I always believe that bare brutal blunt facts can hit home in people's minds more than theoretical explanations. There is lots of discussion about climate change, from both deniers and accepters, but usually in argumentative point scoring debates. Fancy schemes are banded about on how to fix the problem, but the root cause is usually removed from the debating platform. The arguments are usually couched in terms of us all being responsible for this nasty mess. However, the truth is that it is the capitalist system that is carrying out the genocide of entire species, with our species, the humans, being somewhere along that trajectory. It is capitalism that is rapidly clearing forests and killing of the ecosystems that go with the forests. It is capitalism that is polluting our rivers killing off large and small species alike. It is capitalism the is poisoning our seas and oceans putting an end to the rich and varied life that lives in them. It is capitalism and its obscenely wealthy moguls that is driving this suicidal policy by its insane greed driven belief in perpetual growth or die.
Some brutal blunt facts in an article by Dan Fischer, from It's Going Down:
“The solution, then, must involve class struggle against the ultra-wealthy.”
Continue Reading:Half of all wild animals on Earth have been wiped out. You may have missed the news. It came from a scientific study mentioned on page 5 of last Wednesday’s New York Times. You had to flip past the usual stories of Trump regime scandals, four jewelry advertisements, and an ode to a slain officer from the New York Police Department.
“’Biological Annihilation’ Said to Be Underway.” The article took up only as much space as a Sootheby’s ad on the same page announcing jewelry sales in New York City.
While “biological annihilation” sounds like an evil plot thought up by a Bond villain, the term actually comes from a peer-reviewed study in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The authors Gerardo Ceballos, Paul Ehrlich, and Rodolfo Dirzo use it to describe the ongoing destruction of local populations within different species.
Due to the pressures of habitat destruction, pollution, and climate change, species are going extinct at 100 times the rate they normally would. The PNAS study shows that populations within species are disappearing much, much faster.
Billions of Genocides
The authors take data on 27,600 land-dwelling species and map it onto a grid with 22,000 boxes, each representing 10,000 square-kilometer area. They define a “population” as the number of individuals of a given species living in one of those areas.
They discover that wildlife numbers have declined by “as much as 50%” since 1900. The direct killers are “habitat conversion, climate disruption, overexploitation, toxification, species invasions, [and] disease.”
“[B]illions of populations” are “already gone,” they report. In other words, there have been billions of genocides, in an endless mass murder of wild animal communities over the last century. In most of the world, the researchers find, mammal populations have decreased by 70 percent.
Graveyards and graveyards could be filled with all the packs of wolves, colonies of bats, sloths of bears, and herds of giraffes slaughtered by the death machine of capitalism. Lion populations have declined by more than 40 percent since the 1990s. The number of cheetahs in the world has gone down to just 7,000. These dramatic results reinforce the findings of the 2016 Living Planet Index report, which said 60 percent of wildlife has been destroyed since 1970.
It is not just nonhumans facing extinctions. The authors write, “Humanity will eventually pay a very high price for the decimation of the only assemblage of life that we know of in the universe.” On this topic, it is worth turning to a New York article everyone seems to be sharing.
