Earth Inc.: The Management of Life: Turning and Churning the Living into the Dead (Part II)

Earth Inc.: The Management of Life: Turning and Churning the Living into the Dead
(Part II)
Jonathan Gillis
11 November 2011

Food & Agriculture…

According to the international non-profit organization GRAIN, global emissions could be cut in half within a few decades if “measures are taken to restructure agriculture and the larger food system around food sovereignty, small scale farming, agro-ecology and local markets.” GRAIN works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for autonomous communities and biodiversity-based food formations. “We don’t need carbon markets or techno-fixes. We need the right policies and programmes to dump the current industrial food system and create a sustainable, equitable and truly productive one instead.”[1] 

Agriculture accounts for anywhere from 10-15% of total global emissions of greenhouse gases. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it’s between 10-12%[2], according to the World Resources Institute (WRI), its 13.5%[3], and according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)/WRI some 15% of global emission is caused by commercial agriculture[4].  The IPCC reports: “[o]f global anthropogenic emissions in 2005, agriculture account[ed] for about 60% of N2O [nitrous oxide] and about 50% of CH4 [methane].” Furthermore, internationally, “agricultural CH4 and N2O emissions have increased by nearly 17% from 1990 to 2005”.[5] A good portion of these emissions are a result of industrial agricultural practices with an increased dependence “on chemical (nitrogen) fertilizers, heavy machinery run on petrol, and highly concentrated industrial livestock operations that pump out methane waste.”[6]

“Food is the world’s biggest economic sector, involving more transactions and employing more people by far than any other” GRAIN communicates. There is an unprecedented amount of preparation and distribution, of “processing, packaging and transportation, all of which generate GHG emissions”, in the intervening period from when food leaves the farm to when it arrives at our tables. GRAIN estimates that anywhere from 15-20% of all global GHG emissions are caused by the transport, processing and packaging, refrigeration, and retail of food. A large share of food never gets consumed. The modern industrial food system disposes of half the food that it produces. “This is enough to feed the world’s hungry six times over.”[7] There’s no food shortage, there is a deliberate and regimented effort by way of the modern industrial food system, to operate whilst some one billion people are meant to go hungry. At the very least, this is neglect of some one billion people. It would seem, there is a similar state of affairs of mass neglect regarding basic access to healthy, clean, drinking water.       

Put differently, according to Tristram Stuart, all the food wasted in the US, would be enough to feed everyone in the world that is malnourished. Today there are “nearly one billion malnourished people in the world, but the approximately 40 million tonnes of food wasted by US households, retailers and food services each year would be enough to satisfy the hunger of every one of them.”[8] That works out to be 20 million pounds of US food waste, which, going into a billion, would come out to 50 pounds per person. Millions of people are starving in the world by contrivance; this machination is resultant of industrial practices and governmental policy initiatives that codify those corporate practices. Incidentally, a similar case might be made of water. Namely, all the water wasted by industry, corporations, for keeping lawns and golf courses green, households, etc., might very well be enough water to sustain the billion or so people without access to clean, healthy drinking water. It’s less expensive to merely waste half of all food that is produced than it is to distribute to the worlds impoverished peoples, let alone abolish or progressively alter the system which enables an epidemic of such widespread impoverishment. At least ostensibly, that’s how justification is inequitably sought and proved to, and for the record, and in the minds of those who create it, namely the economists, the CEO’s, and other clients of the decadent class at the centers of power. Incidentally, much of this food waste piles up in landfills and garbage dumps, emitting sizeable sums of greenhouse gases.

Since the industrialization of agriculture, beginning in Europe and North America, simulated around the world through the “Green Revolution”, there has been diminutive attention “to the importance of organic matter in the soil.” Presently, it is estimated that “cultivated soils have lost from 30 to 75% of their organic matter during the 20^th century while soils under pastures and prairies have typically lost up to 50%.” This worrying trend will continue unless there is a major shift “away from practices that destroy organic matter to practices that build-up the organic matter in the soil.” A radical new scenario needs to emerge; the existing industrial agricultural model is entirely unsustainable and much too costly in terms of human life, biodiversity, and the global environment. Techniques that small local farmers around the world have been practicing for generations, “such as diversified cropping, better integration between crop and animal production, increased inclusion of trees and wild vegetation, and so on”, must replace the existing commercial agricultural model if there is to be an “increase [in] production potential”, an improvement in soil fertility, and an improvement in the ability of soil to hold water. In turn, there would be fewer and less intense floods and droughts, less soil erosion, diminished soil acidity and alkalinity, and in time reduced toxicity, and there would also be a renewal of natural protection from damaging organisms and diseases.[9] 

In a 2011 report, GRAIN details the innate dangers of the food safety industry. “Across the world, people are getting sick and dying from food like never before. Governments and corporations are responding with all kinds of rules and regulations, but few have anything to do with public health. The trade agreements, laws and private standards used to impose their version of ‘food safety’ only entrench corporate food systems that make us sick and devastate those that truly feed and care for people, those based on biodiversity, traditional knowledge, and local markets.”[10] There are plenty of examples of “notorious food safety incidents in recent years”. In 2008 in China, “[s]ix babies died and 300,000 others got horribly sick with kidney problems when the industrial chemical melamine got into the commercial milk distribution circuit.” In 2001, in Germany, a dioxin scandal prompted “German authorities [to] shut down more than 4,000 farms after it was discovered that a German company had sold 200,000 tonnes of dioxin-tainted animal feed, which had subsequently entered the food chain.”[11] It is nothing short of an outrage, that mass amounts of people are exposed to cancer causing poisons in the foods that they eat. Though of course, this should not be shocking, considering the structural duplicity of the food industry and of the private sector generally.

