The video (below) of “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi” (another one of the fictional “nom-de-guerre” names so beloved of Islamic jihad fighters), shows a hesitant youngish man delivering in Koranic verse style the announcement that he (in all modesty appropriate to a disciple of Mohammed) is the new caliph of Iraq, Syria and Levant that all must bow down to.
As the Angry Arab says; When you bill yourself as a caliph you inevitably raise expectations. And as the Arabic saying goes: ‘the mountain went into labor and gave birth to a mouse’. What a lousy performance.
While these young psychopaths have a certain predilection for violent murder and ignorance, they are definitely not idolised by the vast majority of Sunni Muslems around the world. The sectarian violence, mysoginism and vengeance they espouse, fomented largely through Wahhabi funds from Saudi Arabia and Qatar and with “special assistance” from U.K. and U.S. “intelligence” over the years, fools few on the Arab street. These young violent men are simply tools of those who wish for nothing better than all-out mayhem, death and environmental destruction in middle eastern states that do not sufficiently support a Western view of who should control the world’s resources.
Desperately seeking fame on Youtube, as they behead another infidel of whatever religious persuasion, they are like little children given dangerous toys to play with by the grownups.
Their “secret” cavalcade of many miles of brand new Toyota’s through the deserts of Iraq from Syria to capture key Iraqi northern towns, was somehow never spotted by Western spy satellites. Make no mistake, these are the “moderates” that Western governments have been funding to overthrow Assad’s Syria , and now Maliki’s Iraq, for the past five years. This is a deliberate plan by Western governments to de-stabilise and overthrow any middle eastern government that 1) doesn’t support the ongoing Israeli destruction of Palestine and Palestinians, and 2) doesn’t support the right of the U.S. to basically do anything it wishes to.
It would be amusing if it were not so sad that these nasty little psychopaths in offices in London, Paris and Washington who get others to do their killing and torture for them, believe that this is the way to a brave new future; a “New American Century“. Take the former British Chief of Defence Lord Richards’ brilliant proposal to train and equip 100,000 jihadists to take Damascus from Syrian Government forces, with substantial Western air support- (read collateral air damage) on the pretext that this would reduce civilian casualties in in Syria! . Fittingly, the great Lord Richards was also once Nato commander in the brutal fiasco that is the fourth Anglo Afghan War and is now a senior advisor to the right wing British International Institute of Strategic Studies, and which strangely enough, supported the US invasion of Iraq and is now very anti the current Shi-ite based Maliki government in Iraq.
And of course let’s not forget the $500 million dollars worth of armaments and training from President Obama and Congress that will go only to the ‘moderate’ extremists in Syria fighting the Syrian government forces.
Or perhaps note the leaked ( unverified but eminently plausible ) Rand Corporation document advising the Western Ukrainians how to destroy Eastern Ukraine- these guys in their cosy little offices in the city are oh-so-ruthless in getting others to murder and torture and destroy on their behalf ( but only of course where it benefits their bank accounts).
In that article Monbiot once again traces human civilization’s inability to look at the reality of our circumstances; our headlong race to “having our number called” because of the inherent insanity of the concept of “growth” and “progress” in a finite world system. It seems extraordinary for a so-called “intelligent species” that we globally refuse to acknowledge the inevitable trajectory of the “growth” strategy almost every human being on the planet has subscribed to.
And not only are we fouling our own back doorstep with poisons, the detritus from our consumption of “things” and the laying waste of the natural world upon which we depend, we are also fouling the world’s upper atmosphere with our “space junk”! We seem determined as humans to destroy ourselves and all the living beings we share this planet with. In less than a blink of an evolutionary eye, homo sapiens have largely destroyed the living fabric of this world.
The logic of this insanity should be absolutely clear to every single human being on this planet, and yet the argument that ‘growth and progress’ are anathema to our medium to long term survival, is seen as heresy. Look around: the world we share with millions of other species on this planet, is rapidly turning into a totally homo sapien centric world; where every living and dead thing exists simply for our use and gratification. We are rapidly closing down this planet as a living entity: – sealing over the soil with roads and buildings, poisoning the land with chemicals, burning pieces of it to spread into the atmosphere at colossal rates, modifying the landscape to meet human needs without regard to the other species inhabiting it, digging holes in the ground so we can spread more detritus over the surface of the planet, killing off innumerable species to feed our insatiable appetite- the list goes on and on and on….
