As United States ‘ gunboats’ sail into the Persian Gulf to confront a completely imaginary threat from Iran; as we witness UK politicians floundering to come up with some deal to exit or not exit the EU, and as we witness Vladimir Putin and his capitalist Russian entourage in total denial about climate change; as we see literally crazed American decision-makers like Marco Rubio, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo ( “We lied we cheated, we stole” – and we murder and torture and commit genocide)
move inexorably forward to a completely fictitious casi belli and lethal wars in Venezuela ( or anywhere else in the world that they have decided they don’t like), the world burns. (We are now at record-breaking levels of 415 carbon dioxide parts per million and accelerating) The combined and inter-related drivers of climate change and species loss are causing the world to move ever faster to environmental breakdown.
Perhaps having these very stupid psychopaths in positions of (human) power across the world is Gaia’s way of ensuring that humanity will no longer, in a few very short years, be able to continue to devastate the living world.
It is then more than a little disturbing to hear from greatest of powerful fools Donald Trump that:
Under my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars. I am updating my budget to include an additional $1.6 billion so that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 13, 2019
The United States has displayed a woeful and complete lack of moral and intellectual rectitude for over a century on this planet. Inflicting the United States on the rest of Universe to plunder, destroy and murder ( assuming there are other living entities ‘out there” ) is not exactly good for the rest of our Universe.
While it would appear that Putin has some modicum of intellect, ( but with a very narrow focus of Russian nationalism and capitalist economics, and no insight or long term view of the world’s need for survival), its very clear every American politician and policy maker with any influence in Washington has such a limited understanding of the world beyond America’s borders, and such a distorted understanding of their barbaric violent history, let alone an understanding of climate and species loss, as to render any rational decision-making impossible. The extraordinary ‘Russia-gate’ accusations and investigations have unsurprisingly not come up with any Russian collusion or electoral hacking despite the best efforts of the American corporate media and politicians . Pure logic would have shown that it would be impossible to sway a sufficient proportion of the largely uneducated American public with rational arguments. The last presidential election choice between a small boy with matches and a psychopath did not leave the Russians with much room to maneuver!
And in China, under General Secretary Xi Jinping, the Belt and Road initiative is well on its way to vastly increasing consumerism across Eurasia and its resultant environmental depredations, and further despoliation of the remaining few natural environments in Laos, Burma and beyond with railways, roads, dams and the other usual marks of human “progress” .
It would thus be very helpful if a higher power could lock away those in Washington and their ‘Defence’ department, along with a few of those somewhat less malignant cancers on the planet, despoiling our planet for their own safety and the safety of all other living things on this planet, for the rest of their lives.
The world has no leadership of anyone with a modicum of intellectual or moral rigor. The human race is being inexorably ‘lead’ by incompetent fools towards disaster. We have to turn away from pushing the living world to catastrophe. And make no mistake; a superficial blaming of capitalism for the world’s woes is not enough. Our depredations of the environment go back far further than the 19th century Industrial Revolution (although the damage has been greatly exacerbated by that revolution) .
Richard Attenborough ably delineated the massive damage to the Mediterranean world by Roman and other ‘civilizations” in destroying the natural forests of the region, and changing the climate of the Mediterranean world . Its also likely that pre-Roman civilizations are also largely responsible for the almost total loss of forests and habitat in North Africa. We not only have to remove capitalism as a driver for “progress’ – we also have to instill in every human being an understanding that we cannot survive without our fellow species- that all life is sacred.- and that human “progress” is a self-absorbed, self-perpetuating, myth. All human change has to be balanced against the inevitable loss of species and habitat to other species- and we can no longer afford that species loss
As George Monbiot notes: A system based on perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries and externalities. There must always be an extraction zone, from which materials are taken without full payment, and a disposal zone, where costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution. As the scale of economic activity increases, until capitalism affects everything from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.
https://www.naturalclimate.solutions/the-science
Links
https://www.stopecocide.earth/take-action
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/
https://www.monbiot.com/2019/04/30/the-problem-is-capitalism/
https://www.monbiot.com/2018/01/31/stepping-back-from-the-brink/
New Antarctica 