Far from the centres of world commerce on Midway Atoll, an Albatros, dead from ingesting too much plastic decays on the beach. It is a common sight on the remote island ” Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals, the same fate awaits them both; as one dies , so dies the other. All have the same breath. ” Ecclesiastes 3:19
Photo credit: Chris Jordan
Depleting oil fields – Kern River , California
” I don’t understand why when we destroy something created by man we call it vandalism, but when we destroy something created by nature we call it progress. ” Ed Begley, Jr
Photo credit: Mark Gamba/Corbis
Mexico City
” If our species had started with just two people at the time of the earliest agricultural practices some 10,000 years ago. and increased by one percent per year, today humanity would be a solid ball of flesh many thousand light years in diameter, and expanding with a radial velocity that, neglecting relativity, would be many times faster than the speed of light” Gabor Zovanyi
Photo credit: Pablo Lopez Luz
China
” Globalisation, which attempts to amalgamate every local, regional and national economy into a single world system, requires homogenising locally adapted forms of agriculture, replacing them with an industrial system – centrally manages, pesticide-intensive, one crop production for export designed to deliver a narrow range of transportable foods to the world market” Helena Norberg-Hodge
Photo credit: Google earth
Industrial livestock production in Brazil
” Despite the industry’s spin, concentrated animal feeding operations are not the only way to raise livestock and poultry. Thousands of farmers and ranchers integrate crop production, pastures or forages with livestock and poultry to balance nutrients within their operations and minimise off-farm pollution through conservation practices and land management. Yet these sustainable producers who must compete with factory farms for market share, receive comparatively little or no public funding for their sound management practices” Martha Noble
Photo credit: Peter Beltra
Gulf of Mexico oil fire from 2010
” We must realise that not only does every area have a limited carrying capacity, but also that this carrying capacity is shrinking and the demand growing .Until this, understanding becomes an intrinsic part of our thinking and wields a powerful influence on our formation of national and international policies we are scarcely likely to see in what direction our destiny lies” William Vogt
Photo credit: Daniel Beltra
” In the developing world, the problem of population is seen less as a matter of human numbers than of western over-consumption. Yet within the development community, the only solution to the problems of the developing world is to export the same unsustainable economic model fueling the overconsumption of the west” Kavita Ramdas
Photo credit: Brett Cole
Greenhouses in Almeria, Spain
” We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand or expire agro-industrial empire a crackpot machine that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore devouring world resources at an exponential rate ” Edward Abbey
Photo credit: Yann Arthus-Bertrand
Cattle graze among the burning Amazon jungle in Brazil
” Throughout history human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonise-destroy-move on ” Garrett Hardin
Photo credit: Daniel Beltra
Surfer Dede Surinaya riding a wave in a remote but garbege-covered bay on Java, Indonesia, the world’s most populated island ” Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends on have become global garbage cans” Jacques-Yves Cousteau
Photo credit: Zak Noyle
Source: Imgur
