| HOW TO SAVE THE EARTH |
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The following is a declaration of global emergency, not the short-term disaster of an earthquake or hurricane, but a longer-term, more slowly evolving series of planetary events that may not be noticed by people busy earning a living and trying to raise their children. But the scientists whose job is to study those long-term changes, are noticing that the human race, now 7 billion and counting, is having far greater impact on the Earth than ever before. In times past, when medicine was a primitive science, parents were lucky if 2 out of 10 children survived diseases they didn't understand, because they had no microscopes to see the tiny germs that were attacking them. Today we know all about bacteria and viruses and we have anti-biotics to fight them, so most children survive to adulthood; which means our human population is growing, and growing, and growing, and growing - so now we ask a new question: How many people can the Earth support, how many big cities and sprawling suburbs, how many million-acre farm corporations and how much polluting waste can the Earth absorb before we start getting sick? From the evidence, the answer is there are already too many big cities and sprawling suburbs dumping too much garbage into too many land-fills, too many big farms spreading too much pesticide to fight too many insects, too many gas- burning cars and trucks jamming the highways, too many jet planes crowding the skies and too many coal-fired electric power plants all spewing out too much carbon fumes up into the air, and too many cargo ships flushing their waste and too many illegal dumpers unloading tons of garbage into the the oceans, etc, etc, ad nauseum ! There is now a gigantic mass of plasic waste materials stretching across the northern Pacific Ocean from California to Japan, and no human being, no company, no government or nation is willing to admit any responsibility for it ! The result of all this over-crowding and over-pollution is millions of people are getting sick from a no-longer healthy environment because thousands of power plants and waste incinerators are spewing tons of mercury-laden smoke up into the atmosphere around the World, settling into the soil, the lakes, rivers and oceans contaminating all life everywhere. U.N. Report - Why? Because there are too many people. Yet, everywhere we turn, day and night, we are surrounded by advertising that persuades us to buy more than we can afford going into debt to enjoy "the good life" that really isn't that good anymore. But it has become a habit, an addiction, so our daily lives are hooked into our ad-driven appetites to consume whatever products may or may not be destructive to the air we must breath, the water we must drink, and the food we must eat. In fact, we have become a captive audience to whatever products are sold by the corporations that are themselves hooked into their own inescapable need to expand to earn greater profits, or suffer a hostile take-over by a bigger corporation! Government offices like the Consumer Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, and many others, try to protect the public, but they're always under pressure from whichever political party is in power, or else obstructed by their own bureaucratic inefficiency, as are all government agencies everywhere, because they always have to deal with too many people, more every day, week, month and year. Yet, they're all searching for the same "good life". Thus, Syrian war refugees flood into Europe, poor Southeast Asians move everywhere and poor Mexicans move into California and all over the U.S.A. searching for the "good life". A few are willing to wait several years for legal immigration and citizenship, but many others go into debt to people-smugglers who supply greedy corporations with all the cheap labor they need. People who are afraid of being deported will work below minimum wage. That's the reason there is not enough electricity in California, millions of legal and illegal immigrants are exploding the population. But what about the other animals on planet Earth? Do they have a right to exist in a wilderness home, or are they just sacrifices for the progress of humanity? No and yes, apparently, because despite all the work of all the humane societies and animal rights activists, most wild animals are approaching extinction, the panda bears of China, the mountain gorillas of Africa, the wild horses of Southwestern U.S.A. and many thousands more on every continent around the World. Why? Humans won't leave them alone, but keep on establishing cattle ranches, oil wells, farms and villages in the wilderness areas of South and Central America, Southeast Asia and Central Africa, slashing and burning the jungle forests for lumber and "bush meat". What else can those too many children of poor people do, and where can they go when they grow up - emigrate to the U.S.A. and Europe? Is there an answer? Are we stuck in a population with its World economy that must keep on growing forever, regardless of consequences, or do we have choices, and if so, what are they? OR READ ON - |
