[mobglob-discuss] _SOS_ - Eduardo Galeano Essay - ZNet

Tue Sep 17 22:47:11 PDT 2002

Another commodification of hope, a fuelling of aspirations...
I've heard this already, in many poetic and academic formats. When is the 
revolution going to start, when is action going to start in the First World?

>From: <Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA>
>Reply-To: mobglob-discuss at resist.ca
>To: rad-green at lists.econ.utah.edu
>CC: mobglob-discuss at resist.ca
>Subject: [mobglob-discuss] _SOS_ - Eduardo Galeano Essay - ZNet
>Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 18:47:10 -0700
>
>  ----- Forwarded message: -----From: "Michael Albert" <sysop at zmag.org>
>To: <znetupdates at zmag.org>
>
>(snip)
>
>And here, finally...by one of the very best wordsmiths the left has to
>offer -- we have a new essay from Eduardo Galeano...
>
>
>
>SOS
>By Eduardo Galeano
>
>[translated by Francisco Gonzalez]
>
>Who gets the water? The monkey with the stick does. The unarmed monkey
>dies of thirst. This prehistory lesson opens the film "2001: A Space
>Odyssey". Now, for the 2003 odyssey, President Bush announces a military
>budget of one billion dollars a day. The arms industry is the only sure
>investment: some arguments are irrefutable, whether at the upcoming
>Earth Summit in Johannesburg or at any other international conference.
>
>The powerful nations that own the planet are in the habit of reasoning
>by means of bombardments. They constitute power--a genetically modified
>power, a gigantic Frankenpower that humiliates nature: It exercises its
>freedom to turn air into filth, and its right to leave humanity
>homeless; it refers to its horrors as errors; it crushes whomever stands
>in its way; it is deaf to all alarms and it breaks everything it
>touches.
>
>The oceans are raising, and the low lands are forever buried under
>water. This may sound like a metaphor for economic development as it
>stands now, but what it actually describes is a picture of the world as
>it will be in a none too distant future, according to the scientists
>consulted by the United Nations.
>
>For more than two decades, the predictions of ecologists were met with
>either mockery or silence. Nowadays, scientists concede they are right.
>And on June 3, 2002, even President Bush was forced to admit, for the
>first time, that disasters will occur if global warming continues
>damaging the planet. Journalist Bill McKibben has commented that the
>Vatican now also acknowledges that Galileo was not wrong. But nobody is
>perfect: At the same time, Bush announced that, in the next 18 years,
>the United States will increase the emissions of toxic gases by 43 per
>cent. After all, he presides over a country of machines that roll along
>eating petroleum and vomiting poison. At the end of last year, Bush made
>an appeal to solidarity, and he was able to define it: "Let your
>children wash the neighbor's car."
>
>The energy policy of the world's leading country is dictated by earthly
>business that claims to obey the high heavens. The late Enron
>Corporation (deceased by fraud), which was the main counseling firm for
>the government and the chief financer of Bush's and most senators'
>campaigns, used to issue divine messages. Its CEO, Kenneth Lay, used to
>say: "I believe in God and I believe in the market." Its previous leader
>had a similar motto: "We are on the side of angels."
>
>The United States engages in environmental terrorism with complete
>remorselessness, as if God had granted that country an impunity voucher
>because it has stopped smoking.
>
>"Nature is already very worn out," wrote the Spanish friar Luis Alfonso
>de Carvallo. He wrote this in 1695. If he could only see us now!
>
>A great part of the surface of Spain is losing its soil. The soil moves
>away, and sooner rather than later sand will move in through the window
>cracks. Only 15 per cent of the Mediterranean forests remain standing. A
>century ago, forests covered half of Ethiopia, which is now a vast
>desert. The Amazonian region of Brazil has lost forests the size of
>France. At the rate we are going, Central America will soon start
>counting its trees the way a bald man counts his few remaining strands
>of hair.
>
>Erosion drives Mexican peasants away from the countryside and from the
>country. The more the soil is degraded, the larger the amount of
>fertilizers and pesticides that are needed. According to the World
>Health Organization, these chemical aids kill three million farmers
>every year.
>
>As human tongues and human cultures die away, so do plants and animals.
>According to biologist Edward O Wilson, species disappear at the rate of
>three per hour. And not only because of deforestation and pollution:
>large-scale production, export-oriented agriculture and the
>standardization of consumer products are eliminating diversity. It is
>hard to believe that barely a century ago there were more than 500
>varieties of lettuce and 287 kinds of carrots in the world. And 220
>varieties of potatoes in Bolivia alone.
>
>Forests are scalped, the land turns into a desert, rivers are poisoned,
>the polar ice caps and the snow of mountain peaks are melting away. In
>many places the rains have stopped completely, while in others it rains
>as if the sky was falling. The world's climate has become insane.
>
>Floods, droughts, cyclones, uncontrollable fires--they are all becoming
>increasingly less natural, although the media insists, against all
>evidence, on describing them as such. And the fact that the United
>Nations named the 1990's as the "International Decade for the Reduction
>of Natural Disasters" sounds like some kind of morbid joke.  Reduction?
>That was the most disastrous decade of all. There were 86 catastrophic
>events that left more people dead than even the very deadly wars that
>took place during the same period. Almost all of the dead (96% to be
>precise) were in the poor countries, the ones that the experts insist on
>calling "developing nations".
>
>With devotion, with enthusiasm, the South imitates and exacerbates the
>worst practices of the North. And the North does not export its virtues,
>but rather its worst faults, so the poor countries adopt the American
>veneration for the automobile and the associated scorn of public
>transportation, as well as all the mythology of free markets and
>consumer society. The South also receives with open arms the filthiest
>factories, the most detrimental to nature, in exchange for salaries that
>make slavery seem rather appealing in comparison.
>
>And yet the North consumes, on average, ten times more petroleum, gas
>and charcoal per person than the South, where only one in 100 people own
>an automobile. A charting of environmental feasting vs. fasting
>practices shows that 75% of the world's pollution is caused by 25% of
>its population. This minority does not include, of course, the two
>hundred million who live without drinking water, or the hundred million
>who go to sleep every night with an empty stomach. It is not "humanity"
>that is responsible for gobbling up the natural resources, or for laying
>waste to the air, the soil and the water.
>
>Power merely shrugs its shoulders: When this planet stops being
>profitable, I'll move to another one.
>
>Beauty is beautiful only if it can be sold, and justice is just only if
>it can be bought. The planet is being murdered by the way of life we are
>supposed to emulate, just as we are paralyzed by machines invented to
>expedite movement, and we are isolated by cities created for assemblage.
>
>Words lose their sense, as the green sea and the blue sky--painted by
>the courtesy of algae that have produced oxygen for millions of
>years--lose their color
>
>Those points of light that shine at night--are they spying on us? The
>stars twinkle with astonishment and fear. They can't manage to
>understand how this world of ours, still alive, continues to turn round
>and round, working so feverishly on its own annihilation. And sheer
>fright causes them to flicker when they see that this world is already
>invading other celestial bodies.
>
>
>Michael Albert
>Z Magazine / ZNet
>sysop at zmag.org
>www.zmag.org
>
>
>
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>--
>Tom Childs - Audio/Visual Resources
>Douglas College Library
>New Westminster, B.C. Canada
>T: 604 527-5713 - library
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>         "There's no way to delay, that trouble comin' everyday."
>					--Frank Zappa
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