It’s 6:15am on the 16^th of May, 2013, and here on Waiheke Island I am just making some tea and eating an apple J I am reading a Google article about Europe, and in particular the Eurozone, a financial grouping of 25 countries over there. What this article is talking about is the bad state of many of the countries in the Eurozone. Some of the numbers are quite staggering.  As an example, talking about unemployment, overall, it’s 12.1% as an average across all of those countries, and in Greece is 27.2% and in Spain it’s 26.7%. Those are all fairly grim numbers. I’ve given to considering a term, which is ‘world economy.’  We do have a world economy now and it’s an economy that operates above, beyond and around governments.

We tend to think that we live in democracies where we can go vote and bring into power the candidates that we ourselves choose, but a few years ago with Italy and Greece in severe financial trouble (for various reasons), they spent money they didn’t have based on financial projections that turned out to be incorrect. The people had absolutely no say in this – they didn’t choose this. The people high up in the financial and political institutions did. It went way beyond anyone in the streets, and now the unemployment is incredibly high. Both in Greece and Italy, the prime ministers were forced to resign and were replaced (without any public vote whatsoever, and with little media coverage of course) with someone else that was placed there by the financial elites. This extremely important even has gone largely unnoticed, which begs us to ask the question – are these democracies in actual fact? Based on these actions, we can say that no, they are not.

            Now, here we are with Europe in trouble and not getting any better, and the United States isn’t far behind. The debt is approaching seventeen trillion dollars, and there’s only one of two things that can happen here.  The debt can either be paid back, or it can be forgiven. Here’s the root of the whole issue of growth: Almost all government in the world are based on Ponzi schemes, which means that as long as there is enough money coming in to pay that which is going out, everything is alright. If there’s not enough money coming in to pay what is going out, it’s not alright, and that’s what is happening now with most governments worldwide. All that Ponzi scheme behavior that has been going on for hundreds of years and gotten worse in the last two centuries, has been maintained by constant growth. As long as economies are growing faster than the money is needed to be either printed or paid back, financial institutions will be able to exist. Here’s the news readers: constant growth can only continue as long as the consumption of resources continues to increase, which is why we are told to buy, buy, buy.  The United States economy is based 70% on people buying things in stores, new things. 

So here we have the world economy based on growth, growth is based totally on manufacturing and consumption, and the resources that we’re using for these goods are running out – not just fossil fuels but all sorts of other materials that we take from the earth. There are some mitigated things going on – recycling is becoming more prevalent, but unfortunately this is not enough to plug the gap in the US economy, which needs people to keep buying in order to stay afloat in any way.  There are some things that can be done however – we need to use what we already have rather than continuing to buy more and more things, because very soon there won’t be enough resources to manufacture new things anyway.

            It’s a really important point in history, because we’re in a situation where we need constant growth, but it literally can’t continue. We will be forced into behaving much better with the earth’s resources than we’ve been used to, but there will be major impacts, and I wish I knew exactly what those were.  The running up of debt and printing of money as we’ve been doing in our march forward as human beings simply does not have a future. 

Do I ramble on a lot? Of course But understand that this information is very important to take into consideration so that we may all prepare better for what will come, and perhaps even lessen the blow by doing so.

The reason why I’m relating these two experiences is because a lot of the water that is used here in Southern California actually comes from the Colorado River and more specifically from the Rocky Mountains and the melt from the snowfalls and the ice.  It was interesting to me to be in Colorado witnessing the water in the form of snow that would soon end up on the lush grass I would be standing on a week later, as Southern California most definitely does not have enough rain to make the grass as full and vibrant as it was. To be fair, it had rained a little recently, enough to possibly bring dying grass just back to life.

It’s an interesting thought, because as a general trend, the world’s water supply, although not diminishing (because it’s been the same for millions of years of course), is ending up in different places like in the ocean as salt water and others that are inaccessible to human beings as I’ve mentioned in other blog pieces. Water is a vital resource to us, and unfortunately many of us don’t realize how important it is – we turn on the faucet and out comes the water.  I was like this until my later years living in Los Angeles when I became more aware of how fragile the whole system is. I became more conservationist, and when I came to live in New Zealand, I was happy to know that many people there live off of rain water as much as they can through catching it in tanks and filtering it for their homes.

