BROKEN RELATIONSHIPS

Imagine you are a visitor from space hovering over a small blue planet. You have noticed life, at least something that moves all over the place. That is all you know. You are a visitor from an alien galaxy.

Everything down on earth seems to explode, time has no power because you are human after all, and all this take place in your imagination. The earth transforms before your eyes. Just keep the perspective as if you were seeing everything from a distance

At the time you discovered planet Earth on your space jaunt, industrial fumes had already begun to mix their dark shades with the clouds. A web of roads, train tracks, and cables fragmenting land and polluting the sea. Almost everywhere, large monocultures shown veins of asphalt and concrete. Everything seems to be traceable to a dominated, invasive organism. Is the earth infected by its own evolution of life? The temperature rises and toxic substances eats into every nook and cranny.

As you are aware and enlightened, you probably already know this, but you may not realise clear enough that mammals, kept captive in industrial animal husbandry, together make up 96% of the mass of mammals on earth. Wild mammals make up only 4%.¹

Wild vertebrates (mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles) have declined by almost 70% since 1970. In freshwater habitats, the decline is over 80%. The development of agriculture and industry has meant that birds in industrial production (‘poultry’) have a greater mass compared to the biomass of all wild birds combined.²

Humans have multiplied exponentially, meaning their number has accelerated. In the 1000s, we were around two hundred and fifty million. Six hundred years later five hundred million. That doubling took six hundred years.

In 1800 a billion. One hundred and fifty years later, around 1950, two and a half billion. Fifty years later, as the new millennium dawned, 6.1 billion, more than doubling in just fifty years.

In 2020 7.7 billion, estimated to be 8.5 billion in 2030.

Man himself, one of the great apes, survived through thousands of years without degrading his surroundings, but when mountains, seas, plants and animals turned into resources, there was nothing left to show respect and reverence. Profit has become a value of its own.

Earth seems to harbour a band of robbers who greedily drain the earth of its life and substances, without regard for future. There are other beings who also want to live. It is something fundamental that has broken when the foundation and prerequisite of existence is transformed into a resource, a commodity on a market. Viable cultures do not go against nature.

A living forest is not a log store, it is a universe of its own, a home for countless other beings. There is rustling and crawling everywhere because there are so many places to be.

On the belly of a tree lying on the ground, the world is a damp gloom. In the dark moisture, in close contact with the ground, mushrooms, slaters, and earwigs live and thrive. Above the trunk, in open air where there is sun and light, it is more like a desert, arid and hot. In a living forest, there are trees of many species and different ages, shrubs and herbs, dense vegetation, clearings, variety and diversity.

Uprooted trees, dry sedges, rotting trunks, moss-covered rocks, alder, aspen, spruce, birch, willow, saw-thistle, orchids, bellflower, wintergreen, water avens, Lady's mantle, oak ferns - thousands of species.

In comparison, a pine or spruce plantation is a biological desert. Sweden has never had so few living forests as today.

A modern plantation consists of a variety of trees of the same age, few herbs and peaty micro-life. The biological balance of tree plantations is easily disturbed and they are open to large-scale attacks. The lands were never this species-poor and uniform before modern clear-cutting farming took over.

A plantation exists for one reason only, to be a resource that can be converted into raw materials and money. After felling, the ground is left with wheel tracks from heavy forest machines, cracked and scratched rocks, and in the worst case deep plough ditches of land preparation.

After felling, the roots of the trees rot and decomposers replace the life-stimulating micro-life. For today's managers, living nature is only of interest when it is dead.

Some want to save nature by describing it in economic terms, and thus highlight the economic losses that devastation causes. They call nature's functions 'ecosystem services' and describe them in economic terms.

This is surely done with the best of goodwill, but is economic arguments really the best way to reverse greed? The concept of ‘ecosystem services’ make it sound as if nature exists only for humans.

Furthermore, isn't it a wretched way thinking that the only way to people's hearts is through self-interest? If the intention is to awaken awareness of the value of nature, surely one would least of all want the value to become synonymous with accounts, derivatives, interest rates and accounting entries?

There are dangers in morality based on logic and utility. All it takes is to break the logic or show that the benefit is missing, then the idea will fall apart.

Let me give some examples of statements that will demonstrate genuine respect turned into resource-driven utilitarianism.

“When the forest is cleared, you should make sure that there are tree trunks left for owls to nest in, because the owls help us control pests.”