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FAMILY PLANNING This is so obvious it's hard to imagine that anyone disagrees but they do. The Catholic church, clinging to ancient dogma, opposes any artificial birth control, including condoms, diaphrams, the pill, etc. - although I tend to agree abortion is often a tragedy, but not when giving birth might kill the mother, or the fetus is grossly deformed, or the result of rape. In those grim circumstances, a woman needs the gentle counseling a clinic can provide to help her make a rational and humane choice, perhaps putting her baby up for adoption. Then, if she's still determined to abort, at least she won't infect herself, or bleed to death in a public rest room. And who is qualified to judge a woman's decision about something so personal? Certainly not me, nor anyone else, in my opinion. But today Republican candidates for President are advocating all family planning clinics should be closed, leaving many thousands of poor women without help or advice. Rich women, of course, can secretly buy any such services they need here, or in Europe. Then also the corporations, struggling to expand their markets, need all the cheap labor they can find, and many are willing to hire any illegal alien who will work for less than minimum wage, sometimes MUCH less. The exploding population of poor people is a businessman's ticket to the millionaire's club. But what would happen if millions of such poor working people around the World decided to withhold their labor, not only by going on strike against a particular company, but starting a 20 year BIRTH STRIKE, refusing to have any children until everyone gets reasonable wages and benefits? What would happen is what is already happening in Europe - a shortage of labor, as thousands of women choose higher education and careers. But this time the Euro-corporations could not import poor Turkish workers, and U.S. corporations could not import poor Mexicans, because their populations would be DECLINING as the people learned how to increase the value of their labor by making it scarce! Then millions of young men and women could save a percentage of their wages and decide if, when and where to have children, not under the authority of pope or priest, but with advice and help from a local clinic where friendly doctors and nurses are trained to help them make their own decisions. If this happened, corporate executives would have to slow down their market strategies and pay much more attention to what their customers really need, instead of whatever their slick TV ads can persuade them to buy; and since millions would be saving instead of spending, companies could not expand their sales around the World, nor could some greedy CEOs and Boards of Directors award themselves 6-figure salaries and multi-million dollar bonuses - because the huge profits just wouldn't be there. The entire World economy would slow down and devolve to regional and local markets dominated by consumer-sensitive policies, instead of the ever-expanding, all-devouring "bottom line." Then, all those life-support systems we depend on to survive, fresh air, pure water, nourishing food and a healthy wilderness, would be here for us and our grandchildren for uncountable generations to come. OR READ ON - |
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REFORESTATION The Amazon, South Asian and Central African rainforests are being destroyed by arsonists, lumber companies, real estate developers, cattle ranchers, oil drillers, poachers and new settlers, while dolphins and whales are beaching themselves when sick from areas of polluted ocean. How are those events connected and how do they affect you? Where do you think the oxygen you breathe comes from? It is created by the photo-synthesis of millions of trees and other green plants that convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, and by quadrillions of phyto-plankton and aglae, which are tiny aquatic plants and organisms that float freely in oceans and lakes. So, if exploding populations of hungry, angry and greedy humans cut down the forests and pollute the lakes and and oceans what will they breathe? - carbon dioxide and methane while they slowly suffocate. You may not notice the difference from day to day, except for the pollution from a nearby factory or any bad smog day in any big city, but when today's young children grow up to raise their own children, they will suffer, because, as our human population grows, so does the destruction of forests, oceans and lakes, a little worse every year. Unlike the Moon, planet Mars and Mercury, what prevents our land from immediately burning to dust under the blazing Sun? Each forest, large and small, creates a cool, low-pressure area by the same photo-synthesis that produces oxygen in the air we breathe. These cool, low-pressure areas draw in the rain clouds (while the hot, high-pressure desert areas repel them). That's why they're called rain forests. Trees are the original and biggest air-conditioners on our planet. When I was a boy everyone had a favorite "shade tree". Thus, during the 4.5 billion years of Earth's evolution, green plants and phyto-plankton produced a