This post is prompted by a comment on Facebook saying (paraphrasing); those who are truly English or Scottish should stop allowing new immigrants into “our” country (the UK).
I am reminded that I too am an immigrant,; some of my family immigrated to these southern isles from far-off England and Scotland more than 150 years ago, but I am in native Maori terms, still not tangata whenua (people of the land).
Should we all then return to our “homelands”, wherever they may be? My guess is that there would be none of the current population of people living in the United Kingdom , much of Europe and almost none in the United States if that was the case. The reality is that homo sapiens have always been wanderers, moving from place to place, from continent to continent, island to island, since we first walked on our hind legs.
Our little world
These borders that define the countries of the world, the pretty colours on the globe of the world, are simply fictional; defined for those who need to collect taxes, define what is “right” and “proper”, or control others in so many ingenious ways.
Don’t get me wrong, any Illuminati, Bilderberg Group , or other global world conspiracies, real or otherwise, are fortunately doomed to fail. The incompetence, venality and sheer stupidity of those who attempt ultimate power is a salutary lesson to the species.
But, when it comes down to it; we are all just visitors on this little blue ball. Lets all look after it-together.
In the last few years, New Zealand has seen a massive decline in honey bees. In my little garden in summer a few years ago, when all the flowers would be at their peak, there would be many more honey bees than bumblebees and german wasps; but no longer. This year the number of honey bees I sighted all summer, I could count on two hands.
“Uncontaminated ” research- ie not funded by chemical companies, has established clear correlations between CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) and pesticides called neonicotinoids; chemically similar to nicotine . The most common of these is a pesticide called imidacloprid. Two others are clothianidin and thiamethoxam.
However the correlations are not precise; it appears to require cumulative poisoning over months and perhaps years for the effects of the neonicotinoids to wreak their havoc on bees. And as with other poisoning effects , the impacts on the bees may lead to a lack of resistance to other diseases which can not be directly attributable to the neonicotinoids. The EU has recommended a two year ban on the use of neonicotinoids in specific circumstances, but that may go nowhere to identify or address the issues of CCD. Nature is by definition messy and complex, while man’s actions are linear and relatively unsophisticated. We may not be absolutely sure of the correlations-yet the results are very very clear and disastrous for us all.
As Jill Richardson, in her How We Could Prevent Massive Bee Deaths and Save Our Food article notes at Alternet, Although there’s little private citizens can do, beyond submitting comments to the EPA about these pesticides, contacting your representatives, and perhaps even getting your own beehive, you might be surprised to find out that these toxic pesticides are widely available for home use. Bayer sells imidacloprid in products sold for use on roses, flowers, shrubs, trees (even fruit and nut trees!), and lawns. Even the flea treatment Advantage sold for your pet contains it!
Once again we see the power of corporates to distort research, government agency decision-making, and the truth; even while knowing that the results of their actions are environmentally disastrous for us all.
cicada
Repeatedly, throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, we have seen the power of money over-ride the intrinsic value and beauty of this world’s environment,. our co-habiting species and even homo sapiens’ wellbeing. Like the cumulative destructive power of neonicotinoids, we are seeing the cumulative destruction of our planet for corporate greed beginning to descend on us at ever-increasing speed.
A coalition of interest groups, activists and beekeepers took the issue into their own hands on Thursday to slash the use of bee-killing pesticides in an effort to protect them and the future of food. Pesticide Action Network (PAN), Center for Food Safety, Beyond Pesticides and four beekeepers are among the team who want bees safe from the chemicals that include clothianidin and thiamethoxam. Even if it takes suing the government. How are they able to bring a case against the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) for this problem?
Sadly, van Buren’s parting lines are not about the millions of tortured, raped, and murdered civilians of that trail of “dark skinned’ countries the US has invaded over the past 50 years; it is commiseration for those few hundred thousand US soldiers who have been put in “impossible” environments by those in the “highest seats of power”.
As van Buren notes: The issue is not so much how/when/should we assign blame and punishment to an individual soldier, but to raise the stakes and ask: why have we not assigned blame and demanded punishment for the leaders who put those 19-year-old soldiers into the impossible situations they faced? Before we throw away the life of a kid who shot when he should not have done so, why don’t we demand justice for those in the highest seats of power for creating wars that create such fertile ground for atrocity? The chain of responsibility for the legacy left behind in our wars runs high.
Every one of those soldiers had the opportunity to refuse to fight; every one of those soldiers had the opportunity to refuse to commit atrocities- but failed to do so. The responsibilities for murder and massacre run at all levels of our white-skinned colonial societies. The assumptions of superiority, of “rightness” and ultimately simply pure racism, are endemic at every level of Western society. They are our sins which cannot be absolved, and for which we are likely to pay dearly once the tables are turned in another decade or two, when western economies will no longer rule the world and determine the ‘game’.
Even now, almost forty years after the end of the Vietnam war, the US government and most of it’s citizens, refuse to acknowledge the massive war crimes of at least a million Vietnamese deaths carried out by the US in the name of rolling back a fictional red tide of asian dominos, through carpet bombing, chemical warfare and systemic atrocity after atrocity.
It is time for all countries to acknowledge that for us all to live peaceful fulfilled lives on a sustainable planet, that we have no rights to control other human beings to behave in the way we think they “should” behave through force-nor indeed any rights of force over any other species on this planet.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Forty years after the secret U.S. bombing that devastated Laos, heirs to the war’s deadly legacy of undetonated explosives are touring America to prod the conscience of the world’s most powerful nation for more help to clear up the mess.
Note the casual throwaway line ” The U.S. dropped 2 million tons of bombs on Laos over a nine-year period up to 1973 — more than on Germany and Japan during World War II.”
New Antarctica 