The Life Slant - Page 2

Nineteen Seventy-Six,
Enter Dr Bob Brown,
Franklin River dam preventer,
Conscientious objector:
Nuclear arms hunger striker,
Afghanistan protestor,
President GW Bush snubber,
Tibetan human rights championer,
Take that China!

Record-breaking climate firestorms are raging across the Amazon Rainforest. A stubborn South American drought and extreme temperatures are stoking climate fires in Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Suriname, Guyana and Paraguay.

Global heating has scorched millions of hectares in the Amazon Basin this year. It’s so horrible that black rain with soot from these monster fires has poisoned Brazilian cities. That toxic smoke (50X above the World Health Organisation’s safe level) has choked 10.3 million km²(4 million mi²), an area larger than the United States.

Big Coal, Big Oil, Big Fracking, Big Forestry, Big Animal Agri and Big Fisheries have unleashed hell on earthly life and governments are paying them to do so.

Fossil-fuelled ocean heat has lambasted coral reefs, home to 25% of marine life. This manmade heat is simply too much for sharks, so they are leaving reefs.

Cold-blooded grey reef sharks are moving offshore into deeper cooler waters and this spells disaster for coral life systems attempting to hang-on.

Sharks keep coral reefs in balance. They eat both herbivores and smaller predatory fish, and prevent reefs from being overgrazed or overgrown by algae.

Fossil-fuelled heat has baked Western Australia’s (WA) plant communities, its bees are starving.

Spring in WA and the Top End has sprung with vengeance. Horrible heat that begot a flash drought has lambasted western and northern Australia. Last week in Yampi Sound, WA, the mercury touched 41.6C (106.8F), the highest winter temperature ever recorded on that continent.

Fossil-fuelled marine heatwaves are sweeping the seafloors on both sides of the Arctic Ocean. Ten billion Bering Sea snow crabs were climate victims over a two-year period (2018 and 2019).

Bering Sea floor temps topped 4C, more than double  the polar snow crabs environment. That prolonged spike in temperature depleted oxygen. It increased the energy requirement of all bottom life, which directly led to trillions of marine creatures dying over an area 7X larger than Alaska. Moreover, that manmade heat precluded life along the ocean floor from storing carbon.

Horses are beautiful, loyal, patient, strong herbivores. Spend a few moments with one of these beauts and you will recognise their perceptiveness.

If a horse is cold, it will tell you by pointing at a blanket.

Scientists from Yunnan Centre for Disease and Control Prevention found that Chinese honey contains perchlorate, a poisonous component of rocket and missile fuels, munitions, small fireworks, batteries, airbags and highway and marine signal flares. Perchlorate is a known thyroid disruptor.

A recent posting on MSN,  by Societe US, titled “20 Social Issues Gen Z are Determined to Cancel” listed many things that Gen Z want to cancel in American society. Gen Zs were born in the late 1990s and into 2010s. Every generation has its values. Most of the time, new generations tend to shun at least some of the values and mores of the generation before them. Culture wars aren’t violent, but can be disturbing to the elders who do not understand or accept the new philosophical positions of the next generation. That is, of course, assuming that the philosophical position actually has logical, empirical information that supports their position. Just saying you disagree is not a defendable philosophical position. And rejecting the values of the present society because you are lazy or you find those values inconvenient is not a reason to reject them as well.

SAPPORO, August 5 – The rogue whaling nation of Japan slaughtered its first Pacific 25m(82ft)-long endangered fin whale.

In the midst of the accelerating climate and extinction crises, it’s appalling that Japan would flaunt international law and disdainfully murder defenceless mammals.

TOKYO, 11 June – The rogue nation of Japan announced that it will expand its annual commercial whaling operations to include murdering 59 of the world’s second largest vulnerable whales, fins.

Japan’s new $48 million mothership, the Kangei Maru is 113m(370ft) and 9300 tons, a ghastly floating whale slaughterhouse.

Already Japan cold-bloodedly tortures and kills 25 seis, 187 Bryde’s and 142 minke whales each year, with impunity.

RIO DE JANEIRO, July 23 – Atlantic Sharpnose sharks swimming in the waters off Rio de Janeiro tested positive for cocaine, as well as benzoylecgonine, the major metabolite of cocaine.

The consumption of cocaine in Brazil, particularly in the megalopolis of Rio de Janeiro, mirrors that of the world – it’s sky high!

In 2023, the UN Global Report revealed that cocaine production, purity and trade jumped to an all-time yearly high, 2,300 metric tons.

Brazil is the biggest consumer of shark meat, a booming $2bn annual legal/illegal trade. Brazilians could be eating cocaine, mouthful by mouthful – godawful chemical compounds.

NUUK, Greenland, July 21 – The former co-founder of marine conservation Greenpeace, founder of Sea Shepherd and the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, Captain Paul F. Watson, was arrested upon arrival in Nuuk, Greenland.

