Actually there are many, many other paths.
Many paths to the continued loss of biodiversity, many paths to destruction and ruin. Far fewer paths to an ecologically sustainable Earth, abundant with life, none of which involve industrial capitalism.
In 100 years everyone on this forum will be dead, just let that sink in...... do we really care that the planet becomes venus? We will be dead.
Witness the shallow, suicidal logic of the capitalist. "If it doesn't affect ME, why should I care?" Friend, that logic allows for slavery, genocide, torture, rape, and all things horrible to persist. Don't you think it'd be nice if we did our part to leave this place a little better off than we found it?
If you don't believe in God, then most definitely why would you care.
How about ethics, hard of it? Reason is my god, and reason demands ethics.
In addition to being an advocate for an ideology directly responsible for tens of millions of non-war deaths and untold human misery, Myerson has revealed himself as something of an ignoramus concerning communism’s shocking record on environmental issues. Not only a blight on the human condition, communism’s impact on the planet’s ecology has proven consistently ghastly.
When the Berlin Wall came down and the Iron Curtain was finally lifted to expose the inner workings of communism to Western eyes, one of the more shocking discoveries was the nightmarish scale of environmental destruction. The statistics for East Germany alone tell a horrific tale: at the time of its reunification with West Germany an estimated 42 percent of moving water and 24 percent of still waters were so polluted that they could not be used to process drinking water, almost half of the country’s lakes were considered dead or dying and unable to sustain fish or other forms of life, and only one-third of industrial sewage along with half of domestic sewage received treatment.
An estimated 44 percent of East German forests were damaged by acid rain — little surprise given that the country produced proportionally more sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide, and coal dust than any other in the world. In some areas of East Germany the level of air pollution was between eight and twelve times greater than that found in West Germany, and 40 percent of East Germany’s population lived in conditions that would have justified a smog warning across the border. Only one power station in East Germany had the necessary equipment to clean sulphur from emissions.
Sten Nilsson, a Swedish forest ecologist who was kicked out of East Germany in 1986 for his efforts at collecting data on the health of its forests, said in April 1990 that many forests were “dead, completely” and described the country as “on the verge of total ecological collapse.” The environmental policy of the communist government, according to then Environment Minister Karl-Hermann Steinberg in 1990, “was not only badly designed but didn’t exist.”
Perhaps nowhere suffered more grievous environmental harm than the town of Bitterfeld. Translated as “Bitterfield” in English, its name under the communist regime would prove apt. Pronounced by Der Spiegel as Europe’s dirtiest town, Greenpeace as well as government statistics suggested it may have been the filthiest in the entire world. Home to a variety of manufacturing facilities which spewed a witch’s brew of chemical and industrial byproducts into the air and water, Bitterfeld was nothing less than an environmental horror show. This is how the Washington Post’s Marc Fisher described the town in the spring of 1990:
Here, rivers flow red from steel mill waste, drinking water contains many times the European Community standards for heavy metals and other pollutants, and the air has killed so many trees — 75 percent in the Bitterfeld area — that even the most ambitious clean-up efforts now being planned would not reverse the damage. East Germany fills the air with sulfur dioxide at almost five times the West German rate and more than twice the Polish rate, according to a recent study. One chemical plant near here dumps 44 pounds of mercury into the Saale river each day — 10 times as much as the West German chemical company BASF pumps into the Rhine each year.Writing for The New York Times in September of that year, reporter Marlise Simons said of Bitterfeld that “[t]he air stings, and the water in brooks and rivers has turned to syrup[.]” And a 1994 article in the UK newspaper The Independent recalled that in communist times the town’s leaves would turn brown by June, a local guest-house featured “gas-masks lining the walls of the lobby,” and that in the years since reunification “Bitterfeld’s children were sent for up to a month each year to the coast or the mountains” to give their lungs a break from the relentless assault.
East Germany was hardly the exception to the rule, with environmental degradation being the norm throughout the communist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Sourcing from articles in Time and Business Week, a 1992 Cato Journal paper noted that “[c]hildren from the Upper Silesia area of Poland have been found to have five times more lead in their blood than children from Western European cities,” while half of the region’s children suffered from pollution-related illnesses. Some areas of Romania, the paper added, experienced such heavily polluted air that horses were only allowed to stay for two or three years.
