June 27, 2000
Subject: Some victories to celebrate! --- UK's Iceland to bring organic food to mass market + Earth Stats + FINDHORN INITIATIVE TO RESTORE THE EARTH + AND THE FENCE CAME TUMBLING DOWN + Hamilton War Show Suffers Serious Setbacks --- AND the Continued Fight to Save the Amazon Rainforest: Crisis of the Amazon: An Overview by a Visiting Scientist
Hello everyone,
Here is the other compilation I have mentioned to you yesterday. It is good to read about such positive developments and yet there are many sobering facts (see Earth Stats and Crisis of the Amazon) that remind us how much there is still to heal on this fragile and yet so magnificent planet.
But as Ariel wrote "We, together, can make it different!"
Jean Hudon
Earth Rainbow Network Coordinator
http://www.cybernaute.com/earthconcert2000
and Focus Group Facilitator
http://refcities.com/focusgroup
A reminder: Peace shalls for UN in September: http://www.clothofmanycolors.com/
From: "AriEl" <ari_el@uswest.net>
Subject: Thank you
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000
Thank you for all the awesome emails I receive from you.
It is interesting that just the other day I was wondering about the
chlorine issue. Then I received your missive Miscellaneous Subjects #7.
Thank you for all the info. I commend you on your knack of putting the info
into the most enlightening positive aura. Some of the stuff you send is
pretty horrendous. But, you manage to transform the energy encouraging
people to view it in the light of "We, together, can make it different."
Peace,
AriEl
AND THANKS A LOT ARIEL FOR YOUR ENCOURAGING SUPPORT :-)
Jean
From: "The Campaign" <label@thecampaign.org>
Subject: Children's letters now available!
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2000
Dear Health Freedom Fighters,
The Campaign to Label Genetically Engineered Foods is pleased to announce we
have updated our popular web site. You will notice some revised navigation
buttons and added content. Other improvements are coming soon.
http://www.thecampaign.org/
CLIP
WITH THIS E-MAIL, I AM INCLUDING AN ARTICLE BELOW OF GREAT SIGNIFICANCE. It
is from Reuters news service and reports on a new initiative to promote
organic produce from the British supermarket chain Iceland. Iceland was the
first British supermarket chain to ban genetically engineered foods from
their stores. Iceland's effort against genetically engineered foods led the
marketplace in the United Kingdom and served as an example to the other
supermarket chains who soon followed Iceland's lead.
Now Iceland is making an unprecedented move to promote organic agriculture.
This effort could be the first major step in a worldwide movement towards
organic agriculture.
The biotech agriculture industry has attempted to promote genetically
engineered crops as a method to use less pesticides. However, research is
showing that genetically engineered crops still require nearly as much use
of pesticides as non-genetically engineered crops. Organic agriculture, on
the other hand, has the ability to completely eliminate the use of toxic
pesticides. Pests are controlled by methods non-toxic to humans and the
environment.
Because agriculture has employed the use of chemical pesticides for about 55
years, we have come to accept it as necessary to grow crops. Yet many of the
pesticides have been shown to cause cancer, birth defects and other serious
diseases. Perhaps we should be questioning not only the use of genetic
engineering, but also the use of all chemical pesticides. That appears to be
what Iceland is doing in the United Kingdom.
I am reminded of a quote by Revolutionary War hero Thomas Paine. In the
introduction to his famous work "Common Sense" he stated, "A long habit of
not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being
right." That seems to be the case with chemical agriculture.
From the beginning of time on planet earth to about 1945, virtually all
agriculture was organic agriculture. It was only after World War II that
farmers rapidly switched to chemical agriculture with the promise of the
"Green Revolution." Human history is likely to look back on the change from
organic agriculture to chemical agriculture after WWII as a giant mistake.
These chemical pesticides are responsible for polluting our water, land and
air. Millions of agricultural workers have been poisoned by them and they
have contributed to untold amounts of cancer and other deadly diseases.
Unfortunately, genetically engineered methods of agriculture have the
potential to be even more harmful than conventional chemical agriculture.
