World’s Rarest Great Ape Is On The Brink Of Extinction
World’s rarest great ape is on the brink of extinction
As usual, the problem isn’t with the wildlife, in this case, orangutans. Human encroachment and destruction of habit has made it all but impossible for orangutans to survive.
The “solutions” presented don’t actually work, because none of the solutions address root causes. At best, they are temporary stop-gap measures costing millions of dollars that won’t prevent their extinction.
There is a ridiculous notion that humans can both manage and regulate nature. Maybe in an artificial park or a zoo this is doable, but not in the wild. Since humans won’t leave nature alone, and constantly deprive nature of life (trees, plants, grasses, animals, fish), this activity can never be called “management”. It’s simply depredation and does eventually lead to species extinction.
Nor do we successfully regulate nature because we are regulating the wrong species, which is us and we’ve miserably failed to regulate this species. Unrestrained humanity, which is more accurately described as civilization, is wrecking nature all over the planet.
It’s also been said that “humans are a part of nature” which fails to consider that civilization, the artificial construct created by humans is definitely NOT a part of nature and never has been. If humans are a “part of nature”, that would only apply to the tiny few remaining indigenous wild tribes still in existence. The rest of us, all 7.6 billion are not a part of nature at all. We’re the ones devouring the entire planet, bite by bite, tree by tree as we perpetuate this Death Machine we call “civilization”.
Civilization is the root problem of the global destruction unfolding. Nothing is EVER going to get “better” in or out of civilization (such as nature) until we fix the problems inherent to our civilization, namely the way we live. We take, take, take and take, leaving behind endless waste, destruction and death. Then we complain when we are sick and dying from the poisons we’ve released while ignoring all the death we’ve caused. It’s beyond stupid.
I’m currently finishing up Daniel Quinn’s book, My Ishmael. It’s an interesting narrative, depicting the highly destructive nature of our way of life. There was (and still is) a way to live very differently on this planet without destroying everything around us. But nobody is interested, lacking even the capacity to even imagine something else. Then when a species is being wipe out of existence, the hand-wringing begins (for a short while). I’ve come to believe that we are the stupidest species on this planet. There is literally nothing “great” about us at all. Despite all of our accomplishments, they pale in comparison to all the destruction and death we have caused.
Imagine no employment anywhere in the world. No bosses, no supervisors, no cubicles, no factories. No money, no “ownership” of things that SHOULD belong to everyone. That world used to exist and it’s been deliberately stolen from us. Now we’re stuck, laboring away our lives in a gigantic prison camp, eking out a living by spending our substance on “store bought” essentials. We are all serving life-sentences in this global death machine, ever the uber-rich and the dirt poor.
Most people don’t seem to catch on the ugly reality of what has happened. This is the only world that they “know”, having no concept of anything else. Even their imagination is limited, having been programmed to only “see” what is the official narrative. I’ve found it virtually impossible to break through this institutionalized way of thinking. The world as it is today is desperately wrong, desperately corrupt and desperately unjust, exhibiting incredible levels of evil and indifference and many people would agree. But they stop there, knowing not what can be done or what to do about any of it.
So far, nothing has worked despite trillions of dollars and centuries of effort being spent to solve humanities rising problems. Voting doesn’t work. We routinely dump leaders and try new ones, always forever failing. Nothing seems to work. We go from one band-aid to the next, one bandage to another, when what is needed is amputation. We need to kill off the monster that we’ve created and do things very differently then the way we have.
Read this article for an example in you just can’t stand a discussion about nature: 76 all-cash offers on one home. The housing madness shows no signs of slowing
I suppose most people won’t even spot all the wrong in this story. All the greed, destruction, speculative injustice, all the manipulation, control, fear mongering and imagined “safety”. The competition is “good for sellers” and “bad” for buyers, especially if you’re not flush with cash and prepared to move extremely quick. But that’s not the whole story, not even close. This is a story of human greed and corruption, civilization run amok. Yes, it’s utterly absurd what these prices are, but that doesn’t even begin to portray the real story here.
Did you know that EVERY story is just like that? We generally only write about “us” and our “economy” and our “successes” and “failures” as they apply to our juggernaut of human existence. We complain when we don’t have enough, or can’t buy enough. We throw asinine parties in the middle of a human pandemic! We plunder the depths of the oceans and raze the tops of mountains, filling up the valleys below with toxic wastes and then stupidly gape when they leach into the ground water and streams. What’s wrong with this picture? There’s money being made, people are expending their lives promoting these activities and hey, we all benefit, right?
