Persistent Human Rights Violations Ignored by MSM

It is up to each of us to challenge APARTHEID, wherever it may rear its ugly head.

Nov-26-2019

(OCCUPIED PALESTINE) - The US administration has violated international law before, including use of agent orange in Vietnam and dozens of other actions. But it also funds and fully supports violators of international law and human rights.

Moving its embassy to illegally occupied Jerusalem was a violation of law while funding Israel and telling it that its annexation of the Golan and building settlements is legal is funding and supporting flagrant violations of International law and human rights.

Complicity in murder or such crimes against humanity is after all cooperation in punishable crimes.

The US also violates its own laws which prohibits funding to countries that persistently violate human rights. Israel does that regularly as reported by every credible human rights organization such as Amnesty, Physicians for Human Rights, B'Tselem, Al-Haq, UN Human Rights Commission, and Human Rights Watch.

Monday, Israel expelled the Director of HRW but continues to receive billions of our (I am also a US citizen!!) tax payer money. See: www.hrw.org/news/2019/11/25/israel-expels-human-rights-watch-director-today.

I encourage you to read the reports and act to demand it stop. It is up to each of us to challenge APARTHEID officials as recently happened at Harvard University and elsewhere, and is now happening with increasing frequency. Join us. Harvard students walked out on Israeli apartheid event. See: www.middleeastmonitor.com/20191115-harvard-students-walkout-of-israel-envoy-talk.

Human rights advocate and our friend Ubai Aboudi is being held in administrative detention by the apartheid regime. Ubai Aboudi and I are members in www.scientists4palestine.com, an international organisation created by and for scientists to promote science and support the integration of the occupied Palestinian territories in the international scientific community.

Please join us and act to release Ubai Aboudi from administrative detention by the apartheid regime. See: actionnetwork.org/petitions/end-the-detention-of-ubai-aboudi, and www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/1445/2019/en/

Dissolve the PA and Embrace a One-State Solution Strategy... Now! See: www.pcpsr.org/en/node/771.

Canada has reversed its UN stance on Palestinians in break with U.S. over settlements. Tuesday's UN resolution in support of Palestinians' right to self-determination was opposed by Israel, the United States and three Pacific island nations that depend heavily on U.S. aid and tend to vote with Washington at the UN (the Marshall Islands, Nauru and the Federated States of Micronesia). It was supported by all other nations on earth, not just Canada. See: www.cbc.ca/news/politics/un-palestinian-vote-canada-israel-us-1.5365637.

Kairos Palestine Statement on the U.S Secretary of State legalizing settlements: Kairos Palestine expresses deep disappointment that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has announced in a statement -that disregards the Geneva Conventions, international law and widespread global consensus —a radical departure from U.S. policy regarding the illegal colonial activities of the State of Israel.

The Kairos conference opens this Friday in Bethlehem. See: www.kairospalestine.ps/.

In asserting that the United States will no longer deem West Bank settlements, including those in East Jerusalem, to be “inconsistent with international law,” Secretary of State Pompeo contravenes a 1978 legal opinion by the State Department.

The opinion was upheld with bipartisan support of former administrations which determined that “while Israel may undertake, in the occupied territories, actions necessary to meet its military needs and to provide for orderly government during the occupation, for reasons indicated above the establishment of the civilian settlements in those territories is inconsistent with international law.”

Secretary Pompeo went on to announce that this move by the United States should not be viewed as the U.S. “prejudging the ultimate status of the West Bank.”

Recent actions by the Trump administration belie this statement.

These actions include moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, defunding UNRWA, shuttering the Palestinians’ office in Washington, D.C., attempts to redefine who may be considered a Palestinian refugee, and embracing Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s annexation plans.

All these moves, including what to date has been revealed of the Middle East peace plan put forward by Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner, have to be interpreted as U.S. attempts to force the capitulation of Palestinians to the will of the State of Israel.

In our holy text, the story is told of King Ahab coveting the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite (1 Kings 21). When Naboth refuses the king’s offer to purchase the land which Naboth describes as his “ancestral inheritance”, a plot is launched in the king’s household to take the land by force. A false charge is made against Naboth, which leads to his being stoned to death, after which King Ahab sets out to take possession of Naboth’s vineyard.

In the same way that the Lord instructed the Prophet Elijah to intervene and confront the king, Kairos Palestine asks its partners—people of faith and those of good will—to call on leaders of the U.S. government to reexamine its failed role as a facilitator of peace between Israel and Palestinians.

Secretary of State Pompeo and the government of the United States must understand that God’s community of justice, peace and provision for all—coming on earth as it is in heaven—may be delayed but will not be denied.

As stated in the document, Kairos Palestine: A Moment of Truth, “In the absence of all hope, we cry out our cry of hope. We believe in God, good and just. We believe that God’s goodness will finally triumph over the evil and hate and of death that still persist in our land. We will see here ‘a new land’ and ‘a new human being’, capable of rising up in the spirit to love each one of his or her brothers and sisters.”

Stay Human and come visit us in Palestine.

The True Story of the Genetically Modified Superfood That Almost Saved Millions

Plant biotechnologist Swapan Datta inspects a genetically modified Golden Rice plant at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, the Philippines, on Nov. 27, 2003. DAVID GREEDY/GETTY IMAGES

BY ED REGIS-

OCTOBER 17, 2019, 10:07 AM

The cover of the July 31, 2000, edition of Time magazine pictured a serious-looking bearded man surrounded by a wall of greenery: the stems, leaves, and stalks of rice plants. The caption, in large block lettering, read, “This rice could save a million kids a year.”

The man in question was Ingo Potrykus, a professor of plant sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, where Albert Einstein had studied and taught. The rice plants around him, although the joint products of many minds and hands, had been largely inspired by him. Their kernels were not the usual plain white grains of rice. Instead, they had a distinct golden hue, the color of daffodils. When spread out on a black surface, they looked like nothing so much as tiny yellow gemstones.