There is no real accounting of the cost of annual “food safety” in economic terms, it is perhaps anywhere between $35 million and $152 billion dollars. With increased privatization, as with any industry, monetary costs are sure to explode. GRAIN stipulates that “the industrial food system is – in and of itself – the biggest source of food safety problems, because of its intensive practices, its sheer size, and the level of concentration and power it has accumulated.” This might be extended to any commercial industry, fishing, logging, mining, and so forth. To illustrate: if a small farm produces some bad meat, there will be comparatively small impact. “Networks of small and mid-sized farms producing food for regional consumption spread risk widely, diluting it. A global system built around geographically concentrated factory-sized farms does the opposite: it accumulates and magnifies risk, subjecting particular areas to industrial-style pollution and consumers globally to poisoned products.”[12]

“Government and industry action on food safety gives little indication that they recognise any fundamental problem with industrial food production. Rarely do their regulations or standards hinder corporate practices in any significant way. On the contrary, they tend to reinforce the power of large industry while undermining, or even criminalising, small-scale production and local food cultures.” For example, in an attempt to “modernize” the dairy sector, Columbia’s government has tried to “prevent the sale of raw milk in urban areas” which “over two million farmers and vendors depend” on for their livelihoods. The very food system that has caused numerous safety problems is being tasked to address those issues; like many industries. “Consider the case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the fatal brain-wasting condition popularly known as mad cow disease. People get the human strain of it by eating the meat of cows that have been fed diseased animals as a cheap source of protein – a practice common in industrial feedlots since the 1970s.”[13]

Another essential in the pattern of health hazards caused by the modern food industry that GRAIN details, is “the case of ractopamine, a growth promoter added to pig feed.” Both the EU and China, producers of 70% of world pork production, “say that it is not safe for humans and have banned its use in meat production. The same is true for more than 150 countries. In the United States however, home to Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant that produces ractopamine by way of its subsidiary Elanco, the drug is fed every day to pigs, cows, and turkeys”. The centers of power in Washington fight “tooth and nail to defend the interests of US corporations and prevent countries from rejecting US pork” that contains residues of ractopamine. Today, “it is mainly through so-called free trade agreements…that governments recalibrate the rules of food safety. Too often, the food safety rules that emerge from free trade negotiations become mechanism to force open markets, or backdoor ways to limit market access; they do little to protect health, serving only corporate growth imperatives and profit margins.”[14] At the risk of slight redundancy, the same might be said of most, if not every, regulatory measure for any given industry.

The US “is generally seen to have lower standards than Europe with regard to pesticide and chemical residues…For instance, US poultry destined for export is routinely dunked in chlorine just before it is shipped. This is to kill the bacteria that have accumulated in the birds’ carcasses through the quintessentially American ‘factory farming’ production processes. The Europeans do not allow the import of chickens bathed in chlorine, so no US poultry enters the EU market. The US also carries out fewer physical checks on its own imports. It examines only 2% of all incoming fish shipments…even though some 80% of fish consumed in the US is imported.”[15]

A December 2007 diplomatic cable, originating from Ambassador Stapleton, exposed by Wikileaks shows that the Bush administration determinedly demanded that the French government ease its posture on GMOs and agricultural biotechnology generally, be it the importation or cultivation thereof. According to the cable, the top aid to the French environment minister informed the US that “people have a right not to buy meat raised on biotech feed”. The candor contained within the cable over French “common interest”, i.e., popular public opinion, included threads of disdain. The US complained that France was circumventing “science-based decisions in favor of an assessment of the ‘common interest’. How dare the French or the European Union generally, for that matter, assess the opinion of their citizenry and actually consider implementing policies along the lines of popular public opinion, in conjunction with the “precautionary principle” (a science-based decision, albeit a rather different one not preferable to US corporate-government interests) at that! “Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU [corporate] interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices” the cable claims. US “country team Paris recommends that [the US] calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective [elitist] responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits [namely, those who elicit actions indicative of care more for people and the environment than corporations]. The list should be measured rather than viscous and must be sustainable over the long term, since we should not expect an early victory” team Paris strategically outlines. [16]        

