Friends, as you enjoy your New Year’s celebrations, take a minute or two to reflect upon our earthly home or what’s left of it!
Our planet is groaning under the load of 6.8 billion destructive human beings who, in many ways, are reducing it to the level of a garbage dump.
Human ‘civilization’ is poisoning the soil, the water and the air we breathe. Factories the world over are discharging all manner of pollutants from chimneys and drains. Some of them are toxic.
Cars leave a trail of destruction behind them wherever they go while, in the cars, for good measure, all manner of carcinogens swirl around the occupants who don’t notice because they are listening to their fancy sound systems.
We chop down the trees with gay abandon, use poisons and hormones on crops, change the geography using huge earth-moving machines, build dams which alter river systems and the local climate, put in electricity lines on huge ugly pylons, lines that create deleterious electric fields, plant genetically-modified crops without knowing what their long-term effects are.
Then, for profit, we fight wars endless wars and use hideous things like depleted uranium and cluster bombs and landmines and phosphorous that burns to the bone. We use planes for war and planes for travel discharging more stuff into the atmosphere, stuff which, combined with the pollution from factories and cars, is changing our climate and creating more extreme weather events and rendering some areas of earth uninhabitable.
In two hundred years, humans have caused more damage to planet earth than any species has during millions of centuries. We truly are the worst inhabitants the earth has ever seen and the destruction we cause grows ever bigger as greed continues to consume us.
Then there is the increasing risk of nuclear war which could destroy the whole planet within a few hours…
Yes, enjoy your NY celebrations but spare a thought for our poor, dying planet!
yes, happy new year david………..
i’ve just watched a video of the floods in queensland………it’s like the one in pakistan. (except the australians will have better rescue/relief/aftercare etc.) i didn’t realize how serious it was until now. and this is the result of climate change/global warming due to homo sapiens. we are truly $h*+”£ing in our own nest……….
there was a storm here last night the likes of which i have never seen before in my 3 years here…………..it was quite frightening.
speaking of the billions on the planet, there is a bizarre video released by national geopgraphic on this very subject………..you can see it on c.d.
cheers mate…………
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David G Reply:
January 1st, 2011 at 7:54 am
Thanks, Coco, and warm cheers to you to. Australia is certainly a land of extremes, eh, but then extremes in weather are commonplace now all over the world.
How bad do they have to get before we stop using fossil fuels?
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Shhhhush! Come here. I want to tell you a secret. (Wispering) I am starting to wonder if these calamities might not just be a natural occurence. Can’t say much more now, I need more research. To whose benefit. Think! think! Think about it. My heart goes out to all those suffering from such things. I, for one am tired of being lied to and taken for a fool. We must find the chink in the armour.
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David G Reply:
January 1st, 2011 at 12:02 pm
What we have to do, 76-water, is to turn being rich into a crime against the people, turn wanting absolute power over other nations into an evil.
Greed needs to be seen as a sickness, much like pedophilia or necrophillia!
Take care now!
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I like the photo heading this entry. It shows Africa, the Mother Continent where, ultimately, we all came from. Let’s hope that the rightful winner of the recent election in the Ivory Coast will be allowed to assume office, that the machinations of the recently established American military’s “CENTCOM” will fail miserably, and that Africa will at last be seen as a remarkable and varied land that deserves to exist in peace and justice.
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Bruce, the fact that America has gained a foothold there is ominous. The military bases will follow and so will the semi-occupation.
Cheers.
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It is hard to think of all the abuse done to this lovely Planet. Abuse that as resources become scarcer the methods of extraction become more devastating; fracking, mountaintop removal, tar sands, shrimping in mangroves, BP’s Corexit genocide of the Gulf fishing waters, and more!!I didn’t even mention the extraction of the precious metals for our eco- Prius’ and laptops. Blood diamonds might seem so yesteryear, but they’re not.
I read articles about the abuse of our Planet dutifully, but it is with resentment that I even have to read about it. Especially when it is the corporate polluters that make all the difference. That is why Republicans don’t bother recycling their garbage. They know it doesn’t matter to the overall pollution. Their factories and machines of Planetary doom are what Matters.
As long as we are all guilty green consumers of which I am too and I am not telling you to change that. I am saying that we can all do that and it won’t clean the rivers and bring back the salmon. It started with deregulation of environmental protection. There is a structure – it has just been dismantled. We need to get it back. How to do that is the challenge. How to get a government by the people – for the people and we are in business. How to wrestle it from the cold fingers of greedy, professional politicians that sell out our public lands and health and all that is good… and we can truly be a beacon on a hill to the World. Next we will close our military bases on foreign soil. Leaving only diplomatic outposts at most.
We’ve got the Earth under our feet, supporting us.
Peace on Earth 2011
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David G Reply:
January 2nd, 2011 at 8:00 am
Grace, the world has a capacity to heal itself given enough time and a bit of help. But those looking to make a quick buck only want their ambitions realized and don’t care what damage they cause.
People, in the main, care for today and don’t worry about tomorrow or future generations including their own. They are little better than pigs at a slop trough!
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Trident missile engineer Bob Aldridge-www.plrc.org-resigned because the Pentagon aims to achieve a disarming first strike capability and wrote First Strike! The Pentagon´s Strategy For Nuclear War and Nuclear Empire (ch. 9 on anti-submarine warfare). Bob Aldridge wrote on the missiles to be deployed on ships in the Black Sea in Bulgaria and on land in Romania and Poland by 2015: “Whether they are on ships or land, they are still a necessary component for an unanswerable first strike”. The Russian answer will probably be Launch On Warning.
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David G Reply:
January 2nd, 2011 at 11:27 am
Welcome, Claus, and thanks for your comment, worrisome though it was. If America was a person, they’d be certified as insane!
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