History of Ecocide

History of Ecocide

 “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,”  George Orwell wrote as a preface to his novel, Animal Farm.

This is particularly true of the idea to make ecocide a crime which has been around since the 1950s. Ecocide was almost included as one of the international Crimes Against Peace alongside Genocide but dropped at the eleventh hour – probably due to the opposition of some governments. The only reference which remained inside the Crimes Against Peace is the mentioning of “widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment” as a War Crime (Rome Statute, Art 8, 2 b, iv) – creating the absurd situation that ecocide is nowadays a crime in war time but not during peace. We believe this must change and the below history illustrates that ecocide has been discussed by the academia as well as the relevant UN committees – all it needs is political will and a citizens movement to make it happen.

The first person to openly discuss ecocide was Professor Arthur Galston, the scientist whose research led to the invention of Agent Orange, the toxic which was to devastate Vietnam during its war. Speaking in Washington, D.C. in 1970 before the Conference on War and National Responsibility, he called for a new international agreement to ban ecocide which he defined as: “… devastation and destruction which aim at damaging or destroying the ecology of geographic areas to the detriment of all life, whether human, animal or plant.”

His voice found a kindred spirit in 1972, when Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme – addressing the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm (which established the UN Environment Programme, or UNEP) – cited the ongoing war in Vietnam as an “outrage sometimes described as ecocide”. Interestingly, Vietnam also introduced ecocide as domestic crime in 1990.

Only one year later, Richard Falk, Princeton University’s professor emeritus of international law, established that intent was basically irrelevant when it came to framing responsibility for environmental damage because most cases stemmed from another objective, be it profit or military advantage. This framework lent Falk’s 1973 Ecocide Convention draft policy even more authority and made it more effective internationally than the Genocide Convention would ever be.

By 1978, an official UN study proposed to add Ecocide to the Genocide Convention. The 1985 Whitaker Report came to the same conclusion, recommending that special attention should be given to ecocide, ethnocide, and cultural genocide when revising the Genocide Convention.

Research undertaken in 1988 by Canadian-Australian lawyer Mark Gray and published in 1996 established the legal basis for the proposed crime of ecocide by delivering the proof that the established principles of international environmental and human rights law support such a crime.

The 1993 draft of the Code of Crimes Against the Peace and Security of Mankind (precursor to the 1998 Rome Statute establishing the Crimes Against Peace) included a crime of ecocide. However, by the time the Rome Statute was adopted, ecocide had disappeared from the draft. Only three countries are on record as having opposed its inclusion; namely the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Reasons for this are unknown but there is a suspicion that nuclear arms were in the minds of those opposing the inclusion of the crime of ecocide.

So the four adopted Crimes Against Peace are: Crimes Against Humanity, Genocide, War Crimes, and Crimes of Aggression. The only remaining reference to ecocide is Article 8, 2, b, iv of the Rome Statute which refers to the “widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment” as war crime – however, given the AND (in contrary to our proposed OR definition) it has so far not been possible to prosecute anyone for this crime which is extremely difficult to prove.

In 2010, lawyer Polly Higgins took up the challenge and submitted her proposal to the UN Law Commission to include ecocide, the Missing 5th Crime Against Peace, into the Rome Statute.

In 2012, we, a group of EU citizens, took up the challenge to mobilise one million Europeans around the issue and to propose an ecocide law in Europe and beyond.

The law of ecocide is a law whose time has come. We can make it happen today, All it needs is political will. But politicians need to be pushed. And that’s why we need a citizens’ movement. Join us today by voting here, share this with your networks and get in touch if you want to get involved.

Dracha Arendee says:

    David Jakupca is an American Philosopher, Ambassador, Artist, Activist and Author. He serves both as an American Cultural Ambassador and Universal Peace Ambassador in International capacities. He is extremely influential through his works, especially as a philosophical advocate and practitioner of the environmental arts methods developing the Sustainable Age revolution.

    Jakupca with his wife, Renate, are the co-creators of the ‘Theory of Iceality on Environmental Arts’, aligning the vision with real-world social conditions and logistics. This work established and popularized inductive formulas for scientific inquiry, sometimes called the Iceality Method. His demand for a planned procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for the science of aesthetics, much of which surrounds conceptions of proper Environmental Art Methodology today.

    Jakupca has been recognized as the ‘Spiritual Father of the Environmental Arts Movement’ and in that capacity, several disciples of his work went on to spread the word on Iceality. His ideas were influential in the 1990′s among scholars like Jane Alexander, Chairwoman of the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), who in the ‘AMERICAN CANVAS’ Project frequently adheres to the Method of Iceality approach in its idealistic visions and entrepreneurial inquiries. Major organizations, in particular, the United Nations, featured his Theory on Iceality in many of their World Conferences. The result of this major global public promotion at the United Nations level is that the Theory of Iceality on Environmental Arts is now considered as the cornerstone of the modern sustainable global Environmental Art Movement, and this concept is now replicated by artists, architects, urban planners and sustainable organizations throughout the World, reflecting a still growing global audience. However, it must be noted that not all of Jakupca’s contemporaries did accept the new theory at once.

