Author: ajohnstone

Conservation for who?

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Investigators sent to northern Congo by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) to assess allegations of human rights abuses gathered “credible” evidence from different sources that hunter-gatherer Baka tribespeople living close to a proposed national park had been subjected to violence and physical abuse from the guards over years. Armed ecoguards partly funded by the conservation group WWF to protect wildlife in the Republic of Congo beat up and intimidated hundreds of Baka pygmies living deep in the rainforests.



 Stephen Corry, the director of tribal defence NGO Survival International, said: “This UNDP report is a devastating indictment which should spell the end of WWF’s model of ‘fortress conservation’ which has caused so much damage to people and the environment throughout Africa.



The allegations included Baka tribespeople being beaten by the ecoguards, the criminalisation and illegal imprisonment of Baka men, summary evictions from the forest, the burning and destruction of property, and the confiscation of food. The UNDP’s social and environmental compliance unit heard how the ecoguards allegedly treated the Baka men as “sub-human” and humiliated some Baka women by forcing them to take off their clothes and “be like naked children”.



The report says: “These beatings occur when the Baka are in their camps along the road as well as when they are in the forest. They affect men, women and children. Other reports refer to ecoguards pointing a gun at one Baka to force him to beat another and guards taking away the machetes of the Baka, then beating them with those machetes.



“There are reports of Baka men having been taken to prison and of torture and rape inside prison. The widow of one Baka man spoke about her husband being so ill-treated in prison that he died shortly after his release. He had been transported to the prison in a WWF-marked vehicle.”

The draft report adds: “The violence and threats are leading to trauma and suffering in the Baka communities. It is also preventing the Baka from pursuing their customary livelihoods, which in turn is contributing to their further marginalisation and impoverishment.” The report adds: “Baka men find they can no longer go into the forest to obtain honey. They fear that they are no longer able to trap small animals without running the risk of being severely punished by the ecoguards. There are numerous reports of Baka caught in the forest being beaten.”



The UNDP acted after it received appeals from the Baka in 2018. One, signed by people in Mbaye village, said: “They ban us from going to the forest. If we make camps in the forest the ecoguards burn them down. Many Baka are dead today. Children are getting thinner. We are already finished off with the lack of forest medicines. We tried to tell our difficulties to the WWF but they do not accept them. They just tell us we cannot go to the forest.”



Local Congolese WWF officials interviewed by the UNDP team “acknowledged the evidence of abuse against the Baku” by the guards, says the report. “Such occurrences were presented as isolated incidents due to the existence of a few bad apples among the ecoguards in what was otherwise a successful operation. A WWF staff member … explained that these incidences were occurring because of the psychological ramifications of putting someone in a uniform and giving him a gun, which for some men represents a licence to commit abuse.”



he $21.4m flagship Tridom 11 project in northern Congo set up in 2017 with money from the WWF, UNDP, the European commission, US and Congolese governments and the Global Environment Facility, as well as logging and palm oil conglomerates, includes as its centrepiece a 1,456 sq km area of forest known as Messok Dja. This global biodiversity hotspot is rich in wildlife, including elephants, gorillas and chimpanzees, and has been lived in and used for the hunting of small game by the semi-nomadic Baka tribes for millennia.



Investigators  identified multiple failures  to adhere to human rights policies and standards, and said little consideration had been given to the impact of the project on the Baka peoples. 

Not only were communities given little information that their customary land was to be turned into a protected area, but funders had assumed that the conservation project would bring environmental and social benefits, says the report.
Investigators also said they found no evidence that the UNDP had taken into account the risk of co-financing the project with palm oil and logging companies whose work by its nature threatens large-scale biodiversity loss.
“Logging, palm oil and tourism companies, as well as conservation NGOs are working together to steal Baka land. All the relevant UN policies and laws regarding respect for indigenous peoples and human rights were ignored from the beginning,” Stephen Corry explained.

The report strongly criticises the way conservation is practised in central Africa. “The goal of establishing Messok Dja as a protected area was pursued by following the established patterns of conservation projects in the Congo Basin, which largely exclude indigenous peoples and treat them as threats rather than partners,” it says.

The international NGO Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) found that WWF had only consulted the Baka communities likely to be affected by the park seven years after the idea had been conceived and long after discussions with government and logging companies had begun.