This was Golden Rice, the fruit of nine years of research, experimentation, and development. The “gold” was in fact beta carotene, a substance that is converted into vitamin A in the human body. Conventional rice plants already contained beta carotene, but only in their leaves and stems, not in the kernels. Golden Rice also carries the substance in the part of the plant that people eat. This small change made Golden Rice into a miracle of nutrition: The rice could combat vitamin A deficiency in areas of the world where the condition is endemic and could, thereby, “save a million kids a year.”

Vitamin A deficiency is practically unknown in the Western world, where people take multivitamins or get sufficient micronutrients from ordinary foods, fortified cereals, and the like. But it is a life-and-death matter for people in developing countries. Lack of vitamin A is responsible for a million deaths annually, most of them children, plus an additional 500,000 cases of blindness. In Bangladesh, China, India, and elsewhere in Asia, many children subsist on a few bowls of rice a day and almost nothing else. For them, a daily supply of Golden Rice could bring the gift of life and sight.

The superfood thus seemed to have everything going for it: It would be the basis for a sea change in public health among the world’s poorest people. It would be cheap to grow and indefinitely sustainable, because low-income farmers could save the seeds from any given harvest and plant them the following season, without purchasing them anew.

But in the 20 years since it was created, Golden Rice has not been made available to those for whom it was intended.

 So what happened?

For one, Golden Rice is a genetically modified organism, and as such is weighed down with all the political, ideological, and emotional baggage that has come to be associated with GMOs—stultifying government overregulation, fear and hostility, and criticism (much of it unfounded) from environmentalist and other activist organizations and individuals. Greenpeace, for one, was especially vocal in its condemnation of genetically engineered foods, Golden Rice in particular.

To many, this protracted delay has been unconscionable, and it brought forth reactions as extreme as the hyperbolic claims made by GMO opponents. In 2016, for example, George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, said in an interview with the science publication Edge:
Golden Rice was a tough call strategically for Greenpeace and some of their associates. … A million lives are at stake every year due to vitamin A deficiency, and Golden Rice was basically ready for use in 2002, so it’s been thirteen years that it’s been ready. Every year that you delay it, that’s another million people dead. That’s mass murder on a high scale. In fact, as I understand it there is an effort to bring them to trial at The Hague for crimes against humanity. Maybe that’s justified, maybe it isn’t.
Much of the pro-Golden Rice backlash was overstatement, too. For one thing, it is doubtful that Golden Rice was “ready,” in any but the most technical sense, in 2002. Indeed, some critics would argue that as a proven, viable, agricultural commodity, it is not yet ready even today. Still, the fact is that the crop has been grown, and grown successfully, first in laboratories, then in greenhouses, and finally in open fields since it was invented. The rice has also been subjected to safety studies—toxicity and allergenicity studies—and studies on human consumption, including among American adults and Chinese children. These have found it to be more effective in providing vitamin A than spinach and almost as effective as pure beta carotene oil itself.

So what really happened? Extremist opposition, protests, rhetoric, and even vandalism did not, by themselves, have the power to stop Golden Rice in its tracks or even to substantially hamper the pace of its development. Indeed, the delay may come down to a variety of other, less obvious, factors.

The first source of delay was simply the scientific and technological difficulty of inventing a new crop type, one that was nutritionally enhanced by molecular methods to express beta carotene in a part of the rice plant that did not normally do so. The tasks of genetically engineering a new metabolic pathway in the plant, getting the plant to express the desired trait at the most beneficial levels of concentration, and then transferring that newly engineered trait into several different varieties of rice successfully—all of these things were, at the time, new, untried, and unproven technologies.

The second cause was the fact that plants themselves are recalcitrant experimental subjects: They grow only so fast and no faster, and the cycle of germination, maturation, and seed production is a process that can’t really be sped up. However, this same process can easily be slowed down, or even terminated, by a variety of causes such as disease; insect attack; natural disasters and weather events including floods, frosts, heat waves, and droughts; vandalism; or simple human misjudgment or mishandling.

But it was something else altogether that had the greatest power to impede the development of Golden Rice, and that was government regulation. That power resided in a complex set of operational guidelines, restrictions, and requirements that created enormous obstacles for the Golden Rice scientists to overcome. Governments imposed these constraints in the name of safety; chiefly responsible for these restrictions is an international treaty known as the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and its highly controversial Principle 15, otherwise known as the “precautionary principle.”

This principle states that if a product of modern biotechnology poses a possible risk to human health or the environment, then it is prudent to restrict or prevent the introduction or use of that product or technology, even if the magnitude or nature of the risk is uncertain, speculative, scientifically unproven, or even unknown. Although it may have been benign in its intent, the effect of the principle has been to slow the pace of biotechnology research and development—and in some cases even to halt it, at least temporarily, at multiple times during the research and development process.
In the case of Golden Rice, the combined result of these three factors—the scientific difficulty of the project, the slow and stately rate of plant growth and reproduction, and a body of stifling government regulations governing biotechnology research and development—was to prolong the incubation time of a food that, absent externally imposed government restrictions, could otherwise be saving the sight and lives of millions of people.

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The story of Golden Rice thus makes for a sad and maddening tale of scientists being repeatedly thwarted in their attempts to invent, improve, breed, field-test, and disseminate a potentially lifesaving food.

Yet despite all these roadblocks, Golden Rice has still emerged as the world’s first purposefully created biofortified crop. The project began in 1990, when Potrykus and his colleague Peter Beyer, of the University of Freiburg, started working to genetically engineer a metabolic pathway into a variety of Oryza sativa, the world’s most commonly consumed rice species, so that the plant’s edible kernels would contain beta carotene. It is an understatement to say that their task was daunting. There was no assurance when they started out that what they contemplated was even technologically possible, since it had never been done before. But the two men were highly motivated by the horrors of persistent vitamin A deficiency in developing countries, and they viewed their work as a calling—one from which they would not be deterred.