We are at a pivotal point in the history of agriculture. One path leads to
wide scale use of genetically engineered crops. Another path leads to a
future of sustainable organic agriculture. Let's hope that the action of the
Iceland supermarket chain will be an important step towards a global
rediscovery of the health and environmental advantages of organic
agriculture.
Craig Winters
Executive Director
The Campaign to Label Genetically Engineered Foods
The Campaign
PO Box 55699
Seattle, WA 98155
Tel: 425-771-4049
Fax: 603-825-5841
E-mail: mailto:label@thecampaign.org
Web Site: http://www.thecampaign.org
UK's Iceland to bring organic food to mass market
By Mian Ridge
LONDON, June 14 (Reuters) - British supermarket Iceland Group Plc said on
Wednesday it was investing nine million pounds ($13.58 million) in an
initiative to bring organic produce to customers at similar prices to other
food.
Iceland, the first supermarket chain to ban genetically modified food from
its stores, said it had secured nearly 40 percent of the world's organic
produce and set up long-term contracts with suppliers.
``This is the biggest move in the organic industry so far,'' said Chairman
Malcolm Walker in a statement. ``It is our aim to stop organics being a
niche market and make it accessible to all income groups.''
Iceland will start by switching its own-label frozen vegetables to organic
produce before converting a whole range of conventional foods.
Instead of hiking prices to secure profits it will reduce margins on organic
food to the tune of eight million pounds.
``This means the company will be able to sell organics at the same price as
ordinary supermarket own-label food, while ensuring customers and farmers
get the best deal,'' it said.
Kate Calvert, an analyst at HSBC bank said the move was part of Iceland's
brand repositioning strategy. The supermarket is seeking to distance itself
from its image as a purely frozen food retailer, in which will be helped
along by its merger with grocery wholesaler Booker Plc announced last month.
The deal with Booker is seen as a merger of complimentary businesses, which
will remain separate but reap some synergies. Booker is strong in
room-temperature foods.
ORGANIC DEMAND OUTSTRIPPING SUPPLY
Calvert said the success of Iceland's move into organic food depended upon
its handling of the supply-demand issue.
Iceland says the market for organic food is predicted to grow by 40 percent
per year for the next five years. With only three percent of British land
currently organic, demand for organic food would quickly grow to outstrip
supply.
In order to overcome short-term difficulties this would create, Iceland said
it would source 80 percent of its frozen vegetables from overseas, but it
would also invest one million pounds in the British National Trust's farming
programme to increase organic acreage in the UK.
``This is a big marketing push for Iceland,'' said Calvery. ``There is
potential for growth here, but in any case Iceland's competitors will follow
it into the mass market for organic food very fast.''
Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2000
From: Michelle Moreau <michelle@oneworldec.com>
Subject: Earth Stats
We all have a good challenge on our hands
Nabesse Pishum ( Tom Dostou )
---
By Donella H. Meadows
ENVIRONMENT
IF, in the 30 Earth Day celebrations since 1970, the human population and economy have become any more respectful of the Earth, the Earth hasn't noticed. Planets measure only physical things -- energy and materials and their flows into and out of the changing populations of living creatures.
What the Earth sees is that on the first Earth Day in 1970 there were 3.7 billion of those hyperactive critters called humans, and now there are more than 6 billion. In 1970 those humans drew from the Earth's crust 46 million barrels of oil every day -- now they draw 78 million.
Natural gas extraction has nearly tripled in 30 years, from 34 trillion cubic feet a year to 95 trillion. We mined 2.2 billion metric tons of coal in 1970; this year we'll mine about 3.8 billion.
The planet feels this fossil fuel use as the fuels are extracted (and spilled) and shipped (and spilled) and refined (generating toxins) and burned into numerous pollutants, including carbon dioxide, which traps outgoing energy and warms things up. Despite global conferences and brave promises, what the Earth notices is that human carbon emissions have increased from 3.9 million metric tons in 1970 to an estimated 6.4 million this year.
