My new book is now published and available here in Paperback and Kindle
This book provides a fresh perspective on the exponential rise in depression and suicide in modern western society. It’s an alternative book for alternative people who have tried conventional medicine or who aren’t interested in treating depression with allopathic options, and who are open to trying other options. Scientists have studied depression is in fact a normal response to a global environmental destruction, with growing scientific peer reviewed papers that confirm our degrading environment affects our mental health. There is an urgent need for humanity to reconnect with nature and change society to become more environmentally friendly. The author offers advice on how to manage depression better with nutritional advice and controversial health hacks, recommended lifestyle changes including learning the art of living after surviving grief, deep trauma, and loss.
The aim is to help the reader see their depression as a calling to look within, connect with their truer inner being and begin to nurture themselves spiritually, mentally and emotionally. Furthermore, this book invites the reader to consider their own place in human evolution and redefine their lost purpose to one that is more aligned to Ecology than to Western Materialism, to become self-empowered, not a victim of depression. We look at talk therapies and radical new alternative therapies for managing depression in a challenging world.
Contents-
Introduction
Poem-Faithful Black Dog
Chapter One- I am Not my Story
Poem-The Exiled Dissidents
Chapter Two-Corporate devolution vs Ecology
Poem-My Friend, My Shadow
Chapter Three-A Brief History of Depression
Poem-The Thief
Chapter Four- The Art of Living
Poem-The Heart’s Compass
Chapter Five- Gluten Free Living, Health the Gut, Heal the Mind
Poem-Patented Flower in a Planet Sized Laboratory
Chapter Six- Health Hacks to Avoid Inflammation and Depression
Poem-Beat Your Drum
Chapter Seven- A Look at Different Talk Therapies
Poem-Illusions of Polarities
Chapter Eight- The Therapeutic Benefits of Entheogens and CBD oil
Poem–Merging Galaxies
Chapter Nine- The Noosphere, Consciousness and Biosphere
Carlita is an independent environmental journalist and project developer who provides information overlooked by mainstream journalism funded by political agendas, since Carlita has worked closely with indigenous groups in Latin America for the last fifteen years.
Carlita is an environmental journalist, author, project developer, hypnotherapist and educator who wants to share her insights and experiences to benefit people living with autism, anxiety, trauma, severe depression and suicidal thoughts. Here she talks openly about her life and gives an ecological perspective in her up and coming book, ”Surviving Depression in a Depressing World, an ecological perspective”.
If you want to put your name on the email list to be notified when the book comes out, please email below at
thesilentecocide@gmail.com and to receive updates and learn more about the art of living in a depressing world!
After a state of emergency was declared in Ecuador, with two weeks of intense demonstrations in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, Ecuadorian protestors have released ten police and thirty journalists, who were reportedly taken hostage by activist groups, in the midst of violent outbreaks during demonstrations against IMF austerity pressures on the Ecuadorian government, namely the reason why oil subsidies were being withdrawn,
Before being liberated later that evening, some of the police officers were made to carry the coffin of a protestor, named Inocencio Tucumbí, whose coffin was taken to the city centre, Inocencio died after being hit by a tear gas canister fired by the police at a protest last Wednesday.
Getty
Three other protestors have lost their lives during the protests and over 650 protestors have been arrested.
President Moreno had to move the government out of Quito to Guayaquil, Lenín Moreno has agreed to reassess the subsidies, but not necessarily repeal them.
This is not just about subsidies and the IMF, it is a reaction to the growing awareness by the people of Ecuador, that their country has been bought out by politicians and corporations, heavily exploited. As a result Ecuador now carries heavy debt.
Indigenous people are tired of the exploits of oil companies continuing to ignore the laws and rights of indigenous people. For over a century, oil and mining companies continue to ignoring the rights of indigenous people, accordingto Ecuadorian law, they are to seek prior consultation to any indigenous community that their activities may affect. They need to seek prior notice before going into an area of indigenous territory in the Amazon and exploiting the area for oil or mining. However, most oil and mining companies continue to ignore that indigenous communities exist, and that the ancestral lands belong to in the Amazon people, not for the Ecuadorian governments to allow corporations to enter, for oil, for gold, uranium and so on, this has continued to increase intensively, without international intervention or help, similarly the same is happening in Peru and Brazil where the middle of the rain forests have seen devastating gold mining expansion over thousands of hectares of Amazon rainforest have been turned to deserts this year .