“By then it was far too late in the process. Information provided to communities has been incomplete and provided late,” the FPP report said.



The Socialist Standard carried an article some years back on this topic



https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2015/2010s/no-1334-october-2015/material-world-exiled-gardens-eden/

Poor UK

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The proportion of people with a job who live in poverty went up for the third consecutive year in 2018 to a record high, according to a report that shows rising levels of employment have failed to translate into higher living standards.



The Joseph Rowntree Foundation said while paid employment reduces the risk of poverty, about 56% of people living in poverty were also in a working household in 2018, compared with 39% 20 years ago.



Seven in 10 children in poverty are now in a working family, the charity’s annual UK poverty report found.



Single-parent families have been the worst affected by the trend of wages falling behind living costs, it added. Working single parents accounted for three in 10 households in poverty in 2018, compared with two in 10 in 2011.

The JRF’s executive director, Claire Ainsley, said  it was an indictment of recent government policy that the number of people in poverty across the whole workforce jumped from 9.9% in 1998 to 12.7% in 2018.



Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the TUC, said: “The government must crack down on business models based on poverty pay and insecure jobs. Zero-hour contracts should be banned and the minimum wage must go up to at least £10 an hour right away.”



Approximately 14 million people are in poverty in the UK – more than one in five of the population, including 4 million children and 2 million pensioners, up by 400,000 and 300,000 respectively over the past five years.



A family is classified as being in poverty if it has an income of less than 60% of the median income for their family type, after housing costs. A family’s income includes earnings from employment, self-employment, state benefits and inheritances.



The report said people were more likely to be in poverty if they lived in certain parts of the UK, in a family where there is a disabled person or a carer, if they work in the hospitality or retail sector, or if they live in rented housing.



The worst-hit regions were London, the north of England, the Midlands and Wales, while the lowest poverty rates were found in the south of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, the JRF said.
The charity was especially concerned about the rise in young people living with their parents, who in a previous era would have started to buy a house and start a family of their own, which it named “concealed households”.



Twenty years ago, 20% (2.4 million) of 20- to 34-year-olds lived with a parent or guardian. That proportion rose to 30% in 2018, affecting 3.9 million people, the JRF found.



The report describes in-work poverty as a “critical issue for our economy” and calls for action to reduce job insecurity, lower housing costs and increase earnings for low-paid workers.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/07/uk-live-poverty-charity-joseph-rowntree-foundation


The Coming Catastrophe

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A report, which took the form of a survey of 222 leading scientists from 52 countries, conducted by the international sustainability network Future Earth, found that 

world is facing a series of interlinked emergencies that are threatening the existence of humans, because the sum of the effects of the crises is much greater than their individual impacts, according to a new global study.

Climate breakdown and extreme weather, species loss, water scarcity and a food production crisis are all serious in themselves, but the combination of all five together is amplifying the risks of each, creating a perfect storm that threatens to engulf humanity unless swift action is taken.

The links among the crises are clear in many cases, but the methods the world has chosen to try to solve them do not take account of these connecting factors. For instance, extreme heatwaves can add to global heating, because they release vast amounts of stored carbon from affected ecosystems, in a feedback loop. It has been seen clearly in the Australian bushfires, which are already contributing significantly to the store of carbon in the atmosphere.

The links do not stop there: as the heatwaves damage natural ecosystems, killing off wildlife and flora, they also lead to greater water scarcity, and in turn damage agriculture. These combined effects exacerbate the harm done to people struggling with food and water shortages, in a vicious cycle.

Faced with these crises in nature individually, it could be possible to fix the problems causing them. But confronted with multiple interlinked emergencies that in combination amplify one another’s impacts, people are facing unprecedented dangers and many communities cannot cope.



Future Earth, found that the responses to these emergencies by governments, civil society, business and institutions did not recognise their interlinked nature. Trying to solve the problems individually, without taking account of the “cascading” impacts, was likely to be ineffective, the scientists said.



More than a third of the scientists surveyed said the five crisis types would worsen one another “in ways that might cascade to create global systemic collapse”.



While the risks are amplified when they are connected, so too are the solutions, however. Whenever action is taken to remedy environmental problems, the benefits also cascade: for instance, nurturing wildlife and flora in a wetland can also reduce water pollution and soil erosion, and protect crops against storm damage, alleviating water scarcity and allowing for more food production.



