Industrial society is eating us out of house and home

Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, with the Industrial Revolution, and armed with powerful technologies, Europeans and North Americas have been treating the natural world as if it was a lifeless mass of dirt. They spread to the tropics like a cataclysm, and they took the best land of Africans, Asians, and South Americans and sowed it in cash crops. They killed and decimated wildlife for sport, plundering the valleys, forests, and rivers.

In the Americas, the white masters of the continent nearly wiped out the indigenous population. David E. Stannard, professor of history at the University of Hawaii, says that the coming of Columbus to America triggered a bloodbath against Native Americans.

In time, the Europeans' aggression against the indigenous people took the form of a "ghastly event," a "mammoth cataclysm," which evolved into the largest global genocide, taking the lives of about 100 million people. Disease played a role in the destruction of Native Americans, but only because it operated in the killing policies of the Europeans. Stannard documents that "firestorms of microbial pestilence and purposeful genocide" laid waste the American natives.

One of the reasons Native Americans paid such a price at the hands of the white invaders was their worship of nature. They could no more sell land than the sky.

The Europeans and Americans, including Australians and New Zealanders as well as the rulers of Brazil, China, the Middle East, Indonesia and Africa, still don't think much of nature. The blows against the natural world keep coming at the dawn of the twenty-first century under the guise of mining, logging, factory fishing; the damming of rivers and construction of electricity factories, nuclear power plants, and nuclear weapons.

There are also factories for the production of plastics and chemicals, fertilizers and munitions; "development" projects that blow mountains apart for their coal or uranium, literally eviscerating the natural world; scrambling the genetic staff of life, including crops and food. Agribusiness pretends to be farming with its factories in the fields, spraying toxins on the face of the world.

In 1986, Hugh Iltis, botanist at the University of Wisconsin, blamed ambitious cattle ranchers, land-hungry squatters, greedy corporations, and "the world's multilateral development banks" for this new barbarism. He noted that these developers:

"[A]re recklessly destructive of nature and in an orgy of environmental brutality, clear-cut the forests, burn the trees, and plow up the land to grow more food or graze more cattle, even before any scientist has had a chance to find out what lives there. In the name of growth, progress, and development, and with a colossal self-confidence, we humans are now messing up even the last wild lands and damming the last wild rivers, oblivious of the irreplaceable biological treasures that are being destroyed."

In 1997, Iltis saw biological genocide in the destruction of the tropics. He cited the biodiversity of the land in the Peruvian tropical forest, where in 2.47 acres of land there are 41,000 species of insects, mostly beetles. Destroying such rich forest, he said, would inevitably bring the

"[E]xtermination of millions of plant and animal species, for most of which we do not have a description, a life history, an estimate of their ecological or economic importance, or even a name. As many as twenty per cent of all species on Earth may become extinct within twenty years – at least a million species. The utter devastation that human action wreaks in tropical ecosystems has to be seen to be believed."

This devastation of life is a sacrifice to the agribusiness gods of cash cropping and the model "scientific" farming of North America and Western Europe.

By this new means of colonialism, tropical fruit ends up on the table of the wealthy of the world, especially those living in North America and Western Europe -- the North.

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.

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.

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.

It is this behavior that prompts me to question the morality of the captains of industrial fishing. These corporate managers live in ostensibly democratic societies, which employ "science" in everything they do. Yet despite their skills, or because of them, they have no respect for nature. When they fish, they mine the seas. Add to this catastrophe global warming and the poisoning of the seas by industrial wastes, and the oceans and us are at risk.

The result of such malevolent human actions is the extinction of both fishes and marine ecosystems, at rates matching the greatest extinctions in the history of the earth.

This terrible truth comes out of a 2011 global report of 27 scientists representing the International Programme on the Status of the Ocean and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. These scientists spoke in tragic terms:

"The speed and rate of degeneration of the oceans is far faster than anyone has predicted; Many of the negative impacts identified are greater than the worst predictions; The first steps to globally significant extinction may have already begun."

However, Sylvia Earle, an insider of the civilization effects on the oceans, spoke bluntly of humans being the most voracious predator, the factor decimating life in the seas.

Reacting to the bad news of the global ocean report, she denounced industrial fishing, which is dismembering the "fine-tuned ecosystems that are, in effect, our life-support system." She also said: "We are now [in 2011] appearing to wage war on life in the sea with sonars, spotter aircraft, advanced communications, factory trawlers, thousands of miles of long lines, and global marketing of creatures no one had heard of until recent years. Nothing has prepared sharks, squid, krill and other sea creatures for industrial-scale extraction that destroys entire ecosystems while targeting a few species."

Earle is that rare of scientists who speak from knowledge and experience, cutting through the fog of official lies about "sustainable" fishing and the "protection" of the oceans by governments and the fishing industry. Instead, she directs our attention to another suicidal business of the military-industrial complex in its ruthless exploitation of the oceans, thinking not at all that such dismemberment of nature is also deleterious to us.

Time has come to listen to scientists like Earle. Create a global Environmental Organization with the resources and power to really protect the oceans, the land, water and air from poisoning and other human depredations. No economic or strategic interest should take precedent over the health of the earth, which is also the health of human beings.