March 2014
When all the trees have been cut down,
when all the animals have been hunted,
when all the waters are polluted,
when all the air is unsafe to breathe,
only then will you discover you cannot eat money.
— Cree Prophecy
Earth
One-third of all the organic farmers in the United States are now reporting widespread contamination by genetically modified crops. Over half of the growers have had entire loads of their grain rejected due to their having unwittingly been contaminated by GMO’s.
Speaking of frankenfood, in Sri Lanka and South American, an herbicide developed by Monsanto, along with a phosphate fertilizer, are likely the causes of an epidemic of a mysterious kidney disease in the areas where rice and sugarcane are grown.
On the fossil fuel front, in Canada, large man-made lakes of oil sands mining waste are leaking into the Athabasca River, while “progress” is being made towards the building of two new giant pipelines that would rapidly expand Alberta’s tar sands project.
In Australia, it was recently revealed that the Australian “Environment Department” did not conduct an independent analysis of how much it would cost monetarily to dump dredged soil onto land before it granted permission to dump it on the Great Barrier Reef.
Given the ever-growing preponderance of our usage of electronics, all of us are morally obligated to look at these photos of Agbogbloshie, which was formerly a wetland in Accra, Ghana. Today, it is now the world’s largest e-waste dumpsite, where discarded computer monitors are used to build footbridges to cross rivers.
A new study has confirmed that a magnitude 5.7 earthquake in Oklahoma – one of the state’s biggest man-made quakes – was caused by fracking-linked wastewater injections.
Water
Even the depths of the oceans are now at risk.
Two and a half miles deep in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, mining companies are looking for ore deposits needed to keep feeding the industrial machine and continued production of “smart” phones. The number of companies looking to mine the pristine ocean depths has tripled in recent years, and the deputy secretary general of the International Seabed Authority had this to say of the ramping up of movement toward destroying ecosystems we hardly understand: “The amount of activity has expanded exponentially.”
Never mind that the rapacious machine that runs upon exponential growth has quite possibly already driven Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD) past the point of no return, making short-term human extinction not out of the realm of possibility.
Like the rest of the planet, the oceans are being mined, drilled, dredged, polluted and irradiated.
Examples of this abound, but here are just a few.
The state of Alaska now wants the federal government to remove endangered species protections for humpback whales, so as to remove a hurdle for companies that want to explore the Arctic Coast for oil. Given that the Obama administration has provided no evidence that the president will make a decision that would prioritize environmental protection over corporate profit, humpback whales are in trouble. Even the Supreme Court is doing what it can to protect the major emitters of greenhouse gases.
The lunacy of Alaska’s decision comes into even clearer focus given the fact that this year’s Iditarod sled dog race is facing a minor problem – not enough snow.
A new study led by NASA researches shows that fresh water flowing from rivers into the Arctic Ocean is having a powerful impact on the extent of sea ice cover, since the warm water discharges accelerate the melting of sea ice near the coast. This melting also has a wider climate impact: It creates more open water, which is darker than ice and thus absorbs more heat from sunlight, further accelerating planetary warming.
Not surprisingly, in the Gulf of Mexico, dolphins that were exposed to BP’s oil and dispersants from what remains (to date) the largest marine oil disaster in US history, are suffering from a host of maladies, including lung disease and adrenal problems.