What are we growing into?-where are we “progressing” to? are we happier?, more contented?, more in tune with the world?, kinder to our offspring and other beings?. No; we are more discontented, more avaricious, more grasping of things we do not have but which mean nothing, and more determined to destroy both other humans and the environment, to satisfy our short-term greed.
How can the supposedly so well-connected collectivity of humans on this planet have acquiesced to such an insane model of living? Are humans so blind that they can only see what is immediately before them and the immediate well-being and gratification of their own species? Humankind’s current 50 year strategy leads over a cliff.
What does it take for there to be change?-and will it be too late?
We live in a perpetual cycle of mutual self-justification of our crazy system which creates a seemingly sane “bubble” of human world activity within an insane and dead-end construct. The self-perpetuating myths of progress measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are the very measures of change in countries’ economic activity that are driving the world’s living things to extinction.
Stead and Stead (p1) Joseph Campbell (1988) points out that these myths reflect the underlying paradigms that guide the thoughts and actions of the people of a particular culture. Espousing society’s myths is a primary function of all of its institutions, be they political, religious, educational or economic. Campbell (1988) says that you can tell the dominant myth of a given society by examining the heights of its buildings. The multi-storey seats of economic activity that define the skylines of our cities today demonstrate that humankind’s most dominant current myth is economic wealth.”
In the “Common Knowledge” framework, a paradigm shift of societal knowledge can occur with the input of just one new point of reference.
Our lives as social beings are based on shared certainties of how the world works. Because those illusions are no more real than any other “certainty”, they can easily come crashing down, and a new set of “certainties ” or “truths” constructed. Game theory has also often been used in the area of economic assumption and speculation.
Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth. For the last five decades the pursuit of growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world. The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate, the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2100. This extraordinary ramping up of global economic activity has no historical precedent. It’s totally at odds with our scientific knowledge of the finite resource base and the fragile ecology we depend on for survival. And it has already been accompanied by the degradation of an estimated 60% of the world’s ecosystems.(from ‘Thinking the Unthinkable’, Tim Jackson)
And yet – despite the hype from corporates and governments, it will be relatively easy for most of us to change to become part of a steady state economy. Within a few decades we will have forgotten the importance of having the latest gadget, the next holiday to God-knows-where, or the latest fad or food. Small-scale organic farming provides a readily usable model to replace agri-business’ toxic produce, whilst producing wonderful benefits to the world and our fellow species. We will take our essential equipment for repair, instead of “recycling” to the landfill pit, we will accept as normal that everything we own does not have to be new and shiny, and rely more on local food resources and communities. Yes, the investment banks, multi-national corporations and billionaires will disappear, but we will all then have the time to re-assess what it means to be human and happy and connected to our living world.
The People’s Republic of Donestk was formed in 7th April 2014; breaking away from the state of Ukraine after a very informal referendum of its local population. The referendum was largely caused by the decisions of the Kiev interim Government, after it deposed the former elected ( but like almost every other President of Ukraine since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 – extremely corrupt) president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych fled from power as a result of the Maidan protests and threats to his life, led by right wing extremists.
The interim Ukrainian government’s decision to effectively marginalise Russian speaking Ukrainians through banning the Russian language and subsequently calling anti-Maidan groups in the East, “terrorists”, led to the formation of pro-Russian paramilitary groups in the East, in the oblasts of Donestk and Luhansk. Their stated aim was to preserve their Ukrainian/Russian identity against the threats by neo-nazi extremists to “purify” Ukraine, in the new interim Kiev government; largely from within the Slovoda Party and Right Sektor paramilitary groups based in the West of Ukraine.
It is currently unclear what level of support the “self-proclaimed” (are not all state entities initially “self-proclaimed”?) Donestk People’s Republic has with the local population, with some very problematic opinion polls run out of Kiev and funded from the U.S. which state pro-Russian support at less than 40%. Facts on the ground would seem to suggest otherwise, especially since the killing of 39 people in the Trades Hall centre in Odessa on May 2 2014, apparently by right wing football hooligans from the West.
It is also problematic whether those currently running the administration of the Donestk PR have the best of the local population at heart, or are simply opportunists , ex-soldiers and thugs. In addition there is always the tendency with any revolution, especially when under pressure from the outside, to respond in more and more draconian and violent ways towards its own population. Are the Donetsk PR officials any less rascist, anti-Jew and voracious than those in Kiev?-time will tell.
