Happy Belated Earth Day!

Ah shucks, I missed celebrating Earth Day again. At least this year I have the excuse that April 22d commemorates a much more important event Any way here is a list of 15 predictions from the first Earth Day:

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” • George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

The level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” •
Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” • Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” • Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.” •
Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” •
Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” •
New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” •
Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

From an article by Ronald Baily in the May 2000 issue of Reason which is still an excellent discussion of the issues. The quotes were selected by I hate the Media. HT: Duff and Nonsense


Interestingly several of the quotes are from the (in)famous Paul Erlich who authored the influential “The Population Bomb” predicting massive disasters if we did not institute population control. He is often criticized because his prophesies failed to come true. But is this a surprise? When I was an undergrad the Department, in it’s never ending quest to teach research skills, would send students to the library to check the documentation of books that were popular that year. One of them that year was Paul Erich’s “The Population Bomb”. Result. There was no correlation between “facts” he reported and the numbers in the standard reference works. Often by a magnitude of 10. Garbage in - Garbage Out!

But on a more serious note, while I am sure none of these self appointed groups would intentionally support genocide or mass murder as a means of population control to make more living space for themselves, perhaps at a sub-conscious level it is a contributor to the weak international response to incidents like Rwanda and Dafur.


Related:
Earth Day 40
Climate Change Schandenfreude
Imagne: I agree with John Lennon
2007 Year of Global Warming
A Very Inconvient Court Ruling
Warmmonger Considered for Peace Prize
State Police Blows Up Global Warming
Recycle Now
Never Again and Again and Again


Topics:
Environment Toipic
Genocide/Democide Toipic

Never Again and Again and Again

Never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.

In the the February 1, 2011 issue of Policy Review, David Rieff looks at The Persistence of Genocide, “Never Again,” again and again and asks an unaskable question. Is it even possible to prevent future genocides?


. . Bluntly put, an undeniable gulf exists between the frequency with which the phrase [never again] is used — above all on days of remembrance most commonly marking the Shoah, but now, increasingly, other great crimes against humanity — and the reality, which is that 65 years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, “never again” has proved to be nothing more than a promise on which no state has ever been willing to deliver. When, last May, the writer Elie Wiesel, himself a former prisoner in Buchenwald, accompanied President Barack Obama and Chancellor Angela Merkel to the site of the camp, he said that he had always imagined that he would return some day and tell his father’s ghost that the world had learned from the Holocaust and that it had become a “sacred duty” for people everywhere to prevent it from recurring. But, Wiesel continued, had the world actually learned anything, “there would be no Cambodia, and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia.”

Wiesel was right: The world has learned very little. But this has not stopped it from pontificating much. The Obama administration’s National Security Strategy Paper, issued in May 2010, exemplifies this tendency. It asserts confidently that “The United States is committed to working with our allies, and to strengthening our own internal capabilities, in order to ensure that the United States and the international community are proactively engaged in a strategic effort to prevent mass atrocities and genocide.” And yet again, we are treated to the promise, “never again.” “In the event that prevention fails,” the report states, “the United States will work both multilaterally and bilaterally to mobilize diplomatic, humanitarian, financial, and — in certain instances — military means to prevent and respond to genocide and mass atrocities.”

Of course, this is not strategy, but a promise that, decade in and decade out, has proved to be empty. For if one were to evaluate these commitments by the results they have produced so far, one would have to say that all this “proactive engagement” and “diplomatic, financial, and humanitarian mobilization” has not accomplished very much. No one should be surprised by this. The U.S. is fighting two wars and still coping (though it has fallen from the headlines) with the floods in Pakistan, whose effects will be felt for many years in a country where America’s security interests and humanitarian relief efforts are inseparable. At the same time, the crisis over Iran’s imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons capability is approaching its culmination. Add to this the fact that the American economy is in shambles, and you do not exactly have a recipe for engagement. The stark fact is that “never again” has never been a political priority for either the United States or the so-called international community . . . . Nor, despite all the bluff talk about moral imperatives backed by international resolve, is there any evidence that it is becoming one.

Read the entire article

HT: Arts and Letters Daily


Analysis.

There is trend to call for handling International Law problems with what can be described as a 911 mentality (phone number - not date.)

If there is a problem in a town some one calls the 911 and a policeman is sent, if he can’t handle it he calls for support, if the support can’t handle it perhaps a SWAT team or whatever. AFTER it is over the courts sort it out. The decisions to deploy the first policeman and the reinforcements based on nominal information.

Contrary wise, if there is an international situation that calls for military force, presumable and quite often there is considerable discovery discussion and calculation as to the practical and moral implications of the intervention BEFORE deployment, even if it held behind closed doors. Hopefully the tenets of the International Law Just War Doctrine were consulted.

More and more, there is a call for international problems to be handled on a 911 basis. In this case, the first preliminary reports of a genocide cause troops to deploy. In Rwanda this would have saved mnany lives. But it would be awfully easy for ordinary street riots or civil unrest to be inadvertently or tactically elevated to “incipient Genocide” and force deployed and used only to find out it wasn‘t justified. In a police 911 situation force is deployed in the confidence that the police can deal with any opposition, but applied to the international community it would mean a policy of going to war before asking if the war can be won.

I think there are things that can be done prevent Genocide and move toward it's elimnation, but making a promise of "Never Again" with no intent or willingness to enforce it is useless.

My Genocide Topic

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Author David Rieff is a New York-based writer and policy analyst who has written extensively about humanitarian aid and human rights. He is the author of eight books, including A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis and At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention, and is currently writing a book on the global food crisis
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Roe vs. Wade - Choice

January 22 1973, the Supreme Court decided the case of Roe v Wade -which will in time join Dred Scott, Plessey v Fergusson, Korematsu v. United States in infamy - allowing people to be “deprived of Life … with out due process of law” as guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment in favor of a unstated right to privacy inferred from a tortured piece of illogic.

Screen shot from UTube Video at Rock the Facts 2009 March for Life

If the equivalent of an abortion was done to a convicted criminal - it would violate the Eight Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.”



But now we are told that we have choice!

But then we always had choices.



What’s yours?

Book Review: Left to Tell

Left to Tell – Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
Immaculee Ilibagiza
Hay House, 2006
Left to Tell Fund



Most everyone knows in general that in 1994 there was a genocide of over a million people in Rwanda as the world stood by. Numbers so large we lose any sense of individuals. Immaculee Ilibagiza rivets us the events as they happened to her, her family and acquaintances as she was one of the few who was left to tell their story

From the life of a child in a loving family and a student who is only loosely aware of national politics she is suddenly thrown into the maelstrom of a Civil War that turns into genocide against own her people. Hidden in a bathroom for three months with seven other women she emerges to find her family dead, many whom she had thought friends had been part of the killing. She learns that the only way survive as a human being, not just some one who was not killed, means she has to have faith and trust in God and forgive those who killed her family and friends.

The surreal horror is seen in joy of finding a friend she thought dead, and finding out he was hidden by someone who went out every day to join the killers.

This is a riveting well written account that should be mandatory reading for every one.

Many things can be said about the genocide, but is perhaps best to remind ourselves of the teaching of the Catholic Faith that gave her the strength of survive.

Look in the mirror - the person looking back at you is not so very far from being the hero or villain in a similar situation. Pray that Christ’s Grace and Mercy give us all the wisdom to see the difference and the strength to act.


Grant them Eternal Rest Oh Lord, and let your Perpetual Light shine upon them.


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See Also

R J Rummel’s Power Kills Site Most every thing you want to know about Genocide and more.

What is Genocide

Book Review: Death by Government

Genocide/Democide Topic.

Soldier of Africa

Soldier of Africa is an excellent site with good commentary and excellent photographs on the day to day life of D Company, 6 South African Infantry Battalion (Air Assault) on UN Peace Keeping duty in the Congo and previously Dafur.

In the "an army is an army is an army" department Major Werner Klokow provides us with the latest version of a very old policy:

The Effective Management of Nothing

Check it out.

And keep them in your prayers and thoughts. Good solidiers doing a tough job and trying to keep a smile.

Rwanda and Darfur Compared

From the German Law Journal HT: Milts File

An excellent article

Genocidal Politics and Racialization of Intervention: From Rwanda to Darfur and Beyond

From the Conclusion,

“My modest aim in this paper has been to explore to what extent, if at all, the Rwandan genocide positively affected international response to similar or comparable tragedies in Africa. That is, whether the international community would react any differently today. Using the ongoing Darfur crisis, the paper demonstrates that international attitude to Rwandan genocide was the norm and not the exception as far as responses to tragedies in Africa are concerned.”

Never Again and Again and Again

The UN has decided that the ethnic cleansing in the Sudan is not genocide. They do point out that other crimes are being committed. HT: Democratic Peace Blog

Why would they say such a thing?

In 1948 the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defined genocide “as the intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

It seems from multiple new sources that what is going on in the Sudan is that the leadership of one group “Arab Moslems” in the Sudan wants to destroy in whole or part the resident population of Darfur, as such: the intentional destruction of a group that is racially black African, ethnically non-Arab, and Christian or followers of a traditional religion.

It seems to me that the facts have a reasonably close relationship to the definition. So why not call it what it is?

The government of Sudan has the power to commit genocide and only outside opposition can stop them. As noted in the article, the responses being discussed are things like “peace keeping” forces that are to small and lightly armed to keep the peace or protect any one including themselves. Bringing the government of the Sudan into the “process” to find a solution and prosecuting individuals who are responsible after the fact. (Why would someone want to be part of process who’s end result will be to put them in jail? They are murderers, not stupid!) But there is nothing about doing anything to stop the crime. So it continues.




I think that part of the reason lies in several changes of perspective in international relations that have been gaining ground in past few years. A movement towards resolving disputes some sort of process similar to how governments handle internal conflicts. This has been a motive in the way the UN operates, the establishment of bodies like the World Trade Organization and the International Criminal Court.


Since the Peace of Westphalia (1648) the use of force between nations was bound up in the idea of sovereign states that would only go to war (at least in theory) over serious violations of agreements or general principles of Internal Law. But no one was required to go to war, and presumably had to satisfy themselves first as to the justice, winability and relative cost of the war.


Internally, in a country when there is an incident, someone calls 911, the police are dispatched, backups are sent if necessary, the SWAT teams may be called out, or even the National Guard called up. After the fact the courts sort out whether it was justified or not.

Therein lies the problem. Genocide has it’s own treaty. Genocide has an extremly poor public image that demands action. The failure to take action in the Rwanda genocide has many people saying that the Military should be deployed at the first sign of Genocide, and let the international courts sort it out afterwards


Why did the UN find that the action in the Sudan is not genocide?

Under the old perspective countries could have said we do not have the means, there is no probability of success, the damage would be greater than the gain and decline to do something. While otherwise calling it what it is and denouncing it.

Under the modern perspective calling it Genocide would be to much like a 911 call. It would have to go to the Security Council who would invoke Article 41ff of the UN Charter and require a military force sent STOP the genocide and the pieces would be picked up later. Like the police dispatcher sending the first squad car the accuracy of the complaint, cost, and likliehood of success would be poor excuses for no action in public opnion or perhaps in court. If it is called Genocide something real has to be done.


Why did the UN find that the action in the Sudan is not genocide? Why, because, under the new perspective, if you do not, or cannot do something you have to lie and say there is not a problem.
There are more than enough uncommited militry forces in the world to stop the genocide if the the political will was there. It is not there.

Amoung the reasons I do not like the new perspective. The old one is a lot more honest.



Related posts

January

Death by Governemnet

April

Rwanda and Darfur Compared


Continuing coverage is at the Coalition for Darfur Blog.

Also R J Rummel’s Democratic Peace blog has provided extensive coverage (Scroll down to Sudan section)