In Ecuador, indigenous communties are strong and resistence affects the country immediately. Unfortunately, for Moreno, he took on Ecuador after the prior president Rafael Correa left a messy legacy behind. Correa squeezed all the money he could steal, out of the Ecuadorian economy.
Rafael Correa sold Ecuador out completely just before April 2017 Elections, while he was in government, he did a lot of back handed deals, one such deal was while he was running the Yasuni campaign to keep the oil in the ground, behind closed doors, he secretly made oil deals with Chinese oil companies while pretending to the public he wanted to conserve Yasuni National Park. Promptly after Moreno was elected, Rafael Correa immediately left for Brussels.
Two years before PetroAmazonia oil bonds were sold in the New York Stock Market, Correa’s government denounced the 10 per cent in annual interest the country paid on its bonds as “usury in 2015.” So when the 51-year-old former economics professor was only willing to pay 10.5 per cent in a sale of notes back then, it raised speculation the Opec nation may be running short of cash after oil prices collapsed. Before the March 19 sale 2015, Correa told potential buyers it wanted to pay less than 8 per cent to borrow at least US$1 billion for as long as seven years. Instead, the Andean nation got just US$750 million for five years at yields that were more than two percentage points higher. The sale “indicates that they are running into trouble,” said Sarah Glendon, an economist at Gramercy Funds Management.
Moreno and the people of Ecuador are paying this price, and Moreno is under a lot of pressure to try and find a solution to the mess. However, the ramifications are worse for the indigenous people and so as it is nearing 2020, when the debts of U.S.$315,339,980, has to be paid back at least
4.625% of notes are due by 2020, the pressure on Ecuadorian people and the government is worse than ever, what will Moreno do to compromise for the people of Ecuador? Times have already been hard on the Ecuadorian economy after Ecuador had to spend a lot of money rebuilding important infrastructure recovering from the 7.8 Earthquake in 2016.
Many indigenous people over the last three years have been greatly pressured and exploited as oil and mining activities expand an develop exponentially in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Since this means more destruction of the Amazon, to be exploited by oil companies such as Petro Amazonas and other oil companies for exploitation and drilling, as this debt needs to be paid back by next year, 2020 and these notes were borrowed on Petro Amazonas assets, one of the driving destroyers of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
How could the concept of Natural Capital help Ecuador reclaim economic autonomy?
Ecuador has more than half the world’s biodiversity found in the Amazon rainforest, in terms of Natural Capital, there is a great deal of value in the Amazon that could wipe out all of Ecuador’s world debt.
Today, biodiversity rich areas of the world are a critically endangered and a limited natural resource. We are living in the Sixth greatest mass extinction, because of our addiction to oil and wealth in terms of short term gain, this drastically affects how we manage biodiversity. It is an apocalypse happening in slow motion which affects all of the earth’s biodiversity which took 3.8 billion years of evolution to form. This extinction differs from previous extinctions, in that it is caused by humans, not by natural causes, as we are the cause, we can also slow it down or prevent it, if we make big changes. While governments are aware of this and we continue to accelerate it, each year, and this affects every single species and ecosystem on the planet, nothing is being done to protect biodiversity, instead twenty years on from my environmental science degree, it is disheartening to see environmental laws have become greately weakened as politicians are the stakeholders of lobbying corporations and are legally bribed to rewrite laws for backhanded payments. According to recent scientific data, animals and plants are disappearing at a rate of between 75 and 150 species per day. There may be no rain forest left in twenty years from now, nor fish in the ocean in ten years time and over half the world will have a water crisis, fifteen years from now. Bees are our most important crop pollinators and are fast disappearing and the rate of deforestation and ocean pollution is destroying these keystone ecosystems, which are drastically affected by man’s own actions. As most people are ecologically illiterate, we negate the goods and services and value these natural resources and the wealth they generate or the species that also contribute to the work of ecological goods and services.