Notwithstanding those concerns, the creation of this ‘people’s republic’ does present a unique opportunity for a better state not seen for perhaps almost a hundred years on this planet. The opportunity to begin afresh, untainted by cronyism, the powers of the corporates, the drive for “progress” at the expense of the planet. An opportunity for a state entity driven by altrusim, responsibility for the vulnerable and a respect for the environment. Impossible you say?- certainly improbable when we look at our current rapacious “growth” (read; money-for-the-rich and baubles for the poor) driven state entities.
What we need then, is the development of state structures that foster:
Community initiative and responsiveness- local town “councils” where every citizen has a voice and a right to be heard and responded to.
Central and local policies that recognise that “growth for growth’s sake’ is nonsensical and destroys both our own living environment and the other living things around us- ‘growth’ is the short term path to death
Central and local initiatives that encourage inter-connectivity between people- eg local community places within walking distance for food and product distribution, green spaces,
Town planning which “forces” people to mingle together to get their work done: eg small interconnected urban areas, green spaces and gardens
Local and central state welfare systems that all citizens buy into according to their capacity to pay through taxes, and all are recompensed equitably in times of trouble
Principles and policies that create respect for the other living beings interacting with the human population.
Training for all age groups in the art of mindfulness
An understanding that violence to others destroys oneself
an inalienable obstruction to business interests influencing state and local political decisions (i.e absolutely no capacity for corporates to finance politicians)
It can (and must) be done. For the sake of all of us on this little blue ball.
T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, The Hollow Men, ends with the following lines…
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
A recent study, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center and using new statistical modelling methods, predicts that this current civilization will likely collapse in another twenty to fifty years. The study draws analogies with past human civilizations; the Assyrian, Roman, Mayan, Minoan, the various Chinese empires…. We can assume that like us; the populations of those civilizations had every reason to believe their civilization was unique and would last forever. While civilisational collapse is quite rare, characterised by entire ways of life, systems of thought, cultural values and worldviews disappearing, political collapse occurs frequently ( eg empires and kingdoms disintegrating). What appears likely to happen in our modern context, given the confluence of a number of catastrophic events, is civilisational collapse.
While this particular study has been sharply critiqued by journalists and scientists alike for its simplicity and generalisations ; the broad conclusion that, as Paul Simon aptly put it ,”everything put together falls apart” , is a healthy reminder of human hubris.
The single most important story unfolding in not-so-slow-motion on this planet is the ongoing destruction of the natural world in the name of “progress” and “growth” (ie consuming ever more “stuff”) by humans; , which will in the near future, significantly negatively impact on this species. Despite our insistence to the contrary, humans are entirely reliant on other species for our survival. It is a given that is blindly ignored by politicians, businesspeople and businesses and all those with a current stake in the way our “civilization’ currently works ( ie all of us).
As key resources become more expensive to extract, the world economy (which is apparently now the full extent of this ‘civilization’) begins to contract and distort . And as the gap between rich and poor widens, the “have-nots” increasingly demand in more and more violent ways, their right to a slice of the pie. As the oceans and atmospheric temperatures rise, so do the pressures on our artificial nation-states. As we progressively and rapidly eliminate species after species to produce more things, to make “progress”; our chances of long term survival as a species are being rapidly reduced. Our civilization demands that we assume that we have an infinite volume of resources to consume for the infinite future in a closed planetary system – a small contradiction in terms! We are indeed heading for the perfect storm.
Study after academic study shows that the more we gain from a civilization’s prosperity, the more we are blind to its failings and contradictions and its inevitable fall. This tunnel vision says , that ‘if I am doing well out of this catastrophe then it cant be a catastrophe at all!’
Homo sapiens pride themselves on their remarkable intelligence; their capacity to manipulate their environment for their own ends. They appear unable to grasp that that self-definition process of appropriating everything good, intelligent and wonderful to human attributes, is simply the result of their blinded vision. If by definition, species that manipulate their environment are determined to be superior to all other species; then lo-and-behold!- homo sapiens are superior beings! Because homo sapiens are above all other traits, social beings, all of us have an intensely strong need to “fit in”, to belong to the group. Agreeing with other people on ‘our’ group’s thought processes and paradigms is an essential part of this togetherness. However, agreement does not it make it truth.