growing surplus of oxygenated air which, in its reaction to the Sun's ultraviolet radiation, creates ozone, a gas that blocks just enough ultraviolet sunlight to permit life to flourish on the Earth's surface. If not enough trees produce enough oxygenated air to react with the Sun to create enough ozone to block enough of the Sun's ultraviolet radiation, no life on Earth could exist and our planet would look like the Moon or Mars. Have you noticed the increasing number of wild-fires across the USA and around the World? Every forest that burns sends more heat up into the atmosphere, causing more drought and more wild-fires. Add to that the millions of heat-generating engines of cars, trucks, jet planes, coal-fired power plants, steel mills, and millions of air conditioners...(poem)...and the result is a global catastrophe in which rainfall now arrives in the form of flash floods that wash away the soil, cause landslides and sweep away villages. In ancient times forest fires were caused only by lightning. But today humans will not allow Nature to take its natural course, because thousands of people want to build their homes in the wilderness to escape from the crowds of other people, so the natural cycle of fire and regrowth is stopped, until so much dry underbrush builds up after years of drought, that when fire is inevitably started by lightning or some careless camper or a crazy arsonist, it roars through millions of dry acres, burning all before it, including those over-priced 2-by-4 & plywood fire traps people call their "dream houses". Where do we get the water we drink and farmers irrigate food crops and homemakers sprinkle on lawns and flowers? It is created by the great forests and the smaller woodland areas that filter the rain down through the soil and roots of trees and other green plants to the water table below made of sand, gravel and bedrock. Without the forests, no fresh water, unless you can digest factory-produced bottled drinking water that lacks the trace-minerals your body needs and has no flavor. City tap water is, of course, good for cooking and washing, but not good to drink, since to kill the germs, it's laced with harsh chemicals that taste bad - but soon everyone will have to get used to it, as forest and spring water vanish under pressure from our expanding population and economic growth. Tap water is all I drink now, yet I do remember the taste of fresh spring water from a well. Not many are left in the few remote country areas still remaining untouched by real estate developers and the growing number of bottled water companies like Poland Spring, Nestle's and Coca Cola that are buying up the land to sell us the water we once drank for free. Read "Bottlemania" by Elizabeth Royte. Our growing population also produces a growing garbage and sewage problem. For example, the city of Los Angeles, California disposes of its tons of garbage in growing mountains of "land fill" in which it is assumed the rubbish will eventually recycle itself back into fertile soil, but the mountains of trash continue to grow as the population increases. What to do? Aha! Pacific Ocean to the rescue! It's illegal of course, but there is a huge "garbage patch" of throwaway plastic trash north of Hawaii at a confluence of tides so it is slowly swirling as it grows and chokes the seabirds whose feeding instinct cannot comprehend the danger. The obvious answer is to recycle 100% of all human waste and garbage, but that would cost billions of dollars and make it impossible for anyone to get rich! Did you know our rapidly growing 7 billion population holds about 106 billion, 800 million gallons of fresh water in our collective body, and another several billion in thousands of water towers, dams and artificial ponds? Has anyone calculated how much ground water is seeping into abandoned coal mines and depleted oil wells, and how many millions of gallons are sucked out of the oceans by a new growth industry - desalination factories? Did you know that North America's Great Lakes, the largest supply of fresh water in the World, are approaching their lowest levels in recorded history, yet certain water bottling companies want to sell millions of gallons to Asian nations? Such enormous consumption is taking that much water out of the weather cycle, so that may be why ocean levels have risen only a little despite the melting of the Northern perma-frost and the mountain ice caps of North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Greenland and Antartica. As the ice melts, the North Pole is turning into open sea, creating a shorter passage for cargo ships and ocean liners (!) - a tiny plus compared to the surrounding ecocide. So, is this information available on TV news channels? Only what the media corporations can work into their business agenda. Whatever changes happen they must be turned to profit. If people show a determination to buy organically grown foods, the food corporations buy out the small gardening and farming operations to dominate the market, as usual. Then you don't know just how "organic" the foods may or may not be. Obviously, a better solution would be to shop at a local farmers market, or grow your own in a backyard garden or greenhouse; but if you happen to own a small parcel of fertile land, that would be the ideal situation! So, maybe instead of a trip to Disneyland, families should plant a garden, join a tree-planting club and lobby against construction of that new shopping mall on the last patch of woods outside their community. Recently, because the Pacific ocean is so heavily polluted, not enough water can evaporate to form rain clouds, causing 4 years of drought in California and the other Western states and raging out of control wildfires, while the drought spreads around the World. OR READ ON - |
