October 2014
Vol 14, No.10
EBOLA A SYMPTOM
OF
ECOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL COLLAPSE By Glen Barry
The surging Ebola epidemic is the result of broad-based ecological and social collapse including rainforest loss, overpopulation, poverty and war. This preventable environmental and human tragedy demonstrates the extent to which the world has gone dramatically wrong; as ecosystem collapse, inequity, grotesque injustice, religious extremism, nationalistic militarism, and resurgent authoritarianism threaten our species and planet’s very being.
In particular, the potential for Ebola outbreaks and threats from other emergent diseases is made worse by cutting down forests. Exponentially growing human populations and consumption – be it subsistence agriculture or mining for luxury consumer items – are pushing deeper into African old-growth forests where Ebola circulated before spillover into humans.
Any humane person is appalled by the escalating Ebola crisis, and let’s be clear expressing these concerns regarding causation is NOT an attempt to hijack a tragedy. Things happen for a reason, and Ebola was preventable, and future catastrophes of potentially greater magnitude can be foreseen and avoided by the truth. The single greatest truth underlying the Ebola tragedy is that humanity is systematically dismantling the ecosystems that make Earth habitable.
Poverty stricken communities in West Africa are increasingly desperate, and are eating infected “bushmeat” such as bats and gorilla, bringing them into contact with infected wildlife blood.
Increasingly fragmented forests, further diminished by climate change, are forcing bats to find other places to live that are often amongst human communities. Some 90% of West Africa’s original forests have already been lost. Over half of Liberia’s old-growth forests have recently been sold for industrial logging by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s post-war government. Only 4% of Sierra Leone’s forest cover remains and they are expected to totally disappear soon under the pressure of logging, agriculture, and mining. My recently published peer-reviewed scientific research on ecosystem loss and biosphere collapse indicates more natural ecosystems have been loss than the global environment can from infected animals causing the Ebola epidemic. Once human infection occurs, ecologically denuded, conflict Turn to next page
ARTICLES . HONG KONG PROTEST: WHY IMPERIALIST SUPPORT
‘DEMOCRACY’ MOVEMENT BY SARA FLOUNDERS............................................P 3
.UKRAINE AND NEO-NAZIS
.U.S. PREPARES FOR “GENERATIONAL” WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST BY PETER SYMONDS............................................P 7
. WAR, MEDIA PROPAGANDA AND THE POLICE
.WHAT IF ‘ISLAMIC STATE DIDN’T EXIST?’
BY RAMZY BAROUD..............................................P9
BY WILLIAM BLUM.............................................P11
STATE BY PROF. JAMES F. TRACY............................P 15