Some people have likened the Earth to a relatively small lifeboat wheeling in an incredibly vast sea of outer space. If they also think that the sinking of the Titanic was a sad disaster, they will be heartbroken over the tragic devastation when this sort of decimating occurrence happens on a planetary scale …

Some time ago, I read an article about the death of multiple kinds of birds, bats, bees and butterflies across the world [1]. It didn’t surprise me. Indeed, we can add to the list ever so many other species, also, heading towards extinction, including Asian elephants, frogs, toads, assorted big cats, polar bears, penguins, tunas, coral, vultures, chimpanzees, apes and dolphins. Indeed, the list goes on  … and on. Shockingly, there is, seemingly, no end to it.

In relation, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) had determined that 40 percent of ALL species are currently in danger of vanishing in entirety based on numerous worldwide samplings [2]. However, the number has gone up since this study was done around ten years ago.

Further, this occurrence is largely due to a variety of manmade causes, such as our competition for their food or habitats (i.e., when forests, estuaries or meadows are torn apart to make way for factories, office parks, suburban neighborhoods, malls, farms or other human developments), an intention to ward off starvation (in which case the other species are eaten to the point of being done in), manmade climate changes and pollution – huge mounds of it in oceans and landfills, as well as spewing forth into the air.


Many are loaded with tumors:


Cancerous Lesions -- USFW photo

This sort of happening in mind, our culture is, doubtlessly, a covertly brutal one oriented towards razing the world for ever higher financial gains from an endless stream of manufactured goods and without much concern for damaging side effects. Accordingly, humans keep ravaging ever further regions of the Earth, obliterating everything that gets in the way of monetary goals.


Then, “progress” led to the discovery that coal was a better substitute for, at least, some processes, particularly ones related to industrial and residential electricity supply. (As of a few years ago, approximately seventy percent of the electricity in the US was derived from fossil fuels and there is absolutely NO efficient pollution trapping mechanism close to being developed by the coal industry. In other words, there is no such entity as clean, “green” coal use despite that the concept is being proactively marketed to increase coal profits. In the meantime, communities face hundreds of their mountains being blown to smithereens for coal extraction [4].)


What is mountaintop removal coal mining?



In the end, the answers almost don’t matter because, as Judy Bonds stated some years ago, “In Southern West Virginia we live in a war zone. Three and one-half million pounds of explosives are being used every day to blow up the mountains. Blasting our communities, blasting our homes, poisoning us, trying to intimidate us. I don’t mind being poor. I mind being blasted and poisoned. -- There ARE no jobs on a dead planet.”



For instance, US government officials have in the past obstructed a significant evaluation of gas and oil drilling in the Arctic while the Mineral Management Service (MMS), a branch of the Department of the Interior (DOI), undertakes plans to lease 30 million acres for extraction in the Chukchi Sea. The reason is that this region is the setting for one of few remaining polar bear habitats. (How long will this obstruction last?)


Meanwhile, the frantic rush to snap up any fossil fuels, regardless of the related ethical considerations, clearly causes widespread harm whether in the US, the Middle East, northern Africa or the Arctic realms. Yet, the allure of ever larger economic booty by companies like Exxon-Mobile, an energy hungry and ignorant public, and callous indifference about the long range consequences drives such utterly outrageous events.

Therefore, it would naturally tend to follow that government agents would callously determine that the bears aren’t, actually, endangered and need not be listed as such. How reassuring and credible — just as it was when their colleagues told us that the large cache of weapons of mass destruction hidden by Saddam Hussein WOULD be found by our invasion force! (How many times do we have to keep hearing blatant lies before we lose faith in the whole governmental system, along with its large group of power and money hungry bureaucrats? How can any of the few elected representatives, who ARE dedicated to service and moral considerations, influence this unconscionable plutocratic rabble?)

In any case, we will move to ever more destructive methods to garner energy when we run out of fossil fuels. This is nearly certain as that sort of outcome has always been the pattern. Consequently, we can expect proportionally great amounts of food crops like corn being subverted to biofuel development and more nuclear power plants being put online. (This will happen despite spent uranium disposal problems, especially as the waste is easily dispatched since it can be used for uranium tipped projectiles — bullets and missiles and such. At the same time, there is a diminishing supply of finite uranium worldwide and nuclear power plants can face critical dangers related to lack of water for sufficient cooling as the Tennessee Valley Authority, TVA, management is discovering.)