“Such ‘diplomacy’ is for the clear and direct benefit of Monsanto, DuPont and other agricultural biotechnology corporations that do not like foreign countries banning GM seeds or foods, much less requiring labels that inform customers of the presence of GM ingredients. US firms, especially the members of the Biotechnology Industry Organisation, religiously use FTA talks by Washington officials as a platform to secure market access for GMOs through aggressive regulatory reforms. Besides GMOs, US trade policy [destabilizes] other countries’ sovereignty over food safety and health matters, insofar as Washington regularly demands relaxation of rules against the import of US farm products that others deem risky, such as beef (BSE, hormones), veal (hormones), chicken (chlorine), and pork (swine flu).”[17]

We shouldn’t make the mistake that somehow the EU elites are beneficent, and specifically when it comes to food safety and health. “[W]hen the EU lifted a six-year import ban on Chinese poultry in 2008, in reality it gave the nod to only a handful of meat factories in Shandong Province certified to export to the EU, one of which had been taken over just two weeks before by Tyson, the world’s second-largest meat company.” Furthermore, the EU, similar to the US, is known to compel elevated standards to minimize competition, fashion bilateral committees to persist in shaping policy absent from public scrutiny or any independent oversight, favor corporate takeover wherever and whenever possible by imposing rigid farm-based accreditation systems, and so on.[18]

“In an industrialised, highly consolidated food system geared to maximising profit by selling vast volumes of cheap food, pressure exists at every phase of the production chain to cut costs by cutting corners, including safe food practices. Moreover, the very scale of modern food production means that seemingly isolated lapses can become quite grave, subjecting millions of people to danger based on the actions of a single production facility.”[19] To offer but one example, Peanut Corp. of America, a corporation that makes peanut paste which is used in products such as sandwich crackers and granola bars, and peanut butter that is sold by distributors to schools, hospitals, elderly care homes and restaurants, had repeated health violations before a salmonella outbreak in 2009.

The company’s “history of sanitation lapses [includes repeated citations] in 2006 and 2007 for having dirty surfaces and grease residue and dirt buildup throughout the [company’s Georgia] plant”. “Inspection reports from 2008 found the plant repeatedly in violation of cleanliness standards.” “[A]reas of rust that could flake into food, gaps in warehouse doors large enough for rodents to get through, unmarked spray bottles and containers and numerous violations of other practices designed to prevent food contamination” were observable by inspectors and subsequently documented and reported. The plant has since been shut down. It isn’t difficult to ascertain, why then, there was a salmonella outbreak; though seemingly, to ascertain why there was an outbreak of four distinct strands of salmonella is somewhat compounded. As of late January 2009, “[t]he salmonella outbreak [had] sickened almost 500 people around the country and [was] linked to seven deaths. More than 125 products containing peanut butter or peanut paste from the Georgia plant [were] recalled.”[20] Representative Bart Stupak, Michigan democrat, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations at the time, criticized the FDA, stating in an email, “[t]he fact that four different strains of salmonella have been tied to Peanut Butter Corporation of America’s plant and products show not only that the company was not adhering to good manufacturing practices, but also that FDA inspectors were asleep at the switch”.[21]

“In another incident in 2009, a company called Beef Packers, owned by transnational agribusiness giant Cargill, had to declare two ‘voluntary recalls’ involving over 500 tonnes of ground beef infected with antibiotic-resistant salmonella. The USDA announced that consuming the suspect meat could cause ‘treatment failure’ – that is, death – because of its ability to withstand drugs. At least 39 people in 11 states reported getting sick, and more than 200,000 thousand kilos of the tainted meat was served to school children through the National School Lunch program.”[22]

"The official response to such incidents has been minimal. In January 2011, a hotly debated piece of legislation called the Food Safety Modernisation Act was signed into being. The intention of the original Bill was to update and inject some resources into the US food safety system. It basically called for more inspections, gave the government authority to mandate food recalls, and provided some traceability to an otherwise fairly unregulated industrial sector. Who would oppose such a move? The fat cats from the food industry, you might think – the Cargills and the Tysons, who don't want to be controlled.”[23]

However, the “rules would not even touch the meat sector, the biggest source of food-borne illness in the United States. The main opponents of the bill throughout the debate were small family farm activists who, because of the way the bill was framed, saw themselves falling under these controls when they are not the problem. So instead of instigating real food safety reform in a country where one out of four people gets sick and 5,000 people die from eating contaminated food each year, the law might do next to nothing.”[24]

GRAIN’s well written and informative report states: “In the absence of stricter public action around food safety, corporations have moved to fill the void…A case in point: in the mid-2000s, a company called Beef Products Inc. had an ingenious idea: it would buy slaughterhouse scraps – which are extremely likely to be infected by bacterial pathogens – from large-scale beef processors at cut-rate prices. It would purée those parts into a paste, which it would then mix with ammonia to kill bacterial pathogens. It would sell the product back [to] the beef industry as a cheap filler for ground beef, with the added feature that the ammonia in the paste would sterilise the ground beef it was mixed with…The product, known in the industry as ‘pink slime’ for its distinctive look, could be found in 70% of hamburgers consumed in the United States by the end of the decade. The USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service, which oversees meat safety, applauded -- it recognised ‘pink slime’ as safe without requiring testing, on the grounds that it had been sterilised by ammonia. But in 2009, a New York Times exposé found that pink slime in fact tended to be ridden with pathogens -- and was actively adding to the pathogen load of the ground beef it was mixed with. Beef Products Inc. responded by merely upping the ammonia dose for its mix. To this day, the product remains widely used in the vast US ground beef market, including at fast-food chains nationwide.”[25]

The USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS), tasked with supervising the safety of the entire US meat supply, “routinely endorses meat that it knows to be tainted with residues of ‘veterinary drugs, pesticides, and heavy metals’, the USDA Inspector General revealed in a 2010 report.”[26] According to the report, contrasting “other countries, FDA has not set a tolerance for arsenic. In 2008, a producer self-reported that arsenic had been mistakenly ingested by his cattle, and voluntarily withheld contaminated animals from the food supply after they were slaughtered and tested positive for arsenic poisoning. If the producer had not acted voluntarily, FSIS would not have had a basis to stop distribution of this meat once it was in commerce.”[27]

Also, detailed in the report, is the importance “that FSIS take steps to strengthen its preventive controls over contaminated animals entering the slaughter plants because…significant weaknesses [were found] in how the agency recalls beef that is adulterated with residue [veterinary drugs, pesticides, and heavy metals] and yet has been released into the food supply. Although the agency can request that plants voluntarily recall this meat, it has not done so since 1979 according to an agency official. FSIS officials explained that recalls of meat contaminated with residue are difficult to enforce, because they cannot show that eating a single serving of the product is likely to result in immediate sickness or death, as would consuming a serving of beef adulterated with E. coli or Salmonella. Instead, the effects of residue are generally chronic as opposed to acute, which means that they will occur over time, as an individual consumes small traces of the residue.”[28]

That a corporation has more power than the government, should come as no surprise. To give one example, after the rising number of cases of U.S. meat recalls over the past several years, the top U.S. food retailer, Wal-Mart, has voluntarily opted to “require its beef suppliers [to] use stricter tests for E. coli and other sickness-causing bacteria”. Tyson Foods, the biggest U.S. beef processor, applauded “Wal-Mart’s safety initiative, which ‘appears to be in line with measures [Tyson] already [has] in place”’. It’s rather conspicuous that a mega-corporation like Wal-Mart will voluntary implement, and impose by June of 2012, stronger beef regulations than the US government. This should hardly be reassuring; both Wal-Mart and Tyson are corporations, huge ones, they are not concerned with food safety or health, anymore than the U.S. government is concerned with peace, insofar as aggressive violence is a means to justify U.S. geopolitical and economic ends. Wal-Mart and Tyson are not supposed to be concerned with food safety and public health, that is merely secondary, an offshoot of their business dealings, they are concerned with the bottom line, the almighty worshipped dollar, billions of them at that. With the amount of “capital” at their monopolistic disposal, devising privatized standards of food safety, albeit it those standards go beyond the federal government, is hardly laudable. What of Wal-Mart’s food safety initiatives, internationally? Still, one might hazard a guess that there will be less beef recalls, at least in the U.S., in the upcoming years. In terms of detectable threats to health, so long as those are diminished or eliminated, the private sector’s stricter beef regulatory measures will be heralded as a screaming success.[29] Even if human health risks mount, for instance superbugs (antibiotic resistant bacterium) persevere and patterns of disease development evade detection, treatment or even adequate understanding.   

Incidentally, GRAIN expressed that “Animal welfare is another issue altogether…By 2013, the EU will implement new standards on animal slaughter, including stunning, and these new norms will have to be followed by anyone planning to export meat to the EU.”[30] While this is perhaps slightly encouraging, no international standards regarding animal welfare exist. And of course even with new standards––presumably progressive ones most favorable to the welfare of the animals themselves within concentrated feeding lot operations and slaughter factories, a rather audacious presumption to be sure––implemented, enforcement is an entirely different matter. Just as there are many hurdles to overcome from ideals to the books, there are many bureaucratic bottlenecks from the books to the real world. Though in reality, in the case of the EU, doctrinal “animal welfare” is perhaps principally about setting trade limitations aligned with EU preferences to support EU businesses, not actual animal welfare. It’s virtually nonexistent in the US.

GRAIN adeptly describes that “[t]he customers of these companies may appreciate such measures. But what about everyone else? The only accountability in such a system is to shareholders, not the public; private standards are all about the bottom line. To give one example…poultry companies in South Africa regularly take frozen chicken that is past its best-before date from supermarkets in wealthy neighbourhoods, recycle it by thawing, washing and injecting it with flavouring, and then sell it to shops in black townships. The poultry companies deny that the practice is racist, and claim that they are actually following standards higher than those required by the Department of Health.”[31]

The irony of industrial food health and safety is rather dramatic, given the unhealthful and unsafe conditions that arise from, and broaden out of, the industrial food system. The risks and detriment to human health alone are quite incredible. “In the US, 80% of all antibiotics consumed annually are consumed by livestock. In China, the figure is nearly 50%. Even in the EU, where the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics for animals is banned and where the types of antibiotics allowed for livestock are controlled, the use of antibiotics for animals still exceeds their use for humans. In Germany, for example, three times as many antibiotics are given to animals as to humans. Such widespread use of antibiotics in factory farms speeds up the development of antibiotic resistance among bacteria. Unlike other strains of MRSA [Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus], ST398 can already withstand tetracyclines, a group of antibiotics that is given heavily and regularly to pigs in factory farms.” As antibiotics become ineffective, there is augmented worry in the medical profession.[32] Some 19,000 deaths in the United States in 2005 were due to MRSA infection according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). [33]

