Sunday, April 30, 2017

Ecocide = Genocide, Crimes Against Nature = Crimes Against Humanity

Arnold Böcklin - Nymph (1875)
From coast to coast and across continents, people marched for environmental justice on Saturday, sending a clear message to the climate-denying Trump administration: we'll fight your fossil fuel-soaked agenda every step of the way. Organizers said that an estimated 200,000 participated in the flagship Peoples Climate March in Washington, D.C., while tens of thousands more demonstrated at more than 350 solidarity events in cities across the United States as well as in Asia and Europe. "I can't begin to describe how long and lovely the #climatemarch is," 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben wrote on Twitter. "It goes on essentially forever." -- Deirdre Fulton, In Photos: Peoples Climate March Draws 'One Hell of A Lot of People', Common Dreams, 4/29/17

Yes, on the hundredth day of the Trumpster Fire that rages in the White House, two hundred thousand evolutionary heroes took to the streets of our fallen capitol for the People's Climate March.

Meanwhile, as the sands in the hour glass dwindle, our planetary emergency deepens ...

SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO, engaged in deep conversations about risks and threats with other security and intelligence professionals working in government and industry, I insisted that not only was Climate Change the number one national/global security issue (rivaled only by nuclear proliferation), I also insisted that Climate Change would warp and aggravate all the risks and threats from one end of the spectrum to the other, especially Terrorism. Duh. I would have preferred to be wrong. Sadly, over the decades, I have been right too often and about too much. 
  • Climate change-fueled natural disasters and resource shortages will strengthen recruiting efforts of terror groups like ISIS and Boko Haram, according to a new report commissioned by the German government. “As the climate is changing, so too are the conditions within which non-state armed groups such as Boko Haram and ISIS operate,” the report, issued by the think tank Adelphi, said in its executive summary. “Climate change contributes to creating a fragile environment in which these groups can thrive.” Terror groups, according to the report, are increasingly using natural resources — like water — as a “weapon of war.” In 2015, for instance, ISIS closed the gates of a dam to more easily attack enemies downtstream. ISIS has also used water to flood areas to force people to leave their homes, making an area more susceptible to territorial control. Climate-fueled resource scarcity, the report argues, will likely only contribute to the power of non-state armed groups that control a particular resource. The report also points to diminishing natural resources as fueling an environment ripe for terror recruitment. Africa’s Lake Chad, for instance, provides economic livelihood for nearly 80 percent of the population that lives in its basin. As the lake shrinks, economic opportunities for people in that area also decline, making the population susceptible to recruitment by Boko Haram. -- Natasha Geiling, Climate change will fuel terrorism, report warns, Think Progress, 4/20/17
Crimes against nature = crimes against humanity.

Those who spread climate change denialism are as guilty as radio journalist Georges Ruggiu imprisoned for his on-air role in the Rwandan genocide.

Those who thwart or roll back governmental climate action are as guilty for what is to come as Pol Pot was for the Killing Fields of Kampuchea.
  • In other words, think of the developments in those three African lands and Yemen as previews of what far larger parts of our world could look like in another quarter-century or so: a world in which hundreds of millions of people are at risk of annihilation from disease or starvation, or are on the march or at sea, crossing borders, heading for the shantytowns of major cities, looking for refugee camps or other places where survival appears even minimally possible. If the world’s response to the current famine catastrophe and the escalating fears of refugees in wealthy countries are any indication, people will die in vast numbers without hope of help. In other words, failing to halt the advance of climate change -- to the extent that halting it, at this point, remains within our power -- means complicity with mass human annihilation. We know, or at this point should know, that such scenarios are already on the horizon. We still retain the power, if not to stop them, then to radically ameliorate what they will look like, so our failure to do all we can means that we become complicit in what -- not to mince words -- is clearly going to be a process of climate genocide. How can those of us in countries responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions escape such a verdict? And if such a conclusion is indeed inescapable, then each of us must do whatever we can to reduce our individual, community, and institutional contributions to global warming. Even if we are already doing a lot -- as many of us are -- more is needed. Unfortunately, we Americans are living not only in a time of climate crisis, but in the era of President Trump, which means the federal government and its partners in the fossil fuel industry will be wielding their immense powers to obstruct all imaginable progress on limiting global warming. They will be the true perpetrators of climate genocide. As a result, the rest of us bear a moral responsibility not just to do what we can at the local level to slow the pace of climate change, but also to engage in political struggle to counteract or neutralize the acts of Trump and company. Only dramatic and concerted action on multiple fronts can prevent the human disasters now unfolding in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen from becoming the global norm. -- Michael T. Klare, Climate Change as Genocide: Inaction Equals Annihilation, TomDispatch via AlterNet, 4/29/17  
Posted by at