Four sayings that lengthen Pinocchio’s nose

By Eduardo Galeano

“We all are guilty of the planet’s ruination”

The world’s health is a mess. “We all are responsible,” claim the voices of universal alarm, and the generalization absolves us. If we all are responsible, then nobody is.

The new technocrats of the environment reproduce like rabbits. Theirs is the world’s highest rate of birth. The experts beget experts and more experts who wrap the topic in the cloth of ambiguity. They manufacture the gray language of exhortations to “make a sacrifice” in the statements issued by governments and the solemn international accords that nobody observes.

This river of words – a flood that threatens to become an ecological catastrophe comparable to the hole in the ozone layer – does not overflow gratuitously. The official language chokes reality to grant impunity to the consumer society, an impunity imposed as a model, in the name of development and in the name of the big companies that benefit from it.

The statistics are revealing, however. The data buried under the words reveal that 20 percent of mankind commits 80 percent of the aggressions against nature, a crime that murderers call suicide. And it is all of mankind that pays the consequences of the degradation of the soil, the intoxication of the air, the poisoning of the water, the maddening of the climate, and the dilapidation of the nonrenewable natural resources.

Mrs. Harlem Bruntland, who heads the Norwegian government, recently stated that if the 7 billion people on this planet consumed the same as the developed countries in the West, “10 planets like ours would be needed to satisfy all their needs.” An impossible experience.

The leaders of the southern countries who promise us access to the First World, a magic passport that will make us all rich and happy, should be sued for fraud – and more. Not only are they pulling the wool over our eyes, they are also committing the crime of apologizing for a crime. Because the way of life they offer as paradise, based on the exploitation of others and in the annihilation of nature, is what is making our bodies sick, poisoning our souls and leaving us without a world in which to live.

“If it’s painted green, it’s green”

The giants of the chemical industry are now doing their advertising in green. The World Bank launders its image, repeating the word “ecology” in every page of its reports and using green ink to print its loan applications. “In the conditions of our loans, there are strict environmental rules,” says the president of the world’s supreme bank. We all are ecologists, until some concrete measure limits the freedom from contamination.

When the Uruguayan Parliament passed a timid law for the protection of the environment, the companies that pour poison into the air and foul the waters quickly removed their newly purchased green masks and shouted their truths in terms that could be summarized thus: “The defenders of nature are advocates of poverty; they are engaged in sabotaging economic development and scaring away foreign investment.”

On the contrary, the World Bank is the principal promoter of wealth, development and foreign investment. Maybe because of its many virtues, the Bank will manage, along with the United Nations, the newly created World Environmental Fund.

This tax on a guilty conscience will have little money, 100 times less than what the ecologists had requested, to finance projects that won’t destroy nature. The intention is irreproachable; the conclusion is inevitable. If those projects require a special fund, the World Bank is admitting, de facto, that all its other projects scarcely benefit the environment.

The Bank is called World, like the Monetary Fund is called International, but these twin brothers live, charge interests, and make decisions in Washington. Whoever pays, rules, and the many technocrats never spit on the plate from which they eat.

Because it is the principal creditor of the so-called Third World, the World Bank rules our captive nations – which, to service their debt, pay their foreign lenders $250,000 per minute – and imposes upon them its economic policy according to the money it grants or promises them.

The deification of the market, which buys and pays increasingly less, permits the provision of magical gewgaws to the big cities in the southern hemispheres, drugged by the religion of consumerism, while the fields exhaust their strength, the waters that feed them run dry, and a dry crust covers the deserts that were once forests.

“Between capital and labor, the ecology is neutral”

Say what you will about Al Capone, but he was a gentleman. Good ole Al always sent flowers to his victims’ wakes. The giant companies in the chemical, oil and auto industries paid for much of the expenses of Eco 92, the international conference in Rio de Janeiro that dealt with the planet’s agony.

Yet that conference, called the Earth Summit, did not condemn the transnational companies that produce pollution and make a living from it. Nor did it utter a word against the unlimited freedom of commerce that makes possible the sale of the poison.

In the big masked ball of the end of the millennium, even the chemical industry dresses in green. Ecological anxiety disturbs the sleep of the world’s largest laboratories, which, to help nature, are inventing new biotechnological cultivations.

But this scientific concern is not directed at finding plants that are more resistant to plagues, using no chemical aid. The laboratories are looking for new plants capable of resisting the pesticides and herbicides that the laboratories themselves produce. Of the 10 largest producers of seeds, seven manufacture pesticides: Sandoz, Ciba-Geigy, Dekalb, Pfeizer, Upjohn, Shell and ICI.

The chemical industry does not have masochistic tendencies. The recovery of the planet (or what’s left of it) implies denouncing the impunity of money and affirming human freedom. The neutral ecology, which rather resembles gardening, becomes an accomplice of the injustice of a world where healthy food, clean water, pure air and silence are not the rights of everyone but the privileges of the few who can afford them.

Chico Mendes, a rubber industry worker, was murdered in late 1988 in Brazil’s Amazonia for saying what he believed – ecologic militancy cannot be divorced from social struggle. Chico believed that the Amazonian forest cannot be saved unless agrarian reform is carried out in Brazil.

Five years after the crime, the Brazilian bishops said that more than 100 rural workers are murdered each year in the struggle for the land. And the bishops calculated that 4 million jobless peasants flock to the cities from the plantations. By adapting the figures from each country, the bishops’ statement paints a picture of all of Latin America.

The big Latin American cities, swollen by the incessant invasion of exiles from the countryside, are an ecological catastrophe, a catastrophe that cannot be understood or changed within the boundaries of the ecology, deaf to the social clamor and blind to the political compromises.

“Nature is beyond our control”

In his 10 Commandments, God forgot to mention nature. Among the orders he sent from Mount Sinai, the Lord might have said: “Thou shalt honor nature, of which thou art part.” But he didn’t think about it. Five centuries ago, when America was seized by the world market, the invading civilization mistook ecology for idolatry. Communion with nature was a sin, and it deserved punishment.

According to the chronicles of the Conquest, the nomadic Indians who used barks to cover themselves never stripped the whole tree of its bark, so as not to kill it. And the sedentary Indians planted diverse crops with periods of rest between harvests, so as not to exhaust the land. The civilization that came to impose the devastating single-crop cultivations for export could not understand the cultures that were integrated into nature and mistook them for demoniacal or ignorant.

To the civilization that calls itself Western and Christian, nature was a ferocious beast that had to be tamed and punished so it could function like a machine and serve us forever. Nature, which is eternal, became our slave.

Very recently, we have learned that nature gets tired, just like us, her children. And we have learned that, like us, she can be murdered. No longer is there any talk about taming nature; now, even its torturers say she needs to be protected. But in either case, nature tamed and nature protected, she is beyond our reach.

The civilization that mistakes clocks for time, growth for development and big for great also mistakes nature for landscape, while the world, a labyrinth without a center, smashes its own roof.

Source: http://www.librered.net/wordpress/?p=9935