The news that people see is not really the full news but a biased portrayal of current stories aimed at conditioning the wider public to accept gross inequities without question. Regular readers of News Junkie Post will be aware that it breaks stories that cannot be found in the mainstream. This is because the mainstream media are owned by people with a particular agenda: people who do not want the general public to become aware of any proper news that is contrary to the agenda. To push forward this agenda, the mainstream media also manufacture stories. A recent example may be found in the proposed construction of a new nuclear power station on the Somerset coast at Hinckley Point.[1]

The BBC’s announcement of the construction of a new nuclear power station is part of the mainstream media’s agenda. The French company to whom the contract has been granted, Electricité de France (EDF), cannot just start construction without local people asking questions. What is more likely to be manufactured news came shortly afterwards: two days after the BBC story came a further announcement that Sellafield nuclear power station in Cumbria was being shut down on safety grounds due to weather conditions.[2] Two nuclear power-station stories in a week is a bit suspicious even for those who accept the news as presented. Although there had been an unseasonal fall of snow for March, it had been no different, in fact less severe, than many other wintry snowfalls when the power station was not closed. The timing of this Sellafield story seemed incredible, coming directly after the announcement of a new nuclear power station; the story reeked of being a bit too much of a coincidence. To anybody used to reading between the lines, it is unlikely that the closure was simply due to snow. So what was the story’s purpose?

The plan, or hidden agenda, if followed through might have been to deprive households over a large area of northern England of their electricity during a cold spell. Had the closure lasted, there was a high probability that families would have been left without heating or lighting just to prove how dependent we really are on nuclear energy. This is one possibility. The other is to demonstrate how safety-conscious nuclear facilities are – all of a sudden. The shut down came two days after the announcement of a new plant, yet Sellafield has never closed down because of weather. The only reason nuclear plants shut down is for accidents, or perhaps maintenance. Accidents are different. There was an accident in 1957, which pushed the Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson to pen these apposite lines:

This is a land where dirt is clean,
And poison pasture, quick and green
And storm sky, bright and bare;
Where sewers flow with milk, and meat
Is carved up for the fire to eat,
And children suffocate in God’s fresh air.[3]

At the time of that leakage, Sellafield did not exist. The plant on the site was known as Windscale, as is Nicholson’s poem. The new facility at Sellafield got a new name to ensure that a gullible public, and those born after 1960, would not associate the Windscale disaster with the Sellafield nuclear power station. Nobody names a ship Titanic any more. Today Windscale is hardly ever mentioned, and new generations are oblivious to the accident, except for those who have learned of it from family members or read about it elsewhere. The incidence of childhood leukemia in the area is still up and the highest in the country. Despite a German study’s link of leukemia to nuclear power plants, a study commissioned by a government advisory committee found no such link.[4]

More recent disasters, like those at Chernobyl and Fukushima, are rarely mentioned when new nuclear power stations are proposed; so presenting a safety facade is essential. What is mentioned is how efficient nuclear energy is. Safety must be a key factor in selling nuclear power to consumers who are increasingly aware of its dangers after those major-scale disasters. Nuclear plants are also needed to produce the latest range of nuclear weapons, which is never mentioned. The irony is that these weapons can penetrate nuclear plants. Think about it: no shut down of Sellafield due to the weather for decades, then one in the same week that a new facility is announced. This must be manufactured news, funded by those most likely to gain financially from the construction of yet another potentially-lethal power plant. Sellafield is being decommissioned. There was an accident: a more recent leak than the Windscale disaster at the Thorp facility in 2005 closed the plant for nearly two years.[5]

The manufactured news did not end with the Sellafield shut down. Within three or four days, a second major ‘manufactured’-energy story hit the headlines. This time it concerned a supposed depletion in the UK’s gas reserves. The purpose of this was to show how we cannot rely on gas. Energy users, who have faced year on year increases in bills, are being asked to believe that the country could be running out of gas – which of course ultimately it is – but the article meant imminently. The prediction on Sunday March 24 was that only 1.4 to 3 days of gas reserves were left, and the United Kingdom had the lowest reserves in all of Europe. All stories mentioned how expensive gas is and how rationing might have to be introduced. At the same time, the general public was asked to accept that there will be increased energy bills again next winter.[6]

In reality, the main problem is that all our energy suppliers are privately-owned conglomerates for whom profit — no let that be greed — is the main motivating factor. Increased profit equals increased bills. There are supposed to be ombudsmen to make sure that consumers get a fair deal. Where and when have customers experienced a reduction in bills? Private energy companies have a responsibility to shareholders that supersedes any responsibility to customers, despite the customers being the ones who pay the extortionate bills. There used to be an economic saying that “the customer is king,” meaning that customers could take their business elsewhere for a better deal. Price fixing and energy cartels have eliminated customer choice.

There was a time in the UK when energy bills rose in proportion to increases in wages and salaries, when families could afford to pay for essential services without undue strain on the rest of the family budget. That was back in the happier days when utilities were publicly owned. Back then, when work needed doing, it was done because the driving force was not profit but safety and the delivery of a responsible service. In our stringent days of private ownership, the average family is crippled by energy bills. Water leakages are ignored for decades. When in dry spells the country sees its water reservoirs fall to their lowest ever levels, this is blamed on increased consumption. Privately-owned industries have no motivation to locate and repair the leaks. Instead hosepipe bans are imposed on householders because this is a much cheaper option than fixing the leaks and does not impinge on profit.

As with water, gas, and other essential industries, the new proposed nuclear power station will also be in private hands. This does not augur well for public safety or the family purse. Shareholders of private companies are not concerned about safety so much as profit, knowing as they do, that while the cash keeps coming in, their lives could not be sweeter. If later something goes badly wrong, like the Fukushima disaster, they can move their money and profits elsewhere, with the added consolation that the taxpayer, as usual, will pick up the bill. That is what happened with banking. There is no possibility with a Conservative, Labor or Liberal government that service industries will return to public ownership. They no longer believe in public ownership. Greed cracks the government whip.

References

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21839684

[2] http://lakelandradio.co.uk/2013/03/bad-weather-forces-sellafield-shutdown/

[3] Nicholson, Norman, A Local Habitation, Faber & Faber, London, 1972, p. 31.

[4] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/06/nuclear-power-leukaemia

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield

[6] http://peakoil.com/consumption/could-uk-face-gas-rationing-british-gas-reserves-could-run-dry-in-36-hours and http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/britain-faces-the-prospect-of-gas-rationing-for-the-first-time-8544975.html

Editor’s Note: All photographs by Trey Ratcliff.

About the story. “Tezen Nan Dlo” is one of Haiti’s most popular folk tales. The Créole “te” indicates the past tense, and “zen” means “hook.” It is about hooking and being hooked. The enticements of love, family, and the natural world. It is also a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl in Haiti, where a traditional method of chaperoning is to burden a girl with a younger child. Tales such as this one are told outside at night, usually on a porch, to an assembly of adults and children. The outlines of such stories are as minimalistic as the chord changes of a modern-jazz composition. For the storyteller, the fun is in the invention of the embellishments and variations that will hook an audience already well familiar with the tale. The story should never be the same, but the storyteller’s freedom is not absolute. For example, one is not permitted to change the simple and haunting melodies of the folk-tale songs. Enough explanation. To signal when one feels a story coming on, one calls “Krick?” If the others on the porch want to hear the story, they reply “Krack!”

KRICK?

A long time ago, in a thatched house snuggled in a valley between the flamboyant-covered hills of Haiti, there lived a girl whose greatest ambition was to bring home the cleanest water in all the world. Every morning after a breakfast of fresh bread and hot coffee, when her father went out to hoe the fields, and her mother made ready to harvest the vegetables for market, the girl and her younger brother, each with an empty bucket swinging around an arm, were dispatched to their own work of gathering water from a spring for their family.

Before they could step out of the house every day, the mother asked her son:

“And what do you promise me today, my darling Dieudoné?”

