Is This The End For Us?

Our poor planet, things are going from bad to worse in many areas of our world and some of it is caused by just plain ordinary greed. One had only to look at what happened in the Gulf of Mexico a few years ago to see what I am talking about. BP was using a rig with a faulty blowout preventer valve which if worked could have averted the catastrophe in the Gulf. An article in Scientific American magazine on June 5, 2014 stated even with tougher regulations, companies don’t have to prove they have adequate protection against spills before drilling. It must be nice to be a Mega oil company and not have to worry about consequences when you drill. Sure they may get hit with what seem like large fines, but in the scheme of things they are getting off easy. No one goes to jail and the money they lose if anything goes wrong is only part of what they usually make in profit so they are still doing very well while wrecking the planet.

As bad as things are here environmentally they are far worse in Africa. Africa is facing polluted or no water, waste from coal mining, nuclear waste and all sorts of other problems such as deforestation. Climate change is taking its toll on sub-Saharan Africa. It is responsible for ever decreasing crop yields. Crops need water and it is in short supply. The rainfall has become very unpredictable. This has caused the price of food to increase dramatically. Many of the people in the area are very poor and this has caused them to alter their diets or do without. It is a sad situation indeed. People, including children are actually starving to death. Dwindling resources are another problem.

South Africa has a huge problem and it is being mismanaged and destroying the earth. The problem is almost all of its electricity comes from coal. The country has scarce water reserves and coal pollutes water. Eskom the power company currently uses 10,000 liters of water a second. There are now almost one million people in that country who don’t have access to the minimum requirement of 25 liters of water per day. The two huge coal powered plants under construction will be the third and fourth largest in the world. One of them requires 17 million tons of coal a year. The plants not only uses a huge amount of water which deprives others from getting water, but the pollution from the plants is another problem.

As if it wasn’t enough of a problem for Africa that their water resources were dwindling, they also have plans to develop nuclear plants and really have no way of utilizing long term storage of nuclear waste, which will make matters worse down the road. I find it sort of amazing an African country which has access to so much sunlight hasn’t gone for solar power in a big way. It is nonpolluting, would save all that water use and basically make things much better for the Africans. Is it not being used because it would make power too cheap, thus cutting profits for the big electric companies?

I wonder how many people know over a fifth of our greenhouse gases come from deforestation? Trees clean the atmosphere and when we eliminate them it is like cutting down on filters. We worry about our cars polluting, but if we were to add up all the emissions from cars worldwide and add to that the emissions from airplanes and trains, we would find they are less than the emissions caused by cutting down forests. I find that incredible, but nature put all those forests there for a reason and while we may not need every tree, we do need a certain amount of trees to keep our planet clean and alive. We are our worst enemies. Most companies do not think or care about the harm they are causing and this is because they are not being punished sufficiently with criminal and civil charges. If you are caught cutting down a forest which is needed, then you should be fined twice the value of the wood, made to replant all the trees and sent to jail for an appropriate amount of time. This should be true in the United States and the rest of our planet.

Land is being destroyed everywhere by ruinous mining practices and large scale agribusiness which causes polluted runoffs into rivers and streams. It even affects our groundwater. It just might turn out that some of the cancers and diseases we suffer are partially caused by this.
One problem which is effecting all of us is overfishing. First of all pollution of our oceans is creating dead zones where no marine life can live. This forces fish out of these areas and as they expand it only gets worse which then helps to cut down on the fish population. The overfishing then takes the problem to even a higher level. Some species of fish have been fished to what is known as commercial extinction. This means there is not enough of them left to make fishing them a viable proposition. The United Nations took a study of this situation and came to the conclusion that 75% of fish species are either being fully fished, over fished or very badly depleted. This does not bode well for the planet.

There are other facts hurting our planet and in my opinion genetically altered crops are going to be a big cause as they increase. The idea behind these crops was not to make them more efficient, but this is what we are being fed. The real idea was profit since you have to keep buying seeds every year because Β they don’t produce seeds. On top of that many people believe genetically altered crops may be harmful to the planet and to humans. Seeds are the natural way nature reproduces many of its plants and we are allowing companies and their greed to take this out of the natural equation.

We are rushing headlong into planetary destruction. It is being done a piece at a time without regard to the entire picture. It is a shame money has corrupted our companies so much they no longer even care about what they are doing to the people on this planet.