As a side note, I’d like to write about Auckland and what it is currently doing to supply water to its residents and businesses each day. Auckland Rainfall is 49 inches per year and its population is 1.4 million people. Auckland has 10 dams/lakes that supply most of the water there. The combined reservoir capacity of Auckland’s dams is over 100 billion litres (26.5 million gallons). There are also 3 rivers that supply Auckland with water. Since 2002 the Waikato River has been supplying around 75 million litres (19.9 million gallons) of water to metropolitan Auckland each day, meeting around eight percent of the area’s needs in 2010/2011 (total 248.8 million gallons). There are also springs (wells-bores) from which water is supplied. The largest, Onehunga, was developed by the former Onehunga Borough Council.  Water is pumped from the Onehunga Springs; it is then treated and pumped to the level required for supply to the Onehunga area. It can supply 21 million litres a day (5.65 million gallons).

In comparison, Los Angeles Co Rainfall 13.5 inches per year and has 9.9 million people! The county of Los Angles uses 190 billion gallons of water annually, (3.65 billion gallons per week)

The Colorado River Aqueduct uses these plants to bring the water up 1,600 feet through the course of the aqueduct.  The California Water Project goes uphill 1,900 feet, which is called the single longest water lift in the world. On average 600,000 homes could be powered by the power that is used annually, based on the averages over the last 10 years. These figures are simply mind-boggling to me.

To have been standing on this lush grass in a dry place, and thinking of the irony of being where the water for it came from right in the midst of a rare May snowfall was very intriguing to me, as though I was where I needed to be in order to make a realization by witnessing the reality directly, seeing for myself what was going on rather than reading about it or watching a news program on it. I’ve touched on these subjects before, but I thought this was a worthy restatement through what I felt was an important experience.  I hope that you are able to become more and more aware of these things as I am becoming and incorporate the lessons from these into your own life, conversations and actions J Thank you!

    The reality of things is that most people can’t just stop depending on fossil fuels. Having said that, as we go on using fossil fuels, we are progressively ruining our world – particularly the more aggressive and invasive practices of getting them such as fracking. So why is it that not only are we using fossil fuels, but actually investing in them, when they are ruining the world for future generations?  I think the answer is that most people don’t actually see it in this way. One of the main reasons for this is that the actual stock market is incredibly abstracted.  Typically people who want to invest go through a stock broker or through the internet, but a lot of what gets invested is not that obvious to the investor.  We could talk about the whole way that markets evolved, but the reality of it is that it is a widely used mechanism to finance companies, with the main point being gaining money personally from the investments that are made.

   My thought on this is that, people don’t set out to invest in destroying the world, but they are not digging deep enough to understand what their money is being invested in. There is one other point, which I have detailed before.  We’re getting to the stage where the majority of investments in the stock market are from a very small percentage of the world’s population, which is making it very elitist, making the rich more wealthy, and the poor more poor. What we need to do is know where are money is going, as when we have no control over it, it will go to the companies and technologies that are chosen by who knows whom, and most likely those that are causing the most damage in the world today. My advice to you if you invest your money is to divert it to the companies that are doing good for the world and seeking eco-friendly and eco-promoting technologies and practices. Divest your investments from fossil fuel companies, from mining companies, from agribusiness organizations and invest in a sustainable future.

I would like to speak of the aquifers and the water table and what happens to them, what can happen to them, and how important they are to us. The reason why I am bringing this up is because Atrazine is used widely in the United States and other countries, predominantly for keeping undesirable plants from growing in corn fields, but the down side of that is that Atrazine enters the water aquifers when it rains or just via normal seepage. Some of the results have been that it disrupts the reproductive systems of amphibians, increases the risk of breast and prostate cancers, can be responsible for birth defects and prenatal death, low birth weights, premature births, and increases the toxic effect when combined with other chemicals.  We are back in this situation where we’re marinated in carcinogens of one kind or another, with more and more coming into our awareness, usually after a few or very many have already been adversely affected. This makes me think how even more important it is to live closer to the Earth as we do on Waiheke, where we live off of the water that falls from the skies. It seems to me that that’s a much safer way of life.  It’s a better way as well, as there are many chemicals that we don’t get exposed to there.

