RACHEL CARSON

RACHEL CARSON

SPACESHIP EARTH

"We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent upon its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave to the ancient enemies of man, half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all."

ADLAI STEVENSON, 1964

Sunday, December 10, 2017

THOMAS MERTON'S LETTER TO RACHEL CARSON (1963)

RACHEL CARSON and THOMAS MERTON
 KINGDOM OF THE CLOUDS
 SUNSET ARCH
 BENEATH THE CANOPY OF GRANDMOTHER POHUTAKAWA
REFLECTIONS OF TRANQUILITY

'Technology, Wisdom, and the Difficult Art of Civilizational Self-Awareness: Thomas Merton’s Beautiful Letter of Appreciation to Rachel Carson for Catalyzing the Environmental Movement' by Maria Popova


“Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent,” marine biologist and poet laureate of science Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) wrote to her soul mate, Dorothy, before the release of Silent Spring — Carson’s epoch-making 1962 book that catalyzed the modern environmental movement.

Her courageous and sobering exposé of the assault on nature by the heedless use of chemicals — a dark subject to which she brought her exquisitely luminous prose — disquieted the nation into a major controversy. Despite the propagandist backlash and merciless attacks that government and industry hurled at the author, the popular press sided overwhelmingly with Carson. Her book, soon a record-breaking bestseller, went on to inspire the first-ever Earth Day and led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
The avalanche of editorial enthusiasm for the rare miracle of Silent Spring was dwarfed by the thousands of letters Carson received from private citizens commending her on the moral courage of speaking inconvenient truth to power. 

In the winter of 1963, shortly before her untimely death, this apostle of science received a letter from an improbable admirer — the theologian and Trappist monk Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915–December 10, 1968), who had long admired Carson’s devotion to science as an expression of our spiritual bond with nature. His missive, found in the altogether magnificent Witness to Freedom: The Letters of Thomas Merton in Times of Crisis (public library), is a beautiful testament to how interconnected the deepest truths of existence are, how they transcend all boundaries of discipline and credo to bring us into naked contact with reality itself — and with our responsibility to the web of life.

Reaching out with “every expression of personal esteem” and commending Carson on the “fine, exact, and persuasive book,” Merton writes:
"[Silent Spring] is perhaps much more timely even than you or I realize. Though you are treating of just one aspect, and a rather detailed aspect, of our technological civilization, you are, perhaps without altogether realizing, contributing a most valuable and essential piece of evidence for the diagnosis of the ills of our civilization…. Your book makes it clear to me that there is a consistent pattern running through everything that we do, through every aspect of our culture, our thought, our economy, our whole way of life."
Such civilizational self-awareness is indeed Carson’s invaluable gift to posterity — that is, to us — though a gift of which we are yet to make conscientious use. With great foresight, both tragic and hopeful, Merton adds:
"It is now the most vitally important thing for all of us, however we may be concerned with our society, to try to arrive at a clear, cogent statement of our ills, so that we may begin to correct them. Otherwise, our efforts will be directed to purely superficial symptoms only, and perhaps not even at things related directly to the illness. On the contrary, it seems that our remedies are instinctively those which aggravate the sickness: the remedies are expressions of the sickness itself. 
I would almost dare to say that the sickness is perhaps a very real and very dreadful hatred of life as such, of course subconscious, buried under our pitiful and superficial optimism about ourselves and our affluent society. But I think that the very thought processes of materialistic affluence (and here the same things are found in all the different economic systems that seek affluence for its own sake) are ultimately self-defeating. They contain so many built-in frustrations that they inevitably lead us to despair in the midst of 'plenty' and 'happiness' and the awful fruit of this despair is indiscriminate, irresponsible destructiveness, hatred of life, carried on in the name of life itself. In order to 'survive' we instinctively destroy that on which our survival depends."
Reflecting on his collaboration with the great Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki and humanistic philosopher Erich Fromm on the poetic possibilities behind the notion of original sin, Merton adds:
"Technics and wisdom are not by any means opposed. On the contrary, the duty of our age, the 'vocation' of modern man is to unite them in a supreme humility which will result in a totally self-forgetful creativity and service."
Complement this portion of Witness to Freedom with Rachel Carson on writing and the loneliness of creative work, her brave, prescient letter against the government’s assault on science and nature, and the 1914 protest poem that emboldened her to write Silent Spring, then revisit other radiant beams of appreciation between great minds: Isaac Asimov’s fan mail to young Carl Sagan, Charles Dickens’s letter of admiration to George Eliot, teenage James Joyce’s expression of gratitude to Ibsen, Baudelaire’s “cry of gratitude” to Wagner, and Darwin’s touching letter of appreciation to his best friend and greatest supporter. 