    David Jakupca is also considered to be the philosophical influence behind the dawning of the millenniums Sustainable Age. In his works, David Jakupca called for a development of avant-garde trilateral symmetry of social systems to align his vision with real-world social conditions and logistics that contend with the problems facing earth’s future. He always proposed that these environment/humanitarian/cultural systems should be done in conjunction with charitable purposes as a matter of healing this planet. Recalling Einstein’s admonition, paraphrased here, that a problem cannot be solved by the same thinking that created the problem in the first place, Jakupca, being ever mindful of the ecospheric integrity, advocated that the Environmental Arts should be practical and have as a holistic purpose the improvement of all living things.

    This changed the course of art in history, from a merely contemplative state, as it was found in ancient times, to a practical, inventive modern state that will, it time, continue to lead to the new Methods of Iceality that will help prevent Ecocide and make possible a Sustainable Age, a Culture of Peace for all Living Things in the following centuries.

    Although much of these Methods of Iceality proposals will not be established in his lifetime, his legacy was already considered by TIME Magazine, in their 2000 Millennium Edition, as one of their Heroes of the Planet.

endecocide.eu

Vivienne Westwood is Right

 
Vivienne Westwood is Right:

 we need a law against ecocide

by Charles Eisenstein

The economic and legal system rewards corporations that bulldoze, stripmine and burn. A new law against ecocide could halt this destruction..

 Designer Vivienne Westwood in Brussels in 2011. She has spoken out in favour of a new law against ecocide. Photograph: Francois Lenoir/Reuters

Designer Vivienne Westwood expressed anguish and alarm at the worsening state of the planet, at a press conference yesterday. "The acceleration of death and destruction is unimaginable," she said, "and it's happening quicker and quicker."

Speaking in support of the European Citizens' Initiative to End Ecocide, her words echo a growing sentiment that we have to do something. One thing we can do is to enshrine the sanctity of the biosphere in law.

That ecocide – the destruction of ecosystems – is even a concept bespeaks a momentous change in industrial civilisation's relationship to the planet. To kill something, like Earth, presupposes that it is even alive in the first place. Today we are beginning to see the planet and all its subsystems as beings deserving of life, and no longer mere resource piles and waste dumps. As the realisation grows that we are part of an interdependent, living planet, concepts such as "rights of nature" and "law of ecocide" will become common sense.

Unfortunately, we live in an economic and legal system that contradicts that realisation. With legal impunity and at great profit, corporations bulldoze and cut, frack and drill, stripmine and burn, wreaking ecocide at every turn. It is tempting to blame corporate greed for these horrors, but what do we expect in a legal and economic system that condones and rewards them? Besides, all of us (in industrial society at least) are complicit. That's why we need a law of ecocide: a concrete emblem of the growing consensus that this must stop.

In moral terms the matter is clear, but what about economic terms? Is ending ecocide practical? Is it affordable? The economic objection implies, "Yes, we should stop killing the planet – but not now. We have to wait till the economy improves and we can afford it." Is this to say that we must accelerate our headlong depletion of natural capital in order that, in some mythical future, we will be rich enough to restore it? Does anyone really believe that we should preserve a living planet only if it doesn't disrupt business-as-usual?

The unvarnished truth that environmentalists might not like to admit is that a law of ecocide would hurt the economy as we know it, which depends on an ever-growing volume of goods and services, increased consumption so demand can keep pace with rising productivity at full employment. Today, that requires stripping more and more minerals, timber, fish, oil, gas, and so on from the Earth, with the inevitable loss of habitats, species, and ultimately the health and viability of the entire biosphere.

Changing that is no trivial matter. What about the estimated 500,000 jobs to be created by the ecologically devastating Albertan tar sands exploitation? We need to change our economic system so that employment needn't depend on participating in the conversion of nature into product. We will have to pay people to do things that do not generate goods and services as we know them today – to replant forests, for example, instead of clearcutting them; to restore wetlands instead of developing them. Every facet of modern life contributes to ecocide; we should expect, then, that every aspect of life will change in the post-ecocidal era.

It is more accurate to say that, instead of hurting the economy, a law of ecocide would transform the economy. It is part of a transition to an economy with less throwaway stuff, and more things made with great care, more bikes and fewer cars, more gardens and fewer supermarkets, more leisure and less production, more recycling and fewer landfills, more sharing and less owning.

What about the argument that if Europe criminalised ecocide, it would be put at a competitive disadvantage with countries that allow it? It is often the case that the rapid stripping of natural capital brings high short-term profits.

