Category Archives: Environment

8 Critical Factors Behind Every Food Crisis

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FILE – In this Monday, Aug. 15, 2011 file photo, children from southern Somalia hold their pots as they line up to receive cooked food in Mogadishu, Somalia. A report by two U.S. government-funded famine and food agencies gives the highest death toll yet, estimating that 260,000 people died – more than double previous estimates. (AP Photo/Farah Abdi Warsameh, File)

By John Hawthorne

Source: Business Connect

From the beginning of time, their have been food crises in one form or another. Ancient books such as the Bible have records of various famines devastating portions of the world.

And while it’s easy to attribute these crises to a single cause, such as war or drought, the causes are usually much deeper and much more complex.

Nelson Mandela said, “Overcoming poverty is not an act of charity, it is an act of justice.”

In order for us to achieve the kind of justice envisioned by Mandela, it’s essential that we first understand the underlying causes of food crises. Only after we have understood can we then begin creating meaningful solutions.

With that in mind, here are 8 primary factors behind almost every global food crisis. While not all 8 of these will be present at a time, you will almost always find several of these at work.

Factor #1 – Poverty

One of the greatest factors in every food crisis is stark and abject poverty. This isn’t surprising. With enough money, anyone can ensure they have enough food. But with many developing nations sitting well below the poverty line, the population simply can’t afford the food they so desperately need.

Additionally, poverty has a distinct effect on food output. In Africa, for example, many farmers can’t afford proper irrigation and fertilizer. This, in turn, leads to lower yields, which then reduces the overall amount of food available to the population.

The population of the Sub-Saharan region of Africa is expected to grow at an astronomical rate, topping out at 2.4 billion by 2050. This will continue to exacerbate the poverty issue, which will then continue to drive the lack of sufficient food in the area.

Factor #2 – Drought and Desertification

Widespread droughts, leading to the desertification of particular locations also causes huge disruptions to food production. For example, leading up to and during the global food crisis of 2008, 110 countries experienced significant droughts. This caused even the most well-irrigated, fertile areas to become arid deserts, making it impossible to grow crops.

As Mark Hughes noted:

Australia is normally the second largest exporter of grain, after the U.S. The continent, though, is experiencing an ongoing drought that has been described as the worst in a century. Grain yields have shrunk and many silos remain empty. Australia’s drought is a major factor in global wheat stocks being at their lowest since 1979. In fact, many wheat and rice farmers are switching to crops that demand less water, such as wine grapes.

Additionally, farmers often let animals over-graze on their land, reducing the amount of vegetation and increasing desertification. If the soil becomes dry enough, it is ruined and unable to support any crops at all.

Finally, as populations grow, deforestation occurs at an increased rate, which then leads to less vegetation and more desertification.

Factor #3 – Political Pressure

In the past, the International Monetary Fund has pressured small farmers, particularly in impoverished African countries, to abandon agricultural farming in favor of industrial work. The money generated from this practice would be used to pay off debt and import food.

While it may sound like a working strategy, it has created catastrophic results.

As Eric Holt-Giménez noted:

The urban population increased seven-fold, swelling from 18% to 33% of the population. Millions of poor and unemployed workers have swelled the cities—with two-thirds of them living in slums. The manufacturing and industrial sector did not “take off” in African countries; the percent of the GDP coming from industry was 30% in 1961 and 32% in 2000. In the countryside, as plantations for agro-exports expanded, food production plummeted and poverty grew. Though the rural population, density increased by 180% as more farmers were crowded onto smaller plots.

Factor #4 – Increased Consumption of Meat and Dairy

Many countries have begun adopting a more Western diet, which includes eating significantly more meat and dairy. To make this happen, farmers have been forced to raise more cattle, and more cattle means more grain being consumed.

The problem, however, is that this causes a significant deficiency in terms of calories consumed versus calories available. A cow consumes approximately 700 calories worth of grain to produce a piece of meat containing only 100 calories. When this happens on a massive scale, an enormous shortage of food is the end result. The longer this deficit continues, the greater the imbalance will become.

Factor #5 – Increased Oil and Transportation Costs

When the price of oil goes up, the energy cost for planting and transporting foods goes through the roof. When food costs more to grow, it then costs more to sell. These rising costs then make it more difficult for the local population to purchase crops as well as for farmers to export their crops to industrialized nations.

Additionally, increased oil costs has led many countries to invest heavily in the development of agro-fuels. More agro-fuels always means less food available.

As Esther Vivas helpfully puts it:

The increase in the price of oil, which doubled in 2007 and 2008 and caused a big rise in the price of fertilizers and transport related to the food system, has resulted in increasing investment in the production of alternative fuels such as those of plant origin. Governments in the United States, the European Union, Brazil and others have subsidized production of agro-fuels in response to the scarcity of oil and global warming. But this green fuel production comes into direct competition with the production of food. To give just one example, in 2007 in the United States 20% of the total cereal harvest was used to produce ethanol and it is calculated in the next decade that this figure will reach 33%. We can imagine the situation in the countries of the South.

Factor #6 – Falling World Aid

At the peak of the 2007-2008 food crisis, food aid was at it’s lowest point since 1961. This is one of the oddities about the national food market. When cereal prices are low, countries look to sell their food through international aid. However, when food prices are high, they prefer to sell them on the open market for increased profits.

In other words, during food crises, when food is scarcest and at it’s highest prices, it isn’t available for international aid. When the bottom falls out of world aid, food crises grow in magnitude.

Factor #7 – International Conflicts

International conflicts are a particularly visible factor behind many food crises. During conflicts, it’s common for one country to restrict exports to another country, which then reduces the amount of food available to the general population.

Or, even worse, dictators will intentionally isolate their countries, refusing foreign aid that is desperately needed. Aid workers may be blocked from entering the country, making it difficult for the citizens to receive needed help. If foreign aid does come, they seize it for themselves, depriving the population of desperately needed sustenance.

Factor #8 – Disease

If a country experiences a particularly violent outbreak of a disease, it can completely disrupt the overall food supply. For example, the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa has killed farmers, which in turn pushes families deep into poverty.

When a population is undernourished, drugs become less effective and can at times create intense hunger pains. These two factors combined create a vicious cycle of death, poverty, and hunger.

Additionally, certain highly contagious diseases can restrict the amount of aid available to a country. For example, during the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, aid workers were restricted from traveling to the region due to fear of spreading the disease.

Perfect Storms

Most food crises aren’t the result of a single factor. Rather, they are caused by a perfect storm of events that coalesce into a deadly storm.

For example, in 2011, Somalia was devastated by a drought that caused widespread crop failure. The food crisis was made even worse by a non-functioning government as well as a national conflict. All these forces combined to make it difficult for aid workers to reach those who so desperately needed help.

The result was that approximately 260,000 people died.

