A Crisis Too Many
Tony Wardle offers a veggie’s guide to the end of the world as we know it
The world is in turmoil, in case you hadn’t heard. Human, environmental, financial and political crises are popping up everywhere like molehills. They are all individual and unrelated – or so it seems. And yet there are common threads which bind them together. Take just one day’s stories in a recent edition of The Guardian.
There was a report on the destruction of the natural world, floods in Northampton, a story about the ozone hole, panic selling on the world’s stock markets, Churchill’s plot to invade Russia and a campaign to defeat burglars. Then there was an appeal to the world’s economies to go for growth and a bit about CJD deaths. Now that’s a pretty varied bag you have to admit.
Let’s start with the most important news. In a space of only 28 years, 30 per cent of the natural world has been destroyed. Most depleted are forests, oceans and fresh water. Equally depressing, despite claims that nation states have acted to reduce emissions, the output of CO2 continues to increase:
“We knew it was bad but until we did this report we didn’t realise how bad… time is running out for the planet”, said Nick Mabey, of the World Wide Fund for Nature, who produced the Living Planet report in conjunction with the World Conservation Monitoring Centre.
The response of the US, the world’s biggest polluter, to increasing CO2 levels is to attempt to buy some of the CO2 pollution allowances of less developed countries and even Britain so it can go on poisoning the globe without hindrance. Which is precisely why the people of Northampton recently got pretty tetchy – their town was flooded thanks to global warming and its unpredictable storms and tempests and no one warned them it was coming.
One person who did respond to all this bad news was Sir Gillian Prance (I swear I didn’t make the name up) of Kew Gardens who said: “The conservation of natural ecosystems is not a luxury which only the rich can afford. It is essential to ensure the maintenance of vital ecological functions of our planet upon which we all depend for our survival.”
The ozone hole over Antarctica, it seems, has grown even bigger – by a sixth – and now covers an area more than twice the size of Europe. No one seems too concerned about higher levels of skin cancers and cataracts from increased penetration of ultra violet light, probably because few people live there. As for the death of newly hatched fish and micro-organisms which form the basis of the oceans’ food chain, a reduction in the ability of seeds to germinate and a weakening of the human immune system – not a word. Yet the problem is spreading and a second hole over the Arctic is also increasing in size. In fact, the ozone layer is beginning to look like a lace doily as smaller, subsidiary holes pop open in both hemispheres.
Just close your eyes for a minute and try to grasp the enormity of the situation. Earth’s delicate ecosystems, responsible for producing and sustaining all life, have evolved over nearly five billion years. The response of the human species – supposedly the pinnacle of evolution and spiritually, intellectually and philosophically superior to all other species – is to vandalise them. In no more time than it takes an eyelash to flutter or a heart to beat we have destroyed one third of our planet and have spread the contagion into the highest reaches of the stratosphere. From those who pretend to lead us – nothing! They are mute because it is they who promote the economics of destruction.
Economics is a word now regarded with almost religious reverence and economists are its high priests and priestesses. The truth is, they are little more than gamblers in a global casino with the world’s animal, vegetable and mineral wonders as their chips. They now play only one game with one set of rules but which goes under different names – laissez faire, free markets, capitalism, consumerism . These rules didn’t grow organically, a product of natural evolution, but were the result of a bitterly fought and vicious battle.
And so we come to Mr Churchill’s plot to invade Russia at the end of WW2. An army of US, British and German soldiers was to ‘eliminate’ the Soviet Union. “The overall political objective”, he rumbled, “is to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire”. By ‘will’ he meant economic system.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m no apologist for the corruption that was Stalinism, but that wasn’t why Churchill wanted to invade. Human rights didn’t enter into his thinking or in the following years the West would not have supported and armed every evil dictatorship across the world. No, it was about eliminating a possible economic threat.
In later years, even new age travellers and their drop-out philosophy had to be emasculated, with legislation as extreme as any passed in fascist South Africa. For people whose only crime was to urinate in the woods and nick a bit of kindling, it seems a little draconian. Trade union leaders suffered a similar fate, but they did it willingly, ‘pragmatically’, one eye on their own survival. Even innocuous little organisations such as neighbourhood law centres had their funding removed in case people met, debated and organised around them.
So now the consumerists’ victory is complete. Its most successful practitioners accumulate such wealth that visualising it is like trying to comprehend infinity. What they do with it is try to make more wealth at the expense of you and I and the animals. We surrender our security, health services and employment rights as the civilising influences on society are demolished – while government installs burglar alarms in two million of the poorest homes as a palliative.
And the animals surrender everything as they are more confined, forced to breed more often, grow more quickly, struggle to live with deformity and pain and die more brutally – all so consumerists can maintain their rate of profit. To question this morality or its
methodology sometimes feels like shouting into a hurricane.
You, an ordinary individual, are allowed to borrow two-and-a-half times your salary for a mortgage; the high priests of consumerism have no such restrictions. They borrow up to 250 times their worth and invest it in anything that shows a high enough return, such as ‘hedge funds’. Their vast volumes of money swirl around the world producing nothing, desperate to find instant returns, as devoid of morality as a bag snatcher. But in reality their financial houses are constructed from little more than smoke and mirrors and they have started to disintegrate, even as they celebrate their ideological triumph. So how will the situation resolve itself?
This is not the final chapter in the saga and crises will continue, becoming more frequent and more acute. Meanwhile, the world is already being destroyed with a rapidity which, in evolutionary or any other terms for that matter, is terrifying – one-third of the natural world destroyed in just 28 years in order to provide the raw materials for growth! And herein lies the dichotomy. The only cure for the present financial hangover is rapid growth, as urged by President Clinton and Mr Blair. Yet the only cure for a dying world is less growth, in fact a massive reduction in consumption.
But growth will triumph because consumerism cannot survive unless it continually expands, swallowing up ever more of our finite resources as it does so. Our leaders are as hooked as any junky and they will not – cannot – promote policies which are in conflict with their philosophy and which will inevitably destroy both their power base and their raison d’etre. The 1990 slump came about because the economy shrank by just one per cent. Imagine the outcome if, without planning, it ever truly shrinks on a scale necessary to save a dying planet!
Insistence that there is no alternative to growth has dragged us to the precipice where we now wobble. It will push us over if we allow it to. Just as with BSE and CJD, government honesty will always take second place to the protection of industrial and commercial might.
What a tragedy that a world so beautiful should be viewed through such ugly eyes. But who knows, my Viva! friends, perhaps we are the start of the backlash? I sincerely hope so because the world and its wonders need champions like never before.