Crisis?
What Crisis?
As world leaders’ lips remain sealed on environmental issues, Tony Wardle gives them a piece of advice - what goes into your mouth is as important as what comes out of it.
Words such as globalisation and free trade trip from the tongues of politicians and economists as seductively as sticky syrup. It is a philosophy as inevitable as rising suns and birthdays, as irresistible as a baby’s smile and as vital to our survival as penicillin and soap operas. Or so they claim. To resist it is to be branded a fool, a Luddite, a betrayer of the poor and dispossessed – an anarchist.
This syrup, however, doesn’t rot our teeth, it rots our minds and
is increasingly rotting the fabric of the globe. For globalisation can only
be defended by cooking the books,
by removing one important element from the equation –
the environment. George W Bush wouldn’t recognise environmental concern
if it sat in the electric chair and pleaded for clemency. Tony Blair treats
it like the lavatory – he made be heard talking about it but no one has
ever seen him doing anything. And for all the importance William Hague attaches
to it, it might as well be an Afro comb.
Just to indicate the scale of this idiocy, recent reports from the UN estimate that to spread the west’s profligate lifestyle to every country in the world – which is, after all, the stated aim of globalisation – we would require two additional planets to plunder.
There are many compelling factors causing global decline but they all stem from unbridled consumption and many can be traced to the pre-eminence of animal protein as a profit source in world markets. Here are just two areas for concern which have recently been in the news…
Onslaught on the Oceans
A fish that was once the most prolific in the world is rapidly becoming an endangered species. This year will see four million tons of tuna killed. Catches in the south Pacific have risen seven-fold since 1972 and Japan, the biggest consumer, has refused to limit catches. A large frozen blue fin tuna recently sold for $250,000, encouraging the kill.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is to add cod to the endangered list as numbers collapse to one-tenth of what they were 30 years ago. There is real fear that the North Sea will follow the Grand Banks, where teaming shoals of cod have virtually disappeared. For years we have been fed the pretence that quotas are the answer to preserving stocks but they have now been exposed for what they really are – a carve up of the spoils. Finally, a ban on fishing in certain areas has had to be introduced in a last-ditch attempt to save this once prolific fish. Fishermen, of course, are complaining bitterly. Like game hunters, they demand the right to pursue their quarry into oblivion.
Peter Benchley, author of Jaws, has issued an impassioned plea in defence of sharks, 100 million of which are killed every year for the so-called ‘delicacy’, shark’s fin soup. The animals have their fins hacked off while alive and are then dropped back into the sea to die. Even the diminutive little shark called the spiny dogfish, or spur dog – sold in UK chip shops as huss – has declined by 50 per cent. Fortunately, Viva! succeeded in getting Holland & Barrett to stop selling shark cartilage capsules – a small but important victory.
The UN has issued a global warning, saying: “Unless efforts are undertaken promptly to halt growing catches, the future of many more shark populations is very bleak.”
Aquaculture (fish farming) is being promoted as an alternative to raping the oceans but is wreaking its own havoc. It has been responsible for the destruction of 75 per cent of all mangrove swamps in the sub-tropical regions of the world – swamps which are the vital nurseries of the oceans and contain over 2,000 different species of animals and plants.
To add to the lunacy,
10 million tons of herring, mackerel and sardines are fed to farmed fish as
meal – 3Kg producing just 1Kg of flesh. If aquaculture continues to
expand it will ensure the disappearance of these species from the world’s
oceans, according to the science journal, Nature. To compound the
situation, an even greater quantity of wild fish – 22 million tons – is
fed to intensively farmed animals across the world.
Even wild salmon and sea trout may be facing their last leap as stocks in Scotland’s rivers collapse. Despite years of warnings, the infestations of sea lice spread by fish farms are the main cause of this sad and predictable decline. But there is worse. As a testament to humankind’s breathtaking vandalism, every single creature in every ocean of the world is now poisoned with two of the most deadly chemicals known – PCBs and dioxin – which concentrate in the animals’ fat cells. The official UK position is not to eat oily fish more than once a week yet farmed salmon are fed them daily. A 100g piece of salmon steak can now contain many times the levels of poison ‘acceptable’ for children. Both chemicals are potent carcinogens and can have a ‘gender bending’ effect on young people.