It took almost a decade of laboratory experimentation to invent Golden Rice, but by 1999, Potrykus, Beyer, and a group of colleagues finally succeeded.

 They inserted a set of genes into the rice genome so that the plant’s beta carotene accumulated not only in the plant’s leaves and stems, as it normally did, but also in the rice kernels themselves, just as if nature had intended things to work that way from the very beginning.

Once they accomplished that small but powerful technological trick, the inventors naively imagined that the hard part was now behind them. Little did they know that the most difficult tasks still lay ahead. Looking back on it all afterward, Potrykus reflected, “Had I known what this pursuit would entail, perhaps I would not have started.”

Once they had their initial proof-of-concept rice in hand, the inventors moved swiftly to develop Golden Rice further, first to improve the product and then to make it available, for free, to poor farmers in developing countries. In April 2000, they licensed their rice technology to the British agrochemical company Zeneca on a quid pro quo basis: The company retained the right to sell Golden Rice seeds commercially, perhaps as a health food, on the condition that the company financially supported the inventors’ future work on the rice and let them distribute the seeds at no cost to small-scale farmers. Zeneca later merged with the Swiss-based company Syngenta, but the terms of the original arrangement remained unchanged.

On Feb. 9, 2001, Greenpeace, which had a long record of opposition to all GMO foods and crops, issued a statement that an adult would have to eat 9 kilograms (about 20 pounds) of cooked Golden Rice daily to prevent persistent vitamin A deficiency, and that “a breast-feeding woman would have to eat at least 6.3 kilos in dry weight, which converts to nearly 18 kilos [40 pounds] of cooked rice per day.” Since the bioavailability of beta carotene in the rice was not then known, there was no factual basis for these claims, which in any case were later proved false. At about the same time, the Indian anti-GMO crusader Vandana Shiva called Golden Rice a “hoax.” It was the beginning of a propaganda war against the rice that has only intensified.

Around the same time, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety was making waves. The protocol had been adopted in the year 2000 by more than 100 nations, including members of the European Union (but neither the United States nor Canada). The written document, which came into force in 2003, governed the handling, packaging, identification, transfer, and use of “living modified organisms” among the parties to the agreement.

The agreement contained one version of the precautionary principle. Exactly what that principle, which focused on avoiding unknown risks, meant in practice was not immediately clear. It is more of an ideal, a standard of perfection to be aimed at, than a real-world guide to action or public policy. On the one hand, it sounds like a dressed-up variant of a number of innocuous platitudes such as “look before you leap” or “better safe than sorry.” On the other, it can equally well be interpreted as a doctrine of “guilty until proven innocent.”

In light of the Cartagena Protocol, every aspect of Golden Rice development—from lab work to field trials to screening for “regulatory clean events”—was entangled in a Byzantine web of rules, guidelines, requirements, restrictions, and prohibitions. The simple transfer of seeds from one country to another became a major logistical problem. It could take “more than two years to transfer, for example, breeding seed from the Philippines to Vietnam, and one year from USA to India, during which time 30 politically loaded questions were asked in the Indian parliament,” Potrykus said. “These Cartagena conditions are enforced, despite common sense suggesting that it is extremely difficult to construct a hypothetical risk from seed transfer between two breeding stations in different countries, especially for Golden Rice.”

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Golden Rice was unique among genetically engineered foods, and the properties that made it different also made it immune to many of the conventional criticisms of GMOs. Golden Rice was not invented for profit, and after 2004, when Syngenta renounced all commercial interest in the rice, it would no longer be developed for profit. The rice would benefit the poor and disadvantaged, not modern, multinational corporations. It would be given free of charge to subsistence farmers who can save seeds and plant them from one harvest to the next, without restriction or payment of fees or royalties. The rice was not developed primarily for the benefit of farmers, as were most other GMOs that had been designed to be resistant to herbicides or pesticides. Instead, it was developed for the sole purpose of helping users: the malnourished poor suffering from vitamin A deficiency. And Golden Rice is not a crop upon which a major genetic engineering effort conferred a relatively minor advantage such as a longer shelf life or slightly improved taste, as was true, for example, of the long-since-abandoned Flavr Savr tomato. That’s why, for all the vitriol, the real villain of the story is regulation, rather than activism run amok.

Had Golden Rice not faced overly restrictive regulatory conditions, it could have been cultivated by rice farmers and distributed throughout some of the poorest regions of South and Southeast Asia. It would have already saved millions of lives and prevented millions of children from going blind.

Excerpted from Golden Rice. Used with permission of the publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press. Copyright © 2019.

 

Ed Regis is the author of Golden Rice: The Imperiled Birth of a GMO Superfood.

Our Vanishing World: Wildlife

Fundamentally it is because our parenting and education models since the Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years ago have failed utterly to produce people of conscience, people who are emotionally functional and capable of critical analysis, people who care and who can plan and respond to crises (or even problems) strategically.



by Robert J. Burrowes-2019-12-01-

Throughout its history, Earth has experienced five mass extinction events. See, for example, ‘Timeline Of Mass Extinction Events On Earth’. It is now experiencing the sixth.

1. The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction, which occurred about 439 million years ago, wiped out 86% of life on Earth at the time. Most scientists believe that this mass extinction was precipitated by glaciation and falling sea levels (possibly a result of the Appalachian mountain range forming), catastrophically impacting animal life which lived largely in the ocean at the time.

2. The Late Devonian Extinction happened about 364 million years ago and destroyed 75% of species on Earth. Possibly spread over hundreds of thousands of years, a sequence of events that depleted the oceans of oxygen and volcanic ash that cooled the Earth’s surface are believed to have driven the extinctions. It was to be 10 million years before vertebrates again appeared on land. ‘If the late Devonian extinction had not occurred, humans might not exist today.’