Wrong. This isn’t beneficial, this is destructive. We’ve now taken over the entire crust of the Earth and are mining the ocean floors to preserve and enrich our species. Even that’s not good enough as we ply the skies and probe outer space. Our eyes are now on the Moon and Mars, hopeful billionaires imagine “life”and “prosperity” can be found on dead and airless soil. They’re fucking nuts.
Death and destruction follows in our wake and we see little wrong with most of it. The treadmill of death gobbles up the life energy of billions of humans who we’re told “all want the same things” but this part of their lie. Maybe we do, if they were to dare even ask, but then if you wake up and realize what a sick, sad, horrifying joke this all is, you realize that what they’re offering and at what cost, we definitely don’t all want it. They don’t care because now it’s mandatory, they’ve made sure of that, closing up all the exits in the prison camp they built. What a scam we’ve been brainwashed into believing.
We don’t need 90% of the useless shit produced by humanity while laying waste to an entire planet, extinguishing life wherever we go. We’re told it’s “good for the economy” and other endless lies, as if that is all that matters, when in reality, none of it matters at all. How fucking stupid must we really be to keep on perpetuating these lies? Until it’s all gone and forever destroyed? Or will we finally wake the hell up and realize that this existence is utterly fucking worthless?
Readers will know that you can’t read words like this elsewhere (you’re quickly banned) for being “impolite” and “confrontational”. Fuck-em all. You SHOULD BE ANGRY. YOU SHOULD BE ENRAGED. You are living in a prison camp and you are an inmate, born into servitude and destruction, forced to perpetuate this death machine we all “civilization”. Wake the fuck up.
There must be 99.99% of humanity actively engaged in devouring the world now. It doesn’t even matter what you do for a “living”. You’re part of the problem because your position (ie., “job”) and your consumption is wrecking the planet and the living biosphere. We all secretly know this and keep pretending we can “fix” this with another damned band-aid. Bullshit.
The longer this civilization continues the worse it’s going to get – until we ourselves go extinct. Climate change is definitely on track to bring that about without considering anything else, but this isn’t a article about climate change. We caused climate change and we caused the oceans to be polluted and we ate all the fish and cut down all the trees and we made all the poisons and toxins that swirl all around the world – all in the name of civilization.
I do not know what could be more obvious – we are destroying the ONLY home we have to live on and the majority of humans don’t give a fuck. The few that do feel “helpless” and without hope on how they can put a stop to this. Kids feel hopeless and wonder why there is so little action, conscripting them to suffering and death. They know we failed them. The Death Machine grinds on, every nanosecond of every second, without fail, devouring, destroying, polluting and “producing” from the abundance of nature into endless, voracious human demands and we stupidly wonder how it could have gotten this bad while actively participating in this massive fraud every single day.
It’s going to get a lot worse if we don’t wake the fuck up. Stop perpetuating the Death Machine. Stop participating. Quitting IS possible. Quitting is also the only thing that you CAN do in the end. This is how you become the solution. You quit.
It’s The Sixth Great Extinction Event.
Four of the previous great extinction events were caused by extreme volcanism over periods of thousands of years, and one was caused by a large asteroid hitting the Earth and causing a massive dust cloud, followed by extreme volcanism.
This one is caused by humans digging up fossil fuels [that nature sequestered over a period of hundreds of millions of years] and using them to operate machinery that both destroys nature and promotes population overshoot. Quite a large portion of the fossil fuels consumed is for purely trivial purposes, such as moving people from one place to another so they can look at something….like the last elephants to exist on this planet of the last tortoises to ever exist on this planet, or the last orangutans, or the last sea ice in the Artic.
Some of the fossil fuels are consumed to make smoke (spinning tyres of vehicles that are not going anywhere (I saw and example of that yesterday). Morons like smoke.
There are fuckwits everywhere, and all our so-called political leaders are fuckwits and egregious liars.
There have been more warnings about the utterly disastrous trajectory humanity has been on than anyone can count; all have been ignored.
Arguably, the most impressive was the ‘Limits to Growth’ warning, published in 1972, which pointed out that industrial civilisation would go kaput around 2030 if nothing was done to change course. That warning was not just ignored, but the whole idea of limiting growth was vigorously attacked by economists, bankers and industrialists.
So we are on track for civilisation to go kaput around 2030, with all that entails, including population die-off [of humans].
