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...genetically wired to live unsustainably. It's not new with us. We've been wiping out forests, and fertile lands, and hunting species to extinction, for many millennia, probably from the onset of short-term thinking. Then we move on. I think this explains the extraordinary migration of the human race out of Africa, all over the planet, on foot. We use up one ecosystem, we move to the next. Sometimes the ecosystem we leave behind recovers (or somewhat recovers); more often it does not. Virtually every civilization we've created--at least the ones with cities, armies and ships--has been built on deforestation, and has risen and fallen on the abundance and then depletion of wood, used both for energy (vast forests lost to metallurgy and glass-making, as well as heat) and construction. And when forests are felled, the fertile topsoil of the lowlands washes out to sea and is lost. North Africa, the Middle East, Greece, large parts of Asia (all of China)--the same story. Coal mining is very, very recent, as a basic energy source--and gas and nukes even more recent, all big polluters. We are still destroying forests--at a phenomenal rate--while now we're filling the air with pollutants that forests could absorb (some of it anyway), if we left forests alone.
It is the consensus of all the big E groups that, at the current rate of consumption/destruction of earth's natural resources, we have 50 years to the death of the planet.
We are showing very little sign of recognizing how dire our circumstances are, or doing anything about it. About 25% of this consumption/destruction is caused by the U.S. alone, and, with the Bush junta, we're not going to reverse course any time soon. We're going to do resource wars instead--creating even more consumption/destruction.
It's probable that even with massive, worldwide efforts to stabilize the climate, restore forest biomass and restore soils and related biodiversity, we cannot reverse the dramatic decline of our planetary environment. The decline has occurred extremely fast--over the last 100 years alone, due to the massive growth of earth-altering technology and industrial development. Prior environmental destruction was localized and limited. Now it's global. We can't cut forests down fast enough--in Canada, Siberia, Asia and the Amazon--all the remaining remote places--to feed our gigantic, global industrial machine, which is STILL using wood to build ordinary housing projects (at an incredible rate), and other construction. In Brazil, the problem is the population's need for ag land--they are cutting down and burning off huge swaths of irreplaceable tropical rainforest, converting them to farms for one generation of farming (because of the nature of the fragile soil) and then ranches. Those forests--like those of North Africa, the Middle East, Greece, and China--will never grow back. Other deforested areas--middle Europe, England, the eastern U.S., the Pacific northwest--will never be the same. The thick protective canopies are gone; species diversity has been wiped out. The story is the same everywhere that human civilization has gotten--or is now getting--highly organized, industrial and into global free piracy.
Environmentalists and the wise elders of certain indigenous tribes say that we must learn to respect and revere the earth and live in harmony. But we are NOT learning. Well, we ARE becoming more educated and aware. Poll Americans and 80% to 90% say they want strong environmental regulation, but we have been unable to control the economic system of maximum exploitation for short-term profit. And that system has now even taken away our right to vote--with the new electronic voting systems run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled largely by two Bushite corporations, Diebold and ES&S, and, if you think they're not using this capability--achieved in the 2001-2004 period--to rig our elections to favor resource wars, resource extraction and global corporate profiteering, then you are very naive.
They've had to take special measures to disempower and disenfranchise Americans, because we have so much potential power to regulate and even de-charter and dismantle US-based global corporate predators. So much of the problem is US-based, and, with our democratic institutions and traditions, and our theoretical sovereignty as a people, we were actually making headway on the environmental front. Many grass roots civil groups were also beginning to rebel--against global environmental destruction and anti-human sweatshops and other manifestations of fascist economics (that's what the Seattle 1999 protests were about--50,000 people in the streets, shutting down the World Trade Organization meeting). So they had to find better mechanisms to control us--thus the new voting machines (brought to you by the two biggest crooks in Congress, Tom Delay and Bob Ney).*
But the story of planetary decline is worldwide. In Venezuela and Brazil, for instance, where they now have representative, democratic, leftist governments (via TRANSPARENT elections), those governments are in an economic vise with regard to natural resources and environmental destruction. They have vast poor populations--impoverished by the rich elite and desperately oppressed by past U.S.-supported dictatorships--who want food, housing, land, education, infrastructure, public works, energy and water systems, and all the supports of modern industrial development to improve their lives--and they have natural resources in abundance, the coin of development. Venezuela is giving land back to indigenous tribes, for instance, but not the mineral rights. The conflict between saving the planet and improving the lives of vast poor populations is acute (or seems so--new thinking is needed, regarding what wealth really is).
Then you have scams like the Forest Stewardship Council--which has basically been taken over by the banks and timber interests--putting a phony "green label" on the destruction of the last virgin forests, FOOLING people that, with 80% of the world's forests damaged or entirely destroyed over the last 100 years, we can log the last of it "sustainably."
Bottom-line, we either migrate into the solar system and beyond--and learn terraforming--or our species itself will die out, for having trashed its own home.
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*Throw Diebold, ES&S and all election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!
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