Because the problems are almost always complex and multi-layered, the solutions must be equally multi-faceted. Simple solutions typically exacerbate the problem at the expense of the local population.

The best solutions are those that involve numerous parties working together to create a tangible, workable solution.

There will always be food crises to one degree or another. But as we grow in our understanding of what causes them, we can also grow in our ability to bring them to an end.

The Complexity of Cultural Evolution

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By Joe Brewer

Source: Resilience

What does the ecological crisis have in common with global poverty? How does politics relate to economics? The study of history? The changing landscape of technology, arts, and culture? Why is there not a coherent School of Social Sciences that brings themes like these together in one place? Answers can only be found by synthesizing two of the most important areas of scientific work in the last 150 years — in the fields of evolutionary studies and complexity science.

All of the most interesting and important topics of concern in the world today (How does consciousness work? What is the human mind? Is it possible to restore health to deteriorated ecosystems? Can we create political systems that promote widespread health and well-being?) involve vast networks of relationships interacting with each other — what are called complex adaptive systems in the lingo of complexity science.

Familiar examples include things like the weather with its inherent unpredictability or a market economy that has no central locus of control. The thing that makes a system “complex” is that patterns arise through the interactions that are not reducible to its constituent parts. You cannot explain the weather simply by describing what water molecules or solar radiation on their own are capable of doing. Neither can you explain an economy by describing how individuals engage in barter or exchange if they happen to be in a market-based society.

Importantly, complex adaptive systems are always far from equilibrium. They are not static. And the only way to make sense of their behavior is to computationally model how the various parts interact with each other dynamically — which leads to the importance of evolution. Emphasis on the word adaptive in complex adaptive systems gives an inkling of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection, where the biological traits of an organism that happen to be adaptive in its environment tend to occur more frequently than traits that are not adaptive.

Over time (since living systems are also dynamic), the evolutionary pathway for biology is traced by the intersections of adaptive fitness in environments that might be changing quickly or slowly. All biological systems are complex (they have many interacting parts with emergent phenomena that are not reducible) and they are adaptive (as natural selection plays out in changing environments).

So what does this say about cultural evolution? How can we apply this basic finding from biology to the study of history and economics, politics, and environmental management? Well it turns out that researchers who study cultural evolution — and there are now nearly 2,000 of them in the newly formed Cultural Evolution Society that I was tasked to help create — have brought the mathematical toolkit used in complexity science to the study of cultural change in human and non-human species.

The earliest inklings of this synthesis go back to a debate a century ago when foundations were being laid for the study of population genetics. At that time, statisticians were actively grappling with questions about how to account for genetic variation in biological organisms without the use of digital computers. They developed accounting systems for biological traits that matured continuously through the early-to-mid 20th Century.

In the late 1970’s and early 80’s, there was a group of cultural evolution researchers who translated these statistical tools for the distinct mechanisms of “selection” that play out for behavioral repertoires and other cultural phenomena in human and non-human cultures. Among them were Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman at Stanford, Peter J. Richerson at UC-Davis, and Robert Boyd of Arizona State University. These efforts culminated in the publishing of Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach in 1981 and Culture and the Evolutionary Process in 1988.

It was during this same time period that the field of complexity research was getting underway — with the multidisciplinary Santa Fe Institute being established in 1984 to explore the mathematical patterns of complex adaptive systems across many domains of study. They organized workshops and symposia on economics, ecology, urban studies, epidemiology, and more to discover how complex systems evolve and change using the mathematical tools of fractal geometry, network science, differential equations, and computational methods.

As I have written elsewhere, the time is urgently upon us to synthesize and apply what is known about complexity and evolution. The fate of humanity literally depends on our ability to do this. In a time of unprecedented exponential change, we must learn to manage complex systems as they evolve in real time.

We need to firstly understand that cultural systems evolve according to Darwinian principles. The interested reader can find many books explaining why this is the case. Here are a few to get you started:

This is a mere sampling — there are now hundreds of books on cultural evolutionary studies that one can dive into. Important for this article is to note that (i) the field of cultural evolution is quite mature at this point in time; (ii) it has advanced rapidly since incorporating mathematical tools used in the study of complexity; and (iii)the world is in flux with tremendous need for this body of knowledge to be brought to bear on our global challenges in the 21st Century.

This is the work of culture design.

The most pressing challenges in the world have foundational cultural components. Global warming arose from the false illusions of human separation from nature and the perception of endless bounty for natural resources at the beginning of the industrial era. Terrorism is cultivated in landscapes where people feel deep-seated anxiety and economic desperation — which arise from particular models of colonial (or post-colonial) exploitation that have unique cultural histories.

Similarly, the spread of rugged individualism as a cultural construct treats human beings as if they are separate from their communities, inherently selfish, and venerable for engaging in psychopathic behaviors like wealth hoarding. In each case, the real state of power is culture and the only viable solutions involve the intentional management of cultural evolutionary change.

But we cannot even start to think this way if we don’t recognize how human cultures operate as complex systems. Only by learning to see that emergent patterns arise through the interactions of constituent parts will we begin to discern how evolutionary change is taking us closer to planetary-scale collapse — and that design practices will be needed that make use of what is now known from cultural evolutionary studies.

Onward, fellow humans.

Profit Maximization is Easy: Invest in Violence

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By Robert J. Burrowes

For those of us committed to systematically reducing and, one day, ending human violence, it is vital to understand what is causing and driving it so that effective strategies can be developed for dealing with violence in its myriad contexts. For an understanding of the fundamental cause of violence, see ‘Why Violence?’

However, while we can tackle violence at its source by each of us making and implementing ‘My Promise to Children’, the widespread violence in our world is driven by just one factor: fear or, more accurately, terror. And I am not talking about jihadist terror or even the terror caused by US warmaking. Let me explain, starting from the beginning.

The person who is fearless has no use for violence and has no trouble achieving their goals, including their own defence, without it. But fearlessness is a state that few humans would claim. Hence violence is rampant.

Moreover, once someone is afraid, they will be less likely to perceive the truth behind the delusions with which they are presented. They will also be less able to access and rely on other mental functions, such as conscience and intelligence, to decide their course of action in any context. Worse still, the range of their possible responses to perceived threats will be extremely limited. And they will be more easily mobilised to support or even participate in violence, in the delusional belief that this will make them safe.

For reasons such as these, it is useful for political and corporate elites to keep us in a state of fear: social control is much easier in this context. But so is profit maximization. And the most profitable enterprise on the planet is violence. In essence then: more violence leads to more fear making it easier to gain greater social control to inflict more violence…. And starting early, by terrorizing children, is the most efficient way to initiate and maintain this cycle. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So, for example, if you think the massive number of police killings of innocent civilians in the United States – see ‘Killed by Police’ and ‘The Counted: People killed by police in the US’ – is a problem, you are not considering it from the perspective of maintaining elite social control and maximizing corporate profit. Police killings of innocent civilians is just one (necessary) part of the formula for maintaining control and maximising profit.

