Homo sapiens are a strange species. They self-proclaim their superiority over other species because of their supposed ‘intelligence”, while they are self-evidently systematically destroying all aspects of life on the planet they rely on for their survival. We are, branch by branch, cutting off all the limbs of the tree of life that enables our survival.
One might be forgiven for thinking that those actions of destroying life in exchange for the creation of inanimate objects might be considered the ultimate in folly and stupidity; but apparently this is not the case.
A quote from The Guardian about these illustrious Nobel Prize winners…
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the two men had won the prize – which is not one of those originally instigated by Alfred Nobel – because they had “designed methods for addressing some of our time’s most basic and pressing questions about how we create long-term sustained and sustainable economic growth”.
The two men, it continued, had “significantly broadened the scope of economic analysis by constructing models that explain how the market economy interacts with nature and knowledge”.
One of the most recent media releases from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes that global warming will certainly increase to 1.5C above previous ‘normal” global temperature levels in the next 12 years, and that that increase will dramatically impact on human being’s survival and many other species . Should global temperature increases reach 2C; as they will without dramatic intervention, then the impacts on all species will be catastrophic..
I am always reminded when I go to our local supermarket of this bizarre absurdity- of man making living things into commodities for human beings , when I see the little plastic labels on the fruit and vegetables being sold there. Human beings have somehow created a collective psychosis over many millenia that sees this world we live in as something for use- something outside of us – rather than the reality of being intimately and totally connected to us and essential for our mutual survival.
In the last few weeks Facebook has become assiduous in removing “fake news’ newsposts from its servers. Telesurtv is one such example- now reinstated
One might be forgiven for thinking that Facebook serves interests other than truth and honesty in its promotion of the ‘fake news’ meme, when one looks at just one such media article listed on the Telesur website Telesur is one of the few English language media outlets in South America that promotes indigenous rights against the rapaciousness of corporate entities ( predominantly US-based).
The history of the U.S. ongoing intervention in South America to promote its own interests ( ie US corporate profits) has resulted in many many thousands if not millions of of deaths, the decades long support of South American tyrannical regimes , death squads, torture and the oppression of South America’s working classes, peasants and indigenous population- as well as the rape of its incredible environmental heritage for logging and meat production companies, and the facilitation of the drug trade .
The recent U.S. sanctions against Venezuela are just one more example of the techniques used by the United States to destabilize various Latin American governments that do not suit U.S. corporate interests.
How much longer does South America have to endure the tortures of this ignorant bully from the North I wonder? How much longer will supposedly ‘honest’ American media portray U.S. interventions as being upholding ‘freedom and democracy’?
Sadly this distortion and manipulation of ‘truth’ by powerful American companies for the benefit of corrupt U.S. businessmen has been an ongoing reality for the past century.
Its as though we are all watching in slow-motion; a dream in which we slide inexorably towards that massive motorway firey pileup – helpless to change anything and knowing the inevitability of our fate.
And yet, if it were not for almost every government across the world being in bed with international and national corporations who drive “progress’ ( ie the destruction of the natural world to create the inanimate world humans enjoy)- this whole firey end might have been (and maybe still can be ) averted.
Global warming needs to be seen as simply one of the symptoms of the catastrophic global non-human species loss caused by human beings’ insatiable lust for ‘things” over the past 1000 years- a tiny timeframe in geological terms.
“Human emissions of greenhouse gas are not the sole determinant of temperature on Earth. Our study suggests that human-induced global warming of 2°C ( The Paris Accord limit), may trigger other Earth system processes, often called “feedbacks”, that can drive further warming – even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases,” says lead author Will Steffen from the Australian National University and Stockholm Resilience Centre.
According to the Stockholm Resilience Centre, we have but 3 years to attempt to stabilise global emissions and avert major devastating climate change. We know that renewable energy has some capacity to limit global warming ; but we also now that production of renewabl energy components come at a massive cost to the environment. We also know that man is ‘requiring’ more and energy to fuel his ‘progress’ addiction. Humans have to dramitacally reduce our energy consumption if we are all to survive.
And how is it that, in the face of all the evidence and the very visible destruction of our planet’s living fabric, we continue to press on to final global destruction? Simply man’s greed for transient baubles of ‘wealth’ and power. Humankind prides itself on being a supremely intelligent species.
The evidence is out- to the contrary- we are the most ignorant of all species.
What do we need? We need a global body that transcends artificial national state borders and that forces each nation-state to rebuild its natural living fabric: beginning with massive tree-planting of native local species, a forced requirement that no non-essential products for humans can be bought and sold ; an end to the so-called global ‘consumer society” and a requirement that all non human species be prioritised for their survival over any human “progress”.
From: THE MODERN WORLD BOOK OF WONDERS BY PAUL TOWNEND (1950)
Allow One species to completely dominate all other species on the planet in numbers .
Give that species the capacity to modify the living environment to suit its own purposes.
Give that species an understanding that it has a right to eliminate all species that are not immediately useful to it.
Give that species an understanding that it is superior to all other species using criteria based on its own species’ traits.
Give that species an understanding that dead inanimate things that amuse it are more important than other living things.
Give it limited powers of empathy and understanding towards other species that are not its own.
A tragic and heart-bleeding video below of a Borneo orangutan futilely trying to fight off a mechanical digger which has destroyed its beautiful home and its sustenance and countless more other living things that will be forever no more ( note the condescending language used of “seemingly defending its home “. ) for a few dollars in pay for the loggers and a few thousands of dollars to the logging company. This is why we are destroying the only home we will ever have – our beautiful earth.
Not just in Borneo, but all over the world for the last three thousand years , we have destroyed the trees and living world that made this world our home – for no purpose whatsoever…..
Over the last few years we have seen an increasing crescendo of Western media implicating Russia in wars of aggression, threats to its neighbours and more recently involvement in gas attacks in both Syria and now the U.K.
Russia as one of the major international suppliers of natural gas and oil , is like Iran ( and previously Iraq and Libya) , one of the few states not aligned to Western corporate interests. And like China, (a major oil importer) operates a defence arsenal -both conventional and nuclear, which is largely independent of Western suppliers.
After the breakup of the Soviet bloc in the 1990s, and the resultant Yeltsin years of asset stripping by newly emergent Russian “oligarchs” and Western companies, Russia under Putin has slowly regained some of the strengths it had acquired as a communist nation. But this time with a much stronger ethnic Russian flavour, as the Baltic states and many of the Eastern ‘Stans’ of Soviet times, devolved from the newly formed Russian Federation .
Western interests had intended that any Russian resurgence would be minimal and closely aligned to Western corporates. However President Putin’s presidency has had a strong focus on Russian nationalism, independence and self-reliance-all anathema to Western ‘think-tank” and government foreign policy planners..
With NATO pushing hard against Russian borders in the West, and the Polish and Baltic states electing ever more nationalist governments, Russia has responded with increasing its defence arsenal – both nuclear and conventional. The capabilities of many of these new weapons , like the Kalibr cruise missile and the newly announced Russian hyperspeed missiles have come as a surprise to Western defence analysts. Russia’s military successes in supporting the government of Syria against the Western and Gulf State supported jihadists attempting to overthrow the Syrian regime have also confounded Western military analysts. Russia’s brief war on its borders in Ossetia and in Georgia and its seizure of the Crimea and its centuries old Russian naval base there, after Western intervention in the Ukraine , also came as a surprise to those in the West who expected easy victories there.
However what is much more of a threat to Western interests than all of the above, is Russia’s capacity to be an overland ( and thus secure) conduit for China’s vast consumer production to Europe and beyond . Bizarrely though, it is the military and economic pressure by the West which has cemented the alliance between China and Russia and further enabled the “One Belt One Road” project . In addition, this reinvigorated Russo/Chinese alliance will ensure China’s access in the long-term to essential oil for its factories which is not at risk from maritime attack or blockade by the U.S. or its allies.
While the U.S. remains the largest economic, and by far the largest military power in the world; that power is indisputably waning. Endless fruitless wars have drained its coffers, as well as inflicting enormous suffering on so many of the world’s populations. Rampant corruption at all levels of American society, but particularly in Washington, has left government and strategic vision entirely in the hands of greedy corporates, whose only ‘vision’ is more power and money for themselves. It’s strongest ally, the U.K. has long suffered from the loss of income from the colonial states it is now largely unable to ravage, but its moneyed classes hold still to a vision of a truly “Great” Britain. The “City of London” , the mercantile capital of the world in many respects, has reaped, and continues to reap, enormous profits from the largely illegal siphoning of capital from what were once the state enterprises of the Soviet Union into London’s coffers, via Russian ‘oligarchs‘ . The British press and politicians like to portray these “oligarchs’ as “Putin’s men” , whereas in most instances they are extremely anti-Putin because of Putin’s nationalist views and his desire for Russian money to stay inside Russia .
The recent Kemerovo mall fire tragedy in Siberia, with its obvious implications of corruption and negligence at the Siberian governorship level, will both require and assist Putin to further crack down on corruption in Russia.