All in all, though, biofuels and nuclear power will take sway as coal and oil wane in use, as they can yield more profits than can the production and widespread implementation of windmills, solar panels and hydro-generators based on water wave power. On account, one shouldn’t expect a total devotion to the development of more benign forms of energy provision any time soon.

At the same time, few operators involved in biofuel creation worry that worldwide grain stores have only around a fifty-three day supply in reserve and have reached their most depleted levels since first calculated fifty-seven years ago. In the same vein, do they care about the inordinately large number of humans, who will starve across the globe if there is a drop in the annual grain harvest devoted to food? Have they any concern that, according to agricultural researchers, southern Africa is anticipated to lose 30 percent of it corn (maize) crop, a main dietary staple, and 15 percent of its wheat by 2030 unless highly drought and temperature resistant strains are able to be developed?

Meanwhile, others might start to wonder about the amount that will be in the global grain reserve when the worldwide population hits 9 billion humans in roughly fifty years, as is anticipated to happen according to the International Data Base. They might, also, be perplexed over the way that a gargantuan ongoing supply of fossil or other fuel will be supplied to run the many combines, augers, balers and other farm machinery on which we have come to depend for the enormous amount of food required to feed billions upon billions, and ever growing numbers of humans daily.

From where is this food to derive, especially as water lacks and climate change issues will destroy many of our food growing regions? Are we going to get into a largely self-contained loop wherein biofuel is used to run farm machinery to produce biofuel crops to create more biofuel to run the machinery? Hopefully, benefits will accrue beyond this limited availability despite that biofuels are considered not particularly energy efficient. Simultaneously, cultivation of its homogenous agriculture across the world is responsible for much slash and burn pollution. This in mind, ethanol futures expect to perform well as, one by one, rainforests are replaced by sweeping tracts of unvarying plant life.

Food woes further in mind, trawling vessels, also, pose a problem. … While spanning in size up to 100 meters long, they can weigh as much as 3,000 tons apiece. With a staggering number of them in existence, global fleets, as of around twenty years ago, managed to dreg 15 million square kilometers on an annual basis.

Now the expanse covered is larger and their trawling depths can reach down past 900 meters, while often scraping huge areas and, simultaneously, rendering them practically devoid of life. On account of this and other highly successful forms of demolition, nine or more of the seventeen major ocean fisheries are in severe decline and at least four became commercially collapsed, according to UN sources. In consideration, one has to ask, how much longer will sea life continue to be available to plunder?

For now, though, more than 200 million people (a huge portion of the world’s population) derive their employment from the fishing industry, no fishing vessel owners want to cut back their take when others will not do so and seafood delivers more than half of world’s animal protein eaten by people. At the same time, there is a constant demand for more.

Concurrently, half the world’s turtles face extinction and, for some, it is due to lack of shrimp, a dietary mainstay for many kinds. (Over four million tons of shrimp are eaten per year by humans of which around three-fourth is wild capture, along with representing a multibillion dollar industry. Furthermore, its consumption is quickly rising around the world, so shrimp holds much appeal from a business standpoint.)


Moreover, those in the economic top tier, definitely, garner the lion’s share of resources and there is a pecking order. However, look at these terms: lion’s share” and “pecking order.” They seem to point to the notion that the trouble with our species maybe runs deeper than one in which capitalism is to blame for our wild successes as we, ever growing in number, advance against other member of our kind and other life forms to “hog it all.”



At the same time, the pecking order arrangement, relative to our voluminous population, all but ensures that nearly all individuals in the labor market, except for “the top dogs,” are expendable based on whomever, with the right set of needed skills, can be obtained for the lowest wages. As dehumanizing as this is, it is, in fact, the reason that jobs disappear from the US to Mexico in that the latter’s annual minimum wage was set at $1,557-1,658 International Dollars, a unit of monetary measurement corresponding to the purchasing power of the $ USD in the US at a fixed point in time. (It is, also, known as the Geary-Khamis dollar.) It is, likewise, the reason that these same jobs, eventually, disappeared from Mexico to other countries, such as China, wherein annual income expectations are even lower. (In 2006, officials in Guangdong Province set minimum wage according to five classifications with the highest being comparable to approximately USD $0.60/ hour and the lowest being roughly USD $0.25/ hour. In other words, there is no way that Mexico workers, and especially not American ones, can reasonably compete in the global market.)

