THE
MOST TERRIBLE EVENT
IN
HISTORY
as
part of the Sixth Extinction of the planet
by
Nature's hubris: humankind -
It is the flight from the countryside
of millions upon millions of people
into the cities,
from Tirana to Tasmania,
from Auckland to Arkhangelsk
from Phœnix to Canton
from Turin to Tehran
from Valparaiso to Paris
from Paramaribo to Pnomh Penh
from Capetown to Cairo,
from Lhasa to Lima,
all over the world (except the British Isles)
resulting in appalling world-wide pollution and environmental
degradation,
child-prostitution, low-wage slavery,
racketeering and totalitarianisation,
universal anomie and rootlessness, poverty,
a world full of single, working mothers,
and animal cruelty unimaginable even to an omniscient god.
THERE
ARE MORE PEOPLE ON THE PLANET
NOW LIVING IN CITIES THAN IN THE COUNTRYSIDE
WHICH FEEDS THE CITIES.
Just as the monocultures of
the rich
are degrading the environment of the rich countries,
rural poverty is destroying the environment of the poor countries,
through over-grazing and the destruction of woodland.
The cotton in just one Tee-shirt requires 500 gallons
of water and 40 grams of pesticide.
700,000
tons of textiles are dumped in UK landfill sites every
year.
The
per capita purchase
(and dumping) of clothes doubles every ten years.
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The rural poor then move to
the cities,
where they are either horribly exploited
or become urban gangsters (as for centuries in Sicily and Calabria)
and suicide-bombers.
If régimes collapse,
people flee the cities and rampage
through the countryside (as in Congo-Zaïre and Somalia)
and burn down forests. All of Somalia's forests have been destroyed
and the people are starving, diseased and desperate.
Rural poverty is caused by urban
riches
which depend on urban poverty (an underclass):
a vicious cycle which is the motor of capitalism
and globalisation.
Poor countries cut down their forests in a vain attempt
to pay off their ever-increasing debt to rich countries.
The countryside, forests, woodland,
- and manual work and subsistence - have all been devalued.
Millions are told that dragooned, hierarchical Employment -
no matter how degrading - is the only progress from poverty.
Small farmers are being squeezed out by big retailers.
The countryside is perceived as the trashcan of progress
and history; it is regarded just as the Americans regard Europe:
a boring, backward place to flee from.
ONE
THIRD OF THE POPULATION OF THE WORLD NOW LIVES IN SLUMS
The only rurality that has status now
is the horrific AgrIndustry:
concentration-camps where a million pigs and calves suffer unbelievable
torture;
vast prairies where soy-beans and wheat and maize are grown
on an industrial scale so that the air is unbreathable with insecticide
and fungicide: capitalist biocide.
This event
is just part of the agenda of turbo-capitalism,
also known as 'globalisation',
which depends on a huge, disenfranchised underclass,
aims to pack them and the more fortunate tightly into cities
and 'encourage' them to buy goods and services.
Services including sewerage and water.
This is best achieved by encouraging the collapse of rural economies
through ever-declining prices for produce,
so that small farmers are squeezed out
by people from the cities who farm only to make money,
and buy up more land to cultivate aggressively
with expensive machinery and chemicals.
Coffee now brings a lower return
for the grower
than it did thirty years ago.
Bananas, oranges and other fruit cost almost nothing in the producer
countries.
Big farmers in the rich countries are subsidised, while small
ones
hang on as best they can by diversifying into rural accommodation
or by receiving welfare benefit.
The small farmers in the poor countries are pushed out -
into the shameful slums of the big, expanding, cheap-labour cities
-
so that the rich countries can get food ever more cheaply,
while their supermarkets make greater and greater profits.
Manufacturing (except of armaments) in the rich countries is winding
down,
because labour in the poor countries is cheap -
because people are coming in from the countryside
desperate to earn a pittance in sweatshops
and dangerous factories.
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Cities are where the human heart
is sick .
William Wordsworth
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Capitalism inherently favours
the retailers, the value-adders and investors
while crushing the producers.
We insist on buying food at increasingly-derisive prices which
destroy rural economies, then, with our savings, send out "aid"
which annihilates rural life altogether, and surrounds cities
with appalling slums whose conditions are even worse. The rural
poor become the urban desperate.
Capitalism is causing the Sixth
Extinction of the planet
due to overpopulation (of the poor countries,
while the rich countries import cheap labour to offset the low
birth-rates),
pollution (as the production of food is industrialised
and people are herded into super-cities),
global warming, the decline of land fit to farm
(Western Europe has lost half the topsoil off its agricultural
land since 1950
and the world half its rural population),
destruction of forests, lakes, seas and wilderness,
and horrific reduction of almost all other species
(except viruses, retroviruses, bacilli, rats, cockroaches, certain
insects, cereals and grotesquely man-engineered domestic animals
& pets).
The more obsessively that people wash,
the more degraded they and the planet become.
Consumer-Capitalism - the prostitution
of the entire planet -
is the world's most successful religion,
and all religions (like all armies) are malign.
Be ashamed to be human.
but so what ?
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