S
O S
By Eduardo Galeano (*)
MONTEVIDEO (IPS)
Who gets the water? The monkey that has the club. Unarmed
creature dies of thirst. This lesson from prehistory opens
the film ''2001: A Space Odyssey''.
For the Odyssey 2003, President Bush has announced a military
budget of one billion dollars a day. The arms industry is
the only investment worthy of confidence. There's an irrefutable
argument. Let him make it at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg
-- or any other international conference, for that matter.
The ruling powers of the planet reason with bombs. They are
power itself, a genetically-modified power, a gigantic Frankenpower
that humiliates nature: it exercises its freedom to convert
air into filth and its right to leave humanity without a home;
it calls these horrors errors, flattens whoever gets in its
way, is deaf to all warnings, and breaks whatever it touches.
***
The oceans are rising and the low lands are being entombed
beneath the waters. This might seem a metaphor for current
economic development, but no: it's a photograph of the world
as it will be in the not-so-distant future, according to predictions
of scientists consulted by the United Nations.
For more than two decades the prophecies of ecologists were
met with jokes or silence. Now scientists are saying they
are right.
And in June 3, none other than President Bush had to admit
for the first time that disasters will happen if global warming
is allowed to continue.
The Vatican has recognised that Galileo was not wrong, as
journalist Bill McKibben noted. But no one is perfect: at
the same time, Bush announced that US emission of global warming
gases will increase by 43 percent over the next 18 years.
After all, he presides over a nation of automobiles, more
than 200 million of them. Thank god babies can't drive. In
a speech he gave late last
year Bush praised solidarity and defined it too: ''Let your
kids wash the neighbour's car.''
***
The energy policy of the country that leads the world is
dictated by earthly dealings that say to obey the on high.
The failed megacompany Enron, brought down by swindling, the
major advisor to the government and principal donator to the
Bush campaign and those of most senators, was given to divine
pronouncements. Enron's great leader, Kenneth Lay, used to
say: ''I believe in God and believe in the market.'' The big
shot who preceded him put it this way: ''We are on the side
of the angels.''
The United States is practising environmental terrorism without
a qualm, as if the Lord himself had issued it a certificate
of impunity because it stopped smoking.
***
''Nature is very tired,'' wrote the frail Spaniard Luis Alfonso
de Carvallo. The year was 1695. If he could only see us now.
A large area of the map of Spain is being left without soil.
The dirt is just blowing away; and sooner than later the sand
will come in through the cracks in the windows. Only fifteen
percent of the Mediterranean's forests are still standing.
A century ago trees covered half of Ethiopia; today it's a
vast desert. The Brazilian
Amazon has lost forests the size of France. At this rate
Central America will be counting its trees like a balding
man counts his remaining hairs.
Erosion is forcing peasants in Mexico to leave their fields
or even the country. The more degraded the planet's lands
become, the more fertilizers and pesticides will have to be
used. According to the World Health Organisation, these chemical
'helpers' kill three million farmers a year.
Like human languages and human cultures, plants and animals
are dying as well. According to biologist Edward O. Wilson,
species are disappearing at a rate of three per hour. And
not only because of deforestation and pollution: large-scale
production, export agriculture, and the uniformisation of
consumption are annihilating diversity. To think that just
a century ago there were more than
500 varieties of lettuce and 287 types of carrots. And 220
varieties of potato in Bolivia alone.
***
The forests are being stripped, earth is becoming a desert,
poisons are filling the rivers, the ice caps and summit snows
are melting. In many places the rains have simply stopped
while elsewhere it pours as if the skies had cracked open.
The
climate of the world has gone mad.
Floods and droughts, cyclones and uncontrollable fires are
becoming less and less natural, any yet, in the face of all
evidence, the media insist on calling them so. And what a
stunning example of black humour that the United Nations proclaimed
the 1990s the International Decade for the Reduction of Natural
Disasters. Reduction? The most disastrous decade on record.
Eighty-six catastrophes that left five times more dead than
wars did during the same period. Almost all victims, 96 percent
to be exact, died in poor countries, which experts insist
on calling ''developing countries''.
***
With devotion and enthusiasm, the south of the world copies
and expands upon the worst habits of the north, but receives
none of its virtues. It adopts the American religion of the
automobile and its scorn for public transportation, as well
as the mythology of the free market and consumer society.
The south also receives, with open arms, the filthiest, most
nature-toxic factories in exchange for wages that make one
nostalgic for slavery.
But each inhabitant of the north consumes on average ten
times more oil, gas, and coal. In the south only one in a
hundred people owns a car. Gluttony and fasting at the environmental
cafe: 75 percent of global pollution comes from 25 percent
of the population. And this minority does not include the
1.2 billion people who live without potable water, or the
1.1 billion who go to sleep each night hungry. It is not ''humanity''
that is responsible for the devouring of natural resources,
the purification of the air, the earth, and the land.
The ruling powers shrug it of. When this planet's no longer
profitable, I'll move to another.
***
Beauty is beautiful if it sells; justice is just if it can
be bought. The planet is being killed by life styles, like
we are being paralysed by machines invented to make us move
faster and isolated from the cities created as places to meet.
Words are losing their meaning as the green sea and the blue
sky are losing their colour, tinted graciously by algae busy
exhaling oxygen for three billion years.
***
Are the stars spying on us? They twinkle in amazement and
terror -amazed at how this world so frantically devoted to
its own annihilation keeps on spinning; terrified because
they have already seen that this world has begun invading
other bodies out in space.
(*) Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan journalist, is the author
of ''Memories of Fire'' and ''The Open Veins of Latin America''.
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