Thus, it does not matter that the capacity to manipulate the environment for the benefit of our species and at the expense of all other species on this planet might not be quite such an intelligent thing to do, given that the environmental devastation and species destruction is largely for homo sapiens’ short term pleasures, power and baubles.
Were we to say that a species that can sustain itself easily and efficiently without damaging its environment in the process, were more ‘worthy’ beings than other species ; then homo sapiens would not be registering on the short-list!
Over the millenia, homo sapiens have been able to convince themselves that people of other cultures, or colour, or background are inferior to one’s own culture because of this self-defining process. Using the same intellectual process, the more different another species is from ourselves, the less worthy , less intelligent, more expendable and worthy of our exploitation and destruction that species becomes. The more differentiated from our species the “other” is, the easier it is to dismiss its inherent traits and qualities and its right to life. However on our ever smaller blue planet, we no longer have the luxury to differentiate between “them’ and ‘us”.
How much easier then is it to dismiss the equality of other species with ourselves when their characteristics, strengths and skills are so different from homo sapiens, and when it is so much to our benefit to be able to kill and exploit other species without moral qualms.
As Henry Gee also points out succinctly in his Guardian article , each species’ particular traits or “strengths” are based purely on, firstly, what biological mechanisms of sense are available to them ,and secondly, how they use those senses to that species’ best advantage. Homo sapiens may not value our sense of smell because its not a particularly efficient sensing mechanism in homo sapiens, but you can bet a dog does!
The capacity for self-delusion in our species is immense. Witness the largely American driven anti- climate -change camp. Of course we cannot be destroying our planet with C02 through industrialization, because capitalism and owning the means of production is the reason for our being! – after all, aren’t we, the US consumer, the greatest people on earth because our nation is the epitome of capitalism?
As another example of collective self-deception, Seth Klarman, the manager of the $27billion hedge fund, the Baupost Group, recently remarked on the similarities of the world’s banking system to the ‘Truman Show’, the late nineties Hollywood film, where the lead character “lives a seemingly charmed world, snuggled comfortably into an American suburbia of white picket fences and crisply cut lawns. But gradually Truman starts to notice something is not quite right. He is actually trapped inside a film set controlled by hidden directors, and discovers to his horror that he is the unknowing star of the world’s most popular reality TV show.” In one of the more blatant nuances of reality shifting homo sapiens have acquiesced to, our financial system is in essence simply one of “smoke and mirrors” -the manipulation of facts and figures designed to obscure reason and reality; a fragile house of cards.
The dreaded “black swan”!
One key point of difference with previous human civilizations around the world is that our current civilization is a global one; each of the parts are inextricably connected. Apart from a few small tribes in isolated areas, every one of us has bought in to this unique method of environmental destruction. Thus when this civilization collapses -(and it is a “when” and not an “if” ), that collapse will be both more rapid and more global; there will not be another model of homo sapien civilization around for the survivors to pin their hopes on. The other significant difference with other previous human civilizations is this current one’s geographical reach. Vast areas of the planet have now been laid waste in the name of human progress.
So, while the modelling conducted by Safa Motesharrei may be flawed, it does provide an opportunity for serious debate about the direction this global civilisation of ours is taking us..
In the latest absurdity upon absurdity in this fictitious “war on terror”, the UK Police have defended their actions in holding and interrogating for 9 hours Glenn Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda on the grounds that Miranda was suspected of terrorism because he may have been relaying truthful information about a wide range of Western governments’ illegal spying on its citizens.
As the headline above notes; the UK Police’s rationale for the infringement of Miranda’s rights, was that they “had a duty to protect the public and our national security ” (from such unwarranted journalism). With both the UK and US police forces being increasingly accused of both corrupt and violent behaviour, it is little wonder the public in those countries feel a sense of betrayal by the state. Who are their police and armed forces in fact protecting?
Certainly the deliberately manufactured farce of muslim terrorism ( funded with enthusiasm by the CIA, and various other “intelligence” western agencies around the globe- not to mention our “allies”- the Saudis), is providing an ever more thinly stretched excuse for heavy handed enforcement behaviours, surveillance and the erosion of civil rights.
Who and what is it all for?
It would appear that much of this deterioration in rights and freedoms is simply to improve the profits of those international corporates , whether media, arms manufacturers , energy companies telecommunications or security companies that are able to buy the required influence in western “democracies”.