We have no idea what the eventual outcome will be if we continue to disrupt the oceans’ eco-systems so violently but fish may be replaced by choking algae. If we kill the oceans we kill ourselves as the majority of our oxygen is produced by phytoplankton – the tiny specs of vegetable matter that form the entire basis of the oceans’ food chain. It’s like Russian roulette!
Global Warming
– the heat is on
Total apathy to the plight of the seas is matched only by
the lack of action over global warming – to which livestock production
makes a major contribution through the belching out of methane by cattle, goats,
sheep and camels and the burning of forests to provide grazing.
So fast are the polar ice caps now melting that last year, a Canadian ship completed a journey from the Pacific to the Atlantic, through the Arctic Ocean’s North West passage, without even seeing ice.
The thickness of the polar ice cap is now less than 60 per cent of what it was and clear water has been seen for the first time at the North Pole. Tore Furevik, of Bergen University, says: “The changes we have seen have been much faster and more dramatic than most people imagined.” In fact, thinning of the Arctic sea ice has outstripped predictions by a factor of three and it is expected that the ice cap will totally disappear in summer within 50 years. This will be a devastating blow towildlife but to the global fishing industry it is seen as a golden opportunity to replace falling profits. Having taken the rest of the world’s oceans to the brink of environmental collapse, they are now eagerly queuing up to destroy this last remaining ocean wilderness.
Estimates for global temperature increase have been revised upwards to as much as six degrees Celcius and the rise in sea levels – as ice melts and seas warm and expand – are no longer being quoted in centimetres but in metres – many metres.
Although Viva! has been cautioning against it
for the whole of our short existence, the first official warnings have now
started to appear about the melting of permafrost at both ends of the planet.
It is believed that locked into these frozen tundras are billions of tons
of carbon dioxide, one of the main gases which, together with methane, contributes
to global warming. As the tundras melt, this frozen C02 will be released,
stamping on the accelerator of global warming
and causing even greater C02 releases. It is called positive feedback and is
believed to be unstoppable once it starts. We have no idea what the outcome
will be.
All international debates on limiting CO2 have proved to be a sham, so trivial
are the cuts being discussed. The US, of course, ignores them entirely and
demands the right to carry on being the globe’s greatest polluter.
Now the US has a president who believes there’s no such thing as the
environment. He is the new front man for globalisation and his inability
even to articulate a sentence properly tells us all we need to know about
the quality of world leadership.
It would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic.
But even he may not be able to ignore the growing problems indefinitely. A major report – Climate Change Impacts on the United States – forecasts a bleak future for the country’s fragile ecosystems. Coral reefs are likely to die, swamps and wetlands on the eastern seaboard will be flooded by sea water and the Everglades, richly populated with wildlife (much of it unique), will disappear entirely.
Of course, this is unlikely to concern the global traders unless it hits their profits or brings large numbers of people out on the streets in protest. When that happens, of course, the headline writers will again have a field day – thugs, bullies, morons, you’ve seen it all before. The media, of course, is almost entirely owned by the global masters and its role is clear – to trivialise, marginalise and pacify dissent in order to maintain the status quo.
Historian David Keys, in a new book entitled Catastrophe, claims that global warming has already killed in excess of 100,000 people. He predicts widespread loss of land, mass migrations, increasing diseases as viruses more easily jump the species barrier, massive destabilisation and global warfare as desperate people battle over diminishing resources. When this happens we will no doubt still be treated to mass coverage of Posh Spice’s stolen luggage, David Beckham’s every grunt and the length of Julia Roberts’ legs.
How long will it be before a leading politician takes on the vital role of leadership and has the courage to admit that it is now vital for the world to move towards a plant-based diet? Don’t hold your breath!