In terms of surveillance of pathogens, at least as of late October 2010, the US National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System does not test for MRSA. Denmark on the other hand, “does surveil for MRSA, and…found: 13% of pigs, at slaughter, were positive for MRSA ST398.” [34] Films like the 2011 Contagion may be marketable as fiction, a thriller to be seen by a mass public craving entertainment. Though, reality, namely the reality produced and dominated by humans, should we bother ourselves with it, tells a much more imperative narrative. 

“A staggering 61% of all human pathogens, and 75% of new human pathogens, are transmitted by animals, with many of the most dangerous – such as bird flu, BSE, swine flu and the Nypah virus – having emerged from intensive livestock farms. It is the way that animals are farmed that is fundamentally at issue.”[35] One way the seriousness of an outbreak, such as that of “superbugs”, is epidemiologically measured, “is to compare it to the expected background occurrence of a disease. In the case of MRSA ST398, that background rate is zero. The strain’s an artifact of the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture. It’s really worth thinking about how many more such organisms we want to produce.”[36] Indeed, it is also worth thinking about how many of these organisms already have been produced that are unidentified.

Globalization or the elitist global uniformity of everything is particularly troubling. GRAIN details the arrangement of the global supply chain as follows. “At the top stand the [gigantic] retailers [such as] Walmart [which alone] rings up annual food sales of US$405 billion – more than the annual GDP of Austria, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Greece, Venezuela, Denmark, or Argentina. The four largest global food retailers – Walmart, Carrefour, Metro, and Tesco – have combined annual food sales of US$705 billion…Their sheer size and buying power gives them tremendous leverage over the entire global food system: they are able to dictate terms to all their suppliers, from farmers to food processors.”[37]

Instead of competitors, the mega four food retailers synergistically “work together, with input from the biggest food companies and agribusiness firms, to develop common standards for foods (from farming to packaging) that their suppliers have to follow. An example is GlobalGAP. In the context of a largely laissez-faire – [which is to say] industry-friendly – global food safety policy regime, these standards are emerging as the shadow food safety structure for much of the world…[T]hese gigantic companies are accountable to their shareholders – and to a small extent their customers – but to no one else.”[38]

Moving down the hierarchy, there is the suppliers. “These are large companies that source and ship from around the globe, and increasingly from their own farms or from contract production schemes that they manage. Then there are the producers. More and more, production is centralised in ‘hubs’ or ‘zones’ where production of specific fruits or vegetables is cheap and organised according to the standards dictated by the supermarkets. Some well-known examples are grapes in Chile, green beans in Kenya, and apples in China.”[39] Ostensibly, there is something very wrong with a system whereby there is not merely the potential, but an architectural intent, that at any given time, two people in different parts of the world might be eating an apple that was produced in the same locale of China. Such a system is clearly antithesis to biodiversity.  

“Much has been said about how countries can position themselves to benefit from this global supermarket expansion. To gain access to supermarket shelves, local governments and donors devote huge resources to trying to build production capacity in poor countries. Supermarket growth is even portrayed as an ‘opportunity’ for small growers. The reality is quite different”.[40]

“In most countries around the world, farming sectors are being rapidly restructured to make way for more agribusiness. With food safety standards playing a critical role in justifying new forms of corporate control, it is high time to reassess what food safety means. At present, it translates into ‘audit culture’, involving a transfer of power from people (consumers, small farmers, local food shops, markets, eateries) to the private sector (Cargill, Nestlé, Unilever, Walmart... It can instead be about local control and more community-based food and farming systems.”[41]

Miscellaneous Thoughts and Observations    

Putting aside morality, human and nonhuman, the corporate-capitalist-republican-democratic amalgamation, and the way of life it maintains through immense violence and abject domination has never been nor ever will be sustainable. It’s not a question of if humanity’s last empire, the deadliest of all, will collapse, but rather how soon, and how much violence and misery will ensue because the elites clinging to fleeting power refuse to change course from the current death throes were are in, let alone relinquish their supremacy, instead in favor of adjusting to a global climate which has been deliberately and systematically forcibly changed, all in order that human destructiveness and consumption might be maintained and expanded. That is of course assuming that the majority of the citizenry will remain unthreatening to the highly concentrated sectors of power. A big assumption to be sure, one conveyed as palpable, with no small measure of disinclination. If this culture will not voluntarily change, stop, and modify its collective behavior, which ostensibly is the case, it must be stopped, in any manner of ways, both minute and great, if there is to be any semblance of a decent future.

Empire Incorporated. The turning and churning of the living into the dead will quite probably be the undoing of us all and will cause unquantifiable greater destruction to the natural world and all her nonhuman descendants (which is already occurring at a rapid rate and a greater magnitude than ever before), if those some one percent in power are not emphatically stopped. Stopped very soon.  