As it becomes increasingly clear that we are nearing the end of the free capitalistic lunch-with the remainder of the world’s natural resources being rapidly frittered away for a few quick bucks – the corporate billionaires are rushing for the exits, and trampling us “little people” in the stampede.
Over the last 20 years there has been increasing scientific evidence of the reality that “animals” vary little from homo sapiens in terms of their capacity to feel, to have cognition and to be aware of their circumstances. That very ‘useful’ set of historical assumptions of the lack of true ‘awareness’ of other species compared to homo sapiens, which has enabled those of us who wish to kill or hurt other species on the grounds of their implicit inferiority to humans, has now been fully discredited.
Tilly
It is therefore inevitable that, over the next few decades, a global ethical and moral shift to the full valuing of other sentient life on our little planet will occur. This will in turn translate into a massive reduction in meat eating by homo sapiens and the need for environments where other species are respected and protected. While this world-wide ethical and moral shift and its translation into alternative action to value other species as we would our own, may currently appear absurd to my dear readers, it is worthwhile to consider how rapid the global moral and ethical shifts against issues such as slavery or the rights of women have occurred in the last 200 years.
It is therefore vital that both states and individuals start to explore both the implications of that shift in attitude towards species other than our own, and to assist in driving that change towards a better world for all of us who inhabit this little blue world.
While the challenges to the economic environment of those state entities whose economies are predominantly reliant on the export of meat are undoubtedly immense if we are to shift to a no-kill economy; the opportunities as a world leader in environmental and species ethics and practice are also enormous.
The evidence for the greater efficiency and sustainability of a non-meat based agrarian economy is out there now; we can start to plan for this inevitable change or be sidelined by other more ethical and forward looking economies. No-kill agricultural produce that is produced in a fully environmentally sustainable way, will be in huge and ever-increasing demand as the ethical and moral framework of our species shifts its awareness in the decades to come.
Given the indisputable evidence that other animals than homo sapiens have the same value and senses as ourselves, it is imperative that all laws regarding the management of animals ensure that no cruelty or suffering is permitted under government regulation.
In just one of many examples of research into animal behaviour that explores the real capacities of other species, the recent Guardian article on the work of Tetsuro Matsuzawa at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University exposes how chimpanzees on a number of cognitive fronts are superior to homo sapiens .
It is important to note that all research by homo sapiens is naturally slanted to place positive attributes on those skills that are traditionally deemed “human”, and to either ignore , minimise, ridicule or even simply not observe those skills and attributes of other species that are less familiar to us or deemed by humans to be not important or irrelevant. In addition, our sensory range as humans limits our capacity to even understand at a basic level , th edepth of awareness of many other species.
One revealing comment by Prof. Matsuzawa in the Guardian article is his statement that “As humans evolved and acquired new skills – notably the ability to use language to communicate and collaborate – they lost others they once shared with their common simian ancestors. “Our ancestors may have also had photographic memories, but we lost that during evolution so that we could acquire new skills,” he says. “To get something, we had to lose something.” As the supremely arrogant and species-centric organisms that humans are; we have glorified our skills, while ignoring our sensory and cognitive deficits in comparison to other species on the planet.
Perhaps our most unique skill, is our capacity to manipulate our environment to suit our own ends. It is likely to also be our, and the rest of the species on this planet’s , undoing.
Postscript
A recent article in The Guardian entitled “The American lawyer seeking human rights for chimpanzees” examines with some incredulity and implied mirth at the idea-that a US lawyer is campaigning for chimpanzees to have the same legal rights as human beings. The article references the NonHumanRights Project ; one of the first of many human organisations devoted to rights and equality for all sentient beings on this planet.
A recent Guardian article about the lives of migrant workers in Qatar highlights the issues of forced labour and slavery in middle eastern and some European countries.
As the Guardian article notes; Qatra has the highest ratio of migrant workers to the domestic population in the world; more than 90%. Aidan McQaude of Anti-Slavery International has no hesitation in calling many of these migrants not just forced labour, but true slaves; people who are treated as objects.