Sunday, December 3, 2017

DR. CLAUDIA VON WERLHOF: A TRUE 'RACHEL CARSON OF TODAY' - ON THE BRINK RADIO INTERVIEW on DR. ROSALIE BERTELL, GEO-PHYSICAL WARFARE, 'THINKING LIKE A PLANET' & THE DEMENTIA OF PATRIARCHY

AUSTRIAN ECO-TECHNETRONIC VISIONARY
DR. CLAUDIA VON WERLHOF

“What is planned now are climate and weather wars, wars in which earthquakes and volcanoes, floods and droughts, hurricanes and monsoon rains will play a role.“ Dr. Rosalie Bertell, 2013

"The officially announced reasons for so called climate change that have been identified as being caused by CO2 emissions, proves to be a falsehood deliberately introduced into the world in order to obscure the reasons for the large number of changes occurring in nature." Dr. Claudia von Werlhof, 2015

Dr. Claudia von Werlhof is very much a 'Rachel Carson of Today' who is carrying the torch of her friend and mentor the legendary Dr. Rosalie Bertell, Catholic nun, nuclear awareness educator and geo-physical war-fare activist, as well as advancing her critique of military-industrial civilization as the product of several millennia of progressive patriarchal dementia.

CLAUDIA'S WEB-SITE
'PLANETARY MOVEMENT FOR MOTHER EARTH'
http://www.pbme-online.org/

MOTHER EARTH UNDER ATTACK FROM 'MAN, THE WISE'

LOREN EISELEY ON THE 'HSMV, OR Homo Sapiens Macro Virus'
http://synthaissance.blogspot.co.nz/2008/12/world-eaters-loren-eiseley.html

This On The Brink radio interview was recorded a couple years ago but the messages are more relevant now than ever, as the artifacts, consequences and after-maths of the essentially invisible geo-physical warfare scenario envelope us in a 'climate of increasing ignorance' in which the bogey of 'climate change' is embraced by legions of brain-washed devotees and real global threats to life like ionizing radiation and microwaves are marginalized or absent from the public radar.

Please read von Werlhof's excellent and brand new article "Earth as Weapon, Geo-Engineering as War" published just this week on Prof. Michel Chossudovsky's GlobalResearch web-site, which I consider to be one of the most informative and highly credible sources of meaningful information on the web.

I am honoured that Claudia included a reference to my comprehensive 'geo-terrorism' article from 2011. Thanks Claudia :)

LISTEN AND/OR DOWN-LOAME ACHIVE LINK FOR THIS SHOW
https://soundcloud.com/jeff-kataklysmos/on-the-brink-radio-104-claudia-von-werlhof-mother-earth-as-targetweaponplanetary-consciousness


DR. CLAUDIA von WERLHOF, "EARTH AS WAPON, GEO-ENGINEERING AS WAR"
https://www.globalresearch.ca/earth-as-weapon-geo-engineering-as-war/5620460


"Since World War II the development and employment of new military technologies in the East and the West have been the basis of destructions in the very 'life systems', as Bertell calls them, of our planet. The book presents us with a unique historical documentation, which reads like a breathtaking thriller. Its scope ranges from chemical, biological, and nuclear technological development and warfare to the post nuclear, especially in the field of electromagnetic 'plasma' weapons, not only threatening to wipe out all life on earth using technologies that are able to produce huge catastrophes, but also threatening to destroy the planet itself. The essence of the thriller Rosalie Bertell has written lies precisely in this escalation. For, it is literally this planetary dimension, which connected to warfare that has been taking action for a long time already, is completely new and unimagined. The beginning of this development started with the use of detrimental substances in industrial agriculture, and in the medical field – such as herbicides, pesticides, detergents, chlorine, and anesthetics – which were used during both world wars. It was Rachel Carson (Carson 1962), the first 'eco-feminist' who protested against this development.



"GEO-TERRORISM AND TECHNETRONIC WARFARE" Jeff Phillips
http://geo-terrorism.blogspot.co.nz/2011/03/geo-terrorism-and-technetronic-warfare.html


 “Engineering” is the back-bone of “civilization”, itself a recent innovation in the time-line of homo sapiens. “Civilized” people are themselves the product of engineering. “Progress” is defined as the unlimited expansion of “civilization” and therefore the results of engineering. The “social engineers” who created “money” have increasingly guided and controlled scientific research and technological development, and manipulate the dynamics of the mega-machine for “elite” agendas. In the early 21st century, due to unhindered concentration of political and economic power unfettered by over-sight and accountability, technological methods now exist which would be considered only as ‘science-fiction’ by the scientifically illiterate masses. Weaponization and exploitation of the natural world is rampant; the entire human population is the de facto “enemy.” Few people notice the narrowing of our perceptual bandwidth, the “engineering of consent” contributing to our contemporary psychic malaise, and the “orchestration of reality” that shapes our world-view. Fewer still can distinguish the blurring boundaries between “reality” and “unreality”, between “natural” and “man-made” disasters in thekoyaanisqatsi-matrix of today. Are we “engineering” own demise through a fusion of technologically-empowered control regimes with our own ‘unconscious jihad against nature’ driven by capitalism as a de facto religion?” Do industrial civilizations contain the seeds of their own destruction? Our onward-march has become a free-fall off of the precipice of sanity here on the only planet with life as we know it.

"MOTHER EARTH AS TARGET AND WEAPON"
http://geo-terrorism.blogspot.co.nz/2012/07/mother-earth-as-target-weapon-update-on.html

DR. ROSALIE BERTELL

THETHE 'PEACEFUL ATOM'

DR. ROSALIE BERTELL, "THE FUTURE OF PLANET EARTH:  ARE WE THE LAST SURVIVING GENERATIONS? RADIO-ACTIVITY AND THE GRADUAL EXTINCTION OF LIFE?"
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-future-of-planet-earth-are-we-the-last-surviving-generations-radioactivity-and-the-gradual-extinction-of-life/5361283

"What I think we are doing is that our generation is making a decision on how many future generations there will be. How much in short depends on how careless we are. So we already shortened future generations because whenever you introduce genetic defect then this line will eventually die out. But some will go two generations, some will go seven generations.
When you are talking about constant low radiation exposure, what you are doing is introducing mistakes into the gene-pool. And those mistakes will eventually turn up by killing that line, that cell line, that species line. The amount of damage determines whether this happens in two generations or in seven generations or 10 generations. So what we are doing by introducing more mistakes into the DNA or the Gene pool is we are shortening the number of generations that will be viable on the planet.
We have shortened the number of generations that will follow us. We have shortened that already. So we reduced the viability of living systems on this planet, whether it can recover or not. We don’t have any outside source to get new DNA. So have the DNA we have, whoever will live on this planet in the future is present right now in the DNA. So if we damage it we don’t have another place to get it.
There will be no living thing on earth in the future that is not present now in a seed, in a sperm and the ovum of all living plants and animals. So it is all here now. It is not going to come from Mars or somewhere. Living things come from living things. So we carry this very precious seed for the future. And when you damage it you do two things. You produce a less viable harmonized organism with the environment; at the same time we are leaving the toxic and radioactive waste around. So you are going to have a more hazardous environment and a less capable organism. That is a death syndrome for the species, not only for the individual. It is going to be harder to live. And the body will be less able to take stress and you are increasing the stress at the same time."
THE 'ULTIMATE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE'
 SUFFERING FROM MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION

"WE ARE NOT ALONE...YET: HOW WE ARE WAGING WAR ON A TRUE 'EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE" Jeff Phillips, 2012
http://tutunui-wananga.blogspot.co.nz/2012/08/we-are-not-aloneyet-how-we-are-waging.html

INTERVIEW WITH DR. ROSALIE BERTELL
http://www.pbme-online.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Bewegung_9_Info-Brief_eng.pdf

"...I think for practical purposes the military has abandoned nuclear bombs. I think they are unusable, and they keep them as a threat and they also keep them to keep a very large part of the population busy trying to write books, and why they shouldn’t have them and how you could manage.. - You know, zero nuclear weapons and all this sort of things. And so it keeps a lot of people busy that are not looking at the other things that they are really doing. But this isn’t unusual because if you look at World War One where they used gas - they never used that again in a war. It went into the pesticides, herbicides and defoliants) of the Vietnam war, and so if you look at the technology of a war it changes by the next war so you really shouldn’t be back here fighting the one that they used the last time, you should be trying to figure out what they are going to use in the next one. And I believe there will be weather wars."

