Evolution of Consciousness

From my view here in Rancho Navarro of the forested hills to the north east, now shrouded in thick brown smoke from the Covelo fire, there are now numerous patches of newly dead and dying trees that pockmark this formerly green and lush ridge. Hack-and-squirted to death with herbicides by a local corporation owned by the fantastically rich Fisher family of San Francisco, our forests here in Mendocino County are being poisoned all around us, soils tainted, water contaminated. But it is like this all over the planet, corporate plunder in various forms. From this larger scope, our story here is only a small one in this terrible march towards ecological destruction all over the globe. But for those of us who live here — unlike the Fisher family — who breathe the air, drink the water, and grow food in the soil, it is paramount and deadly. Journalist Chris Hedges addresses this insane corporate plunder from a place I often do, from the heart of a despairing parent looking at the bleak future ahead. I wanted to share this excerpt with you, AVA, readers.

“In America, when reality is distasteful we ignore it. But reality will soon descend like the Furies to shatter our complacency and finally our lives. We, as a species, may be doomed. And this is a bitter, bitter fact for a father to digest.

My family and I hike along the desolate coastline of an island in Maine that is accessible only by boat. We stop in the afternoons on remote inlets and look out across the Atlantic Ocean or toward the shoreline and the faint outline of the Camden hills. My youngest son throws pebbles into the surf. My daughter toddles over the rounded beach stones holding her mother’s hand. The gray and white seagulls chatter loudly overhead. The scent of salt is carried by the wind. Life, the life of my family, the life around me, is exposed at once as fragile and sacred. And it is worth fighting to save.

When I was a boy and came to this coast on duck hunting trips with my uncle, fishing communities were vibrant. The fleets caught haddock, cod, herring, hake, halibut, swordfish, pollock and flounder. All these fish have vanished from the area, victims of commercial fishing that saw huge trawlers rip up the seafloor and kill the corals, bryozoans, tubeworms and other species that nurtured new schools of fish. The trawlers left behind barren underwater wastelands of mud and debris. It is like this across the planet. Forests are cut down. Water is contaminated. Air is saturated with carbon emissions. Soil is depleted. Acidity levels in the oceans skyrocket. Atmospheric temperatures soar. And someone, somewhere, makes obscene sums of money from it. Corporations, indifferent to what is sacred, see the death of the planet as another investment opportunity. They are scurrying to mine the exposed polar waters for the last vestiges of oil, gas, minerals and fish. And since the corporations dictate our relationship to the ecosystem on which we depend for life, the chances of our survival look bleaker and bleaker. The final phase of 5,000 years of settled human activity ends with collective insanity.” — Chris Hedges

Elaine Kalantarian
Navarro

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 15th, 2012 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.