The Road To Extinction

What a happy world it would be if all its living species lived in harmony- plants, animals and humans. It’s an utopian dream, some say, impossible in this world of modern urban living, say others. It does happen. In the last remaining forests of the Amazon, the indigenous people have lived for centuries in isolation and in close dependency in harmony with nature. Now they, together with the plants and animals, are being driven to extinction.

The rain forests are being burnt, the wild animals are dying with less habitat and food and the indigenous tribal people are being increasingly infected with the diseases of intruders, the most recent is Covid-19. The natural world is being destroyed. The forests are burnt replaced with palm trees, beef cattle and soya beans. We humans are a ferocious species. Greedy for profit, the corporations mine and excavate the minerals, cut and haul the logs, capture and trade the wild animals, over-fish the oceans and pollute the air. We are dangerously overheating the planet with poisonous greenhouse gases. That temperature increase is killing animal species, damaging sea corals and causing raging bush fires around the globe where animals die. We must understand the cause and act to stop it.

The first place to look is at human nature. Our species has evolved rapidly and unpredictably to the point where we have taken over the earth. The number of wild animals on the earth have been reduced by half since 1970 and the human population has doubled. As a result, animals are becoming extinct 100 times faster. Our expanding population is cutting and destroying the forests, killing and eating the animals and, in the process, provoking and inviting deadly killer viruses to jump from one animal species to humans.

We had Sars, Ebola, HiIV and now Covid-19 to mention a few and more to come. Call it the deadly embrace of nature. Another more deadly virus will attack for which we cannot develop a vaccine and could face extinction ourselves.

It all began with oil, fossil fuels, fertilizers, pesticides and corporate agriculture. Cheaper food in abundance. Then, the scientific community made great discoveries in antibiotics and vaccines. Life expectancy zoomed from 45 to 70 years and the Green Revolution produced more food and populations grew but most remained poor.

In 1898, when the Philippines fought Spanish and then America forces for independence the population was about seven million people scattered over the islands. Then 102 years later, by the year 2000, it was 76 million people. According to the UN projection report by the year 2050, it will be 127 million. Presently, the population of the Philippines is 110 million. Will the nation be able to feed itself? Obviously not. It imports most of its rice and has a semi-starving population of impoverished slum and rural dwellers of 16 million people, if not more. With millions of educated Filipinos migrating and working abroad the future is bleak with social unrest and political turmoil brewing. This Philippine population growth is unsustainable and should it continue at this rate, it would be a doubling of the population every 35 years. That means a population of 152 million in the year 2035 and 304 million by the year 2070. The Philippines is just one example in a global catastrophe of ecological destruction because of uncontrolled population growth in the developing world. There is now only 3 percent of the Philippine primeval rain forest left. In 1900, there was 70 percent forest coverage of the archipelago. The forest dwelling indigenous people of the Philippines are now neglected, abandoned subsistence farmers on bare mountains denuded by corporations owned by local elite and foreign corporations. An ecological crime of gigantic proportions and a lost and stolen natural resource and heritage.

The world population is at present seven billion people, most are in China and India. The world population will continue to increase to 9 billion by 2045, according to UN projections. The continent of Africa where the great remaining rain forests and most of the world’s species of animals live face a very precarious uncertain future and extinction is ongoing at present. There was about 230 million African people in 1950. They made up nine percent of the world population but in 60 years, by 2010, that number had grown to one billion. That was then 15 percent of the world’s population.

By 2050, Africans will make up 24 percent of the world population. This is 2.2 billion people, the UN says. Every 12 to 15 years, we humans add one billion more humans to the earth. They have to live, work, eat, procreate and survive. That demands more land, housing, farming, chemicals and water. Population growth has a huge impact on the ecology and the animals in Africa and the Amazon are losing their habitat and are dying out.

In Africa, about 60 percent of the population is below 25 years of age. There is high unemployment, inequality, poverty, social unrest, corruption and political conflict. These are driving the youth to migrate. Thousands are streaming toward Europe in the hope of a better life. Western countries are absorbing many and some nations are fast becoming multi-cultural and multi-racial. Racists want to stop them. The European population growth, presently stagnant, will soon start growing because of the young migrants.

Climate change, driven by western industrialization, is heating the globe with greenhouse gases. That is drying up once lush African grass lands, rivers are drying out leaving dying reptiles and animals. What is left alive are being hunted to extinction for their tusks and horns or captured and sold internationally to corrupt collectors of wildlife.

The hope for the remaining forests and the natural world is the international movement to save the planet, to reduce global warming and to preserve the environment vital for our survival. We can all join in by working for a clean organic environment, campaigning and speaking out for each other and the animals and creatures with whom we share the earth.

