Silent Spring For Us?
With her 1962 book,
Silent Spring,
Rachel Carson got DDT and other synthetic pesticides banned and saved
bird life. Today it is humans who are directly threatened by
technologies designed to extract the maximum profit at the lowest
private cost and the maximum social cost from natural resources.
Once abundant clean water has become a scarce resource. Yet, in the
US ground water and surface water are being polluted and made unusable
by mountain top removal mining, fracking and other such “new
technologies.” Ranchers in eastern Montana, for example, are being
forced out of ranching by polluted water.
Offshore oil drilling and chemical farming run-off have destroyed
fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico. In other parts of the world, explosives
used to maximize short-run fish catches have destroyed coral reefs that
sustained fish life (
http://aquatek-california.com/coral-reef-destruction/).
Deforestation for short-run agricultural production results in
replacing bio-diverse rain forests with barren land. The “now
generation” is leaving a resource-scarce planet to future generations.
Nuclear power plants are thoughtlessly built in
earthquake and
tsunami zones.
Spent fuel rods are stored within the plants, a practice that adds
their destructive potential to a catastrophic accident or act of nature.
The newest threat comes from genetically modified seeds that produce
crops resistant to herbicides. The active ingredient in Monsanto’s
Roundup herbicide is glyphosate, a toxic element that now contaminates
groundwater in Spain and according to the US Geological Survey is now
“commonly found in rain and streams in the Mississippi River Basin.”
In 2011 Don Huber, a plant pathologist and soil microbiologist, wrote
to the US Secretary of Agriculture about the unexpected consequences of
GMOs and the accompanying herbicides. He cited adverse effects on
critical micronutrients, soil fertility, and the nutritional value of
foods. He cited the impairment of metabolic pathways that prevents
plants from accumulating and storing minerals, such as iron, manganese,
and zinc, minerals important for liver function and immune response in
animals and people. He cited toxic effects on the microorganisms in the
soil that have disrupted nature’s balance and resulted in large
increases in plant diseases. He cited livestock deaths from botulism,
premature animal aging, and an increase in animal and human infertility.
In an interview, Huber said that the power of agri-business has made
it almost impossible to do research on GMOs and that regulatory agencies
with the responsibility of protecting the public are dependent on the
industry’s own self-serving studies and have no independent objective
science on which to base a regulatory decision.
In short, in order to secure bumper crops for several years, we are destroying the fertility of soil, animal and human life.
Mankind has been destroying the world for a long time. In his fascinating book,
1493,
Charles C. Mann describes the adverse effects on the environment,
people, and civilizations of the globalism unleashed by Christopher
Columbus. These include the international transfer of human and plant
diseases, deforestation, destructions of peoples and empires, and the
impact on distant China of Spanish new world silver.
Mann provides a history lesson in unintended and unexpected
consequences resulting from the actions of elites and of those that
elites dominated. The Chinese government fixed taxation in terms of the
quantity of silver, but the importation of Spanish silver inflated
prices (decreased the value of a given quantity of silver) and left the
government without sufficient revenues.
A successor government or dynasty evicted Chinese from the coast in
order to deprive pirates of resources. The displaced millions of people
deforested mountainsides in order to sustain themselves with terrace
agriculture. The result of deforestation was floods that not only washed
away the terraces but also the crops in the fertile valleys below.
Consequently, floods became one of China’s greatest challenges to its
food supply.
The first slaves were conquered new world natives, but the “Indians”
had no immunity to European diseases. The second wave of slaves were
European whites, but the Europeans had no immunity to malaria and yellow
fever. By default slavery fell to blacks, many of whom had immunity to
malaria and yellow fever. Thus, a black workforce could survive the
infected environments and newly created wetlands in which to raise
sugarcane, wetlands that were ideal homes for malaria and yellow fever
bearing mosquitoes. Mann, of course, is merely reporting, not
justifying black or any slavery.
Mann points out that the lowly mosquito had a large impact on
American history. The Mason-Dixon Line roughly splits the East Coast
into two zones, the South in which disease carrying mosquitoes were an
endemic threat, and the north in which malaria was not a threat. In the
South, a person who survived childhood and grew into an adult had
acquired immunity. Northerners had no such protection.
