Fouling our nest

926:

How can the people in rural areas be entirely blamed for making money out of animals? There’s not much else one can make money from, so animals are put to use, and the rest of the story we know.

The most immediate payback has shown up in health problems amongst exploited animals on farms and amongst so many of the humans who eat them and eat their by-products. Down on the farms they feed the animals chemicals to increase their growth rate and fend off disease. If they didn’t, with so much fierce competition from home and abroad, they’d go broke. Farmers are being economically backed into a corner over the animal welfare issue. On top of that are environmental problems associated with modern farming practices, again brought about mainly by economic pressures. Animals have long been seen as a resource; they are ‘free-for-the-taking’. And now today, what was regarded as a nice little earner is now being seen as coming with many hidden costs.

It’s the same story with petrol or gas. It is useful. We have used our considerable brains to extract it and use it for human benefit. The hidden cost is that, by using so much of it, it has polluted our planet and even affected the delicate balance of our planet’s climate, on which we depend for our very survival. Again, with trees being so useful for timber, but in the taking of so many of them we’ve caused a catastrophe for the environment.

We humans push everything to the limits of toleration and then complain about the consequences, or rather the rich get richer by exploiting and the consequences hit the poor the hardest, since they haven’t the means to withstand the damage caused.

The collective human, as distinct from the individual, doesn’t learn from one bad experience. We have to wear each system down to the bone before we realise how there must be a withholding of so called ‘progress’. People are not willing to speak out, inconvenience themselves or set a good example to influence others, and so the species as a whole, in fact the planet as a whole, must suffer the consequences. It seems that our inevitable selfishness is linked to our common materialist traits, and this seems to control our lives. Up to now, we haven’t been able to stop fouling our own nest.