Craig Murray, ex British ambassador to Uzbekistan and long time campaigner against child labour/slavery in their cotton fields, notes that both the tolerance and the exploitation of slavery or cheap labour inevitably goes right to the top. In Uzbekistan’s case, to its torture loving President Karimov and his daughter (who are such good friends with Tony Blair!) . Anti Slavery International describes the working conditions for children in the cotton fields thus: Cotton production in Uzbekistan is a state orchestrated forced-labour system. The Government of Uzbekistan forces over a million children, teachers, public servants and private sector employees to pick cotton under appalling conditions each year. Those who refuse are expelled from school, fired from their jobs, and denied public benefits or worse. The Government harasses and detains citizens seeking to monitor the situation.
In Qatar’s case, the official responses to the accusations of slavery are so far at odds with the reality on the ground , that it would be very surprising that the government authorities and companies involved did not have full cognisance of the systemic exploitation occurring.
Asia News notes that the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) highlighted “contradictions with Qatari law” that fail “to give workers any real rights or protection from slavery conditions.”
ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow said the visa sponsorship system in Qatar allows the exaction of forced labour. “Under Qatari law, employers have near total control over workers. They alone choose if a worker can change jobs, leave the country or stay in Qatar,” she said.
In 2012, the Labour Relations Department in Qatar’s Labour Ministry received 6,000 worker complaints. The top concerns facing workers included exploitation, delays in paying wages, violence and work-related safety issues and fatalities.
In one of those most malignant of ironies, Qatar is one of the richest countries in the world for its Qatari citizenship population of 300,000 (total population of 1.9 million)
Similarly, across the border in Saudi Arabia, the Guardian in January 2013, noted that 45 foreign maids faced beheading by the State executioner . The International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Committee of Experts on the Application of (Labour Rights) Conventions noted in 2012 that in Saudi Arabia the vulnerable situation of migrant workers, particularly domestic workers who are excluded from the provisions of the Labour Code, who are often confronted with employment policies such as the visa “sponsorship” system and subjected to abusive employer practices such as the retention of passports, non-payment of wages, deprivation of liberty and physical and sexual abuse which cause their employment to be transformed into situations that could amount to forced labour.
The Himalayan Times in July 2012 stated that up to 3,000 migrant workers from Nepal alone had died in Saudi Arabia since 2000.
However as Migrant Rights notes, the abuse of workers is not limited to Qatar or Saudi Arabia, abuse is epidemic and systemic in the middle east and beyond.
As I have noted in a previous blog , “We are all Immigrants”, none of us have any rights to this piece of land we currently plant our feet on. We are simply travelers, as were our ancestors before us. And to be fully human , we must welcome those new travelers amongst us too. And yet we continue to play this foolish and deadly game of “us’ and the “others”.
French attitudes towards the Roma are also indicative of the mindless attitude of those in power towards those who believe that simply because they and their ancestors happen to have lived in a geographically bounded state territory for some time, they are entitled to certain privileges, and those who are recent comers are not. The brutal and barbarous attitude by many in Australia towards the “boat people” from Asian countries, is a supreme example of this vicious mind-set.
The concept of “citizenship” is a useful mirage, a fiction created by states to marginalize some populations.
In reality any person who lives under the jurisdiction of a state geographic entity needs to be protected by its laws; whether they be occupiers of the lands for many generations, recent migrants, asylum seekers, or migrant workers.
As As’ad AbuKhalil, aka the Angry Arab states, it is the ignorance of racsim that drives these brutal policies and systems of exploitation and terror.
Over the years, there have been many discussions about the potential to create large-scale organic farming enterprises to replace the disastrous impacts of chemical farming.
A lovely article by Tom Philpott of Mother Jones outlines one attempt by some US farmers to break the dead-end cycle of spraying, tilling and loss of environment caused by commercial farming, using no-plough methods and winter “cover crops”. While this method does not completely eliminate the toxic impacts of spraying ; it does go a long way to develop large-scale sustainable farming practice.
Another “new” farming concept is is the use of charcoal in soil. Native american indians used Terra preta in pre-Columbian times to create long term sustainable gardens in environments where high rainfall leaching should have made sustainable agriculture impossible.
Given that at least a third of commercially produced food is wasted, it would seen perfectly feasible to create food sources closer to food consumers, allowing less wastage in transit, and better targeting of food production to need.
We dont need the environmental destruction that is touted as necessary by agribusiness to create sustainable global food production. We don’t need to keep killing our essential insects with insecticides, spraying weedicides to control the plants we dont want, constantly digging up the soil to destroy its structure and life, and destroying more and more natural environments and the plants and animals that live there, for short-term gain. We can live a wonderful sustainable and more joyful life through living instead of buying.
