Sunday 30 March 2008

What are environmentalists fighting for?

"Those god dam hippies!

Stop crying! The world has been changing and dying every since it was born. Who do you think you are to have had such a 'great' impact on the planet?"


Is it really too late?

Do you think we are loosing our time for something we have no responsibility nor fault for?

Environmentalists and environmental bodies do not just exist to point at the grey fleck smothering the blue sky.

Caring and working for environmental causes is more than that.

It is about a burden called ‘responsibility’: aiming to mend the economy itself, culture, society and all beings, animals, humans and environment alike.

Ironically, many nations, in view of the Kyoto II, are frightened of submitting their greed in the name of our future.

Too many see the dilemma of climate change and industrialisation as a choice between one or the other, like oil in water.

These cannot be separate though, as the dilemma faces factors that are in fact components of one system. Economy cannot be alienated from climate, nor can the first be prioritised before the later.


Unless some nations are truly so egoist as to only aim for short term booming economies, it should be finally realised that slowing down will only save them [economies] from skidding dangerously off the racing track once resources inevitably finish, with no foundations left on which to rebuild.

Look at the whole setting from a rational ‘economist’ point of view, forgetting for the time being, that economists supposedly care only about capitalism;

One needs to take into account all needs that fuel and are produced for society.

Take the PPF (Production Possibility Frontier), which is a rationalised concept of allocating resources to achieve specific ratios of various products. Only a certain amount of all products can be produced in a matrix of proportions summing up to one.

If we focus more investment, territory and human resources on cultivating palms, then there will be less land to cultivate other agricultural products, animals and crops.

If, on the other hand, more land is used for growing animals, then there will be a shortage of palms and therefore of palm oil.

Industrialisation pushes the PPF limits upward, with less vital consumer goods, so those basic goods will become scarce and become more expensive than their intrinsic value.

Environmental bodies, I believe, are like an earthing stick, rooted deep in the earth, and by chipping away at governmental and industrial patience, pressuring them with seemingly ‘primitive emotional’ motivations, they tug at the rope of capitalisation, weighing it down from rocketing out of control.

But all that is asked for is the principle of respect toward ourselves, where we come from and where we live.

Respect to all things around us, because economies have not yet obtained a soul nor pain nerves.

Is cruelty to animals vital for our existence? It might be the fastest way of procuring whale and seal oil or fur coats. But with a minimum of integrity industries could go an extra mile and exploit in ways that would fruit economies and environment alike.

Why can governments not take the first step to reallocate lands and means to quell vacuoles painfully growing in the psychological and physical global reality?

Because: patience is not a virtue of humans and because consumerism reflects their very nature.

The most rational of all beings is driven to destroy the earth for irrational, useless greed for bulks of a life style which we do not need to survive; that in fact, will end up killing us.

It would be so easy for a country such as China(used as an example only for practical terms as it represents a huge work force and land territory) to dedicate all its resources into producing merely to export, hence becoming the richest economy of the world.

But there are needs for its people that include living standards.

These include a living space with breathable air, ambitions and ideals other than working in a factory, and culture by which to retain some form of ideological structure and identity.

Without agriculture, typical landscape and once basic utilities and products that characterised the average life of a Chinese (still using this nation only as an example), the person would loose every quality of life and China would have become a money-making machine where humans soon would not physically be able to breath the terrestrial air, nor remember their identity.

Inevitably this would culminate in a backlash.

So where do environmentalists come in?

To fight to maintain that underestimated balance between economy, industrialisation, culture and ‘life space’ for nature, animals and environment, without which we loose not only clean air, and wildlife, but our cultures, nations and identities.

All those 27 nations to pledge action against climate change and those yet ignoring this possibility, should get a reality check and ask them selves what they are gonna do:

Choose to go for the money race, running up into thin air, or, choose to stop and work to mend the soil they stand on.

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