Ecocide

“We’ve got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?” –Lee Iacocca

People

  • As of June 1999 for the first time in human history, the population level has reached six billion. This exceeds the capability of current food supply and distribution channels to sustain most of humanity. 
  • Three people are born every second, or one million every four days. That’s 95 million people per year. That is the current population of Mexico. Hence each year the equivalent of a large country is added to the world’s population. As of 2002, 1/3 of the world’s population are either starving or has insufficient nourishment.
  • A species is eliminated from this planet every 40 minutes. This is the greatest mass extinction in the last 65 million years. It has become increasingly apparent that humans may be next.

Trees

  • In the United States, an acre of trees is lost every 8 seconds. This is creating a mass carbon sink catastrophy.
  • In British Columbia, Canada, one acre of forest is clear cut (nothing left standing) every minute. Another catastrophy in the making. Companies do not have to bid competitively to log public forests. The majority of logging in British Columbia is in old growth (i.e. ancient) forest and the Canadian government estimates that the province is over cutting its forest by 20 percent. Clear-cutting makes up 80 percent of all logging there - the results are environmentally catastrophic. Pulp mills there are destroying the health of entire populations. Further, there is no endangered species legislation to protect wildlife from logging despite the fact that the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada now lists 387 species of plants and animals at risk of extinction. This is an increase of 20 percent since 1992.
  • In China 25,000,000 trees are cut down every year only to make chopsticks.
  • Trees create oxygen and clean the air of pollution. Cut them down, and breathing may be a thing of the past.

Oceans

  • Vast pools of dead zones filled with human pollution and larger than Britain, exist in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.  Nothing can survive there. That means plankton, which produce oxygen, cannot survive there. Yet deeps sea vessels, including the navies of several powerful nations, continue to dump their sludge over the side. As on land concerning trees, killing plankton may shortly make breathing problematic.

 

Species destruction

  • Many species are as intelligent as human children. (And much brighter than politicians.) Some corvids for example are brighter than bonobos which in turn are at the level of a five-six year old human infant. Humanity is killing these intelligent creatures very quickly. Take a look at the research of Dr. Irene M. Pepperberg, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona into thinking in African Grey parrots, or look into some of the latest large corvid research - you might be amazed, even as we destroy their remaining habitat.
  • A race that believes itself superior to all others is, in my opinion, a doomed race.

Destruction and contamination of food sources

Monsanto and other (mainly U.S. based) corporations have introduced genetically modified foods. As of this writing, over 2/3 of US foods have now been contaminated by wind and other drift of genetically modified seeds. Testing has found that at “the most conservative expression”, half the maize and soybeans and 83 per cent of the oilseed rape in the USA are contaminated with GM genes - just a few years after the modified varieties were first cultivated on a large scale in the US. Because of the contamination, farmers unwittingly plant billions of GM seeds a year thereby spreading genetic modification throughout US agriculture. A recent report to the British government has indicated that this “would be likely to lead to danger to health with the next generation of GM crops, bred to produce pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals - delivering “drug-laced cornflakes” to the breakfast table”.

Summary

Ecocide is not the mark of an intelligent species. Ecocide is what humans are currently perpetrating. Ergo...