Now, entrance the ‘Novichok’ affair…Moon of Alabama and Craig Murray, among many others, have effectively destroyed any argument by London’s ‘ruling classes’ , that this was indisputably a Russian government initiated nerve agent attempted murder of a Russian ex double agent and his Russian daughter. However what seems often missed in these accounts of the counter-arguments to the British Government’s spin on the attempted murders is the extraordinarily implausible likelihood that such nerve agent deaths would not only occur within a few kilometers of Britain’s only Chemical Weapons facility at Porton Down near Salisbury, (where disgusting and inhumane activities are carried out in the name of the Western world, and in direct contravention of the U.K.s obligations as a signatory to the UN Conventions on the prohibition of chemical and biological weapons), but that a few weeks before, the BCC had aired a British /American spy drama called “Strike Back” in which Novichok was used by a disgruntled ex-Russian spy. The laws of probability say that those two events, and the actual attempted murders, cannot be coincidence. Now add in into the mix the current controversy over Facebook personal details being leaked to benefit Trump’s presidential campaign by SCL subsidiary , Cambridge Analytica. As Bella Caledonia notes: SCL is a very British company dedicated (and funded by the British Ministry of Defence) to manipulate public opinion in a multitude of foreign and domestic environments. There in Bella Caledonia’s post you will note that in 2005 SCL ” went public with a glitzy exhibit at the DSEI conference, the UK’s largest showcase for military technology. It’s ‘hard sell’ was a demonstration of how the UK government could use a sophisticated media campaign of mass deception to fool the British people into the thinking an accident at a chemical plant had occurred and threatened central London.” And the Novichok affair gets rather messier for Western ‘intelligence’ here..
As SCL notes on its website: ‘SCL is experienced in using data driven communication to achieve behavioral change in civilian groups. National programs across the spectrum from social programs, health campaigns, and educational initiatives can all be designed using advanced data analytics informed by our behavioral tools. SCL combines the micro-segmentation data from the target audience and combines it with behavioural profiles to increase the effectiveness of information campaigns.’
Hmmm- might a display of ‘novichok” in some quiet little British city be helpful in pushing the case that Russia ( and instrumentally Vladimir Putin) is indeed the demon we have always thought her to be? And here is the ‘proof’ in 5 slides that Her Majesty’s Government was able to persuade its NATO allies that Russia did indeed do the deed. Demonstrably we are indeed talking about totally incompetent UK politicians , defence planners and easily bought NATO allies here…
A wonderful and hugely sad post by George Monbiot on the world around us , which we, for some reason differentiate as “nature”. And the inexorable tragic loss of species, lives and our own humanity in the process-and ultimately, our own survival….
In the last few months we have seen the Trump administration reeling from one extraordinarily stupid move in foreign policy, to another.
Firstly we have the tragedy and farce of the declaration that the US will ‘accept’ Jerusalem as Israel’s capital; somewhere that all Western nations have been loathe to go (officially) whilst fully accepting and unconditionally supporting the reality of the triumphalism of the apartheid racist Israeli entity. A two state solution has, since 1948, been known to all parties as a totally non-viable option, and will never happen.
It is of course possible that the Israelis finally realise that the nation of Israel has no future in the long term , unless it grants full right of return to all Palestinian and full compensation for lands stolen since 1948 and lives destroyed… The alternative for Israel does not bear thinking about.
It is not that Trump’s declaration changes anything; what is upsetting for the West and for China and Russia, is that it makes plain that there never was a two state option- and that the United States has always been the Dishonest Broker in the ‘peace process’ .
Now we can start to face reality in Palestine- and it is not a pretty picture for the Israelis.
The ludicrous aspect of this, is that for those modern day Israelis whose ancestors came from the Levant; they are of exactly the same ethnic Semitic lineage as the ‘dirty Arabs’ they despise . We have seen more than 60 years of completely farcical “peace’ negotiations; the Israelis have never had any intention of returning any of the lands stolen by war or genocide, and both the ‘disinterested” broker and the Palestinian negotiators have always known that.