And Dieudoné replied in his most fervent voice:

“I promise to watch over my sister, Mommy, and to learn from her.”

All along their route, the pair of children were well known to their neighbors. The girl had been named Arélia by her parents, but the neighbors for many miles had long forgotten that name. To them she was Angélia, because she was gentle… and earnest.

“Promise you’ll marry my Ti-Toto and become my granddaughter some day Angélia, so I can tell you my stories! What do you say?” Gran’Aline would implore Angélia, only partly in jest.

“God willing Gran’Aline.” she would respond without breaking her stride.

So many things along the way called to her.

Malachite butterflies fluttered through her braids then alit suddenly along her path as if to say: “Run and catch up with us, Angélia!”

But this did nothing to slow her pace.

The flamboyants’ black pods, as large as machetes, rattled on the ground, and this did cause Angélia to imagine their shiny brown beads, and how nicely they could be stringed together into a pretty necklace. But these daydreams passed as quickly as the cha-cha of the pods. Next time, Angélia thought, turning her mind again to the problem of gathering a bucket of water without the fine particles from the spring.

Dieudoné, on the other hand, forgot his promises as soon as he made them and always before he reached Gran’Aline’s house twenty yards down the hill. He darted here and there, calling to all his friends. Often he challenged Ti Toto to a game of marbles, or the two boys disappeared behind the house to join several others in a match of soccer. Only after Dieudoné became too hot from the midday sun and tired from his exertions did he abandon his games. At such times, in a final burst of effort, he would sprint to the spring, dive into its cool waters, and emerge from them with his bucket full of a liquid so turbid that, even in brightest sunlight, the shiniest coin beneath it vanished from sight.

Angélia’s water, on the other hand, was always clean enough for her golden ring to shine through it. This was because, by the time her brother reached the spring, Angélia had usually sat by the water for hours, guarding a quiet spot, waiting for the fines to settle so she might gently tip in her bucket to let flow the clearest possible liquid into it. If, after all of this, she could not discern her ring beneath the water in the bucket, she started all over again.

It was in those quiet times of waiting that her longing became most acute. Soon Dieudoné would arrive to splash about and complain of hunger, she thought. Again, he would ignore her advice on how to collect the water; and again, it was she who would be scolded after the long walk home with her load. “My poor boy!” her parents would exclaim while coddling Dieudoné and comparing the two buckets. “You are not being taught anything by your selfish older sister. Poor boy… poor boy.” At these thoughts, Angélia’s eyes welled up with tears.

As the girl began to wipe her tears, the ring she had held slipped from her grip and into the water. She ran her fingers through the muck, but this was of no use, and in defeat she abandoned herself to her tears. As her teardrops dissolved into the turbid spring, the water began to churn, as if her sorrow had opened a portal deep beneath the ground. Out of this turbulence came the most magnificent creature Angélia had ever seen: a giant fish with a head and pectoral fins that shined like silver, eyes of black and gold, dorsal and tail fins red as blood, and scales that twinkled pink, yellow, and turquoise in the sunlight.

“I am Tezen”, the great fish said, bowing to her.

“I am Arélia”, the dazzled girl replied.

“You are more than Arélia. What is your true name?”

“How do you know about my other name?” the girl asked, astounded. “They call me Angélia.” she confessed.

“An-gé-li-a. Yes… that is your true name.” The fish nodded thoughtfully. “I should know your name… and so many other things about you! I am your friend who has waited for you here all this life, Angélia.”

At that instant, the great fish dived into the great vortex from whence he came. Seconds later he reappeared through a spray of water with Angélia’s ring and offered it to her, bowing.

The girl jumped for joy. “Oh! Thank you, Tezen!”

“Angélia, if you want me to, I will bring you a bucket of the clearest water from this spring every day from now on.

“I would like that so very much, Tezen!” the girl exclaimed.

She had hardly finished speaking when the great fish dived again into the vortex, this time with her bucket. He returned with water clearer than Angélia had ever seen.

“I hear your brother’s footsteps, so I must say goodbye soon.” Tezen alerted her. “But I am yours forever Angélia. Now, please remember this: when you want to see me again, sit quietly by the spring and sing this song, and I will come to you. It is our secret. Teach it to no one else.”

Tezen’s song (in Tezen’s voice)
Tezen of the waters, my friend from the clear spring
Tezen of the waters, my friend from the deep
Tezen, my true friend
True friend of mine, Tezen, Tezen
Tezen, true friend from the waters
Come to me!

Tezen’s song (in Angélia’s voice)
Tezen of the waters, my friend from the clear spring
Tezen of the waters, my friend from the deep
Tezen, my true friend
True friend of mine, Tezen, Tezen
Tezen, true friend from the waters
Come to me!

“I will keep your secret, Tezen.” the girl quietly promised herself, as the fish disappeared into the churning water.

The first time Angélia brought home a perfect bucket of clear water, her parents coddled Dieudoné nearly all afternoon, and they complained more bitterly than ever of her selfishness. Angélia hardly heard them that day, though, as she lunched on the tastiest red beans and rice that she could remember. She thought often about the next day; and the more she thought about it, the happier she became. Her excitement was so great that she spent nearly all of that night counting the stars.

On the first rooster’s crow, she jumped out of bed and made ready to go, but on the way to the spring that day, she took her time, knowing well that she could count on Tezen’s gift of pure water.

When the malachite butterflies fluttered past her, she skipped after them and invited them to land on her arms and lick the salt from her skin.

When Gran’Aline called her, she stayed to listen to the old woman’s story about the orange tree.

When the flamboyant pods rattled, she split them and stringed herself a magnificent necklace of their seeds.

She even stopped under the ylang ylang tree that always seemed to whisper to her to spend all day in her shade. The yellow flowers shivered as Angélia stood beneath them, and the fragrance they lent to the passing breeze joined the aroma of the green and gold carpet of petals right about her face. And she closed her eyes.

Soon she was by the spring again. She looked all around to make sure she was alone before she began to call Tezen.

Tezen’s song (in Angelia’s voice)
Tezen of the waters, my friend from the clear spring
Tezen of the waters, my friend from the deep
Tezen, my true friend
True friend of mine, Tezen, Tezen
Tezen, true friend from the waters
Come to me!

When the magnificent fish reappeared, Angélia wondered if she would live to know a happier day. And since happy people cannot perceive deceit, she never noticed that Dieudoné had not stopped to play with his friends. Early that morning, his parents had promised to relieve him of all work if he would spy on his sister and bring them her secret for clear water. The boy watched his sister from behind a great ceiba tree. Now he knew her song and her pact with the giant fish.

“Sing to me again, Angélia.” Tezen said sadly. And the girl sang the song again.

Tezen’s song (in Angélia’s voice).
Tezen of the waters, my friend from the clear spring
Tezen of the waters, my friend from the deep
Tezen, my true friend
True friend of mine, Tezen, Tezen
Tezen, true friend from the waters
Come to me!

“Why are you sad Tezen?” Angélia asked.

“I will be betrayed Angélia, and when I am, I will be killed.” the great fish confided to her. “Take this handkerchief.” he continued, handing her a square of linen so white it glowed in the sunlight. “Keep it close to your heart. So long as this stays white, know that I am alive. If three drops of my blood appear on it, then I have died.”

That day, the girl walked home with her brother beside her as she had done for so many days, except the water she carried was clearer than she had ever dreamed. Whenever she began to worry about Tezen, she checked her hankerchief… and she smiled.

Her parents did not scold her that afternoon, but soon after lunch, they dispatched her to the market so they could question Dieudoné.

“She is friends with a huge fish, Mommy, who brings her the clear water.”

“An evil spirit!” his father gasped.

“How does Arélia get this monster to consort with her?” his father demanded.

“He just jumps… he just jumps out of the water.” the boy stuttered, trying to grasp his father’s question.

“Think hard Dieudoné. You know the answer. Does Arélia splash her feet a certain number of times in the water? Does she call anyone’s name? Does she say any spells?” the man asked on his knees, grasping his son’s shoulders.

