The petition for local governments to test local food for glyphosate is slowly gaining ground. As more people are joining up, I am getting more feedback on potential decision makers to enter into the petition. One such recent entry has been the minister of agriculture for the Canadian province of Saskatchewan.
I was impressed by the promptness of the response, but not by its content. Passing the buck and sidestepping the demand to test local food for glyphosate and not depend on another branch of Government which is obviously not testing anything for the people – seems to be the preferred method used by politicians to tap dance around the burning necessity for letting the people know the quantity of glyphosate in their food, and to deal with it in anyway they like.
These answers are not considered to be depressing. It gives us knowledge of what to expect from the fence sitting governments. It also bolsters the notion that the petition is needed more as a tool to develop grassroots movement, where people pressure begins to trump corporate lobby, and clean food trumps toxic one.
Anyhow, I wished to preserve this piece of information, not only because it deserves to be in the general body of information attached to the petition, but also as a blog and perhaps a near future book of essays, on my experience as a food security activist, and the journey of trying to push back from the toxic avalanche we are all subjected to.
Many articles of the mainstream are covering Donal Trump’s to-do list.
I have read through quite a few of them, and decided to write this blog covering something that I wished the mainstream would address. There are mainly two items of importance here – one is what all these “Trump Special” articles avoids mentioning, and another, the the most visible and incessantly discussed one – illegal immigrantion.
1) What the mainstream media seems to consciously and deliberately sidesteps and keeps out of public view – is US Warmongering. There is in my view no other topic, other than climate change and the sixth mass extinction now ongoing, that is more important and relevant, not just to the American society, its politics, culture, and its economics, but to the whole planet. Trump has mentioned, whether he means it or not – a wish to de-escalae and step back from constant militarism and doctrine of a perpetual war. I find it mind-boggling, that Washington Post or other mainstream media do not even mention it.
The issue of climate change, the age of anthropocene and the impending catastrophe to the living planet is not part of this blog, but shall cover it in just three sentences. a) Trump says he does not believe in climate change. b) The democrats, the liberal media and the rest of the “aware” population makes a show of being aware of it (they are not), but are as much in denial of truth as Trump, and are prepared to do absolutely nothing about it except provide lip service, tokenism and hypocrisy. The planet is going to cook itself whether the deniers of the pretenders have sway.
2) The second, and often the most visible one, is about deporting illegal immigrants that have a criminal record. There has been a hysteria raised against Trump as a racist, xenophobic and what not, because he said he would erect a wall to stop further illegal immigration, and would deport all that are undocumented and same time committed certain crimes in the US.
Just think of it – almost every nation that I know, has some sort of a system that promotes restricted legal immigration (some do not even allow that), and prevents within its means any illegal immigration. I am yet to see any major country that promotes a fully open border for outsiders to come and take jobs from locals, and also free to commit crime without threat of deportation.
Many many countries erect walls to keep unwanted people from coming in. The most classic case of inhuman activity might be in occupied Palestine, where Israel erected walls so locals themselves cannot freely move in their own country, so that the stolen land can be freely used by Israeli citizens without the bother of having to see disgruntled Palestinians.
India has erected walls and tall fences and guard posts along border with Pakistan and Bangladesh, to keep illegal immigrants and potential terrorists from entering. Many countries do that.
But this article essentially tries to claim that the US economy depends on illegal immigration. This is really startling.
This may be a tacit acceptance of the corporate culture that prefers to employ undocumented workers who will accept lower wages and demand less support than local citizens would. Therefore, products and services can be cheaper with illegal immigrants even if that results in unemployment for the locals.
Not just that. If the nation stopped this practice, and the jobs went back to locals, the cost is likely to rise and perhaps make things even more difficult to run.
There is one related issue here that is kept hidden. This illegal employment and suppression of wages should not be necessary for the “richest” country on the planet. So where is the money going, if locals cannot even be hired with respectable wages?
The money is going to feed this perpetual war machine, taking half of all US tax money.
That is why the war mongering cannot be mentioned, and that is why the US economy has gotten used to hiring illegal immigrants at dirt poor wages at the expense of local and legal citizens.
I may not be a Nobel prize winning economist – but in absence of any mainstream covering these issues – I do what best I can, thinking this trough and trying to make sense.
And Trump had hinted at these, though not with bullet points. I do not fault Trump for it, because nobody else – not even Bernie Sanders seem to have the necessary number of family jewels to spell this out.
Ten years ago, I used to subscribe to, or read often, daily and weekly news outlets such as Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, Washington Post, The New Yorker, Time magazine, Newsweek, New York Times etc, as well as many other sources, and web sites, blogs and the social media.
