Tony Eberts
What we can lose
By
Tony Eberts
As
we enter a new year, much of the media is still dominated by
the horror of the death of some 3,000 in the New York City and
Washington D.C. attacks. We naturally hope that 2002 will
bring nothing as awful.
But in this
brave, progressive new year, more than 25 million people will
die of disease and famine in a world capable of feeding and
caring for everyone, yet too caught up in the rush for profit
and power to actually do it.
The great
majority of those millions of deaths--a total so huge that
it's hard to visualize--are the result of the continuing
degradation of our world. The biggest killer by far is
contaminated water. But great numbers die in droughts and
famines caused by farming and grazing methods that erode soil
and bring desertification. Many more are killed by
chemical poisoning, toxic waste pollution, atomic radiation
and floods brought on by the clear-cutting of mountain
forests. Others are murdered because they try to fight against
the exploitation of their tribal lands or get in the way of
corrupt governments.
On average,
30,000 children die of these causes every day. Every day, a
death toll ten times greater than the Sept. 11 tragedy. It may
be that their surviving loved ones are just as devastated by
the deaths as the families of those killed in the collapse of
the Twin Towers.
When power
groups like the World Trade Organization stage their showcase
get-togethers and crack the heads of dissidents, they make
gestures toward helping the doomed millions. Then they get on
with wheeling and dealing to make the world safe for Wal-Mart.
We in the smug, fat West choose to believe that this is as it
should be, because we are no more willing to give up any of
our comforts than the industry is willing to reduce its
profits.
Although the
scientific evidence is clear that man's rampant consumption of
fossil fuels is a significant cause of global warming,
industry and its media shills still deny it and manage to
stall any major, concerted effort to reduce the pollution. And
that means our children or grandchildren face the cataclysmic
drowning of coastal cities all over the globe.
In the early
1960s a scientist named Rachel Carson managed to catch the
attention of the North American public with a book that told
of the deadly dangers of DDT and other pest-killing poisons
being spread in vast quantities over the land. For several
years "experts" hired by the chemical industry
denied the truths of Silent Spring and vilified its author.
But at last the evidence of the killing of both wildlife and
people grew so strong that governments banned the stuff.
But while DDT
and its ilk could no longer be made in the U.S.A. or Canada,
the chemical moguls simply spread their empires overseas,
where the toxic stuff is still peddled to Third World
countries. Large numbers of farm workers die each year of
pesticide poisoning.
What are we
doing about all this seemingly inevitable destruction and
death? Here in B.C. we have a government that has chopped
spending on environmental protection to the bone and beyond.
Every action is aimed at increasing exploitation of our
natural resources with little apparent thought beyond the next
election. Money rules.
That's our
happy new year. Can we live with it? More important, can our
children survive the future we seem to have accepted?
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