How many times can you cut down a tree?
The next insanity of the industrial human race is the development of technology to transform forestry resources into bio-fuel. The developers of the industry are looking for efficient ways to process wood chippings into ethanol. The industrial definition of efficiency is monetary, it has to be economically efficient. This means the industry will process wood, corn, wheat or sugarcane into bio-fuels if it is financially profitable to do so: What you pay for the bio-fuel has to generate a profit for the industry and investors. So, the price for creating the supply of ethanol have to be lower than the price of petrol, and the production costs have to be efficient enough to leave the industry with a substantial profit.
The cost of habitat destruction to the earth, and to the human beings on the earth will be the price paid by the next generations. Not the price you pay for your gas when you fill the tank, but the price your grandchildren pay in terms of higher populations and rapidly decreasing resources to feed and sustain those populations. Industry in non-economic terms is the development of extraction of resources multiplied by the current world population at any time in human history.
In those simplistic terms industry is the organisation of human populations to extract and utilise resources, currently for economic gain. The way human populations organise the utilisation of resources can either harm the local and planetary environment, or it can harmonise with the environment. At this point in time we harm the natural environment, unfortunately to the point that we are literally fuelling extinction.
The key words are bio-fuels, habitat, petrolium, population growth, industrial expansion, mono-culture, rapid growth, extinction. The current marketing technique being used to increase consumer interest in the expanding production of ethanol is: bio-fuels. In the future the bio-fuel industry is know as the extinction-fuel industry, but as we are talking about market economics the word extinction is not a good marketing symbol for a rapidly expanding market. The first rule of marketing is to give your product a good image. What better propaganda than: You buy this product and you are going to save the planet.
All across the earth the industrialised world banks, the European Union and now Asian banks are financing extinction through a massive funding of economic production in ways that create local environmental loss of habitat, or an unnatural extraction of resources in excess of normal standards. For example, the funding and subsidies given to the vaccum-fishing industry. The funding of mono-plantations, the extraction of planetary resources and the industrial process required to convert those resources into energy or consumer products.
More than half Portugal's wildlife has come under threat of extinction since the country joined the European Union 20 years ago - and massive redevelopment made possible by EU cash is at least partly to blame. The Portuguese Institute of Nature Conservation's list of all the species either in grave danger or on the brink of extinction amounts to nearly half of the country's wildlife. And environmentalists say that the threat has come from the impact of years of intensive development, funded by grants from the European Union. BBC News
Eucalyptus as Far as the Eye Can See Native to Australia, the eucalyptus is ideal for pulpwood production: It grows quickly and is accomplished at scavenging large amounts of water at the expense of other plants. Foreign-owned large-scale plantations of the fragrant trees now occupy more than 700,000 hectares (2,700 square miles) in Uruguay, estimates María Selva Ortiz of the REDES- member of the Friends of the Earth non-governmental environmental network.
Botnia of Finland has planted trees on 60,000 hectares (232 square miles) of prime land, while ENCE of Spain already owns 50,000 hectares (183 square miles) and plans to purchase even more, according to Ricardo Carrere, spokesperson for local environmental group Guayabira.
The plantations and mills, meanwhile, enjoy powerful and richly funded backers. Large-scale eucalyptus plantations were introduced in Uruguay in 1988, promoted mainly by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), with the active participation of forestry companies.
Our current levels of greed are exceeding the planets ability to provide us with resources. The emphasis is on fast growing trees, cows have to produce twice as much milk, bees have to produce more honey and pollinate faster before they are moved to the next location, apples have to be bigger, wheat crops have to produce more grains per head, Europe needs more births (fast), fishing vessels target fish stocks faster using sonar and modern satellite technology. Species all over the earth are reaching extinction faster than we can count them out.
Could it all be done differently? Of course it could all be done differently. Those who control the financing control the development. Today rich institutions are financing habitat extinction industries and projects according to their methods of expanding the supply and demand based on their technologies. Those institutions are the catalyst behind the financing of and therefore the rapid spread of mono-culture plantations to meet the increased demands for certain industrial resources, and for the financing of bio-fuel technologies and extraction of resources to fire those technologies: Palm Oil Industry Fuels Extinction of Orang Utans
Biodevastation Fuelling Deforestation - Why Save Trees?