You would think that an unimaginably huge thing like a planet would not notice the 1 degree (Fahrenheit) warming it has experienced since 1970. But 1 degree is a big deal, especially since it is not spread evenly. The poles have warmed more than the equator, the winters more than the summers, the nights more than the days.
That means that temperature differences from one place to another have been changing much more than the average temperature has changed. Temperature differences are what make winds blow, rains rain, ocean currents flow.
ALL creatures, including humans, are exquisitely attuned to the weather. All creatures are noticing weather weirdness and trying to adjust, by moving, by fruiting earlier or migrating later, by building up whatever protections are possible against flood and drought. The Earth is reacting too, shrinking glaciers, splitting off nation-sized chunks of Antarctic ice sheet, enhancing the cycles we call El Nino and La Nina.
Since the first Earth Day our global vehicle population has swelled from 246 million to 730 million. Air traffic has gone up by a factor of six. The rate at which we grind up trees to make paper has doubled (to 200 million metric tons a year).
We coax from the soil, with the help of strange chemicals, 2.25 times as much wheat, 2.5 times as much corn, 2.2 times as much rice, almost twice as much sugar, almost four times as many soybeans as we did 30 years ago. We pull from the oceans almost twice as much fish.
With the fish, we can see clearly how the planet behaves when we push it too far. Fish become harder and harder to find. If they are caught before they're old enough to reproduce, if their nursery habitat is destroyed, if we scoop up not only the cod, but the capelin upon which the cod feeds, the fish may never come back. The Earth does not care that we didn't mean it, that we promise not to do it again, that we make nice gestures every Earth Day.
Die-hard optimists will berate me for not reporting the good news. But it is mostly measured in human terms, not Earth terms. Average human life expectancy has risen since 1970 from 58 to 66 years. Gross world product has more than doubled, from $16 trillion to $39 trillion. Recycling has increased, but so has trash generation, so the Earth receives more garbage than ever before. Wind and solar power generation have soared, but so have coal-fired, gas-fired and nuclear generation.
In 1970 there were no cell phones or video players. There was no Internet; there were no dot-coms. Nor was anyone infected with AIDS, of course, nor did we have to worry about genetic engineering. Third-World debt was one-eighth of what it is now.
All that is beneath the notice of the Earth. The Earth sees that its species are vanishing at a rate it hasn't seen in 65 million years.
That 40 percent of its agricultural soils have been degraded. That half its forests have disappeared and half its wetlands have been filled or drained, and that, despite Earth Day, all these trends are accelerating.
Earth Day is beginning to remind me of Mother's Day, a commercial occasion upon which you buy flowers for the person who, every other day of the year, cleans up after you. Guilt-assuaging. Trivializing. Actually dangerous. All mothers have their breaking points. Mother Earth does not soften hers with patience or forgiveness or sentimentality.
Donella H. Meadows is an adjunct professor at Dartmouth College and director of the Sustainability Institute in Hartland, Vt.
---
Let us be thankful for what we have achieved just the same. Imagine what the stats would be like if we had not put forth the effort that we have to save our planet and all that shares her with us. And to all those who are doing something about it, I applaude each and every one
of you. Now continue, lead by example and try harder.
Michelle
From: "Rory Winter" <rory@winter.greatxscape.net>
Subject: RESTORE THE EARTH INITIATIVE
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2000
http://www.egroups.com/group/GAIALINK and
http://www.delphi.com/GAIALINK in synergy with
http://www.world-action.com
FINDHORN INITIATIVE TO RESTORE THE EARTH
TREES FOR LIFE, an award-winning Scottish charity associated with the Findhorn Foundation, has launched an ambitious project to promote the ecological restoration of the Planet. Named simply RESTORE THE EARTH, it has written to every Head of Government in the world urging their co-operation in having the UN officially declare the 21st Century as the THE CENTURY OF RESTORING THE EARTH.
To that end, International Programme Officer, Dr Roger Doudna, has asked the leaders of all nations to agree to a simple declaration of support at this September's UN Millenium Summit in New York, prior to the Earth Summit +10 in South Africa in 2002.
