THERE IS NO SUCH PLACE AS 'AWAY'.

Killer whales so contaminated that they were classified as toxic waste. A once-beautiful Lebanese beach that’s now a towering mound of garbage, bleeding contaminants into the Mediterranean Sea. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area the size of Quebec that has six times as much plastic as plankton, the foundation of the food chain.

We all know that trash is a serious environmental problem, but it’s hard to grasp the full extent of the global predicament, and even if you are well-informed, it’s good to be reminded that waste is perhaps the most dire environmental crisis today. So often I hear people say that they are going to throw something 'away'. There is no such place as 'away'.

In this documentary Trashed tells the story of the world’s waste disposal problems through the eyes of Jeremy Irons. The actor-turned-environmental activist takes the audience around the world, showing first some of the most gory garbage patches, before presenting the challenges of getting rid of such trash.

Jeremy Irons, who narrated the film, noted, “We’re making more garbage now than at any time in history.” At the beginning of the film, Irons travelled to Sidon, Lebanon where he found a large, uncontrolled waste dump on the beach. He interviewed a Palestinian refugee who had come to Lebanon 30 years earlier, when the trash mound was non-existent. “When I first worked here it wasn't here,” the refugee said.

In Britain, Irons found that the waste problem was not quite as obvious as in Lebanon but was still significant. Paul Dainton, a British activist who tries to promote regulation of landfill sites said, “We have the most landfill sites in Europe.” Dainton added that breaches occur in the lining of the landfills with “notorious regularity.”

The waste problem is no less serious in the United States. “Over the past decade, 14 dumps around New York have reached capacity,” Irons said. A major problem with these landfills is that the lining used to prevent seepage of materials to the surrounding soil is not always reliable. As a result, landfills can threaten the environment for hundreds of years.

An alternative to landfills used in some parts of the world is incineration of waste. This method has its advantages, but in many ways is not much better than using landfills.

“It’s a very, very challenging environment inside an incinerator,” Professor of Bio-imaging at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland Vyvyan Howard said in the film. Incinerators produce man-made halogenated dioxins, which cause health concerns and can be extremely toxic.

In one small French town, 24 out of 80 residents on a street near an incinerator got cancer. There is no conclusive proof that their cancer came from toxins released from their incinerator, but such a high rate of the disease is unusual. “Governments have to be prepared to act with caution,” Howard said, referring to the danger created by toxins from incinerators.

No area of the planet has been safe from the toxins and waste spread by incinerators, factories and other means. “The Arctic has become one of the most contaminated places on Earth,” Irons said. Charles Moore, an oceanographer and boat captain who has done research on the Great Pacific Garbage, noted, “It’s rare to find a trawl that has no plastic in it.” As Moore says, waste is a problem both on land and sea, with no areas immune to the effects of pollution.

“This is not about what might happen in some distant future,” Irons warned. Howard added, “What we have to do is to stop making that amount of waste.”

Irons ends the film by saying that the status quo in terms of waste management must change. “We are trashing the planet and it’s time to stop,” he said. If waste management practices do not change, Irons and other environmentalists believe the waste problem will continue to damage the planet.

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.” — Greek proverb

For the Queens Jubilee Year our little Parish Council decided to plant a Jubilee Wood. We were fortunate to be granted 420 saplings from the Woodland Trust that we planned to use as hedging and asked local residents to sponsor a tree, this could be in memory of an event, a person, or as simply as a gift to the parishioners present and future. So far we have 60 trees sponsored. We plan to have seats in the centre where locals to come and meet or just sit and enjoy the view.

The recently started Youth Club became involved and they also sponsored a tree and, on a cold spring day (!) came to plant it and some others. They chose a fruit tree and we hope that in the many years to come they will bring their families to what will be then a small wood, tell them the story of the event and pick an apple or two.

Although the area is somewhat waterlogged and bare in places as I write, this will soon change as many have given willingly of their time and knowledge, working hard to turn what was a once small area of grazing land into what will become an attractive village facility. As for the value of a tree, just look at the image below, and for more detail of that and the value of trees, see HERE. 

I HAVE ACTUALLY MET JESUS

It was late one dark, cold and wet October night when, like many of our team after hearing an unspoken direction while searching for the lost and lonely, I finally found Jesus.   As I walked along the edge she became illuminated by the light of my torch, sitting with her legs dangling over the drop, almost shapeless and shivering in her tattered worn coat and falling apart open sandals.   I came close but Jesus gently told me not to get too close as the edge was not safe, so I sat down a few feet away and spoke to her, telling of my concern for her and asking for her story. 

Jesus said how she had been born into a family to be sexually abused by them and their friends and that when she was fifteen she had run away and lived with a group of people in a squat.   The squat seemed good at first, but the novelty soon wore off and she found out that it was cold, dirty and used by alcoholics and drug takers.   Money was a problem but she soon became adept at picking pockets and shoplifting, and if things got really bad, she sold her body.   “At least I had the choice then” she said with a slight grin, through the stumps of broken and rotten teeth.   

