Ignacio Ramonet: Cuba is not a ‘consumer society’; consumption is, in fact, austere, and some people here even bemoan that. What would you say to those who complain of not having access to the products of capitalist consumer society?

Fidel Castro: Well, I’d tell them that the consumer society is one of the most frightening, terrifying inventions of developed capitalism today in this phase of neoliberal globalization. It is disastrous, just awful, because I try to imagine 1.3 billion Chinese with the per capita number of cars that the United States has… I can’t imagine India, with its more than 1 billion inhabitants, living in a consumer society; I can’t imagine the 600 million people who live in the sub-Saharan Africa, who don’t even have the electricity and in some places more than 80 percent of whom don’t know how to read and write, in a consumer society.

Under a diabolic and chaotic economic order, in fifty or sixty years at the most, consumer societies will have exhausted the proven and probable reserves of fossil fuel… There is no clear and coherent idea about the energy that in fifty years or so will be moving the billions of motorized vehicles that flood cities and highways in the wealthy nations, and even in much of the Third World. (The consumer society) is the expression of a completely irrational mode of life and consumption, and it will never serve as a model for the 10 billion people who will supposedly inhabit the planet when the dreadful oil age is over.

That economic order and those models of consumption are incompatible with the world’s limited and non-renewable essential resources and the laws that govern nature and life. They also clash with the most elementary principles of ethics, culture and moral values created by mankind.

Many thanks, Richard Register, author of “Ecocities – Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature”

Thank you very much. I was glad to read your story on ecology and economy in Deep Green. You put in words a lot of questions I have put for myself for some time now.

I have a question for you – since you are from the Greenpeace. I have been involved in an anti-uranium campaign in my state, Andhra Pradesh, in India. We have approached Greenpeace India, (based in Bangalore) many times asking them to take up the issue of the Uranium Mining and all the new Nuclear Plants coming up in the country.

We have no response from them. One memeber who is a good friend said to me, “Greenpeace India doesn’t have the mandate regarding nuclear issue.” I find that the most shocking statement, considering that Greenpeace started as an Anti-Nuclear movement.

Please tell me the reason why this is happening?

Warm Regards and Wishes

saraswati kavula
filmmaker and activist

Rex Weyler:

I write my Deep Green column for Greenpeace, but I am not involved in campaign decisions. I don’t know what the campaign priorities are for Greenpeace in India.

However, I know that humanity faces many more urgent environmental issues than Greenpeace alone can fix. Yes, Greenpeace started as an anti-nuclear peace group, and they are still working on nuclear and peace issues, but we can’t expect Greenpeace to come in and solve all our ecological challenges. It is more important for each community to stand up on their own and insist that their governments protect their environment. Nuclear power will not save us; it is a carbon-intensive, wasteful industry that has a huge toxic waste backlog. Here is my article on nuclear power. Many blessings. rw.

We have an environmental publication in our community. Is it possible for us to reprint some of your articles to reach our brothers and sisters who have no Internet connections, particularly in the rural areas, which are less informed?

Thank you, and more power to you!

Philip Bartilet
Philippines

Rex Weyler:

“Richer ends and simpler means” is an idea borrowed from Arne Naess. The meaning is that our real quality of life, the richness and enjoyment of life is not dependent on complex and wasteful consumption, but rather on simpler means: family, community, creativity, walking in nature, teaching our children, playing, and so forth. We must consume less stuff, and to achieve social justice, the rich world must share with the poor, but using less stuff does not mean less enjoyment of life. Quite the opposite. A simpler life, with less bashing about to earn more wealth reduces stress and distraction. Where do the rich go for holiday? Into nature, to the seashore, to the mountains. When we ask our elders what made them happy in life, what was rewarding in life, do they say, “Oh, making all that money, working every day, driving through traffic.”? No, they say that what gave their life meaning and happiness were friendships, family, community, their opportunities to be creative, to be in nature. So, we can achieve this rich life without destroying the planet. Richer ends, simpler means.

rw.

When the last tree has been be cut, when the last fish has been caught, when the last river has been drought, only then you will find that money can not be eaten.

We are living in a totally artificial world, a nightmare in which all the lower human desires are fulfilled by those who are manipulating the puppets of consumerism and making money off this.

It is an organized brainwashing. Manipulation and lies are the main weapons of these monsters using all the resources to addict children to useless and potentially deadly desires and the adults they will become to destroy the planet. Subjected to this mind manipulation they will buy cars, they will destroy without even knowing it all the ecosystems of our beautiful Earth.