Australian environmentalist, John Seed, one of a growing number of international figures and organizations enthusiastically endorsing the project, has dubbed it 'the Findhorn Initiative.'
One of its novel features is a request that each nation redirects 10% of its annual military expenditure, in cash or kind, to ecological restoration - whether planting trees, greening deserts or digging wells. "We have the will and increasing support for this project, and the need is imperative," says Dr Doudna. "What we require immediately are the resources, financial and otherwise, to make it happen."
Inquiries to Roger Doudna trees@findhorn.org or rdoudna@findhorn.org Website: http://www.restore-earth.org.uk
From POSITIVE NEWS, #24 Summer 2000, e-mail office@positivenews.org.uk website http://www.positivenews.org.uk
FOR THOSE WHO REMEMBER THE COURAGEOUS ACTIONS OF HUNDREDS OF WOMEN CIRCLING THIS MILITARY BASE IN THE UK TO PROTEST THE DEPLOYMENT OF CRUISE MISSILES THERE, THIS IS A VERY GOOD NEWS INDEED AND IT HERALDS THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE MILITARY AGE ON EARTH... REMEMBER THE END OF THE YELLOW SUBMARINE CARTOON MOVIE BY THE BEATLES WHEN THE MEANIES AND THE BADIES ARE IN FULL RETREAT AND THE FLOWERS ARE BLOOMING ONCE AGAIN? THIS IS IT!
ALL WE ARE SAYING IS...
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000
From: Antares <Antares2012@pd.jaring.my>
Subject: AND THE FENCE CAME TUMBLING DOWN
On April 8, 2000, a perfect sunny spring day, a dream became reality when the Greenham Common base was finally opened with an invitation to take down the nine mile fence surrounding it. There was a brass band playing, lots of dogs and children and many of the adults had boltcutters with them. It was a mixed crowd of local people of all ages, Greenham Women, camera crews and local dignitaries. Some of the people there had played on the Common in the 1930s before it was taken by the military and were in tears at seeing their childhood playground returned.
There were many ironies; the speeches before the ceremonial entry were all by men in suits with no mention of the women and the actual cutting of the Blue Gate was done by the leader of the Council with his chain of office round his neck. Worst of all, the Trident nuclear warhead convoy was on the road and women at the nearby Aldermaston Peace Camp were dashing from fence-cutting operations to monitor it.
However, nothing could deny the huge transformation that has been wrought at Greenham. 50 years of military occupation by the UK and the US has gone completely and the Common is coming back into its
natural state with cattle grazing, wildlife thriving and people walking at ease on the land. Resisting non-violently and non-hierarchically with love, creativity, humour and courage the
Greenham Common Women got what they really wanted: No Cruise Missiles and the land returned to the people. No housing estates or shopping malls -no continued military and nuclear presence- but 900 acres of glorious open heathland and woods.
Greenham Common will once again be a place for wildlife, the free grazing of cattle, picnics and play. It is planned to commemorate the Women's Peace Camps with a stone circle and garden outside the Main Gate.
Janet Bloomfield will take pieces of the Greenham Common fence to the Non-Proliferation Treaty in New York to give to the delegates to remind them that it is time to take all fences down at all the bases in the world. Tim Knock is producing a short film on the transformation of Greenham, available later this year. For further information contact: Janet Bloomfield, 25 Farmadine, Saffron Waldon,
Essex CB11 3HR or janet@atomicmirror.org
From POSITIVE NEWS, #24 Summer 2000, e-mail
office@positivenews.org.uk website
http://www.positivenews.org.uk
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000
From: Richard Sanders <ad207@freenet.carleton.ca>
Subject: Excellent article on opposition to Hamilton War Show
Hamilton War Show Suffers Serious Setbacks
In what has proven a significant weekend in the new effort to end the
26-year-old Hamilton War Show, a combination of nonviolent protest and
resultant traffic tie-ups on Saturday, June 17, and rain on Sunday, June
18, may prove too much for the financially unstable institution to continue
its annual homage to planes whose only purpose is mass murder from the air.