“She sings for the fish daddy.”

“Sing her song for me, my son.”

Tezen’s song (in Dieudoné’s voice).
Tezen of the waters, my friend from the clear spring
Tezen of the waters, my friend from the deep
Tezen, my true friend
True friend of mine, Tezen, Tezen
Tezen, true friend from the waters
Come to me!

“That water demon has stolen my daughter’s soul!” the mother sobbed.

And the father and mother left Dieudoné to his play and went into their room to plot their next day.

That morning Angélia woke up happy merely knowing that Tezen lived somewhere. After breakfast, when she grabbed her bucket to go to the spring, she learned from her mother that her job that day would be to fetch more provisions from the market. She suspected nothing. This had happened before, and besides, her gentle nature would have never allowed her to imagine her parent’s plans.

As soon as Angélia was gone, the father filed his machete, and he stuffed it into a sac, together with a large club and many large rocks, before he led his wife and son to the spring.

Though the malachite butterflies greeted the family, they saw nothing. Though Gran’Aline invited them for conversation and coffee, they did not stop. They heard nothing of the flamboyant’s pods and smelled nothing of the ylang ylang’s fragrance. They marched straight ahead, seeing a world full of demons and thinking of the many ways to kill.

As they approached the pond, the mother and father hid behind the ceiba tree.

“Go sit by the spring and sing the demon’s song.” they urged Dieudoné.

And the boy sat by the spring and sang.

Tezen’s song (in Dieudoné’s voice).
Tezen of the waters, my friend from the clear spring
Tezen of the waters, my friend from the deep
Tezen, my true friend
True friend of mine, Tezen, Tezen
Tezen, true friend from the waters
Come to me!

But the fish did not come.

“Sing louder!” his mother commanded. And the boy sang again.

But the fish did not come.

“Sing it like your sister!” the father ordered. And the boy sang again.

Tezen’s song (higher pitch, like Angélia).
Tezen of the waters, my friend from the clear spring
Tezen of the waters, my friend from the deep
Tezen, my true friend
True friend of mine, Tezen, Tezen
Tezen, true friend from the waters
Come to me!

And the great fish came.

At the market, Angélia felt a chill from her wet handkerchief. She withdrew it from her breast and, on it, discovered the three drops of Tezen’s blood.

Angélia returned home to find the day’s water as cloudy as milk and the house filled with the fragrance of the fried filets of fish set out on the table. She gasped and requested to be excused from the lunch. Her parents were relieved, in their celebration, to be rid of the girl who had come so close to bringing a demon into their mist.

Angélia ran away from her house, without stopping for Gran’Aline, or greeting the butterflies, or listening to the flamboyants’ pods, or breathing in the ylang ylang. Though she was out of breath, as soon as she arrived by the spring, she began to call Tezen.

Tezen’s song (sung by Angélia, gasping for breath).
Tezen of the waters, my friend from the clear spring
Tezen of the waters, my friend from the deep
Tezen, my true friend
True friend of mine, Tezen, Tezen
Tezen, true friend from the waters
Come to me!

But the great fish did not come.

She rested a while then sang again.

Tezen’s song (sung by Angélia).
Tezen of the waters, my friend from the clear spring
Tezen of the waters, my friend from the deep
Tezen, my true friend
True friend of mine, Tezen, Tezen
Tezen, true friend from the waters
Come to me!

But the great fish did not come.

Angélia returned to her house, walked to her small bedroom, sat on her straw chair, unbraided her hair and began to comb it down to her neck. As she combed through her hair, she sang Tezen’s song, and her sadness weighed so heavily that her chair and her feet slowly sank into the dirt floor. She kept on singing and combing through her hair, as her legs were next buried, and then her waist. She did not notice her brother when he bounced into the room.

“Mommy, Daddy, Angélia is dropping into the ground!” the boy shouted.

“Silly boy! Such a vivid imagination!” the father said, hardly raising his head from his meal of fish and rice.

Angélia continued to sing and comb her hair, until her shoulders sank, then her neck and, finally, her face.

The distressed boy returned, the next time with both his mother and father. All they found were the last inches of Angélia’s hair, sliding down into the ground.

Sometimes, when a full moon or perfect rainbow is reflected in a spring, if one stays still for a long time, one can hear Angélia calling to Tezen and Tezen splashing in the water.

 In memory of my darling mother, who loved me well.

Editor’s Note: This story is also available in Portuguese.  All photographs by Tambako The Jaguar. Submit your entry to the News Junkie Post short-story competition.

The End Age for humanity will not be a date known to man, but a point of no return from climate change, about which we shall be as oblivious as if we had sleepwalked out of an airplane without a parachute. Scientists will describe their shock at the free fall, estimate the time of impact and ask for more funds to refine their estimates. World agencies will organize meetings to exotic places, to which people will fly long distances at great costs in emissions, to discuss how to mitigate the effects of climate change and promote a capitalist notion of buying and selling carbon credits. All will be helpless against our catastrophic crash once we pass the turning point. Are we there now, as the Hopi and Mayans have predicted? Is there time left and, if so, how long?

By five different estimates of global warming from measurements of the temperatures of the lower atmosphere as well as Earth’s surface, during the 30 years between 1980 and 2010, human activities raised the entire globe’s surface temperature by one degree Celsius (3.6 degrees Farenheit). Regardless of what scientists might say to prevent a panic or protect their careers, they generally agree that another one-degree rise in temperature is too horrible to countenance and will be catastrophic for humanity.

Some climate reports say that we might reach this two-degree warming around 2050 to 2070 if we do nothing to “mitigate” climate change, but these projections are disingenuous. Based on the “Albedo Effect” alone, which predicts that the decreased reflectivity of the Earth, due to melting of glaciers, will cause warming to accelerate, anyone can reasonably calculate that, if we do nothing at all, the next one-degree increase in temperature will happen faster than the last. In other words, if we stop all emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) today, we have less than 30 years.

The time left to us might be very much less than 30 years because global warming itself is expected to trigger a series of events that will release massive quantities of greenhouse gases to trap yet more heat in the atmosphere. One of these is the release of methane from the Arctic permafrost. This has already started, with methane emissions increasing over 30 percent  from 2003 to 2007.  Another is the expected conversion of the Amazon from a carbon fixer to a net carbon emitter due to warming of the rivers and their release of CO2.

How might we prevent a catastrophe? For sure, it cannot be averted without acquainting the public with the seriousness of the problem, which is as follows. Our cumulative emissions of CO2 are the main source of the greenhouse effect that is warming the planet’s surface. Furthermore, CO2 stays in the atmosphere, on average, for about 200 to 300 years, and possibly longer. Therefore, at this juncture, the notion of emitting additional CO2  should be understood by all as being complete lunacy. We should, instead, be turning our attention to the task of removing much of the accumulated CO2.

Those scientists who do not communicate the urgency of the situation and participate in lulling the public into inaction have much to answer for. This is no time for inoffensive names like “thermal inertia” to describe the continued warming if we do nothing, or for obtuse terms like “negative emission,” to communicate the urgent need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. All scientific jargon must be thrown away. Not only our species is at risk, but also much of the ensemble of life that makes our existence possible. It is time for straight talk.

How excessive is the human contribution to global warming? Think how much heat one needs to warm a small pot of water by one degree centigrade. Imagine the heat needed for a container of water 10 times larger, a 100-liter drum and, finally, the surface of, not only the Earth’s oceans, but also the entire lower atmosphere! Consider the energies involved. They are now stored as heat over the planet’s surface and can transform at any time into massive storms. The epicenter of these events is the tropics.