A recent sobering article in the Guardian notes that as of May 2013 we have now reached the new exciting record of having 400 parts per million of Co2 in our atmosphere!
The Guardian states that:
The last time so much greenhouse gas was in the air was several million years ago, when the Arctic was ice-free, savannah spread across the Sahara desert and sea level was up to 40 metres higher than today.
These conditions are expected to return in time, with devastating consequences for civilisation, unless emissions of CO2 from the burning of coal, gas and oil are rapidly curtailed. But despite increasingly severe warnings from scientists and a major economic recession, global emissions have continued to soar unchecked.
However what is most sobering, is that last slide in this Guardian narrative, which shows the likely scenario of reaching 1000 parts of carbon dioxide per million by 2100 if industrialization continues as it has for the past 200 years; which is everybody’s best guess at this point.
Not one government in the world is committed to real carbon dioxide emission reductions at this point. Most governments talk about reducing carbon emissions, but in reality pedal “progress’ and ‘economic growth ” as the panacea to their little national problems of recession or poverty… However “growth” and “progress” are the true causes of our death-wish.
By the time real decisions are made to reduce industrialization and consumption globally, we will be well and truly past the point of ensuring our survivability as a species with any significant numbers on the planet, along with thousands of other species. In reality, right now, we are long-gone.
What the impacts of living on a planet with 1000 parts per million of carbon dioxide will be; no-one knows. Nor do we know what the short to medium term impacts of this totally never-before-witnessed sudden change in our atmospheric composition will have on this planet.
Nor does anyone know, even if we stop producing CO2 right now, how long it will take before CO2 levels start to decline, and consequently the world’s climate begin to return to”normal ” conditions. Quite possibly it may take thousands of years for climate conditions to return to the levels of the 1960s; if they ever do at all.
What we do know is that we have entered an unfamiliar world-there is no going back.
George Monbiot in his blog “The Great Unmentionable” once again powerfully articulates the insanity of consumerism -the relentless drive by governments, media and corporates to encourage us all to not only maintain our spending on foolish things, but to increase it.
Monbiot points out that it is not heating lighting and transport which are the predominant carbon emission culprits-it is the “stuff’ we buy – which increasingly is produced for “us’ Westerners by ‘those’ people over there.
In its quest for economic growth and more wealth for the wealthy, corporates attempt to even commodify nature; where would we be for instance without our little sticky labels on our fruit and veges, not knowing which international conglomerate had marketed that piece of produce?
But by far the most insidious aspect of consumption of “stuff” is the central part it plays in the relentless destruction of the natural world- the loss of natural habitat, the annihilation of species after species, for more pieces of short-lived pieces of ‘stuff ‘ that no human will want in a year or so.
The environment may be able to be resurrected after the factories have been pulled down, as some artificial and dumbed-down version of true nature -but without the ever-growing list of extinct species that can never return to us.
Maple Trees in Autumn
As our species becomes more and more urbanised, we lose our awareness of our indelible link with nature; our capacity to just watch and listen and wonder at the glorious real world around us ; our heads down watching ‘smartphone” screens or plugged in to our latest preference for noise on our mp3 player. We become immune to the beauty and randomness and unexpectedness of nature of which we are an integral member-and have blinded ourselves to that reality.
Instead of being open and alive to new and unexpected events and situations, we increasingly self-select our perception of the world from an ever-narrowing mechanical IT menu driven by our past experience.
We lose our connectedness to the world around us-our inherent knowledge that we are transient fragile beings like all other sentient things on this planet: that we are different-but no better- than all the other species we live with.
The standard response to the current financial crisis has been to punish the presumed debtors. Are the creditors blameless, then? asks Dinyar Godrej.
It’s almost a reflex. Think about debt and we think first about something owed. Then come secondary considerations of whether it ‘should’, ‘ought’ or ‘must’ be paid back, how this should happen, and whether possible.
Large outstanding personal debts – say a mortgage taken out during a housing bubble – can turn even the stoutest of us into ‘quivering insomniac jellies of hopeless indebtedness’ (as Margaret Atwood so accurately puts it). Debt is, we feel, whatever the rights or wrongs, ‘our own fault’.
We can’t help it, we are socialized to take such a moral view of debt.
New Antarctica 