RACHEL CARSON

"Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp. What is the message signaled by the hordes of diatoms, flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea?"


"The great tides at the close of the Middle Ages, with their accompanying snow and ice, furious winds, and inundating floods, are more than five centuries behind us. The era of weakest tidal movements, with a climate as benign as that of the early Middle Ages, is about four centuries ahead. We have therefore begun to move strongly into a period of warmer, milder weather. There will be fluctuations, as earth and sun and moon move through space and the tidal power waxes and wanes. But the long trend is toward a warmer earth; the pendulum is swinging."


"The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth's vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.

During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials."

DDT

"The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature. Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural creation of man's tampering with the atom. The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the minerals washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the sea; they are the synthetic creations of man's inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature."


"For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future. Shaped through long aeons of evolution, oru genes not only make us what we are, but hold in their minute beings the future – be it one of promise or threat. Yet genetic deterioration through man-made agents is the menace of our time, ‘the last and greatest danger to our civilization."


AUSTRIAN ECOLOGICAL VISIONARY 
FRIEDRICH HUNDERTWASSER

“It is madness to be part of a merciless competition, running amok straight into a fatal illusion, into the deadlock of economic growth. Our technical achievement must match our creative responsibility. We are far behind, unfortunately. We cannot think as fast as we use more and more dangerous tools. Genetic engineering violates the laws of nature in complete ignorance of the function of beauty in all manifestation of creation. This short-sighted contempt of the beauty and the inter-woven variety of creation triggers the suicide of humanity. Because the so-called unnecessary beauty is essential for the survival of this earth. Little to nothing is done to counteract the visual pollution which is the most dangerous of all pollutions because it kills the soul. As we are now reaching the limits of growth, only decentralization, reflection and slowing down in harmony with nature can save us. If you reach an abyss, only a step back can save you.

Friedrich Hundertwasser, 1999

Friday, November 24, 2017

HONOURING RACHEL CARSON: HER MESSAGE, LEGACY & SPIRIT - AN ON THE BRINK RADIO SPECIAL PRESENTATION #224


RACHEL CARSON

"Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp. What is the message signaled by the hordes of diatoms, flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea?"

RACHEL CARSON'S LESSONS 50 YEARS AFTER SILENT SPRING

This broadcast of On the Brink Radio is dedicated to Rachel Carson, one of my absolute greatest heroes of humanity. Her legendary contributions and immense legacy speak for themselves, which is why most of this show is my reading of excerpts from her writings. Please join me to explore the meaning and messages from one of the loveliest spirits ever to incarnate in human form, whose essence speaks more loudly and is more highly relevant now than at any time since they were written.

LISTEN AND/OR DOWN-LOAD ANYTIME ARCHIVE LINK
https://soundcloud.com/user-315121551/on-the-brink-radio-188-rachel-carson



THE EDGE OF THE SEA (1955)
http://rachels-carson-of-today.blogspot.com.au/2009/11/edge-of-sea-excerpts.html

PREFACE


“When we go down to the low-tide line, we enter a world that is as old as the Earth itself – the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflict and eternal change. For us as living creatures it has special meaning as an area in or near which some entity that could be distinguished as life first drifted in shallow waters – reproducing, evolving, yielding that endless varied stream of living things that has surged through time and space to occupy the Earth.”

INTRODUCTION

“To understand the shore, it is not enough to catalog its life. Understanding comes only when, standing on a beach, we can sense the long rhythms of earth and sea that sculptured its land-forms and produced the rock and sand of which it is composed; when we can sense with the eye and ear of the mind the surge of life beating always at its shores – blindly, inexorably pressing for a foothold. True understanding demands intuitive comprehension of the whole…”

THE MARGINAL WORLD

“The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. All through the long history of Earth it has been an area of unrest where waves have broken heavily against the land, where the tides have pressed forward over the continents, receded, and then returned… The shore has a dual nature, changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea…

Only the most hardy and adaptable can survive in a region so mutable, yet the area between the tide lines is crowded with plants and animals. In this difficult world of the shore, life displays its enormous toughness and vitality by occupying almost every conceivable niche.

