They now say there is a food crisis. And a water crisis.
There are people talking about the food crisis and giving completely crazy analysis, more to do with their trying to stir up people against those recently doing well rather than reality of what the situation is. But the discussion of water crisis is even more of fibbing going on in the belief that no one will notice the facts or the gaps in those arguments.
The obvious about water is all those fresh water resources - lakes, ponds, rivers, and generally water tables - polluted by industrial effluents, and in case of rivers by shipping as well. So naturally there is a "shortage" of water for drinking, cooking, irrigation and other human needs - washing, bathing, cleaning.
That those are really the primary needs for which fresh water should be reserved is blithely ignored, and there is an atmosphere being created of anxiety, panic, terror. Of course no one can or should point at the industries or else they will be muzzled, silenced in one way or another.
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Look at the record on air pollution, carbon excess, ozone holes. People have lived for all these millennia without this stage of danger to the planet, without us getting to this where we are thinking about saving the planet. But no one is talking about what industries need to do, should do, to curb this - instead people are being told not to use this or that.
Well, why not ban the products that people are told are not good for the atmosphere or water tables or other resources of the planet, the environment? The aerosols, the chemical cleaning materials that are bad, why not stop the production? Why not make them illegal to produce, to sell, to keep and to use?
It needed a severe level of lung problems before tobacco smoking was banned in west - and of course those very people often visit Asia and smoke defiantly at airports in countries where courtesy to visitors makes people refrain from throwing them in the slammer - but the question of aerosols and so forth is more than a danger to just those who use them, as in fact was with tobacco, passive smokers being just as much in danger. This menace is to the whole planet - so what is stopping the lawmakers from banning them?
What does it need, another tsunami, this time in a place where it will hit them directly?
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Then there is food. What exactly is the quantity of corn and other food that is perfectly good for human consumption that is wasted by feeding pigs and so on, in U.S. and other western nations? you might think this is of not relevance to the food problem which is in fact mostly in Africa and nowhere near U.S.; but that is not entirely true, is it?!!!
African continent is used for the coffee and chocolate to provide U.S. through various multinationals and other companies, and if you think you are after all paying good money for it think about how little of that actually goes to the Africans, much less the actual people that were disfranchised when the colonial masters took their land away from them and deprived them of grazing and farming land, and think of how many people would be fed by the lands now in use for export crops, and think of if the starving people, the children, can eat the money that goes to Africa for chocolate and coffee, and if they were to ask if they could buy the corn you feed your pigs would you agree or refuse indignantly - and then think if your land were used for luxury products for, say, China, and if your children were starving and you were told your produce of (fill in the blank yourself - cars, gadgets, software, electricity, milk products, fruit, corn) was only this much worth whereas the what food you needed in exchange was not only expensive it was needed to feed Chinese chicken for their consumption. Would you then be indignant? Or does it seem like the way it should be, to those who call themselves Christian?
If you really think African starvation has nothing to do with you find out - at least - if your one pound of meat costs the equivalent of enough corn to feed forty people in Africa, and ask yourself if it is worth the cries of innocent deaths that reach straight up - and at the very least try to stop using the luxury products from African farms that could be used to produce food for them.
Sending money through organisations is not good enough. It merely is a sop for your own conscience - you are telling it to shut up and let you enjoy that chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwich.
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As for water, think of what rivers and ponds and lakes are.
Last few days on a discussion too many young people seem to have confused fresh water with that which is piped into your homes by your city or town corporations after processing - that actually is processed and therefore guaranteed by those whom you trust rather than actually fresh water, isn't it?
Fresh water you might have encountered on a trek or camping and you knew the air was fresh, the water from the stream refreshing. Extend that thinking and you will see that fresh water is - it is all the natural water except of oceans, of course. Lakes, rivers, ponds, wells.
For that matter - isn't "source" the word for spring, as in a spring of water, in French? (In case you were not aware English language is sourced from French among many other of its tributary languages, which include not only those that were native of England, but also German brought by the Anglo-Saxons, Latin - and its source, Sanskrt - through the Roman occupation of England, and also west Asian due to crusades and finally various Indian languages other than Sanskrt due to occupation of India.) So think again of where your water is sourced from, and is it fresh - and what is being done to your fresh water.
Of these, while lakes can be most enchanting to some and glacial streams to others, it is clear that rivers are the most ever renewing and therefore most fresh water source ever on earth. Unless otherwise polluted by humans, that is.
And when this pollution is by chemical industrial sources, and not likely to stop because you don't know and you don't care - whose fault is it you don't have drinking water, and are being told bathing is a waste of precious resources?
That precious resource is first and foremost for human purposes of drinking and cooking, bathing and irrigating - but for food grown for feeding humans, first. As for meat eating do the animals need food to be farmed for them or is it that you need them fattened? Do you really think animal body fat is healthy food for you? Especially when it is red (or for that matter white) meat you are paying for, under the impression it is good for your health.
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Long ago a German friend remarked on how the red meat available in U.S. was nowhere near as good as that in Germany because back home he got meat that was lean, not so full of fat - and he further explained that this was literal, that there was too much fat in the meat he bought while at Harvard. He had to explain it further what he meant before I understood - being a vegetarian, I had no idea what he was talking about.
All this was new and academic to me but now it all makes sense in many connections - this is how and why people who look very thin (in my language they can be referred to as "ancestors of sinners", as extremely thin people generally are called in our language), and yet have high cholesterol - and I used to be puzzled; how one can have cholesterol without being far from anything but stick thin!
Now I know - those with cholesterol are actually fat, just with hidden fat that is on the inside and is actually killer fat, unlike that on the people that everyone calls fat because you can see their size - but if they do not have high cholesterol they are not actually fat, only large at best and overweight at worst.
Coming back to the original issue (not that this was unrelated), is it not clear that well fed pigs that are fattened with produce that could feed humans instead - and give life to a whole starving continent, too, - is not good for you, either, for your own food consumption?
You are paying your hard-earned money on fat to put inside your body by going for meat from farms where the animals are neither free to choose what they eat - they would be far healthier if they did have that freedom - and nor are they free to walk about or do any exercise - which sounds funny but in their natural lives animals get a lot more exercise than in farms where they are penned so they cannot move and get fatter so you pay more.
Then you ingest it all, and since people are what they eat according to an English proverb, you sit in one place or another, and are becoming a nation of overweight people where one large section is ridden with problems of how to reduce and then there are young women psychologically so traumatised by it all they are dying of starving themselves.
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If all these ills are corrected - your industries did not pollute your water tables, your rivers and your ponds, if your produce was not fed to pigs instead of humans, if your superfluous food went to the continent that supplies your coffee and your chocolate and is starving in exchange - perhaps the water and food crises would not exist for now.
Instead the guys are proposing - no, actually forecasting, as if there was no choice and this is inevitable future - that forests are going to be cut for farming.
Forests and trees are our one hope of dealing with carbon for now. Global warming is not a joke, nor is the spiralling of our planet towards extinction through the warming of the planet, the carbon in the air, and the melting of polar ice. Already the northern route is ice free in summer for the first time and if it is used for industrial shipping forget your winters; or rather, remember them well, they are memory. And if more forests go, woods are not stopped from being chopped, and there is nothing to absorb the carbon, forget your planet.
Your planet - not someone else's concern. If you are young, if you are looking forward to a good life (and you should!), if you have children and care about their survival and their human experience (of having children and caring and hoping for them), then you have to save your planet.
And for starters, save your water, save the corn for humans, save Africa, the cradle of humanity.
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It is not fresh water or food that is immediately short - it is honesty and thought and perhaps a little humanity.
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