A testament to the seriousness with which the City of Hamilton treated the
protests was reflected in criminal charges and severe bail restrictions.
But by the time the last resister was released from jail at 3:30 pm on
Sunday, war show organizers were no doubt left wondering what the future
looked like considering two crucial factors: given that the Sunday is
usually a bigger turnout than the Saturday, a huge source of revenue was
lost through the rainout. In addition, the massive traffic jams on
Saturday, which were partly credited to the protests, caused numerous cars
to turn around, with drivers perhaps thinking Sunday might be a better try.
(Later, war show organizers admitted Saturday attendance was actually down
from last year, a sign attendees hoped to avoid the protests).
Even more important was the fact that, despite the usual catcalls and
verbal threats from the truly dedicated war show fans, thousands of
attendees were actually reading the flyers handed to them during their stay
in the traffic jam, and some engaged in dialogue with the clowns, grannies
and others who were eager to discuss their opposition to the exhibition.
For the first time, many of these folks had to consider why they
unquestioningly attended something innocently labeled family entertainment
each Fathers Day Weekend, to ask themselves how one family's entertainment
could represent another family's terror and tragedy.
The War Show, which goes by the friendly moniker "air show", features such
events as "Kiddie Commando", in which little children dress up as soldiers
in camouflage with face paint and play war on an obstacle course with real
soldiers sporting large water guns, "toy" grenades and military camouflage
and facepaint. It is one of the largest displays of aerial firepower each
summer in North America, with a range of criminal warplanes from the air
forces of Canada, the U.S. and U.K.
Following a year's worth of public education -- which began when five men
were charged for praying in front of the A-10 Thunderbolt (which fires
rounds of depleted-uranium-coated munitions, leaving a deadly radioactive
legacy behind) in June of 1999-as well as a string of attempts at public
dialogue with war show organizers, members of Homes not Bombs, Fathers Day
Coalition for Peace, and numerous other groups, including the Toronto
Catholic Worker, travelled from across Ontario to Hamilton this weekend to
protest the celebration of death from the air.
Rising at the painfully early hour of 5:45 am, over 100 resisters took
school buses and vans from downtown Hamilton to the airport, located in the
small township of Mount Hope. They then formed a parade down the two-lane
Airport Road, led by a large, beautiful bird of peace, huge puppets of
peace, and colourful banners with slogans such as "Warning: These Planes
Kill" and "Swords into Ploughshares." As the cars lined up to enter the
war show grounds, passengers were met by Clowns for Peace (whose banner
read: "Clowns for Peace Say War is Not OK!", by a stiltwalker who handed
out anti-war flyers, and individuals who held pictures of the human victims
and environmental damage caused by aerial bombardment, underlined with the
words: "This is what these planes do." "This could be your home that was
destroyed, this could be your sister who was killed, this is what these
planes are made for," the sign holders would calmly declare to passersby.
As demonstrators gathered at the four corners to the airport entrance and
cars lined up for close to a mile in both directions. The Festival of Life
included singing, poetry from Poets for Peace, satirical songs from the
Raging Grannies, fiddling, bubble blowing, hula hoops, and a theatrical
piece called "The Men Who Bring us War," featuring Ronald Reagan, Richard
Nixon, and current war criminal Bill Clinton.
Meanwhile the construction and distribution of paper origami cranes
continued in honour of Hiroshima victim Sadako Sasaki, and Clowns handed
out peace lollipops as a unicyclist road up and down the shoulder of the
road. A huge origami crane was festooned with ribbons as a memorial to all
victims of aerial bombardment.
Midway through the Festival of Life, as a die-in on the four corners was
planned, police actually aided people to do the die-in in the middle of the
road. As the names of a number of previously bombed cities were read out,
about 70 people "died" in the road and lay still for 10-15 minutes as two
people chalked the outlines of the bodies on the road.