“Despite the ubiquity of connections [between these looming crises] many scientists and policymakers are embedded in institutions that are used to thinking and acting on isolated risks, one at a time,” the report says. “This needs to change, to thinking about risks as connected.”
The authors of the report, “call on the world’s academics, business leaders and policymakers to pay urgent attention to these five global risks, and to ensure they are treated as interacting systems, rather than addressed one at a time in isolation.”



The report also warned of social problems that scientists identified as potential major risks for the future. These included the rise of populism and fake news, trends in migration and the rise of artificial intelligence.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/06/humanity-under-threat-perfect-storm-crises-study-environment




We stand for socialism!

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The Socialist Party stands with the oppressed, with all those who struggle for a better world. Around the world humanity is saying “Enough.“ Those who doubt that socialism would ever come about, are challenged today by its continued prevalence. The world’s peoples are still on the road to the most thoroughgoing social change in history.



Capitalism involves a restless search for profit by a class prepared to mobilise all means to pursue its ends and willing to elaborate all manner of rationales for its activities. This capitalist system offers unemployment, hunger, homelessness, welfare cuts, epidemics and the plague of drugs. We face two choices – either accept destruction and murder or set out to overturn this system. Technology is powerful enough to end hunger, homelessness and all want – but only if it is seized from the exploiters and organized in the interests of those this system has discarded. Though our lives and conditions be different; though we live in different parts of the world; though our struggles take different forms; ours is a common goal—an end to the exploitation of man by man. Only when we have economic democracy, when production is planned for use and not for profit, when the right of all to share in the abundance of our country is established – only then will democracy be truly established. A new world to be created—a world which will create a participatory democracy every level. The potential of mankind virtually limitless, if it is freed from economic and social oppression. 



The Socialist Party was formed to serve these aims. As a democratic and organisationally independent movement, we are part of the world community of socialists. We have no illusions that the way will be easy, no visions of quick success. But the future belongs to humanity and socialism. Only socialism will create a world without national barriers, without international rivalries, a world without war, without master and slave. Humanity’s primary duty will be to conduct the affairs of the world with the aim of eliminating poverty, joblessness, hunger and general insecurity. Its sole criterion would be the needs of the people. Socialism will end the root evil of modern society, i.e., the private ownership of the means of production, the factories, mines, mills, machinery and land, which produce the necessities of life.



In socialism, these instruments of production will become the property of society, owned in common, producing for use, for the general welfare of the people as a whole. With the abolition of the private ownership of the means of life and with it the factor of profit as the prime mover of production, the sharp divisions of society between nations and classes will disappear. Then, and only then, will society be in a position to become a social order of abundance and plenty for all, for socialism will create a new world of genuine cooperation and collaboration between the peoples of the earth. In abolishing classes in society, socialism will change the form and type of governments which exist today. Governments will become administrative bodies regulating production and consumption. They will not be the instruments of the capitalist class, i.e., capitalist governments whose main reason for existence is to guarantee the political as well as the economic rule of big business, their profits, their private ownership of the instruments of production, and the conduct of war in the economic and political interests of this class. The preoccupation of socialism will be to assist in the elevation of society, to improve continually the living standards of the people, to extend their leisure time and thus make it possible to heighten the cultural level of the whole world. In abolishing classes, class government and war, socialism will at the same time destroy all forms of dictatorship, political as well as economic. World socialism will be the freest, most democratic society the world has ever known, truly representing the majority of the population. A citizen of a socialist society will look back upon the capitalist era with its wars, destruction and bloody and cruel dictatorships as we now look back upon the dawn of written history. A socialist world will assess the industrial potential of the world, determine its resources, the needs of the people and plan production with the aim of increasing the standards of living of a free people, creating abundance, increasing leisure and opportunity for cultural enjoyment. Socialism will not concern itself with profits and war, but with providing decent housing for all the people. Socialism will provide for a multitude of schools for all the people. Socialism will eliminate illiteracy, which is one of the hallmarks of capitalism, and cease to regard schools primarily as institutions to produce skilled labour to help operate the profit economy. Socialism will create a system of health CARE in which the needs of the people and the improvement of the human race would be the paramount consideration,



