We've Borrowed from the Planet and the Debt's Due

By Paul Gilding
THE Earth is full. In fact our human society and economy is now so large we have passed the limits of our planet's capacity to support us and it is overflowing.

Our current model of economic growth is driving this system, the one we rely upon for our present and future prosperity, over the cliff.

This in itself presents a major problem. It becomes a much larger challenge when we consider that billions of people are living desperate lives in appalling poverty and need their personal economy to grow rapidly to alleviate their suffering. But there is no room left.

This means things are going to change. Not because we will choose change out of philosophical or political preference, but because if we don't transform our society and economy, we risk social and economic collapse and the descent into chaos. The science on this is now clear and accepted by any rational observer.

While an initial look at the public debate may suggest controversy, any serious examination of the peer-reviewed conclusions of leading science bodies shows the core direction we are heading in is now clear. Things do not look good.

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Interview with Renowned Scientist David Suzuki on the Future of the Planet

By Joseph Roberts

For related articles and more information, please visit OCA's Politics and Democracy page, and our Environment and Climate Resource page.

Joseph Roberts: How did it all begin?

David Suzuki: We started when the Worldwatch Institute said it's the turnaround decade. We thought we were only going to be here for 10 years. So we said every dollar we raise we're going to spend because we don't have time. Who would've imagined that 20 years later we'd still be here and that conditions would be worse.

JR: And it hasn't turned around.

DS: No. We've had five years now of the most anti-environmental government we've ever had. We have a leader who claims the economy is his highest priority, proroguing parliament to focus on the economy and yet a leading economist like Sir Nicholas Stern says if we don't deal with climate change it's going to destroy the global economy. Our prime minister has never, ever, said this is an important issue affecting Canada and we've got to do something.

JR: My concern now is the way global economics is actually speeding up the destruction. With the UN declaring 2011 the International Year of the Forest and we have less than a third of the forest left on this planet, what is to be done?

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Planet Hiroshima 2010

By Mark T. Harris
Harris Magazine, August 4, 2010
Straight to the Source

When the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, two-year-old Sadako Sasaki was at home with her family. Unlike tens of thousands of others, she was fortunate enough to survive the immediate blast of the 15-kiloton Uranium-235 bomb.

But the young, athletic girl who liked to run could not escape the grim reality of what it meant to live through an atomic blast. Nine years later Sadako would contract leukemia, dying a year later in a Hiroshima hospital at the age of 12. In death she joined the legions of the hibakusha, the Japanese term for the victims of radiation poisoning.

An estimated 140,000 people died as a result of the Hiroshima blast, tens of thousands of them instantly or within the next few months and almost all of them noncombatants and children. Three days later at Nagasaki, another bomb was dropped, killing thousands more. Eventually over 200,000 people would die as a result of the attacks, either during the bombings or later from illness. By any objective measure the nuclear attacks by the U.S. military constitute the largest acts of mass murder in the history of the world.

They also constitute acts shrouded in lies. At the time President Truman told Americans the targets were military sites. It was necessary to use the bombs to force Japan's surrender, he declared. The public was also told-falsely-that leaflets were dropped prior to the bombings warning people to leave. Later, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson claimed that the atom bomb saved the United States from an invasion of Japan that might have cost a million American casualties.

But U.S. official McGeorge Brundy came up with the million figure, based on nothing, as he later acknowledged. Consider only the assessment of Admiral William Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1945, who years later wrote: "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan." The admiral compared the use of the bombs to adoption of "an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages."


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