                Atrazine is only one of the majorly disruptive toxins that is leaching into the water supply that humans live off of in the US as well as other countries. It’s not worth it. Let us look to safer, more natural farming methods that don’t pollute the water supply and cause severe health issues to our children, adults or elderly, and look for safer methods in all that we do.  It is vital to the future of our children who will have to live to provide for their children, as well as all animals, plants and living beings.

What these things have brought me to think about is that market-based finances and economics and so on which most of the world is based on at the moment are failing us, and they’re failing us because we have the progressive ruination of the world as a result of the unethical pursuit of profits, which anyone with even a mildly open mind can see is going on (more and more animals are extinct or endangered, the weather is changing, collapsing economies etc.). So what really sticks in my mind about the two articles relating to the markets is that if it is that those market mechanisms are pushing us in ever-worsening directions, be it via climate change, worshipping of processed foods, increased use of genetically modified organisms, none of these things are of any benefit to us health-wise. My opinion is, is that they are failing us in every way, to the extent that they are causing severe damage to the very environment that we live in, which doesn’t make any sense to me. They are making the world a much more difficult place to live in, so how can that make any sense?  How can making money in this way make any sense to anyone if the world isn’t a good place to live in? As someone has said before, the rich went down just as fast as the poor on the Titanic. It doesn’t matter how much money you amass – if the Earth is uninhabitable, what in Heaven’s name is the worth of money? Of course, it gets worse if we start talking about the war industry corporations.  There is nothing constructive about creating weapons to maim and kill one another. It’s totally and utterly negative and totally and utterly unbeneficial. The military industrial complex itself is driven by the stock markets. I’m working on a book series with Alexandra Bwye called Blue Marble based around the discoveries of two animal friends who move into another world where the evolution of that world took a constructive path, a path that ours has not.

I’ll close this blog with this: Many people who are rich or big in the financial world are worshipped. It is totally wrong and without common sense to worship other human beings, and not only to worship them, but to then allow their children to inherit that worship when they pass away, as with monarchies. We shouldn’t have worshipped them in the first place and we certainly should not be allowing that to pass on to the following generations.

I read an article recently about an area in South Central LA where they’re trying to create a gardening community there where they can grow the food in the land that’s available, even in the side of the road next to a footpath! Anything that’s got dirt can grow edible food.  Yes, the sadness is that we don’t help our children to eat as well as they should.  I have a friend that I admire who feeds her son amazing food like fresh fruit, avocadoes and quinoa, and he loves it because he’s grown up on it.  He doesn’t eat any bad food at all, and he’s not missing anything!  This is the tradgedy – when we eat processed or fast food, we tend to subject our children to it as well – please don’t do this!  They don’t have to have their palates altered to this way of eating, nor should they ever. I’ve seen it so often in families, where adults subject their children to their poor eating habits, and I find this incredibly unfair to the innocents who are put into this way with no say.  The processed and fast foods they are eating are laced with unhealthy fats, refined sugars, extremely acidic salts and toxic colorings – all things that are extremely unhealthy. It’s as unhealthy as smoking – becoming habit forming and addictive even. There are all sorts of ramifications – here’s just one:  if we have more weight on our bodies than we need, it’s going to damage our organs and joints.

I’ll finish this point with something that came to me years ago.  When people ask me what my main goal in life is, I answer that it is to die healthy. That’s how it should be, and it’s possible for all of us.  If we eat badly, and it’s hard to stop, at least do not bring children into this world eating badly as well. It’s not necessary, and will very deeply harm their future.  Our mission as humanity is not to give our children money, to give them mansions and cars and power.  It is to make the world better for our children, make them healthier than we are, and just increase their quality, not quantity of life all around.

As I was waking up this morning, I was thinking about health. A lot of my posts are interlinked in one way or another, and this is no different in that regard. It’s inevitable really, as in these later years in my life what I’m trying to do is just lay out some of the things I’ve observed in part of my life. I deeply care about the future, though I don’t know how much longer I will be around, whether it’s a day or 50 years, though when you get down to it, nobody knows really.

