Part I

The Way Things Are Now

Worldwide Threats

New York Times editorial, January 30, 2001 (IHT).

“Global warming, many experts believe, has led to devastating floods and hurricanes in tropical areas, and could eventually produce drought in America’s breadbasket.”

IHT, February 20, 2001

Kilimanjaro’s ‘Perpetual’ Snows Melt Away [from heat-trapping gases, especially carbon dioxide, poured out by industrial smokestacks and automobile talepipes in the burning of fossil fuels like oil and coal]

New York – The ice cap atop Mount Kilimanjaro, which for thousands of years has floated like a cool beacon over the shimmering equatorial plain of Tanzania, is retreating at such a pace that it will disappear in less than 15 years, according to studies.

The vanishing of the seemingly perpetual snows of Kilimanjaro that inspired Ernest Hemingway, echoed by similar trends on ice-capped peaks from Peru to Tibet, is one of the clearest signs that a global warming in the last 50 years appears to have exceeded typical climate shifts and is at least partly caused by gases released by human activities, a variety of scientists say.

Cancer

The assault on Nature by pollution and the assault on human beings by Cancer share many of the same causes. Why? Because environmental pollution causes Cancer. Learn basic facts about Cancer. Since you and your children have a keen chance of suffering from and being killed by this terrible disease, it might protect you and yours to pay attention here.
. . .

1. Cancer was a rare, rare, almost unheard of problem before the Industrial Revolution began to pour artificially-produced, poisonous, carcinogenic (cancer-causing) chemicals into the air, earth, and water.
. . .

2. Cancer cannot be inherited. It is an environmental problem.
. . .

3. Environmental Pollution – in air, water, earth, and hence food – together with smoking tobacco accounts for an overwhelming majority of deadly cancers.
. . .

4. The more carcinogenic substances (quantity and intensity) one absorbs, the more likely he or she will be to contract Cancer. Accumulation, that is the death sentence.
Note, by the way, that there is no such thing as "low-level" radioactivity posing no threat. Any radioactivity absorbed into the body increases the risk of Cancer and other diseases.
. . .

5. Prevention of Cancer by excluding carcinogens from the environment is the solution to the Cancer epidemic (not some magic "cure"). The problems involved in preventing Cancer are not scientific, but political and educational.
. . .

6. Doctors are, in a very important respect, causes of Cancer. Except for the anti-smoking advice (which has been forced upon them), doctors refuse to come out against the other carcinogens and the operations which produce them.

- - - - - - - - - -

Culture Destruction:

Native Peoples Living Traditional life-Styles

The American Anthropological Association established a Committee for Human Rights in October 1995. The first formal action was to protect the government of Sri Lanka's expropriation of forestland in which the Wanniga-laeto people had traditionally lived by hunting and gathering.

In a March 21, 1996 article, the International Herald Tribune wrote ("Anthropology Group Moves to Protect Endangered Cultures"):

"[The Committee] has protested the mistreatment and displacement of Maya Indians by the Guatemalan army, the execution of leaders of the Ogoni tribe by the Nigerian government and the seizing of the lands of the Yanomami Indians in Brazil and Venezuela by gold miners.

"Last week Dr. Yolanda Moses, the president of the association, issued a report protesting a January decree by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil that reopens to land claims the protected reserves of an estimated 344 tribal societies in the Amazon basin.

" . . . One reason for the new activism is concern over the disappearance of cultures, a problem that appears to have become more serious in the last century or two.

"While no one can say with exact certainly at what rate cultures are becoming extinct worldwide, Dr. Patrick Morris, an anthropologist at the University of Washington said, 'At least a third of the worldıs inventory of human cultures have disappeared completely since 1500.'

"Dr. David Maybury-Lewis, an anthropologist at Harvard University, said: 'The roughly 5 percent of the world population who are indigenous people are being seriously threatened worldwide. Cultural diversity is an important world resource, as essential to the resilience of the human race in the long run as is biological diversity.' "

continue