I slowly stopped subscribing and reading the mainstream, as began to realize that these vaunted news sources were not real news, but market manipulations and perceptions of some of the writers, all of whom were stuck to a few universally accepted ideas that I was beginning to doubt – that constant rise of GDP measured in an unsustainable yardstick was the first and only measure of development, that constant upward development was a must, that only news was financial news, war news, sports news, or trivia.
In the last few months, I got thoroughly disappointed by almost all major news sources as I could clearly and plainly see that it was engaging in a concentrated attack on Donal Trump for minor or trivial issues, inflating them and turning him into a demon, while giving the nasty deeds of Obama-Hillary a total pass. I found it increasingly difficult to take any of these news sources seriously.
I came to realize another factor – the Democratic party of Hillary was far to the right of Donald Trump, and in fact, Hillary was likely more a fascist than Trump himself. And yet, even Jill Stein was identifying Trump as the fascist instead of Hillary! The world was gradually turning upside down and black was being painted white and vice versa.
I used to be an instinctive Democratic party supporter, somehow influenced in my school days by the charm of John & Jacqueline Kennedy. But I began to understand, now, that my fixation with the “liberal” wing was kind of wrong because the liberals were pretend liberals, and dishonest to boot.
I came to understand in the last fifteen years, the real dangers of removing the glass-steigel act and implementing NAFTA, the de-linking of currency from gold, and the ability of western economies to create vast amounts of money out of thin air, without any backing, and that all money thus created were in essence counterfeit money, legalized by state governments.
I came to understand the real goals behind the agendas of IMF and the world bank, and the reason WTO failed and the new drive for the west to create regional trade agreement so that difficult components and nations could be bypassed, thus writing down TPP and many other such localized trade deals, all of them designed to make money for multinational corporations and hurt local labour forces and remove the rights of nations to resist these efforts.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
I also came to understand that the war mongering of the US government was more a democratic party gift than a republican one. I remembered that the only ex-president that warned the American people of the threat posed by an all consuming military industrial complex was Dwight Eisenhower, a republican and not a democrat. I also came to understand how the one living Democratic ex-president that to me appeared to be morally straight and willing to call a spade a spade – Jimmy Carter, would denounce Israel’s apartheid policies in his book with regard to the treatment of Palestinians and US governments incestuous relationship with Israel. He identify USA not as a democracy any more, but as an oligarch with unlimited bribery. And now, the democratic party was trying to create as much distance as it could, with Jimmy Carter.
I found it hard to identify reliable news sources anywhere. Aljazeera english remained an interesting alternative, but it was way too far leaned towards Soudi and Qatar Governments and their obnoxious record in human rights and anti-shia blood letting and joining hands with Israel and the US to create a phoney civil war in Syria so the war machine can continue rolling.
I even found google news to be heavily biassed in favour of Hillary and I had to seriously fine tune google news asking it to specifically restrict sources like New York Times, Washington Post and the like.
I now find it amusing that The New York Times is asking me, here, to get back on board and start subscribing again….
Hahhhhh …. not a chance, buddy, you are not a news outlet. You and most others here are all paddlers. What I see is the death of mainstream news, replaced by rubble and a few paddlers, and a promising grassroots movement of a mass of citizen journalists mushrooming up through the social media.
___
Thought I’d move all these from ranting on Facebook, into a blog.
India ranks 97th, near the bottom, of the 118 nation index of hunger. Indians do far worse than neighbours Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Iran, Iraq, China, or even Ghana, Senegal, Malawi, Congo, Uganda etc.
But we can take pride that India is less hungry than Pakistan, and a very short list of unfortunate countries like Haiti, Zambia and Central African Republic etc.
When thinking this item through, I can identify as the root cause of this to be no other than the voting and upwardly mobile middle class of India – people like you and me.
In the age of virtual world and instant messaging and electronic media and TV channels by the dozens, I see no mention anywhere of the fact that half of India’s population cannot get a healthy meal a day, that nearly half of all children of India are malnourished, or that India, despite all the hoopla about progress, is among the poorest countries when it comes to basic minimum food requirement and access to health care.
For the educated people of India, the other half dose not exist. It is not in their TV, nor in their incessant messaging on whatsapp, Facebook, pinterest, instagram or whatever other platform a huge number of folks are spending millions of collective hours every day to catch up with each other. The endless plethora of soap opera on Indian channels never cover the story of the hungry and dying India.
We are ignorant despite education, and arrogant without any justification.