This had enormous consequences when Northern armies invaded the
South. Mann reports that “disease killed twice as many Union troops as
Confederate bullets or shells.” Between the summers of 1863 and 1864,
the official annual infection rate for what was called “intermittent
fevers” was 233 percent. The average northern soldier was felled more
than twice. In one year 361,968 troops were infected. Most of the
deaths from malaria were indirect. The disease so badly weakened the
troops that they died from dysentery, measles or strep infection.
The mosquito was the South’s most powerful ally and so prolonged the
war, despite the vast numerical superiority of the Union force, that
Lincoln was forced to take action that he opposed and declare
emancipation of slaves. Thus, Mann writes, it is not farfetched to
conclude that blacks were freed by the very malaria mosquito that had
caused blacks to be the preferred workforce.
Mann shows that long before the birth of capitalism, greed drove men
to barbarous treatment of their fellows. He also shows that policies,
whether driven by greed or by well-intended socio-political design,
inevitably had unexpected consequences. His multi-faceted history well
illustrates the old adage, “the well laid plans of mice and men often go
awry.”
The old world’s colonization of the new world devastated new world
peoples, but the new world bit back with the spread of the potato blight
to Europe and Spanish and European inflation.
Environmental destruction resulted mainly from deforestation and
soils washed away by consequent floods. Prior to modern technology and
toxic chemicals, the planet survived mankind.
Today the prospects for the planet are different. The human
population is vast compared to earlier times, putting far more pressure
on resources, and the disastrous consequences of new technologies are
unknown at the time that they are employed, when the focus is on the
expected benefits. Moreover, these costs are external to the business,
corporation, or economic unit. The costs are inflicted on the
environment and on other humans and other animal life. The costs are not
included when the business calculates its profit and return on its
investment. The external costs of fracking, mountain top removal
mining, chemical farming, and GMOs could exceed the value of the
marketable products.
Businesses have no incentive to take these costs into account,
because to do so reduces their profits and could indicate that the full
cost of production exceeds the value of the output. Governments have
proven to be largely ineffective in controlling external costs, because
of the ability of private interests to influence the decisions of
government. Even if one country were to confront these costs, other
countries would take advantage of the situation. Companies that
externalize some of their costs can undersell companies that internalize
all of the costs of their production. Thus, the planet can be
destroyed by the short-term profit and convenience interests of one
generation.
The main lesson that emerges from Mann’s highly readable book is that
people today have no better grasp of the consequences of their actions
than superstitious and unscientific people centuries ago. Modern
technological man is just as easily bamboozled by propaganda as ancient
man was by superstition and ignorance.
If you doubt that the peoples of Western civilization live in an
artificial reality created by propaganda, watch the documentary on
psyops at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZiAV6fU2NM&feature=player_embedded#!
The documentary does a good job despite wandering off into a couple of
side issues on which it takes one-sided positions. It is a bit heavy
on blaming the rich, and overlooks that Stalin, for example, had plenty
of propaganda and wasn’t looking to make himself a billionaire. Not all
the rich are against the people. Billionaires Roger Milliken and Sir
James Goldsmith fought against jobs offshoring and globalism, which
increases the powerlessness of the people vis-a-vis the elites. Both
spoke for the people to no avail.
The documentary also blames the Constitution for limiting the
participation of the mass of the people in governing themselves without
acknowledging that the Constitution restricted the power of government
and guaranteed civil liberty by making law a shield of the people
instead of a weapon in the hands of the government. It is not the
Constitution’s fault, or the fault of Founding Father James Madison,
that the American people succumbed to propaganda by Bush and Obama and
gave up their civil liberty in order to be “safe” from “Muslim
terrorists.”
The documentary shows that propaganda is a form of mind control, and controlled minds are indeed the American predicament.
In 1962 Rachel Carson caught Monsanto off guard and thus gained an
audience. Today she would not get the same attention. Ready and waiting
psyops would go into operation to discredit her. I just read an article
by an economist who wrote that economists have decided that
environmentalism is a religion, in other words, an unscientific belief
system that preaches “religious values.” This demonstrates what little
importance economists attribute to external costs and the ability of
externalized costs to destroy the productive power of the planet. Thus,
the question, “silent spring for us?” is not merely rhetorical. It is
real.
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Dr. Roberts’ latest book is Economies in Collapse: The Failure of
Globalism, published in Europe, June, 2012. Seller information will be
made available as soon as possible.