Very pertinent to the discussion is the fact that the extraction of liquid fuels has already peaked and is on the way down: that does not stop politicians and economists proposing ways to increase the use of liquid fuels via more tourism, more trade, population growth etc.
I was mystified by all this insanity until I worked out (around 12 years ago) that it was the factional reserve banking system, creation of money out of thin air and the charging of interest on that money created out of thin air that was at the heart of the problem. The bankers demand continuous growth on a finite planet, and their Ponzi schemes collapses if growth ceases. Governments are ‘owned by banks’ and promote the scam on a daily basis.
When things start to go wrong economically, what do government do: bail out the financial system via yet more money created out of thin air.
Suppression of interest rates and driving them down to historically low (near-zero) rates enabled the bankers to hold together their Ponzi scheme together in the short term but now even that is failing, as it must, because of declining energy availability.
Sadly, there is still enough energy available to allow humans to behave like complete morons. Indeed, one of the most perverse aspects of current conditions is that demand destruction has pushed down oil prices to around what they were 15 years ago. That causes oil-exporting nations to go broke and causes oil companies to go broke, leading to yet more borrowing of fake money.
Another important aspect of this lunatic system is GDP, which counts destruction and waste as positive, since all GDP is concerned with is activity, not whether that activity is worthwhile or not. There is ZERO WILL to reform the dysfunctional GDP system and replace it with a Genuine Progress Index.
All of the insane commercial activity (that governments are so keen on) completely messes up the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans.
There is no escape from the madness, and all we can hope for is that the system collapses earlier rather than later. That way the suffering will be somewhat less than if the system keeps going for another several years and then goes kaput.
Great summary. “Fuckwits everywhere” – and nearly everyone. I would say the problem is even deeper then fractional reserve banking. Prior to this scam, civilization was still rapidly destroying the world. Infinite growth was also a widely accepted myth. Civilization as we know it today is voracious, down to the last individual inhabiting this system of death and destruction.
Indeed, pre-civilisation humans are attributed with the extinction of the great fauna of Australia and with the extinction of mammoths. Pre-industrial sailors clubbed the last great auks to death….because they could.
And ancient civilisations wrecked the environment around the Mediterranean, converting great forests into to deserts via shipbuilding and construction of cities and palaces etc.
The big difference, I believe, between people in previous ages and us is that since the 1960s we have well understood the consequences of deforestation, of over-use of fossil fuels, of looting and polluting the oceans, of population overshoot, of generally messing with nature….and have gone ahead and done it anyway! That is fuckwitism on a grand scale!
By the way, I didn’t mention before; the NZ government has set up a Climate Commission, to make recommendations to ‘limit warming to under 2oC’. The report came out just over a month ago, and the public were invited to comment.
I did, not because I have any hope of affecting the outcome but because it is a moral imperative to challenge bullshit. And there was plenty of bullshit in the Climate Commission recommendations – unscientific thinking and including mutually exclusive concepts and outright contradictions.
In one section the CC talks of using hydrogen as a carbon-free replacement for natural gas or to augment natural gas.
That sounds impressive if you don’t know that there are no sources of hydrogen on Earth and that the most common method for making it is from natural gas, via partial oxidation, and at considerable energy loss.
The other method for making hydrogen is via electrolysis of water (at great expense and considerable energy loss).
In NZ, we have hydroelectricity but a substantial portion of the electricity is made via burning natural gas.
So the NZ government Climate Commission recommends using natural gas to make hydrogen in order as a replacement for natural gas.
Don’t get me started on electric vehicles.
There are fuckwits and scammers everywhere, including so-called experts advising governments. That is one of many reasons why we are totally screwed. Well, the next generation is.
I must get on with my preparations for the global financial meltdown, which I believe will occur later this year.
As far as I know, all true. The difference is how civilization has both industrialized death on a mega-scale, and how they’ve robbed us of our food supply, deliberately. All things ‘civilized’ have become opportunities for mass exploitation with corresponding destruction (resource extraction and pollution). Prior to the advancement of this particular civilization, it took a long time to inflict anywhere near enough damage to cause species extinction, but that’s not to say it didn’t eventually happen since we know it did.
Not so with industrialized, mechanized, modernized civilization. It is indeed fuckwitism on a grand scale. Saturated Stupidity. We know we’re doing it, and what it causes, but greed and profits and indifference rule the day – until that particular resource runs out, then we switch focus to “something else” and repeat the process all over again.