China will not replace the United States as a global hegemonic. Nor Russia, nor any alliance of countries; no other country or countries will ascend to global power as the US empire declines due to, among other, more specific reasons, the institutional organization of the world. Even if this were to occur, it would be a blip, the earth will not let this way of life continue indefinitely. There are too many people living on the planet to be inclusive of the dominant way of life; the equilibrium of the earth is out of whack because of the limits on “carrying capacity”. Dominant civilization is predicated on ecological destruction, and the efficiency thereof––due to technology and the way in which technology is used––the decline in countless nonhuman species, the poisoning of the land, air, and water, and so forth, are all occurring with the intended or implied objective that there will be no similar future for successor generations to experience the current prevailing way of life. Let alone a present for the current generations of the billions of impoverished, whom do not “enjoy” the relative comforts and luxuries of the dominant cultural way of life. Namely there is a narrow window in which this way of life will be tolerable by the earth, which is to say, by Natural Law.

In the dominant culture we are disconnected and disassociated from the Natural world. Not even in the major organized religions, to my limited knowledge, namely Christianity, is the Natural world a primary concern. It is a shame, that we are lead to believe out of convenience for those in power, that the destruction of the earth is not evil. For it seems, that in a doctrinal sense, evil can only be quantified in terms of human to human relations and interrelations, and even then, the poor among us, are eschewed, casted by the directors of power as superfluous. The evil, so to speak, at the bottom of the hierarchy are critically confronted, rarely if at all at the top. Additionally, while the behavior itself, and those engaged in the unacceptable behavior, are admonished, locked up, tortured, killed, never is their own, or the overriding experience of culture looked at. For to look at the experience of the lowly criminal as it were, and the societal context in which the crime as it were, was committed, would be to look at one’s self in the mirror; not in the way of confidence. It seems an evil thing, a society which tolerates, which willfully allows a significant segment of its population to go impoverished, while simultaneously signaling crowning achievements of the rich––however these are measured and construed. Similarly, it seems evil, a society which tolerates, which willfully allows a significant segment of its population to be imprisoned for long sentences for nonviolent offenses, while simultaneously signaling crowning achievements of the rich, whose crimes, of course not considered crimes at all, are off the spectrum, for they adversely effect so many people’s lives, so many nonhumans, so much of the Natural world.       

The living earth, Her oceans and forests that used to, and to a degree tragically smaller still do, burgeon with highly diverse, intelligent life, Her countless known and unknown genus’s of life, all with experiences delicately balanced and interconnected, Her brilliance, Her mountains, air, and on, has been, is being violently assaulted and abused in incredible ways. Imagine, the very being, or mega-being if you will, that nurses and tends to us and our every need; we, as a species, treat with utter antipathy and contempt. Irreparably harming, poisoning, and dominating, ironically and quite foolishly at our own peril. We marvel and delight no more at, and in, Her beauty, but rather at and in our own ugliness and the magnitude thereof, while we shriek to each other with fervor of the luster of our inflated ego, arguably fiat much like the entire currency of the world, namely the U.S. dollar. We rant of human ingenuity, progress, success, excess and so on, as the waste and wreckage of the earth and the effects become evermore impossible to ignore.

This obliteration is called “growth”, the extraction and exploitation of “resources” considered necessary, and “profitable”, the management of the destruction deemed “conservation”. In a word, the earth has been incorporated. Though, unlike a corporation, the earth, and certainly not her interconnected and interrelated nonhuman kin, has not been given the rights of a person. Which amounts in the case of the corporation to the rights of an ad infinitum super-person, insofar as rights can be and are bestowed, and insofar as rights can be and are protected. Specifically, the earth has been combined as one whole, that is to say, styled into the folds of, and by, industrial and post-industrial tyrannical institutions and their activities. The living earth and every being contained within, has been branded as a product or service for some type of human consumption within the monetary system, which is entirely based on oil, coal, natural gas, uranium, and so forth.

Sightseeing tours, fabulous cruises, high-dining on marine life born during the Napoleonic era, fashionable trends which applaud the attiring of the refined carcasses of the dead, be they worn on our feet, or covering our heads, to give some among a flood of examples. New, sublet industries emerge with the fast changing times within the industrial and post-industrial apparatus; in the energy sector alone, solar and wind are but two examples of this expansion. While far more preferable than the oil and coal companies, the incentives are hardly a match for the influence of the former, and a technological “fix” is rather counterintuitive, compounded by the fact that technology, and the ways in which it has by and large been used thus far, has paved a thoroughfare of destruction many times the world over.    