So, on this so called auspicious occasion when everyone with a laptop, a smart phone or a tablet is wishing everyone else seasons greetings and শুভ বিজয়া, I would write the last paragraph of Tagore’s poem “হে মোর দুর্ভাগা দেশ ”
—–
দেখিতে পাও না তুমি মৃত্যুদূত দাঁড়ায়েছে দ্বারে ,
অভিশাপ আঁকি দিল তোমার জাতির অহংকারে ।
সবারে না যদি ডাক ‘ ,
এখনো সরিয়া থাক ‘ ,
আপনারে বেঁধে রাখ ‘ চৌদিকে জড়ায়ে অভিমান —
মৃত্যুমাঝে হবে তবে চিতাভস্মে সবার সমান ।
Happy holidays – ignorant and arrogant Indian middle class.
This is a movement in need and in waiting.
This was not possible a year or two ago, cause we did not have enough labs, but is possible today.Here is something this movement is NOT about:
Its NOT about debating if glyphosate is safe or unsafe to be in our food.
Its NOT about what the “science” might say about it.
Its NOT about passing new laws by federal or provincial Government about labelling.
Its NOT about if our farmers can or cannot do without Glyphosate.
So, what is it about ?
Its about people’s right to know if Glyphosate in in their food and how much.
Its about recognizing that labelling GMO does to give the full picture since non GMO crops are now desiccated with glyphosate and people can be more poisoned by some of these non-GMO crops than even GMO crops.
Its not about labelling – its about measuring and disclosing the contamination.
In order to kick start the movement, which should have a corresponding petition on change.org, it would be necessary to influence people that this is supposed to be a people’s movement that needs more than arm-chair activists.
Signing petition and sharing them on Facebook is not the goal. The goal is to appeal, for each of us, to our respective municipalities, to set aside a budget and start testing food, both locally grown and/or sold in stores, for glyphosate content, using Canadian labs, and to make the results public.
Irrespective of the debate, the science and the politics around Glyphosate/ RoundUP, the people will decide if they like some of the food brands that have more glyphosate or they like other brands that have less. Its about people’s right to choose without ever having to explain to any politician or scientists why they prefer to have one kind and not the other. That is their right.
Municipalities do not have the authority to get involved in scientific debate. Their job is to fulfil people’s wish. People wish to know which brands of their bread or other food items have how much glyphosate – and the MUnicipality’s job is to provide the answer. Thats it.
In order to kick start this effort, we wish to have a short 10-15 minute video where committed grassroots activists are ready to discuss this under a camera. Once it is done, we shall make more from others around our country that have found novel ways to approach their municipalities. How some of our compatriots manage to get our largely do-nothing municipalities to get off their hind quarter and start testing food.
Anyhow, for the first brainstorming, idea-exchanging video, I am inviting like minded and committed food security activists from nearby to respond, so we can arrange a date, time and venue, to get this off the ground.
Mind – we are not looking for arm-chair activists, but real people committed to approach municipalities and stubborn enough to be at it.
Interested parties please contact. My email – tony.mitra@gmail.com. my phone 604-649 7535.
Thank you
We have so far gone around the country, speaking about the dangers of chemical dependent agriculture, forestry and weed control in public places. We have had meetings with politicians, and joined marches against Monsanto. We have written to ministers and contacted labs about testing of Glyphosate in food.
And yet, Canada, its land, air, water, soil, flora, fauna and people are all getting systematically poisoned through introduction of batches of killer chemicals that are deemed safe by our Government, but whose safety documents are kept hidden from public scrutiny, which essentially makes the approval of these chemicals potentially illegal.
We have a petition asking Ottawa to release all hitherto hidden safety documents on Glyphosate to the people of Canada, with over 22,000 supporters. The details of this petition has been handed over to Minister Carla Qualtrough on April 27, to be hand delivered to the Minister of Health in Ottawa.
Apart from that, we have also asked Minister Qualtrough to try and arrange some public funds to start public testing local food and water in her own constituency, Delta, BC, for Glyphosate.
Jane Philpott
We have so far not achieved any measurable success. There is no response from the minister of health about disclosure of the safety documents. There is a separate access to information act application from me to the Ministry of Health asking for the same safety documents, which too are languishing, as the ministry drags its feet over the issue.
I might send her another letter, but there is no compulsion for the minister to respond to it and from the pace of follow ups, it may well be that Canadians shall not hear any feedback from the ministry, let alone disclosure of the safety documents, or a review of the approval of Glyphosate for Canadian agriculture.
As a result, I have started preparing another petition, this time not on change.org but on the Government web site using Government’s own official template. It is addressed also to the Minister of Health (Health Canada), and asks for public disclosure of safety documents for Glyphosate.