3. The Permian-Triassic extinction, which occurred 251 million years ago, is considered the worst in all history because around 96% of species were lost. ‘The Great Dying’ was precipitated by an enormous volcanic eruption ‘that filled the air with carbon dioxide which fed different kinds of bacteria that began emitting large amounts of methane. The Earth warmed, and the oceans became acidic.’ Life today descended from the 4% of surviving species.

4. The Triassic-Jurassic extinction happened between 214 million and 199 million years ago and, as in other mass extinctions, it is believed there were several phases of species loss. The blame has been placed on an asteroid impact, climate disruption and flood basalt eruptions. This extinction laid the path that allowed for the evolution of dinosaurs which later survived for about 135 million years.

5. The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, best known of ‘the Big 5’ mass extinctions, occurred 65 million years ago, ending 76% of life on Earth including the dinosaurs. A combination of volcanic activity, asteroid impact, and climate disruption are blamed. This extinction period allowed for the evolution of mammals on land and sharks in the sea.

6. The sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history is the one that is being experienced now. Unlike earlier mass extinctions, which helped to pave the way for the evolution of Homo sapiens, the precipitating cause of this extinction event is Homo sapiens itself and, moreover, Homo sapiens is slated to be one of the species that becomes extinct.

Let me explain why this is so by touching on the diverse range of forces driving the extinctions, concepts such as ‘co-extinction’, ‘localized extinctions’ and ‘extinction cascades’, the ways in which extinction impacts are often ‘hidden’ in the short term, thus masking the true extent of the destruction, and the implications of all this for life on Earth, including Homo sapiens, in the near term.

But before I do this, consider this excerpt from the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind written by Yuval Noah Harari, commenting on the expansion of ancient humans out of Africa:

‘If we combine the mass extinctions in Australia and America, and add the smaller-scale extinctions that took place as Homo sapiens spread over Afro-Asia – such as the extinction of all other human species – and the extinctions that occurred when ancient foragers settled remote islands such as Cuba, the inevitable conclusion is that the first wave of Sapiens colonisation was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom. Hardest hit were the large furry creatures.

At the time of the Cognitive Revolution [which Harari argues occurred during the period between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago and probably involved an internal restructuring of the Sapiens brain to facilitate learning, remembering, imagining and communicating while also, in the case of the earlier date, coinciding with the time when Sapiens bands started leaving Africa for the second time], the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over fifty kilograms. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution [about 12,000 years ago], only about a hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet’s big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing or iron tools.

‘This ecological tragedy was restaged in miniature countless times after the Agricultural Revolution’ with mammoths, for example, vanishing from the Eurasian and North American landmasses by 10,000 years ago as Homo sapiens spread. Despite this, mammoths thrived until just 4,000 years ago on a few remote Arctic islands, most conspicuously Wrangel, then suddenly disappeared with the arrival of humans.

While there has been some debate about the full extent of the human impact compared to, say, climate and environmental changes including ice age peaks – see, for example, ‘What killed off the giant beasts – climate change or man?’ and ‘What Killed the Great Beasts of North America?’ – the archeological record provides compelling evidence of the role of Homo sapiens as, in Harari’s words, ‘an ecological serial killer’. There is further well-documented evidence in Professor Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People an excerpt of which in relation to New Zealand, where the megafauna survived until Maoris arrived just 800 years ago and then rapidly vanished, can be read here: ‘The Future Eaters’.

And the onslaught has never ended as the inexorable encroachment of Homo sapiens to the remotest corners of the Earth (including virtually all of the thousands of islands of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans) has inevitably led to the extinction of myriad local species including birds, insects and snails. In fact, following the Industrial Revolution about 270 years ago which enabled the development of killing technologies on a scale unheard of previously, the human assault on life on Earth has accelerated so effectively that 200 species of life are now driven to extinction daily.

Whatever other claims they might make about themselves, human beings are truly the masters of death.

So where do we stand today?

According to one recent report, the Earth is experiencing what could be described as ‘just the tip of an enormous extinction iceberg’. See ‘Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change’. ‘Just the tip?’, you might ask.

Extinction-causing Behaviours

The primary human behaviours that are modifying Earth’s biosphere, with catastrophic outcomes for many species, are readily apparent and well-described in the scientific literature: destruction of habitat (such as oceans, rainforests, grasslands, wetlands, mangroves, lakes and coral reefs) whether through military violence, radioactive contamination, industrial activities (including ecosystem destruction to build cities, roads and railroads but a vast range of other activities besides), chemical poisoning or other means; over-exploitation; biotic invasion and the effects of environmental modification, including climatic conditions, leading to temperature rise, more frequent droughts, ocean acidification and other impacts which so alter a locality’s environmental conditions that tolerance limits for inhabiting species are breached causing localized extinctions. Unfortunately, however,  there are other, more complicated, mechanisms that can exacerbate species loss.

‘In particular, it is becoming increasingly evident how biotic interactions, in addition to permitting the emergence and maintenance of diversity, also build up complex networks through which the loss of one species can make more species disappear (a process known as ‘co-extinction’), and possibly bring entire systems to an unexpected, sudden regime shift, or even total collapse.’ In simple language, a species cannot survive without the resources (the other species) on which it depends for survival and the accelerating loss of species now threatens ‘total collapse’ of ‘entire systems’.

This is because resource and consumer interactions in natural systems (such as food webs) are organized in various hierarchical levels of complexity (including trophic levels), so the removal of resources can result in the cascading (bottom-up) extinction of several higher-level consumers.