Look at Africa, the natural capital if given monetary value would make it the richest country in the world in terms of natural resources. Western society must live more within our ecologically realistic limitations, consume less and live more sustainably. We agree that predatory capitalism equals exploitation, and thrives from growing centralized power structures. This is part of its subjective characteristics and results in a few countries having more power, wealth and opportunities than the rest of the world, which is the cancer of this growing disparity between the first world nations and ”third world nations”, which were originally ancient first world superpowers in the story of ancient history.
Natural Capital is a concept that was explored nearly 20 years ago now, pilot projects have been quietly funded by the United Nations to see how we can value nature and biodiversity for policy makers. The World Resource Institute (WRI) estimates the value of ecosystem services to be US $33 trillion a year, nearly twice the value of the global gross national product (GNP) of US $18 trillion. The US is also in debt by 17 trillion dollars, if the US switched to an economy based on natural capital, the financial value tied up in its natural capital would take care of this debt. In the same way that a banknote is a promissory note against the gold or silver that has been deposited in the bank, ecological economists are seeing how we can start to put the same value onto ecosystems and the role of species in ecosystem production; another example would be the 80 percent of oxygen generated by algae and microbial activity in the oceans. Hypothetically, the value of the work done in existing ecosystems could regenerate local economies and increase the wealth and monetary value of nature globally, simply by ensuring its conservation and existence by using initiatives similar to the TEEB Economic of Ecosystems and Biodiversity model if we took it to a community level to decentralize governmental powers and management of our natural resources.
Nature’s ecological banking system could be a way to revolutionise our world and local economies and transfer wealth from an oil-based economy to an ecology-based economy, this wealth would provide poor countries with enough ecological economy that global debt would become a thing of the past. This starts on a local level, worldwide, which would regenerate and allow local communities to have better control over their own natural resources, protecting and managing them from over-exploitation of previously decentralised management of resources, which could be prevented, if corporate social responsibility pays a tax to the natural capital destroyed and when more is taken out of the ecosystems and Natural Capital, than is put into them, this crucially needs to be taken into account in order to gain more balance.
In terms of flipping this over to give people power instead of governments, we could make local land trusts run by the local communities which protect thousands of hectares of rain forest for the future preservation of biodiversity and translate the value to cryptocurrency rather than fiat, which is centralized and controlled by governments, whereas cryptocurrency is not. Ecuador, Peru, Brazil,Bolivia, Venezuela and Colombia would be infinitely more wealthy because these countries are where the Amazon basin covers. If we put a value on just one hectare of the Amazon for the biodiversity it holds, or for the oxygen and clean water it produces, or for
Here we provide further steps towards sustainability and increasing power to local communities and protect nature from centralized predatory capitalism exploits:
1. Decentralisation of power in cities and governments, to smaller towns and villages, for local communities to have more say in governance of local resources instead of foreign governments.
2. Improve infrastructures in rural areas for solar and wind technology for self sustainable towns and greener cities, strengthening local infrastructures for alternative fuel systems to make the transition from oil easier, such as make hydrogen fuel cell refuelling stations, along with electric cars more available in every town and city and alternative energy resources for off the grid power generators.
3. Ideally, (because this won’t happen in real world politics), Western governments that currently have central power would return the rights for developing countries the access to manage their own land and natural resources which would remedy starvation, put a stop to corporate land grabs and create a more sustainably balanced structure that is not centralised or controlled by corporations and politicians of the Western World.
4. This is a hard one since those who have the power prefer to keep countries in debt, especially to exploit their resources. -Abolish “third world debt” based on unrealistic inflation agendas for the world powers to control natural resources in ‘poorer’ foreign countries that are actually ‘richer’ in rare minerals and natural resources than most Western countries, we will see how in further paragraphs the Natural Economy in terms of goods and services and biodiversity, can turn the poorest nations into the richest over night and would be used to wipe world debt.
