United Nations?

Is this one more oxymoron like jumbo shrimp … literary devices that juxtapose contradictory words to create a more complex or nuanced meaning?  The United Nations was created after World War II to foster world peace and wellness by providing a place for open discussion and resolution of world problems.  Cooperating in solving problems has been elusive to say the least at the UN, because each country tends quite naturally to look out for what it thinks are the best interests of its citizens.  Seeking the “greater good” has been elusive.  Somebody’s ox is going to get gored.

Don’t get me wrong … it has been a helpful venue to openly discuss world problems, or at least the perception of those problems, but perceptions are the problem about which the world is far from united. 

If we define the problem as world hunger, we get answers like rich countries attempting to feed the starving rather than admitting people shouldn’t live where there is no food.  Over millions of years, our species and all other animals have adapted to living where there is food and water.  As one late night comedian humorously summarized the situation of people in the Sudan needing other countries to send them food and water saying, “They don’t need food or water!  They need U-Hauls!”

Food is a critical element of world peace, but what we define as food matters as well as our country’s obsession with beef and even chicken has pushed us to use farmlands to raise their feed rather than feed our people directly.  The world has proven a rice diet keeps humans alive longer and living healthier.  We all know that, yet we persist.

Water of course is the foundation of life.  We can live for weeks without food but only a matter of days without water.  Fresh, clean drinking water has always been a fundamental and whole societies have relocated when it was no longer available.  It is a miracle of our planet that it has an abundance of fresh water, yet almost all of it is now polluted with microparticles in part because of our obsession with plastic containers.

Books and movies can help make us aware of our sins.  Rachel Carlson’s Silent Spring published in 1962 documented the environmental harm caused by the indiscriminate use of DDT, a pesticide used by soldiers during World War II. Carson accused the chemical industry of spreading disinformation, and public officials of accepting the industry’s marketing claims unquestioningly. 

Read that last sentence again … public officials accepting claims unquestioningly.  That my friends is the root of our problem.  People believe we can supply our unquenchable thirst for energy by using wind and solar rather than asking why we are using energy in the first place.  We can’t keep building wind and solar devices by raping the planet for rare earth minerals and killing the children used to mine them.  The excellent documentary Planet of the Humans covered this extensively.

We can’t keep destroying “the wild things” like our rain forests and oceans, which is so well documented in David Attenborough’s testimony movie A Life on our Planet.  The Amazon rain forest is being destroyed to raise grain to feed the beef industry in that country.  We can’t let the world overharvest our fish in international waters.  See the movies Seaspiracy and Cowspiracy for vivid proof, and Cowspiracy points out accurately that the beef industry not only consumes too much farmland … it also depletes our water supplies.

The intellectuals of the world all know these are facts and that we are headed for another extinction event if we fail to heed the clear warnings today.  Yet the spirit of cooperation to seek the greater good falls on deaf ears as the world tweaks the business models to appear to be sustainable.

There is almost no wild salmon in our food supply: it is all farm raised.  We have almost no grass-fed animals: it is all fed in feedlots.  Our world fish supplies have been decimated, so we clearly can’t keep going.  Yet, we argue that eliminating the use of fossil fuels will save the planet.

Can we be united on one clear message?  We must heed the warnings … and not be distracted by superficially appealing notions like climate change that are the result of bad decisions in our life choices far beyond the use of fossil fuels.  Food and water are the basics of life and the path for the future of these right now is unsustainable.

Am I going too fast?  Or are you OK with the equivalent of the movie Hunger Games playing out in your future? … yes … within your lifetime!