Rio+20 - A failure?

Started by Toruk Makto, June 26, 2012, 08:23:51 PM

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Toruk Makto

Is Jake's plea to Eywa at ayVitrayä Ramunong going to actually going to come true?  -Markì


(From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/25/rio-governments-will-not-save-planet)


After Rio, we know.
Governments have given up on the planet


The post-summit pledge was an admission of defeat against consumer capitalism.
But we can still salvage the natural world...


It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war. The Earth's living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations – the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia – could not even be bothered to turn up and discuss it. Those who did attend the Earth summit in Rio last week solemnly agreed to keep stoking the destructive fires: sixteen times in their text they pledged to pursue "sustained growth", the primary cause of the biosphere's losses.

The efforts of governments are concentrated not on defending the living Earth from destruction, but on defending the machine that is destroying it. Whenever consumer capitalism becomes snarled up by its own contradictions, governments scramble to mend the machine, to ensure – though it consumes the conditions that sustain our lives – that it runs faster than ever before.

The thought that it might be the wrong machine, pursuing the wrong task, cannot even be voiced in mainstream politics. The machine greatly enriches the economic elite, while insulating the political elite from the mass movements it might otherwise confront. We have our bread; now we are wandering, in spellbound reverie, among the circuses.

We have used our unprecedented freedoms – secured at such cost by our forebears – not to agitate for justice, for redistribution, for the defense of our common interests, but to pursue the dopamine hits triggered by the purchase of products we do not need. The world's most inventive minds are deployed not to improve the lot of humankind but to devise ever more effective means of stimulation, to counteract the diminishing satisfactions of consumption. The mutual dependencies of consumer capitalism ensure that we all unwittingly conspire in the trashing of what may be the only living planet. The failure at Rio de Janeiro belongs to us all.

It marks, more or less, the end of the multilateral effort to protect the biosphere. The only successful global instrument – the Montreal Protocol on substances that deplete the ozone layer –was agreed and implemented years before the first Earth Summit in 1992. It was one of the last fruits of a different political era, in which intervention in the market for the sake of the greater good was not considered anathema, even by the Thatcher and Reagan governments. Everything of value discussed since then has led to weak, unenforceable agreements, or to no agreements at all.

This is not to suggest that the global system and its increasingly pointless annual meetings will disappear, or even change. The governments which allowed the Earth Summit and all such meetings to fail evince no sense of responsibility for this outcome, and appear untroubled by the thought that if a system hasn't worked for 20 years, there's something wrong with the system. They walk away, aware that there are no political penalties; that the media is as absorbed with consumerist trivia as the rest of us; that, when future generations have to struggle with the mess they have left behind, their contribution will have been forgotten. (And then they lecture the rest of us on responsibility.)

Nor is it to suggest that multilateralism should be abandoned. Agreements on biodiversity, the oceans and the trade in endangered species may achieve some marginal mitigation of the full-spectrum assault on the biosphere that the consumption machine has unleashed. But that's about it.

The action – if action there is – will mostly be elsewhere. Those governments which retain an interest in planet Earth will have to work alone, or in agreement with like-minded nations. There will be no means of restraining free riders, no means of persuading voters that their actions will be matched by those of other countries.

That we have missed the chance of preventing two degrees of global warming now seems obvious. That most of the other planetary boundaries will be crossed, equally so. So what do we do now?

Some people will respond by giving up, or at least withdrawing from political action. Why, they will ask, should we bother, if the inevitable destination is the loss of so much of what we hold dear: the forests, the brooks, the wetlands, the coral reefs, the sea ice, the glaciers, the birdsong and the night chorus, the soft and steady climate which has treated us kindly for so long? It seems to me that there are at least three reasons.

The first is to draw out the losses over as long a period as possible, in order to allow our children and grandchildren to experience something of the wonder and delight in the natural world and of the peaceful, unharried lives with which we have been blessed. Is that not a worthy aim, even if there were no other?