How can sustainably harvested lumber from one place compete with cheap, clearcut lumber from another? It can't – unless the principle of ending ecocide is also written into international trade agreements and tariff policies. Sadly, international trade agreements under negotiation today, such as the Transpacific Trade Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TPIP), threaten to do the opposite: corporations could have ecocide laws invalidated as barriers to trade.

We need to reverse that trend. A European anti-ecocide law would establish a new moral and legal basis for a global consensus to end ecocide and preserve the planet for future generations. Even if the law isn't enacted immediately, the initiative puts the idea on the radar screen. Sooner or later, such a law is coming, and far-sighted businesses that anticipate the changes it will bring will thrive in the long run, even if that requires difficult short-term transitions.

The European ecocide initiative has so far been signed by about 100,000 people – far short of the one million threshold required to compel the European Commission to consider it formally. Will future generations look back from a ruined planet and wonder why only 0.02% of Europeans exercised their democratic rights to stop ecocide? We can do better than that.

Charles Eisenstein is a speaker and writer focusing on themes of civilisation and human cultural evolution.

Source: theguardian.com

Fear of a Living Planet

Fear of a Living Planet

Charles Eisenstein

Does the concept of a living planet uplift and inspire you, or is it a disturbing example of woo-woo nonsense that distracts us from practical, science-based policies? The scientifically-oriented nuts-and-bolts environmental or social activist will roll her eyes upon hearing phrases like “The planet is a living being.” From there it is a short step to sentiments like, “Love will heal the world,” “What we need most is a shift in consciousness,” and “Let’s get in touch with our indigenous soul.” What’s wrong with such ideas? The skeptics make a potent argument. Not only are these ideas delusional, they say, but to voice them is a strategic error that opens environmentalism to accusations of flakiness. By invoking unscientific concepts, by prattling on about the ‘heart’ or spirit or the sacred, we will be dismissed as naive, fuzzy-headed, irrational, hysterical, over-emotional hippies. What we need, they say, is more data, more logic, more numbers, better arguments, and more practical solutions framed in language acceptable to policy-makers and the public. I think that argument is mistaken. By shying away from the idea of

a living planet, we rob environmentalism of its authentic motive force, engender paralysis rather than action, and implicitly endorse the worldview that enables our destruction of the planet.

The Psychology of Contempt....

To see that, let’s start by observing that the objection to “Earth is alive” isn’t primarily a scientific objection. After all, science can easily affirm or deny Earth’s aliveness depending on what definition of life is being used. No, we are dealing with an emotional perception here, one that goes beyond ‘alive’ to affirm that Earth is sentient, conscious, even sacred. That is what upsets the critics. Furthermore, the derisiveness of the criticism, encoded in words like ‘hippie’ or ‘flake,’ also shows that more than an intellectual difference of opinion is at stake. Usually, derision comes from insecurity or fear. “Judgment,” says Marshall Rosenberg, “is the tragic expression of an unmet need.” What are they afraid of? (And I—the voice of the derisive critic lives in me as well.) Could it be that the contempt comes in part from a fear that one is, oneself, ‘naive, irrational and over-emotional?’ Could the target of the derision be the projection of an insecurity lurking within? Is there a part of ourselves that we disown and project, in distorted form, onto others—an innocent, trusting, childlike part? A feminine part? A vulnerable part? If so, then critics of the infiltration of New Age ideas into the environmental movement may not be serving the movement at all.

They may be enacting their own psychological dramas instead. If you are one of those critics, I am not asking you to join hands with me and sing Kumbaya. I ask only that you soberly and honestly consider where your discomfort comes from. Certainly, much of the discomfort is a healthy revulsion toward the escapism, spiritual bypass, and cultural appropriation that plague so much of the New Age. Certainly, there is a danger that, intoxicated by the idea of cosmic purpose or some-such, we ignore the pain and grief that we must integrate if we are to act effectively and courageously. Certainly, dogma like “It’s all good” or “We’re all one” can blind us to the exigency of the planetary crisis and discourage us from making changes in our lives. Certainly, borrowed rituals and concepts of sacredness can be an insidious form of colonialism, a strip-mining of cultural treasure to compensate for and enable the continuation of our own cultural vacuity. However, such criticisms address a mere caricature of the thoughtful work of generations of philosophers, scientists and spiritual teachers, who have framed sophisticated alternatives to conventional phenomenological, ontological and causal narratives.