Then we have the ongoing playground bully tactics to North Korea by the United States president and his policy advisors and chiefs of staff. A country that knows full well the epic scale of barbarity the American nation is capable of; having endured American genocide in the Korean War and the continuous threats from various U.S. presidents and US generals since that time to blast them back into the stone-age. With its back against the wall, North Korea has only one option- to continue to develop enough nuclear ICBMs to substantially debilitate the American economy ( Given that of course from the American side, there will be no negotiations with North Korea until they ‘behave’ )
And then we have dear Nikki Haley the United States ambassador to the United Nations displaying bits of what are supposedly Iranian made missiles launched by the Yemenese Houthis against their Saudi aggressors ,who are currently killing thousands of Yemen citizens with cholera and millions through starvation…
But hey Nikki!- what ‘s more important? -the lives of a few million Yemenese? Or the need to destroy Iran to serve the interests of the Israeli supporters and Saudis who pay Congress and the Washington ‘think-tanks’ ? One hopes that karma is not for real:- Nikki’s future lives are not going to be exactly pretty…nor will it be in this life should true international justice be finally served.
The facade has been removed…We have seen a dramatic transition from a President able to so plausibly lie through his teeth (and win a Nobel peace prize for it), to one who seems to say (or tweet) whatever fleeting thought is on his mind at the time , but whose sole immediate directive for decision-making is money and power, rather than a longer term strategy of deceit to reach the desired same end.
It is disturbing to think that these great leaders of the ‘Free World’ are supposedly the best of humankind- a sad indictment on us all
The title of this post comes from a quote in a mini-thesis by Rafael M Santos (2011) “Ethical Responsibilities and the Environment’ in which he notes the Australian Aboriginal response to the commodification of land and animals as “much like putting a price on your own mother” .
In late February/March of 2017 the Vatican pulled together a Working Group to look at the current state of the world in relation to species extinction and global warming.
As the Vatican notes; The subject of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ (biodiversity especially its Chapter 2), climate change, is estimated in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be on a course to destroy 20-40% of all biodiversity on Earth by the end of this century regardless of any other factors, but of course interacting with them. The living fabric of the world, which we are enjoyed in Genesis, Chapter II to protect, is slipping through our fingers without our showing much sign of caring.
Predictably the Vatican discourse continues along a familiar theme , how man should be the “protector’ of all living things for the purpose of their usage by man. As always, it is our ‘god given right’ to subjugate and destroy the other species on this planet as we see fit. But even the working group has to admit; such a philosophy is rapidly leading humans, as well as the other species on this planet, to extinction.
To its credit however, the working group has however , finally made the connection between global warming and biodiversity and the horrendous impacts both outcomes will have for both humanity and the planet.
Our desire for enhanced consumption grows more rapidly than our population, and Earth cannot sustain it. Nothing less than a reordering of our priorities based on a moral revolution can succeed in maintaining the world in such a way as to resemble the conditions we have enjoyed here.
Somehow we are supposed to believe that we are ‘superior beings’ to all other species on this planet; our ‘intelligence’ and problem solving skills are apparently gifts from one or other god, and thus proclaim our right to sovereignty over ‘nature”. The reality is that as a species we have demonstrated, over and over, that we are extremely limited in our selective ‘intelligence’ and an understanding of what matters, and our capacity to behave ‘rationally’. Our capacity for self-delusion is enormous.
Our species’ intellectual reasoning is a hardwired self-fulfilling congratulatory process that determines its successes using its own definition of what ‘success’ is. Such a process is clearly designed to allow us to continue to pat ourselves on the back with our species’ ‘progress’ and continue to collectively do what we have been doing to this planet for the past few thousand years , while the planet heads ever closer to massive extinction.
There is however a kind of blind logic to why we are progressively destroying the planet on which we stand: an internal circuitous set of arguments that permit all of us to legitimise the insanity of our actions.
As Jackson (2017) notes ‘The tendency to economic growth according to Schnaiberg (1980) is due in part to the competitive character of capitalism, such that corporations and entrepreneurs must continually expand their operations and their profits lest they be swamped by other competitors. On the other hand there is also growth logic within the sphere of the state, as state agencies and officials prefer growth over stagnation in order to ensure tax revenues-the essential fiscal basis of the state (Redclift and Woodgate 2010). Neither of these two drivers (corporate competitiveness, and the state’s need for growth, are in any way related to necessity or human survivability; they are essentially “nice to haves’ from a human perspective. We are in fact driving the planet rapidly to extinction for shiny little baubles of no value.
What is desperately and urgently needed then, is the incorporation of what Jackson (2017) refers to as the Biocentrismethic into everything we as humans do.. Biocentrism is a life centered attitude towards biological diversity of the environment. The life centered theory posits that all forms of life have an inherent right to exist. It considers nature and all forms of life special in itself. Nature has intrinsic value or inherent worth apart from human appropriation. Biocentrism hence advocates for the preservation of the environment and all life forms free from human intervention.