It is a simple matter of thermodynamics that we are returning to the conditions that prevailed during the Permian Era, before green plants fixed the carbon that we are now burning as fossil fuels. Back then, the seas were vaster, and the Earth’s landmass was smaller than it is today. At two degrees of warming, civilization, as we know it, will end. Port cities will become submerged. Islands will disappear or shrink to their highest peaks. Simultaneously with the violent cyclones and massive floods, there will be fires in currently dry regions because they will become yet drier. The salinity of the oceans has already changed to the extent that many aquatic species are greatly stressed and might soon disappear.  The overall process is underway, and it will intensify even if we stop all carbon emission right now. We need to do more. Much more. At the least, we must set out to reforest the planet as rapidly as we can. We must also gradually decrease the human population to a sustainable level, if only to prevent the achievement of this depopulation by disease and other calamities. The world simply cannot accommodate more humans, nor can it tolerate the religion of capitalism, which calls for infinite growth and consumption on a finite planet.

Editor’s Note: Photographs one, four and five by NASA Goddard Photo stream. Photographs seven and eight by Lynn D. Rosentrater.

Show me a corporate boss who calls Haiti the “poorest country in the western hemisphere,” and I’ll show you a con artist preparing to fleece Haiti. Likewise, show me a western technocrat who bemoans Haiti’s “dramatic deforestation due to charcoal production” and I’ll show a bio-pirate or vandal preparing to wreck the country’s remaining cloud-forest and mangrove-forest ecosystems.

It turns out that the real plan for Haiti’s northeastern region — especially the Caracol Bay area — is one that was hatched by U.S. and Canadian mining corporations, with the U.S. and South Korean sweatshop zone being a side project and distraction. If this mining plan is given a green light while Haiti is under foreign occupation, it will permanently strip the country of much of its mineral, cultural, and ecological wealth.

In a May 1 interview with Canada’s Financial Post, Majescor Resources Inc. CEO Dan Hachey was effusive about Michel Martelly’s installment as president because he expects Martelly’s policy of mimicking the Dominican Republic (DR) to be a boon to the mining sector. Hachey enthusiastically noted that “thirty years ago, there was no mining sector to speak of in the Dominican Republic…. In that short period of time they’ve seen the development of the Pueblo Viejo Project [of Barrick and Goldcorp's], which is one of the world’s largest gold deposits — and is pretty much a neighbour of ours…. They’re going to be coming on with production this year.”

This glowing picture omits the fact that Barrick and Goldcorp have come under strong popular opposition in the DR. In a country where 20 percent of the population lacks access to drinking water, these companies are accused of polluting 2,500 cubic meters of water per hour with the vast quantities of cyanide needed to process 24,000 tons of ore a day by opencast (or open-pit) mining. Open-pit mining is banned by the European Union. Activists in the DR have joined forces with a broader group called Observatorio de Conflictos Mineros de América Latina (OCMAL) that launched a campaign to end this practice in the region. These problems are compounded by the damages from the more intense tropical storms due to climate change. For example, in the Philippines, the largest gold mine had to be suspended due to an unexpected spillage of waste into a major river.  In the DR, there is great concern that the country’s biggest water reservoir, which is close to the mining operations, is continuously at risk of cyanide contamination, since stories of spills and massive fish die offs caused by mining companies are legion. Barrick and Goldcorp have also been accused of dynamiting mountains and destroying Taino Indian archaelogical sites.

Like the Pueblo Viejo region of the DR currently under exploitation, the spot being eyed for mining by Majescor in Haiti — a 50-square-kilometer area called the SOMINE property — belongs to a broader region, replete with archeological sites, situated along a metal-rich mountain ridge running from southeastern DR to northern Haiti. This was formerly known simply as Le Massif du Nord but has become the “Massif du Nord Metallogenic (or Mineralization) Belt.”

An EMX-Newmont joint venture and the Haitian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding in April 2012 that allows exploration drilling while a Mining Convention is being ratified to permit development. Under this MOU, a gold prospect called Savane La Place is the first project picked for drilling.

SOMINE is an acronym for Société Minière du Nord-Est S.A. and is described in the mineral trade sheets as a “Haitian affiliate mining company.” It is 66.4 percent owned by Majescor, with the rest being owned by unidentified members of Haiti’s elite. Majescor is still a relatively small company that conducts mineral surveys. The SOMINE property is surrounded by other mining properties owned jointly by Majescor and much larger concerns like Eurasian Minerals and Newmont Mining. Once Majescor’s surveys are complete, it plans to find a big partner, like Eurasian, Newmont or Barrick (or some partnership of these like EMX-Newmont), to handle the extractive part of the project.

Curiously, the area of the SOMINE property was initially surveyed as early as “the 1970s by the UN Development Program, with some very good results [but the project was not pursued. Then] there was a feasibility study done by the Germans [Bundesanstalt fur Geowissenschaften und Rohstoffe (BGR)] in 1980, and there was further drilling done in the 1990s by Canadian junior [mining companies],” recalled Hachey. During the 1980′s, the area was explored again by the UNDP and also surveyed by the French Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minière (BRGM), both of which reported finding only copper. The official story is that an abundance of copper had until recently obscured the fact that the area’s ore is also rich in silver and gold, and this was discovered from Majescor’s recent prospects of Douvray, Blondin and Faille-B. However, the story could just as well be that the mining executives were biding their time and waiting for a “stable” non-nationalistic government to take effect before initiating their projects.

Indeed, the issue of gold mining could have been one of the undeclared motivations behind the February 2004 removal of Aristide. The post-coup government immediately went to work signing away Haiti’s mineral rights without any knowledge of the public. For example, the mineral rights to the SOMINE property were quietly assigned under a Mining Convention executed between this company and the coup government on May 5, 2005 and presumably valid until March 9, 2020. In any case, after the coup, Haiti’s mountains suddenly began to glitter. For example, an exploration of the Faille-B prospect in 2007 reported a gold vein that averaged 42.7 grams of gold per ton of ore (g/t) over 6 meters, including values of 107.5 g/t of gold over one meter.

According to Hachey, April 11, 2012 assays from Blondin found:

• 0.45 percent copper over 96.5 meters;
• 0.3 percent copper over 12 meters, including 0.61 percent copper over 1.5 meters; 154 grams of silver per ton (g/t) over 12 meters, including 869 g/t silver over 1.5 meters.

March 13, 2012 results from Blondin discovered:

• 72.4 g/t silver over 15 meters;
• 16.9 g/t silver over 113 meters, including 6.2 g/t silver over 1.5 meters; 0.43 percent copper over 113 meters, including 4.44 percent copper over 1.5 meters.

February 1, 2012 results from Douvray discovered:

• 255 g/t silver over 13.5 meters, including 2,069 g/t silver over 1.5 meters; 0.35 percent copper over 13.5 meters, including 0.52 percent copper over 1.5 meters; 0.02 g/t gold over 13.5 meters, including 0.04 g/t gold over 1.5 meters;
• 277 g/t silver over 13.5 meters, including 1,428 g/t silver over 1.5 meters; 0.18 percent copper over 13.5 meters, including 0.52 percent copper over 1.5 meters; 0.04 g/t gold over 13.5 meters, including 0.04 g/t gold over 1.5 meters.

These highly concentrated deposits of copper, silver and gold should reasonably represent a new found wealth for Haiti during a dire need of resources for the country’s reconstruction. But if the DR is to serve as an example, Haiti will not benefit from its minerals. In the DR, Barrick owns 60 percent of the Pueblo Viejo gold mine and Goldcorp Inc. owns the remaining 40 percent. To get a sense of the scale of the greed, one need only consider that, while gold currently costs over $1,700 per ounce, the Pueblo Viejo mine is slated to produce one million ounces of gold per year at a cost of only $20-50 per ounce, making it one of the lowest-cost gold mines in the world.

Hachey comments with evident enthusiasm: “What we’re most excited about is that we found some silver which was never really realized before. It’s the first silver discovery in Haiti…. Part of the reason why it was never really discovered was that historically there was so much copper prevalent — there’s a lot of outcropping at the surface. The people who did the work before did not do much testing, even for gold…. The geology is a little complex for a copper porphyry, but in a good way. The surprises that we’re getting are all good ones.”