Above all, socialism will provide jobs for all. But this will be work without exploitation. For the aim of socialism is not the increased exploitation and intensification of labour, but the utilisation of machinery, technology, science and invention to diminish toil, to create time in which to permit all the people to enjoy the benefits of social progress. The modern world already contains all the pre-conditions necessary for socialism. All about us we observe gigantic industrial establishments containing machinery which could produce the goods of life in abundance. Man has developed a marvellous technology. The discovery and control of atomic energy has not only made it more possible for man to control his natural and social environment to create a fruitful life of abundance, but has made it imperative. Socialism will place at the disposal of science and the scientists all the material means to help create an ever-improving social life for mankind. Under capitalism, scientists are mere wage workers hiring out their skills to private industry. The fruits of their intelligence, learning arid research become the exclusive property of the capitalists who profit from the labours of these scientists. Thus, science has become subordinated to profits rather than to the common good of all mankind. Yet the future society depends in large measure on changing this relation of science to society. Only socialism can place science where it properly belongs: in the service of the people.


Ban the Boat

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The Saudi Arabian ship, Bahri Yanbu, is heading toward Sheerness docks, after abandoning plans to dock at Antwerp where protesters, calling themselves “citizen weapons inspectors”, set up a checkpoint to halt any flow of arms. Bahri, the state-owned shipping company that owns the Yanbu, confirmed to Belgian media that military equipment was onboard.



Campaigners have now called on the British authorities to refuse permission for a vast Saudi ship carrying military equipment to dock in the UK because the Gulf kingdom is still embroiled in the war in Yemen.



Andrew Smith of  Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) said: “This ship must be turned away. If it is carrying weapons for use in Yemen then they could be used in war crimes and abuses for years to come.” He added: “Arms-dealing governments like the one in the UK have played a central role in strengthening the Saudi dictatorship and fuelling the devastating war in Yemen.”
The ship has travelled from North America, where it has docked in the US and Canada, and is travelling around Europe before heading to Saudi Arabia and other nearby countries.

On a previous visit to several European ports in May 2019, the vessel was carrying US-manufactured military components and equipment worth $47m (£36m), much of it linked to military aircraft, according to Amnesty International. Containers of arms were loaded onboard in Belgium and Spain, and howitzer cannon were due to be loaded in France although pressure groups in the country successfully took legal action to halt the arms transfer at the time.



Eco-Marxism

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“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.” ― Karl Marx,  Theses on Feuerbach



Capitalist ideas are present in all parts of the society, including education, politics, the media and culture. Thus socialist ideas are rarely feature in political debates. The environmental movement and its books and journals seldom incorporate it within their analysis and the scientific community certainly does not include it in their solutions. While the climate crises requires a political response it is conducted within the parameters of what reformers consider immediately possible. The socialist claims of insolubility of the climate crisis through capitalism is dismissed. The Socialist Party’s contribution to the environment movement’s development is to emphasise that its goals can only be accomplished by the elimination of the capitalist economic system and the transformation to a socialist society. Only in a socialist society can the ecological problems capitalism creates be solved. The Socialist Party continually emphasises the necessity of transcending capitalism and creating a new society based on democratic ownership and control of resources and production. The features of capitalism – its drive for expansion, production for profit rather than social good, the inability to plan, and, ultimately, alienation of humanity from nature – make it inherently ecologically destructive. Our aim is to show the inability of capitalism to manage the economy sustainably or in the general interest and necessity of socialism.


Socialism presents a quandary for many radical greens. While engaging themselves in local grassroots activism and nongovernmental organisations forming transnational networks, this new global citizenship, the challenges to consumer capitalism obscure the continuation of the same old harsh realities that are fundamental to capitalist mode of production. No matter how much the patterns of lifestyles and consumption may change—no matter how decentralised or re-distributed they become—the basic structural reality of capitalism remains the same: EXPROPRIATION AND EXPLOITATION IN THE PRODUCTION FOR PROFIT. Capitalism is still a continuation of the centuries-old process of growth and incessant accumulation of capital through the expansion of world markets and attempt to control material resources and labour beyond national borders. Eco-activists neglect the exploitative process of capitalism—the expropriation of people’s surplus value for profit and thus diverts attention from what is at stake, which is the use of science not for emancipation of humankind from the realm of necessity but for profit. The question is that the resources of the planet can be can be used for meeting the needs of human kind, or it can be used to produce profit. It is not technology that is the problem, rather than capitalism. Equating environmental degradation with industrialisation, or  new technology per se lets capitalism off the hook. The solution is not simplistically ending growth, but ending capitalism: ending production for profit and eliminating the exploitation of labour. Much of contemporary environmentalism cannot think the future of humanity outside of capitalism and instead embrace and accept capitalism working within the system rather than transforming it.


