combatting normality

 

 

 

THE MOST TERRIBLE EVENT

IN HISTORY

 

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is occurring now

 

as part of the Sixth Extinction of the planet

by Nature's hubris: humankind -

 

 

and almost nobody is noticing .

 

 

 

It is the flight from the countryside
of millions upon millions of people
into the cities,
from Tirana to Tasmania,
from Auckland to Arkhangelsk
from Phœnix to Canton
from Turin to Tehran
from Valparaiso to Paris
from Paramaribo to Pnomh Penh
from Capetown to Cairo,
from Lhasa to Lima,
all over the world (except the British Isles)
resulting in appalling world-wide pollution and environmental degradation,
child-prostitution, low-wage slavery,
racketeering and totalitarianisation,
universal anomie and rootlessness, poverty,
a world full of single, working mothers,
and animal cruelty unimaginable even to an omniscient god.

 

THERE ARE MORE PEOPLE ON THE PLANET
NOW LIVING IN CITIES THAN IN THE COUNTRYSIDE
WHICH FEEDS THE CITIES.

 

Just as the monocultures of the rich
are degrading the environment of the rich countries,
rural poverty is destroying the environment of the poor countries,
through over-grazing and the destruction of woodland.

 

The cotton in just one Tee-shirt requires 500 gallons of water and 40 grams of pesticide. 700,000 tons of textiles are dumped in UK landfill sites every year. The per capita purchase (and dumping) of clothes doubles every ten years.

 

The rural poor then move to the cities,
where they are either horribly exploited
or become urban gangsters (as for centuries in Sicily and Calabria)
and suicide-bombers.

If régimes collapse, people flee the cities and rampage
through the countryside (as in Congo-Zaïre and Somalia)
and burn down forests.
All of Somalia's forests have been destroyed
and the people are starving, diseased and desperate.

Rural poverty is caused by urban riches
which depend on urban poverty (an underclass
which keeps crowding into cities):
a vicious cycle which is the motor of capitalism
and globalisation.
Poor countries cut down their forests in a vain attempt
to pay off their ever-increasing debt to rich countries.

Four-fifths of Ghana's rain forests have disappeared
through legal exploitation and
'economic development'.

 

The Capitalist Doctrine in Three Words

 

The countryside, forests, woodland,
- and manual work and subsistence - have all been devalued.
Millions are told that dragooned, hierarchical Employment -
no matter how degrading - is the only progress from poverty.
Small farmers are being squeezed out by big retailers.
The countryside is perceived as the trashcan of progress
and history; it is regarded just as the Americans regard Europe:
a boring, backward place to flee from.

ONE THIRD OF THE POPULATION OF THE WORLD NOW LIVES IN SLUMS

Human Overpopulation:

The only rurality that has status now
is the horrific AgrIndustry:
concentration-camps where a million pigs and calves suffer unbelievable torture;
vast prairies where soy-beans and wheat and maize are grown
on an industrial scale so that the air is unbreathable with insecticide
and fungicide: capitalist biocide.

This event is just part of the agenda of turbo-capitalism,
also known as 'globalisation',
which depends on a huge, disenfranchised underclass,
aims to pack them and the more fortunate tightly into cities
and 'encourage' them to buy goods and services.
Services including sewerage and water.
This is best achieved by encouraging the collapse of rural economies
through ever-declining prices for produce,
so that small farmers are squeezed out
by people from the cities who farm only to make money,
and buy up more land to cultivate aggressively
with expensive machinery and chemicals.

Coffee now brings a lower return for the grower
than it did thirty years ago.
Bananas, oranges and other fruit cost almost nothing in the producer countries.
Big farmers in the rich countries are subsidised, while small ones
hang on as best they can by diversifying into rural accommodation
or by receiving welfare benefit.
The small farmers in the poor countries are pushed out -
into the shameful slums of the big, expanding, cheap-labour cities -
so that the rich countries can get food ever more cheaply,
while their supermarkets make greater and greater profits.
Manufacturing (except of armaments) in the rich countries is winding down,
because labour in the poor countries is cheap -
because people are coming in from the countryside
desperate to earn a pittance in sweatshops
and dangerous factories.

Cities are where the human heart is sick . William Wordsworth

 

Capitalism inherently favours the retailers, the value-adders and investors
while crushing the producers.
We insist on buying food at increasingly-derisive prices which destroy rural economies, then, with our savings, send out "aid" which annihilates rural life altogether, and surrounds cities with appalling slums whose conditions are even worse. The rural poor become the urban desperate.