However, there are some steps that need to be taken before such a petition can be submitted. One of them is to have a sponsor, among the current Members of Parliament. I would have asked Mr. Alex Atamanenko to be the sponsor, if he was still an MP. Unfortunately he retired from politics last year. Next, I thought of asking MP Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada. However, I have written to her in the past and never received any reply, and feel unsure of her willingness to help in this cause. I should ask my own MP first, honourable minister Carla Qualtrough, and I have done so in an email. However, I do not wish to feel her pressured in an awkward situation with her colleagues in the Government, so I do not know what her response would be.
As a result, I am kind of in the hunt, for a suitable MP that might take up this cause for Canadian people.
The draft petition
I invite readers to suggest a suitable MP. More importantly, if they personally know a good MP that could be interested to sponsor it, I encourage them to check with the MP first and let me know.
I have not done such an official petition before, so do not know if the system allows more than one sponsor, but believe it might. So, if more than one MP is willing to support this cause, I shall be very keen to contact them. I am thinking of approaching some of the other party members such as NDP and CP. Any help would be appreciated.
There is one more issue at hand – which is to try and push the movement for grassroots activism for people to get their local municipalities to set aside funds and start testing local foods and water for Glyphosate and to make the results public. I shall come to that hopefully in the next blog.
My blog itself had been hacked, taken down, and access denied. But all that has thankfully been solved after many days of off-and-on struggle. Allt things finally became OK yesterday, June 7th, in the evening. Hence today I have my first update again.
To a few scientist friends
+++++++++++++++++++
Dear friends,
I trouble you again in search of some truths or information from three reports that Health Canada (ministry of health, Canada) has published of studies on various harmful manmade environmental chemicals and how much of each has been found in humans. The studies started in 2007 for the first report, and ended with the publication of the third report in 2015.
Two of these three reports are available from Health Canada web site, and one is available by personal request made to Health Canada. I have all three of them and have been going over them repeatedly, to find if the Government considers Glyphosate to be a harmful environmental chemical (as a herbicide) and if Canadians have been tested for its presence in their body fluids.
I have found mention of other substances such as 2,4-D, 2,4,5-T, Atrazine, Dicamba, and many many other pesticides and herbicides, as well as metals such as Uranium, Lead and Arsenic. But I failed to find a single mention of Glyphosate or RoundUp.
There are mentions of organophosphates, but I am unsure if it includes Glyphosate and how much of it has been found in humans.
Ultimately, I decided to pass the three reports, the first (2007-2009), the second (2009-2011) and the third (2012-2013, published 2015) to you for some help in finding if Glyphosate is at all represented in Health Canada’s ten year study on environmental chemicals and human exposure to them.
I would very much appreciate if any of you can advise me if these three definitive reports by Health Canada on Canadian citizen’s exposure to environmental chemicals does or does not include Glyphosate.
I wished to also pass some of these to Nancy Swanson, but since she changed her email, I am out of touch with her. Perhaps one of you will pass this to her, in case she might offer to help.
The reason I ask this is – I intend to do something about it in case Health Canada has neglected to test Glyphosate in Canadians. I do not know yet what I would do, but that would depend on if and how much these reports have or have not covered Glyphosate.
By the way, the first and the second report covers the generic topic of “pesticide” and the third, the most recent one, does not.
I apologize again for troubling you all.
I do not know where else I could go.
Apr 2, 2016 — To: The Mayor Ms Luis Jackson,
Delta Corporation
April 1st, 2016 (not a prank)
Subject : Test Glyphosate in Delta’s water, soil and food.
Mayor Jackson,
Good day.
I write to you, yet again, regarding potential dangers linked with exposure to Glyphosate for residents of Delta, and what the municipality could do.
Delta has fertile lowlands and farms. Glyphosate is the most used chemical in Canadian food production. Besides, since our town is actually in the delta of the Fraser river, and comprises of tidal mudflats and lowlands, most runoff from farms, as well as from the upland forests go through our midst. Both these regions use glyphosate, in agriculture by farmers and aerially in hilly forests by logging corporations.
In spite of being the most used toxin in Canada and the planet for a generation, safety test records and data of this weed killer are kept hidden from Canadians, possibly illegally, to protect commercial interest of the promoter.
Legal precedence is already being set in some countries, where supreme court has overruled federal Governments about keeping safety documents hidden from the people. Apparently, commercial confidentiality agreements and intellectual property rights cannot trump public safety. So, if a corporation cannot divulge safety records of its product to the public, the product itself may not be approved by the Government either.