5. Environmental laws need to make corporate exploitations of foreign natural resources a crime, more stringent environmental laws are necessary and no more erosion of these laws by politicians who are corporate pimps bribed to rewrite laws for corporate agendas. Western corporations need to abolish privatisation of water, and land resources in “third world countries”.
6. Return land rights to rural community agriculturalists in developing countries, and locally supporting sustainable agriculture. With localised sustainable farming, there would be an equal distribution of food and grain and where there is poor soil quality implementation of soil restoration projects .
The current global conflicts, we see emerging in both the ecological and economic crisis, is a sign that we need to re-evaluate the global economy that has been built on short-term gain and erroneous decisions of greedy politicians and their corporate partners, with no acknowledgement or regard for nature’s capital, invisible goods, services and production that everyone takes for granted. This completely disregards nature’s capital value. Our view of nature is to see ourselves as separate and above it, a western view that is so engrained in our perception of the world, we don’t think twice about our wasteful consumerist culture. We could start exploring new ways of seeing nature as a valuable investment we need to protect, to preserve biodiversity and the natural balance of ecosystems for the future of humanity.
The indigenous lands of Kayapó, in Pará, house mining fronts with an area equivalent to dozens of soccer fields. Photo from Planet Labs
A significant expansion of illegal Gold mining outbreaks in Amazonian indigenous lands is destroying the rainforest at an accelerated rate in Brazil, which began to emerge since January of this year. This is confirmed by the satellite images analysed by BBC News Brazil.
The indigenous and environmentalists are critically concerned with this development occurring in different parts in the states of Pará and Roraima, in the north of Brazil, the mining activity has increased since the public statements and hate speech of President Jair Bolsonaro against indigenous people and in favour of the exploitation of minerals in indigenous lands and what they consider a weakening in the fight against environmental crimes by the government.
The mining invasion of one of these reserves in the Amazon has also resulted in a murdered indigenous leader of the Wajãpi tribe , which occurred following a plea for help from the leader, that miners had entered their territory with guns and weapons.
The Wajãpi indigenous community who reside in the west of the state of Amapá, reported last Saturday that a group of miners assassinated Emyra Wajãpi last wednesday. The indigenous leader, Wajãpi ´s death was the beginning of an attack to the Mariry village that took place between Friday and Sunday with the invasion of 50 gold seekers to the place.
The Coordination of the indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB) issued a statement condemning the invasions and showing their solidarity with the Wajãpi people.
“The Coordination of the indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB), together with its base organizations on a state, regional and local level, mainly with the APOINAP (Articulation of Indigenous Peoples and Amapá and Northern Pará Organizations), are here to express publicly their complete solidarity and support for the Waiãpi indigenous people, in lieu of the recent events in which metal seekers invaded their territory, while we express our deep and vehement repulsion towards this kind of action, that has intensified itself, fomented mainly by intransigent and irresponsible, authoritarian, judgemental, arrogant and disrespectful positions of the current government, especially from the president of the republic Jair Bolsonaro, for the attacks he has been making against the rights of the people of this country, especially the territorial rights already guaranteed in completely demarcated and regularized indigenous lands in light of the Constitution of the Federal Government of 1988 and which this government is constantly trying to set back.” – Reported to Latin American News
Opening these ancestral protected lands to mining and other extraction industries such as oil and gas drilling have devastating consequences for indigenous communities and irreversible ecological devastation such as mercury poisoning of the Amazon waterways which people use to fish and bath in.
Previous affected indigenous people were also the Yamomami people in on-going illegal gold extraction in 2013 and before.
The deforestation of the Amazon has accelerated with the arrival of Bolsonaro to the presidency of Brazil, since the president has been encouraging racial discrimination and persecution of indigenous people in the Amazon whose lives and ancestral lands are being destroyed and threatened by mining and oil extraction.
The mine outbreak occurred at a time when the National Space Research Institute (INPE) has claimed that there is a high rate of destruction in the Amazon, which has been questioned by President Bolsonaro, who said the publication of data on deforestation could affect the country’s international negotiations.
The images evaluated by the BBC are from Planet Labs , an American company that orbits more than 100 satellites and takes daily photographs of the world.
Illegal gold mining in the Indigenous Land Kayapó, Pará, in July 2019. The clearest points indicate recent activity.
The activity was monitored in three of the Brazilian indigenous lands that suffer the most illegal gold extraction: Kayapó, Munduruku (both in Pará) and Yanomami (in Roraima and Amazonas). The three territories occupy an area equivalent to that of the state of São Paulo and house some of the most conserved sections of the Brazilian Amazon.
In three Brazilian Amazon territories, there was an increase in these areas of mining extraction to reopen old mines, some created more than a decade ago – and in those created more recently.
The satelite photographs were sent to two satellite imagery specialists: to geologist Carlos Souza Jr. of Imazon (a non-profit organization dedicated to the conservation of the Amazon rainforest); and to the geographer of the business intelligence software Arcplan, Marcos Reis Rosa.
In June, the BBC published a report that showed that in 2019, gold became the second most exported product in the Roraima area , although none of the mines operate legally.
Officials are investigating whether the metal has been illegally extracted from the territory in Yanomami, where, according to the natives, at least 10, 000 miners are currently operating.
The executive coordinator of the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Apib), Sonia Guajajara , says that indigenous people from different parts of the Amazon have reported “an absurd increase” in mining companies since the beginning of the Bolsonaro government, this is due to Bolsonaro´s hate speech against indigenous people and encouragement of mining in these areas, desperation is increasing as Brazil on the verge of recession.
While Bolsonaro served as a federal deputy and, later in his presidential career, he repeatedly said he agreed with the economic exploitation of these territories to improve the living conditions of indigenous communities, but this doesn´t improve their lives or living standards, their land is illegally taken from them and their Amazon waterways and fish are killed and polluted with mercury and other toxic poisons.
The 1988 Constitution provides for the exploitation of minerals in indigenous lands as long as it is regulated. But as laws in this field have never been passed, the activities are continuously illegal.
Since 1996 , Congress has tried to pass a bill to regulate mining in indigenous lands. Now, the Bolsonaro government is trying to unlock the agenda.
However, according to Sonia Guajajara, the vast majority of Brazilian indigenous communities oppose the regulation of the activity because they fear their social and environmental impacts.
At the end of 2018, Amazon’s geo-referenced socio-environmental information network – which brings together eight environmental NGOs from Latin America – published a report on threats to the Amazon. The document identified illegal mining on 18 indigenous lands in Brazil. There is also a prior report written by Jasmine Plummer investigating the environmental laws on this activity and how it affects the from 2007
In some territories, rafts are installed on the Amazon riverways, to look for precious metals in the riverbed. In addition to the rafts, industrial machinery such as backhoes and dredgers form Deforested craters in the forest. This is the case of many of the mines in the Tapajós de Pará region , where satellite images exhibit important “scars” open in the forest.
In addition to logging, the activity causes sedimentation of rivers , diverting their courses and creating artificial lakes that become breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Not by chance, malaria is common in the mining areas of the Amazon.
In some areas the damage is permanent, with no possibility of complete regeneration.
“Scars” caused by the extraction of gold in the Tapajós de Pará region, in an image taken in July 2019.
Gold mining is also associated with an increase in conflict, increasing human trafficking, prostitution and disease in the indigenous areas where it operates.
For forest engineer Paulo Barreto, an associate researcher at Imazon, deforestation in the Amazon has been stimulated not only by Bolsonaro’s statements, but also by the weakening of regulatory environmental agencies.
“It has created a climate where everything and anything goes, and people think it will not be punished,” Barreto told the BBC.
By order of Environment Minister Ricardo Salles, the annual budget of Ibama, the main federal environmental agency, was reduced by US $ 23.57 million this year, a quarter of the total.
The indigenous lands of Kayapó, in Pará, have mining activities which have destroyed with an area equivalent to dozens of football fields.
