MEIO AMBIENTE

"Hardly 30 years ago, few people in the world discussed the environment. Ideas or themes linked to the destruction of the forests, soil erosion and salinity, climate change, the disappearing ozone layer, melting icecaps, whole cities and nations doomed to fatally disappear beneath the sea, polluted air and water; overexploited oceans seemed to be inventions of doomsday scientists and not pressing realities".

"(...) many things threatening the life of the planet today, aside from war, like climate changes, the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, the poisoning of the air, the rivers and the seas. These things threaten the life of the entire planet, thus all of the peoples have a common cause with the people of Latin America, North America and Europe".

Under the precepts and ideology of a diabolical and chaotic economic order, within five or six decades the consumer societies will have depleted the proven and unproven fossil fuel reserves and in a mere 150 years will have used what it took the planet 300 million years to create.

My point of view is that there is no more urgent task than that of building a universal awareness, of taking the problem to the billions of men and women of all ages, including children, who inhabit this planet. The objective conditions and the sufferings of the overwhelming majority of them create the subjective conditions for this awareness-raising task.

" It is a real fact that Bush and his group are much more trapped in their foreign policy errors than even Nixon when he resigned in 1972.  The bloody Iraqi War and its rejection by the U.S. people, the toll in human lives, the extremely high number of wounded and maimed for every death in the military adventure, all reveal a situation full of contradictions:  the deteriorated image of the United States and the impossibility of giving up the wars of conquest for raw materials, the dollar and the price of gold, currency devaluations and inflation, consumerism and the inability to supply themselves with consumer goods, production of ethanol and the world shortage of food, fascist methods and democratic demagoguery, torture practices  and secret prisons and human rights, maximum environmental pollution of the country and the species’ right to survival, the benefits of science for health and the use of the same to massively liquidate or invalidate human beings, the brain drain and underdevelopment of poor countries, the price of oil and the ever-greater wasting of energy, the November elections and growing numbers of Latinos dying on the border. The list would be endless.  It is, in essence, a contradiction between life and death".

"There’s been a long time since the environment is compromised. ¿Could our species surmount that barrier?"

“On a global level and with constant value, military expenses have doubled in the last 10 years as if there were no danger at all of any crisis.  At this moment, it is the most prosperous industry on the planet.”

“The hundreds of military bases set up in scores of countries in every continent; their aircraft carriers and Navy fleets; their thousands of nuclear weapons; their wars of conquest; their military-industrial complex and their arms trade are incompatible with the survival of our species. Likewise, the consumer societies are incompatible with the idea of economic growth and a clean planet”.

“On the other hand, I can’t help but think of a world where over one-third of the population have no access to medical care or the basic medicines required to ensure health.  And this situation will be aggravated as climate change, and water and food shortage worsen in a globalized world where the population grows, the forests disappear, the arable land decreases, the air is more polluted, and the human species inhabiting it –which emerged less than 200 thousand years back, that is, 3.5 billion years after the first forms of life on the planet—is running the real risk of annihilation.”