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“The Slaughter of Nature”

BY AWAKE! CORRESPONDENT IN IRELAND

GREED is threatening your home. It is undermining the earth’s potential to provide the food and shelter all of us need to survive. No doubt you are already aware of how greed is damaging the earth, but here are a few reminders.

Poisoning the Planet

Back in 1962, Rachel Carson, in her book Silent Spring, warned about the poisoning of the planet by pesticides and toxic waste. Says The Naked Savage: “Mankind was contaminating its own environment and fouling its own nest, the signal for the extinction of the species.” Men are still greedily poisoning the planet. “Seeking the greatest profits in the shortest time,” says World Hunger: Twelve Myths, “big growers are willing to overuse the soil, water, and chemical inputs without thought to eroding the soil, depleting the groundwater, and poisoning the environment.”

Instead of protecting the world’s invaluable rain forests—which are crucial to earth’s survival—men are destroying them faster than ever. “Living tropical forests,” say the writers of Far From Paradise—The Story of Man’s Impact on the Environment (1986), “will have all but disappeared in fifty years if the present rate of exploitation continues unchanged.”

Unscrupulous fishermen use dynamite and chemical poisons to catch fish around coral reefs—which have been described as “the marine equivalents of tropical rain forests” because of the abundance of life forms they shelter. These brutal fishing methods along with thoughtless chemical pollution have “gravely damaged” much living coral.—The Toronto Star.

“We Are Our Own Scourge”

Sir Shridath Ramphal, who was president of the IUCN-World Conservation Union from 1991 to 1993, describes this kind of mismanagement of earth’s resources as “the slaughter of nature.” Just how bad is it? Citing an example, Ramphal writes: “Most of India’s rivers are little more than open sewers carrying untreated waste from urban and rural areas to the sea.” What is his conclusion? “We are our own scourge.”

Greed has dominated man’s history for centuries, but the threat to the survival of the planet today has increased. Why? Because man’s ability to destroy is now so much greater. “Only in the last fifty years,” says Far From Paradise, “have we had the chemical and mechanical means to destroy effectively other forms of life on our planet. . . . Homo sapiens [Latin, wise man], as man so immodestly calls himself, has almost absolute power and has ceased to exercise any restraint.” Recently, the Greenpeace environmental organization made a strong indictment, saying: “Modern Man has made a rubbish tip of Paradise [earth] . . . and now stands like a brutish infant . . . on the brink . . . of effectively destroying this oasis of life.”

But greed does more than threaten the long-term prospects of the planet. It threatens the immediate happiness and security of you and your family. How is this? Consider the next article.