Police had been informed that the die-in would end when the giant bird of
peace flew over the bodies and helped them rise. Perhaps thinking that a
die-in would only last 1-2 minutes, agitated police worrying about the
increasingly large traffic jam began demanding to know where "that damned
bird" was. As a lone voice beautifully sung out We Shall Overcome through a
microphone, the bird of peace gently flew over the bodies, helping them to
slowly rise, leaving behind the outlines of the bodies.
CLIP - To read the rest please ask a copy of the original from
Richard Sanders <ad207@freenet.carleton.ca>
From: Ricardo Ocampo <anahuak@webtelmex.net.mx>
The Academy For Future Science
Crisis of the Amazon: An Overview by a Visiting Scientist
by J.J. Hurtak, Ph.D., Ph.D.
ABSTRACT
Intimately coupled with the whole complex of environmentalism and sustainability is the Amazon rainforest. No other area of earth has been as much in the news and in our consciousness in the past few years. In terms of biological diversity, natural resource potential and ecological influence, this area of the world is one of the most significant. This is not to demean or belittle any other area, far from it. Rather, the highlighting of the Amazons in both its actual and symbolic significance for life on earth is to contribute to the greater understanding of the need to preserve all habitats, human and non-human. The awareness of the interconnectivity of all life and the consequences of this view serve to accentuate the need for rethinking our relationship between our own activities and the world around us.
-------
Over the past twenty years, the fight has been on to save the Amazon and to protect its Indian lands. Pertinent in this struggle is the construction of the last sector of the BR-364 Road which would give the general population, as well as the timber industry, increased access to the Amazon and its wild resources.
Some of the greatest environmental and geological studies of the Amazon Basin to date have not been made from the ground but through the use of remote-sensing technology. Many specialists have long recognized the need for classifications of the vast biographical domain of the greater Amazon Basin. Deforestation is clearly contributing to the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere, yet the actual amount of deforestation for a long time was largely unknown. It was found that no one system of remote sensing could provide the answers. Therefore both spaceborne and airborne radar images were acquired of portions of the Middle and Upper Amazon Basin in the State of Amazonas and the Territory of Roraima. The radar image data sets were obtained not only by Shuttle Imaging Radar B (SIR-B) in 1984, but by SIR-A in 1981 and by Radambrasil which operated from 1970 to 1985. The radar device used was able to penetrate clouds and the jungle canopy to reveal the surface features below. Radar has proved to be an effective supplement to Landsat and NOAA observations because of persistent cloudiness in the tropics. Remote-sensing radar can reveal features such as agricultural fields, urban areas, mountain ranges, and water surfaces.
CLIP
Thus, scientists have been able to witness through remote-sensing, which produces both two and three-dimensional pictures, the first-hand destruction of massive hectares of forests robbing nature of the last ecosystems for the survival of the Indian people. There is no doubt that large-scale environmental changes are being created by population influx and land development. Computer simulations based on extensive historical data suggest the Amazon's rainfall can be expected to decline radically as drainage and deforestation proceed; then as deforestation proceeds, reforestation becomes nearly impossible.
Brasil's former Minister of the Environment, Dr. Jose Lutzenberger, was the visionary who saw the role of interdependence between the Amazon and the world. His plan was for education, research and protection policies to create a realistic authority over environmental units in each of Brasil's twelve government ministries to form a "consensus strategy" for long-range preservation of both land and wildlife, but before long he was displaced from his position.
Reacting to worldwide concern over the devastation of the rainforest, many claim there is no need to worry. After all, burning forests in Amazonia only account for less than 20% of the total increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (according to Prof. A. Goldemberg, University of Sao Paulo, Brasil). However, the burning of the rainforest is doing more than just increasing carbon dioxide. The Amazon is the "great heat factory of the world" with a daily energy turnover equal to some six million atomic bombs. One of the great ironies of the modern industrial society with its remote-sensing technologies is that we can now see planet Earth as a whole˜as a living biosphere. Yet, down here, we continue to behave as if we were blind.