As major draws for a big mining partner to this next phase of the project, Hachey is advertising that, unlike Port-au-Prince, which was destroyed by the earthquake, Cap Haitien is a pleasant place for a Canadian mining executive and his family to come to. In addition, he notes that there are plans for “the construction of a deep-water port at Caracol,” only 15 kilometres from the SOMINE property and near Cap-Haitien. Indeed, on May 7 Martelly announced that the construction of a port would soon start in Fort-Liberte (near Caracol), in the Northeast. The port will cost U.S. $179 million and is supposed to be “built with the U.S. government’s help,” but it will likely be entirely owned by U.S. concerns. This first official announcement of a deep-water port for Caracol explains in part why there has been no effort to mitigate the ecological effects of the massive free-trade (sweatshop) zone inaugurated in October 2012 in that area: the textile factories’ contributions to the degradation of Caracol Bay should be trivial compared to the damage from opencast gold mining and construction of a deep-water port.

UPDATES on December 21 and 28, 2012, Associated Press, VCS Mining. Haiti’s Mining Director Ludner Remarais has issued a gold exploitation permit to VCS Mining LLC (and its wholly-owned subsidiary Delta Societe Miniere S.A.), a U.S. company based in North Carolina, and gold and copper exploitation permits to SOMINE S.A. SOMINE is 66.4% owned by Canada’s Majescor Resources Inc and 33.6% owned by a group of unidentified, and possibly nonexistent, Haitian investors. According to Majescor CEO Dan Hachey: The permit “allows us to finally produce and make money, at least get to that step…. It’s also a great step forward for the mining industry in Haiti.” SOMINE engineer Michel Lamarre said he expects exploration to start in 36 to 42 months, and VCS CEO Angelo Viard expects his company to enter into “production” within 29 to 38 months. The gold permits are for five years and renewable for up to 25 years, with a possible renewal for another 10 years if new resources are discovered. These permits were issued by Remarais without any environmental-impact assessment (EIA).

Update on January 24, 2013, Defend Haiti. After a meeting of Haiti’s Senate Committee on Public Works and Communication, Minister of Public Works, Transportation and Communication Jacques Rousseau, and Director General of Mining and Energy Ludner Remarais on Tuesday January 22, the Senate met and rejected the agreements made by Remarais with the U.S. and Canadian mining companies in December, pending a review of the companies and the agreements.

Editor’s Note: News Junkie Post co-Editor in Chief, Dady Chery, broke this story on May 2, 2012. Photograph one by Sky Truth; photographs two, five and six by United Nations Photo. Photograph four by Stormy Dog and photograph seven by Andrew Kuznetsov.

Honeybee populations have plummeted in recent years. Simultaneously, government and industry funds to study whether pesticides, mites, or viruses are the root cause of this problem have been granted to American and European researchers. These scientists call the disappearance of the bees “colony collapse disorder”, or CCD, though a more appropriate name would be CCC, for colony collapse catastrophe. After all, this disorder entails the disappearance of a hive’s 5,000 to 100,000 or so individuals in a few days without leaving even a trace of their bodies. CCD was first reported in Pennsylvania in 2006. The speed of the devastation in the continental United States has been astounding, with small private apiaries already becoming a thing of the past, and the honeybee (Apis mellifera) numbers dropping on average by more than 30 percent: a total of about 3 million hives. The phenomenon has spread to Canada, Central America, South America and most of Europe.

Honeybee society

As a species, humans are about three million years old: a blink of an eye compared to the honeybees’ more than 100 million years of living in a highly egalitarian society. Honeybee hives consist mostly of sister workers who live together in wax cities of their own making. During the seasons when flowers bloom, many of these insects go out daily to forage for their foods. Typically, they collect nectar and pollen from a broad variety of flowers within a one- to seven-mile radius of their hive. When honeybees discover a good food source, they direct their sisters to it by performing a dance for their hive on their return. The discovery of this “waggle dance,” which describes the quality of the food and gives distance information as well as the angle to the food’s location with respect to the sun, was a milestone in the demonstration of intelligence in non-human animals. Even more amazing than the dance: the final decision about the best food source for the group turned out to be based on facts, discussion and consensus building.

A honeybee hive represents a tight-knit society of individuals devoted to the greater good. The workers feed a special secretion – royal jelly – to a queen who is usually the mother of the entire hive; her job is to mate with a few drones (males), lay all the eggs, and care for the larvae. In addition, the sisters prepare honey from nectar as a common store of food for leaner seasons. In places were winters are cold, bees, who cannot fly when the temperature drops below 17 C (54 F), assemble the hive into a football-shaped structure around the queen that vibrates in unison to stay at 29 C (85 F). During attacks on the hive by predators, the sisters defend their home without hesitation, although they perish if they administer a sting. In cases of illness, to prevent the spread of disease, individual bees exile themselves from the hive to die.

Have humans been good friends to the bees?

Entomologist E. O. Wilson has noted that bees are “humanity’s greatest friend among the insects.” Honeybees originated in Africa and then migrated to Europe. According to the historical record, the ancient Egyptians learned to harvest honey at least 6,000 years ago. The practice reached Europe probably through the ancient Greeks. European settlers became so fond of honey that they introduced honeybees and non-native fruit trees to the New World and other places in the early 17th century. Contrary to prejudices about non-natives, honeybees have been exemplary citizens everywhere. They are the Earth’s best pollinators by far. Without them about 90% percent of our fruits, nuts, seeds, and vegetables would disappear, leaving a bland choice of wind-pollinated grasses like rice, wheat, or corn for our plates. Fibers such as cotton and flax would also go the way of the apples, carrots, and blueberries.

The decline in honeybees is alternately blamed on the unpredictability of flowering by many plants due to climate change, the ravages of the neonicotinoid pesticides introduced in the 1990s, parasitic mites and, more recently, the viruses harbored by these mites. Were it not for several spectacular traffic accidents in 2010 and 2011, we might not have learned about the lucrative business — also started in the 1990’s — of trucking bees in the Spring by the tens of millions, to vast monocultures of fruit trees or plants such as almonds or blueberries grown by agribusiness, from a series of massive industrial hives. Nor would we have considered that the overcrowded industrialized hives represent ideal breeding grounds for parasites.

Currently one industrial hive costs about $100, but its price in bee misery is inestimable. Examinations of CCD hives have shown most of the insects to be afflicted with multiple infections, as if the parasites are behaving opportunistically on a depressed immune system in the honeybees. Often single insects have been discovered to be simultaneously infected by mites, bacteria, fungi and viruses. This wealth of possible causes for illness has created a real boon for researchers, whose mission is to maintain the bees’ health under the unnatural industrial conditions that are killing them. Indeed, the only solutions being seriously considered for CCD are those that involve the continued industrialization of honeybees, such as the replenishment of the populations with hives imported from Australia or the development of bees that are more robust.

A new ecological consciousness

One need not be an entomologist to understand that it is unethical to treat a group of social and intelligent animals as a disposable commodity to be trucked thousands of miles to pollinate nuts and berries for our pleasure and then thrown away. Although the reasons for the decline of honeybee populations are probably many, all of them relate to the scale up of farms and the industrialization of bee hives, which are hardly ever discussed. Even for those bees that dodge the infections from overcrowding, disease is bound to follow the extreme stresses of homelessness and alienation, and possibly the deficiencies that result from foraging on an industrial monoculture. It was inevitable that infections would spread from the industrialized bees to the insects from smaller apiaries – even organic ones –  since it is impossible to isolate the trucked bees from the other populations.

Again and again, articles about the plight of the bees remind us that their services to the world are worth many tens of billions of dollars. But isn’t the focus on money the origin of our problems? There is no substitute for bee pollination. None. In parts of China where honeybees disappeared some 30 years ago, and humans have tried to assume the pollination of fruit blossoms, this process has been laughably inefficient. While a beehive can pollinate millions of flowers per day, a small village can pollinate a few dozens trees at best. In response to demonstrations that honeybees are indeed injured by neonicotinoids, these pesticides have become restricted in parts of Europe. The future of honeybees, however, is hardly the sort of agricultural problem that can be patched up by legislation. A new ecological consciousness is needed, and fast. If the honeybee decline continues at its current rate, by 2035 honeybees will disappear permanently from our world, along with much of its color and fragrance.