I have two different channels of communication ongoing with the Ottawa Government about this. One of them is an online petition through change.org for the Government to disclose all safety test documents, based on which it is supposed to have approved Glyphosate for use in Canadian agriculture and environment. Link : https://www.change.org/p/minister-of-health-canada-justin-trudeau-health-canada-prove-glyphosate-is-safe
The petition has generated a large number of follow up updates with input from scientists around the world and other notables, and has over 22,000 supporters, 98% from Canada. The volume of information on the petition has crossed a thousand pages, and MP Carla Qualtrough has agreed to see me so I can present all that to her and request her to hand deliver it to the minister in Health Canada, to either place the safety documents in public domain, or inform Canadians why they do not have a right to these safety documents, or perhaps arrange a debate on the floor of our parliament about if Canadian citizens have, or do not have, a right to see first hand, all safety test data on this herbicide that has been entering our food chain in ever increasing dose for a generation.
Meanwhile for the town of Delta, and perhaps many other towns where concerned Canadians have supported this petition, there are areas where our municipal governments could actively engage, at the bottom tier of our political system, to address this issue in the following manner:
1)
Start having our food, water, and soil, tested for concentration of Glyphosate. This could not even be done just a few years ago since labs did not offer such services, especially about testing our food for Glyphosate. But this can easily be done today. Increasing number of accredited labs are offering a high quality service. And some of the labs are nearby, such as in Burnaby. This testing is legal, and reasonably easy to do for a Municipal corporation. The reason so many labs are now scrambling to offer this service, is because our Government has started a massive effort to test our food, but behind closed doors, more or less from the time World Health Organization decided to reclassify Glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen.
2)
Start placing these test results online and available for any research student, scholar, scientist or concerned citizen to read, download and follow up on, should they so desire.
3)
Inform all parties, such as farmers, or loggers or nature park managers, that samples will be drawn from their areas after application of the herbicide, or when its concentration is noted to be highest, and also in off season, to get an idea of seasonal variation, and to start tracking the toxic load in regions within Delta.
4)
This data should be available to local hospitals and doctors, to check if reports of skin rashes, gastro-intestinal or auto-immune disorders, especially among children, seem to be following the rise and fall of prevalence of Glyphosate, in which case any research organization would now have some data to start working on, to investigate if some ailments might be linked to Glyphosate exposure. The municipality need not get involved in this research, but can easily and legally offer accumulated data. Why ? Because that aught to be our first line of defence against environment induced ill-health and it aught to be the duty of our town council to ensure the residents are protected from the most used and most controversial agriculture and environmental toxin in Canada.
5)
This data should also be available to wildlife research scientists that are investigating sudden population decline, unexpected mass death, skewring of sex ration in newborns, or disappearance of creatures starting from bees, birds, amphibians, herbivores and even whales.
6)
Invite volunteers to check if recommended limits of dose of glyphosate is followed by those authorized to use it, like farmers and loggers, or exceeded by anybody. I have reason to believe that application of Glyphosate is not supervised by anybody, even if the packaging warns that it is (or may be) relatively safe only if applied according to instructions and within the maximum recommended dosage limits. I believe a municipality has the right to allow citizen volunteers a right to check if such limits are maintained, even if the council cannot afford employing people to do so for them.
This is not the first time I have written to the Delta Corporation on Glyphosate and what I wished the town council to consider engaging in. This is unlikely to be my last. I wish the municipality would take this seriously.
This letter will likely be included in the petition asking Ottawa to place all safety data on Glyphosate in the public domain. The reason this letter, and others written to other politicians, will be included is that battling indiscriminate use of an untested (it remains untested as long as the tests are hidden from people) and potentially hazardous chemical will need to be challenged on multiple fronts and the people would need to engage in it directly, and apply pressure on the politicians. It is my hope that this update, which reaches all 22,000 supporters of the petition across Canada and beyond, will influence a few hundred others to also write to their respective town councils, MPs and MLAs. Even if a single politician or town ends up being the first in initiating a program to track our food, soil, water and environment for glyphosate concentration, that will amount to a kicking in of the door, a pathfinder, and a worthy achievement that others might follow.
Should Delta Corporation have an interest in discussing this further, I shall be more than happy to attend.
Looking forward to a positive response,
With good wishes
Tony Mitra, 10891 Cherry Lane, Delta, BC, V4E 3L7, Canada
Somewhere down the track where we evolved from apes to hominids with a brain that could handle complex sentences and a language, the basic tools for being a speaker were hardwired in.
I am told that this change essentially distinguishes anatomically modern humans from archaic forms, and that this development is rather recent, perhaps under a hundred thousand years old.
