Censored 2014 (53 page)

Newsweek,
however, takes the prize for human arrogance and reckless “solutions.” In the longest and most detailed article located, the
causes of mass extinctions were cavalierly dismissed with “assigning blame is less important than figuring out how to prepare for the inevitable and survive it.” The answer: “What we need to do is actually quite unnatural. . . . we need to adapt the planet to suit humanity.” Calling humans “extremely cunning,” author Annalee Newitz proceeded to lay out various geo-engineering schemes including sun blockage efforts referred to as “solar management.” Ships could spray “aerosols high into the air” or “inject reflective particles into the stratosphere.” Admitting that unintended consequences could be disastrous, Newitz declared,

If these scifi proposals aren't preposterous enough, Newitz seriously suggested that humans must “find ways of escaping [the planet] to build cities on the moon and on other planets.” To investigate the plans for this idea further, she attended a conference where scientists were planning a sixty-two-mile high space elevator.

So, the corporate media reserves little to no space for scientific evidence informing the public about the activities and policies actually causing mass extinctions, policies that might actually be changed by an aroused public. At the same time, there appears to be ample room to tout grandiose technological projects that are imprudent at best and patently dangerous at worst, given that human technologies have wrought the extinction crisis in the first place.

Fragmentation

Many scientific studies focus on the decline or loss of a particular species. These reports, and the accompanying media articles, are important, but they often neglect to explain how the decline of a particular
species is part of the sixth mass extinction. So, one can find items in the US corporate media on the “loss” of bees, a study on the world's oldest giant trees dying, or a report on the plight of the polar bear—as if these events have nothing to do with each other. This fragmentation, as Herbert Schiller pointed out many years ago, is one of the key strategies of manipulation used by the corporate media.
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Distance through Time and Space

Like the quotation about bees at the start of this chapter, extinctions are quiet, difficult-to-observe events. In fact, a species is confirmed as extinct only when it has not been seen for fifty years. This lengthy waiting period, and the tendency of the corporate media to focus on species that live in other countries, distances readers from the actual imminence and proximity of extinctions. For instance, the article “In Haiti, a Trek to Save Rare Animals: As Its Forests Disappear, Other Life Does, Too,” reads more like an adventure story of the hardships endured by an intrepid biologist trying to capture endangered frogs and lizards than a wake-up call about the impact of extinctions on the whole planet.
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Since we do not see animals dying in mass numbers in our daily lives or in our immediate spaces, and thus are not attuned to observing key changes in our natural environments, we do not feel a sense of urgency about this issue.

Distance through Language

Language strongly affects how information is received, and whether emotions are aroused enough to move people to action. The terms “biodiversity” and its “loss” distance a reader from the trauma and realities of extinctions. They do not evoke images of frightened, hungry, exhausted, homeless animals; the violence of clear-cutting of forests; or the deaths of oil-soaked birds. The term “loss” can imply that there are no persons or actions causing these annihilations. Such “cool” language does not really communicate the intensity with which human policies and technologies are killing animals and species; the killings are happening even though the “deciders” may not be there to witness the deaths.

Further, many articles and reports only highlight how the deaths and extinctions will affect human beings. The loss of other beings is completely contextualized as a loss of services and products for humans. They do not educate the public about how all life is intricately intertwined and why all ecosystems and forms of life should be valued in and of themselves.

Missing Information

Of course, censorship is fundamentally characterized by what is omitted. While some articles about the sixth extinction can be located in the corporate media, the most important pieces of information are either ignored or purposefully suppressed, as they may conflict with the business interests of corporate owners. Missing from these corporate press articles, a few of which were picked up by several corporate news outlets, are the human-based root causes of extinctions, and what actions and policies must be immediately undertaken to stop and reverse these root causes if we hope to ameliorate the extinction crisis. There is no discussion of how the pattern of extinctions threatens life everywhere on Earth and disrupts the complex interactions among species that is necessary for the survival and well-being of all species and ecosystems.

SPECIESISM AND HUMAN IGNORANCE

Even though human beings are a recent species on this planet and did not exist during the millions of years that most other forms of life evolved, many human societies have adopted unwarranted beliefs that humans are superior to all other living beings, and that the Earth and other forms of life are here specifically for our use. Some reli-gions have encouraged this disposition, but industrialized societies that extract resources through massive projects, and capitalist societies that emphasize the accumulation of wealth, especially promote this thinking. This lack of regard for the lives and well-being of other animals and plants has provoked the most egregious human abuses of the land, air, water, and other species. The name of this belief and the actions that follow from it is called
speciesism.
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Many people do not understand the extreme seriousness of animal extinctions. People have been taught to think of animals as “other,” peripheral to the lives of humans. Unless they are companions, they can be sold, used for work, or killed so that their body parts can be eaten or turned into other consumer products. At the same time, we often are not educated to understand the significance of each plant or animal to the intricate web of life.