 Phew, that was a mouthful. What I’m saying is not to hide behind facile criticisms. The fear of being emotional, irrational, hysterical, etc. is very close to a fear of the inner feminine, and the exclusion of the fuzzy, the ill-defined, and the emotionally-perceived dimensions of our activism in favor of the linear, rational, and evidence-based, mirrors the domination over and marginalization of the feminine from our social choice-making. Part of our resistance to the notion of Earth as a living being could be the patriarchal mind feeling threatened by feminine ways of knowing and choosing. But that’s still pretty theoretical, so let me share a little of my own introspection. When I apprehend concepts such as “Earth is alive,” or “All things are sacred,” or “The universe and everything in it bears sentience, purpose and life,” there is always an emotion involved; in no case is my rejection or acceptance. Either I embrace them with a feeling of eager, tender hope, or I reject them with a feeling of wariness, along the lines of “It is too good to be true,” or “I’m nobody’s fool.” Sometimes, beyond wariness, I feel a hot flash of anger, as if I had been violated or betrayed. Why? That wariness is deeply connected to the contempt I’ve described. The derision of the cynic comes from a wound of crushed idealism and betrayed hopes. We received it on a cultural level when the Age of Aquarius morphed into the Age of Ronald Reagan, and on an individual level as well when our childish perception of a living, personal universe in which we are destined to grow into magnificent creators gave way to an adulthood of deferred dreams and lowered expectations. Anything that exposes this wound will trigger our protective instincts. One such protection is cynicism, which rejects and derides as foolish, naive or irrational anything that affirms the magic and idealism of youth.

Our perceived worldview has cut us off, often quite brutally, from intimate connection with the rest of life and with the rest of matter. The child hugs a tree and thinks it feels the hug and imagines the tree is his friend, only to learn that no, I’m sorry, the tree is just a bunch of woody cells with no central nervous system and therefore cannot possibly have the qualities of beingness that humans have. The child imagines that just as she looks out on the world, the world looks back at her, only to learn that no, I’m sorry, the world consists of a jumble of insensate stuff, a random melee of subatomic particles, and that intelligence and purpose reside in human beings alone. Science (as we have known it) renders us alone in an alien universe. At the same time, it crowns us as its lords and masters, for if sentience and purpose inhere in us alone, there is nothing stopping us from engineering the world as we see fit. There is no desire to listen for, no larger process to participate in, no consciousness to respect.

“The Earth isn’t really alive” is part of that ideological cutoff. Isn’t that the same cutoff that enables us to despoil the planet? The wounded child interjects, “But what if it is true? What if the universe really is just as science describes?” What if, as the biologist Jacques Monod put it, we are alone in “an alien world. A world that is deaf to man’s music, just as indifferent to his hopes as to his suffering or his crimes.” Such is the wail of the separate self. It is loneliness and separation disguised as an empirical question. While no amount of evidence can prove it false, we must acknowledge that the science that militates against an intelligent, purposeful, living universe is ideologically freighted and culturally bound. Witness the hostility of institutional science to any anomalous data or unorthodox theory that suggest purposiveness or intelligence as a property of inanimate matter. Water memory, adaptive mutation, crop circles, morphic fields, psi phenomena, UFOs, plant communication, precognitive dreams…and a living Earth, a living sun, a living universe, all incite scorn. Anyone who believes in these, or even takes them as a valid topic of investigation, risks the usual epithets of ‘pseudo-scientist,’ ‘flake,’ or ‘woo-woo,’ regardless of the merits of the theory or the strength of the evidence. Of course, simply by making this assertion I open myself to the very same calumny. You can conveniently dismiss me as irrational, scientifically semi-literate, gullible at best and delusional at worst, perhaps knowingly dishonest, bamboozling my audience with learned allusions to impart an illusion of scientific probity to my ravings. But if you really care about this Earth, you’ll want to be curious about the emotional content of this judgment. What hides behind the contempt? The reactivity? What Moves the Environmentalist?  Our discomfort with New Age-sounding concepts like “The planet is alive” is not entirely rational, but comes in large part from a wound of betrayal, cloaked in the pervasive ideology of our culture. Is it true though? We might play with various definitions of life and come up with logical, evidence-based arguments pro and con, just as we could debate the veracity of anomalous data and unconventional theories, and never come to an agreement.  So let us look at the matter through a strategic lens instead. What belief motivates effective action and real change? And what kind of action results from each belief? Most people reading this probably consider themselves to be environmentalists; certainly most people think it is important to create a society that leaves a livable planet to future generations. What is it, exactly, that makes us into environmentalists? If we answer that, we might know how to turn others into environmentalists as well, and to deepen the commitment of those who already identify as such. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t become an environmentalist because someone made a rational argument that convinced me that the planet was in danger. I became an environmentalist out of love and pain: love for the world and its beauty and the grief of seeing it destroyed. It was only because I was in touch with these feelings that I had the ears to listen to evidence and reason and the eyes to see what is happening to our world. I believe that this love and this grief are latent in every human being. When they awaken, that person becomes an environmentalist. Now, I am not saying that a rational, evidence-based analysis of the situation and possible solutions is unimportant. It’s just that it will be compelling only with the animating spirit of reverence for our planet, born of the felt connection to the beauty and pain around us.  

charleseisenstein.net

2013: Hope or Despair?

2013: Hope or Despair?