This is because if you want to make a lot of money in this world, then killing or exploiting fellow human beings and destroying the natural world are the three most lucrative business enterprises on the planet. And we are now very good at it, as the record shows, with the planetary death toll from violence and exploitation now well over 100,000 human beings each day, 200 species driven to extinction each day and ecological destruction so advanced that the end of all life (not just human life) on Earth is postulated to occur within decades, if not sooner, depending on the scenario. See, for example, ‘The End of Being: Abrupt Climate Change One of Many Ecological Crises Threatening to Collapse the Biosphere’.

So what forms does this violence take? Here is a daily accounting.

Corporate capitalist control of national economies, held in place by military violence, kills vast numbers of people (nearly one million each week) by starving them to death in Africa, Asia and Central/South America. This is because this ‘economic’ system is designed and managed to allocate resources for military weapons and corporate profits for the wealthy, instead of resources for living.

Wars kill, wound and incapacitate a substantial number of civilians, mostly women and children, as do genocidal assaults, on a daily basis, in countries all over the planet. Wars also kill some soldiers and mercenaries.

Apart from those people we kill every day, we sell many women and children into sexual slavery, we kidnap children to terrorise them into becoming child soldiers and force men, women and children to work as slave labourers, in horrific conditions, in fields and factories (and buy the cheap products of their exploited labour as our latest ‘bargain’).

We condemn millions of people to live in poverty, homelessness and misery, even in industrialized countries where the refugees of western-instigated wars and climate-destroying policies are often treated with contempt. We cause many children to be born with grotesque genetic deformities because we use horrific weapons, like those with depleted uranium, on their parents. We also inflict violence on women and children in many other forms, ranging from ‘ordinary’ domestic violence to genital mutilation.

We ensnare and imprison vast numbers of people in the police-legal-prison complex. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’. We pay the pharmaceutical industry and its handmaiden, psychiatry, to destroy our minds with drugs and electro-shocking. See ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’. We imprison vast numbers of children in school in the delusional belief that this is good for them. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’ And we kill or otherwise exploit animals, mostly for human consumption, in numbers so vast the death toll is probably beyond calculation.

We also engage in an endless assault on the Earth’s biosphere. Apart from the phenomenal damage done to the environment and climate by military violence: we emit gases and pollutants to heat and destroy the atmosphere and destroy its oxygen content. We cut down and burn rainforests. We cut down mangroves and woodlands and pave grasslands. We poison the soil with herbicides and pesticides. We pollute the waterways and oceans with everything from carbon and nitrogenous fertilizers to plastic, as well as the radioactive contamination from Fukushima. And delude ourselves that our token gestures to remedy this destruction constitutes ‘conservation’.

So if you are seeking work, whether as a recent graduate or long-term unemployed person, then the most readily available form of work, where you will undoubtedly be exploited as well, is a government bureaucracy or large corporation that inflicts violence on life itself. Whether it is the military, the police, legal or prison system, a weapons, fossil fuel, banking, pharmaceutical, media, mining, agricultural, logging, food or water corporation, a farm that exploits animals or even a retail outlet that sells poisonous, processed and often genetically-mutilated substances under the label ‘food’ – see ‘Defeating the Violence in Our Food and Medicine’ – you will have many options to help add to the profits of those corporations and government ‘services’ that exist to inflict violence on you, your family and every other living being that shares this biosphere.

Tragically, genuinely ethical employment is a rarity because most industries, even those that seem benign like the education, finance, information technology and electronics industries, usually end up providing skilled personnel, finance, services or components that are used to inflict violence. And other industries such as those in insurance and superannuation, like the corporate banks, usually invest in violence (such as the military and fossil fuel industries): it is the most profitable.

So while many government bureaucracies and corporate industries exist to inflict violence, in one form or another, they can only do so because we are too scared to insist on seeking out ethical employment. In the end, we will take a job as a teacher, corporate journalist or pharmaceutical drug pusher, serve junk food, work in a bank, join the police or military, work in the legal system, assemble a weapons component… rather than ask ourselves the frightening questions ‘Is this nonviolent? Is this ethical? Does it enhance life?’

And yes, I know about structural violence and the way it limits options and opportunities for those of particular classes, races, genders…. But if ordinary people like us don’t consider moral issues and make moral choices, why should governments and corporations?

Moral choices? you might ask in confusion. In this day and age? Well, it might seem old-fashioned but, in fact, while most of us have been drawn along by the events in our life to make choices based on such considerations as self-interest, personal gain and ‘financial security’, there is a deeper path. Remember Gandhi? ‘True morality consists not in following the beaten track, but in finding the true path for ourselves, and fearlessly following it.’

Strange words they no doubt sound in this world where our attention is endlessly taken by all of those high-tech devices. But Gandhi’s words remind us that there is something deeper in life that the violence we have suffered throughout our lives has taken from us. The courage to be ourselves and to seek our own unique destiny.

Do you have this courage? To be yourself, rather than a cog in someone else’s machine? To refuse to submit to the violence that surrounds and overwhelms us on a daily basis?

If you are inclined to ponder these questions, you might also consider making moral choices that work systematically to end the violence in our world: consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’, signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ and/or helping to develop and implement an effective strategy to resist one or the other of the many threats to our survival using the strategic framework explained in Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

Of course, these choices aren’t for everyone. As Gandhi observed: ‘Cowards can never be moral.’

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Robert J. Burrowes P.O. Box 68 Daylesford Victoria 3460 Australia

Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
http://thepeoplesnonviolencecharter.wordpress.com (Nonviolence Charter)
http://tinyurl.com/flametree (Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth)
http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence (‘Why Violence?’)
https://nonviolentstrategy.wordpress.com/ (Nonviolent Campaign Strategy)
https://nonviolentliberationstrategy.wordpress.com/ (Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy)
http://anitamckone.wordpress.com (Anita: Songs of Nonviolence)
http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com (Robert)
https://globalnonviolencenetwork.wordpress.com/ (Global Nonviolence Network)

When the Butterfly Flaps Its Wings

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credit: Twitter/@caroleenarn

By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

It remains to be seen what the impact will be from Mother Nature putting the nation’s fourth largest city out-of-business. And for how long? It’s possible that Houston will never entirely recover from Hurricane Harvey. The event may exceed the physical damage that Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans. It may bankrupt large insurance companies and dramatically raise the risk of doing business anywhere along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the USA — or at least erase the perceived guarantee that losses are recoverable. It may even turn out to be the black swan that reveals the hyper-fragility of a US-driven financial system.

Houston also happens to be the center of the US oil industry. Offices can be moved elsewhere, of course, but not so easily the nine major oil refineries that sprawl between Buffalo Bayou over to Beaumont, Port Arthur, and then Lake Charles, Louisiana. Harvey is inching back out to the Gulf where it will inhale more energy over the warm ocean waters and then return inland in the direction of those refineries.