The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water. Yet it is a world that keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and of the relentless drive of life. Each time that I enter it, I gain some new awareness of its beauty and its deeper meanings, sensing that intricate fabric of life by which each creature is linked with another, and each with its surroundings…

Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp. What is the message signaled by the hordes of diatoms, flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea? What truth is expressed by the legions of barnacles, whitening the rocks with their habitations, each small creature within finding the necessities of its existence in the sweep of the surf? And what is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is a sea lace, existing for some reason inscrutable to us – a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore? The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of life itself.”



"The great tides at the close of the Middle Ages, with their accompanying snow and ice, furious winds, and inundating floods, are more than five centuries behind us. The era of weakest tidal movements, with a climate as benign as that of the early Middle Ages, is about four centuries ahead. We have therefore begun to move strongly into a period of warmer, milder weather. There will be fluctuations, as earth and sun and moon move through space and the tidal power waxes and wanes. But the long trend is toward a warmer earth; the pendulum is swinging."

RACHEL CARSON ON 'CLIMATE CHANGE'
http://rachels-carson-of-today.blogspot.com.au/2015/04/rachel-carson-on-climate-change-solar.html

http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/seacarson.pdf

"...day by day and season by season, the ocean dominates the world’s climate. Can it also be an agent in bringing about the long period swings of climatic change that we know have occurred throughout the long history of the earth the alternating periods of heat and cold, of drought and flood?

There is a fascinating theory that it can. This theory links events in the deep, hidden places of the ocean with the cyclic changes of climate and their effects on human history. It was developed by the distinguished Swedish oceanographer, Otto Pettersson, whose almost century-long life closed in 1941- In many papers; Pettersson presented the different facets of his theory as he pieced it together, bit by bit. Many of his fellow scientists were impressed, others doubted. In those days few men could conceive of the dynamics of water movements in the deep sea. Now the theory is being re-examined in the light of modern oceanography and meteorology, and only recently C. E. P. Brooks said: ‘It seems that there is good support for Pettersson’s theory as well as for that of solar activity, and that the actual variations of climate since about 3000 B.C. may have been to a large extent the result of these two agents.’



SILENT SPRING, Rachel Carson, 1962 (excerpts)
http://rachels-carson-of-today.blogspot.com.au/2009/11/silent-spring-rachel-carson-1962.html


THE OBLIGATION TO ENDURE (chapter 3) 

"The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth's vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.

During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life.Strontium 90, released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to the earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there, and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death. Similarly, chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long in the soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death. Or they pass mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on those who drink from once pure wells. As Albert Schweitzer has said, "Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation."

'THE PEACEFUL ATOM'
DichloroDiphenylTrichloroethane

It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth—eons of time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment and balance with its surroundings. The environment, rigorously shaping and directing the life it supported, contained elements that were hostile as well as supporting. Certain rocks gave out dangerous radiation, even within the light of the sun, from which all life draws its energy, there were short-wave radiations with power to injure. Given time—time not in years but in millennia—life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time. 

The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature. Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural creation of man's tampering with the atom. The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the minerals washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the sea; they are the synthetic creations of man's inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature. 

To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature's; it would require not merely the years of a man's life but the life of generations. And even this, were it by some miracle possible, would be futile, for the new chemicals come from our laboratories in an endless stream; almost five hundred annually find their way into actual use in the United States alone. The figure is staggering and its implications are not easily grasped—500 new chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the limits of biologic experience. 

Among them are many that are used in man's war against nature. Since the mid-1940's over 200 basic chemicals have been created for use in killing insects, weeds, rodents, and other organisms described in the modern vernacular as 'pests'; and they are sold under several thousand different brand names. 

These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes—nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the 'good' and the 'bad,' to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in the soil—all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called 'insecticides,' but 'biocides.' " 


THROUGH A NARROW WINDOW (chapter thirteen) 

"For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future. Shaped through long aeons of evolution, oru genes not only make us what we are, but hold in their minute beings the future – be it one of promise or threat. Yet genetic deterioration through man-made agents is the menace of our time, ‘the last and greatest danger to our civilization.’
 