Enough is enough! Joe the Dolphin speaks out

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I was born in a crossfire hurricane, 
In a river for a house in the pouring-driving rain





That’s how the Rolling Stones – I bet there’s not a human alive over a certain age who hasn’t heard of THEM! – start their song Jumping Jack Flash. But rain never bothered me because I really was born in a river! Pouring and driving rain is just what I like. Yes, that’s right, I was born in a river – the lower Mekong River in southern Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam – you humans called it southern French Indochina for a while before I was born, before you mucked up my home with your endless wars against one another and against my environment. Especially devastating was the American bombing, which sharply reduced our population. Those bombers probably killed more dolphins than ‘Vietcong.’



Well, my name is Joe and I’m an Irrawaddy dolphin. I bet you didn’t see that coming! You humans probably named me after the Ayeyarwady River, presumably the river you first found us in.



Look, I’m appealing to you humans simply because it’s YOU, collectively, who are ruining my life and the lives of my family and my dearest friends! You humans and your shenanigans are the cause of most of our troubles.



Some of you know that we dolphins have really big brains despite being what you human animals call animals. You humans are members of the same biological Phylum, Class, Order, Family, and Genus as us. We are social animals too! I know that you have nothing personal against us, but sometimes it sure is difficult for us to understand why it is that whenever you humans are around things go wrong for us.



You humans seem to like to ‘poop in our pond,’ so to speak! You certainly do not seem very concerned, at least not many of you. Before you humans showed up recently, we were hanging out at our favorite spots throughout the lower Mekong River south of the Khone Falls, including Tonie Sap Great Lake and major tributaries such as the Sekong.



We Irrawaddy dolphins used to like to visit others of our species and sub-species up and down the length of our river. You call it the Mekong — we just called it Home Sweet Home. But now, ALL because of YOU and the dirty things you do to us, we are confined to only 190 kilometers of the river – and it ain’t the best part neither!



We too are social animals. We like to hang out in groups of 2 or 3, sometimes as many as 25, but our real preference is for a group of half a dozen – enough to help one another without a lot of bickering. We ain’t perfect either, but WE try!



It’s kinda cool that many Laotians and Cambodians believe that we are reincarnations of their ancestors. It could be because some of us have saved some of them from drowning or from crocodile attacks. Crocks are brutes, all of them, and although some of you humans are too it is not apparent to us which of you are and which are not. So we make no distinction and help you if we can.



Some of you humans seem to want to ignore the fact that we even help you out from time to time with your fishing enterprises – true, only when there is benefit for all concerned. When you bang on the hulls of your boats with sticks we often pay heed and try to drive fish into the area where you throw your cast-nets, though we do expect you to toss a few stunned ‘trash fish’ – of no commercial value to you – back into the water as a tasty little snack for us and a well-deserved reward for our labors.



But it seems to us that you humans are consumed with squabbling to get more, more, more all of the time. A report from 1879 has come to our attention (don’t ask how – that is something I can’t talk about) that ‘legal claims were frequently brought into native courts by fishers to recover a share of the fish from the nets of a rival fisher which the plaintiff’s dolphin was claimed to have helped fill’ (P. Stacy and P.W. Arnold, ‘Orcaella brevirostris’ (PDF), Mammalian Species, 1999—2005). One fisher human refers to a fellow fisher human as a ‘rival’ and claims one of my relatives as his private property! Astonishing impudence! Disgusting! This property system of yours stinks. Whew! 



When you humans realized that many of my relatives were being drowned in fisher humans’ gill-nets and drag-nets with large mesh size, you made their use illegal. Almost three quarters (74%) of dolphin deaths were attributed to this netting practice. So some of you humans then decided to use high-voltage cables, strung through the water in our neighborhood, to stun or kill as many fish as possible. Never mind that they also killed some of us!