The economic damage could be epic. Much of the supply for the Colonial Pipeline system emanates from the region around Houston, running through Atlanta and clear up to Philadelphia and New York. There could be lines at the gas stations along the eastern seaboard in early September.

The event is converging with the US government running out of money this fall without new authority to borrow more by congress voting to raise the US debt ceiling. Perhaps the emergency of Hurricane Harvey and its costly aftermath will bludgeon congress into quickly raising the debt ceiling. If that doesn’t happen, and the debt ceiling is not raised, the federal government might have to pretend that it can pay for emergency assistance to Texas and Louisiana. That pretense can only go so far before government contractors balk and maybe even walk.

Ordinarily, failure to raise the debt ceiling would lead to a government shut-down, including hurricane recovery operations, unless the president invoked some kind of emergency powers. That would be decisive action, but it could also be the beginning of something that looks like a full-out dictatorship. Powers assumed are often not surrendered when the original emergency is over. And what would the president use for money if a substantial enough number of congresspersons and senators are prompted by their distaste for Mr. Trump to drag out the process of financially re-liquefying the government? (And nevermind even passing a budget.)

Meanwhile, two other major sources of aggravation are waiting off-stage: one is North Korea. Why wouldn’t Kim Jong-un use the opportunity of political disarray in the US to create more headaches for a distracted US government? Never let a crisis go to waste. Another potential irritant is the return of students to American college campuses. Imagine how the campus Antifa forces would react to Mr. Trump assuming emergency powers. It’s easy to foresee an acceleration of violence between the extreme Left and the Extreme right during what is shaping up to look like a major crisis in governing. If the campus Left had any tactical brains, they’d stop marching around in black uniforms and instead organize a mass renunciation of college loan debt.

Behind all this political strife will be wobbling financial markets. The message from the debt ceiling stalemate to the bond market would be that the US can no longer be relied on to pay its debts. Interest rates on US Treasury paper would have to go up as the long-lost concept of risk returned to the bond scene. People and institutions will not be induced to hold bonds unless the yield is recalibrated to the actual risk. Of course, in the mysterious world of bonds (i.e. securitized debt), the price of bonds goes down as interest rates rise. Meaning a lot of current holders of bonds would be hammered if they tried to sell. Rates rising would also spell big trouble for corporations and governments who have to make regular interest payments to bond-holders. A rate rise to as little as 3 percent on US Treasury bonds could spin the country into comprehensive bankruptcy.

How might stock markets and currency markets react to the scenario above? To me it would look like a drop of at least 1000 points on the S & P. The US dollar might actually rise initially as a whole lot of debt is renounced — which makes money actually disappear — but then you have the Federal Reserve waiting on another flank to roll out their own emergency response: Quantitative Easing No. 4, flooding the system with new “money” that has all the appearance and none of the mojo of value, tanking the dollar anew. As a wise correspondent of mine wrote a while back: “financialization is nothing more than money with its value removed.” (Graham Reinders.)

A lot can happen when a faraway butterfly flaps its wings and sets a slight current of air in motion.

Hurricane Harvey: An Epic Disaster, An Environmental Nightmare

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: StephenLendman.org

Natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey are greatly exacerbated by America’s neglected infrastructure nationwide – a deplorable situation unaddressed by Republicans and undemocratic Democrats alike for decades.

Poor maintenance, aging pipe networks installed up to a century ago, and lack of proper drainage facilities in flood-prone cities like Houston, New Orleans, and Chicago’s downtown Loop, along with poor communities in these and other cities left especially vulnerable, make disasters like Katrina and Harvey far worse than otherwise if proper protections were in place.

They’re not nationwide. America’s neglected infrastructure bears much of the blame for Houston’s epic disaster – worsening as rain keeps falling, making landfall a second time west of Cameron, LA, heavy rain hitting the state’s coastal areas.

The National Weather Service issued a flash flood emergency, its severest flood alert. Millions of Texas and Louisiana residents vulnerable. Rainfall in Houston already exceeds 50 inches.

By Tuesday afternoon, an estimated 444 square miles were flooded, an area six times the size of Washington, DC. Shocking, and things keep worsening as rain keeps falling – lightly in Houston, not torrentially like earlier, but floodwaters are still rising.

According to Rice University Environmental Engineering Professor Phil Bedient, “Houston is the most flood-prone city in the United States. No one is even a close second – not even New Orleans, because at least they have pumps there.”

Rice University Environmental Law Professor Jim Blackburn said Houston’s system is designed to drain only up to 12 or 13 inches of rain per 24-hour period. It’s “so obsolete it’s just unbelievable,” he stressed.

Houston’s Harris County has the nation’s least-regulated drainage policy, according to Bedient. Reservoirs overflowed. Water pressing against 70-year-old dams was released, worsening downstream flooding.

Houston’s storm drain and pipe system is minimal compared to other cities. Overdevelopment eliminating green space exacerbated what’s ongoing.

Chairman of Residents Against Flooding Ed Browne said area politicians bend to the will of developers. Whatever they want they get.

According to Bedient, the way Houston is governed created “a perfect mix for the perfect storm. And that’s why we flood so often” – though never before like now.

The calamity is hugely aggravated by damaged oil refineries and fuel facilities along the Texas Gulf coast – releasing millions of pounds of toxic chemicals into the air and water, creating a serious health hazard for area residents.

Releases include carcinogenic benzene and nitrogen oxide. Texas environment director Luke Metzger warned that “(i)t’s adding to the cancer risk to the community and well as respiratory problems.”

Area refineries and plants account for about 25% of America’s refining capacity, over 40% of its ethylene production, and more than half of its jet fuel.

The Gulf Coast is home to around half of the nation’s chemical manufacturing facilities. Hazardous gases were emitted during plant shutdowns.

The effects on human health won’t be known for some time. Exposure to toxins causes cancer and other diseases.

It’s just a matter of how many local residents will be harmed – besides damage or loss of homes and personal possessions.

End-times for humanity

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Humanity is more technologically powerful than ever before, and yet we feel ourselves to be increasingly fragile. Why?

By Claire Colebrook

Source: Aeon

The end of the world is a growth industry. You can almost feel Armageddon in the air: from survivalist and ‘prepper’ websites (survivopedia.com, doomandbloom.net, prepforshtf.com) to new academic disciplines (‘disaster studies’, ‘Anthropocene studies’, ‘extinction studies’), human vulnerability is in vogue.

The panic isn’t merely about civilisational threats, but existential ones. Beyond doomsday proclamations about mass extinction, climate change, viral pandemics, global systemic collapse and resource depletion, we seem to be seized by an anxiety about losing the qualities that make us human. Social media, we’re told, threatens our capacity for empathy and genuine connection. Then there’s the disaster porn and apocalyptic cinema, in which zombies, vampires, genetic mutants, artificial intelligence and alien invaders are oh-so-nearly human that they cast doubt on the value and essence of the category itself.

How did we arrive at this moment in history, in which humanity is more technologically powerful than ever before, and yet we feel ourselves to be increasingly fragile? The answer lies in the long history of how we’ve understood the quintessence of ‘the human’, and the way this category has fortified itself by feeding on the fantasy of its own collapse. Fears about the frailty of human wisdom go back at least as far as Ancient Greece and the fable of Plato’s cave, in which humans are held captive and can only glimpse the shadows of true forms flickering on the stone walls. We prisoners struggle to turn towards the light and see the source (or truth) of images, and we resist doing so. In another Platonic dialogue, the Phaedrus, Socrates worries that the very medium of knowledge – writing – might discourage us from memorising and thinking for ourselves. It’s as though the faculty of reason that defines us is also something we’re constantly in danger of losing, and even tend to avoid.

This paradoxical logic of loss – in which we value that which we’re at the greatest risk of forsaking – is at work in how we’re dealing with our current predicament. It’s only by confronting how close we are to destruction that we might finally do something; it’s only by embracing the vulnerability of humanity itself that we have any hope of establishing a just future. Or so say the sages of pop culture, political theory and contemporary philosophy. Ecological destruction is what will finally force us to act on the violence of capitalism, according to Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2014). The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has long argued that an attempt to secure humans from fragility and vulnerability explains the origins of political hierarchies from Plato to the present; it is only if we appreciate our own precarious bodily life, and the emotions and fears that attach to being human animals, that we can understand and overcome racism, sexism and other irrational hatreds. Disorder and potential destruction are actually opportunities to become more robust, argues Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Antifragile (2012) – and in Thank You for Being Late (2016), the New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman claims that the current, overwhelming ‘age of accelerations’ is an opportunity to take a pause. Meanwhile, Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute pursues research focused on avoiding existential catastrophes, at the same time as working on technological maturity and ‘superintelligence’.

It’s here that one can discern a tight knit between fragility and virility. ‘Humanity’ is a hardened concept, but a brittle one. History suggests that the more we define ‘the human’ as a subject of intellect, mastery and progress – the more ‘we’ insist on global unity under the umbrella of a supposedly universal kinship – the less possible it becomes to imagine any other mode of existence as human. The apocalypse is typically depicted as humanity reduced to mere life, fragile, exposed to all forms of exploitation and the arbitrary exercise of power. But these dystopian future scenarios are nothing worse than the conditions in which most humans live as their day-to-day reality. By ‘end of the world’, we usually mean the end of our world. What we don’t tend to ask is who gets included in the ‘we’, what it cost to attain our world, and whether we were entitled to such a world in the first place.

Stories about the end of time have a long history, from biblical eschatology to medieval plague narratives. But our fear of a peculiarly ‘human’ apocalypse really begins with the 18th-century Enlightenment. This was the intellectual birthplace of the modern notion of ‘humanity’, a community of fellow beings united by shared endowments of reason and rights. This humanist ideal continues to inform progressive activism and democratic discourse to this day. However, it’s worth taking a moment to go back to René Descartes’s earlier declaration of ‘I think, therefore I am’, and ask how it was possible for an isolated self to detach their person from the world, and devote writing, reading and persuasion to the task of defending an isolated and pure ego. Or fast-forward a few centuries to 1792, and consider how Mary Wollstonecraft had the time to read about the rights of man, and then demand the rights of woman.

The novelist Amitav Ghosh provides a compelling answer in his study of global warming, The Great Derangement (2017). Colonisation, empire and climate change are inextricably intertwined as practices, he says. The resources of what would become the Third World were crucial in creating the comfortable middle-class existences of the modern era, but those resources could not be made available to all: ‘the patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be practised by a small minority … Every family in the world cannot have two cars, a washing machine and a refrigerator – not because of technical or economic limitations but because humanity would asphyxiate in the process.’

Ghosh disputes one crucial aspect of the story of humanity: that it should involve increasing progress and inclusion until we all reap the benefits. But I’d add a further strand to this dissenting narrative: the Enlightenment conception of rights, freedom and the pursuit of happiness simply wouldn’t have been imaginable if the West had not enjoyed a leisured ease and technological sophistication that allowed for an increasingly liberal middle class. The affirmation of basic human freedoms could become widespread moral concerns only because modern humans were increasingly comfortable at a material level – in large part thanks to the economic benefits afforded by the conquest, colonisation and enslavement of others. So it wasn’t possible to be against slavery and servitude (in the literal and immediate sense) until large portions of the globe had been subjected to the industries of energy-extraction. The rights due to ‘us all’, then, relied on ignoring the fact that these favourable conditions had been purchased at the expense of the lives of other humans and non-humans. A truly universal entitlement to security, dignity and rights came about only because the beneficiaries of ‘humanity’ had secured their own comfort and status by rendering those they deemed less than human even more fragile.

What’s interesting about the emergence of this 18th-century humanism isn’t only that it required a prior history of the abjection it later rejected. It’s also that the idea of ‘humanity’ continued to have an ongoing relation to that same abjection. After living off the wealth extracted from the bodies and territories of ‘others’, Western thought began to extend the category of ‘humanity’ to capture more and more of these once-excluded individuals, via abolitionism, women’s suffrage and movements to expand the franchise. In a strange way these shifts resemble the pronouncements of today’s tech billionaires, who, having extracted unimaginable amounts of value from the mechanics of global capitalism, are now calling for Universal Basic Income to offset the impacts of automation and artificial intelligence. Mastery can afford to correct itself only from a position of leisured ease, after all.

But there’s a twist. While everyone’s ‘humanity’ had become inherent and unalienable, certain people still got to be more fully ‘realised’ as humans than others. As the circle of humanity grew to capture the vulnerable, the risk that ‘we’ would slip back into a semi-human or non-human state seemed more present than before – and so justified demands for an ever more elevated and robust conception of ‘the human’.

One can see this dynamic at work in the 18th-century discussions about slavery. By then the practice itself had become morally repugnant, not only because it dehumanised slaves, but because the very possibility of enslavement – of some humans not realising their potential as rational subjects – was considered pernicious for humanity as a whole. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), for example, Wollstonecraft compared women to slaves, but insisted that slavery would allow no one to be a true master. ‘We’ are all rendered more brutal and base by enslaving others, she said. ‘[Women] may be convenient slaves,’ Wollstonecraft wrote, ‘but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent.’

These statements assumed that an entitlement to freedom was the natural condition of the ‘human’, and that real slavery and servitude were no longer genuine threats to ‘us’. When Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued in The Social Contract (1762) that ‘man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’, he was certainly not most concerned about those who were literally in chains; likewise William Blake’s notion of ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ implies that the true horror is not physical entrapment but a capacity to enslave oneself by failing to think. It’s thus at the very moment of abolition, when slavery is reduced to a mere symbol of fragility, that it becomes a condition that imperils the potency of humanity from within.

I’m certainly not suggesting that there is something natural or inevitable about slavery. What I’m arguing is that the very writers who argued against slavery, who argued that slavery was not fitting for humans in their very nature, nevertheless saw the unnatural and monstrous potential for slavery as far too proximate to humans in their proper state. Yet rather than adopt a benevolence towards the world in light of this vulnerability in oneself, the opposite has tended to be the case. It is because humans can fail to reach their rational potential and be ‘everywhere in chains’ that they must ever more vigilantly secure their future. ‘Humanity’ was to be cherished and protected precisely because it was so precariously elevated above mere life. The risk of debasement to ‘the human’ turned into a force that solidified and extended the category itself. And so slavery was not conceived as a historical condition for some humans, subjected by ruthless, inhuman and overpowering others; it was an ongoing insider threat, a spectre of fragility that has justified the drive for power.

How different are the stories we tell ourselves today? Movies are an interesting barometer of the cultural mood. In the 1970s, cinematic disaster tales routinely featured parochial horrors such as shipwrecks (The Poseidon Adventure, 1972), burning skyscrapers (The Towering Inferno, 1974), and man-eating sharks (Jaws, 1975). Now, they concern the whole of humanity. What threatens us today are not localised incidents, but humans. The wasteland of Interstellar (2014) is one of resource depletion following human over-consumption; the world reduced to enslaved existence in Elysium (2013) is a result of species-bifurcation, as some humans seize the only resources left, while those left on Earth enjoy a life of indentured labour. That the world will end (soon) seems to be so much a part of the cultural imagination that we entertain ourselves by imagining how, not whether, it will play out.

But if you look closely, you’ll see that most ‘end of the world’ narratives end up becoming ‘save the world’ narratives. Popular culture might heighten the scale and intensity of catastrophe, but it does so with the payoff of a more robust and final triumph. Interstellar pits the frontier spirit of space exploration over a miserly and merely survivalist bureaucracy, culminating with a retired astronaut risking it all to save the world. Even the desolate cinematic version (2009) of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) concludes with a young boy joining a family. The most reduced, enslaved, depleted and lifeless terrains are still opportunities for ‘humanity’ to confront the possibility of non-existence in order to achieve a more resilient future.

Such films hint at a desire for new ways of being. In Avatar (2009), a militaristic and plundering West invades the moon Pandora in order to mine ‘unobtanium’; they are ultimately thwarted by the indigenous Na’vi, whose attitude to nature is not one of acquisition but of symbiotic harmony. Native ecological wisdom and attunement is what ultimately leads to victory over the instrumental reason of the self-interested invaders. In Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), a resource-depleted future world is controlled by a rapacious, parasitic, and wasteful elite. But salvation comes from the revolutionary return of a group of ecologically attuned and other-directed women, all blessed with a mythic wisdom that enables ultimate triumph over the violent self-interest of the literally blood-sucking tyrant family. These stories rely on quasi-indigenous and feminist images of community to offer alternatives to Western hyper-extraction; both resolve their disaster narratives with the triumph of intuitive and holistic modes of existence over imperialism and militarism. They not only depict the post-post-apocalyptic future in joyous terms, but do so by appealing to a more benevolent and ecologically attuned humanity.

These films whisper: take a second glance at the present, and what looks like a desperate situation might actually be an occasion for enhancement. The very world that appears to be at the brink of destruction is really a world of opportunity. Once again, the self-declared universal humanity of the Enlightenment – that same humanity that enslaved and colonised on the grounds that ‘we’ would all benefit from the march of reason and progress – has started to appear as both fragile and capable of ethical redemption. It’s our own weakness, we seem to say, that endows humanity with a right to ultimate mastery.

What contemporary post-apocalyptic culture fears isn’t the end of ‘the world’ so much as the end of ‘a world’ – the rich, white, leisured, affluent one. Western lifestyles are reliant on what the French philosopher Bruno Latour has referred to as a ‘slowly built set of irreversibilities’, requiring the rest of the world to live in conditions that ‘humanity’ regards as unliveable. And nothing could be more precarious than a species that contracts itself to a small portion of the Earth, draws its resources from elsewhere, transfers its waste and violence, and then declares that its mode of existence is humanity as such.

To define humanity as such by this specific form of humanity is to see the end of that humanity as the end of the world. If everything that defines ‘us’ relies upon such a complex, exploitative and appropriative mode of existence, then of course any diminution of this hyper-humanity is deemed to be an apocalyptic event. ‘We’ have lost our world of security, we seem to be telling ourselves, and will soon be living like all those peoples on whom we have relied to bear the true cost of what it means for ‘us’ to be ‘human’.

The lesson that I take from this analysis is that the ethical direction of fragility must be reversed. The more invulnerable and resilient humanity insists on trying to become, the more vulnerable it must necessarily be. But rather than looking at the apocalypse as an inhuman horror show that might befall ‘us’, we should recognise that what presents itself as ‘humanity’ has always outsourced its fragility to others. ‘We’ have experienced an epoch of universal ‘human’ benevolence, a globe of justice and security as an aspiration for all, only by intensifying and generating utterly fragile modes of life for other humans. So the supposedly galvanising catastrophes that should prompt ‘us’ to secure our stability are not only things that many humans have already lived through, but perhaps shouldn’t be excluded from how we imagine our own future.

This is why contemporary disaster scenarios still depict a world and humans, but this world is not ‘the world’, and the humans who are left are not ‘humanity’. The ‘we’ of humanity, the ‘we’ that imagines itself to be blessed with favourable conditions that ought to extend to all, is actually the most fragile of historical events. If today ‘humanity’ has started to express a sense of unprecedented fragility, this is not because a life of precarious, exposed and vulnerable existence has suddenly and accidentally interrupted a history of stability. Rather, it reveals that the thing calling itself ‘humanity’ is better seen as a hiatus and an intensification of an essential and transcendental fragility.

Sweat Shops, GMOs and Neoliberal Fundamentalism: The Agroecological Alternative to Global Capitalism

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By Colin Todhunter

Source: Global Research

Much of the argument in favour of GM agriculture involves little more than misrepresentations and un scrupulous attacks on those who express concerns about the technology and its impacts. These attacks are in part designed to whip up populist sentiment and denigrate critics so that corporate interests can secure further control over agriculture. They also serve to divert attention from the underlying issues pertaining to hunger and poverty and genuine solutions, as well as the self-interest of the pro-GMO lobby itself.

The very foundation of the GMO agritech sector is based on a fraud. The sector and the wider transnational agribusiness cartel to which it belongs have also successfully captured for their own interests many international and national bodies and policies, including the WTO, various trade deals, governments institutions and regulators. From fraud to duplicity, little wonder then the sector is ridden with fear and paranoia.

