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Here! Here!
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, June 16, 2003 9:58 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Fw: [AB] Jane
Goodall: devastating the earth
Selma,
Thank you for posting this article.
I used to write for Resurgence 30 years ago when it was regarded as a magazine
of extreme eccentricity but, mainly, because Jane Goodall has been one of my
greatest heroes during my lifetime, too. She has recently been made a Dame in
the Queen's Birthday Honours List. I am no lover of royalty and I think that
most of the honours bestowed by the Queen every year go to the sycophantic and
often to the worthless, but in this particular case I would lay down my cloak
for Dame Goodall were I ever to meet her.
She is an Elder of our tribe
and her life and work will be cited more often and more respectfully in the
centuries to come than any of the vapid presidents and prime ministers
presently strutting the stage.
Keith Hudson
At 16:56 16/06/2003
-0400, you wrote:
This isn't directly about work but I
thought it relevant to many of the
discussions that have taken place here
lately; in any case, it is important
information for all of us to
have.
Selma
----- Original Message -----
Sent:
Monday, June 16, 2003 2:36 PM
Subject: [AB] Jane Goodall: devastating the
earth
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16160
from
Alternet.org
Devastating the Earth
By Jane Goodall,
Resurgence
June 16, 2003
In 1960, I began my study of
chimpanzees on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in
what is now Tanzania. At
that time chimpanzee habitat stretched for miles,
fringing the lake from
Burundi to Zambia in the south. From the hills of
Gombe national park one
could see the forest stretching away inland,
interrupted only by a few
villages with their fields of crops. Today, the
scene is very different:
Cultivated land crowds up to the boundaries of the
park, the trees have
gone, peasants are trying to grow crops on the steep
rocky hillsides,
causing terrible erosion, the soil is losing its fertility,
the forest
animals have gone, and the human population is struggling
to
survive.
What has caused this devastation? Partly, of course,
the same kind of
population growth that we have seen around the world
since 1960. But the
situation has been made infinitely worse by the vast
numbers of refugees
fleeing the wars ravaging Burundi, to the north, and
the Democratic Republic
of Congo (DRC) on the other side of the lake, to
the east.
Refugees in Africa as they trudge towards some place of
safety usually one
of the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission on
Refugees) camps have a
terrible struggle to survive. They cut down
trees for temporary shelter and
for firewood, gather every kind of edible
plant, and hunt wildlife for food.
Sometimes entire populations flee into
formerly uninhabited even protected
areas where they must
exploit the land to survive. And even when they are
located in UNHCR
camps, the young men, who are usually not allowed to work,
go on illegal
hunting trips in an ever increasing radius from their camp.
Sometimes
they do this to supplement their rations when, due to shortage of
funds,
the food supply to the camps is cut. This fuels tensions between
the
local people and the refugees. Scarcity of natural resources can
actually
trigger conflicts as well as prolonging existing
wars.
Wild animals (as well as livestock) are often direct
casualities of war.
Soldiers as well as refugees hunt wildlife for food.
According to the
Biodiversity Support Program, war in the DRC in 1996 and
1997 led to an
escalation in poaching in one area that reduced the
elephant population by
half, buffalo by two-thirds, and hippo by
three-quarters. Gorillas,
chimpanzees and bonobos, already seriously
endangered by the commercial bush
meat trade, were also
affected.
Not only do landmines maim innocent humans, hundreds of
animals are also
affected, and vast areas of farmland are made useless so
that increased
destruction of wilderness areas results. The instability
caused by conflict
enables people to take advantage of the situation to
mine diamonds and other
commercially valuable resources illegally, even
in protected areas where
they destroy the environment and kill all
available wildlife for food.
Other insults to the environment are
more sinister. Defoliants, like the
infamous Agent Orange, destroyed vast
areas of forest in Vietnam to provide
the us and South Vietnamese armed
forces with improved visibility. Eleven
million gallons of this chemical
were used, and it is still active in the
environment today. Countless
children exposed to Agent Orange have suffered
birth defects, and
Vietnamese researchers believe that between 800,000 and
one million
Vietnamese people suffer health problems related to the use of
the
chemical. The US government questions these statistics
yet
nevertheless it is finally compensating its veterans for a variety of
health
conditions apparently related to their time in Vietnam, and
even
compensating their children who suffer from spina bifida and other
such
diseases, often from contaminated sperm.
More recently,
countless people have been exposed to depleted uranium shells
as used in
the Gulf War and Kosovo. The nature of Gulf War Syndrome, which
has
incapacitated numerous veterans of that war, is still being
investigated.
Huge areas of land will remain contaminated far into the
future. Toxic
chemicals are regularly used for fumigation as part of the war
on drugs
in Columbia; these too will remain to contaminate the environment
and
threaten human and animal health for years to come.
And then there
are the weapons of mass destruction. The environment has not
recovered
from the atomic bombs that were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima
at the
end of World War II. People living in these areas are still
suffering
from increased rates of cancer and other diseases. That such
weapons were
ever created is an evil stain on human history. That
governments have
continued to develop and test nuclear bombs along
with chemical and
biological weapons is a crime against humanity
that surely can never be
justified. The sale of traditional weapons by
the developed world to enable
developing countries to fight each other is
bad enough; selling weapons of
mass destruction is infinitely worse. And,
as an aside, billions of animals
are tortured by scientists in the pay of
the military during the development
of these weapons; and who knows how
many human beings, along with animals
and the environment, have been
affected by nuclear tests?
Much has been written about the crumbling
nuclear arsenal of post-Cold-War
Russia and the millions of dollars
required to contain the deadly leakage.
Nuclear waste from World War II
was dumped in the oceans of the world.
Scientists suspect that many of
the containers will soon leak if they are
not leaking already but
the precise location of some of them seems not to
be known. Additional
hazardous waste is accumulating all the time.
Another world war has
been ignited, and the effect on all living things is
likely to be
catastrophic. Indeed, it is possible that the environment,
already
stressed in many places close to the point of no return, will be
unable
to recover. And the situation is made even worse when governments in
the
developed world, when preparing for war, themselves violate
environmental
regulations as in exploiting protected wilderness areas for
oil
persuading their citizens that such operations are to
increase
national safety and must therefore take priority over any
concern for the
environment. Our reckless burning of fossil fuel
contributes to global
climate change even in times of peace imagine
the monstrous increase in
CO2 emissions that would be generated by modern
warfare around the globe.
It is desperately important that the
general public should have access to
the facts. Unfortunately, a common
response is to shy away from such
knowledge. People prefer not to know,
not to think about such things but
rather, like some gigantic flock of
ostriches, bury their heads in the sand.
As more and more of that sand
becomes contaminated as a result of war and
the preparations for war, the
outlook for the ostriches and for all life
on Earth will
become increasingly desolate.
Jane Goodall is founder of Roots
And Shoots, an environmental and
humanitarian program for young
people.
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath,
England
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