Being drowned in your nets was bad enough, but at least it happened only to those who accidentally swam into the nets. The high-voltage electrical charge was indiscriminate. We had only to be in the vicinity to get electrocuted. True, its range was limited – but still wider than a net. And many of the corpses drifted away in the river current, undetected and uncollected. 



And then some of you humans started to use a simpler, more direct, and much cheaper method (cost appears to be very important to many of you, perhaps because it is related to gain or profit). Some of you just lit the fuse on a stick of dynamite and tossed it right into our front yard. BANG! – and plenty of dead fish floated to the surface, along with many of my friends and relatives! This was even more indiscriminate than the electrical charge, because it covered a wider area of the river. The shock waves from the explosions killed mainly by damaging our internal organs and traumatizing our brains. You must surely know that we have really LARGE, sophisticated, and sensitive brains.



Although if you kill too many of us what will happen to your tourist trade? Dolphin-watching tourism began in 1994 and has brought direct financial benefit to all local human communities in our areas of Laos and Cambodia. The number of paying tourists in 2008 was 3,480. That number more than doubled to 7,200 tourists in 2011.



And now – the damned dam! 



The Laotian government wants to build a dam across our river to generate electricity so that more of you humans can move nearer to our ancestral home and still get a monthly electricity bill. It ain’t working out too well for us just with those of you who are here right now. It surely ain’t gonna get any better for us with even more of you living nearby!



You must surely know that there is a terrible ecological price to be paid for disrupting and excavating primordial land! Or do you?



The official name of the dam is the Don Sahong Hydropower Project. The Laotian government knows full well that we are a sacred species in both Laos and Cambodia. The old tales in both countries tell of the part we played in human ancestry. I know that it is not all of you humans who want to hurt us, so the government should be removed for ignoring you and your traditions! The government always seems to ignore the will of the people. Why do you put up with it? According to your own traditions, some of us may be your great great-great-grandparents! So stop screwing us over and letting us get screwed over by the impersonal ‘others’ of the government!



Consider the environmental side of this question. Hey, fellow dolphins, look at me – a dolphin taking humans to ‘school’! I’m not erudite, you know. We dolphins aren’t fish: we don’t swim in ‘schools’! We swim in herds. But on with the lesson! 



When you humans disturb the ecosystem by building your dam a myriad of consequences will ensue. The run-off of water will be altered. Oxygen-producing, carbon-dioxide-absorbing trees, plants, and grasses will be affected for the worse. The dam itself will divert the flow of the river and change the natural patterns of river bank erosion. It will also change the depth of the river at many locations. There will be plenty of other unexpected changes to the ecosystem and biosphere.



It doesn’t matter whether or not you believe in global heating. You do not have to believe in something for it to end up killing you. This planet that is home to both dolphins and humans could become uninhabitable for humans, for dolphins, for all sentient tellurians! Are you going to allow your governments to orchestrate our common funeral?



There are many safer and cleaner ways to generate electrical power: photoelectric solar panels, solar mirrors, ocean tidal energy capture systems, windmills, hydrogen-burning systems that produce only water as a by-product. And many more are under development in your laboratories.



The cement used in building this one hydropower project will release tons and tons of greenhouse gases into the already damaged atmosphere. Westerners consider Laos and Cambodia underdeveloped countries, so they discount your ability to come up with your own solutions to problems created not by you but by the supposedly enlightened Westerners. So why listen to them now? Are THEY not the culprits?



It must be our object to get the money out of this damned dam. The way to do that is to show that the rising cost of mitigating the damage it does will eventually render the dam unprofitable and unsustainable. Over the course of its operational life it will cost more than it is worth. And we Irrawaddy dolphins forewarn you of what lies ahead for you too.



Show us Irrawaddy dolphins that you humans are not carrying around those large brains you have in your skulls as mere ornaments. Show us how good they are for making wise decisions about vital issues. ‘Impossible,’ you say? ‘Impossible’ is NOT a fact — it is an opinion! 



There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop (Mario Radio).



Enough is enough!