On the subject of health, personally my one ‘weakness’ if you could call it that, is vertigo, which comes back to me every now and then. I can deal with it at the time with certain exercises, but otherwise there’s nothing I can do to prevent it.  So I met somebody here in New Zealand the other day who works in healthcare software, an area that I used to work in in fact years ago. He said something that was interesting to me, as I’d heard it before in England. He said not to use the healthcare system here unless you have to, as it was broken, a way that many people feel in the UK. The truth is, however, is that many people do have to use it, and I am not a fan of elitism – I don’t think there should be two systems, nor that healthcare should be a business entity in any sense of the word.  It is total nonsense to make money from people’s health, or lack of it.  I know it’s a burden for government to provide healthcare, but that’s what taxes are for.  If you mention socialized medicine, there’s an incredible uproar from the people, but in my opinion I think this is because people have been brainwashed to think that socialized medicine is a bad thing. In reality, if we’re paying taxes, why would they not be providing the most important, basic life-support system there is?  Medicine should be provided by governments, not private entities. I think we’re seeing the extreme example of that in the USA – the healthcare system there is broken and getting worse; there are millions of people who don’t have any insurance at all, there are many documented on-going mistakes that get made, and the annual amount of money that is getting spent in healthcare is mind-boggling – it’s larger than the economy of many countries!  And it’s not getting better – it’s getting worse!

Just imagine becoming ill, you go to get treatment, and you’re denied because you’re ill.  You’re told to try again when you’re not ill, so that they can then treat you when you become ill- it’s utter nonsense!  This is how the healthcare system basically works in the US, and I find this completely inhumane.

(…to be continued)

                This article that I mentioned sums up the absolute irresponsibility of the attitudes of a lot of people in the corporate world of the United States to what we’re doing to the ecology there by de facto and proxy to the rest of the world. I’ll read a little of it here to exemplify what I mean.  Local leaders say Keystone XL will be good for Cushing’s economy. On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Brent Thompson, executive director of the Cushing Chamber of Commerce, remarked on the thick smell of petroleum that fills the air here. “Smells like money to me,” he said. “God, I love it. Create them jobs, guys!”  This is so irresponsible and literally bordering on the insane.  We’re moving into a time in some ways where the USA is making the Roman Empire look like a tea party.  I read something else very disturbing, that as India tries to move more to a solar power base, which makes total sense (as India gets a lot of sunshine), that the US government is trying to sabotage the Indian government from subsidizing the move to solar energy.  This is totally nonsensical – the level of greed and avarice that is going on in the US is beyond belief to me. It’s a sad thing to me as I lived there for 21 years and enjoyed many wonderful times with my family, but I would find it very hard to live in anymore.  I even find it hard to visit these days, as it is becoming a very dark place in my opinion.  I see the standard of living in the US and the rest of the world aspiring to it, and what that’s doing is it’s driving us to ruin the ecology of the world.  I absolutely believe that eco-cide is one of the worst crimes and really should be treated as such.

                Speaking of the Second World War which was largely driven by the Nazis and Hitler, and also included the Japanese and Italy in opposition to my country, England where I was born and raised, after the war there were war crime trials – the Nuremburg Trials, upon which people were found guilty and executed as such. If there were trials for war crimes, why are there not trials for what is equally, if not more serious – the crimes against nature which have much longer term effects?  We are sabotaging the future, for future generations. It’s absolutely a crime and the United States is the main driving force. It’s plain as anything to see, and now with the XL pipeline which sadly I believe will probably go forward, I am rendered speechless in my extreme frustration considering the obviousness of negative effects this will have on the world.

                I have also read that the Trans-Canadian Corporation want to lift production beyond levels that are planned. As always, they just want to grow, grow, and grow. We forget that we only have one world.  One analyst said that they’re going to need 5 or 6 pipelines to meet the levels they want and expect. For Heaven’s sake, America, stop this devastation, with this, with fracking – you’re destroying your own land!  Maybe there’s a goodness in that, as the United States is driving us a s a world to a place that we can’t exist in, which is complete dimunation of finite resources, so maybe it’s fitting that the USA should devastate its own land, but what about the people? What about the next generation and those following? It’s just a terrible situation.

