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is destroying ecosystem after ecosystem around the globe, and THAT--the complex "web of life" on Planet Earth--is what we are losing as a result: not just one small patch of ground with its local complexities, or this ecosystem or that one--a dead coral reef here, a forest turned to desert there, farm land turned to salt somewhere else. We are seeing the catastrophic loss of the Earth's "web of life" on a planetary basis. It is a very complex system--and one that we do NOT understand--and thus it is a very complex loss, and that makes it easy to lie about and to keep people stupid about.
The COMPLEXITY of Nature is also why we hear so many goddamn LIES from corporations, and, by extension, from our government, which serves corporations, and not us, and not life. Remember the "trees are a renewable resource" campaign of Big Timber? Yeah, trees grow back, but that is one of the most stupid, simplistic and ill-intended lies we have seen from corporations. If you destroy the ECOSYSTEM in which trees evolved--the birds, the fish, the rodents, the amphibians, the mammals, the fungi, the companion plants, the microclimates, the clear, cold water and other forest components--with clear-cutting, toxic pesticide use and other corporate short-term profit practices--you not only make that land unusable for timber production in the near future and more likely to be converted to other uses such as real estate development, you degrade the quality of the trees that may grow back on that land, creating what is no longer a forest with high quality trees but a plantation for the monoculture of crap trees that are only good for wood chipping, paper pulp and fence posts.
This is what happened to California's redwood forest--lies, lies and more lies--until, now, less than 5% of old growth forest remains, with numerous high end species--the coho salmon, the steelhead, the marbled murrelet, the spotted owl--and numerous never-mentioned or unknown low end species (such as bacteria, insects, fungi) fast becoming extinct, the unique, awesome redwood forest microclimate (with 200 to 300 foot tall trees creating their own wet weather) gone, gone, gone, and the land that has been clearcut and drenched with toxic pesticides, and in which the streams run muddy, NEVER AGAIN producing the most beautiful, most fine-grained, dark red, disease resistant, fire resistant, amazing wood on earth, and now producing cheap, fat-grained "yellow redwood" that is subject to disease and rot, in tiny, 12 to 18 inch diameter trees, compared to the 20 to 30 foot diameter trees of old.
And if you want the starkest of all lessons in government officials bald-faced LYING on behalf of corporate profit, just read any California Department of Forestry Timber Harvest Plan.
California is purported to have the toughest forest regulation on earth. That is another goddamn lie.
It is the unstated, non-public, secret policy of every government entity in the U.S.--state, federal and local--to ignore the complex "web of life" in favor of corporate profit. And corporations, the corporate media and their bought-and-paid-for government servants deliberately trivialize the "web of life" by mocking environmental struggles on behalf of the "web of life" as being about one species of frog, or bird, or insect. This one insect is holding up "progress," is interfering with poor, beset businesspeople, is holding up much needed housing development, etc., etc., etc. They deliberately focus the discussion DOWN, to one tiny component of the "web of life" and refuse to focus it UP on the higher, complicated, poorly understood MATRIX of which that tiny component is an intricate part. As for the biggest matrix of all--Earth itself and its INTERACTING ecosystems--for instance, the function of forests in sequestering carbon from the atmosphere and producing oxygen, a critical factor in global warming and climate change (i.e., climate disasters)--that NEVER is allowed to be a factor in local, state and federal regulation of individual corporate projects.
And when the resource is gone, as with California's redwood forest--the mills now closed, the jobs all gone, the ancient forest that produced such high quality wood entirely cut over and useless for short term profit--the timber corporations move on and the communities that had been created around this industry are decimated, as has occurred in northern California with the logging industry, and including related industries like fishing (because the fish are all gone). There was plenty of wood to sustain these communities on a continuing basis, forever, without destruction of the ecosystem, until the corporations got involved--"organized money," as FDR put it--that is, until profit became the ONLY motive, and government started serving profit and nothing and nobody else.
Now imagine a corporation that doesn't plunder and rape one resource, but learns how to plunder and rape the "web of life" itself--its genetic codes. That's Monsanto--which isn't threatening one resource or one community, but the entire planetary food chain, with selective cleverness about the "web of life" but no real understanding of it, and, indeed, deliberate blindness to its manifold complexities. We've seen catastrophe to the redwood forest and to its dependent communities, to make a few people rich. We are seeing something far worse with Monsanto, to make a few people rich--and the potential catastrophe goes way, way beyond the affected farming communities (with one of the impacts being the disappearance of knowledgeable farmers) right to your dinner table, and everybody else's, with food that you cannot trust, food that is not what it seems to be, food with unknown, long term poisonous potential, and food that may not be there tomorrow, because, oops!, they forgot about the bees, or, 'sorry, people, no meat this year; the cattle have developed this mysterious fungus and have all fallen down dead, but we're doing a study to pinpoint the cause and we'll have a solution, um, sometime...'. Messing with the DNA of staple foods such as corn is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS, and nobody is regulating this any more than they were regulating the timber industry in California.
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