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The Invisable Armies How many people can the Earth support? How many billion, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12? What happens to people when they are packed into overcrowded cities, traffic jams, multi-passenger jet planes, etc.? You've heard of road-rage and air-rage. What about school-rage, as at Columbine, when a child goes berserk and kills at random? You also know about AIDS, but did you ever hear of mutant tuberculosis and meningitis? In a crowded society, a small percentage of sick patients stop taking their medicine just as soon as they start feeling better, giving a few surviving germs a chance to mutate an immunity to the anti-biotic in their prescription. Then these careless people get on buses, trains and jet planes and spread their mutated germs wherever they happen to go. Medical science does its best, but in a fast-growing population of adventurous travelers, the good doctors cannot quarantine thousands of patients, so they prescribe their pills, give their best advice and hope for the best, while fearing the worst. Laurie Garret, in her book "The Coming Plague", warns of a global pandemic because so many millions of people are so careless about where they go and what they do, like the African settlers who cut down jungle to raise cattle and grow food, but stumble into an area infested with the mysterious Ebola virus; or the U.S. real estate developers who build on the edges of a desert where mice carry the Hanta virus. Medical laboratories struggle to invent new anti-biotics, but how can they keep up with exploding populations of people and germs? They can't. OR READ ON - |
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Science Fiction Becomes Reality But suppose our growing population manages somehow to muddle through and survive to the year 2050. What kind of a a World would our grandchildren have to deal with? Between 1950 and 2000 our human population doubled, so it could double again, at least, swelling to about 11 or 12 billion busy, irritated people, all struggling to get enough money to live as rich as possible. The problem is, the Earth will be about the same size, or slightly smaller, so there would be no room for wilderness or wild animals, all forests would be tree farms and, without stable nesting areas, most of the birds would be extinct, while insect populations would then explode to attack our single-crop-mega-plantations, the ancient "family farmer" having passed into history. Faced with self-immunizing swarms of insects and massive crop loss, they too would have to be harvested to fill our many billions of growling stomachs - pass the fried grasshoppers! Yet, without enough birds, the insects would flood the Earth, reproducing much faster than we could eat them, so food crops would have to be sealed inside vast, multi-acre greenhouses, while humanity would have to isolate itself inside gigantic housing projects, each person assigned to a tiny cell. In fact, the plans have already been drawn up. Buckminster Fuller started it with his geodesic sphere to house 5000. Then Paolo Soleri designed his bizarre hexahedron structure to accomodate an entire city. Erected on a point, it looks like two pyramid bee hives, one right side up, the other upside down. Yet, if global warming gets worse, the heat may drive our entire civilization underground. But people don't enjoy living like bees or ants! Today we are seeing road-rage, air-rage and school-rage. Imagine how much worse we would behave all jammed inside enormous ghettoes! Then again, if we assume rich and poor would still be living in different neighborhoods, the most wealthy would probably have far more plush and spacious accomodations, away from the sweltering mobs of hoi polloi, like it is today, but involving billions more suffering people. There are several ways to prevent the above scenario from becoming a daily fact of life: 1. Global pandemic disease and die-off, 2. Environmental collapse and mass starvation, 3. Revolution, dictatorship & genocide, 4. World War Three, 5. Peaceful family planning to reduce the human population and 100% recycling of all waste and garbage would return the Earth to its natural balance. Choose thoughtfully, but know that time is running out. or Back to Contents? OR READ ON - |