Living on the streets was a nightmare Jesus said, telling of how she had been crawled over by vermin, urinated and defecated on by people and animals, spat at, kicked, and beaten up, the mocking sarcastic voices and comments still echoing in her ears.   “The bruises and breaks usually healed, but the looks of disgust and the insults and abusive comments never do, they always, always hurt” she said.

I asked how old she was, “Thirty four” was the answer.   Thirty four... good grief half my age and I was sure she was only a little younger at best.   She turned and looked at me, her tears had made clean tracks down her dirt encrusted face, “and I can’t even sell my body now” she said.   Jesus moved, and an expression of pain winced across her face, “everything aches, everything hurts, everything is such an effort, it’s not possible to avoid all the punches and all the kicks”, her ever laboured breathing and feeble voice was evidence of this.

She read the look on my face when the noise echoed around the hills of a speeding car passing by on the nearby road “The world has always been concerned for itself” Jesus said.   The wind changed direction slightly and I could sense the unmistakeable smell of her urine, I asked if the black sack I had passed by on my way to find he was hers.   “Yes it is, but I won’t need it where I am going” was Jesus reply.

So here we were, me, a man who knew without any doubt just who he was in the company of showing her concern, yet she had the right to hate all men but so obviously didn't, in fact I heard not one word of condemnation and not one word of hate for anyone, just the stories of the events that had led her there.   

Then, as the rain and cold increased and in the middle of a scene the world would rather forget, a filthy and unloved victim journeyed to paradise.

THE IRAQ WAR FIASCO AND A LETTER FROM A DYING VETERAN

Ten long years ago the combined might of the US and UK military under President Bush and Prime Minister Blair with their relationship that rode over legalities and know facts (1) took armed action against Iraq in a “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign and a land based invasion. In those ten years thousands of military personnel have died. On the Iraq side an unknown number members of public have been killed.

All this was carried out in order to stop the Iraq military from using what the US authorities said were their ‘weapons of Mass Destruction’.

As Bush and Blair knew, there were no such weapons.

So why start a war and who profited out of it? George Bush’s Vice President, former CEO of the giant US Company Halliburton, (one of the world’s biggest oilfield companies who also have subsidiaries involved in private military contracting) Dick Cheney certainly did.

Despite his denials to the contrary, when special advisor to the under secretary of defence for policy at the Pentagon Michael Mobbs stood up to give an under-oath statement, he told how Cheney had held more than $3 million in Halliburton stock options until sometime in 2005, and that Halliburton paid the vice president $178,438 in deferred compensation. (2) A Pentagon Whistleblower, Bunny Greenhouse complained, and was demoted and sacked. (3)

Halliburton’s Iraq war income actually began in 1992, before the Iraq war started when Cheney’s Defence Department paid Halliburton $3.9 million to prepare a classified report on privatising war logistics. Halliburton spent the $3.9 million and then were given a further $5 million for a follow-up report, and later granted a five-year contract to provide the army with logistical support. 

The Bush family made profits from the war via their many interests in different companies, the 2006 article in (4) explains how.

Tony Blair has profited from the war (5) and I wonder where the missing Iraq $billions are? (6)

But for the vast majority of those involved in the Iraq War there has only been despair, pain and anguish. One such Person is Thomas Young, a dying Iraq War veteran, he wrote the letter below to George Bush and Dick Cheney, but I personally think that it should be addressed to Tony Blair as well.

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralysed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbours, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. 

The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretence of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness. 

1             http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jan/21/tony-blair-george-bush-iraq

2             http://www.texasmonthly.com/content/soldier-fortune

3             http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/world/middleeast/29reconstruct.html?_r=0

4             http://www.heatherwokusch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=86

5             http://rainbowwarrior2005.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/tony-blairs-attempt-to-keep-his-iraqi-oil-profits-a-secret/

6         http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7444083.stm

Do We Have Only A Food Scandal, Or Is It More Than Simply That?

In the UK we are, as I write this, going through a food scandal.   It has been found that many ready meals sold in Europe and the UK labelled as beef contained horse meat, in some cases, 100% horse meat.

To be totally honest I am not at all surprised.   When it is possible to buy a ready meal for the same price as a cabbage then there must surely be something amiss somewhere.   What this does show though is just how detached the vast majority of our modern (i.e. Western) civilisation has become from the environment that it actually depends on for its very existence.