Do we have the collective wisdom as a species to stop destroying this planet, to understand how our commodification of the world we live in is destroying all of us, to begin to undo the incredible destruction we have wrought on our fellow species in such a short space of time , and most fundamentally, to begin to respect all other creatures as our equals?
While multinational mining companies and other entities continue to plunder the remains of our natural resources on this planet, we are rapidly heading towards environmental disaster.
Our blind stupidity as a species, our incapacity to plan for anything more than the next year or two, combined with our capacity to inflict horrendous damage to the eco-systems that give us all life, are rapidly, and ever more speedily, pushing us down the path to oblivion.
Those remaining indigenous cultures that have not been sucked into the collective insanity of the human ‘progress’ meme, are being actively imprisoned and murdered because they stand in the way of more profits for multinational companies. One wonders where exactly those muti-national board members will run to when their gold is literally too hot to handle?
In the United States there is even debate as to whether the U.S. Trump administration will ‘accept’ the recent Draft of the 2017 ‘Climate Change Report’, such is the insanity that prevails; not just in the United States but across the word where governments are locked into close relationships with the business sector that is destroying the planet in the name of progress.
There appears to be no capacity to change our direction of increasing species destruction and increasing production of carbon dioxide and the other climate change accelerants, despite the hype generated at the voluntary Paris Accords.
It is of course not surprising that the U.S. president has rescinded the United States willingness to implement the Paris Accord. In a country where all government policy is, and always has been , sold to the highest bidder, the coal industry won out!
However it’s important to bear in mind that while we have not seen a significant increase in the amount of CO2 production globally, we have not seen a decrease- the amount of CO2 being pumped in to the atmosphere is now about 9.9 billion tonnes per year….More than enough to continue ratcheting up global temperatures at an increasing rate for centuries to come, when we take into account both the immediate impacts of increased temperatures and the slower impacts of the capacity for CO2 storage in our oceans, soil and plants ( which are rapidly declining in global volume) steadily decreasing..
We are quite simply , not a fit species to be entrusted with the future of this planet.
When the supposed ‘greatest nation on earth’ behaves like a child bully in the playground and threatens nuclear war on all and sundry; when ecological devastation is not even taken into consideration as we plunder the planet, and its once multitudinous living things for our little shiny baubles, then we know we have lost our way- irremediably..
Our current epoch has now come to be known as the ‘Anthropocene’ for the impacts man has had on our planetary environment. It is also called “The Great Acceleration..”; being the sixth event in the life of this planet where species loss has become so pervasive and devastating.
A May 2017 study for the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America was entitled “Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines”. The paper notes in conclusion that: “The massive loss of populations is already damaging the services ecosystems provide to (human) civilization…Thus, we emphasize that the sixth mass extinction is already here and the window for effective action is very short, probably two or three decades at most.. All signs point to ever more powerful assaults on biodiversity in the next two decades, painting a dismal picture of the future of life, including human life. .” In other words, without the survival of significant complex bio-systems of multiple species, each with sustainable population numbers, humans too are rapidly headed towards extinction.
While we talk (and talk) about global warming, what we also ignore is the combined impacts of man-made emissions into the atmosphere with the steady destruction of the biosphere through human “progress’ – the literal cancer of inert dead non-organic edifices being built over the top and at the expense of the natural world that make up humans’ cities and towns and transportation systems, agribusiness destroying countless wilderness areas into single species ‘dead’ environments, the ongoing deforestation of native habitats, increasing wildfires, needless human consumption, acidification and over-fishing of the oceans, human over-population, meat-production, war, pollution, global warming, water-loss .. the list goes on and on… Incrementally, humans are destroying the liveability for all species on the planet at an ever increasing rate, with carbon monoxide production being just one aspect of our ongoing destruction of this planet.
Wikileaks notes: At present, the rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than the “base” or historically typical rate of extinction (in terms of the natural evolution of the planet)[14][15][16] and also the current rate of extinction is, therefore, 10 to 100 times higher than any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth.
What is urgently needed is a recognition of this fact by humans, and an understanding that the model of human’ progress’ we have espoused for the past few thousand years is killing our planet. An understanding that all life- regardless of species, is inherently sacred and our mutual survival is intertwined, and that consequently human ‘needs’ must be balanced against the rights of other species. One small step to delay or even possibly reverse this destruction, is the urgent massive scale planting of native vegetation in every possible locality and an end to our model of human “progress”.
While Russian capacity to understand or even work as an equal partner with its ever-more-powerful eastern neighbour is currently limited- this China/Russia alliance has enormous future consequences for global trade and dominance ( 
New Antarctica 