Stop War Against Earth
By Dr Arvind Kumar
The ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere are small when compared to the bigger war being waged against the planet Earth. This war is rooted in an economy that falls short of respecting ecological and ethical limits – limits to inequality, limits to injustice, limits to greed and economic concentration. Sinister designs of few corporations and powerful countries to control the earth’s resources have been instrumental in transforming the planet into a supermarket in which everything is for sale. As Vandana Shiva, famous environmentalist has rightly put it, “They want to sell our water, genes, cells, organs, knowledge, cultures and future.”
The war against the earth begins in the mind. And nowhere is this more vivid than in the metaphors and methods on which industrial, agricultural and food production is based. Factories that produced poisons and explosives to kill people during wars were transformed into factories producing agri-chemicals after the wars. Violence to the soil, to biodiversity, to water, to atmosphere, to farms and farmers produces a warlike food system that is unable to feed people. One billion people are hungry. Two billion suffer food-related diseases – obesity, diabetes, hypertension and cancers.
The richer one gets, the poorer one becomes ecologically and culturally. Lamenting that the growth of affluence, measured in money, is leading to a growth in poverty at the material, cultural, ecological and spiritual levels; Vandana Shiva rightly points that making peace with the earth has now become a survival imperative for our species.