We in the West don’t need to know where our food came from, where or who made our clothes, or who was it that picked those tomatoes in Senegal that are on our supermarket shelves, or if those Jordan River dates were grown on seized land or not.   We can ignore everything about food, our homes, our clothes, or our transport as long as we have the money to pay for it.   Most do just that of course, simply ignore what is in front of them by the use of their wallet or purse, but there is always a price to be paid sooner or later by this ignorance, deliberate or not.

The last 60 or so years have seen the depletion of Earth’s resources on a massive scale.   Fossil fuel is diminishing and the world has passed Peak Oil.   The climate is warming causing instability in the world’s weather with “every 100 years” floods, droughts and tornado’s now being regular, often year-on-year events as ecosystems fail.   Deliberate blindness and amnesia does not make a problem, any problem go away.   The fact is that, cheap (horse) meat or not, our present lifestyle is not one that can be afforded.

What is ignored is the fact that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, or what is usually termed as the world’s ‘natural resources’.   

The Western Culture takes in its stride the exploitation and abuse of people in other countries, whatever their age, that lack safe working conditions, honest working hours, a proper roof over their head, running water, and decent food.   Everything is reduced to the bottom line, to a financial or political advantage.  

The total and utter obscenity is that hungry people in arid lands work for a pittance so we can eat cheap food that exports with it their water. (1)  and (1a)  

That badly clothed and badly treated people work so we can wear good clothes. (2)

  

That people that try to protect the oppressed whose lands are being ‘acquired’ by governments and businesses are victims of death squads. (3)

Our modern Western food systems tell of abundance.   Groaning supermarket shelves surely can’t lie... or can they?   Actually they can, and do.   We have manufactured over the last sixty or so years an illusion that cannot be sustained for much longer.

There are droughts in the grain areas of the US (4)

There are droughts in the grain areas of Russia (5)

There are droughts in Australia (6)

There is a seemingly unnoticed farming crisis in the UK (7)

While the above takes place the message is that ‘we’ need to double food production by 2050 to feed a growing population, while even now we waste enough food to do just that.   What has been created is simply a mirage.   A mirage looks real from a distance but as the inevitable happens, time passes and one gets closer to it, it fades.   What is needed is to recognise the mirage of seeming abundance of cheap food while the chance to do so is still available to us.

(1) http://www.wfp.org/stories/sahel-crisis-by-country

(1a) http://www.compagniefruitiere.fr/en/nosproduits/tomatecerise.php

(2) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2188085/Indian-sweat-shop-boys-13-sold-11-month-rescued-forced-cover-murder-11-year-old-beaten-death-young-worker.html#axzz2KdARrHGf

(3) http://www.christianaid.org.uk/statement-about-cicero-guedes.aspx

(4) http://news.yahoo.com/u-drought-expands-top-wheat-growing-state-kansas-170953804.html

(5) http://www.sott.net/article/253663-Russian-drought-means-every-breadbasket-region-on-Earth-has-been-hit-with-crop-failure-in-2012-wheat-prices-set-to-soar

(6) http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/01/heatwaves,-droughts-and-wildfires-in-australia-what%E2%80%99s-the-link-to-climate-change

(7) http://www.ukagriculture.com/farming_today/farming_crisis.cfm

May I wish everyone a happy Christmas season, and a healthy and very peaceful new year.

SO; WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR CHRISTMAS?

I have been lucky in my ministry in becoming involved with people that have been on the edge of society, the suicidal, the depressed, the addicts, the abused, and the victims of society’s deliberate blindness. 

The sad fact is that disaster can overtake anyone from any strata of society. I and my colleagues have worked to help concert pianists, builders, doctors, gardeners, engineers, those that left school unable to read or write and those that had university degrees. It made me realise just how fortunate I am, and just how close are the disasters that can overtake any one of us.

I will freely admit that there have been times when I, like my colleagues, have most certainly put my personal safety in great danger and when I have made myself more than vulnerable, but unless this is accepted, then it is not possible to reach out to those that need help most.

I work with those that have given up much, far more than I, in order to also help those I have mentioned. These are people that have left the security of their everyday lives in order to help those that have lost everything. It has been, and still is, a humbling experience to stand alongside those that could so easily be very wealthy in the eyes and standards of the world and yet these heroes have, as I have, endured the sarcasm and derision of some for not just the thought of helping others, but who for any act of kindness is seen as pathetically stupid. Yet the people that I work with have made the commitment to devote their lives in order to help those far less fortunate than they are.

When you live alongside those that need help, it is obvious that there is an unbridgeable difference between want and need. Those that I and my colleagues reached out to needed help of many differing kinds. Protection from physical violence and sexual and mental abuse, a safe house, medical assistance, shelter from the elements, a hot meal, financial advice, these needs seemed never ending, but more than anything else, they needed someone that cared enough for them, was prepared to listen to them and, after doing so, to offer them advice and help.

When a person’s uppermost thought is how best to commit suicide then there is nothing whatsoever in the world that they want, but much that they need.