Perhaps one of the most obvious examples of the destruction, the alteration, and domination of the Natural world is the institutions of zoos. Patrons pay to see Nature literally caged; the encapsulation of the Wild into objects, showcased and displayed for them and their children to gawk at. That there is a demand, or even a need (enslavement being the only sanctuary, the only alternative being the death of endangered species) for such institutions, is testament to the scale of the destruction, which continues, largely ignored or dismissed. That it is profitable is conceivably a testament to the universal sponsorship of the profit motive. “The idea of ‘life’” Barry Sanders wrote in Unsuspecting Souls, “or of ‘a life’ has a short history. It simply does not exist, for instance, in the ancient world. Some words come close: Bios, as in biology, means a range of things in Greek, including a ‘mode of life,’ ‘a manner of living,’ a ‘livelihood,’ or ‘means of living’; and zoe, as in words like ‘zoo’ and ‘zoological,’ refers to something that we try to capture in English with the word ‘aliveness.’”[42] 

The toxic mimic of taxidermy, (of course an industry itself), namely the industry of “stuffed animals”, be they real, or caricatures, which are given to children is one of plenty examples of the branding of everything, of the incorporation of everything into a product to be manufactured, bought and sold, then purchased, in this case by the mother or father or guardian for their children, at a retail store. Never-mind, that probably the bulk of “product” or “merchandise” we purchase, including stuffed animals, are constructed, crafted, assembled in sweatshop factories in the so called third world. Presumably, the environment is so harsh, the workers perpetually sweat, literally and figuratively, hence the term; it’s highly documented that the conditions of these factories, such as those run by Nike, the Gap, and so on, are utterly slavish.

As a child, I remember clinging to Mickey Mouse, night after night before falling asleep. The purchase was made at Disney World in Florida, a souvenir brought back from an artificial world, within the artificial world of civilization, whereby families and their children go for entertainment and extravagance. A mouse is made larger than life, charismatic and magical, given to a realm of fantasy which taps the impressible imagination, rousing the desire to retain fantastical illusions that debase one from reality. For if one is distracted, one will have little time or desire to concern themselves with reality, let alone explore and appreciate the workings, finer and coarser and all the gray between, of the real, or Natural world, or what is in actuality occurring, and why. The real mice, as well as numerous other real nonhuman living beings, in uncounted tens if not hundreds of thousands, are condemned to slavery, torture, experimentation, and death. They are found in vivisection, and other comportment of labs, for instance. The real mouse, deprived of life, a life intentionally diminished, is utterly uncharismatic, his inherent magic, which is quite real, bestowed by the brilliance of Nature, by evolution, is to be studied, to be exploited, and to be branded as something in the form of a scientific breakthrough or discovery, mostly of some use, in some way, to humans. This goes for all animals, primates, rabbits, and so on, condemned “lab rats” to the laboratory, extracted from the Wild like resources to be used up in all variety of manner, disallowed of their Natural experience, forcibly prevented from living their Natural lives as Nature intended them to. This goes also for all domesticated animals meant to feed the population. Factory farming is a major example of this as well.              

The expansion of human growth, development, and consumption is to such a degree at present, leaving virtually no refuge for the majority of the world’s nonhuman species to live their Natural and evolutionary lives. This is an intended and accepted consequence of civilization, though an extreme violation of the earth and the earth’s organic processes, which we, as well as our nonhuman co-inhabitants (100-200 species of which reportedly die daily), are clearly dependent upon in order to survive; a violation that contends with no precedent in all of history. Though it’s popularly denied, or merely ignored altogether. It shouldn’t be surprising really. If we take a casual look, at how we, human beings, treat each other, allow each other and ourselves to be treated, it’s little wonder we have such sickening disdain for the earth and all Her marvelous creatures. If the majority of us humans cannot even show each other elementary respect, tolerance, universe forbid, compassion, not to dare mention love, how could there be any optimism for our nonhuman victims?   

Every 6.2 minutes there is a “forcible” rape in the United States according to the FBI.[43] That’s some 232 per day, some 85,000 a year as of 2010 data; though that does not include sexual assault tiered at a lesser degree, or “forcible” rapes that are not reported, which arguably, is most rape that occurs. This is indicative of a very sick culture.  

Roughly, some 4.5 percent of the United States was arrested in 2010 (except traffic violations). The estimated arrest rate was 4,257.6 arrests per 100,000 inhabitants. Out of those arrests, how many were millionaires? This is not to say pop-culture celebrities who are, to a great extent, mere illusory distractions, but the financiers, the CEOs, the politicians. I haven’t the answer, but if not zero, the ratio is perhaps grossly disproportionate; an illustration of where cultural priorities lie. According to Bloomberg, there were over 4.7 million millionaire household in the US in 2009; with a cumulative share of the country’s wealth at, 56%. This is to further say, roughly, 1.5% of the populace, the rich, own 56% of the wealth of the country.[44] The problem is not economic inequality per se; it is the established tyrannical order which exists specifically and unashamedly by virtue of the creation of gross monetary divides.   

Journalist Stephanie Condon reported in late June 2011 that “[n]ational unemployment has lingered above 8 percent for longer than 28 straight months. Congress, meanwhile, is a club that consists of 245 millionaires. Based on 2009 data, there are currently 66 in the Senate and 179 in the House (among current voting members). So while just 1 percent of Americans are millionaires, 66 percent of senators are millionaires, as are 41 percent of House members.”[45] Moreover, “[m]embers of the House and Senate made investments [in 2009] in a number of companies that have a strong presence on Capitol Hill, spending large sums on lobbying efforts and political donations. The most popular company among members of Congress…was General Electric, in which 82 current members invested. The second most popular company was Bank of America, which 63 members invested in.”[46] Obviously this is a functioning kleptocracy and a dysfunctional republic, as well as a defective democracy as it were.