Summarizing the findings of several studies based on simulated or real-world data, Dr. Giovanni Strona and Professor Corey J. A. Bradshaw explain why ‘we should expect most events of species loss to cause co-extinctions, as corroborated by the worrisome, unnatural rate at which populations and species are now disappearing, and which goes far beyond what one expects as a simple consequence of human endeavour. In fact, even the most resilient species will inevitably fall victim to the synergies among extinction drivers as extreme stresses drive biological communities to collapse. Furthermore, co-extinctions are often triggered well before the complete loss of an entire species, so that even oscillations in the population size of a species could result in the local disappearance of other species depending on the first. This makes it difficult to be optimistic about the future of species diversity in the ongoing trajectory of global change, let alone in the case of additional external, planetary-scale catastrophes.’

In an attempt to emphasize the importance of this phenomenon, Strona and Bradshaw note that ‘As our understanding of the importance of ecological interactions in shaping ecosystem identity advances, it is becoming clearer how the disappearance of consumers following the depletion of their resources – a process known as “co-extinction” – is more likely the major driver of biodiversity loss’ [emphasis added] and that ‘ecological dependencies amplify the direct effects of environmental change on the collapse of planetary diversity by up to ten times.’ See ‘Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change’.

In their own recently published scientific study ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines’ the authors Professors Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo document another frequently ignored element in understanding the accelerating nature of species extinctions.

‘Earth’s sixth mass extinction is more severe than perceived when looking exclusively at species extinctions…. That conclusion is based on analyses of the numbers and degrees of range contraction … using a sample of 27,600 vertebrate species, and on a more detailed analysis documenting the population extinctions between 1900 and 2015 in 177 mammal species.’ Their research found that the rate of population loss in terrestrial vertebrates is ‘extremely high’, even in ‘species of low concern’.

In their sample, comprising nearly half of known vertebrate species, 32% (8,851 out of 27,600) are decreasing; that is, they have decreased in population size and range. In the 177 mammals for which they had detailed data, all had lost 30% or more of their geographic ranges and more than 40% of the species had experienced severe population declines. Their data revealed that ‘beyond global species extinctions Earth is experiencing a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization. We describe this as a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.’

Illustrating the damage done by dramatically reducing the historic geographic range of a species, consider the lion. Panthera leo ‘was historically distributed over most of Africa, southern Europe, and the Middle East, all the way to northwestern India. It is now confined to scattered populations in sub-Saharan Africa and a remnant population in the Gir forest of India. The vast majority of lion populations are gone.’

Why is this happening? Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo tell us: ‘In the last few decades, habitat loss, overexploitation, invasive organisms, pollution, toxification, and more recently climate disruption, as well as the interactions among these factors, have led to the catastrophic declines in both the numbers and sizes of populations of both common and rare vertebrate species.’

Further, however, the authors warn ‘But the true extent of this mass extinction has been underestimated, because of the emphasis on species extinction.’ This underestimate can be traced to overlooking the accelerating extinction of local populations of a species.

‘Population extinctions today are orders of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions. Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so Earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume.’ Moreover, and importantly from a narrow human perspective, the massive loss of local populations is already damaging the services ecosystems provide to civilization (which, of course, are given no value by government and corporate economists and accountants).

As Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo remind us: ‘When considering this frightening assault on the foundations of human civilization, one must never forget that Earth’s capacity to support life, including human life, has been shaped by life itself.’ When public mention is made of the extinction crisis, it usually focuses on a few (probably iconic) animal species known to have gone extinct, while projecting many more in future. However, a glance at their maps presents a much more realistic picture: as much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once shared Earth with us are already gone, as are billions of local populations.

Furthermore, they claim that their analysis is conservative given the increasing trajectories of those factors that drive extinction together with their synergistic impacts. ‘Future losses easily may amount to a further rapid defaunation of the globe and comparable losses in the diversity of plants, including the local (and eventually global) defaunation-driven coextinction of plants.’

They conclude with the chilling observation: ‘Thus, we emphasize that the sixth mass extinction is already here and the window for effective action is very short.’

Another recent study examined ‘Experimental Evidence for the Population-Dynamic Mechanisms Underlying Extinction Cascades of Carnivores’, and was undertaken by Dr. Dirk Sanders, Rachel Kehoe & Professor F.J. Frank van Veen who sought to understand ‘extinction cascades’. Noting that ‘Species extinction rates due to human activities are high’, they investigated and documented how ‘initial extinctions can trigger cascades of secondary extinctions, leading to further erosion of biodiversity.’ This occurs because the diversity of consumer species is maintained due to the positive indirect effects that these species have on each other by reducing competition among their respective resource species. That is, the loss of one carnivore species can lead to increased competition among prey, leading to extinctions of those carnivore species dependent on prey that loses this competition.

Another way of explaining this was offered by Dr. Jose M. Montoya: ‘Species do not go extinct one at a time. Instead… ecosystems change in a kind of chain reaction, just like in bowling. The impact of the ball knocks down one or two pins, but they hit other pins and this ultimately determines your score. Likewise, when in an ecosystem one species goes extinct many others may follow even if they are not directly affected by the initial disturbance. The complex combination of direct and indirect effects resulting from species interactions determines the fate of the remaining species. To predict the conditions under which extinctions beget further extinctions is a major scientific and societal challenge under the current biodiversity crisis…. Sanders and colleagues… show how and why initial extinctions of predators trigger cascades of secondary extinctions of the remaining predators.’ See ‘Ecology: Dynamics of Indirect Extinction’.

To fully grasp the extent of the crisis in our biosphere, we must look well beyond Earth’s climate: There are a great many variables adversely impacting life on Earth, many of which individually pose the threat of human extinction and which, synergistically, now virtually guarantee it absent an immediate and profound response. As reported in the recent Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services researched and published by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) – the scientific body which assesses the state of biodiversity and the ecosystem services this provides to society – ‘Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history. The IPBES Global Assessment ranks, for the first time at this scale, the 5 direct drivers of change in nature with the largest global impact. So what are the culprits behind nature’s destruction?’ Number 1. on the IPBES list is ‘Changes in land and sea use, like turning intact tropical forests into agricultural land’ but, as noted, there are four others. According to this report: one million species of life on Earth are threatened with extinction.