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MEANWHILE If you want the Earth to keep on providing you with fresh air, clean water and nourishing food - 1. Save the forests. 2. Save the creeks, rivers, lakes and oceans. 3. Save the fertility of the soil. 4. Save the atmosphere. 5. Get out of debt and stay out. 6. Go on a poison-free diet. 1. To save the forests, a) Stop eating the burgers made from cattle whose grazing pastures are created by clear-cutting those forests. b) Stop buying wood products made from those clear-cuts. c) Don't build a new house made from plywood and 2 by 4s, which are firetrap materials. Instead buy an old house and fix it up, or build with recycled materials like car tires (I know someone who has lived happily in such a house for many years) This will reduce public demand for commercial lumber, so fewer trees will be cut. d) When you go camping, take along 2 plastic bags, one for your own garbage, the other for what you find on the trail. 2. To save the creeks, rivers, lakes and oceans, a) Compost your food scraps and find recycling stations for your scrap paper, glass and plastic. b) Don't buy chlorine bleach and petroleum-based pesticides that pollute both soil and water. Find harmless alternatives. c) To conserve water in your home and neighborhood, don't build a backyard swimming pool, instead plant trees and ferns around your house, not grass, then you won't have to water the lawn. That way your land will become part of the watershed that filters the rain down through soil and roots to the water table below. d) Don't wash dishes under a running tap, or in a dishwasher, instead wet, soap and scrub them first, then rinse quickly. e) Don't use your toilet as a compost disposal unit and flush it 20 times a day, but only for its original purpose. 3. To save the fertility of the soil, Grow vegetables in your own backyard greenhouse, then plant fruit and nut trees, using organic fertilizers and bio-degradable pesticides. This will reduce dependence on mass-production of food grown on corporate mega-plantations that use huge amounts of petroleum-based pesticides that taint the soil and run off into streams, rivers, lakes and waterfront harbors, making the fish unsafe to eat. Here are 7 resources: Gardens Alive Terra Viva Organics Living Foods Permaculture Activist Planet Ark Earth Watch Institute 4. To save the atmosphere, a) Don't buy a gas-guzzling, air-polluting motor vehicle, instead live close to your job, carpool, ride a train, bus, bicycle, or walk whenever possible. This will reduce public demand for mass-production of oil, gas and electricity and decrease the number of oil spills around the World. b) Then, to put some oxygen back into the air, join a tree- planting group and study horticulture. 5. Cut up your credit cards and open a savings account, then the bank will pay YOU interest. That way, you will escape the debt slavery that is pushing economic expansion to the brink of global ecocide. 6. Eliminate alcohol, tobacco, hot spices, caffiene and sugar from your daily intake of food and you will notice an immediate surge of energy and mental perception. Millions of people have stopped smoking and boozing because they're such obviously destructive habits. But caffiene and sugar are more subtle poisons and many think of them as energy boosters. In fact, after a few minutes of stimulation, they drain away energy for the rest of the day, leaving the body susceptible to a virus. On Saturdays, I liked to sit in a local coffee shop sipping Columbia black with a danish while reading the Times, but within an hour I would get the sniffles that soon got worse. But since I quit coffee and sugar I've never had another cold, and at 83 I'm in better physical condition than any of my retired neighbors. But perhaps the biggest long-term health advantage is becoming a vegetarian, because we almost never get any kind cancer or heart disease and often live to be 90+. Each of these changes in personal habits, and others you may discover and think of yourself, IF activated peacefully by millions of people according to principles similar to those established in the Constitution of the United States, history will change course. In fact, it's beginning to happen now, because every profit-making company in the World, large and small, depends totally on what people are willing to buy with their money. So, when they see beyond the short-term lure of advertising to their own long-term survival and shop defensively, bottom-line corporations will have to re-tool and re-invest their capital to supply the people with what they really need and demand - or go out of business; and if most of the people decide to birth fewer children, for whatever reasons, there will be no public demand for mass production of anything, and the nations will devolve to continental networks of eco-tech villages freely trading with each other for what they need and want, with harm to none. Then there will be plenty of room for a healthy wilderness evolving in balance with a truly humane civilization. If you want a stable World, create stability in your own life because everything and everyone is connected to this living planet we sometimes call Biosphere Blue, or Mother Earth. Back to Contents Recent Good Books Cultivating Survival Be Truly Conservative? Last of the Blue Planet Special John Talbot Ross |
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