National boundaries don’t matter to Earth’s eco-systems
By Letter to the Editor on September 3, 2019.
In regards to the mass-burning of the Amazonian rainforest, which produces 20% of Earth’s oxygen, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro tells the rest of the rightfully concerned world, “You have to understand that the Amazon is Brazil’s, not yours.” Earth’s eco-systems honour no national boundary. If only it were so, that the damage to the natural environment by morally and ethically corrupt governments and corporate puppet-masters was somehow poetically miraculously confined strictly to the owners’ territory. It’s like humanity is confined to a massive interstellar spaceship, owned and operated by the fossil fuel industry, but on which we’re all permanently confined; and while we’re adamantly arguing over finite resources and how much one should have to pay for it, the spaceship is burning and toxifying at locations not normally investigated – or else those areas are occupied thus claimed and controlled by one narrowminded possessive party. “Mind your own business,” asserted the Brazilian president, in what may be memorialized throughout the ages, if our species survives our own perverse collective nature. To quote Jacob Marley’sghost in rebutting Ebenezer Scrooge’s cold-cash-hearted mentality, “Business? Mankind was my business! Their common welfare was my business!” Frank Sterle Jr. White Rock, B.C. 8-7
