Extinctions, The Economy and American Politics - Part 1

PART 1

Extinctions are happening at an accelerated rate because of human activity. We are altering the biosphere so quickly that many species have neither the ability to flourish nor adapt. Examples range from deforestation by burning so that we can plant palm oil plantations across formerly virgin rainforest in Indonesia, to the burning of dirty coal in the U.S., Russia and China which leads to acid rain which in turn has killed off freshwater fish. In America, even where we have brought back the fish, as in the 25,667 km²  Lake Erie, the waters and bottom sediments remain so contaminated that governments suggest it's fish not be eaten, or if ingested, only in severely limited amounts. The single factor that distinguishes humans from the rest of life on earth is our ability to collectively alter the environment on a vast scale. Fish can’t change the acidity of lakes, and orangutans can’t burn forests to replant the land as a mono-culture, No other species alters the environment on such a scale or so capriciously.

It's up to all of us to both recognise the gravity of the issues we face and press our governments to cooperate and move forward to address these concerns, for they ultimately affect us all. The potential for catastrophe is growing year by year, such that an increasing number of reputable climatologists believe that we may be too late to avert mass extinctions. They call the present time the anthropocene, an era when the Earth's biosphere came to be dominated by a wildly reproducing species that so fouled its environment, that survival became impossible for most life. This crazy self-destructive species is us. The boldest of these scientists suggest that the anthropocene is ending, and that our end as the dominant species will be its closing act.

Since the advent of the modern era, humans again and again have developed technologies that enhanced our ability to survive. We are living longer and have much lower infant and child mortality than ever in history. As a result, our populations has exploded. Beneath the advances in food production, sanitation, medicine and housing that have led to this population bomb, is a vast infrastructure of finance, commerce, and governments. Of these governments, which once ruled, have become agents of finance and commerce with the militaries and policing functioning to direct, control and defend these structures and their raw materials.

All three of these areas are currently contributing to rapid climate change, and to date are resistant to solutions to the problems that population growth and associated infrastructures are creating. Finance benefits from agile and rapid distribution of money, and identifies as a "good" a continuous increase in consumption (a growing market), commerce identify increases in productivity  and adaptation to the needs and desires of a growing population as a primary “good.” Governments, by and large, identify the security of each of these elements, and a peaceable, growing population, steady growth in both finance and commerce, as well as the survival of its own institutions as primary “goods.”

To date, all three of these stakeholder of modern life have been resistant to change in response to ecological and climatological concerns. In the U.S., for example, the last wide ranging ecology protection legislation were passed in the 1970’s. Over time, the three most important acts, concerning clean air, clean water and toxic substances have come under continuous attack by finance and commerce, and have all suffered at the hands of de-regulators, especially after the propagandistic association of these laws and regulations with a set of false economic claims put forward during the Reagan administration (1981-1989).

Some pressure or force needs to develop for this slowly growing troika of forces to change, but barring a large scale catastrophe that will force the issue, it's likely that change will occur too late  to avoid large scale collapses of the biosphere. The only alternative agent of change is us, the citizens of the nation to act in defense of the biosphere.  But for this to happen, a decades long process of pacification needs to be upended, and a swift, decisive new definition of individual prerogatives and responsibilities needs to be quickly developed. Part of the issue preventing effective change  is that so many of us have been effectively disenfranchised, becoming consumers, rather than a responsible citizenry. A decades long decline in voting, the repeal of equal time regulations for broadcast media, journalistic acceptance of patently false and misleading electioneering claims, the programmatic diminution of news gathering abilities and resources by corporate owners,  has been coupled to legal and propaganda attacks on the Fourth Estate as a whole, just as its vulnerability to digital media was coming to the fore.

Cont. in Pt II.