Burning the rainforest isn’t an ordinary crime. It’s a crime against humanity and a crime against the ecosystems of the world — and all for a fistful of dollars.
Years ago when I first learned they were burning rainforest I cried, I made paintings about it; people with whom I’m acquainted tried to buy some of the rainforest to protect it.
Years later we learn that the environment is more dangerously threatened than ever yet the fires rage on.
The movement to save our endangered planet has inspired people all over the world, and some activists now envision this barbarous attack on the forest as a crime against humanity.
From the New York Times,
Since August, as vast stretches of the Amazon rainforest were being reduced to ashes and outrage and calls for action intensified, a group of lawyers and activists who have been advancing a radicalidea have seen a silver lining in the unfolding tragedy: One day, a few years from now, they imagined Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, being hauled to The Hague to stand trial for ecocide, a term broadly understood to mean the willful and widespread destruction of the environment, and one that, they hope, will eventually be on par with other crimes against humanity.
There is no international crime today that can be used to neatly hold world leaders or corporate chief executives criminally responsible in peacetime for ecological catastrophes that result in the type of mass displacements and population wipeouts more commonly associated with war crimes. But environmentalists say the world should treat ecocide as a crime against humanity — like genocide — now that the imminent and long-term threats posed by a warming planet are coming into sharper focus.
In Mr. Bolsonaro they have come to see something of an ideal villain tailor-made for a legal test case.
www.nytimes.com/…
The concept of “ecocide” was first articulated in 1972 by Sweden’s Prime Minister Olaf Palme. Palme, according to the NYT article, hosted the first major UN summit on the environment in ‘72 — in 1972, people — and here we are in 2019 with the forest burning. My god.
This is truly unconscionable.
We have made progress here and there. In 1972 in Denver I couldn’t see across the street let alone to Pike’s Peak. Lake Erie was basically dead. Rivers caught fire.
But on the overall issue of ecocide what has happened?
We have been strangling the oceans with plastic. We have a monster in the White House who is setting us back decades, who enthusiastically destroys clean air and water standards and threatens to drill in pristine forests and in the Arctic wildlife refuge and who wants to resurrect coal even as fires burn under the state of Pennsylvania; fires that burn underground for decades. He sues the auto industry because they are trying to lower emissions.
I would like to see Brazil’s Bolsonaro at the Hague but I’d like him to have company. Lots and lots of company, including Koch, Trump, Bannon, the Mercers, Tillerson, the ridiculous Brexiteers; and Vladimir Putin.
We knew decades ago that the fossil fuel industry was a threat to the world. It has been a geopolitical threat, a direct cause of war, since the 19th century at least.
I hope we have time to save this beautiful lonely little world with its glorious plants and animals, so intricately and delicately interwoven, so totally irreplaceable.