How We Can Undo Injustice and Help Indigenous Communities

He was in his mid-twenties, young, dedicated, a defender of the trees and the ecology of his native Amazon rain forest and guardian of his community. Paulo Paulino Guajajara is the latest of many indigenous people shot and killed in a cruel and treacherous murder by illegal loggers. His companion, Laércio Souza Silva, was also seriously wounded but he survived. It happened in the Arariboia reservation in Maranhao State, Brazil.

The indigenous Guajajara community of the Amazon have organized themselves as forest guardians to stop the encroachments of loggers and agri-corporations on their ancestral lands and rain forests.The corporate elite covet the land for growing monocrops like soya and cattle-raising and mining and try to drive away the indigenous people.The people in these remote regions are also victims of Coronavirus and many have died infected no doubt by the invaders and exploiters of the forests.

Forest trees are chain-sawed to death and burnt on a funeral pyre of devastation and greed. What the exploiters deliver is death and destruction. What the indigenous communities want is life, peace and solitude and what is rightfully theirs.

In the Philippines, 46 land defenders and protectors of ancestral rights of Filipino indigenous people have been murdered in 2019 on Negros Island and in Mindanao. They have been wrongly branded subversives by government officials out to crush dissent and silence opposition by indigenous people.

The intensity of the incursions has greatly increased since the dismissal and death of environmental campaigner Gina Lopez who, as secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), cancelled dozens of licences and permits for mining firms for violating environmental protection rules and failure to respect the rights of the indigenous communities. Since then, the murder rate of environmentalists has greatly increased to 46. Previously, in 2018, the number of land defenders killed was 29. The Philippines was declared the world’s most dangerous place for environmental protectors.

The sacred rights of indigenous people that have occupied and peopled the Philippine lands and forests for thousands of years, while clearly stated in the Constitution and law, are trampled upon and ignored. The indigenous people are disgracefully considered inferior human beings subjected to racist slurs and humiliation and their rights continually violated. The environmental NGOs, Mongabay and Kalikasan, keep records of number of environment defenders killed. They said that, “63 percent comprise agribusiness workers and farmers, followed by government officials and forest rangers (35%), indigenous peoples (20%), and lawyers and church workers (4%).”

In Brazil, the campaign of President Jair Bolsonaro to open up the Amazon and allow agri-business to destroy the forests for soya production and cattle farmers has been called genocidal of the indigenous people. The people will lose their lives, families, culture and way of life. They risk their lives every day to protect their rights and the environment. Paulo Paulino Guajajara is the most recent victim. Millions of unique wildlife will also perish and disappear from the face of the earth as the land grabbers cut and burn the trees and destroy the wildlife habitat. A July 2019 report by NGOs stated that over 7,200 square miles of the Brazilian rainforest has been deforested and burnt between 2017 and 2019.

With the destruction of the rain forests around the world, the absorption of CO2 has greatly decreased causing greater global warming. The more than 1 billion beef and dairy cattle on the planet emit methane gas that is even more destructive to the atmosphere than CO2. The global warming dries the forest and woodlands around the world and they are devastated by wildfires. More than a billion creatures and many people were killed in the massive bushfires that raged across Australia recently. The Guardian newspaper reported that a royal commission was told by a professor that “…96,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, including 35,000 children, were affected by the fires…….. That amounts to 29 percent of the indigenous population in affected states, and 12 percent of the national Indigenous population.”

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007 set a standard for national laws to follow. Philippine laws protecting indigenous are weak and mining and agri- corporations run by local elites exploit loopholes to violate indigenous ancestral land rights.

Indigenous people are the original inhabitants and occupiers of the lands and they have natural rights over the mountains, forests, seas and lakes. They ought to be honoured, respected, and affirmed in dignity and the first beneficiaries of wealth generated from the natural resources, as original owners of the sources of wealth stolen from them everywhere.

A great wrong perpetuated by the invaders and never righted. The Aeta of the Philippines, the original occupants of the islands for some twenty or thirty thousand years, have been driven into poverty. Most indigenous people have practically no representation, few spokespersons and are victims of systematic racism, rejected and treated as throwaway people. When and how can such gross social and racial injustice and selfishness be overcome? How will the world change for the better?

Great social and environmental change to undo wrongs and injustice, to restore human dignity and to overcome evil and poverty so people can live in peace, respect and trust each other can only happen when inner change comes in the people as a whole.

That change can only be when one of the greatest and most profound virtue, a heart-felt feeling of the human person is offered, accepted and lived. That is compassion. This is a strong feeling of empathy and concern for the plight and suffering of others. It empowers and creates a desire to help strangers. It is a spiritual force that inspires and compels a person to take effective action to alleviate the suffering, deprivation, oppression or exploitation of any kind and it never seeks a reward or imposes conditions.

To bring about compassion that will transform the unjust and uncaring world, we need to have compassion ourselves and to act upon it so that by example we will inspire it in others and cause it to spread. Then, then the people of compassion can change the world for the greater good of all people.