A similar story was found in the Soviet Union. Writing for the now-defunct (and Ralph Nader-founded) Multinational Monitor in September 1990, James Ridgeway noted widespread pollution of both the air and drinking water:
40% of the Soviet people live in areas where air pollutants are three to four times the maximum allowable levels. Sanitation is primitive. Where it exists, for example in Moscow, it doesn’t work properly. Half of all industrial waste water in the capital city goes untreated. In Leningrad, nearly half of the children have intestinal disorders caused by drinking contaminated water from what was once Europe’s most pristine supply.A 1996 Russia country study published by the Library of Congress’ Federal Research Division described the country’s air as “among the most polluted in the world,” and found that 75 percent of its surface water was polluted and 50 percent of all water not potable according to 1992 quality standards.
While the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor probably counts as the country’s best-known environmental disaster, it was but one of numerous episodes of serious environmental damage which plagued the Soviet nuclear sector. Wikipedia describes a 1957 explosion at the Mayak nuclear reactor as resulting in “long-term contamination of an area of more than 800 to 20,000 square kilometers” with 10,000 people forced to evacuate and an unknown number of deaths related to the accident. Unsurprisingly, it also notes during the plant’s construction that “[e]nvironmental concerns were not taken seriously.”
This casual approach to nuclear issues extended to the country’s military, where the Soviet fleet — the largest nuclear-powered navy in the world — opted to sometimes dispose of reactors by simply dumping them into the ocean:
A Russian government report acknowledged in March 1993, that “during the period of 1965 to 1988 the Northern Fleet had dumped four reactor compartments with eight reactors (three containing damaged fuel) in the Abrosimov Gulf in 20 to 40 meters of water.” Six other compartments, containing nine reactors in all, had also been dumped into the water in the 1960s and 1970s.Wikipedia also notes that the improper removal of control rods on board a Victor-class submarine outside Vladivostok in 1985 led to an explosion, the “release of large amounts of radioactivity,” and ten deaths, while a 1961 nuclear accident on board the K-19 submarine — later immortalized in a 2002 movie starring Harrison Ford — resulted in the contamination-related deaths of 22 crew members within two years of the incident and radiation poisoning of the environment. After the vessel’s nuclear reactors were removed and replaced, the Soviets predictably decided to dispose of the original compartment used to house them by dropping it into the Kara Sea.
The sea was also a favored method for the disposal of nuclear waste as noted by this 1992 New York Times article:
Of possibly greater concern [than the nuclear reactors disposed in the ocean] is the radioactive waste dumped at sea. Russian authorities told Dr. Charles Hollister [of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution] that 11,000 to 17,000 waste containers, holding 61,407 curies of radioactivity, were dumped off Novaya Zemlya from 1964 to 1990. In addition, 165,000 cubic meters of liquid waste were dumped in the Barents Sea west of Novaya Zemlaya from 1961 to 1990. For comparison, the Chernobyl accident released about 86,000,000 curies of radioactivity.
[In addition], Dr. Hollister reckons the amount of nuclear material within some of the [four Soviet submarines lost at sea] at seven times that in the ill-fated Chernobyl reactor.[...]
Central economic planning is also largely responsible for the devastation of the Aral Sea. Once the world’s fourth-largest lake, its massive decline can be directly traced to directives issued by top economic officials in Moscow:
In the early 1960, the Soviet government decided the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea, the Amu Darya in the south and the Syr Darya in the northeast, would be diverted to irrigate the desert, in an attempt to grow rice, melons, cereals, and cotton. This was part of the Soviet plan for cotton, or “white gold”, to become a major export.
…From 1960 to 1998, the [Aral Sea]’s surface area shrank by approximately 60%, and its volume by 80%…The amount of water it had lost is the equivalent of completely draining Lake Erie and Lake Ontario.
Camels and rusting ships on the bed of the Aral Sea:
http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/13/if-you-think-communism-is-bad-for-people-check-out-what-it-did-to-the-environment/