Factory farming and industrialized agriculture are monoculture death machines, inflicting enormous damage and destruction (and suffering). You could say that we’ve been incredibly adept at killing life and you would be 100% correct. Our entire business model is based around this very concept.
I know view this as a cultural issue, going way back before modernization, industrialization, and pre-civilization. Go back far enough and our impact wasn’t absent, but nor was it near-immediate (one or two human lifetimes), global and irreversible in most cases. Many mammal species were driven to extinction, but not only because of hunting, other factors contributed. It wasn’t until modern man came along and decided eradication was the solution did we see mass extinctions caused by humans and with such indifference and apathy.
2C of warming is deadly. Don’t they know that? And it’s pointless if just one country figures out how to limit warming to 2C anyway. Warming doesn’t stop at borders.
I had the same ‘discussion’ recently about “zero carbon energy” claims, utter bullshit. And yes, it was about electric vehicles and all the ridiculous empty promises and falsehoods how this was going be zero carbon, save the planet and all the other lies. People are bonehead stupid these days. They believe whatever bullshit they read or sound byte they hear from a babbling head. The ‘experts’ are paid fools representing business interests and their interest is only in maintaining and advancing the status quo.
This is why I harp on the real issues that nobody will address, the root causes of our so-called ‘problems’. These are decisions made long ago that we would craft a non-sustainable, destructive and unjust civilization based upon the asinine model of constant growth, and the control of resources and life itself.
I don’t have an opinion about the financial meltdown by the way. They keep injecting band-aid solutions. We’re still here, struggling harder then ever, but the bottom as it were, could be prevented with different schemes. They give out money to some citizens in this country as an example. It doesn’t seem to be making any real difference other then increase the national debt.
I’ve always believed that we all have to prepare for the ‘status-quo’ as much as anything else that could happen. That is, the Death Machine munches on, unstoppable, devouring more and more until we each, individually, reach our own state of collapse, now being directly and personally impacted by the developing status-quo. There are countless examples of that happening here, with middle-class families now living on the streets.
In other words, I don’t wait for an ‘event’ to occur to signify that collapse is underway. Collapse is well underway all over the planet, but the masses are distracted and pretending they’re going to be ok. That’s on them.
One aspect most just don’t get is that the current systems are self-defeating; squander fossil fuels and then find they are in short supply; wreck the global energy balance and then find you cannot grow crops as well as you could; print money and lower interest rates to prop up the system and then find doing so does not generate the required result.
Right now we have the biggest house price bubble in history…absolutely insane prices like $1.2 million for an average house in Auckland, and nationally something like $700,000, when the average worker gets $20 to $40 an hour ($40k to 80k per annum). Pensioners get about $20k p.a. and people on social welfare substantially less. All costs are rising.
It will soon reach breaking point.
Limits to Growth. 1972
http://www.donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Limits-to-Growth-digital-scan-version.pdf
Thoughts for Easter.
Easter, like everything else in the Christian calendar, is fake.
Easter was the pagan festival celebrating the rebirth of nature that occurred when the soil began to warm up and trees began to sprout foliage etc. (which still occurs, though humans have managed to annihilate most of nature, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. And the parts that haven’t been annihilated have been seriously messed-up).
Needing to stamp out pagan beliefs (that actually represented something real and meaningful) in order to impose the fake religion that is based on massive inconsistencies and outright lies, the Romans of the collapsing empire chose to usurp the pagan festival, as part of the control-the-masses agenda. People in fancy hats talking gibberish helped.
The Roman empire continued to collapse, but the fake religious festivals they established endured.
So does the fake calendar the Romans came up with. Hence, the tenth month of the year is called the eight month, the eleventh is called the ninth, and the twelfth month of the year is called the tenth, and poor old February got robbed of a couple of days to serve the vanity of a couple of emperors.
Which all goes to show that a large portion of the population prefers to believe in fantasies rather than reality, and most things people take as sacrosanct are actually arbitrary and phony.
The commercial sector will undoubtedly make a killing, selling stuff that is bad for children to uninformed/misinformed parents, many of who are guilt-ridden, and are definitely highly-controlled. After all, money (and its acquisition) is the new religion, the religion of the age, worshipped on a daily basis by the government, the commercial sector and a large portion of the populace.
And don’t forget to do your bit in destroying the environment over the holiday period, as required by the government and the commercial sector in the pursuit of money and hedonism.
I’m not sure what Christ would have said about any of what goes on these days if he were around today (assuming he actually lived and wasn’t pure fabrication), but I suspect he would be astonished and outraged.
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