And then, much more recently, a mere five to ten thousand years back, folks started scratching around on the sand, of the walls of their caves, to describe something or other – passing phase of the moon, or the tide, or animals that were around them. And as humans discovered pastoralism and agriculture, experienced perhaps the first population spurt, and started building their own homes and not depend on caves, they managed to figure out how to use those scratchings for record keeping and identification. Written text, or script, was on the way.
And thus, although we have not yet evolved to the point where ability to speak in a language or read and write is hardwired into our genetic construct, and we have come some distance towards it. A normal child will automatically pick up a language without being expressly tutored, simply by being around others speaking a specific tongue. Writing or reading, unfortunately is something that a human needs to specifically learn. It does not come automatically by hanging around people, or books, or a pencil.
Nonetheless, it is perhaps a fair assumption that a lot of people around the world can read some and write some, in some language. A few fortunate ones are comfortable in two languages, and some in more than two.
And that brings me all the way to my own situation. I had mentioned I knew three languages – Bengali, which is my mother tongue, Hindi, which is India’s national language, and English, which is the language I used in my profession as well as one of the two working languages of my adopted nation – Canada.
The problem these three languages each uses its own distinct script. This means, even if I am conversant in speaking in those languages, I would need to be familiar with three distinct scripts, or letters, to be able to read or write in any of them. This can be better understood if one considers differences between European languages such as English, Spanish and French. They use the same script, with perhaps a small number of special characters in each. If one is proficient in any language, one could more or less read the other, even if he fumbled with the exact meaning of grammar of it. Not so in my case. The three languages use three different scripts. Hindi and Bengali are both derived from a common mother language – Sanskrit and fall in the same language family, and yet their script separated from each other early on, and now one needs to be totally familiar with the different scripts to be able to read a sentence.
Anyhow, I write very little in Hindi, although I did part of my early schooling in that language and my first tentative writings and childhood poems were composed in Hindi.
My later years in a different part of India in a different school system let me lose familiarity with writing Hindi, while picking up two others – Bengali and English. Today, I can read Hindi and converse in it, but would struggle to write in it.
I type the fastest in english, but that is primarily because the computer keypad is designed for english, and adapting that keypad to other scripts has its hassles, and sometimes I have to press multiple keys to generate a single letter in Bengali, which automatically slows things down and increases chances of mistake. While I can usually type in English without looking at my fingers, I cannot do that easily for Bengali using the same keyboard.
Anyhow, I have a lot of writings done in English and Bengali. And now the time has come I feel, to start publishing some of them since self publication is reasonably easy.
Some years ago, I tried to write a novel, but it turned out to be more a musing of an opinionated immigrant that observed the world around not superficially at the surface, but using What could amount to be a maverick effort at penetration below the surface and check if what we see at the surface is sustainable, or if the root is getting rotten, or in indeed the surface is shiny but is blocking out other parts of our world intending to insert an element of romance, the guy had a Canadian girl with him as they travelled across western Canada. But it was not really up to him to write a romance, and the continuing novella turn out to be a conversation between the two, mostly covering the land, its geological transformation, and evolutionary track of the living world, including man’s involvement is it.
Nonetheless, the total writings might appear to be somewhat curious and did include musings that I believe deserve to be preserved.
Due to sheer bulk of material, the writings needed to be split into multiple volumes. The first volume, covering 133 pages, was put up today. Its sections went as follows :
Captor description : Early writings
Section 1: A vanishing world
Section 2: Missing the world of his father’s paintings
Section 3: Golden
Section 4: An universe for an anchor
Section 5: Quantum mechanics of mass hysteria
Section 6: Storm warning
Section 7: Wish I could write like them
Section 8: Miguel, the Everglades and Lovelock’s warning
Section 9: Eocene Thermal maximum in a bowl of soup
Section 10: When you are right and wrong at the same time
Section 11: Rice in the Vedas
Section 12: Autobiographic blues
Section 13: At the water’s edge
Section 14: How green was my Facebook
Section 15: Suta at the riviera
Section 16: Coffee with a giant rhynoceros
Section 17: Considering Mabel
Section 18: Overload
Section 19: A sunset, mitochondria, peat bog, and a kiss
Section 20: A few pages on a leap year day
Section 21: The ten thousand year old woman
Section 22: The vanishing Y chromosome
Section 23: Cult of Tagore
Section 24: Old woman sacrifices herself.
Section 25: Hello world
And so, I compiled these twenty five blogs into 25 sections of chapter 1 of the book. The book has only one chapter but 25 sections, and is 133 pages long.
And then I converted it into an iBook (epub) format and uploaded it in Apple store.
Next, I exported it to pdf, reimported that for kindle and uploaded it again at Kindle.