This week President Bolsonaro was again criticized by environmentalists. After the president insisted that deforestation figures released by the National Space Research Institute (INPE) were a lie and could hamper Brazil’s negotiations with other countries, such as those related to the trade agreement between Mercosur and the European Union .
European leaders have expressed concern about the increase in deforestation in Brazil and Bolsonaro’s actions in the environmental sector.
In April, a letter published in the journal Nature signed by 607 scientists and two indigenous organizations criticized the Bolsonaro government for “working to dismantle deforestation policies.”
The signatories of the document denounce that “the new administration of Brazil threatens indigenous rights and natural areas.”
In the words of the Yanomami’s foremost
shaman-activist, Davi Kopenawa Yanomami-
The Earth cannot be split apart as if the forest were just a leftover part. With leftover trees and leftover rivers, leftover game, fish and humans who live there, its breath of life will become too short. That is why we are worried. We shamans simply say we are protecting nature as a whole thing. We defend the forests’ trees, mountains and rivers, its fish, game, spirits and human inhabitants.
Learn the story of Margoth, Amparo and Amada, three brave women that defend the Pueblos Indígenas and the Amazon Rainforest.
Please sign the petition for better protection of these brave environmental defenders https://bit.ly/2ZPLvDh
Ecuador: In the absence of protection from the State, Amazónian women risk their lives to defend the Rainforest
The lack of capacity and political will of the Ecuadorian authorities to guarantee protection and adequately and effectively investigate attacks and threats against Amazonian Women defenders of the environment which puts their lives at risk, and those of other people who protect the Amazon against political and economic interests linked to large-scale extractive projects in indigenous territories, said Amnesty International in a new report published today.
“They will not stop us” : The Ecuadorian government fails justice and protection for Amazonian women defenders of land, territory and environment, which exposes the failures of the Ecuadorian Attorney General’s Office in response to a series of attacks and death threats registered in 2018 against Patricia Gualinga, Nema Grefa, Salomé Aranda and Margoth Escobar. The four women are members of the Mujeres Amazónicas collective, made up of dozens of indigenous women from Ecuador who defend the environment in the Amazon and the rights of indigenous peoples.
The work of people who defend the environment, such as the Amazonian Women and other organizations of the indigenous peoples, is urgent and necessary in Ecuador and in the whole world, before the increasingly evident impacts of the global environmental crisis.
“Despite the promises made by the government of President Moreno, the lack of political will to seriously investigate the attacks against human rights defenders and to give them adequate protection sends a clear message to society: that these crimes are tolerated in Ecuador. This is unacceptable, “said Erika Guevara Rosas, Americas director for Amnesty International.
The lines of investigation and the protection measures that the Ecuadorian authorities have offered to the victims seem to ignore possible motives of the attacks linked to their challenge to large-scale economic interests and to traditional gender roles, through their role as indigenous leaders. and human rights defenders.
“This attack is retaliation for my struggle to defend life and our territories against the threat of oil exploitation,” said Salome Aranda, after several strangers threatened and attacked her and her family with stones while they were at home in May 2018.
The Amazonian Women point out that the authorities in charge of investigating do not collect or analyze critical evidence in time, which could even help identify those responsible for the attacks against them. Faced with these failures, the defenders end up in practice assuming the burden of the investigation.
”We are united and we will continue in our fight for the defense of Mother Earth.”-
Patricia Gualinga, Amazonian Woman defender.
The Amazonian Women also criticize that the protection measures that they have offered are inadequate and insufficient in the face of the particular needs and the exceptional risks they face every day.
Regardless of the possible causes of these failures, their consequences on the lives of human rights and environmental defenders in Ecuador are clear and concrete. In a country where attacks against them are not punished and authorities do not assume their responsibility to guarantee their safety, many people face the permanent dilemma of risking their lives and that of their families to defend human rights and nature. .
“President Lenin Moreno and the new Attorney General, Diana Salazar, have in their hands the opportunity to put an end to this grave situation and guarantee justice and protection for the Amazonian Women and any person who defends human rights in Ecuador. For this, they must implement a national protection policy and a protocol to investigate crimes against them, “said Erika Guevara Rosas.