I am living at the moment in a big city and on the streets I never see somebody looking at the sky, at few birds flying their way somewhere or watching a very polluted sunset. Like pigs (sorry for the pigs, they are certainly more sensitive) they are looking on the dirty pavement of the city, lost in their headphones and throwing on the ground their empty McDonalds containers.

I’m writing just to thank you very much for another excellent article. It is very good indeed. I’m in favour of a more fair distribution of the resources and of a world population control, to decrease the world production and, so, to decrease the damages that are being done to the Environment.

Reading about the alarming methane emissions, I would appreciate your comments on the theory which says that we are facing an Ice Era, produced by Sun cycling activity. If I am not wrong, this theory is from a Mexican scientist.

Best Regards

Miguel Ariza
Colombia

Rex Weyler response

Earth warming and cooling cycles

Cooling and warming influences constantly converge within the earth climate system, so Earth could move into a cooling period, or regional cooling, regardless of warming caused by human activity. The Earth’s atmosphere has been in a long cooling trend for over 65 million years, since the demise of dinosaurs, and during that trend, we call the extreme cooling dips “ice ages,” but these are small fluctuations in the big picture of Earth temperature over the eons.

Life on earth – the first bacteria – emerged some three billion years ago, and endured through two billion years of fluctuating temperatures. Terrestrial life forms boomed during a million-century warm spell between 600 and 500-million years ago, the warm Cambrian period.

Over the next 300 million years life forms thrived and crashed four times, during both warm and cold cycles that lasted a million centuries each. The most dramatic species crash of all time, the “Permian collapse,” which wiped out 95-percent of all species, happened at the end of a long cool period between 325 – 215 million years ago.

Thereafter, the planet began a long warming as atmospheric carbon dioxide reached 2000 parts per million (ppm; compared to 370 ppm today) and Global Mean Surface Temperature peaked at about 25°C (10°C hotter than today). During this 200-million-year Mesozoic heat wave, reptiles and forests flourished.

A long cooling

The expanding forests cooled the planet by increasing moisture circulation and storing carbon from the atmosphere. An asteroid hit Earth 65 million years ago in the Gulf of Mexico, changed the environment, killed off the large reptiles, and began a cooling trend, supported by the growing forests and eventually grasses and flowering plants.

We remained in this cooling phase, until the expansion of industrial human civilization, the loss of forest cover and the release of CO2 into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.

Modern warming

Since the earliest human temperature records, about 1860, atmospheric carbon and global average surface temperature have increased. Temperatures have risen by about 0.6°C over the last century, and the rate has accelerated to about 1.0°C per century now. This accelerating rate remains troubling.

Nevertheless, cooling influences remain, even if the warming influences prevail. Regional cooling may appear superimposed over greenhouse warming. One reason this happens is that the warming causes water to evaporate in the tropics and fall as rain at high latitudes, toward the poles. Thus, fresh water is lost in the tropics and added into high latitude oceans, where it dilutes the salt content, changing ocean current patterns. As North Atlantic warm currents are slowed, Europe and North America may experience colder winters. Nevertheless, the heat gained due to greenhouse gas in the atmosphere remains in Earth’s climate system.

Other geophysical cooling forces can include the tilt of Earth’s rotational axis and the orientation of our elliptical orbit around the sun, causing the well known “precession of the equinox” (a 23,000 year cycle through the zodiac: Taurus, Aries, Pisces, Aquarius, etc.). These orbital changes contribute to warming and cooling cycles.

Human warming impact prevails

Nevertheless, the impacts of human activity, reduction of forest cover and emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases appears now dominant over the natural cooling trends, as confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the US National Academy of Sciences, and other climate observers. Nevertheless, there remain many climate forces, and the Earth’s climate can change rapidly, as it has in the past, and could again in the future.

Recent data indicate deep ocean heating (to 3000 meters deep). This sequestering of heat in the deep ocean might mitigate global warming of the atmosphere, but we now know that the deep, sub-sea permafrost is melting, releasing ancient methane back into the atmosphere, which in turn will cause more heating of the earth. This recent discovery of deep methane releases remains extremely unsettling, and could signal the beginning of run-away warming.

So yes, cooling and warming influences continue simultaneously, but right now in the history of Earth, human-caused warming appears to dominate temperature change.

rw.