Further, because industrialized humans are “busy” with the projects promoted by our societies and media, we often do not pay attention to nature and thus do not notice the extinctions happening around us. In our ignorance, indifference, or arrogance toward other species, we do not seek to understand how the precipitous extinction of many amphibians, deaths of bees and pollinators, the killing of top predators, drastic loss of bat populations, massive deforestation, extreme declines in bird populations, contamination of ecosystems, and so on, affect other forms of life or even our own human lives. Indeed, as we know at some level, we are animals ourselves—although we are taught to think of ourselves as separate from, and superior to, all other life.

The Human Activities Driving Species Extinctions

There is widespread scientific agreement on the key drivers of extinctions and their human origin: “Habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, climate change, over-exploitation of resources, and above all— the factor that magnifies all the others—human overpopulation.”
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Human overpopulation, as an ecological burden, is exacerbated by the complex web of institutions and social psychological processes that humans have created and rigorously defend. Sociologists have been analyzing the social consequences of these phenomena for many decades, but not in an integrative manner that includes the relevance of speciesism within the fabric of all life and thus within all social and ecological systems.
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Greed, wealth accumulation, and economic systems that foster the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few have exacerbated the cruel and destructive projects that humans have initiated to make money. Many of these projects are identified below as part of a list of
human activities that are harmful to life, and thus species survival. UN Under-Secretary General Achim Steiner of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) identified economics as a key reason that the UN Convention on Biodiversity goal was not met:

Human beings have drastically altered every ecosystem on the planet. Societies and economic systems that emphasize material wealth, overconsumption, and maximization of profits incentivize “taking more than you need and not leaving the rest.” Products are extracted from the Earth, or from plants, animals, and even humans with little to no concern for the consequences of the extraction or production processes. The “precautionary principle,” whereby an activity should not proceed until proven safe for the public and the environment, is rarely followed.
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Instead, corporations are permitted to engage in harmful activities until some weak government “regulatory” agency can demonstrate that the activity is causing harm—typically direct harm to humans only, and occasionally to the environment in general. Federal and state regulatory agencies, led by politically appointed and approved directors, run the gamut from good intentions
with insufficient enforcement capabilities to intentional neglect of duty on behalf of corporations—often the very corporations the regulatory directors once led. Under these circumstances, even piecemeal environmental impact statements, to whatever extent they exist, provide minimal, if any, protection for the environment.

What constitutes “harm” is always a negotiated item within a legal process that favors those with the most legal resources, and most often that is the corporation conducting the harmful activity. Thus, legal definitions of harm to some aspect of the environment, or life in general, are never set at an actual zero point: the complete absence of harm, allowing corporations to seamlessly externalize large portions of their costs—environmental and natural resource protection—to the general public.
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Only in the most egregious cases, after significant harm has been done, is the public able to address the problem in some small way—though legal remedies, when available, seldom repair the damage that has been done to the ecosystem or deter future violations. Negotiated definitions of harm create an artificial zero point that is well above the actual absence of harm. The assumption implied within this process is that the environment and/or life within an ecosystem can tolerate a certain amount of poison, destruction, exploitation, and/or overutilization. But following that assumption is still not enough to satisfy corporate interests within an economic system based on greed. Once an industry-friendly definition of harm is legally established, corporations expend huge portions of their resources to go considerably beyond those legal limits.
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The corporate media do not take responsibility for educating the public about the importance of the precautionary principle. No activity that involves changing the natural state of an ecosystem should be allowed to take place unless the change has been demonstrated to have absolutely no negative consequences for that ecosystem. Indeed, with the sixth mass extinction occurring as a result of past neglect, corporations should now have to go beyond an actual zero-harm requirement, to prove that their actions will have a positive effect on the environment. Some Native American cultures inform us that we can create artificial laws defining what constitutes “harm,” but if human laws are not consistent with natural law they are meaningless.
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The harm of a mass extinction is not captured by the sum of the in
dividual losses: its greatest damage can only be understood in terms of the consequent interaction effects, which scientists are only beginning to understand. The dynamics of “cascade and collapse” mean that mass extinctions are likely to produce many more negative consequences than scientists have yet considered.
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Humans have invaded and dramatically altered almost all the lands and waters on Earth. Throughout the world, humans control or affect nonhuman life in two major ways: corporate projects and overconsumption, and direct killing.

Corporate projects harm all life—including humans—through the processes of extraction, production, dissemination, overconsumption, and disposal.
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Consider the combined effects of the following projects and products causing harm, disease, and/or death in humans, animals, and plants: