“Some river! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows. ‘Anyone who falls into the Cuyahoga does not drown, ‘ Cleveland’s citizens joke grimly. ‘He decays.’ … The Federal Water Pollution Control Administration dryly notes: ‘The lower Cuyahoga has no visible signs of life, not even low forms such as leeches and sludge worms that usually thrive on wastes.’ It is also – literally a fire hazard.”
– TIME magazine, August 1, 1969
In June of 1969, pollutants in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire, and it is to this event that some historians trace the beginning of the environmental movement in the United States of America.
This week the mainstream American media have been very timid in their reports on cases where thousands of birds have literally dropped dead out of the sky in Arkansas and an adjoining state, and where thousands of fish reportedly turned up dead in nearby waterways.
1969 was not the first time the Cuyahoga had caught fire. The Cuyahoga had been suffering from a process of unmitigated pollution which began back in the nineteenth century with the absence of regulations to protect the environment from manufacturing industries, especially steel mills.
A couple years ago, Belize’s historic Sibun River began turning green because of manufacturing pollution. There have been other rivers and waterways here which have been similarly poisoned. The Belize politicians are in a pickle where these matters are concerned, because it is businessmen and industrialists who provide the campaign contributions they need to win elections. The Belizeans who live on the banks of these waterways are usually poor people. They have no money to give to political parties, and, of course, rivers and creeks and lagoons can’t talk for themselves.
As a life form, man got himself into this contradictory situation where he is destroying the very land and sea and rivers and air which gave him life, because man has been focused on technological development and man has been focused on war. Writing way back in 1929, Winston Churchill remarked on the fact that modern equipment and methods of warfare were taking man to a point where man could destroy himself and the planet which gave him life. It was not until 16 years later that the United States, in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, proved Churchill’s point for all of us to see.
If you want to be fair, you have to concede that terrorists do not only come from Yemen and Palestine and Somalia. There are terrorists who wear the finest of three-piece suits on Wall Street. They are terrorists because they sacrifice human lives, albeit over a period of time, in the pursuit of profits, and they do so, they murder people in cold blood.
Look, my personal opinions are not that important. The important thing is for the facts and the information to be made available to our people so that the Belizean people can increase their knowledge, engage in intelligent conversation, and make sensible decisions. There are some media systems in this country which will never discuss such issues: they are afraid of losing corporate advertizing revenues. In fact, some Belizean media systems behave as if they actually believe everything the globalist business predators propose.
Presently, the most vital question is what’s going on in our schools with reference to environmental matters. Personally, I can remember when a Jesuit scholastic by the name of Richard Hadel entered a third form St. John’s College classroom with a book by an American lady scientist named Rachel Carson. This would have been perhaps 1962. The book was Silent Spring, which became a landmark work in the progressive, non-corporate world.
Rachel Carson was arguing from that time, fifty years ago, that various chemicals being sprayed into the air as insecticides and pesticides were poisoning fishes and birds and animals in the food chain. The most controversial of all these chemicals was DDT, because it was being used all over the world, including British Honduras, as the main weapon against the malaria mosquito. Carson argued that DDT was the cause of a surge in the phenomenon of bird eggs which were so fragile they collapsed at the slightest touch.
I do not recall Richard Hadel pursuing this subject for any length of time, and I certainly do not recall any other teacher taking up the issue of the environment up to the time I left SJC for good in 1965. It may be that Belizean schools have become progressive, but I doubt it. The reaction time of educated Belizeans to issues of our land, sea, rivers and air has always been delayed, and that reaction has been muted.
I remember that in the very early 1970s the fish in the Haulover Creek, which splits Belize City into two, began to die. It was because of the waste from a nail factory, owned by a foreign businessman, to which the ruling PUP politicians had granted a development concession. The fledgling Amandala attacked this issue all out. There was nothing said in the other media outlets of that era.
No matter how great you may believe homo sapiens to be, this you must absolutely know and concede: when the fishes and the birds begin to die, it is homo sapiens who is next. This one is especially for you, Bill Lindo.
“The earth and myself are of one mind. The measure of the land and the measure of our bodies are the same …”
– Joseph, Nez Percé chief
“We sit in the lap of our Mother. From her we, and all other living things, come. We shall soon pass, but the place where we now rest will last forever.”
– Luther Standing Bear, Lakota Sioux chief
“This we know: the earth does not belong to Man, Man belongs to the earth.”
– Seattle, Suquamish chief
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.