I once heard a lecturer say: “All people have the same value because all people have equal needs”.

“We have to protect our children because it is the children who take care of us when we get older”.

These statements consist of two parts: first, a statement about a moral attitude towards something or someone, then a statement that explains why the first statement applies. The consequence will be that all that needs is to question the explanation to make the basic claim itself to be questioned. Wouldn't the owls be worthy of respect if they didn't go after vermin? Does the idea of human value fail if you can show that not all people have the same needs? Wouldn't we protect the children if they didn't take care of us when we get older?

If you are serious, there is only one way to say it: without instrumental justification.

Owls have a right to have somewhere to nest
All people have equal value
We must protect the children

There are values that neither can nor should be justified, moral values that our time needs more than ever. Determining economic values of ecosystem services does not lead to reverence for nature.

Industrial society has indeed brought about a magical transformation of our living conditions. Children of today take products for granted that could hardly even been imagined fifty years ago.

The magic of industrial products has poured in like a tsunami, reshaping everyday life with the promise of an even richer future. Few think what it costs people in exploited countries, indigenous peoples and living nature. Mingled with the abundance, in the brilliance of all the new things: Industrial society was from start a civilization of broken relationships.

Already a hundred years ago, there were voices telling about the need for us to correct the course.

A rational thought, without contact with the heart, is no longer rational. It is ironic that the most intelligent and versatile creature the earth has ever created is working so stubbornly for the abyss.

Everyday life in industrial society lets in very little of the reality on which it is based. The goods on the shop shelves lie there without background stories. The pork packages say nothing about bored, idle, frustrated pigs suffering through their short lives until they are killed in agony.

The milk packet says nothing about a calf that wasn't allowed to live with its mother, nothing about a mother who is repeatedly forcibly inseminated and then deprived of her child and eventually, as thanks for her services, brought to an early death, was cut up, wrapped in plastic and marked with a price tag.

The egg packaging does not tell that more than ten thousand rooster chickens are killed every day in Sweden since they are considered a by-product in the production of egg laying hens. The law allows killing them with rapidly rotating blows. You simply make sure that the conveyor belt knocks them off into a stainless steel hopper with a grinder at the bottom.

Happy chefs prepare chicken dishes from birds that, during their five weeks of life, have been forced to grow heavier than their skeletons can bear. You don't hear anything about broken wings and birds that die during transport to the slaughterhouse.

The designed packaging is not reminiscent of environmentally destructive mining and poorly paid workers.

Industrial society's grip on existence means that not even a committed and well-intentioned person can avoid being a participant in a game with hidden sides that no one in their right mind wants to stand for.

The lack of context is not only about something as abstract as the way of looking at the world, it has a very tangible effect on society. The lack of a comprehensive view means that Sweden can write down its carbon dioxide emissions because the emissions from imported goods take place outside Sweden's borders. In The Myth of the Machine, Alf Hornborg writes, “When we exchange our money for goods, we rarely think that what we exchange are hours from our own lives for hours from other people's lives, and for resources from other people's landscapes.” ³

In agricultural society, the connection between producer and product still existed, but that connection faded away and is no longer visible in industrial society.

In our day-to-day consciousness, there is no connection between a hamburger and a cow who no longer performed well enough was terrified herded into a stall without escape and gets a bolt shot in the forehead and her throat cut open and the body is dismembered, ground up and sold over the counter between a couple of slices of bread in a street stall.

If you see the world as a resource to enrich yourself, there will be no wild forests and pristine mountains and no place for other creatures.

Now there is almost no untouched nature left. Three quarters of the earth's solid surface is adapted to man. Since 1990, an average (low estimate) of just over ten million hectares of forestland has been cleared ⁴ to make way for pasture, mines, oil palm plantations, soy plantations and other human activities.

Ten million hectares is just a number, it is hard to imagine what it means. Imagine a logging machine a hundred meters wide busy 24/7 at a speed of almost 115 km/h (70 mph) and has been doing so non-stop since 1990.⁵ This is an alternative view of logging ten million hectares in a year.

People shovel, trashes down with matter, light and sound. Oceans are full of ships and plastic, leaving lesser and lesser room for other creatures. It is not an fallacious to regard Earth as possessed by a parasite. Not even a wise parasite, but one prepared to kill the body that gives it life.

Man's impact on the earth has led to the proposal of the designation ‘anthropocene’—the age of man—for our current epoch. Edward O Wilson proposed ‘Eremocene’—the age of solitude.