Charles Eisenstein

Was the year 2013 a cause for hope or a cause for despair? Were the positive developments signs that the world is turning the corner? Or were they delusionary exceptions to the downward spiral into tyranny and ecocide?

The case for pessimism is hard to refute. We have the good news, like outbreaks of people power in Turkey, in Brazil, in Thailand and the Ukraine, juxtaposed against the collossal disappointment of the Arab Spring to bring economic, social, or political justice to the Mideast, as Egypt slips back into dictatorship, Bahrain further into autocracy, and Libya into chaos.

We have the good news – for the first time, solar and wind power have reached grid parity with fossil fuels – paired with record demand for oil and the vast expansion of fracking and tar sands exploitation, as CO2 levels topped 400 ppm for the first time and the Warsaw climate talks imploded.

    We have a rennaissance of cooperative economics in southern Europe, even as austerity deepens, youth unemployment hovers near 50%, pensions are cut, and professionals flee.

We have a rennaissance of cooperative economics in southern Europe, even as austerity deepens, youth unemployment hovers near 50%, pensions are cut, and professionals flee.

In the United States, the moribund labor movement shows signs of life with strikes at Wal-Mart and McDonalds, while at the top of the pyramid, the rich get richer and Wall Street perpetrates on even greater scale the same kinds of abuses that precipitated the 2008 crisis.

Uruguay, Colorado, and Washington state legalized marijuana in 2013, yet the militarization of police forces reached new levels. Edward Snowden exposed the surveillance state to the public, yet the capability of governments to monitor people continued to grow.

    Sometimes the positive developments look like pinpricks of light under a blanket of darkness.

Sometimes the positive developments look like pinpricks of light under a blanket of darkness. The points of light are tiny in comparison to the injustice and the ecocide. Let us not delude ourselves: Nothing substantive has really changed. The environment continues to degrade. The ocean grows more acidic. Drought spreads across the globe. Life dwindles in the oceans. Military spending increases the world over. Fukushima keeps leaking. Concentration of wealth intensifies.

The points of light, however, are not merely temporary exceptions to a negative trend, isolated bits of good news. Many of them signify a deep and ongoing tectonic shift in the psychic and ideological foundations of our culture that, while it has yet to substantially manifest in our systems and institutions, portends vast, nearly unimaginable changes in coming decades. That is why, unreasonably, these pinpricks of light inspire such hope within us.

Here are a few examples. Cannibis legalization might seem a drop in the bucket compared to the vast systemic injustice that pervades the United States and the world, but here is what it portends: (1) the demise of the ecologically destructive cotton and wood pulp monopoly for fiber and paper, as industrial hemp comes back; (2) the social acceptance of altered states of consciousness that, unlike those offered by caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol, tend to accompany withdrawal from a violence-based, hurried, linear, machine society; (3) the acceptance of herbal medicine – cannabis, the first herb in a century to enjoy widespread medical use, might be a “gateway herb” at a time when conventional medicine is failing to address so many chronic conditions.

Second, consider marriage equality for gay people. The cynic might doubt whether this victory for a relatively privileged group of North Americans, with no disruption to business as usual, really deserves so much more attention than, say, ending human trafficking or sweatshop labor or water privatization or predatory lending. It is no accident, say the cynics, that the powers-that-be have channeled reformist energy into this relatively innocuous arena. I beg to differ, because gay rights is an outcropping of a deeper vein of principle that holds all human beings equally deserving of every right. Social acceptance of gay marriage marks a

momentous retreat from the “othering” of people who are different from oneself – and this othering is the basis of war, punishment-based “justice,” discrimination, and to a large degree, economic exploitation.

A final example: For the first time I can remember, in 2013 public pressure averted American involvement in a war (Syria); it also reversed the trajectory to war with Iran. Insignificant, perhaps, in the context of unabated drone strikes, conflict in Afghanistan, and military bases around the globe, but rather than see Syria as an exception that proves the rule, we might see it as the start of a new trend. It foretells the end of the age of conquering the enemy, a time in which we know we are, as the Black Eyed Peas song puts it, “one tribe, one world, one people.”

Could we be seeing the next stage in the obsolescence of war, that began when the hydrogen bomb made total war between the great powers unthinkable? Could it be that the ecological crisis is making concepts of “America’s adversaries” ring hollow and obsolete? Could it be, as the $15 minimum wage movement and European unconditional basic income movement suggest, that we are beginning to assert the right of every person to be free of material want? Could it be that the rights of nature, as written into law in Ecuador and Bolivia and the subject of Europe’s ecocide initiative, are becoming as self-evident as the rights of man?

Of course, none of these possibilities are original to the year 2013. My point in illuminating them is that we treat these positive developments as harbingers of the future, and stand firmly in the energy of their possibility. They are not distractions from despair’s version of reality; they are heralds of a more beautiful world. As we move into 2014, let us ask, If these are possible, what else is possible?

charleseisenstein.net

The Point of No Return

 

At The Point of No Return

by Julian Rose

The wrong people are in charge… that’s pretty obvious. But what is not so obvious is how they got there? And once having found an open gate, why have we left them to graze the best pastures while we grovel around in the barren fallow?