Again, the parallel between chemicals and radiation is exact and inescapable.
 

The living cell assaulted by radiation suffers a variety of injuries: its ability to divide normally may be destroyed, it may suffer changes in chromosomal structure, or the genes, carriers of hereditary material, may undergo those sudden changes known as mutations, which cause them to produce new characteristics in succeeding generations. If especially susceptible the cell may be killed outright, or finally, after the passage of time measured in years, it may become malignant.
 

All these consequences of radiation have been duplicated in laboratory studies by a large group of chemicals known as radio-mimetic or mutation-imitating. Many chemicals used in pesticides – herbicides as well as insecticides – belong to this group of substances
 that have the ability to damage the chromosomes, interfere with normal cell division, or cause mutations. These injuries ot the genetic material are of a kind that may lead to disease in the individual exposed or they may make their effects felt in future generations. 

Only a few decades ago, no one knew these effects of either radiation or chemicals. In those days the atom had not been split and few of the chemicals that were to duplicate radiation has as yet been conceived in the test tubes of chemists. Then in 1927, a professor of zoology in a Texas university,
Dr. H. J. Muller, found that by exposing an organism to x-radiation, he could produce mutations in succeeding generations. With Muller’s discovery a vast new field of scientific and medical knowledge was opened up. Muller later received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his achievement, and in a world that soon gained familiarity with the grey rains of fall-out, even the non-scientist now knows the potential results of radiation. 

Although far less noticed, a companion discovery was made by Charlotte Auerbach and William Robson at the University of Edinburgh in the early 1940’s. Working with mustard gas, they found that this chemical produced 
permanent chromosome abnormalities that cannot be distinguished from those induced by radiation. Tested on the fruit fly, the same organism that Muller had used in his original work with X-rays, mustard gas also produced mutations. Thus the first chemical mutagen was discovered. 

Mustard gas as a mutagen has now been joined by a long list of other chemicals known to alter genetic material in plants and animals…
 

Dr. Peter Alexander, an outstanding British authority, has said that the radio-mimetic chemicals ‘may well represent a greater danger’ than radiation. Dr. Muller, with the perspective gained by decades of distinguished work in genetics, warns that various chemicals (including groups represented by pesticides)
…can raise the mutation frequency as much as radiation…As yet far too little known of the extent to which our genes, under modern conditions of exposure s to unusual chemicals, are being subjected to such mutagenic influences." 



ONE IN EVERY FOUR (chapter fourteen)
 

"The battle of living things against cancer began so long ago that its origin is lost in time. But it must have begun, in a natural environment, in which whatever life inhabited the earth, was subjected, for good or ill, to influences that had their origin in sun and storm and the ancient nature of the earth. Some of the elements of this environment created hazards to which life had to adjust or perish. The ultraviolet radiation in sunlight could cause malignancy. So could radiations from certain rocks, or arsenic washed out of soil or rocks to contaminate food or water supplies.
 

The environment contained these hostile elements even before there was life; yet life arose, and over the millions of years it came to exist in infinite numbers and endless variety…These natural cancer-causing agents are still a factor in producing malignancy; however, they are few in number and they belong to that ancient array of forces to which life has been accustomed, from the beginning.
 

With the advent of man the situation began to change, for man, alone of all forms of life, can create cancer-producing substances, which in medical terminology are called carcinogens. A few man-made carcinogens have been part of the environment for centuries. An example is soot, containing aromatic hydrocarbons. With the dawn of the industrial era, the world became a place of continuous, ever-accelerating change. Instead of the natural environments there was rapidly substituted an artificial one composed of new chemical and physical agents, many of them possessing powerful capacities for inducing biological change. Against these carcinogens which his own activities had created man had no protection, for even as his biological heritage had evolved slowly, so it adapts slowly to new conditions. As a result these powerful substances could easily penetrate the inadequate defenses of the body.
 

The history of cancer is long, but our recognition of the agents that produce it has been slow to mature…
 

One of the most impressive theories of the origin of cancer cells was developed by a German biochemist, Prof. Otto Warburg of the Max Planck Institute of Cell Physiology. Warburg has devoted a lifetime of study to the complex processes of oxidation within the cell. Out of this broad background of understanding came a fascinating and lucid explanation of the way a normal cell can become malignant.
 




