Only One Earth
I cannot write about Mother Earth, the dear home to all of us, without emotions of joy and admiration, tears and sorrow. In deep forests and on high mountains, by
lakes and waterfalls, I find my cathedrals.
Extreme floods and droughts, murky rivers and streams, contaminated soil, polluted air choking our breath. Unbearable heat waves. Toxic waste is finding its way into every corner of our wonderful planet and its atmosphere.
DESTROYING OUR ONE EARTH
We are also threatening lots of other living species sharing this planet with us. Just as care and love for our fellow human beings is accompanied by pain and suffering, so is our love for the natural world, its rich resources and beautiful scenery.
Fortunately, lots of people take action to prevent destruction, to protect and restore, like the seven courageous grassroots activists who recently won the Goldman Prize. Amongst them were an indigenous river campaigner Maria Luz Murayari of the Kukama people who spearheaded a successful legal campaign to protect the Maranon River in the Peruvian Amazon. Another winner was Carlos Molina, leading the effort to preserve an important marine reserve on the island of Tenerife.
Projects of reforestation, rewilding, monitoring the lives of birds and animals, actions of cleaning up beaches, and demonstrations. The enthusiasm, commitment, creativity and achievements of those involved give tangible hope. And we have just said farewell to Pope Francis who challenged the indifference and recklessness of the rich and powerful in his encyclical on the environment in 2015.
The state of our environment is high on the international agenda. The COP conferences, on climate change every year, and on biodiversity every other year, gather government and business leaders to set targets and reach agreements on actions to be taken. The next one on climate change is in Belem in the Amazon. The forests are essential for our life on earth.
Yet, despite all this effort, the overall picture is depressing. Facts and figures show that we are moving in the wrong direction. Why?
THE OIL & GAS DECEPTION
Brutal wars are stealing the attention of our leaders and consuming enormous resources which should have been used on our environment. Although this is true, we have to dig deeper for the root causes of our environmental degradation.
In 1966 and the following years I cycled to school and had to get through busy streets in Oslo, Norway’s capital city. The car fumes troubled my breathing as I was trying to keep safe between cars, trams, buses and the pavements. On my way home up the hills, big lorries sent clouds of exhaust in my face. I wondered where these fumes ended up. Did they dissolve or stay up somewhere in the atmosphere? I hoped the pollution was local, limited to the city centre and on the roads in the rush hours.
Today we know the truth.
40 – 45 years ago that truth was starting to spread amongst the top managers of the oil and gas companies. Research by their own scientists revealed that CO2 would have a greenhouse effect. The climate would become warmer. What happened with that information? “Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades” was the headline of an article by Chris McGreal in The Guardian three years ago. More articles revealed the same. The oil and gas companies decided to hide the truth and even invested money in spreading false information.
This is unfortunately not only true about the past, and not only about oil and gas. Big money continues being invested in spreading misinformation. A wide spectrum of companies and industries responsible for products causing harm to the human health and the environment, are doing their best to play down how serious the effects might be. Lobby groups turn up at environmental conferences to prevent tough environmental laws being approved. At COP 29 in Baku there were hundreds of lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry and industrial farming. We, the majority, have been and are being deceived. Those with power and money want more of what they already have.
COMPLACENCY AND GREED
However, one question troubles my mind: My own generation in Europe, the USA and other highly developed countries, growing up in peace and increasing prosperity after the Second World War, learnt more and more about the world we live in. We were brought up to have a critical mind and had the freedom to speak out. We observed the growing destruction and contamination of our environment. Why were we, with some exceptions, so complacent? Where did we think it would end? Getting increases in salaries often seemed to mobilize more people to protest than toxic chemicals being let out in the environment.
Professor in social anthropology at the University of Oslo, Thor Hylland-Eriksen, who passed away last November, said “the world has fever, because of our greed.” Our greed? Not only the greed of the rich elite, but the motivation driving all of us?
Once in a while I do some shopping in a big supermarket near my home. There are lots of people, an abundance of products and all kinds of special offers. I feel uncomfortable. Exaggerated plastic packaging is one thing, but what bothers me most is that this abundance is made possible by excessive exploitation of fertile land, natural resources and workers who are poorly paid all across the world. On the other hand, is it fair to say that all these people out shopping are greedy? Don’t they just enjoy the good fortune of being able to buy what they need and want?
