That's us under attack in Fallujah By Bill Henderson

That's us under attack in Fallujah

By Bill Henderson

Al-Jazeerah, November 19, 2004

Easy for me to say in my super-safe Canadian home. But the war in Iraq is that first slippery step down a path that leads to a war against us all: the Bush Administration has chosen a naked, criminal, grab-the-oil policy path that leads to a century of resource wars and terrible societal and economic dislocation.

The problem is that Bush war in Iraq, in Fallujah today, is not understood within the context of humanity at a crossroads between an emerging cooperative maturity in understanding who we are in an evolutionary cosmos, and horrific, cats in a sack, potential die-off.

You don't understand and you don't have time to read what I can direct you to to fully understand why it is so important that the insurgency in Iraq succeeds in repulsing this very un-Christian American imperialism.

So I'm going to present you with a series of quotes as koans, as terrorist missiles into your presently secure and stable homes, in an effort to wake you up to the context for Iraq and how Bush Admin criminality threatens our common future.

" The pattern of human population growth in the 20th century was more bacterial than primate. When Homo Sapiens passed the 6 billion mark we had already exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on the land." Edward O. Wilson

"The Gaia hypothesis is a biological idea, but it’s not human-centered. Those who want Gaia to be an Earth goddess for a cuddly, furry human environment find no solace in it. They tend to be critical or to misunderstand. They can buy into the theory only by misinterpreting it. Some critics are worried that the Gaia hypothesis says the environment will respond to any insults done to it and the natural systems will take care of the problems. This, they maintain, gives industries a license to pollute. Yes, Gaia will take care of itself; yes, environmental excesses will be ameliorated, but it’s likely that such restoration of the environment will occur in a world devoid of people." Lynn Margulis

"While human population had increased fourfold between 1860 and 1991, human use of inanimate energy increased 93-fold in the same period. Human influence upon the planet had thus grown enormously faster than mere human biomass. Is this fact a basis for optimistic amazement, or should it be arousing deep anxiety?" William R. Catton, Jr.

"This is the first moment in the history of our planet when any species, by its own voluntary actions, has become a danger to itself - as well as to vast numbers of others." Bill Joy

"Our prosperity is built on the principal of exhausting the world's resources as quickly as possible, without any thought to our neighbors, all the other life on this planet, or our children." Dale Allen Pfeiffer

"Those of us who are alive today have been lucky enough to have been brought up in an age of energy surplus. This is a remarkable historical and biological anomaly. A supply of oil that exceeds demand has permitted us to do what all species strive to do – expand the ecological space we occupy – but without encountering direct competition for the limiting resource. The surplus has led us to believe in the possibility of universal peace and universal comfort, for a global population of 6 billion, or 9 or 10. If kindness and comfort are, as I suspect, the results of an energy surplus, then, as the supply contracts, we could be expected to start fighting once again like cats in a sack. In the presence of entropy, virtue might be impossible. " George Monbiot

"Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." Kenneth Boulding

"The cluster of transformations labeled global change dwarfs all previous experiences in its speed. in the geographical scale of its consequences, and in the numbers of people who will be affected." William Norgaard

"The likelihood must be that the laissez-faire regime will not be reformed. Instead it will fracture and fragment, as mounting scarcities of resources and conflicts of interest among the world’s great powers make international cooperation ever more difficult. A deepening international anarchy is the human prospect." John Gray

Petroleum geologists have known for 50 years that global oil production would "peak" and begin its inevitable decline within a decade of the year 2000. Moreover, no renewable energy systems have the potential to generate more than a tiny fraction of the power now being generated by fossil fuels. In short, the end of oil signals the end of civilization, as we had known it. Jay Hanson

"For many counties the nation state is becoming too big for the small problems of life and too small for the big problems of life." Daniel Bell

"We cannot have cowboys and Indians, for instance, in a space ship, or even a cowboy ethic. We cannot afford unrestrained conflict, and we almost certainly cannot afford national sovereignty in an unrestricted sense." Kenneth E. Boulding

"Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know." M. King Hubbert

"Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility." James Gleick

"I believe we must find alternative outlets for our creative forces, beyond the culture of perpetual economic growth; this growth has largely been a blessing for several hundred years, but it has not brought us unalloyed happiness, and we must now choose between the pursuit of unrestricted and undirected growth through science and technology and the clear accompanying dangers." Bill Joy

"The United Nations is one of the pre-eminent social innovations of the 20th Century and must form the basis of a reformed multi-lateral system." Hazel Henderson

"(t)he immediate future is usefully conceived as a bottleneck: science and technology, combined with foresight and moral courage, must see us through it and out." Scientific American introduction to E.O. Wilson's "Bottleneck" chapter

www.pacificfringe.net

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

Apartheid Wall


The Israeli Land-Grab Apartheid Wall built inside the Palestinian territories, here separating Abu Dis from occupied East Jerusalem. (IPC, 7/4/04).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python. (Alquds,10/25/03).

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