“What do you want for Christmas?” This will be a question asked in millions of homes over the next weeks; perhaps the real question should be “what do you need for Christmas?” 

IT'S GLOBAL WARMING STUPID!

I don’t know where you live, but here, in the UK, we had the wettest summer for 30 years with flash floods in many areas. This followed the driest winters for years, near empty reservoirs and a hosepipe ban. There were record droughts across the grain belt in America, worldwide crop failures, worldwide floods, wild fires in Spain and the US, and record ice melt at the poles and Greenland. As I write this, in early November, it is pouring with rain and blowing a gale outside and our son has just phoned to tell us that there is a blizzard where they live in Dorset. I could go on but I am sure you get the picture.

Where we live the fields that surround us are so wet that any farmer taking a tractor out on them would, at the present rate, only be able to drive it back next April; any harvest that remains will rot in the fields and the UK has recently had an Environment Agency alert to be aware of flooding due to the saturated fields being unable to absorb more water. Time after time and month after month we are experiencing once in a century events. Floods, droughts, rainstorms, all coupled with rising sea levels, the changes in the Gulf Stream, (Atlantic Conveyor) the movements in the Jet Stream and the horror that the US has only just experienced with Hurricane Sandy.

Forget Star wars, let’s face the facts, the environment strikes back at our way of life.

There seems to be a mindset in the Western World that it is our God given right to consume, that the earth has no limits, that we can extract what we like, emit what we like, produce what we like, consume what we like and waste what we like. This mindset has been built by, and ruled by, and run in favour by many of the mega companies that have the financial power, and so the political power to rule in their favour. If you think that is an exaggeration then just remember the power that Rupert Murdoch and his News Organisation had over UK governments. What Murdoch said went, and it was only when his company finally stepped so far over the mark that the situation was blindingly obvious that the whole obscene operation came to light.  

We live in a society that is addicted to consumption. In the UK we are regaled by the main political parties about the need to increase our national growth via consumption, the desire is, we are told, to increase national prosperity, but how do you measure prosperity? Is it the need to have what we are told we need in order to have a happy and fulfilled life? If so, why are so many unhappy and unfulfilled?

I know from my own work that many are addicted to prescription drugs, let alone the illegal ones. From the local recycling facilities it is blindingly obvious that local alcohol consumption has rocketed, and yet we are told what we need to do is to grow the economy by consuming more. So what is needed to cure our financial ills is another dose of what caused our financial ills... Really... is that what will make us all happy?

The dream of our Western life has now hit the realities of the environment. The earth has limits. Society cannot continue to pollute the atmosphere, plunder the earth and go to war for ever dwindling resources of fossilised sunlight. We cannot continue to mortgage our children’s and grandchildren’s future by ignoring these realities, as the American Indians knew, we did not inherit the world from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children and grandchildren.

The sad fact is that this Global Warming (Climate Chaos) environmental disaster has been forecast for many years and yet the population in general seems to be of the opinion that this is but a recent discovery.

 In 1965, US scientist Roger Revelle forecasted that by the year 2000 there would be 25% more CO2 in the atmosphere and that this could lead to a modification of atmospheric heat balances and marked changes in climate. Revelle also forecast rising sea levels and melting polar ice. US economist William Nordhaus also wrote at this time about ‘the imponderable side effects on society – coastlines and agriculture, on life in high latitudes, on human health and simply the unforeseen’ if CO2 pollution was unchecked.

So, why was this knowledge not acted upon when there was time?

Much in the same way as the tobacco industry used doubt to counter the claims of doctors and scientists (“our weapon is doubt” was said in a leaked memo) the energy and political lobby groups also used doubt and the views and opinions of ‘doctors’ and ‘scientists’ to do the same. The problems were, so the merchants of doubt informed us, “due to sunspots, volcanic activity, were normal climatic events etc, etc”. Meanwhile the future grew ever closer.

In the UK an ex Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, has said that there is no such thing as Global Warming. In the US presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has laughed at Obama’s climate concerns, meanwhile Stephen Hawking, the greatest brain that has ever existed, said that after a nuclear war, the biggest threat to the human race was Global Warming; I know who I would put my money on!

The fact is that the environmental future for our grandson of but a few months will be very different from the environmental life I have been lucky to enjoy, and my hope is that in the future years, when I am probably just an image in a photo, he will read this, because this entire post is for him.

You will wonder H, as will others, why no one did anything about the environmental situation you are now experiencing. The sad fact is that many tried their hardest, but were ignored, decried and laughed at until it was too late to halt it. I would just like you to know that I was one of those that tried their hardest and were ignored, decried and laughed at. I have tried to live as low an impact carbon neutral life as possible.

So when your fellows ask about the environmental situation “Why didn't someone try to do something about it” your answer is quite simple, “someone tried”.   

Granddad

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