“They are scared to death,” says Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and author of several books on food policy. She adds: “They have an industry to defend and are attacking in the hope that they’ll neutralize critics … It’s a paranoid industry and has been from the beginning.”

War against reason

Global corporations like Monsanto are waging an ideological war against not only critics but the public too. For instance, consider that the majority of the British public and the Canadian public have valid concerns about GM food and do not want them. However, the British government was found to have been secretly colluding with the industry and the Canadian government is attempting to soften up the public to try to get people to change their opinions.

Instead of respecting public opinion and serving the public interest by holding powerful corporations to account, officials seem more inclined to serve the interests of the sector, regardless of genuine concerns about GM that, despite what the industry would like to have believe, are grounded in facts and involve rational discourse.

Whether via the roll-out of GMOs or an associated chemical-intensive industrialised monocrop system of agriculture, the agritech/agribusiness sector wants to further expand its influence throughout the globe. Beneath the superficial façade of working in the interest of humanity, however, the sector is driven by a neoliberal fundamentalism which demands the entrenchment of capitalist agriculture via deregulation and the corporate control of seeds, land, fertilisers, water, pesticides and food processing.

If anything matters to the corporate agribusiness/agritech industry, contrary to the public image it tries to convey, it clearly has little to do with ‘choice’, ‘democracy’ or objective science. It has more to do with undermining and debasing these concepts and displacing existing systems of production: economies are “opened up through the concurrent displacement of a pre-existing productive system. Small and medium-sized enterprises are pushed into bankruptcy or obliged to produce for a global distributor, state enterprises are privatised or closed down, independent agricultural producers are impoverished” (Michel Chossudovsky in The Globalization of Poverty, p16).

Critics are highlighting not only how the industry has subverted and debased science and has infiltrated key public institutions and regulatory bodies, but they are also showing how trade and aid is used to subjugate regions and the most productive components of global agriculture – the small/peasant farmer – to the needs of powerful commercial entities.

Critics stab at the heart of neoliberalism

By doing this, critics stab hard at the heart such corporate interests and their neoliberal agenda.

According to Eric Holt-Giménez:

“The World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the World Food Program, the Millennium Challenge, The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and industrial giants like Yara Fertilizer, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Syngenta, DuPont, and Monsanto, carefully avoid addressing the root causes of the food crisis. The ‘solutions’ they prescribe are rooted in the same policies and technologies that created the problem in the first place: increased food aid, de-regulated global trade in agricultural commodities, and more technological and genetic fixes. These measures only strengthen the corporate status quo controlling the world’s food… The future of our food-and fuel-systems are being decided de facto by unregulated global markets, financial speculators, and global monopolies.”

The geopolitics of food and agriculture has played a significant role in creating food-deficit regions. For instance, African agriculture has been reshaped on behalf of the interests described in the above extract. The Gates Foundation is currently spearheading the ambitions of corporate America and the scramble for Africa by global agribusiness. And in India, there has been an ongoing attempt to do the same: a project that is now reaching a critical phase as the motives of the state acting on behalf of private (foreign) capital are laid bare and the devastating effects on health, environment and social conditions are clear for all to see.

Any serious commitment to feeding the world sustainably and equitably must work to challenge a globalised system of capitalism that has produced structural inequality and poverty; a system which fuels the marginalisation of small-scale farms and their vitally important cropping systems and is responsible for the devastating impacts of food commodity speculation, land takeovers, rigged trade and an industrial system of agriculture.

And embedded within the system is a certain mentality. Whether it is the likes of Monsanto’s High Grant, Robb Fraley or Bill Gates, highly paid (multi-millionaire) white men with an ideological commitment to corporate power are trying to force a profitable but bogus model of food production on the world.

They do so while conveniently ignoring the effects of a system of capitalism that they so clearly promote and have financially profited from.

It is a capitalism and a system of agriculture propped up by the blood money of militarism (Ukraine and Iraq), ‘structural adjustment’ and strings-attached loans (Africa) or slanted trade deals (India) whereby transnational agribusiness drives a global agenda to suit its interests and eradicate impediments to profit. And it doesn’t matter how much devastation ensues or how unsustainable their model is, ‘crisis management’ and ‘innovation’ fuel the corporate-controlled treadmill they seek to impose.

Genuine solutions: agroecology, decentralisation and localism

However, what really irks the corporate interests which fuel the current GMO/chemical-intensive industrialised model of agriculture is that critics are offering genuine alternatives and solutions. They advocate a shift towards more organic-based systems of agriculture, which includes providing support to small farms and an agroecology movement that is empowering to people politically, socially and economically.

This represents a challenge to all good neoliberal evangelists (and outright hypocrites) with a stake in corporate agriculture who rely on smears to attack those who advocate for such things.

To understand what agroecology involves, let us turn to Raj Patel:

“To understand what agro-ecology is, it helps first to understand why today’s agriculture is called “industrial.” Modern farming turns fields into factories. Inorganic fertilizer adds nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous to the soil; pesticides kill anything that crawls; herbicides nuke anything green and unwanted—all to create an assembly line that spits out a single crop… Agro-ecology uses nature’s far more complex systems to do the same thing more efficiently and without the chemistry set. Nitrogen-fixing beans are grown instead of inorganic fertilizer; flowers are used to attract beneficial insects to manage pests; weeds are crowded out with more intensive planting. The result is a sophisticated polyculture—that is, it produces many crops simultaneously, instead of just one.”

And it works. Look no further than what Cuba has achieved and the successes outlined in this article. Indeed, much has been written about agroecology and its potential for radical social change, its successes and the challenges it faces (see this, this and this). And now there a major new book from Food First and Groundswell International: Fertile Ground: Scaling agroecology from the ground up.

Executive Director of Food First Eric Holtz-Gimenez argues that agroecology offers concrete, practical solutions to many of the world’s problems that move beyond (but which are linked to) agriculture. In doing so, it challenges – and offers alternatives to – the prevailing moribund doctrinaire economics of a neoliberalism that drives a failing system (also see this and this) of GM/chemical-intensive industrial agriculture.

He adds that the scaling up of agroecology can tackle hunger, malnutrition, environmental degradation and climate change. By creating securely paid labour-intensive agricultural work, it can also address the interrelated links between labour offshoring by rich countries and the removal of rural populations elsewhere who end up in sweat shops to carry out the outsourced jobs: the two-pronged process of neoliberal globalisation that has devastated the economies of the US and UK and which is displacing existing indigenous food production systems and undermining the rural infrastructure in places like India to produce a reserve army of cheap labour.

When you fail to understand capitalism and the central importance of agriculture, you fail to grasp many of the issues currently affecting humanity. At the same time, when you are part of the problem and fuel and benefit from it, you will do your best to attack and denigrate anything or anyone that challenges your interests.