Now, I can go have a coffee and plant some more seeds.
I do not believe the Paris Climate talks will produce any result other than a lot of empty talk and photo shoot. Why do I feel that ? Because the world leaders appear to be allergic to calling a spade a spade, and spend their time on obfuscation that to me looks like deliberate attempt to hide the truth from the people who is responsible for the carbon, or total greenhouse gas emission. And the trick is – total emission by nations, and per capita emission by citizens of nations. If you cannot wrap your head around these two figures, you may fail to get to the bottom of this issue.
Here are a few graphs and sources of what I mean.
The above twin chart was made by me, taking CO2 emission figures from Wikipedia, World Bank, World Resources Institute and COTAP. The left half of the chart is what the major leaders would like to talk about – singling out China as the one polluting the planet. The same figures are also at the right half, but sorted according to per capita emission, or how much each person in these countries are emitting. And here you see a different pattern – the Anglo Saxon world is leading the attack on our environment, leading by far in carbon emission. Since these nations, and in particular USA, gives the impression of being among the best country in the world that others should imitate, they are setting the worst possible example for the rest of the planet. And this is something I would like to hear from Malcolm Turnbull, Barak Obama, or Justin Trudeau, And that is exactly what these leaders will not talk about, and will not accept.
Let us look at some more figures. This one is from Wikipedia
The list is sorted according to total emission of CO2 by nation. China is touted to look like the bad guy, having overtaken USA as the single largest CO2 emitting nation. But the bars at the right, give you the per capita figure. I added the red arrow to single out the greatest polluters on a per capita basis. Again, the Anglo saxons stand out as the worst environmental degraders, along with a few countries with easy access to fossil fuel such as Saudi Arabia, Kazakstan and UAE.
Now let us check a chart of total Green House Gas emission (Carbon Dioxide is not the only GHG) per capita, among the ten largest total emitting nations of the world, by World Resources Institute.
I added the red and blue dotted horizontal line and the ellipses around USA and Canada. Notice that the world average emission is just over six (tons per person per year), along the dotted line. This means, if the playing field was made level right now, and the world decided not to increase carbon emission any further than what is today, every one will be allowed to emit only around 6 tons per year. Of course that is not what the world likes to aim at. They would like to limit total green house gas emission to what it was back in 1990. That total figure, of around 37 or so giga tons per year, when divided by the current population, of say 9 billion people, comes to, around 4 tons per person per year. That line was superimposed by the fat blue dotted line by me.
So now, let us see what this means. First, why do folks want to go back to the 1990 total, or reduce emission even less than the 1990 total? That is because folks have figured out that the cumulative effects of global warming and climate instability has a lag period in relation to the greenhouse gas emission. This means, even if every human dies today and stops producing any more CO2, the warming effect would continue for a while, before it begins to fall off. And we are not planning to all die off. Far from it. So, it was decided that going back to 1990 level would be a start. Even achieving that would ensure the world climate would change for the worse, up to a point, and then stay that way and not get any worse.
That was the basis for the 1990 emission level. So, now we understand the issue, and that the world average annual emission, based on 1990 total emission and current world population, should be around 4 tons.
This effectively means, if we really wish to make the playing field level, and that every human on earth is allowed have the same limit of GHG emission, then Canada, for example, will have to learn to do with a sixth of its current level of emission, or say 17% of its current level. And USA, the so called leader of the free world, will have to learn to live with a fifth of its current emission level. Can USA, or Canada, or Australia, manage to go back to energy consumption of a century ago? Can anybody imagine it? I do not see any of our leaders even talk about “per capita” emission, let alone setting any limit. And I know no poorer or developing country is going to accept any level that is lower pollution level than what the rich nations now enjoy. So, as long as the rich and the powerful are not willing to call a spade a spade, the rest of the world has every right to tell the leaders to go fly a kite, even if the outcome is environmental destruction that makes the earth’s surface less habitable by large air breathing vertebrate animals.
Meanwhile, how it is going to be for China, if the limit of 4 tons was to be implemented today ? Well, China will have to cut its own per capita emission to almost half. China is of course not at all ready to do that. In fact, China’s understandable argument or accusation has been that it is the west that caused the problem through four centuries of “development”, and damned if China is going to be penalized for that. China has every right, and will exert that right, to catch up with the west.
What does that mean, in terms of total emission ? If china is to catch up with the west, meaning primarily the anglo saxons (USA, Canada, Australia), it can easily double its per capita emission. That would add at least another 10 giga tons of carbon annually, and increase the global total by a fourth. In short, if the Anglo Saxons do not agree to decimate their emission level, China promises to increase global emission by 25%, from the current total level of around 40 to around 50 giga tons. What would that mean, in terms of average rise in temperature ? I do not know, and would appreciate anyone clarifying that.