                I really think this XL Pipeline is a defining moment. I hope I’m wrong, I hope Obama won’t sign off on it, but I know there is so much pressure from corporate and business interests, and even local people like this idiot who’s running the Chamber of Commerce in Cushing, a city where there’s a lot of fossil fuel type derivatives moving through. We just have to stop it!  We have to learn how to live within the resources that we have, and we have to realize that we can’t continue driving and flying as much as we’ve been used to.  Fossil fuels are a finite resource!  We would not be trying to get to the oil in these tar sands in Canada that have been there for hundreds of thousands of years if the oil that we’ve been consuming in the past few generations were permanent in our lives in any sense. All of the reserves which seemed infinite before are at the bottom of their barrels, so to speak, because we’ve already used them.  Deep sea drilling is now going on right under our noses, drilling into the Earth’s crust where it’s incredibly thin under the deep oceans. We have to stop, as it’s a stark situation.  Myself?  I’m moving to a way of life that is not consuming the earth’s resources aside from what we can take around us and give back in one way or another.  I know this piece is more emotional than usual, but it is such a serious situation and we need to change our ways if we want to survive as a species – this includes your children and theirs, my children, grandchildren, and recently great-grandchildren. They need a pristine world, and it is up to us to provide that for them.

I am enjoying writing about New Zealand so I will be writing about it for as long as I have inspiration and information to do so.  Continuing on from the first piece on New Zealand, I’m living the curiosities of this country, so I will share those here. As a reflection, I was born in Britain just after the Second World War, so it was a very tumultuous time for everybody there and in other countries involved in the war of course.  When we’re in that sort of situation, we’re in a completely different mindset than when we’re in a situation of no threats.  Most of the tenets of war are bad, but one thing that one could say is good on one level, is that war brings people together in a way that they wouldn’t normally be in a group, neighborhood, town, city or country otherwise. This makes me think about New Zealand as the people here seem to be close in the way people do during wartime, only it is obviously not warranted by war.

                We have a situation here in New Zealand where the government is being run by the Prime Minister John Key who is essentially a financier, having worked for Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan, world financiers that are helping to ruin the world as we know it. He is bent on exploiting New Zealand assets one way or another, be that in the form of selling off the assets to overseas or even local companies and shareholders (like the power and water utilities). He’s also intent on opening New Zealand up to mining and drilling exploitation.  The good news is, so far he’s not been very successful in any of those things.  This is because this nation of 4.5 million people (obviously with some who actually don’t care as there are in any country in the world), is made up largely of people who do care. It’s really interesting to watch (albeit personally agonizing) John Key and his government trying to do what they can to remove a lot of the environmental protections that exist in New Zealand, just as most governments around the world are and have succeeded in doing.  The second Bush Administration is a good example of that, and we’re just now beginning to learn about how much they did to tear down the ecological protection that existed.

I had this thought that any government in any country that makes any decision that goes beyond their own term in office should be held liable for it for as long as they are alive. If they make decisions that have ecological consequences or commit ‘eco-cide’ in any sense, they should be held responsible, rather than the current way of leaving office and leaving the consequences for the future term-holders. As I watch this going on in New Zealand currently, I feel I am here at this point in time for a reason, as we are rapidly as an ‘Agricultural/Industrial’ world hitting a brick wall.  This is good news in a way, because we’re going to come out of this as a much better species – much less ravaging, damaging and consuming, as we’ll have no choice.  We’re beginning to see the start of that now, with country economies faltering.  What I intend to do is go somewhere where I can get out of the nonsensical rat race that most of us are in, making money to pay bills that are largely speaking unnecessary, to find out at the end of our lives that we spent our lives doing just that.  I don’t have much of my life left in the sense that I have already spent 64 years of it, but I do intend to get myself out of that situation and I will, as I am slowly doing that at present. I highly suggest others do so as well.

We have a country here that has managed to conserve itself pretty well ecologically under threat by its own government. Australia is a country neighboring New Zealand that has terribly and shockingly exploited their own resources, a lot of which is sent to India and China.  A lot of people go from New Zealand to Australia to make more money, and this is sacrificing their quality of life for a certain standard of living.  We need to stop doing that, because if we don’t, we’ll be stopped anyhow, there won’t be any choice.  I advise you reader, to think about your quality of life, not your quantity of life, and assess that as what might be called a standard of living.  It’s a material fact that our life is going to end. It’s not or good enough to get to the end of our lives and think “Why did I do what I did? Why didn’t I do what I could have done?” All I can say to you is to do what’s good, what you want to do. Do it.  That’s what a lot of people here in New Zealand are doing, and in this way, New Zealand (the people, not John Key or the government behind him) is a model for the rest of the world as well as us as individuals.