Editor’s Note: Photographs two and four by Danny Perez.

By Sutapa Chattopadhyay

Today, our democratically elected governments are grounded in the conviction that markets should be the sole organizing force of political, social, and economic decisions: an ideology that entirely dislodges welfarist, democratic and uncommodified values from the state. Over the last four to five years, for example, ordinary people throughout Europe have protested under the financial crisis but received no recognition from the International Institute for Finance (IIF), a lobby group of the 450 biggest banks in the world. Representatives of IIF include Charles Dallara (who served in the treasury of Ronald Reagan) and Josef Ackerman (chief executive of Deutsche Bank) who were prime players in deciding Greece’s future. Both were present throughout the Euro summits and enjoyed access to policy decisions with European heads of state and other policy makers. The austerity measures that followed their so-called success led to an economic depression in Greece. Unemployment continued to rise, rendering ordinary people destitute and desperate but favoring a small percentage of global capitalist elites. Further, the dismantlement of the welfare state destroyed the notions that individuals can rely on the community in times of need or have rights to resources as public goods, or even have rights to basic needs, or a right to live.

Looking back on colonial times, the forest, for example, became a resource and source of wealth after its use value was discovered following the establishment of regimes of extraction and technologies of rule, and the construction of new knowledge under the name of scientific forestry. Scientific forestry allowed a systematic exploitation of forests by censuring, as wasteful and unsustainable, the practices of the people who had generational rights to the resources. Why? Because resources had to be appropriated for capital accrual.

The economy of extraction is best understood today by analyzing the imperial regimes of rule, technologies of rule, and the western hegemonic construct that all third world resource-rich nations support terrorism. Thus the notion of stewardship can be applied because the more civilized world presumably knows how to improve poor lives. In fact, it is doubtful that there would have been any wars, conquests, or occupations if west Asia had been devoid of oil or if Africa had not been so richly endowed with resources. Improvement of the lives of thousands of Iraqis or, more recently, the liberation of Libya from Gaddafi, echo Mill’s declaration that “despotism is the legitimate mode of government dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement”. Michael Klare argues that the global energy giants puncture holes in the oil fields of West Asia, Africa, Latin America – the so-called third world – because the governments there are compliant, corrupt, easily manipulated and environmental regulations can be effortlessly fiddled. Consequently, if resource conflicts are analyzed under unitary, singular explanations, then the study fails to capture the intricacies of power-knowledge and the politics of extraction and accumulation. The web of power is complex, distributed and functional.

Claudia von Werlhof rightly claims that the colonial South is not becoming the North through any western, masculine and classical development prescriptions; rather the North is transforming into the South. The latest form of development is a world system of underdevelopment, which further establishes that development, underdevelopment and unequal development go in tandem. If the path of over-consumption, exploitation and waste by the west is filtered, what we get is an unequal distribution of resources, benefits and wealth because those who sacrifice for development and those who benefit are not the same.

Genetic mutilations, patent rights, and TRIPS (trade-related aspects of intellectual rights) have reduced access and availability of resources, medicines and food to the poor and to poorer countries. The situation is all the more grim and painful because neglected diseases — simplistically, poor people’s diseases — have no vaccines or treatments because there is supposedly no market. With the expansionist policies of the superpowers who were the former colonial settlers, one sees that colonialization of the south has not stopped with decolonization efforts but has instead been more aggressively installed and violently continued through free-market fundamentalism and globalization. Various writers perceive this phenomenon as settler colonialism or internal colonialism or even a continuation of the cold war. Although globalization has brought us together with enhanced technologies and telecommunication, it has devastated third-world economies and the environment. Environmental destruction has such a domino effect on the entire world that we are already experiencing climate change in the form of appalling tropical storms, floods, droughts and sudden weather fluctuations that bring a huge toll to the livelihood mechanisms and health of poor people. Despite indications that the Earth is warming, the production of abstract wealth, forest clearings, grabbing of wastelands, displacement of subsistence farmlands with plantation crops and biofuels are on rise, and this will probably continue until it annihilates the poor.

Paradoxically, these discussions are not new, nor is the capitalist exploitation of nature and humans. Walter Benjamin was one of the first Marxists to denounce “the notion of dominating nature as an imperialist idea.” Five years after “ecology” appeared as a popular term, Boochin and College explicitly elaborated the anthropogenic sources of massive environmental destruction; thereafter, liberal and Marxist writers parasitized these concepts. The second half of the nineteenth century marked the critical consciousness around capitalism and ecology from Marx’s writings and anarchist politics of struggle and social uprisings. Radical environmental theorists had still not aligned with Marxist theories of class consciousness, articulation of modes of production and the relation between forces of production and social relations of production, but they accused Marx and Engels of being obsessed with capitalist production. This led to many faulty and unjustified analyses, because no one more than Marx condemned the logic of production for the sake of capital accumulation.

Further, there are other illusions, such as those of clean capitalism and the possibility of controlling the excesses of capitalism through eco-taxes, whereby ecologists shy away from correlating environmental crises with issues of class exploitation/exclusion. Consequently they abandon all possibility of joining the reds (social and workers movements) to the greens (environmental movements) for a combined approach to eco-social justice. No eco-social change will be possible until the fundamental ecological problems are recognized as being those of over-consumption and over-accumulation by the bourgeoisie and rich nations, arms trade and militaristic and imperialistic interventions of powerful nations, inegalitarianism, and the transplantation of western essentialist conservation agendas and policies to the south. The resolutions of the COP17 Durban conference that consumption of nonrenewable energy resources would be curbed only after 2020 make it blatantly obvious that ecological destruction would proceed unabatedly as a furtive class war.

It is important to know our ecological footprint. This would help us to make more responsible usage of resources, argue for a switch to a sustainable use of most resources; understand why waste recycling has to be a generous practice and not a taboo; appreciate how resource squandering in one part of the world causes larger problems for people living in precarious climatic zones, and most importantly recognize how all this is linked to capital accrual, exploitation of free labor and enclosure of resources. Joel Kovel wrote that: “humanity is not just a perpetrator of the crisis; it is its victim as well. And among the signs of our victimization is the incapacity to contend with the crisis, or even to become conscious of it”. Eco-socialism points to the need for formation of autonomous organizational structures, recognition of the complexities of power, subversion of authority and direct collaborative action to better equip us with strategic tools to combat the oppressive capitalist practices that continue to exploit the health of our society and environment.

Editor’s Note: Sutapa Chattopadhyay is an academic researcher whose work focuses broadly on social exclusion and in particular on indigenous populations, development-induced migration, development politics and policies, irregular immigrants, and academic corporatization. Photograph one by Fadzy Mubin, photographs two and four by Vincent Raal, photographs three and five by Adrian Kenyon and photographs six and seven by Ikhlasul Amal.

A giant storm is announced to make its landing on the East Coast of the United States on Sunday October 28. Two days ago, hurricane Sandy was hammering Cuba and Haiti in the Caribbean. On Friday, NASA called hurricane Sandy  “the bride of Frankenstorm”. The extreme weather system is coming as an uninvited guests and will crash the celebration of Halloween. Its aftermath will also likely disrupt the US presidential election. Although Sandy was only a category-two hurricane in the Caribbean, it did qualify as a killer storm in both Cuba, where the eye was centered, and Haiti.

When the hurricane or storm system lands in the United States, it will not say “Trick or treat!” but instead could rudely tear apart houses, dump several feet of water, and blow roofs and electrical lines off from Miami all the way to Boston. Frankenstorms, just like the fictional character Frankenstein, are man-made and, according to all legitimate research, are projected to intensify both in strength and frequency as the impact of climate change rapidly worsens.

