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Industrial society is eating us out of house and home

By Evaggelos Vallianatos - posted Tuesday, 19 July 2011


Iltis denounces the cash crop plantations in the tropical forests of South and Central America. He sees them not like an agronomist, high-yielding science farms, but like symbols of illiterate plunderers: a "vast ocean of sterile cultivated uniformity."

The spreading of this cultivated uniformity into the natural world simplifies the complexity of whatever survives in that world, undermining the resilience of species of plants and animals and, sometimes, obliterating entire ecosystems.

Iltis is right: Western experts, ignorant of ecology and geography, are having a deadly impact in the tropics. The result is orgies of environmental brutality fueling the agenda of economic development worldwide.

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Man's Ecocidal Footprint

The Greeks thought of the earth as a living goddess, the grandmother of gods and humans. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, some scientists in Europe and North America recognize that the earth is, in fact, alive. We don't know exactly how the earth, a living complex of ecosystems, is reacting to the man-made violence and onslaught against her.

The observable signs in nature, however, are warnings of more and more calamities. In the 1990s we witnessed fires of unprecedented ferocity in the tropical forests of Indonesia and Brazil; vast coral bleaching in the Caribbean Sea, and the Pacific and the Indian Oceans; the near decimation of fish in the Atlantic; the destruction of the Black Sea, which the ancient Greeks called Euxeinos Pontos or Welcoming Sea; the devastation of the Aral Sea and Lake Chad; the killer tsunami in Asia in December 2004 and Japan in early 2011; the tsunami in Japan also triggered a meltdown of that country's nuclear plants; Hurricane Katrina nearly wiped out New Orleans in August 2005; and the ceaseless destruction of wetlands and damming of wild rivers all over the planet.

Between 1970 and 2000 there was a 37 percent decline of life in forest, freshwater, and marine ecosystems – in both seas and oceans. Forest fared better than freshwater and marine ecosystems. The decline among 282 populations of species of birds, mammals, and reptiles was 15 percent. Life in lakes, rivers, and wetlands had the greatest casualties. The decline among 195 species of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish was 54 percent. And for 217 species of birds, mammals, reptiles and fish living in coastal and marine environments opportunity for life went down by 35 percent.

The decimation of so much life in such a short period of time, 30 years, barely a moment in the age of the earth, is a result of economic development, i.e., logging, fishing, irrigation, and intensive factory-like farming. Between 1961 and 1999 this development, which scientists dub "use of renewable natural resources," increased by 80 percent. This 80 percent overshoot is 20 percent more than the capacity of the earth to renew itself.

The only reason this ecocidal development goes on largely unchallenged is because of corporate tyrannies. Those who control the world - a small number of politicians, doing the bidding of corporations - are only interested in power.

Harold Pinter, the 2005 British Nobel Prize winner in literature, spoke of the "vast tapestry of lies" surrounding and feeding people, a necessary condition for the politicians to maintain their hold to power.

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No democratic society would tolerate the plunder of nature.

Robert Ovetz, professor of biology at the New College of California, reported in February 2004 that the campaign to save the sea turtle is part of an international effort "to end the lawless pillaging of the oceans and needless slaughter of millions of marine species such as the Pacific leatherback [turtle] by industrial fishing."

In June 2005, however, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced the further privatization of the oceans, enabling American corporations to lease a zone of water for their fish farms, which could be up to 200 miles from a coast. That way, fish farmers, completely unsupervised, and following the model of agribusiness, could poison and decimate the oceans.

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About the Author

Evaggelos Vallianatos is the author of several books, including Poison Spring (Bloomsbury Press, 2014).

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