Exploitation of Nature

As Howard Zinn has pointed out, grass root movements begin in “the streets” and, if effective, legislation can then be enacted.  No longer is the student of “the way things really are” deluded into believing that meaningful change can come about through legislation, especially since the new, “secure” voting policies and procedures, as well as the accelerated utilization of the Diebold AccuVote voting system (foreign based company) preclude the possibility of the democratic process.  Therefore, I shall address my correspondence to the Editor of every major newspaper in the USA.

I am exceedingly alarmed, as I believe most readers would be if the reality of the current conditions here on planet earth were more widely known.

What we are facing, if we continue to live as we are currently, is that the human race will either perish or be reduced to a few scattered tribes while the diversity of other life forms on earth will continue down the path of rapid extinction until we are left with a planet consisting of, but a few remaining ecosystems.
  

Much of what has occurred is the result of the unnatural habituation of the human race to eating flesh foods.  Consequently, 50% of US land is used for food production, which could be reduced to 25% if we did not use animals for either their flesh or their biological by products.  The agricultural practices required for this vulgar exploitation of land results in a loss of 50 million acres of cropland every year due to soil erosion and salinization.  An unthinkable 80% of our fresh water is required for flesh food production and the quantity of grains consumed by the 9 billion livestock raised for these purposes annually could feed approximately 840 million people.  And yet, 55,000 children starve every day and approximately 3.7 billion people (60%) are malnourished.

Beyond those and other land concerns such as deforestation, which produces drought conditions, there are non-sustainable agricultural practices resulting in vast runoffs of nitrogen fertilizers into rivers such as the Mississippi, which then empty into the Gulf of Mexico. 

This is occurring all over the earth resulting in vast oceanic “dead zones”, where no marine life can exist.  Coupled with the outrageous overfishing of 85 to 90 million metric tons of fish annually, the entire biomass of the oceans is declining at such an alarming rate that a graph could be or already may have been produced on which one could extrapolate to the time in the very near future when human life will no longer be possible in any form other than small groups or tribes subsisting on a very few species of plants.