And in their latest assessment of 100,000 species, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) concluded that not one species had improved prospects of averting extinction since their previous ‘Red List’ report. See ‘News Release’ and ‘From over 100,000 species assessments in IUCN update, zero improvements’.

Of course, separately from the systemic extinction drivers noted above, including the unmentioned destruction of Earth’s oceans through its absorption of carbon dioxide, pollution with everything from pesticides to plastic, and chronic overfishing which is pushing many ocean species to, or over, the brink of extinction as well, humans also engage in yet other activities that drive the rush to extinction. Hunting wildlife to kill it for trophies or pet food – see ‘Killing Elephants “for Pet Food” Condemned’ – and trafficking wildlife: a $10-20 billion-a-year industry involving illegal wildlife products such as jewelry, traditional ‘medicine’, clothing, furniture, and souvenirs, as well as exotic pets – see ‘Stop Wildlife Trafficking’ and ‘China must lead global effort against tiger trade’ – play vital roles as well.

In summary, the tragedy of human existence is that the Cognitive Revolution gave Homo sapiens the capacity to plan, organize and conduct an endless sequence of systematic massacres all over the planet but, assuming that we have the genetic capacity to do so, our parenting and education models since that time have ensured that we have been denied the emotional and intellectual capacities to fight, strategically, for our own survival. And the time we have left is now incredibly short.
So what can we do?

Given that the ongoing, systematic industrial-scale destruction of Earth’s wildlife has its origin in evolutionary events that took place some 70,000 years ago but which probably had psychological origins prior to this, it is clearly a crisis that is not about to be resolved quickly or easily.

‘Why the mention of psychology here?’ you might ask. Well, while many other factors have obviously played a part – for example, abundance of a species in a particular context might mean that the issue of killing its individual members for food does not even arise, at least initially – it is clear that, given the well-documented multifaceted crisis in which human beings now find themselves, only a grotesquely insufficient effort is being put into averting the now imminent extinction of our own species which critically requires us to dramatically stem (and soon halt) the tide of wildlife extinctions, among many other necessary responses. See, for example, ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’ and ‘Doomsday by 2021?’

It is psychologically dysfunctional, to put it mildly, to participate in or condone by our silence and inaction, activities that will precipitate our own extinction, whether these are driven by the insane global elite – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – or by our own dysfunctional overconsumption. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.
For that reason, after 70,000 years, we must finally ask ‘Why?’ so that we can address the fundamental drivers of our extinction-threatening behaviour as well the several vital symptoms that arise from those drivers. Let me explain what I mean.

The fundamental question is this: Why are humans behaving in a way that will precipitate our own extinction in the near term? Surely, this is neither sensible nor even sane. And anyone capable of emotional engagement and rational thinking who seriously considers this behaviour must realize this. So why is it happening?

Fundamentally it is because our parenting and education models since the Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years ago have failed utterly to produce people of conscience, people who are emotionally functional and capable of critical analysis, people who care and who can plan and respond to crises (or even problems) strategically. Despite this profound social shortcoming, some individuals have nevertheless emerged who have one or more of these qualities and they are inevitably ‘condemned’ to sound the alarm, in one way or another, and to try to mobilize an appropriate response to whatever crisis or problem confronts them at the time.

But, as is utterly obvious from the state of our world, those with these capacities have been rare and, more to the point, they have had few people with whom to work. This is graphically illustrated by the current failure to respond strategically to the ongoing climate catastrophe (with most effort focused on lobbying elite-controlled governments and international organizations), the elite-driven perpetual (and ongoing threat of nuclear) war as well as the other issues, such as the use of geoengineering and the deployment of 5G, that threaten human survival. See ‘The Global Climate Movement is Failing: Why?’, ‘The War to End War 100 Years On: An Evaluation and Reorientation of our Resistance to War’ and ‘Why Activists Fail’.

Given the preoccupation of modern society with producing submissively obedient students, workers, soldiers, citizens (that is, taxpayers and voters) and consumers, the last thing society wants is powerful individuals who are each capable of searching their conscience, feeling their emotional response to events, thinking critically and behaving strategically in response. Hence our parenting and education models use a ruthless combination of visible, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence to ensure that our children become terrified, self-hating and powerless individuals like virtually all of the adults around them.

This multifaceted violence ensures that the adult who emerges from childhood and adolescence is suppressing awareness of an enormous amount of fear, pain and anger (among many other feelings) and must live in delusion to remain unaware of these suppressed feelings. This, in turn, ensures that, as part of their delusion, people develop a strong sense that what they are doing already is functional and working (no matter how dysfunctional and ineffective it may actually be) while unconsciously suppressing awareness of any evidence that contradicts their delusion. See ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’, ‘Do We Want School or Education?’ and ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.
So if we are going to address the fundamental driver of both the destruction of Earth’s wildlife and the biosphere generally, we must address this cause. For those adults powerful enough to do this, there is an explanation in ‘Putting Feelings First’. And for those adults committed to facilitating children’s efforts to realize their potential and become self-aware (rather than delusional), see ‘My Promise to Children’ and ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

Beyond this cause, however, we must also resist, strategically, the insane elite-controlled governments and corporations that are a key symptom of this crisis – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – by manufacturing and marketing a vast range of wildlife (and life)-destroying products ranging from weapons (conventional and nuclear) and fossil fuels to products made by the destruction of habitat (including oceans, rainforests, grasslands, wetlands, mangroves, lakes and coral reefs) and the chemical poisoning of agricultural land (to grow the food that most people eat) while also using geoengineering and deploying 5G technology worldwide. See Nonviolent Campaign 
Strategy.