Joe Hopkins

https://www.wspus.org/2020/01/enough-is-enough-joe-the-dolphin-speaks-out/

Poor in Poor Exam Results

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A breakdown of GCSE results issued by the Department for Education (DfE) showed the gap between disadvantaged pupils and others increased for the second year in a row. 



Just 456 of the 143,000 pupils classed as disadvantaged by the DfE achieved top grade 9s in English and maths last summer, compared with 6,132 out of 398,000 other pupils.



While more than two-thirds of non-disadvantaged children achieved grade 4 or higher in maths and English, just 36% of those eligible for free school meals did so.



Of boys eligible for free school meals, those from mixed white and black Caribbean backgrounds had the weakest results, along with children from Gypsy or Roma families. Of girls eligible, those from a white British background also ranked lowest for attainment in English and maths among the main ethnic groups.



“Some groups of disadvantaged pupils make less progress than others because of challenges in their lives, and this can penalise schools with more disadvantaged pupils,” said Duncan Baldwin, deputy director of policy at the ASCL.



https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/feb/06/attainment-gap-widens-disadvantaged-pupils-gcse-results-england

Population Matters (Not so Much)

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The world’s population is on the decline. For decades we’ve read frightening headlines about the consequences of overpopulation, from food shortages to resource wars. But it turns out that the world’s population growth rate is now half of what it used to be.
The fertility of half of the world’s population is already below the replacement ratio. There has been a global decline in the number of children women are having. The fertility rate drop meant nearly half of countries were now facing a “baby bust” – meaning there are insufficient children to maintain their population size. There would be profound consequences for societies with more grandparents than grandchildren. As fertility falls, countries initially benefit from having a bulk of working-aged adults and relatively fewer dependent children and old people — known as a “demographic dividend.” Eventually that benefit reverses: By 2050 developed countries will have twice as many old people as young ones. 
All this does not mean the number of people living in these countries is falling, at least not yet as the size of a population is a mix of the fertility rate, death rate and migration. It can also take a generation for changes in fertility rate to take hold. Fertility rates continue to fall, yet the predictions are that the world population will continue to rise 10 billion inhabitants by the end of the century. That’s because the fall in fertility rates takes a long time to show up as a subsequent fall in birth rates. “Demographic momentum” wears on because there’s still a generation of people born in the previous echo baby boom (The first Echo Boomers were born between 1977 and 1982. The last Echo Boomers were born 1994 to 2004) who are just entering their reproductive years. This also means it is imperative that to cope, we must change the nature of society which already is incapable of providing for almost a billion of its citizens.


Prof Christopher Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, told the BBC: “We’ve reached this watershed where half of countries have fertility rates below the replacement level, so if nothing happens the populations will decline in those countries…We will soon be transitioning to a point where societies are grappling with a declining population.” 



OurWorldInData.org researcher Max Roser reports “The richer the people, the lower the fertility.”



When more infants survive fertility goes down and the temporary population growth comes to an end. If we want to ensure that the world’s population increase comes to an end soon we must work to increase child survival. It’s not numbers. It’s how we treat the quality of life for individuals.

According to Wolfgang Lutz, of the Vienna University of Economics and Business, the reason for the fertility decline, in a word, is education. “The brain is the most important reproductive organ,” he asserts. Once a woman receives enough information and autonomy to make an informed and self-directed choice about when to have children and how many to have, she immediately has fewer of them and has them later. “Once a woman is socialized to have an education and a career, she is socialized to have a smaller family,” he explains. “There’s no going back.” Lutz and his fellow demographers at Vienna’s International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) believe that advancing education in developing countries, brought about by increasing urbanization, should be factored into future population projections. Lutz believes the human population will be shrinking as early as 2060.
His is hardly a lone voice. Jørgen Randers is a Norwegian academic who co-authored The Limits to Growth, which predicted that global population would reach unsustainable levels by 2100. But since publishing the book, he has changed his mind. 
“The world population will never reach 9 billion people,” he now believes. “It will peak at 8 billion in 2040 and then decline.” He attributes the unexpected drop to women in developing countries moving into urban slums. “And in an urban slum, it does not make sense to have a large family.”

Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrell Bricker re-examined the UN forecasting models ‘In Empty Planet,’  to conclude that global population will start dropping in about 30 years, and warn ‘once that decline begins, it will never end.’

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