% in the past two decades.

Read the piece from The Guardian by George Monbiot - “Our natural world is disappearing before our eyes. We have to save it | George Monbiot."

The Koch Brothers Get Their Very Own Secretary of State

In the Republican wave election of 2010, when Charles and David Koch emerged as defining figures in American politics, the greatest beneficiary of Koch Industries largesse was a political newcomer named Mike Pompeo. After his election to the House eight years ago, Pompeo was referred to as the “Koch Brothers’ Congressman” and “the congressman from Koch.”

Mike Pompeo testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 13.

Now Pompeo is positioned to become a Koch brothers–influenced secretary of state.

After serving for a little more than a year as Donald Trump’s top yes-man at the Central Intelligence Agency, Pompeo is Trump’s pick to replace Rex Tillerson, the administration’s listless placeholder at the Department of State.

In a measure of the extent to which Trump and Tillerson had disengaged from one another, the outgoing secretary of state apparently learned of his firing via Twitter Tuesday morning—when an aide showed the nation’s top diplomat a tweet from the president announcing the transition. A statement from the department indicated that Tillerson was “unaware of the reason” for his removal.

Read The Nation story by John Nichols - “The Koch Brothers Get Their Very Own Secretary of State.”