Warburg believes that either radiation or a chemical carcinogen acts by destroying the respiration of normal cells, thus depriving them of energy. This action may result form minute doses often repeated. The effect, once achieved, is irreversible. The cells not killed outright by the impact of such a respiratory poison struggle to compensate for the loss of energy. They can no longer carry on that extraordinary and efficient cycle in which vast amounts of ATP are produced, bgut are thrown back on a primitive and far less efficient method, that of fermentation. The struggle to survive by fermentation continues for a long period of time. It continues through ensuing cell divisions, so that all the descendant cells have this abnormal method of respiration…At last they reach the point where fermentation is able to produce as much energy as respiration. At this point cancer cells may be said to have been created from normal body cells…
 

The Warburg theory also explains why repeated small doses of a carcinogen are more dangerous under some circumstances than a single large dose. The latter may kill the cells outright, whereas the small doses allow some to survive, though in a damaged condition. These survivors may then develop into cancer cells. This is why there is no ‘safe’ dose of a carcinogen.
 

In Warburg’s theory we also find explanation of an otherwise incomprehensible fact – that one and the same agent can be useful in treating cancer and can also cause it. This, as everyone knows, is true of radiation, which kills cancer cells but may also cause cancer. It is also true of many of the chemicals now used against cancer. Why? Both types of agents damage respiration. Cancer cells already have a defective respiration, so with additional damage they die. The normal cells, suffering respiratory damage for the first time, are not killed but are set on the path that may eventually lead to malignancy.
 

Measured by the standards established by Warburg, most pesticides meet the criterion of the perfect carcinogen too well for comfort
…they may be creating sleeping cancer cells, cells in which an irreversible malignancy will slumber long and undetected – its cause long forgotten and even unsuspected – it flares into the open as recognizable cancer."




RACHEL CARSON 'AMERICAN EXPERIENCE' DOCO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4pv2woA7EU

"SOLAR CELL" Jeff Phillips and Liesbet Verstraeten (2008)

"LIVE SIMPLY SO THAT OTHERS MAY SIMPLY LIVE...MAY ALL BEINGS BE PEACEFUL, MAY ALL BEINGS BE HAPPY"

Sunday, October 22, 2017

WHALE & DOLPHIN UPDATE: REAL GLOBAL THREATS, PART 2 (Whale-Watching, Deep Seabed Mining, Under-sea Warfare & the 'Electrified Ocean') [HoMoMIMIC]








REAL GLOBAL THREATS PART 2: 
WHALE-WATCHING, UNDERSEA WARFARE AND THE 'ELECTRIFIED OCEAN' 

This is part 2 of an update to my analysis of the real global threats to cetaceans, marine life in general, and the health of Mother Ocean. I am introducing my new HoMoMIMIC approach.

HoMoMIMIC: What is it?

An acronym for Holistic Modeling of Marine Impacts from Military-Industrial Civilization, HoMoMIMIC is a full-spectrum awareness approach to mapping and understanding the real anthropogenic effects and impact on life in the sea and on Mother Ocean herself. Public awareness, 'environmental' organizations and science in general tend almost exclusively to focus only on tiny subsets of reality, for a variety of reasons...reality at any level is far too complex and unwieldy, time-consuming and inconvenient to deal with; 'solvable' problems are more attractive to 'do-gooder'-spinning' non-profits than apparently insoluble ones...which most of the real ones are; and very few people, and no organizations, have the mental capacity and willingness to confront the enormity and direness of this field of inquiry and investigation.

A truly holistic approach to the real global threats to cetaceans...or any other major area of, for example, ecological  or psychological research...is a MAJOR under-taking with no limits or boundaries other than those imposed by the human mind and will = not most people's cup of tea.

WHALE AND DOLPHIN UPDATE: THE REAL GLOBAL THREATS (PART 1)

ON THE BRINK RADIO #216:  CETACEAN UPDATE: REAL GLOBAL THREATS, introducing HoMoMIMIC


CETACEAN HOLOCAUST:  THE REAL GLOBAL THREATS 

from "We Are Not Alone...Yet: How We Are Waging War on a True 'Extra-terrestrial Intelligence" by Jeff Phillips (2012)

http://tutunui-wananga.blogspot.co.nz/2012/08/we-are-not-aloneyet-how-we-are-waging.html