Now, what about India? If we are to believe what some of the leaders are saying, it is USA, China, India, EU that are the power blocks. India is not high on total or per capita emission levels. But India is being taken seriously because it has the second highest population and is slated to overtake China as the most populous country soon. Not just that, but India is also an emerging nation, meaning it is recording a faster growth rate going over 7% annually, and its fuel consumption, deforestation, and contribution towards GHG emission is expected to climb exponentially for the coming decades.
Interestingly, among the top ten total emitters of today, in the chart above, only two nations, Mexico and India, have a per capita emission that is lower than the current average, while India is the only one that is below the average based on 1990 level too.
So, if India was to jump from its current low emission to the 1990 average level, there would not be a significant rise in global emission. But, if an agreement is not reached, and India too decides to go like China, and catch up with the Anglo Saxons, it can in essence increase its per capita emission ten fold, and national total by almost 20 giga tons, or 50% of the world total as of today. How much would that translate into a climate crisis ? How much would China+India catching up would cost the world in environmental greenhouse effect ?
Do we, as Canadians, have the right to demand that we continue to burn up 20 tons per man per year, and that China stays at 8 and India stays at 2? Will India or China agree to such a demand? Will USA agree to go back to the stone age with regard to fossil fuel consumption ?
Is anybody talking about these issues? I do not see truth coming from any of our leaders, not even second tier leaders. Not even small party leaders like Elizabeth May of the Green Party.
If we check the cumulative effect of CO2 emission since the dawn of the industrial age, from Dennis Silverman’s Southern California Energy blog, again USA stands out as a major villain, along with Germany, Russia, China. Eurasia, comprising of a rather vast region, and a slew of nations, still comes up with far less cumulative emission in the past two and a half century.
Greenhouse gases might be one out of more than one weapon of mass destruction we have unleashed on the planet – a chemical onslaught being at least one other. And since no leader is at all willing to call a spade a spade, I do not see how the higher planetary life can survive. Our leaders are calling a spade a Micky Mouse.
Whats the matter with the Anglo Saxons?
In general the more developed a nation is, more it has been polluting the environment with GHG. But out of them all, Australia, Canada and USA stand out as particular bad apples. Why? Is it something to do with their ethnicity, or culture, or work view or language, or geography? Well, Geography can be discounted since Australia, USA and Canada do not share identical climate geographic region. I shall let experts ponder this one out, but at first glance, the Anglo Saxons seem to be the least likely to provide a way out of this environmental dead end, because, as an ethnic group, it appears to be the most polluting in the entire planet. Unfortunately, the same anglo saxons also often assume they are in fact the leaders of the world, along with UK of course. Time for us to have a paradigm shift in our thinking, if we are going to solve this problem and get out alive as a civilization.
In general, the world is screwed, and human development and technology are, when you cut it to the bone, responsible for this crisis.
May be the solution would not come from humans at all, but from the micro organisms. I doubt man’s destructive “developmental” habits will be able to harm much of the micro-biota of the planet though. Those nitrogen fixing, oxygen breathing or exhaling, Methane eating, biochemically inventive micro-organisms might collectively produce a feedback loop, and begin to address the climate crisis, like in James Lovelock’s gaia hypothesis.
Anyhow, I wished to preserve this piece of information, not only because it deserves to be in the general body of information attached to the petition, but also as a blog and perhaps a near future book of essays, on my experience as a food security activist, and the journey of trying to push back from the toxic avalanche we are all subjected to.
Many articles of the mainstream are covering Donal Trump’s to-do list.
That is why the war mongering cannot be mentioned, and that is why the US economy has gotten used to hiring illegal immigrants at dirt poor wages at the expense of local and legal citizens.
I found it hard to identify reliable news sources anywhere. Aljazeera english remained an interesting alternative, but it was way too far leaned towards Soudi and Qatar Governments and their obnoxious record in human rights and anti-shia blood letting and joining hands with Israel and the US to create a phoney civil war in Syria so the war machine can continue rolling.
In spite of being the most used toxin in Canada and the planet for a generation, safety test records and data of this weed killer are kept hidden from Canadians, possibly illegally, to protect commercial interest of the promoter.
Anyhow, I write very little in Hindi, although I did part of my early schooling in that language and my first tentative writings and childhood poems were composed in Hindi.
Nonetheless, the total writings might appear to be somewhat curious and did include musings that I believe deserve to be preserved.
And then I converted it into an iBook (epub) format and uploaded it in Apple store.