A very strange phenomenon..

This World is run by those of whom the great majority have absolutely no qualifications to be at the helm of anything – not even a small rowing boat. Yet, somehow or other, there they are perched in their palaces, surveying their empires – while simultaneously engaging in the systematic degradation of planet Earth.

Doesn’t matter whether they are generals, headmasters, corporate executives, CEO’s of banks, media moguls, ministers or prime ministers or just about any big bosses – they have the distinction of all acting in unison. While by contrast, the great majority of intelligent and able bodied citizens of this planet, only manage to act – or react – in sporadic and discordant bursts; if at all.

The current controlling masters – and it hasn’t changed much over many centuries – have a commonality of intent: to extract the last ounces of profit and prestige from any and all assets and opportunities that fall into their grasp.

Yet even that isn’t enough for some of them. Profits get a bit boring when they come in the tens of millions year after year and one has occupied the prime suite at Claridges for the past six months. No, there always needs to be just one more thing that can be ‘owned’ and brought under control, so as to satisfy the false agrandissement that is part and parcel of an endless and ultimately fruitless attempt to become omnipotent and untouchable by ordinary mortals.

Such is the aphrodisiac called ‘power’.

Time and again, those who suffer most from a sense of being inwardly dispossessed are the very ones to seek, as compensation, the maximum level of outer possessiveness. And this is the mechanism whereby the wrong people get to be in charge.

Ironically, many who do not suffer such delusional power urges, are quite happy to just tick along fulfilling their aspirations and daily needs as best they can. Yet in doing so, they unwittingly allow the megalomaniacs a direct route to the seats of power.

Those who are secure enough in themselves to take a responsible attitude towards the life around them, seldom come forward to take-on positions of authority and civil responsibility. Their preference is to leave it to others – and in too many cases these ‘others’ often harbour barely disguised ulterior motives.

Yet we look on, aghast, as our world is torn apart by duelling crooks and madmen, each more desperate than the other for the top job in the race for planetary ecocide. Each more desperate than the other to fill any power vacuum that might emerge. Each more desperate than the other to hold a cosh over the disinterested daily workers who struggle on, trying not to notice how bad it’s got..

Where do you belong in this mad scrum?

The wrong people are in charge and the right people don’t want to bother themselves unduly to do anything about it. That just about sums-up the dire state of our post industrial ‘civilisation’. Something has to give..

The question is what?

Will a critical mass of the 99% finally finally act to bring back some genuine self autonomy through wresting control from the 1%?

Or will the 1% finally complete their annihilation job, trashing our planetary assets and crushing our human propensities once and of all? That is the question..

But none of us are free to sit back and play at second guessing the outcome. We are all in there. We are part of the pack. Our every move, whether we see it or not, is either promoting or resisting the despot’s master plan. There is no such thing as being ‘in between’ in this game. The fence you once sat on is broken. The wires are hanging limp. There is no no-man’s-land left to hide in.

At some point soon, those who are fit to lead must take over from those who unfit. It may be a bloodless coup – or it may be a bloody insurrection. One way or another, the shift has to happen.

Forget about Divine intervention. There will be no Divine intervention unless and until there is a very visible human determination already out of the starting blocks and heading for the finishing line. Only then is it possible that higher energies will join the race to bring justice back to this battered World.

We are approaching the point of no return. If we don’t respond to the myriad calls for help that are echoing around this World at an ever increased velocity each day, then we will be condemning ourselves – and those who call upon us – to being forever stranded upon a desolate and barren shore.

That help starts with helping each other to break free from our learned and self induced state of fear and pacifism. A combination that pretty much guarantees an unwillingness to act. An unwillingness to act even when presented with the choice of participating in a mass genocide or opposing it.

I use the word ‘pacifism’ here to convey a ‘state of withdrawal’ in face of the need to act. I do not refer to the choice, which everybody has, to refrain from violence. These are two very different conditions. In this context, taking the decision not to act with violence – is an action. Taking no decision, but simply retreating into a shell – is not.

This unwillingness to act is giving voice to the notion that ‘no action’ is the spiritual choice of the knowing. That to retire into a cul-de-sac of meditation and inward looking self examination can ‘change the world’ by dint of a shifted value focus. Can serve to hermetically seal the self away from the trials and tribulations of the outer world and thereby help avoid any confrontation with that which demands a full and spontaneous response.

Confrontation, in this view, is a negative, reactionary manifestation that undermines ‘peace’ and the supposed tranquility of a chimeric world which takes over from rational observations and becomes the new reality. A ‘virtual reality’.

This is a deeply flawed and dangerous ethos. For it splits in half that which is whole and sets the two halves in opposition to each other.