Capitalism is causing the Sixth Extinction of the planet
due to overpopulation (of the poor countries,
while the rich countries import cheap labour to offset the low birth-rates),
pollution (as the production of food is industrialised
and people are herded into super-cities),
global warming, the decline of land fit to farm
(Western Europe has lost half the topsoil off its agricultural land since 1950
and the world half its rural population),
destruction of forests, lakes, seas and wilderness,
and horrific reduction of almost all other species
(except viruses, retroviruses, bacilli, rats, cockroaches, certain insects, cereals and grotesquely man-engineered domestic animals & pets).

The more obsessively that people wash,
the more degraded they and the planet become.

Consumer-Capitalism - the prostitution of the entire planet -
is the world's most successful religion,
and all religions (like all armies) are malign.

Be ashamed to be human.

 

only mass-frugality can 'save the planet'
and capitalism cannot tolerate frugality

BOOK REVIEW

WASTE
by
Tristram Stuart

reviewed by Paul Kingsnorth in The Independent
Friday, 17th July 2009

What do farmyard pigs eat?
Easy answer, you might think: they eat swill. They clean up after us, chomping on trough after trough of our potato peelings, carrot tops, sour milk and stale bread. In return, we turn them into bacon. Ungrateful, perhaps, but a system of mutual reliance which has worked across Europe for millennia.

Not any more. As Tristram Stuart explains in Waste, it is now illegal to feed pigs on swill in Britain, and in many other countries too. Chuck an apple core to your porker and you face prosecution. Instead, farmers and even smallholders are expected to buy in stocks of expensive, corporate pig feed, and dump their own waste food into landfill. Ostensibly a system designed to prevent diseases like foot and mouth, the pig-swill ban is in reality a bureaucratic, illogical nightmare which is driving pig farmers out of business and contributing further to the already astonishing amount of food that goes to waste all over the world every day.

This is one of those books that everybody should read, but that too few probably will. In particular, it should be read by every politician, bureaucrat, restaurateur and sandwich manufacturer in Britain; anyone with a kitchen and an appetite will benefit, if that is the right word, from reading Waste. It may well change your view of the way we treat food forever. And that goes for those of you who, like me, smugly compost their kitchen waste, grow their own veg, re-use plastic bags and try not to buy any more packaging than necessary. However hard you try, Stuart shows that you are probably contributing to the biggest, most wasteful system of food production the world has ever seen.

Did you know, for example, that UK retailers waste 1.6 million tonnes of food every year? That manufacturers waste 4.6 million tonnes and that 'consumers' - that's you and me - waste a further 4.1 million tonnes? All of this is potentially edible food that goes straight into the bin. And Stuart has more than statistics to prove it. He has lived, himself, off the contents of such bins, and lived well - a habit that sounds disgusting until you see the photos he provides of what is thrown away daily by shops and cafes; meals, literally, fit for kings, all perfectly edible, chucked out because of overcautious sell-by dates, lack of shelf space, bad planning or simple lack of interest in the consequences. The amount of food wasted in this way, says Stuart, could feed the world's starving many times over - or rather, the cropland taken up to produce it for us could instead be producing for them.

If you have ever been taken in by the talk of a"free market" in which superstores and food manufacturers produce food by the leanest, most efficient methods, think again. Stuart will take you to farms where entire fields of spinach lie rotting because a few blades of grass have been found growing between the rows. He will show you the vast piles of carrots rejected by Walmart/Asda for not being perfectly straight (between 25 per cent and 40 per cent of all British fruit and veg crops are wasted in this way every year).

He will take you to the factory where 13,000 slices of good, edible bread are thrown away every day because Marks and Spencer orders its sandwich manufacturers to waste 17% of every loaf they use. He will give you an insight into how whole species of fish are being driven to the edge of extinction so that London's sushi bars can dump dustbins of rare tuna into landfill every day. And he will demonstrate how our spineless politicians, in thrall to the gods of the market, refuse to impose any effective rules on these scandalously wasteful companies, and how fast things might change if they did.

There are solutions: this is the book's final, hopeful message. Stuart provides us with a manifesto for what he calls "Utrophia" - a land of good eating. He wants to scrap output-based farm subsidies, impose mandatory food-waste production targets on companies, ban the sending of waste food to landfill, ban the discarding of "bycatch" in the fishing industry, and much more. It's a workable, well-researched and practical plan which only awaits a political party to start making it happen.

Oh, and as for pig-swill: Stuart wants that ban lifted. In fact, he wants to see the feeding of swill to pigs made mandatory. When you see that happening down on the farm, you'll know that perhaps sanity has started to prevail.