The second is to preserve what we can in the hope that conditions might change. I do not believe that the planet-eating machine, maintained by an army of mechanics, oiled by constant injections of public money, will collapse before the living systems on which it feeds. But I might be wrong. Would it not be a terrible waste to allow the tiger, the rhinoceros, the bluefin tuna, the queen's executioner beetle and the scabious cuckoo bee, the hotlips fungus and the fountain anenome to disappear without a fight if this period of intense exploitation turns out to be a brief one?

The third is that, while we may have no influence over decisions made elsewhere, there is plenty that can be done within our own borders. Rewilding – the mass restoration of ecosystems – offers the best hope we have of creating refuges for the natural world, which is why I've decided to spend much of the next few years promoting it here and abroad.

Giving up on global agreements or, more accurately, on the prospect that they will substantially alter our relationship with the natural world, is almost a relief. It means walking away from decades of anger and frustration. It means turning away from a place in which we have no agency to one in which we have, at least, a chance of being heard. But it also invokes a great sadness, as it means giving up on so much else.

Was it too much to have asked of the world's governments, which performed such miracles in developing stealth bombers and drone warfare, global markets and trillion-dollar bailouts, that they might spend a tenth of the energy and resources they devoted to these projects on defending our living planet? It seems, sadly, that it was.



By: George Monbiot

Lì'fyari leNa'vi 'Rrtamì, vay set 'almong a fra'u zera'u ta ngrrpongu
Na'vi Dictionary: http://files.learnnavi.org/dicts/NaviDictionary.pdf

Seze Mune

Ma Markì, there is hope.  There is always hope.

If the least every one of us does is carve out a small niche, even within an apartment, and grow a symbol of our love and relationship to the natural environment - a small plant, even a wildflower - there is the chance that after mankind has passed from the planet, we can reseed our Mother. 

There is the Doomsday Seed Vault in Norway which is saving seeds from all over the world.  Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmental and political activist who won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, placed the first seeds inside the vault in 2008.  We can hope that there will be those who will remember to broadcast these seeds when other life on the planet recedes.

Breeding programs within zoos will keep some of our wild brethren alive and my hope is that the final keepers will open the cages and allow them their natural freedom when the human system breaks disastrously and has no chance of real restoration.

According to io9:

"Humans may have evolved during an unusual period of relative climate stability (despite those ice ages). What you see here are the biggest mass extinctions in Earth history and their places in the major geological ages of Earth. We've also got body counts - the line graph in the middle shows you how many species survived, which in some cases is nearly zero."  See below:



As I see it, humans are avatars for a cosmic experiment.  As humans we are standing on the brink and looking at the abyss.  The quantum probabilities swirl around us and we each choose our own probability according to our personal inclinations.  There is more, but it probably doesn't belong in this thread. 

Have hope, ma Markì.  Please...have hope.

Toruk Makto


Lì'fyari leNa'vi 'Rrtamì, vay set 'almong a fra'u zera'u ta ngrrpongu
Na'vi Dictionary: http://files.learnnavi.org/dicts/NaviDictionary.pdf

Niri Te

 Toruk Makto, and Seze Mune,
  The global Governments have turned into the RDA, and GREED in the motive.  AVATAR has turned into fantastic Allegory.
  Yes, we can grow a few plants on our balconies, But as long as Coal Fired Utilities, and Industries are NOT shut down, the only thing that we are doing, is living right in an EVIL world.  That is NOT to say that Eywa will not one day when we return our energy to the source, we WILL be rewarded for our pure Spirits, but we should not despair, if we do not bring down the Rock of Gibraltar with several thousand BB Guns, The countering effect that enlightened, sincere, environmentalists, versus the Industrialists, and Governments. We may not be able to turn the demise of this Planet around, short of direct intervention by Eywa, of greater scale than was even depicted in the movie, but when the time comes for each of us to go home, "Righteous Living" will Most definitely have been it's own reward.
  That is not to say that we should not continue to try to enlighten others, we must, but we must also understand that if we do not effect global change and turnaround, the fault is NOT ours, I believe that after these greedy people have killed themselves, and destroyed the Planet for a short, in geological terms, time, Eywa will once again populate it with people like, to include we, ourselves. And I believe that she will do it on this planet reborn, when it LOOKS like Eywa 'Eveng.
Niri Te 
Tokx alu tawtute, Tirea Le Na'vi