Giving one example, Glenn Greenwald succinctly explains how the power system works. “Given the clarity of this law [Article 2 of the Convention Against Torture] and its multiple reiterations, what can explain the resolve of the political and media class to ignore it? Why do ostensibly adverse factions leap to one another’s defense even in cases of egregious criminality, with Democrats shielding Republicans, media figures demanding no transparency or accountability for political officials, self-proclaimed populist politicians devoting themselves to the protection of Wall Street? One easy answer is that those factions are not really adversaries, at least not in any way that counts. All their members belong to the same class — the powerful and the elite — and thus are motivated, as discussed, to defend an immunity that they might one day need themselves.”[47]

Greenwald continues, stating that “[i]n this world, it is perfectly fine to say that a president is inept or even somewhat corrupt. A titillating, tawdry sex scandal, such as the Bill Clinton brouhaha, can be fun, even desirable as a way of keeping entertainment levels high. Such revelations are all just part of the political cycle. But to acknowledge that our highest political officials are felons (which is what people are, by definition, who break our laws) or war criminals (which is what people are, by definition, who violate the laws of war) is to threaten the system of power, and that is unthinkable. Above all else, media figures are desperate to maintain the current power structure, as it is their role within it that provides them with prominence, wealth, and self-esteem. Their prime mandate then becomes protecting and defending Washington, which means attacking anyone who would dare suggest that the government has been criminal at its core.”[48]

A case in Bolivia is an exemplar of a route which has a travel prerequisite of sanity, wisdom, and moral authenticity. The Law of Mother Earth encompasses the “world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to human” beings. The Law of Mother Earth “redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as ‘blessings’ and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.” The 11 new rights codified for Nature include “the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.”

The Bolivian legal system has undergone radical changes in recent years; “following a change of constitution in 2009, [Bolivian law] has been heavily influenced by a resurgent indigenous Andean spiritual world view which places the environment and the earth deity known as the Pachamama at the centre of all life. Humans are considered equal to all other entities.” While industry will not cease, ostensibly it will by highly mitigated, at least that is the intent. The mining of tin, silver, gold and other raw materials has caused severe environmental devastation in Bolivia. ‘“Existing laws are not strong enough,’ said Undarico Pinto, leader of the 3.5m-strong Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, the biggest social movement, who helped draft the law. ‘It will make industry more transparent. It will allow people to regulate industry at national, regional and local levels.”’ “In the indigenous philosophy, the Pachamama is a living being…The draft of the new law states: ‘She is sacred, fertile and the source of life that feeds and cares for all living beings in her womb. She is in permanent balance, harmony and communication with the cosmos. She is comprised of all ecosystems and living beings, and their self-organisation.”’ Additionally, Ecuador, “which also has powerful indigenous groups, has changed its constitution to give nature ‘the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution’.” However, oil companies continue to “destroy some of the most biologically rich areas of the Amazon.”[49]

It’s worth quoting some excerpts from South African environmental lawyer Cormac Cullinan in an April 22, 2010 interview with Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!.

“What we’re saying is that everything has inherent rights. By virtue of the fact that the earth exists and all other creatures and mountains and rivers exist, they must also have inherent rights. At least the right to exist, to play their part in the evolutionary processes of Mother Earth. So the problem is, because we’ve only recognized human rights, we’ve created an imbalance. So human rights trump everything else, because they don’t have rights. And we’re trying to redress that balance by recognizing the rights which surround human rights.”

Cullinan further stated that “our legal systems are aimed at controlling and dominating nature, essentially, and…we need to change to an attitude of participation, and…wildness, in a sense, is a kind of a synonym for the natural creative energy of the universe, and…we need laws that enable that to flourish, rather than attempt to dominate it.”[50]

The current state of affairs, namely, the destructive culture on its death kneel, certainly can change, and must if there is to be a chance for a decent future. Collectively, we would be wise, to seriously consider how we might fundamentally alter the present course we find ourselves barreling down, and rise to the occasion to do so. For a failure to fully learn, concede, and correct, utilizing any methods approximated, the many problems which stem directly and indirectly from the industrial post-industrial civilized system is sure to bring a dismal future for humanity as well as all of non-humanity. We have glimpses of that future now, for it is foreshadowed within every facet of civilized life. At present, it seems we are severely flunking our cosmic test. The earth, namely, Natural Law, will not indefinitely tolerate globally impactful human activities and meddling. There is no reason we cannot ascertain to rectify the peril we have created for our selves and for the earth. We have collectively chosen a path of destruction which is ensured; the choice is ours to reverse that course. Our continued existence, as well as the continued existence of inestimable nonhuman beings depends upon that reversal. The earth, She beckons us to cease turning heaven into hell.

NOTES: