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Friends, as if the world is not bad enough what with a financial crisis, share market collapse, global warming, wars, Presidential elections, etc, Reuters carries the story that we are also in the middle of an Ecological Crisis.
Two planets will be required to sustain current lifestyles within a generation, the conservation group World Wildlife Fund said recently in its Living Planet Report. It claimed that over three quarters of the world’s population live in countries whose levels of consumption are outstripping environmental renewal. The Report warned that economic impacts will include increasingly high costs for food, water and energy.
Jonathan Loh of the Zoological Society of London said in the Report that the dramatic ecological losses from pollution, deforestation, over-fishing and land conversion were having serious impacts. He said that, "We’re acting ecologically in the same way as financial institutions have been behaving economically — seeking immediate gratification without due regard for the consequences." He stated that the consequences of a global ecological crisis are even graver than the current economic meltdown.
The report said the world’s global depletion rate now exceeds the planet’s capacity to regenerate by 30 percent. The United States, China and Australia rank among the five countries with the largest depletion footprints per person, along with the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Denmark. Regionally, only non-EU Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean remain within their "biocapacity." Emissions from fossil fuels were among the top culprits cited by WWF.
The WWF’s said world leaders needed to put ecological concerns at the top of their agenda and ensure the environment is factored into all decisions about consumption, development, trade, agriculture and fisheries management.
Does this news make your day? It is a grim forecast. It brings the terrible reality of the photograph into focus. It was taken by Kevin Carter in 1994 in the Sudan during a famine. It shows a child crawling towards a U.N. Food Camp which is a kilometre away. The child is being followed by a vulture which knows the child will soon die and is looking forward to a good meal (the photographer committed suicide three months after this photograph was taken).
This chilling sight could become commonplace all too soon. Only the children will be white and black and brown. They could be yours.
Is it not time to forsake the stupidity of war and capitalism and working out how to bail out greedy banks and trying to be the topdog military nation, etc?
Shouldn’t we concentrate on saving ourselves, our children and what’s left of our planet?
Oh yes!, is the answer. From what I know about the motives of our permanent legislative class, as well as those of our executives, governor and president, it will take public financing of campaigns to keep them from doing the bidding of the bankers, the military establishment, Zionists, and the wealthy elites.
I also have been told that very few people donate money to help the wildlife. Thank you so much for disseminating the information contained in this living planet report. I have found that very few people in USA care good government, or at least doing much about ensuring we have it.
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corr: “care ABOUT good government”. Thanks.
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This tragic photograph is an indictment of our whole amoral world, Swan.
It probably makes people who live in affluent, Western nations feel uncomfortable. Some might even claim it shouldn’t be shown, that it’s offensive, puts them off their prime steaks and potato fries and vintage wine.
Perhaps, in time, they will experience the same situation, come to know what it’s like to starve.
Perhaps then we humans might finally come together to banish poverty AND the exploitative, infinitely greedy wealthy classes.
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At last a subject I can relate to completely.
David, my brother has recently sold his “Orange Farm” the loss has had put him on anti depressants since the sale, such is the connection we have to the land.
The reason of course as you well know is H2O. If you have been to the Riverina and Riverland of late, the place is dying a slow death.Property’s can be bought for a song, and there isn’t a town in these areas, where there isn’t a property for sale.
We cannot blame the drought on politicians, but what we can blame them for, is not having enough catchment areas, and bringing in yet more people to these areas in numbers, which was/is totally unsustainable.That the river Murray still exists is a minor miracle in itself.
How well I remember the farmers and the National Party telling us all those years, you people in the C.S.I.R.O. and other trendy ecological types, telling us experienced men on the land we were using to much water and clearing to much land, wouldn’t have a clue.
Yea right!
My brother told me years ago there would be violence in some parts of Oz over water, I told him he had a vivid imagination.Of course violence comes in many forms,suicide being the saddest type of all.I don’t know the statistics, but at one stage it was averaging three a week directly related to the situation on the land.
David you may be able to enlighten us.
We are leaving our children a wonderful legacy aren’t we ?
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If only it were so, Phill.
Our obsessive greed or more correctly, the greed cultivated by those who, like parasites, siphon off the large rewards, are to blame, people like those who import orange juice and bankrupt honest fruit growers.
Of course there is also unsustainable farming across the nation and regulators have allowed farming in areas that should’ve been left alone as well as allocated water that the rivers just couldn’t provide given rainfall fluctuations.
Greed and stupidity and blindness across the world have generated a high price, one which many will have to pay, some with their lives!
Cheers.
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Every time I have seen the above photo I would always wonder, ‘did the photographer snatch this child up and save it before the vulture got to it?’, but then the photographer’s subsequent suicide, answers that question, I suppose. He left it to die. He was just doing his job that fateful day.
Never before; not in the 1980′s when there was alot of hullabaloo about famine relief, has there been the absolute connection between the excesses of a few and the destitution and famine of many.
Being a parent has opened my eyes to the universal needs of children. My child is IDENTICAL to all children in terms of what he needs to thrive and become his own person. This is shocking when I see how many children do without things that I consider basic. Though the photo shown is extreme, I feel that what goes on, right here amongst us, is no less immoral.
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I find it strange that only one person has actually mentioned the photograph, Grace. Perhaps it’s like an elephant in a room: we know it’s there but it’s better to pretend that it isn’t!
For me, the photograph graphically symbolized the inhumanity of humanity, an inhumanity which will eventually bring us down as a species.
Cheers.
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I didn’t focus on the photo until David mentioned it, because I became absorbed with his detailed writing and started thinking about why governments in the USA don’t work for the good of the masses. That poor infant!
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