When David Attenborough presented his Living Planet BBC series in 1984, the year used for the name of Orwell’s iconic novel on dystopia, people started to awaken to the immense beauty and complexities of our world. Thirty-three years on, this living planet is not alive and well. Rather, it has been a slippery slope downhill most of the way for both the earth and its inhabitants.
In March 2011 a massive earthquake hit Fukushima, Japan, home to a nuclear power plant. Radioactive fallout was between 20 and 30 times that of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The fallout also hit our oceans badly as contaminated water found its way across the entire Pacific. For the next few years massive fish die-offs started to sweep across the Pacific and beyond, with sailors saying that the ocean had turned into a silent morgue. Yet these mass die-offs that hardly ever make the news continue to this day, with some reported a few weeks ago in Chile, Columbia, New Zealand and Costa Rica. The effects of Fukushima are far from over.
As any doctor would advise, the causes of disease are often a mix, giving rise to complications, weakening of immune systems and lack of proper nutrition and eating habits. Likewise the die-offs could have several causes that come together to form a perfect storm of aquatic destruction and drastic reduction in sea birds. These most likely include radiation and warming of ocean waters and currents, increasing algae growth which could be toxic to fish, and the runaway release of methane from the ocean floors, increasing carbon dioxide not only in the atmosphere but also in the water, reducing the supply of oxygen.
Then there is massive pollution from particulate matter from power stations and forest fires, on the increase with climate change, as well as other sources of air pollution, including air traffic with its endless plumes hanging in the atmosphere, and the dimming and clouding of our skies as a result. Each factor can be a contributory cause that leads inexorably to what we call a positive feedback loop, that is, a runaway train of effects, as the delicate balance of nature snowballs out of control.
In the backdrop of all this US President Donald Trump has walked away from the Paris climate accord. What is less known is the US Supreme Court decision back in February to issue a prohibitory injunction, preventing the Environment Protection Agency from carrying out and enforcing the Clean Power Plan that aims at reducing greenhouse emissions from power plants by 26 per cent by 2025.
To make matters worse, many of the individual American states had already challenged the Clean Power Plan, showing that it has enemies not just at federal government and coal and oil industry levels, but at Supreme Court and state governor and legislature levels too. On another note, ExxonMobil is defending itself in a huge climate fraud investigation case initiated by the New York attorney general.
Meanwhile scientists are left picking up endless samples of dead fish and spikes in levels of heavy metals and other chemicals across the planet found in humans, water, soil and animals. Many of them monitor air pollution, dimming of skies and a whole list of symptoms indicating a seriously ailing planet and its occupants, while news channels focus their attention on the latest horrors and casualties in a global struggle of ever-increasing proportions in the forms of terror attacks and mass migrations.
Yet make no mistake about it. The sicker our planet becomes, and the greater the struggles for resource domination and control, the more migrations there will be appearing on different shores. Wars of information and disinformation will grow, as the world becomes divided into the proverbial good and bad guys, as lines are drawn, military machines are boosted and official narratives are entrenched in corporate media with vested interests and churned out ad nauseam until they are chiselled into the very fabric of our collective unconscious.
Fictitious enemies will continue to be sighted at the gates and clarions sounded, while enemies within will be left to roam surreptitiously, dangerously ensconced within our own walls.
It has been over 57 years since the outgoing US president Dwight Eisenhower warned his successor and the world in his farewell address to the nation, about the growing might and threat of what he coined the “military industrial complex”. Today this has grown to incorporate financial institutions, the chemical and petro chemical industries, large corporate media, the drug trade, the arms trade, and the GMO and processed food industries.
It also includes of course the indomitable secret agencies that are stamping thousands of public documents as top secret like there is no tomorrow, away from the prying eyes not just of journalists and historians, but also of judges and parliamentarians who are appointed and elected respectively to uphold the rule of law and to represent the people to oversee all government actions and programmes in a system allegedly “of the people, by the people, for the people”.
The Romans used to keep the people happy with games and grain. We do too, but people are also distracted by short-term comforts and gadgets, while power structures prey on their fears of the foreigner and some imaginary ‘villainous’ nation beyond our borders, taking the obvious leaf out of Orwell’s book.
But Newton’s law of action and reaction is universal. If we do not face the enemies within, there will be no sanctuary away from the scourges that will keep ravaging both the natural and the human world as a result of unbridled and extreme capitalism gone wild that has morphed into plutocracy, and of domination through unelected financial, intelligence and military institutions.
These only benefit the super rich and the oligarchs, to the detriment of small and medium enterprise, the average
citizen, established democratic structures, and ultimately to the detriment of all nations.
This is the true global conflict and malaise that our generation faces
today, and acts of terror, proxy wars, mass immigration and climate up-heaval are just a few of the many symptoms and consequences.
Rodolfo Ragonesi is a lawyer and researcher in international affairs.