Watson’s flagship, M/Y John Paul Dejoria, with 25 volunteer crew, docked for fuel en route to the Northwest Passage to intercept Japan’s new whale-killing slaughterhouse, Kangei Maru, in the North Pacific.

“We were here, and arrested Paul, due to an international arrest order from Japan,” stated the leader of the Danish federal police boarding party at the site of the arrest. The crew were given no further notice.

The arrest is linked to a former Interpol Red Notice for Watson’s previous anti-whaling interventions in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, Antarctica. Japan’s phony Antarctic research whaling programme was forbidden in 2014 by a ruling of The International Court of Justice (ICJ).

In the darkest icy abyss, the largest predators, Sperm whales, hunt the biggest prey, Colossal squids. The battles are legendary. The winners take all. Welcome to the Sperm’s Kingdom.

The Monarchs of The Deep, male Sperm whales, rule the oceans with brawn and brains, 6X larger than humans. Gigantic head cavities filled with 1900 litres of spermaceti, a pearly white buoyant wax, facilitate the world’s deepest divers. Does the spermaceti prevent the skulls of these 50-ton Highnesses from being crushed, 3km beneath the surface? Undivulged.

During the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, bloodthirsty whalers relentlessly massacred Sperms for spermaceti that became candles, light, energy, cosmetics, textiles and more. Hundreds of thousands of our brothers and sisters, Sperms, were brutally murdered.

VICTORIA—Despite agreeing to protect trees over 400 years old, British Columbia Timber Sales, a government agency, greenlit the destruction of rare thousand-year-old western red and yellow cedars adjacent to Cape Scott Park, northwestern Vancouver Island.

Let me tell you about British Columbia’s wild woody neighbourhoods and why they are so worthy of defending. It’s awe-inspiring to stand in the presence of big venerable trees with impossibly high canopies. An old-growth temperate rainforest is a salubrious mystical experience.

From Edmonton, Alberta, to Burnaby, British Columbia, 890,000 barrels of oil per day are now flowing through the Trans Mountain Pipeline and off-loading onto tanker vessels docked on the edge of the Salish Sea.

Beguiled Canadian taxpayers forked out C$39bn to buy and rebuild the Trans Mountain Pipeline that winds its way through a school yard, waterways and endangered animals’ habitat.

The 2016 Paris Agreement was a smoke screen for unprincipled heads of state. The business of combusting carbon fuels was always the order of the day. From the Great Barrier ‘Graveyard’ and the Gulf of Carpentaria’s expired mangrove woodlands to the drought-ravaged Amazon rainforest and beyond, life is damned by accelerating manmade heat.

In the Pacific Northwest, fossil fuel tanker traffic is predicted to increase by a whopping seven-fold, to 408 trips through the Salish Sea – home of the critically endangered Southern Resident Orcas. And there’s 168% chance of a major oil spill from this obscene madness.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 11 – Iceland’s government issued a licence to the North Atlantic nation’s last whaling company, Hvalur hf, to brutally slay 128 fin whales.

It’s long overdue for the notorious whaler, Kristján Loftsson, to cease and desist massacring Mother Earth’s great whales, the oxygen replenishers.

Did you know that the oceans provide planetary life with three out of every four breaths of oxygen? Combustion heat (fossil fuels, wood pellets, palm oil) is adding the equivalent of 15.95 Hiroshimas every second of the year (31,536,000 A-bomb detonations) into the oceans, and it’s accelerating. Consequently, 40% of the oxygen-producing phytoplankton and cyanobacteria (Prochlorococcus) are missing from heat-disrupted nutrient deficiencies.

Leaves roots trunk,
Barking humankind,
Our collective medicine chest,
Our lungs
Our regulatory system
Our climate
Our oceans.

Corporate hypocrisy is a masterclass in deceit, where companies promote their so-called social responsibility, while their actions tell a completely different story. This chasm between sparkling company promises and grim reality erodes the trust of citizens and shatters the ethical foundations of our communities.

Take JBS, a meat processing giant that pledged to fight deforestation but was caught sourcing cattle from illegally deforested Amazon land. Or Cartier, a luxury brand that prides itself on ethical sourcing yet was found using conflict gold and advertising their products using indigenous Amazonian peoples they violently dispossessed. Then there’s IOI, a palm oil producer boasting about their “sustainability” while contributing to massive environmental destruction. Such brazen acts of deception ignite public outrage, often sparking more public discontent that the original acts of deception.

Imagine that planet Earth is a corporation with many indispensable branches called Earth Inc. After completing a pro forma balance sheet for the Earth Inc, I mulled over what might be said to a group of investors who were contemplating acquiring that entity.

It was very clear that Earth Inc was in a downward spiral and that a substantial portion of the annual operating profit was now being derived by liquidating assets that were essential for its continued operations. To correct the existing problems, and make the entity viable, it would realistically take decades and require injecting hundreds of trillions of dollars.