We are ‘of nature’ not above or outside it. We go forth and we return. That is the Tao. Universal forces all dance to this tune. Breath, ocean waves, cycles of birth and death, growth and decay, all is in motion and at rest, all the time. There is no contradiction.

Outward action and inward contemplation are two halves of one whole. They are synonymous. One should move between the two constantly and joyously.

 “When injustice become law, resistance becomes duty”

Well, injustice has become law – yet resistance remains doggedly muted and the search for an escape route remains the preferred option.

Cultivate spirit, wisdom and deep awareness – yes. Yet not as an alternative to toppling our oppressors from their corporate thrones, but as part of it.

Don’t be fooled. There is a war on. We are all called to the front. Just as the white corpuscles of our bodies are fighting off attempts by the pathogens to take hold – all the time. We should be doing the same – all the time.

Everyday we should be conjuring-up and putting into affect actions to end the draconian government/corporate dictatorship that continues to herd great swathes of humanity ever faster towards a sheer and genocidal cliff.

We can have no ‘peace’ until the criminals at the master control consulate are ejected from their padded leather chairs and are forced to confront the true price of their obscene power games.

Peace – and enlightenment, at the individual level, is only possible if we are engaged in this battle.

The battle to rid both ourselves and this planet of that which seeks to dominate and destroy the true well-spring of life.

The road to victory also requires the wise and aware to form a council of responsible oversight to step-in to the void once the despots are dethroned. That is an essential ingredient of any uprising determined to manifest genuine justice.

The lessons of history teach that fickle rebellion simply replaces one bunch of power predators with another. That is no longer an option; we are now at the point of no return. This time we have to get it right.

Julian is a committed international activist, writer, farmer and actor. He is an early pioneer of UK organic farming methods and is currently involved in the front line of efforts to keep Poland free from genetically modified organisms. His latest book “In Defence of Life – a Radical Reworking of Green Wisdom” is available at Amazon or can be requested on www.julianrose.info

changingcourseforlife

End Ecocide

Ecology Is the Meaning of Life

By Dr. Glen Barry

Naturally evolved ecosystems are marvels that make Earth habitable, yet sadly they and all life are threatened

Ultimately, all humanity and all life have is the biosphere, the thin layer of life just above and below Earth’s surface, composed of ancient, miraculously evolved natural ecosystems. The natural Earth is a marvel – a complex coupling of species within ecosystems, whereby life begets life.

Ecology is far more than the study of life and its environment. The word is used here as a synonym for ecosystems – the vibrant connections that emerge between species across scales, which cumulatively make life on Earth possible.

Nature is far, far more than pretty plants and animals. Ecosystems make Earth habitable, providing water, food, air, shelter, and more – everything that we need and desire to live well. In naturally evolved ecosystems, from genes to individual organisms and species, to ecosystems and everything else in between, each living being present fulfills a niche which sustains itself, its neighbors, and the whole.

All species uniquely express evolutionary brilliance and have a purpose, a reason for being, a right to exist, and are necessary to maintain life’s full potential. From the lowly worm to soaring eagles, to the human race – all naturally evolved life has value and relies upon all the rest. Even seemingly noxious disease organisms and man-eating predators have a role to play in maintaining ecological balance.

The Earth as a whole is a living organism, similar biologically to a cell, plant, animal, or ecosystem. Without large intact ecosystems, Earth becomes uninhabitable. Yet sadly, she is being murdered by industrial human growth at the expense of ecosystems. Past certain planetary boundary conditions, like any life, Earth can die.

The vibrant mélange of life found in natural ecosystems is godlike in its all-embracing nurturing. Ecology is the meaning of life.

Ecosystem Collapse

Humankind’s demand for resources and growth overwhelms nature, our steady diminishment of ecosystems abruptly changes climate, and this is collapsing the

biosphere. Global ecosystems – water, air, food, forests, oceans, wetlands, and more – are collapsing and dying under the burden of human industrial and population growth.

Human destruction of natural ecosystems and disintegrating climatic integrity are already past critical thresholds. Humanity (meaning each of us) can’t dump filth into air, defecate into water, kill and diminish natural vegetation, plunder oceans, and expect a habitable Earth and decent lives. Abrupt climate change is indicative of much broader decline, both ecological and social – habitat loss, water shortages, inequitable overconsumption, dead oceans, nationalistic injustice, and industrial agriculture – that threatens life itself.

Comforts of modern life for some come at the expense of utterly decimating natural ecosystems required to sustain life; such comforts cannot last. Mass chaos and death are sure to ensue. No one will survive abrupt climate change, ecosystem loss, and biosphere collapse.

Ecosystems are being wantonly liquidated based upon the myth that we can grow forever. Yet we know perpetual exponential economic growth is impossible on a finite planet. Humanity is systematically dismantling Earth’s environmental life support systems, and at most a few more decades of industrial growth will be inevitably followed by ecosystem and biosphere collapse.

The human family is epically failing to protect and restore ecosystems and reduce greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to avert global ecosystem collapse, achieve ecological sustainability, and enjoy universal well-being forever. The brutal manner in which humankind treats Earth, other species, and each other makes a mockery of claims of being civilized. At our worst, we have become out-of-control vermin destroying our own habitat for momentary pleasure.

The human family is in ecological overshoot, having exceeded Earth’s carrying capacity, and is pulling down all species and the biosphere with us, as Earth’s life collapses into nothingness. There is no easy way out, as together we face an end to ecology, and thus life itself.

Sustainability Solutions Exist

Workable solutions to climate change and broad-based environmental decline exist; they include ending fossil fuels, protecting and restoring ecosystems, agro-ecological food production, reducing population and inequity, and establishing a steady state economy. Plainly, however, such a transition is not going to be easy. Solutions to avert global ecosystem collapse will be disruptive. Yet there is no alternative if together humanity is to survive and enjoy well-being within Earth’s ecological boundaries.

Industrial growth at the expense of ecosystems and climate must end as soon as possible. For human and all life’s survival and well-being, intact ecosystems must remain the context for human endeavors. Huge potential exists to further develop organic, permaculture based agro-ecological systems for growing our food. Ultimately, we are all challenged to create something of worth from our hands and minds working on the land, based upon regenerating and nurturing ecosystems, for our daily sustenance.

We each must nurture a sense of enoughness, realizing more isn’t always better, particularly if it undermines our natural habitat, and thus our ability to persist.

It is not too late to embrace an ecology ethic. But the longer we wait, the more limited our options. Despite pernicious trends in ecological decline – and allowing for the possibility of a deep resiliency to the Earth System of which we are unaware – out of love of life, we owe it to Earth, kindred species, and kids everywhere to try everything possible to save being.

Growth in industry, population, consumption, and inequity cannot be maintained. Together we must reach a steady state economy whereby natural capital is replenished, not diminished. Through measures like educating all girls and providing birth control to all, we must urgently pursue reductions in human population, the most basic human impact upon the climate and ecosystems, or the biosphere collapses.

Ignorance and superstition must be banished through education and promoting a love of truth, justice, knowledge, wisdom, and fairness.

For capitalism to have any future and avoid social, ecological, and economic collapse on a dead planet, it must learn to price external costs and environmental risk now, while

rejecting its obsession with growth as the ultimate measure of well-being. Otherwise industrial capitalism will have to be replaced soon just so most may survive, let alone thrive.

Alternatives exist that are fair and reward hard work, but sadly we find it easier to consider the end of life on Earth, rather than embrace essential social change.

For human survival and well-being, committing acts of ecocide that destroy ecosystems must somehow be made unacceptable, and this must be enforced. The environment movement must make more of an effort to communicate the complexity of ecological crises, their profound risk, and these and other sufficient solutions – while resolutely rejecting and outing greenwash that legitimates ecocidal activities.

The green movement must also move beyond awareness-raising stunts and build a broad-based movement to seize power and to implement the ecological policies necessary to sustain being.

Only total societal reorganization away from destroying ecosystems and burning fossil fuels can save Earth and humanity. Either humanity finds a way together to implement difficult ecological policies to end fossil fuels, protect ecosystems, and achieve a steady-state economy – or it is the end. No measures except indiscriminate terrorism targeting innocents can be off the table in efforts to together protect ecology.

Hope in Ecosystems

Today free your mind and senses to see ecology everywhere, in everything you do, and the myriad ways it suffers from human hubris, indifference, ignorance, and overuse. As long as together we still breathe, there is hope we can sustain Earth, but realistically the state of ecosystems and the biosphere is grim and worsening. We must start in haste, today, to build the world that is possible and needed.

Love of other peoples and species, nature, truth, justice, and equity are the only lasting basis of global ecological sustainability and show the only effective way forward to avoid final ecosystem collapse. For a sustainable, decent future we must go back to the land, stop burning fossil fuels, and nurture ecosystems and one another.

We are one human family with inalienable rights and duties to freedom, work, equity, peace, justice, and sustained ecology. Profound inequity, ecological collapse, persistent injustice, nationalistic perma-war, superstition, and ignorance when faced with truth – all are sicknesses that mar human potential and will prove fatal.

Together the human family either learns to live well together within intact ecosystems and without fossil fuels or faces a period of profound suffering, followed by biosphere collapse and the end of being. Together we could end the current system’s elite rule, inequity, injustice, and gross ecological negligence at any time. Either we act together soon, courageously, on the basis of truthful ecological knowledge, or else each of us alone faces misery and a final apocalyptic global ecological collapse.

Ecology is the meaning of life. Truth, justice, equity, and sustainability are the ideals whereby ecology can be maintained. Let’s make it so.

ecoearth.info