CLIP
What will happen if the Brasilian rainforest disappears? The forest makes its own climate and is the result of that unique climate. What if devastation continues at the present rate? Most everything could be gone by the year 2025 AD. A hundred thousand square kilometers of primeval forest are cleared every year the results of destruction grow exponentially. Land the size of Portugal is slashed and burned every year. And the end will inevitably be: (1) a change in weather, (2) an increase of drought and desert, and (3) massive starvation for many peoples, regardless of background and world economics. With large land parcels being given away for exploitation, there is absolutely no way, even with Radam surveys, to oversee clearance. At the present time, 100 tons of topsoil are lost per hectare each year. The forests that are destroyed will take a thousand years to regenerate. With their destruction goes the refugia of a species diversity entirely preserved from the early periods of evolution˜the Pleistocene era in our "present" time: with color morphs, strange and beautiful speciations, butterfly wings of color.
All of this is being steadily destroyed, and there is human tragedy as well. At least 87 Indian tribes have become extinct this century. Anthropologists have seen an overall Amazonian aborigine population decrease over the past 500 years from an estimated 6.8 million to the present 125,000. Anthropologist Emilio Moran cites disturbing research indicating the decline of the Parakana and Nambiquara indigenous groups within very short periods of time due to the influences of outside companies, ranchers, and road workers whom the Indians call the "termite people."
As highways and small farmers who are simply trying to create a livelihood intensify their own slash-and-burn techniques throughout the Amazon basis˜and more and more ruropoli (frontier family villages) of some 48-1000 people spring up in various locations throughout the Amazon˜the forests are razed, the inroads flooded, the Malaria vector is strengthened, intense soil erosion occurs, and the river fish species die out. The tragedy is that most of these small family plots created by hundreds of thousands of new inhabitants are only able to sustain crops for a limited number of years because of the rainforest terrain. Therefore, these farmers must move on and find new land to utilize. So what happens to their old plots of land? They become wastelands with small brush, because the original trees cannot grow back due to their root structures and because the soil has been destroyed and removed.
In the wake of vast devastation throughout the Amazon, only now has the revelation of global atmospherics impressed biologists. The Amazon is the critical link in the Earth's carbon dioxide clearing house. Furthermore, Amazonian Indians and forest species possess the richest repository of native wisdom and potential medical, and technological plant products of any other region of the planet. But the metaphor of human disruption since the sixteenth century is fully at work in Brasil. The country is the vortex of ecological imperialism and new deforestation. A generation of embattled conscience has arisen in Central and South American writers who have responded to the political and moral crises with an anguished outpouring due to the mismanagement of such critical factors as: population growth, political agendas, and regional economics. Nobel Prize winner Garcia Marquez (The Autumn of the Patriarch) and Vargas Llosa (The War of the End of the World) are but a few of the many testimonies of this anguish.
Our time has now come to work for new cooperation in this and other critical environmental regions. Our species is the only one to lay claims to being able to influence the make up of the natural world. We long ago drew up the battle lines. Today, that struggle is most dangerously pronounced in the tropics, where soil is in short supply and human food is at a premium. The Amazon contains some 550 million hectares of rain forest, 3.5 million square kilometers, nearly half of the Earth's water moisture, easily a million plant and animal species. In but 2 hectares of Amazon forest, 173 floral species have been discovered on a base of 900 metric tons of living biomass. In short, for several thousand years, life has been fashioned according to its evolutionary laws and in the Amazon basin archaeological relics suggest an early habitation at the mouth of the Amazon dating back as far as 5000 years.
As a part of Eden on earth, its destruction may also signify the end of life as we know it. It is our time to make the change to work together to expand the lifetime of the Amazon Basin in Brasil so that there would be no end of real civilization, but a wise and practical preparation for the opening of the high frontier in meeting with other cultures and cosmic civilization in the 21st century.
affs@affs.org
http://www.affs.org
P.O. Box FE, Los Gatos CA 95031, USA
Copyright ©2000 The Academy for Future Science
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