The big enterprises and businesses are constantly competing for access to new resources and ways of producing more and more. Some choose nice words to define their motivation, but ‘greed’ may often be the most accurate one. To sell their products the business elites keep one essential feeling alive in all of us. Enough is never enough. The feeling of having enough only exists in the future, once we get a little more. The employment of thousands of clever and creative people in marketing and advertising, and the money invested in this field, show how important we, the consumers, are. We must never be completely satisfied. We must buy the next good product on offer. Our economic system is organized so that our high level of consumption continues and preferably increases.
We have got hooked on a consumption presented to us as something that will make our lives better. However, it ultimately destroys our earth, because it depends on overexploitation and contamination of the natural environment.
OUR DILEMMA
Sir David Attenborough has made remarkable documentary films about the marvels and secrets of our natural world. He has just reached the age of 99 and has made a new film about the oceans, giving a stark picture of how serious our overexploitation is, and on the other hand, how the oceans can recover when protected and left alone. He has observed over several decades the spiralling decline in our planet’s biodiversity and its tragic consequences. He puts his finger on our dilemma in his book “A Life on Our Planet”:
“We live our comfortable lives in the shadow of a disaster of our own making. The disaster is being brought about by the very things that allow us to live our comfortable lives.”
We have got addicted to a level of consumption that the world cannot afford, and the business elites of this world want to keep us addicted. Their greed and our seemingly innocent wish to have a little more, all the time, walk hand in hand and take us closer to disaster. But this does not happen only because of our desire for more. Our society is organized in such a way that it is hard to break free and live differently. Everything from the construction of our houses, transport, the production of the food and clothes we need, cosmetics and entertainment, are part of a system which leads to the gradual destruction of our environment. This is our dilemma!
As a European I cannot escape a tragic fact of history. People from my continent flooded into all the other continents, ruined local culture, and made people work for our economic development and progress. We arrogantly imposed our economic system on them. Despite this injustice, it looked as if this system might one day deliver real progress across the whole world, and many of my generation, concerned about injustice, believed aid from our rich countries to the developing world would provide an equal share in the growing prosperity.
Sadly, environmental destruction has shattered hopes and predictions, and the affluent world has been incredibly slow in picking up the signals. Today the developing countries are demanding compensation for the ecological disasters caused by the economic system imposed on them. The expected progress has become a nightmare for far too many!
THE TRUTH OF THE STATUS QUO
There are two more characteristics of our present economic system which are clear obstacles to a turnaround. Unfortunately, space does not allow us to deal with them properly here.
The first one is: Mass production has been a hallmark of industrialization. Why have we time and again entered production on a large scale before doing proper research into dangerous effects of toxic waste that these products may cause? Once mass production is in place and our lifestyle and the organization of our society is shaped by them, change becomes much harder.
Secondly, why do we at this critical stage pursue technologies that require a higher and higher consumption of energy? The increase in solar and wind-power is definitely a step in the right direction, but with a continuous increase in our consumption of energy, what will the result be?
Many take refuge in illusions, and powerful leaders have made denial their political banner. It is not only the earth which is contaminated. Our minds are contaminated.
Mahatma Gandhi said*: “There is enough in the world for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed.”
How do we create an economic system built on this reality? It will take a revolution. Not violent, but a step-by-step revolution. Every project of restoration and protection will count.
The turnaround will not be achieved by a minority of activists alone. Those in power wanting to maintain the status quo can put up with opposition on the fringes of society as long as the majority continue to be addicted and imprisoned by the present system.
There is no escape. We must face the truth! Once we realize and admit how entangled we are in a system and way of life that causes destruction, we have a chance. We can release huge resources of human creativity which today are wasted on producing and marketing things we do not need. Exceptional leadership, commitment and hard work may flourish.
That is my stubbornly flickering hope.
* While the well-known but not always heeded sentence about need and greed is frequently attributed to Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), the sentence was probably first articulated by Frank Buchman (1878-1961), the founder of Moral Re-Armament, later renamed as Initiatives of Change. Gandhi’s life may have shown an appreciation of the truth of this sentence, but he was not its author. – Rajmohan Gandhi
