We are madly careering ahead putting short-term profit in front of long-term loss. Relentlessly growing in numbers. Relentlessly chopping down forests. Relentlessly killing off wildlife. Relentlessly polluting. Relentlessly destroying the very ecosystem on which we depend.
More and growth are the things that will kill us.
I for one do not wish to live in the sterile hell we are creating out of our greed and stupidity.
John Peachey sent me this article through from the Guardian newspaper.
It shows the dilemma quite clearly. Bolsonaro is a criminal who is raping the rainforest. The Amazon is the lungs of the planet, home to the most amazing range of species in the world. Bolsonaro is overseeing its destruction as he opens it up for mining and logging. He’s selling the future for a bag of beads.
Biden is planning to save the Amazon and has a plan that involves donating money to Brazil.
Bolsonaro will undoubtedly use the money to bribe people and help him get re-elected.
But the destruction of the Amazon is too important to wait.
This Guardian article explains it.
‘Negotiating with your worst enemy’: Biden in risky talks to pay Brazil to save Amazon
Activists fear billion-dollar climate deal will bolster Bolsonaro and reward illegal forest clearance – but US says action can’t wait
@jonathanwatts
The US is negotiating a multi-billion dollar climate deal with Brazil that observers fear could help the reelection of president Jair Bolsonaro and reward illegal forest clearance in the Amazon.
That is the concern of indigenous groups, environmental campaigners and civil society activists, who say they are being shut out of the most important talks on the future of the rainforest since at least 1992.
Senior US officials are holding weekly online meetings about the Amazon before a series of big international conferences. Ministers and ambassadors from Britain and Europe are also involved. But rather than those who know forest protection best, their Brazilian interlocutor is Bolsonaro’s environment minister, Ricardo Salles, who has overseen the worst deforestation in more than a decade.
Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro cosies up to his environment minister, Ricardo Salles.
Salles is asking for a billion dollars every 12 months in return for which, he says, forest clearance would be reduced by 30-40%. Without the extra foreign cash, he says Brazil will not be able to commit to a reduction target.
Only a third of the money would go directly to forest protection, with the rest being spent on “economic development” to provide alternative livelihoods for those who rely on logging, mining or agriculture in the Amazon. This has prompted worries that Salles will channel cash to the strongly Bolsonarist constituency of farmers and land-grabbers, rewarding them for not invading, stealing and burning forests.
Scientists say international action is long overdue on the world’s biggest tropical forest. The Amazon is essential for climate stability, but human activity is turning the region into a source – rather than a sink – of atmospheric carbon. Some areas are close to a tipping point where the forest shrinks, dries and irreversibly degrades into a savannah.
The coming months ought to be the best opportunity to reverse this in many years. The US president, Joe Biden, has invited world leaders to a climate summit in Washington on 22 April, having promised $20bn for tropical rainforests during his election campaign. Later in the year, the UK will stage Cop26, the most important UN climate conference since Paris, in Glasgow. In between, world leaders are due to meet in Kunming, China to set biodiversity targets for the next 10 years.
But there can be no solution without the Amazon, which means anyone seeking progress has to deal with Bolsonaro and his ministers, despite their nationalist, anti-science and anti-environment policies.
“Brazil is too important to keep off the negotiating table,” said one insider familiar with the talks. “Many in civil society say ‘don’t deal with the Brazilian government’. But the US says they have to deal with elected leaders because they can’t put off the deforestation discussion for two or more years.”
This is a risk for Biden, who is on the verge of doing what Trump never did: give cash to a Brazilian president who has eviscerated forest protection agencies, lethally mismanaged the Covid crisis, and is seen as a danger not only to Brazil, but the world.
Izabella Teixeira, the former Brazilian environment minister, said the US and the UK were poised to pay off a government that is holding the planet to ransom. “They have to offer money to Bolsonaro’s government so he doesn’t block the Cop meetings,” said Teixeira, who represented Brazil in several international conferences during the administrations of Dilma Rousseff.
But Salles, who became environment minister in 2019, has no credibility with those who defend the forest. He has tried to monetise the region and promoted mining and agribusiness, and under his watch the rulebook for Amazon protection, which reduced deforestation by 80%, has been shelved, monitoring agencies have been eviscerated, 15,000 sq km of forest have been cleared, and Brazil has backtracked on its international commitment to cut carbon emissions.
Salles already has access to substantial international funds. About $3bn from Norway and Germany sits idle in the Amazon Fund, which was frozen by the environment minister because he disliked the strict conditions on deforestation that came with it. This raises questions about what any new funds would be used for, and by whom.
Campaigners and academics say any deal should involve payments for results, money should be channelled through state governors rather than the federal government, it should not reward landowners simply for obeying the law, and resources for enforcement should be in the form of specialist environmental rangers, rather than recruits for the pro-Bolsonaro police force.
They want Brazil to provide a detailed plan to reach zero deforestation. Most important, they say, is that distribution of funds should focus on protecting existing old-growth forests in indigenous territories rather than new plantations on land cleared by farmers. An effective deal, they argue, would need to involve traditional forest communities, who have proved to be the best guardians of the environment.
Sources close to the talks say if there is no bilateral deal with Brazil by April, then the US is likely to make a strong but broad statement of support for tropical forests worldwide. This would be a carrot to encourage Amazon nations to compete for funds with quantifiable reductions of deforestation. Brazil could lose out to its neighbours Colombia, Bolivia or Peru.
This is part of a coordinated diplomatic push. A group of five ambassadors from the US, UK, Germany, Norway and the EU have recently met Salles and other senior ministers to press home the message that Amazon policies have to change and deforestation has to slow if Brazil is to strike a deal and lose its damaging international reputation as an environmental vandal.
Time pressures could weaken resolve. Biden wants a success to announce at his climate summit later this month and the UK will be looking for progress at Cop26 in November. Environmentalists fear a rushed deal with an insincere negotiating partner could be worse than no agreement. Unless payments are tightly pegged to emissions-reduction results, they could be frittered away on dubious carbon credits, vague development plans, benefits to land-grabbers and a huge new greenwashing system for fossil-fuel companies.
“Brazil is today a divided country. On the one hand, there are indigenous people, quilombolas [descendants of afro-Brazilian slaves], scientists, environmentalists and people who work against deforestation and for life,” said Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Brazilian Climate Observatory, a network of 50 civil society organisations. “On the other, there is the Bolsonaro government, which threatens human rights, democracy and puts the Amazon at risk. Biden needs to choose which side he will stand on.”
As I walked around the deck of the Marco Polo and thought about the immense changes that have taken place in the last two hundred years I kept reworking this poem.
I’ve travelled through oceans that once teemed with life and are now empty.
I visited islands where British ships replenished their larders by bludgeoning to death all the indigenous creatures.
Two hundred years ago life teemed. Now it is hanging on by its talons.
I am ageing in fits and starts on a slow decline towards an inevitable death. The planet is on a similar trajectory.
In the next two hundred years we will have paved it all, caged what’s left and be living in an artificial, plastic paradise, as free as any good consumer can be.
Take me back to where I can breathe and wonder. I want out of this nightmare.
As the number of Homo sapiens on this planet approached 8 Billion it is at the expense of the our surviving fauna.
A look at the biomass and numbers puts it in stark relief.
8 Billion humans have a combined mass of just over 300 million tons.
Our farm animals (cows, horses, chickens, pigs, goats, oxen, sheep etc.) have a mass of over 700 million tons.
An estimate of the mass of all the surviving wild animals – from the rhinos, elephants, penguins, chimps, and gorillas to the whales, monkeys and pigeons – comes to around 100 million tons.
How do you think that would have looked a bare two hundred years ago?
The environmental vandal and scourge of wildlife Trump has announced plans to slash the size of two of Utah’s most beautiful National Parks provoking fury from environmentalists, Native American tribes, conservationists and all decent people who care for natural beauty and wildlife.
The uncaring Trump called for the 1.3 million acre Bears Ears National Monument to be cut back to 228,784 acres split into two separate areas.
He also called for Grand Staircase Escalante Monument to be slashed by 50% to just under one million acres and split into three areas.
Both parks are in the dramatic Southern Utah red rock country and are places of outstanding beauty and ecological significance.
The changes will make way for oil and gas drilling, mining and other resource extraction activities in the beauty spot.
In Trump’s psychotic world the only thing that matters is profit and short-term gain. The long-term damage to nature, people or wildlife is of no consequence. He is happy to destroy swathes of the most wondrous wilderness if it puts money into his pocket. The oil and mining companies are having a field-day. They’ve been after getting their hands on America’s most wondrous National Parks for decades.
All those who support Trump and love nature must surely now see what a callous monster he is.
Destroying nature for profit is just the start of it. He is also relaxing environmental legislation so industry can pour out more pollution into the air and water; he is relaxing employment legislation so that workers lose rights and employers can make more profit; likewise with health and safety.
Great for the businessmen like him. They’ll stack away the Billions into their offshore tax havens. Terrible news for the wildlife, workers and all of us who appreciate nature.
This is what happens when you put an uncaring louse in charge!
Supporters of Trump should feel ashamed. You’ve given licence to a criminal; a man lacking in empathy who doesn’t give a hoot for ordinary people or the planet.
The 45% decline in invertebrates is catastrophic for the environment. Invertebrates form the basis of the food webs for most living organisms. Without invertebrates there is no food for our wild birds or mammals. Our soil is replenished by invertebrates. Our plants are pollinated by them. They are integral to all life on this planet.
The human population has become out of control.
Our use of pesticides has become suicidal.
Read about a Biologist’s witness accounts of what is happening around the world in his frightening book – Anthropocene Apocalypse at Amazon.
Ten thousand years ago Human Beings and all their livestock & pets made up 0.1% of mammalian life on this planet.
200 hundred years ago that had risen to around 11%
Now it is a staggering 97%!
– All the other wild mammals make up only 3% of the total mammal population! That is a disaster!
Read all about one man’s views on what is happening to the planet from the witness accounts of Biologist Opher Goodwin in his book Anthropocene Apocalypse – available at Amazon –