Despite impunity and lack of protection, Patricia Gualinga says they will not surrender: “We are united and we will continue in our fight for the defense of Mother Earth.”
Gluttony for new technology is feeding African slavery and causing extinction of rare natural elements, a heavier price for our insatiable consumer paradise, if we buy a new cell phone device or a laptop, we are part of this destructive predator named Capitalism, the beast of ‘First World Nations’ that is driving ecocide and modern slavery. The predator that we feed, leaves behind a trail of destructive footprints across the planet, wherever it treads to extract and deplete, natural resources. The frightening thing is, no where on Earth is left sacred, protected or untouched any more, because Corporations are able to lobby, (legally bribe) politicians to rewrite environmental laws or any law that allows corporations to access minerals, oil, gas or any other biological resource, even in the most protected national parks, environmental laws have dwindled dramatically over the last forty years. All species, all ecosystems, all natural resources are dwindling at an exponential rate, as a result of this predatory insatiable appetite.
Another EPA report reveals that by recycling one million cell phones, we can recover more than 20,000 lbs of copper, 20 lbs of palladium, 550 lbs of silver, and 50 lbs of gold. Then there are these other rare elements below that will soon be extinct, if we were able to recycle computers and cell phones without worrying about license laws, but with the care of the planetary resources in mind, we could millions of tons of reduce electronic waste each year and salvage rare elements that are becoming seriously depleted.
Diagram shows the scarcity of the elements. A new periodic table sizes the boxes for each element based on their relative abundance. Credit: EuChemS/CC BY-ND
Our over-reliance on renewing our technological devices, is driving this unfolding ecocide, the consumerism of electrical goods such as ipads, tablets and android phones. All of these electrical devices rely on a highly unethical mining industry that uses slave labour to mine and assemble electrical products in inhumane conditions; in addition to driving the destruction of the last cloud forests home of the highly endangered Silverback Gorilla populations in Africa. This is well illustrated by the story of the Silverback Gorillas in the African Congo.
The mining of Gold, Diamonds and Coltan, (Ta on the Periodic table-geological name – Columbite Tantalite), a mineral used in the microchips of every single new electronic device, cell phone or tablet and laptop, comes from the African Congo, in the Virungas National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The African Congo has a small area of biodiverse cloud forest ecosystem, where a small group of the world’s last pocket of remaining Silverback Gorillas which lend thanks to the work of Dian Fossey who was murdered on December the 26th 1985, her work was to preserve and protect these primates, which are critically threatened with extinction from poaching and a continually eroded habitat due to these existing ‘Conflict Minerals’ being extracted in the area. Including the mineral Coltan used for microchips, the western greed for constantly renewing cell phones and laptops, is responsible for this plundering. Other rare elements such as Indium are also depleting for the same reason –
”Devices like computers and smartphones. Indium, for example, is a silvery metal used to create touch screens for phones and computers. According to Cole-Hamilton, the world’s indium supply is “extremely thinly spread” across the planet and could soon dry up if we continue chucking out our old devices every few years”-LiveScience
According the the European EuChemS new Periodic table on the rarest elements, Coltan Ta is under serious threat of disappearing within the next hundred years. Coltan Tantalite is used primarily for the production of tantalum capacitors, used in every kind of electronic devices such as mobile phones.
Niobium and Coltan Tantalum have a wide range of uses, including refractive lenses for glasses, cameras, phones and printers. They are also used in semiconductor circuits, and capacitors for small electronic devices such as hearing aids, pacemakers, and mp3 players, as well as in computer hard drives, automobile electronics, and surface acoustic wave (SAW) filters for mobile phones. Coltan is also used to make high-temperature alloys for jet engines and other engine turbines.
