Some sobering seasonal thoughts from Laurence
Cause for Despair
Although there is much to
celebrate, find wondrous and joyful in today’s world,
human folly, cruelty and greed lead one to despair. A case in point is the war
in the Congo in which an estimated 5 million people, mostly hard working impoverished
villagers have been killed since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The brutality
meted out by soldiers of the various armies on civilians, in particular women,
sickens. The war gives weight to the William Golding idea that given the
circumstances human beings will inflict pain and suffering on others without
measure. By all accounts depravity has triumphed in the Congo.
Another cause for despair is that
hubris, rather than empathy, determines how we
interact with the environment. Since the publication of Rachel Carson’s book
Silent Spring in 1962 the billions of words spoken and written about the ruin
our consumer culture wreaks on the fragile web of life has not brought about a
decline on our reliance on fossil fuels, mono crops and general wastefulness.
Our megaphone morality does not prevent the
forced displacement of indigenous peoples from lands in which they have lived
in environmentally sustainable ways for generations. In almost all cases the
hand behind their expulsion is big business and financial speculators who want
unfettered access to trees, soil, water and minerals.
The complicated nature of the
global political and economic order enables the affluent to use the bounty
gouged from the natural environment with a clear conscience. Ecocide and abuse
of the poor are inextricably
bound-up with our much-loved electronic devices, cosmetics and food. The war in
the Congo, mainly in the eastern part of the country, is driven more by the
desire of competing interests to control its enormous mineral wealth than by
ethnic rivalries or political ideology.
The Congo has deposits of gold,
tin, tungsten, tantalum, copper, coltan and cobalt worth trillions of dollars.
The country holds 70 percent of the world’s supply of tantalum, a metal used in
mobile phones, tablets, i-Pods, laptops and other electronics. The purchase of these goods wrapped now in
Christmas tinsel pays for the bullets and boots of the armies in the Congo.
Tin is another vital component of
electronic goods. Kate Hodal informs us in The Guardian Weekend, 24 November
that mining tin on Bangka Island, east of Sumatra “has scarred the island’s landscape, bulldozed its farms and forests,
killed off its fish stocks and coral reefs ... The damage is best seen from the
air, as pockets of lush forest huddle amid huge swaths of barren orange earth,
this is pockmarked with graves, many holding the bodies of miners who have died
over the centuries digging for tin. Encircling the island are the dredgers and
the suction ships and the thousands of illegal pontoons sucking up ore from the
seabed like mechanised mosquitoes.”
Hodal’s account describes in
microcosm what we are doing to the whole planet in pursuit of what we imagine
to be the good life. In an article on Climate Change in New Scientist, 17 November,
Steven Sherwood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of New South Wales
in Sydney, is quoted as saying that if we “fully
‘develop’ all of the world’s coal, tar sands, shales and other fossil fuels we
run a high risk of ending up in a few generations with a largely unliveable
planet.”
The idea that in a few
generations the Earth may no longer be the home of humankind, and other
life-forms, is frightening. Yet the evidence suggests this is precisely the
course we are set upon with governments giving more subsidies to fossil fuels
than to renewable sources of energy, sanctioning the death of the seas and the
loss of biodiversity. The building of the Belo Monte Dam in the Brazilian
Amazon and Brazil’s recently enacted Forest Code, the latter will have global
environmental consequences, vividly illustrates our relationship with the
Earth, which is trashing it for trifles.
The 2012 end of year report card
on humankind’s relationship with the environment and action on justice issues fills me with despair.
Wishing all our readers a happy
Christmas.
Laurence Speight
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