Biological Annihilation on Earth Accelerating

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By Robert J. Burrowes

Human beings are now waging war against life itself as we continue to destroy not just individual lives, local populations and entire species in vast numbers but also destroy the ecological systems that make life on Earth possible.

By doing this we are now accelerating the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history and virtually eliminating any prospect of human survival.

In a recently published scientific study ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines‘ the authors Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo document the accelerating nature of this problem.

‘Earth’s sixth mass extinction is more severe than perceived when looking exclusively at species extinctions…. That conclusion is based on analyses of the numbers and degrees of range contraction … using a sample of 27,600 vertebrate species, and on a more detailed analysis documenting the population extinctions between 1900 and 2015 in 177 mammal species.’ Their research found that the rate of population loss in terrestrial vertebrates is ‘extremely high’ – even in ‘species of low concern’.

In their sample, comprising nearly half of known vertebrate species, 32% (8,851 out of 27,600) are decreasing; that is, they have decreased in population size and range. In the 177 mammals for which they had detailed data, all had lost 30% or more of their geographic ranges and more than 40% of the species had experienced severe population declines. Their data revealed that ‘beyond global species extinctions Earth is experiencing a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization. We describe this as a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.’

Illustrating the damage done by dramatically reducing the historic geographic range of a species, consider the lion. Panthera leo ‘was historically distributed over most of Africa, southern Europe, and the Middle East, all the way to northwestern India. It is now confined to scattered populations in sub-Saharan Africa and a remnant population in the Gir forest of India. The vast majority of lion populations are gone.’

Why is this happening? Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo tell us: ‘In the last few decades, habitat loss, overexploitation, invasive organisms, pollution, toxification, and more recently climate disruption, as well as the interactions among these factors, have led to the catastrophic declines in both the numbers and sizes of populations of both common and rare vertebrate species.’

Further, however, the authors warn ‘But the true extent of this mass extinction has been underestimated, because of the emphasis on species extinction.’ This underestimate can be traced to overlooking the accelerating extinction of local populations of a species.

‘Population extinctions today are orders of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions. Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so Earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume.’ Moreover, and importantly from a narrow human perspective, the massive loss of local populations is already damaging the services ecosystems provide to civilization (which, of course, are given no value by government and corporate economists).

As Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo remind us: ‘When considering this frightening assault on the foundations of human civilization, one must never forget that Earth’s capacity to support life, including human life, has been shaped by life itself.’ When public mention is made of the extinction crisis, it usually focuses on a few (probably iconic) animal species known to have gone extinct, while projecting many more in future. However, a glance at their maps presents a much more realistic picture: as much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once shared Earth with us are already gone, as are billions of populations.

Furthermore, they claim that their analysis is conservative given the increasing trajectories of those factors that drive extinction together with their synergistic impacts. ‘Future losses easily may amount to a further rapid defaunation of the globe and comparable losses in the diversity of plants, including the local (and eventually global) defaunation-driven coextinction of plants.’

They conclude with the chilling observation: ‘Thus, we emphasize that the sixth mass extinction is already here and the window for effective action is very short.’

Of course, it is too late for those species of plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects and reptiles that humans have already driven to extinction or will yet drive to extinction in the future. 200 species yesterday. 200 species today. 200 species tomorrow. 200 species the day after…. And, as Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo emphasize, the ongoing daily extinctions of a myriad local populations.

If you think that the above information is bad enough in assessing the prospects for human survival, you will not be encouraged by awareness or deeper consideration of even some of the many variables adversely impacting our prospects that were beyond the scope of the above study.

While Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo, in addition to the problems they noted which are cited above, also identified the problems of human overpopulation and continued population growth, as well as overconsumption (based on ‘the fiction that perpetual growth can occur on a finite planet’) and even the risks posed by nuclear war, there were many variables that were beyond the scope of their research.

For example, in a recent discussion of that branch of ecological science known as ‘Planetary Boundary Science’, Dr Glen Barry identified ‘at least ten global ecological catastrophes which threaten to destroy the global ecological system and portend an end to human beings, and perhaps all life. Ranging from nitrogen deposition to ocean acidification, and including such basics as soil, water, and air; virtually every ecological system upon which life depends is failing’. See ‘The End of Being: Abrupt Climate Change One of Many Ecological Crises Threatening to Collapse the Biosphere‘.

Moreover, apart from the ongoing human death tolls caused by the endless wars and other military violence being conducted across the planet – see, for example, ‘Yemen cholera worst on record & numbers still rising‘ – there is catastrophic environmental damage caused too. For some insight, see The Toxic Remnants of War Project.

In addition, the out-of-control methane releases into the atmosphere that are now occurring – see ‘7,000 underground gas bubbles poised to “explode” in Arctic‘ and ‘Release of Arctic Methane “May Be Apocalyptic,” Study Warns‘ – and the release, each and every day, of 300 tons of radioactive waste from Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean – see ‘Fukushima Radiation Has Contaminated The Entire Pacific Ocean – And It’s Going To Get Worse‘ – are having disastrous consequences that will negatively impact life on Earth indefinitely. And they cannot be reversed in any timeframe that is meaningful for human prospects.

Apart from the above, there is a host of other critical issues – such as destruction of the Earth’s rainforests, destruction of waterways and the ocean habitat and the devastating impact of animal agriculture for meat consumption – that international governmental organizations such as the UN, national governments and multinational corporations will continue to refuse to decisively act upon because they are controlled by the insane global elite. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane‘ with more fully elaborated explanations in ‘Why Violence?‘ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice‘.

So time may be short, the number of issues utterly daunting and the prospects for life grim. But if, like me, you are inclined to fight to the last breath, I invite you to consider making a deliberate choice to take powerful personal action in the fight for our survival.

If you do nothing else, consider participating in the fifteen-year strategy of ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth‘. You can do this as an individual, with family and friends or as a neighbourhood.

If you are involved in (or considering becoming involved in) a local campaign to address a climate issue, end some manifestation of war (or even all war), or to halt any other threat to our environment, I encourage you to consider doing this on a strategic basis. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

And if you would like to join the worldwide movement to end violence in all of its forms, environmental and otherwise, you are also welcome to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World‘.

We might be annihilating life on Earth but this is not something about which we have no choice.

In fact, each and every one of us has a choice: we can choose to do nothing, we can wait for (or even lobby) others to act, or we can take powerful action ourselves. But unless you search your heart and make a conscious and deliberate choice to commit yourself to act powerfully, your unconscious choice will effectively be the first one (including that you might take some token measures and delude yourself that these make a difference). And the annihilation of life on Earth will continue, with your complicity.

Extinction beckons. Will you choose powerfully?

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding
and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in
an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a
nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘
His email address is flametree@riseup.net
and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

—
Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford
Victoria 3460
Australia
Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network