Perhaps then, competition and not predacious capitalism, per se, is to blame for the sweeping demise of other species taking place, large portions of first world economies going belly up and other tribulations, such as global warming, worsening. If so, it is likely that humans, so filled with self-serving aims and hubris, just can find their own balance and place in the natural scheme of things.




If we want to look beyond ourselves, we can blame the human dilemma on technical progression, itself, as is done by the writers of many books (The Postman, Antibodies, etc.) and movies (“The Terminator,” “Water World, etc.),. Then again, possibly the fact that humankind is just a bit too adept, bright and capable, when stacked up against many other species, represents the crux of our difficulties.

Regardless of the reason, “human beings and the natural world are on a huge collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.” — World Scientists, in a warning to Humanity in 1992

Like the pharmaceutical industry’s management, that keeps asking “What new ailment can we make up, like restless leg syndrome or halitosis, to get people to part with their dollars,” we just can’t seem to stop trying to imagine new ways to advance ourselves at the expense of others. We can seem to stop turning everything of the Earth, including other people, into a commodity.






Likewise, can we cut back on eating high on the food chain as this, too, has ecological ramifications? Simultaneously, can we buy less goods since the more that we rapaciously take, the more that the overtaxed natural world is forced to yield? Most of all, can we cut back on our energy consumption, regardless of the way that we go about it, so that we can slow down the ravage of beleaguered places like the blown-up Appalachian Mountains and the increasingly ruined Chukchi Sea where most of the polar bears left in the world live?


This above vision/warning in mind, each and every one of us needs to critically examine the ways that we individually go about our lives and make adjustments as needed. If we do not carry out this deep introspection, we will have not only put many in our own generation at peril like eastern Africans who suffer from climate change consequences, but definitely will have condemned future generations  — involving many more humans, other animals and plants alike — to be at risk for never existing at all.


Since there would be no one to take any responsibility at that point of close to nothingness alive in an increasing number of regions on our common Earth, it is up to us to take full responsibility for our actions right away. Without any equivocations what-so-ever, let us begin now while there is still time for some corrections in our common pathway forward!

We, obviously, need to protect our planet on which all life going forward depends. Regardless of anyone’s particular religious convictions with which s/he was raised, s/he needs to collectively come together with all of us to honor and take care of life around us from the smallest spider to the largest creatures, such as elephants that are being killed one after another in droves for their ivory tusks to turn them into jewelry.

If we refuse to participate in the salvage of the planet, then the consequences will be dire as the huge dismantling process will pull too much potential future life apart. So we need to take the lead from our indigenous populations and others who resist the world’s and inadvertently our own increasingly perilous destruction!

The Wings (Native American Music)


Sally Dugman is a writer in MA. USA.

1] The report referenced is: The Canaries In The Mine Are Dying -- How Much Longer Until It Spreads To Man? (http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_w

[2] For IUCN’s and several other assessments, please go to: Endangered species -- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangered), IUCN Red List -- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IUCN_Red_List), Endangered Species (www.earthsendangered.com/) and Endangered and Extinct Species Lists (https://www.fws.gov/endangered/).

[3] For details, please refer to: Sex Genes Of Fish Disrupted By Common Household Products (www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/07/0207300758).
[4] The harm of coal use and acquisition is exposed at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20862243/, Nevada’s ‘nervous energy’ (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/
) and CCAN -- I love mountains: Take Action to stop MTR (iLoveMountains.org — End Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining).

[5] This quotation is taken from: Genesis 1:26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, (http://bible.cc/genesis/1-26.htm).

[6] SEZ and Coca-Cola damage is described at: Special Exploitation Zones By Tejal Kanitkar & Puru Kulkarni (www.countercurrents.org/ind-kanitkar181006.htm), India Does Not Need SEZs – The SEZ Act Will Have To Go! By … (www.countercurrents.org/dipankar210407.htm) and Coca-Cola, Plachimada, Farmer suicides, Maoists, cricket and… (http://www.thewe.cc/weplanet/news/


One Comment

  1. Avatar K SHESHU BABU says:

    Causes for the extinction of many species from earth is a man-made disaster. For selfish gains he is destroying natural resources and the habitats of many animals . Unfortunately, there is no one who can punish man ..! He should punish himself for his heinous act of not heeding to calamity .