But we can also undermine this destruction, for example, by refusing to buy the products provided by the elite’s corporations (with the complicity of governments) that fight wars (to enrich weapons corporations) to steal fossil fuels (to enrich energy, aircraft and vehicle-manufacturing corporations) or those corporations that make profits by destroying habitats or producing poisoned food, for example. We can do this by systematically reducing and altering our consumption pattern and becoming more locally self-reliant as outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ or, even more simply, by committing to The Earth Pledge (below).

In a nutshell, for example, if we do not travel by car or aircraft, NATO governments will have much less incentive to invade and occupy resource-rich countries to steal their resources and corporations will gain zero profit from destroying wildlife habitat as they endlessly seek to extract the resources necessary to manufacture and fuel these commodities thus saving vast numbers of animals (and many other life forms besides) and easing pressure on the biosphere generally.

You can also consider joining those working to end violence in all contexts by signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

1. I will listen deeply to children(see explanation above)
2. I will not travel by plane
3. I will not travel by car
4. I will not eat meat and fish
5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
7. I will not buy rainforest timber
8. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
9. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
10. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
11. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
12. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
13. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

Perhaps the key point to be learned from the evidence cited above is that just as we have triggered a series of self-reinforcing feedback loops that ‘lock in’ an ongoing deterioration of Earth’s climate which we are now virtually powerless to halt (if we were even trying to do so), we have also precipitated a biodiversity crisis that is self-reinforcing because the loss of each and every species has an impact on those species that are dependent on it, precipitating chains of events that make further extinctions inevitable. This is one of the ‘negative synergies’, for example, contributing to the Amazon rainforest’s rapid approach to the tipping point at which it will collapse. See ‘Amazon Tipping Point’.

Hence, we are approaching the final act of a tragedy that had its origins in the Cognitive Revolution some 70,000 years ago and which we have not been able to contain in any way. The earlier acts of this tragedy were the countless species of plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects and reptiles that Homo sapiens has driven to extinction.

Now, in the final act, we will drive to extinction 200 species today. 200 species tomorrow. 200 species the day after….

Until, one day very soon now, unless you and those you know are willing to commit yourselves wholly to the effort to avert this outcome, the human assault on life on Earth will reach its inevitable conclusion: the extinction of Homo sapiens.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

This Could Prevent 3 Million Cases of Degenerative Disease

Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola-November 22, 2019

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

• Research published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation suggests 3 million fewer people in the U.S. would develop degenerative diseases if they improved hydration throughout life
• Compared to mice with optimal hydration, the water restricted mice had a shortened lifespan and metabolic changes that led to increased food intake and energy expenditure
• A strong association was found between serum sodium concentration, a measure of hydration, in middle age and markers of coagulation and inflammation and the development of age-dependent degenerative diseases
• Humans with less-than-optimal hydration status had increased inflammation and other factors associated with degenerative diseases, including cognitive impairment, dementia, heart failure and chronic lung disease
• High blood pressure and diabetes were also associated with hydration status
• Both children and adults often fail to drink enough water, and it’s estimated that 20% to 30% of older adults are dehydrated

Providing your body with optimal hydration in the form of pure water is one of the simplest steps you can take to improve your health. It’s such a powerful tool that research published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation suggests 3 million fewer people in the U.S. would develop degenerative diseases if they improved hydration throughout life.1

It makes sense, since your body is made up mostly of water. At birth, body weight is 75% water, dropping to 55% in the elderly.2 Keeping an optimal balance between water intake and output is essential for survival, which is why if you become dehydrated, your body will activate a number of hormonal and neuroregulatory mechanisms to save your life.

Among them, you’ll begin to feel thirsty, reminding you to drink some water, while your kidneys hold onto water, so your urine output decreases.3

Researchers looked into the effects of long term subclinical hypohydration, or chronically losing more water than you take in, in mice and humans, finding evidence that even subtle changes in hydration levels led to “profound” effects on long-term health, and stating, “[W]e provide evidence from mouse and human studies that maintaining optimal hydration throughout a person’s lifetime provides protection from the development of age-dependent chronic disorders.”4

Restricted Water Intake Shortens Lifespan in Mice

For the first part of the study, mice had their water mildly restricted for a lifetime. While they easily adapted to the slightly lower water intake and showed no signs of distress, further testing revealed a state of chronic mild dehydration. Compared to mice with optimal hydration, the water restricted mice had a shortened lifespan and metabolic changes that led to increased food intake and energy expenditure.

During the first 12 to 14 months of life, the study also found that the water restricted mice had increased low-grade inflammation and coagulation, which could accelerate aging and act as indicators of age-related degenerative disease. By 14 months, the water restricted mice had faster declines in motor coordination.5 Further, the researchers noted:6

“We demonstrate that restricting the amount of drinking water shortens mouse lifespan with no major warning signs up to 14 months of life, followed by sharp deterioration.

Mechanistically, water restriction yields stable metabolism remodeling toward metabolic water production with greater food intake and energy expenditure, an elevation of markers of inflammation and coagulation, accelerated decline of neuromuscular coordination, renal glomerular injury, and the development of cardiac fibrosis.”

Not Enough Water Leads to Accelerated Aging and Degeneration

In the second part of the study, researchers analyzed data from 15,792 adults, using serum sodium concentration as a measure of hydration status and lifelong hydration. Participants whose serum sodium concentration was close to the upper end of normal had increased levels of risk factors for age-related morbidity and mortality.

Further, a strong association was found between serum sodium concentration in middle age and markers of coagulation and inflammation and the development of age-dependent degenerative diseases.

Like mice, humans with less-than-optimal hydration status had increased inflammation and other factors associated with degenerative diseases, including cognitive impairment, dementia, heart failure and chronic lung disease. High blood pressure and diabetes were also associated with hydration status.7 According to the study:8

“By analyzing disease prevalence, we showed that a serum sodium level below 142 mmol/L greatly reduced the risk for the development of many degenerative diseases including heart failure (HF), dementia, and chronic lung disease (CLD).

