They keep the truth by risa
With world leaders locked in a dance where they communicate through small and large acts of terror and torture, in a time tainted by the deep deep trauma of environmental collapse and the knowledge of our and our parents responsibility for it, it is no wonder truth gets badly treated in swings of hysteria and secrecy. Here’s an update.
First just a quick share a link, here’s video showing Fox’s campaign for war in Iran:
And an excerpt from and article about Iran and the way the truth goes there:
The last newspaper I worked for in Iran – Zan – was closed by the judiciary in the spring of 1999. I was in the United States at that time, and as soon as I returned to Tehran, I was arrested. The government held me in solitary confinement for three months, and during that time I confessed to crimes I never committed and did whatever a human being could do to save his or her life.
I now wonder if all the opportunities we had seen for reform were really illusions created to trick us. Did the government encourage a fleeting era of reform in order to identify its opponents so as to come after them? Was Khatami’s election the storm that ultimately allowed the government to hunt us down?
And on how the truth is being treated in China:
President Hu Jintao’s most ambitious attempt to change the culture of fast-growth collapsed this year. The project, known as “Green GDP,” was an effort to create an environmental yardstick for evaluating the performance of every official in China. It recalculated gross domestic product, or GDP, to reflect the cost of pollution.
But the early results were so sobering — in some provinces the pollution-adjusted growth rates were reduced almost to zero — that the project was banished to China’s ivory tower this spring and stripped of official influence.
…
This spring, a World Bank study done with SEPA, the national environmental agency, concluded that outdoor air pollution was already causing 350,000 to 400,000 premature deaths a year. Indoor pollution contributed to the deaths of an additional 300,000 people, while 60,000 died from diarrhea, bladder and stomach cancer and other diseases that can be caused by water-borne pollution.
China’s environmental agency insisted that the health statistics be removed from the published version of the report, citing the possible impact on “social stability,” World Bank officials said.
And lastly again in America, hustling to keep up with the demand for power power power, instead of working to make the bug fixes necessary to change our addictions and escape the environmental fate we’re hurtling toward, the BUsh administration removes instead the last restraints on poisoning the water table, following the path toward mass desertification and disease so clearly lit up like a warning fire in China.
Read this for a hmmmm balancedish perspective, then read this from 2003 for context, and think about the blindness that destroys forests for coal and calls itself godly (people of faith who use torture or aren’t environmentalists make no sense to me and make me queasy.)
When I reach the mouth of the intermittent stream, I follow Lost Creek until I can see no signs of human intervention, not even the inevitable Bud Light can. I sit down on the bank, beneath the yellow glow of beeches and maples. Dark water glistens in the shallows below. Squirrels rustle through the leaves. Trees decay where they have fallen, providing shelter and food. A Carolina wren hops among the tangled branches. These days it is thought unfashionable, even backward, to talk about laws of nature or to read a philosophy, a morality, into the workings of the natural world. For 4,000 years, theologians and philosophers have debated whether an Intelligent Designer stands behind it all. I have nothing to contribute to that discussion. But this much seems clear: this forest certainly demonstrates an intelligence, one it has been honing for 290 million years. Its economy is a closed loop that transforms waste into food. In that alone it is superior to our human economy, where the end of the line is not nutrients but rather toxic industrial waste. Is there design behind this natural intelligence? I have no idea. But I will venture this: The forest knows what it’s doing.
Compare the two economies: the forest’s and ours. The sulfur dioxide that escapes from coal-burning power plants is responsible for acid rain, smog, respiratory infections, asthma, and lung disease. Due to acid rain and mine runoff, there is so much mercury in Kentucky streams that any pregnant woman who eats fish from them risks serious, lifelong harm to the fetus she carries. And this year, thanks in large part to coal burning, climatologists found record-high levels of climate-altering carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A forest, by contrast, can store twenty times more carbon than croplands or pastures. Its leaf litter slows erosion and adds organic matter to the soil. Its dense vegetation stops flooding. Its headwater streams purify creeks below it. A contiguous forest ensures species diversity. A forest, in short, does all of the things that the mining and burning of coal cannot – that is its intelligence.
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