So here I am, looking at a darkening evening.  It’s 8:21 here in Waiheke Island off the coast of Auckland. We’ve had a bit of a drought here for a while and we’re waiting for some rain. We’ve had some, but we should have some more soon. Anyhow, let us get to the subject of this blog post, which is the United States of America.

Starting with my own story relating to America, I first went to there back in 1986 for a job interview in Los Angeles. I was living in England at the time, where I had been living since birth. Even though I’d never been to the United States previous this, it was incredibly influential in my life in England.  As children, we played ‘cowboys and Indians,’ a popular American game influenced by Western movies and such.  I would always play an Indian, which most children did not prefer to be. I don’t know why, it just felt right to me. The name ‘Indian’ came from the experience of the Europeans finding America populated by people of darker skin, which in previous experience had been Indians from India. Nowadays, the term more widely used is ‘Native Americans.’  So that was my first exposure to American culture.  I also had a Davy Crockett hat, a hat made of the skin of an animals with a tail hanging from the back.  I didn’t realize the inhumanity of the hat itself, as I was a child going along with a trend.

When I was a teenager, my first job was in an electrical wholesale store, but they also had a retail area which was a record department. The customers were discerning and often sought out American imports, namely blues.  That was my second fairly deep exposure to American culture, as blues was an American-origin style of music that I had not heard in Britain before.  I then started to become interested in other types of American music – surf music and Frank Zappa (worthy of a blog piece himself) who wrote a lot about Los Angeles and in fact when I eventually moved to Los Angeles, I already knew a lot about what was there because of Frank Zappa’s music.  What’s quite fascinating to me is that even the Beatles, Rolling Stones and other British bands were heavily influenced by American music.

So back to 1986, on a fine day in May, I flew to the United States to have a final interview for a job. At the time I was in the vehicle business, transportation equipment to be more specific and was working for a company called British Leyland in England. They pretty much controlled the car, truck and bus industries there, but things have changed since then.  Seeing the United States for the first time, one is overcome by the fact that it is totally and utterly different than anywhere else.  I found Los Angeles very pervasive, to be fair and very interesting.  My first exposure to Los Angeles was flying into LAX and being picked up by a driver and immediately heading onto the famed 405 freeway, heading south.  I had seen a lot of cars before as I had been on the M25 in England, but I had never seen so many cars as I did on the 405 that day. I found it quite interesting, and was actually astounded at how long it took to get anywhere in LA. It was fascinating to me how wide the streets were, how many lanes there were on the freeway etc.  I think the thing that stuck in my mind then more than anything else, was simply how different LA was then anywhere I had ever been in my life previously.

This is my way of leading in to what will be a series of blog posts on the USA, because what people worldwide are facing relating to consumption or excess stem from them wanting to emanate Americans. I have this interesting feeling in my ethos that the real problem came about because the USA broke away from the colonial dominance of England (obvious with the successful War of Independence).  I just feel that somehow the large companies in the United Kingdom lost out one way or another because of the Independence of the US.  I think there are some very deep ties between the US and UK banking systems, which are very deep and endemic and there is evidence for this so it is not solely my belief here.

I read an interesting article on obesity in the US as well, on eating too much fat sugar and salt. Time and again in the article I read that the food industry, at least part of it, is concerned about that. Unfortunately, they are under so much pressure from Wall Street to make profits that that they daren’t really take a chance with trying to be healthier.  Kraft has tried, Whole Foods as a grocery chain, and others are trying, but they are all under the same pressure to continue to grow.  This concept is flawed in reality because as we all know, resources are finite. We don’t have endless Earths to utilize. We have one. We’ve tried to get around this by using technology to defy nature, but that hasn’t been successful and I don’t think it will ever be successful, and I am being conservative when I say “I don’t think.”

So wrapping up here, this is the first of a series of blogs on the USA which I believe is creating a standard of living which is unsustainable and which other countries are striving towards now. Most of the problems around the world are in fact because of that. Because I see the USA as such a focal point of a lot of the problems we have in the world, I am sharing my thoughts and observations here for any and all to think about themselves, comment, debate or share. Open discussion is always welcome.