These findings indicated that serum sodium levels in the upper half of the ‘normal range’ should be treated as a clinical risk factor that prompts recommendation for modification of water and salt intake.”

Proper Hydration Could Spare Millions From Disease

Maintaining optimal hydration status during your life could lead to significant health benefits, but it’s difficult to define a set hydration level for everyone, since fluid needs vary according to activity levels, nutrition, health status and environment. However, the featured study suggested “a clear threshold of 141.5 mmol/L for serum sodium concentration,” above which the risk of age-related diseases goes way up.9

If everyone in the U.S. with sodium concentrations above this level were to decrease them by drinking more water, reaching the 140 to 141.5 mmol/L range, 3 million cases of related diseases could be spared. The researchers noted impressive benefits from improved hydration on a population-wide scale. Specifically:10

“These calculations predicted that the prevalence of dementia in people aged 70–85 years would decrease by 48%, HF by 24%, CLD by 20%, CKD by 10%, diabetes mellitus by 11%, high BP by 7%, and stroke by 3.1%. To estimate how many people would not develop these diseases as a result of such a preventive strategy, we extrapolated the results … to the whole population of the United States …

The calculations predicted that there would be about 342,000 fewer people with dementia, 353,000 fewer with HF, 597,000 fewer with CLD, 422,000 fewer with CKD, 442,000 fewer with diabetes mellitus, 822,000 fewer with high BP, and 59,000 fewer with stroke, in total decreasing the number of people aged 70–85 years with these diseases by 3,000,000 in the United States alone.”

Mental and Physical Health Risks of Dehydration

Your body needs water for blood circulation, metabolism, regulation of body temperature and waste removal. If you’re dehydrated, even mildly, your mood and cognitive function may suffer. In a study of 25 women, those who suffered from 1.36% dehydration experienced worsened mood, irritability, headaches and lower concentration and perceived tasks to be more difficult.11

A 2013 study in which 20 healthy women in their mid-20s were deprived of all beverages for 24 hours also showed the mental repercussions of too little water. While no clinical abnormalities were observed in the biological parameters (urine, blood and saliva), thirst and heart rate did increase and urine output was drastically reduced (and became darker).

As for mood effects, the authors noted, "The significant effects of [fluid deprivation] on mood included decreased alertness and increased sleepiness, fatigue and confusion.”12 This may be one reason why, in another study, dehydrated drivers were found to make twice the amount of errors during a two-hour drive compared to hydrated drivers.13

The No. 1 risk factor for kidney stones is also not drinking enough water, and there is research showing that high fluid intake is linked to a lower risk of certain types of cancer, such as bladder and colorectal.14

Even the risk of fatal coronary heart disease has been linked to water intake, with women who drank five or more glasses of water per day reducing their risk by 41% compared to women who drank less. Men, meanwhile, reduced their risk by 54%.15,16 Other symptoms of mild and severe dehydration include:17

Mild to Moderate Dehydration	Severe Dehydration
Dry, sticky mouth	Extreme thirst
Sleepiness or tiredness	Irritability and confusion
Dry skin	Sunken eyes
Headache	Dry skin that doesn't bounce back when you pinch it
Lightheadedness	Low blood pressure
Dizziness	Rapid heartbeat
Few or no tears when crying	Rapid breathing
Minimal urine	No tears when crying
Dry, cool skin	Fever
Muscle cramps	Little or no urination, and any urine color that is darker than usual
	In serious cases, delirium or unconsciousness

Are You Drinking Enough Water?

Both children and adults often fail to drink enough water,18 and it’s estimated that 20% to 30% of older adults are dehydrated,19 often due to water deprivation and the fact that people naturally have a lower volume of water in their body as they get older.20

How much water is optimal varies depending on your age, health status, activity levels and more, but you might have heard the advice to drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day (known as the 8x8 rule).

This is not necessarily the best amount for everyone, as there is no one-size-fits-all water quota for humans. In fact, in a review published in the American Journal of Physiology, Heinz Valtin of Dartmouth Medical School in Lebanon, New Hampshire, could find no scientific basis for the 8x8 rule, which is more aptly described as a myth.21

Toby Mündel, senior lecturer at the School of Sport and Exercise, Massey University, New Zealand,22 recommends another method for monitoring your hydration levels: keeping track of your body weight. First thing in the morning when you get out of bed, weigh yourself for three mornings in a row, then calculate the average of your weights.

This is your normal baseline weight, and you should stay within 1% of that if you’re adequately hydrated (assuming other factors haven’t influenced your weight). Simply using thirst as a guide to how much water you need to drink is another way to help ensure your individual needs are met on a daily basis.

Optimal Hydration May Protect Your Health

You can also use the color of your urine as a guide. If it is a deep, dark yellow then you are likely not drinking enough water. A pale straw color or light yellow is typically indicative of adequate hydration. If your urine is scant or if you haven't urinated in many hours, that too is an indication that you're not drinking enough.

What is clear is that your body depends on a precise fluid balance to stay optimally healthy, and even slight changes in this balance can affect your physical and mental health. Even if you are only skimping on water slightly, it could be leading to accelerated aging or increasing the risk of degenerative disease, if the featured study is confirmed.

That doesn’t mean you need to stress over the proper amounts of water or force yourself to drink large quantities. Just be conscious of replenishing your body with pure water regularly, and definitely take a large drink if you’re feeling thirsty. Keep in mind that during strenuous physical activity, in hot climates and on long airplane flights,23 you may need more water than normal, so plan to keep your (reusable) water bottle handy.

Further, if you can’t remember the last time you’ve drank a glass of water, especially if you ordinarily reach for soda, energy drinks or fruit juice instead, make a point to switch your fluid of choice to pure water, and enjoy the health gains that follow.

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