Coltan can only be found in a few places in the world, one of which is in Australia, which was the world’s largest producer at Wodinga Tantalum mine in Western Australia, however they closed their mine in 2012 because it is cheaper to mine Coltan using child and adult slave labour in inhumane conditions in Africa’s Democratic Republic of Congo and exposing these working communities to toxic chemicals. To make matters worse for the Silverback Gorillas, the SOCO International energy company are pushing to extract gas and oil reserves from under Lake Edward in the National Park. All this, at the cost of one of the last greatest African forests and majestic Gorillas which have only been given an estimated 15 years of survival amidst the adversities they face through our lack of global responsibility to better manage conservation of critically endangered species, because minerals, gold, diamonds and oil are far more important to the world than saving the Silverback Gorillas and their forest home.
The fact that global mining companies can cut corners to make a bigger profit at the expense of an entire endangered species such as the Mountain Gorilla and at the expense of hard working African miners, who are exploited slave labourers,
shows that international environmental and human rights laws are far too flimsy and ineffective.
However, the Western world conveniently lacks humanitarian and environmental ethics in business, which in turn perpetuates slavery, species extinction and ecocide. This has come so far as corporations suing and imprisoning entrepreneurs and innovators whose mere crime is to combat human waste and planned obsolescence to attempt to create sustainable solutions.
Eric Lundgren, ecological entrepreneur was imprisoned for recycling computer circuit boards into reusable computers. Image credit-David Sprague
Eric Lundgren, a 33 year old e-waste entrepreneur, from Los Angeles, United States, was imprisoned in 2018 for his success in a business which achieved recycling of 41 million pounds of e-waste each year from major corporations such as IBM and Sprint.
Microsoft took Eric Lundgren to court where he was then served a sentence of 15 months in prison and had to pay a $50,000 fine on April the 11th 2018. Microsoft’s argument was that Lundgren could potentially damage their future sales of new computers and new software licenses, the court ruled in favour of Microsoft saying that he had infringed on Microsoft Corp. to the sum of $700,000.
Lundgren pleaded guilty, but he stated that the value of his discs to Microsoft was zero, as Microsoft, nor any computer manufacturers, sell them. He also explained that the discs could only be used to restore the software to computers already licensed for it. The licenses are good for the life of the computer.
Right-to-repair activists want legislation to remove the manufacturing and legal barriers that make it harder for consumers to fix their stuff. When people buy used devices and keep those devices working longer, fewer natural resources are needed for manufacturing and less e-waste ends up in landfills.
Planned Obsolescence needs to be revealed for what it is. People need to wake up to the damage corporations and consumers are causing to the environment and the perpetuation of slave labour, habitat destruction for mining and as a result species extinction.
First this year, the US Sanctions were on Gold in Venezuela, amid the financial and humanitarian crisis, where Venezuelans have been forced to flee the country for years without international help or intervention after financial and governmental collapse. Now, the US is stepping in, starting with sanctions on gold and this week, US sanctions are on oil and finally, de-recognition of Maduro as president and Trump’s coronation of Guaido as Venezuelan president – Al Capone redux .
This is a geopolitical tactical move that will also affect China, Venezuela has for decades been the largest exporter of oil even though it’s a small country in South America. One of the reasons the US has wanted to see its downfall in addition to co-opting its demise as with interfering with many Central and South American coops on a Machiavellian level, with the geopolitical strategies in place, US military base in Haiti, Mexican Gulf polluted and transformed into an industrial oil zone since the Mexican Gulf oil spill, US occupation of the oceans and Oil industry is present all the way down to Venezuela, possibly to hit China where it hurts cutting off China to Venezuelan Oil supplies will hit China very hard, as its biggest oil supplier has been Venezuela.
US control of Venezuela is intrinsic in the elite power games between the West and the East. The US wants to make sure China doesn’t overtake US power by 2025, which is predicted already by financial experts who say that China will become the global superpower if not soon at the latest by 2040 according to financial experts in Forbes, and the US will lose power since most of its finances has gone into military investments and it carries a huge debt in trillions. There are always years of geopolitical strategies involved in the crisis of any country, its not just by accident these things happen with planning and social engineering many decades and even a century in advance, hence predictive programming working so well.
Eric Lundgren, ecological entrepreneur was imprisoned for recycling computer circuit boards into reusable computers. Image credit-David Sprague
