I don't rant very often - I'm the guy who posts my sermons, after all. But I'm gonna just let rip.
Quit being distracted! The bombings in London are small potatoes compared to the thousands of preventible deaths every single day in the developing world. The media - and this site - could have worked to hold the feet of the leaders of the G8 to the fire on Africa and climate change. Instead, we've allowed them to get off the hook, saying that they'll deal with this in 2010, without a whimper.
Just disgusting. Nothing on the front page about this. How fucking insular are we?
Facts and figures below the fold - read if you dare.
In eastern Africa, there are over 1000 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. In Kenya, one in thirteen women will die in childbirth; in Rwanda, one in six. Compare this to Canada, where the rate is one in 8700. Indeed, ninety-nine percent of maternal deaths occur in developing countries.
Or, consider just one preventible communicable disease - HIV/AIDS. There have been over twenty million deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, mostly in the Third World. Over three million per year are dying, and 13.2 million children have been orphaned. And this is a disease which is entirely preventable.
When it comes to global health, it is sobering to note that life expectancy is less than 50 years of age in twenty-five nations. Indeed, at the age of 38, I'd be beating the odds in places like Botswana and Mozambique.
Or what about access to food and water? One-third of the children in the developing world are malnourished. Annually, the equivalent of twenty million tons of grain is lost to soil degradation, mostly in Africa. Twenty percent of the people in the world do not have access to clean drinking water. In parts of Africa, the figure is as high as fifty percent. Annually, 12,000,000 people die as a result of inadequate or unsanitary water consumption. And, while more than half of the world's freshwater sources are being used, this could increase to 70% over the next thirty years.
Finally, there is the environment, which is so intimately linked to health and hunger. In 1900, the world's population stood at 1.6 billion. It is now six billion, and has been rising by one billion approximately every twelve years since the mid-1950s.
One fifth of the world's population consumes sixty percent of the planet's energy. 256 billion tons of carbon have been released in the past two and half centuries - over half of that in just the past twenty-five years. Fossil fuel emissions have quadrupled since 1950. In the past two centuries, carbon dioxide concentration has increased to levels not exceeded in perhaps the past twenty million years. The planet's surface temperature is expected to increase this century by an average of six degrees Celsius. Sea levels are expected to rise by almost one metre. As a result of this global warming, snow cover has decreased by 10%, and Arctic ice thickness has been reduced by nearly one-half.
The ozone hole in the Antarctic has grown to 30,000,000 square kilometres. There have been reductions in ozone cover of up to one-third in parts of Canada.
Almost half of the planet's original forest cover has been destroyed, most of it in the past thirty years. Every minute, the equivalent of about thirty-three football fields is lost. One quarter of mammal, reptile, and amphibian species; one-third of fish species; and one eighth of bird species are threatened with extinction - close to 5500 species in total, mainly due to habitat loss.
Terrorism - huh!!!! Get a load of the real terrorism, cuz it's happening every single day. Quit being distracted!!!!!