Frankenstorm: The Most Formidable Third-Party Candidate

While both Green and Libertarian candidates Jill Stein and Gary Johnson were shut down by the mainstream media from the debates in the upcoming US election parody, the wrath of Frankenstorm will not be silenced. Police will not be able to handcuff it with plastic ties either. In all the staged debates preceding the November 6 elections, the critical global crisis climate change represents was not addressed as a key electoral issue. This is the first time since 1984 that it was casually swept under the rug of presidential political debates.

During his one term in office, between 1976 and 1980, former President Jimmy Carter was ridiculed when he solemnly called on the American people to lower their thermostats and wear sweaters. But Carter had the right idea: to make people aware of the danger of an out-of-control use of fossil fuels. Needless to say, the wise recommendations of Carter were largely ignored by the American public, and even more by his successors in the White House. Since then, with the rapid development of China and India, our global carbon footprint has grown exponentially and has already taken all of us to a point of no-return, where the catastrophic consequences of climate change cannot be reversed.

The United States, China and India: Rogue Nations on Climate Change

China, the United States and India — with China now in the lead — are the juggernauts of CO2 emission, which is the primary cause of climate change. Yet, none of these nations has ratified the Kyoto Protocol. When Obama was elected in 2008, most environmentalists were hoping to have an ally finally in the White House. They wrongly expected that under President Obama’s impetus, the US would join the Kyoto Protocol of 1998. The Obama administration was also expected to push for an extension of Kyoto, which expires in 2012.

This was, however, wishful thinking on the parts of  US citizens concerned with environmental issues. In fact, the Obama administration has consistently acted as if it wanted to derail any new agreements with even more modest goals than the Kyoto Protocol to cap CO2 emissions. “The Obama administration proposal could undermine a new global treaty and weaken the world’s ability to stove off the worst effects of climate change. If Kyoto is scrapped, it could take several years to negotiate a replacement framework, a delay that could strike a terminal blow at efforts to prevent dangerous climate change,” wrote Adam David for The Guardian.

The use of deadly fossil fuels such as oil and coal is not only killing the planet, but also will kill many humans in the near future and make the survivors’ lives extremely challenging. As ocean waters rise, many coastal areas worldwide will become uninhabitable. This will affect around 650 million people on a global scale. To imagine Manhattan, San Francisco, Hong Kong and New Orleans under three or four feet of water is not a science-fiction movie scenario but a likely outcome of our folly. Killer hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes and giant storms will swirl all over the globe teaching us the painful lesson that the wrath of nature is vastly stronger than our illusion of controlling it. Our arrogance, lack of forethought, and the criminal inaction of corrupt governance motivated by greed have opened a Pandora’s box and released Frankenstorm: a monstrous child of our own making.

 Editor’s Note: All photographs by NASA Goddard photo and video’s stream.

An unprecedented study of global biological and cultural diversity paints a dire picture of the state of our species.

Like the amphibians that climb to ever tinier areas at higher altitudes to avoid being extinguished by global warming, most of the world’s species currently huddle in a tiny fraction of the Earth’s surface, and most human cultural diversity — as measured by the number of languages — occupies essentially the same tiny fraction of the planet.

We are dying.

A scientist would never say it quite this way. Instead, he would tell you that the world’s animal and plant species are disappearing 1,000 times faster than ever in recorded history. He might add that some areas of the world have lost 60% of their languages since the mid-1970’s, and 90% of the world’s languages are expected to vanish by the year 2099.

In Haitian Creole, we would yell “Amwe!” (Help!), and this would be right and proper.

As ever, the best scientific studies merely quantify what everybody has known all along. Life, in general, has suffered horribly from the runaway spread of European values and the notions of progress that began with the Industrial Revolution. A sharp bit of mathematics finally brings forth the maps that expose the poverty of the world’s major carbon emitters and the little wealth that remains in those parts of the world where the indigenous are making their final stand.

High-biodiversity wilderness areas

There currently exist very few places on Earth that could be considered intact. The researchers found only five such areas, which are numbered 36-40 on the biodiversity map and colored in shades of green.

These are, by number: 36: Amazonia; 37: Congo Forests; 38: Miombo-Mopane Woodlands and Savannas; 39: New Guinea; 40: North American Deserts.

Global biodiversity map.

Together these intact spots amounted to only about six percent of the terrestrial surface but were home to 17 percent of vascular plants and eight percent of vertebrates that could not be found anywhere else. The same areas were the refuge for 1,622 of the world’s 6,900 languages, with little New Guinea topping the chart at 976 tongues.

The only glimmer of hope from the study was the discovery that, contrary to what conservationists might presume, a place does not have to be untouched by humans to serve as a refuge for the world’s plants and animals. Instead, habitats must be handled in the right way, and more than anything, they must be protected from the kinds of blows dealt by industrialization.

Biodiversity hotspots

The researchers additionally identified 35 “biodiversity hotspots” (numbered 1-35 and colored in shades of yellow to red on the biodiversity map), defined as places with a high density of endemic species despite having lost over 70% of natural habitat.

These were, by number: 1: Atlantic Forest; 2: California Floristic Province; 3: Cape Floristic Region; 4: Caribbean Islands; 5: Caucasus; 6: Cerrado; 7: Chilean Winter Rainfall-Valdivian Forests; 8: Coastal Forests of Eastern Africa; 9: East Melanesian Islands; 10: Eastern Afromontane; 11: Forests of East Australia; 12: Guinean Forests of West Africa; 13: Himalaya; 14: Horn of Africa; 15: Indo-Burma; 16: Irano-Anatolian; 17: Japan; 18: Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands; 19: Madrean Pine-Oak Woodlands; 20: Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany; 21: Mediterranean Basin; 22: Mesoamerica; 23: Mountains of Central Asia; 24: Mountains of Southwest China; 25: New Caledonia; 26: New Zealand; 27: Philippines; 28: Polynesia-Micronesia; 29: Southwest Australia; 30: Succulent Karoo; 31: Sundaland; 32: Tropical Andes; 33: Tumbes-Chocó-Magdalena; 34: Wallacea; 35: Western Ghats and Sri Lanka.

The biodiversity hotspots amounted only to about two percent of the Earth’s surface, but they were home to a whopping 50% of plant species and 43% of vertebrates that could be found nowhere else. Again, there was a stunning correlation of biodiversity with culture, with the hotspots being home to 3,202 of the world’s languages.

Global language diversity map.

Biodiversity is being lost, but what’s far worse is that the ability to express this loss is vanishing. For example, 1,553 of the languages in hotspots were spoken by only 10,000 or fewer people, and 544 were spoken by fewer than 1,000 people. Ironically, the American researchers who did this study are now regarded as experts on biodiversity, although the only real experts on how to maintain biodiversity in places occupied by humans are the world’s indigenous.

The logical conclusion to take from this study is that modern science, with all its sophisticated technology, is completely trumped by the thousands of years of experimentation by the world’s indigenous, although their findings have been transmitted by oral tradition and other simple means. To be fair, it isn’t so much the fault of modern science as the fault of the industrialized world, which worships power, greed, and the absurdity of exponential growth.

One cannot disdain all other living beings, grind mountains to extract minerals, build roads without a thought for habitat fragmentation, design gardens to please only human aesthetics, or harvest monocultures that serve solely human needs, and expect one’s world to continue for long. There is room for humans at Earth’s banquet, but only those who have lived in place long enough to have learned the contours of their terrain, the language of their plant and animal neighbors and, more than anything, the needs of non humans.

When a shaman leaves a lock of his hair where he has uprooted a medicinal cactus, it is not a bit of imbecility, but a humble acknowledgement that, for each living thing taken, one must give a bit of oneself, however small. For centuries humans have spilled their most beloved animals’ blood to the earth to acknowledge the cyclical aspects of life in preparation for battle and celebration of life’s milestones. These are not concepts that a pharmaceutical corporation could ever understand.

As for every other scientific report, this one concludes that yet more study will be needed, but what is needed, and urgently so, is more humility, because as the world’s indigenous cultures go, so does all humanity.

Editor’s notes. The original article discussed here and images 3 and 5 are in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. Images 1 and 6 are of San medicine man Jan van der Westhuizen, by Jan Stuermann. Image 2 is of Haiti’s Solenodon paradoxus, the world’s only venomous mammal, from Arboresciences. Image 4 is of a man in traditional dress in Papua New Guinea, by Bruce Beehler.

Dady Chery is a journalist, playwright, essayist and poet, who writes in English, French and her native Creole. She is the Editor of Haiti Chery.

Like a hulking giant, Isaac has stomped across the Caribbean at practically human speed, for days. Ten miles per hour, 14 mph, and Isaac continues its march northwest and west-northwest, for nearly one week, as if for a rendez-vous.  With whom?

Haiti could not have been tapped more gently, although at least 24 people have died. The propaganda is in full swing to credit Isaac with the collapsed Haitian agriculture on which USAID has labored for years. No. Give credit where credit is due.  USAID should take a bow. A possible resurgence of cholera is also being predicted from Isaac’s passage, although this is hardly the logical outcome of a tropical storm that has brought Haiti a gift of vast quantities of naturally distilled water.  If cholera reappears, it will most likely be due to the contamination of the country’s waters with hospital wastes or the sale of uninspected emergency bottled water to the population.

Isaac, Isaac, Isaac…. Better stop. It is unwise to malign anything so powerful. Isaac politely waited more than two years after Haiti’s earthquake for its Caribbean promenade. If the reconstruction funds for Haiti have only managed to build a few luxury hotels for disaster capitalists, it isn’t Isaac’s fault.

Isaac became a hurricane just before hitting the mouth of the Mississippi. The insensitive talk of “slamming,” “throttling,” and “thrashing,” liberally used to describe the misfortunes of other people, has become muted as the U.S. mainstream news organs learned that the hurricane would come to knock at their own doors in Louisiana and Mississippi.  And as U.S. news people receive a lesson in humility, so too does the population.  The poor are learning that their government, whatever the party, does not represent them.  The middle class is reminded that it is merely one fire or hurricane away from “losing it all.” In the U.S. this means not only the loss of a home, which is the major investment of the middle class, but also the disappearance of documents, heirlooms, memories. A loss akin to being  thrown at sea on a raft, deeply grateful to be alive.

Isaac appears set to revisit Katrina’s old haunts. The timing is identical: midweek, near the end of August. Many who live from paycheck to paycheck, whether they are paid monthly or weekly, will lack the cars of the funds to evade the storm. Will the buses come for them this time? Will the police show more respect for lives than for property this time? Will the levees hold this time? After all, it has been seven years: time enough for reconstruction and even a new culture.

But little has happened during those years, apart from a loss of population from Louisiana, a few lawsuits to punish trigger-happy police officers, and the transfer of some of the Louisiana disaster business to earthquake-hit Haiti. For example, the formaldehyde laden FEMA trailers were sent to Haiti as school buildings.  For when the culture change?

Climate change is real, and it is here.  Since 1980, the ocean surface temperatures have increased by one degree Celsius, and the amounts of energy involved in warming such massive volumes of water should give pause to anyone with more than half a brain. Hurricanes are powered by warm tropical waters and the Earth’s Coriolis force. Since 2005, scientific studies have predicted that the increased warmth of the ocean’s surface at the tropics would lead to vastly more damaging hurricanes that pack more water and churn farther inland. As we have seen for Typhoon Gener in the Philippines, which caused a spill from a gold mine, or the tsunami in Japan that caused the Fukushima disaster, it is only a matter of time before the effects of climate change become amplified by their interactions with human industries. How long before a direct hit on the Gulf’s oil rigs and refineries by a hurricane? How long before a major hurricane hit on the New York-Boston area and its nuclear power plants?

Isaac is in the U.S. now and, however it rearranges the landscape, it can hardly be blamed for coming without notice. It is an extraordinarily gracious giant that sent its calling card seven years ago.

Editor’s Note: All photographs of New-Orleans post Katrina by Gilbert Mercier.

Dady Chery is a journalist, playwright, essayist and poet, who writes in English, French and her native Creole. She is the Editor or Haiti Chery.

UPDATE 1, Wednesday August 29 at 12:00 EST. Hurricane Isaac is churning over Louisiana and Mississippi with sustained winds of 75 mph and slowly moving at 6 mph while dumping as much as 20 inches of rain in some places. For more details go to National Hurricane Center ( NHC).

UPDATE 2, Friday August 31 at 00:02 EST. According to RT, Isaac’s ravages in Louisiana and Mississippi killed at least three, including two people whose bodies were found in the kitchen of a flooded house in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, and a truck driver in Mississippi who died when a tree fell on him.

VIDEO: US floods in Isaac’s aftermath (1 1/2 min; source: RT).

As we are coming closer to December 21, 2012, anxiety is building up for many. It is of course the prediction of the Mayan calendar, the one of Nostradamus, and the belief of christian fundamentalists  that the fateful “judgment day” phase has already begun with a few potential candidates  playing the role of the anti-Christ. As a rationalist, I can not adhere to any of this and especially not the part of the return of Jesus. However, anyone able and willing to analyze our current human predicament knows that we are entering a very challenging period for our own survival. The two main causes are purely man made in the form of overpopulation and climate change. As a specie we are heading for a cliff to be forever sent to oblivion. We can only blame our own arrogance, selfishness, lack of foresight and stupidity.

We have a plethora of problems that our largely incompetent governments are not tackling. It is of course climate change, but also overpopulation and social inequality. The world will unlikely come to an end in 2012, but we might have entered the phase of “the end of the world as we know it”, and most of us are not prepared to make any significant adjustments from our current social behavior. With a world population already at six billion, not addressing this quickly ticking time bomb is the equivalent of global suicide. With the ice cap quickly melting, fertile and highly populated areas worldwide will be flooded and will become inhabitable for 600 million people within less than 20 years. Large migration of people, escaping the floods, will take place, and such migrations will likely cause conflicts with existing local populations.

We are living under the delusional concept of stability and permanence, as if our trivial mentality of “business as usual” will always prevail. But, with sea waters rising, extreme weather spreading destruction all over the world, and nuclear disasters poisoning our food supply, it seems that humans have created an unstoppable army of Frankensteins, with the ability to destroy our very own planet. Since the industrial revolution, the focus of development has been on constant growth of production and labor force to accomplish it. The concept of exponential growth is by essence unsustainable.

But in order to accommodate this exponential development drive our insatiable appetite for natural energy and mineral resources have depleted planet earth and compromised the natural balance necessary for our survival. Unfortunately, this obsession for energy and resources is even more prevalent today than it was 150 years ago. We have collectively raped the planet for one and a half century, and we are about to pay the price for it. Some of us already have: just ask Haitians or Japanese facing their respective man-made so called “natural” disasters.

My experience with a preview of such apocalyptic scenario  was in New-Orleans post-Katrina. It gave me a precise idea of what our life can be like when you can’t rely on standard first world amenities, such as electricity, gas, water coming out of the pipes and stores to buy food. In disaster situations such as New-Orleans, Haiti or Japan, governments usually fail, to some degree, and survivors are left to fend for themselves. Then, it is back to the basics, and it translates into the two absolute  human necessities: food and water.

Today humans are stupid enough to fight for the exploitation of resources such as oil, natural gas and charcoal. If we are unable to curtail this madness, the wars of the very near future will not be about energy, control of transport and access to cheap labor forces. Instead, they will be about basic survival. There is an international trend burgeoning all over the world, populated by people smart enough to understand that the proverbial feces is just about to hit the fan. The off the grid survivalists are trying to be self reliable, and they have the right idea.

In California, Los Angeles is overdue for a major earthquake, yet, is the population prepared? As a former resident of the City of Angels, I can say that the community is absolutely not ready to handle such a challenge. Globally, we should ask ourselves some critical questions.  How would we survive if all our utilities (water, power) were cut off for weeks? How and where would we get water and the food to feed ourselves and our  families?

Editor’s Note: All photographs of New-Orleans post Katrina  by Gilbert Mercier.