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100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Matt's place was a four storey residence built at the time when Prussia was at the height of its power and glory under the Iron Chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck, and the Emperor Wilhelm II. Behind the staid air was a hip district, where St Michael's church, once a house of worship, had been transformed into an art space, home to gigs, exhibitions, and pop up galleries. On the other side of the nearby park and its Japanese gardens was Ehrenfeld, where Matt's production company, Zyborg Filmstudio, was located in what was one of Europe's largest concentration of TV and film studios. In short it was part of Cologne's up and coming place to be with its thriving art, cafe and club scene. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Matt had produced a successful series of documentary films covering the history of ethnology for Arte, a Franco-Germany TV channel, focused on culture, environment and international reportages. It was how he met Kyril and produced his first full length documentary film Rainforest, which picked up a string of awards at the Cologne Film Festival, one of the most outstanding international gatherings for independent producers. Matt, now a successful film maker, had abandoned a promising career at the family bank, now run by his brother, preferring the cinema, setting up his own production company, becoming a successful and internationally recognised director in the field of documentaries on the natural world and its multiple ecosystems. * * * |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | That evening they were invited by Gisele and Matt for dinner at their place. Pat Kennedy had arrived first and was clearly excited to be back in Germany, bubbling away in his particular version of Goethe's tongue. The atmosphere was informal, and as drinks were served Matt gave them a guided tour of his collection--African masks, Papuan shields, Samoan statues, spears and textiles. Extraordinarily rare pieces, many of which had been collected by his great-grandfather more than a century earlier. As dinner was served they discussed their plans for Indians and were soon into global warming. Matt recounted how Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a renowned climatologist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, had formulated a mathematical equation whereby risk could be calculated. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Matt was a convinced ecologist who feared the world was nearing tipping point, when the rate of change became uncontrollable. He likened the situation to that of the Titanic's captain when he saw the iceberg looming out of the freezing mist, all that could be done was to save as many as possible, whispering to Pat with a knowing smile, 'the best'. The question was not when, but how much time remained, and who could be saved. Matt pulled out a sheet of paper and scribbled: Emergency = R × U = p × D × τ / T 'There, you can see how simple it is. To understand Emergency, we have to quantify the relationship between risk R and urgency U. Schellnhuber borrowed it from the insurance industry. R is the probability of something happening p multiplied by damage D.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Pat knitted his brows as he concentrated his attention on the formula. 'Take for example, sea levels, what is the probability they will rise by a metre and how much damage will that cause? 'Well, you see Urgency U is the time it takes to react to an issue τ divided by the time left to avoid a bad outcome T. 'This allows you calculate the do nothing, business as usual probability of a highly damaging event,' he said. 'You're a businessman, so you can understand that.' Pat nodded trying to absorb the idea. 'With this we can see the reaction time left for limiting global warming to less than 2oC is about 30 years, while the time needed for full global decarbonisation is at least 20 years. If the reaction time is longer then we're fucked, if you'll excuse the expression.' 'I see.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'In other words we'd just have enough time to see who'd go into the lifeboats!' Pat seemed taken back by the brutality of the conclusion. It confirmed his worse thoughts, especially coming from a German, an outstanding member of a people he had always admired for their seriousness and organisation. | | ---|---|--- # 14 # THE CONQUISTADORS PAT KENNEDY HAD ALWAYS BEEN inspired by the adventures of Francisco Pizarro and his conquest of Peru. It was different to that of Mexico, by his compatriot and cousin Cortes, and in very many ways. Pizarro's voyage was at the outset one of discovery on a continent which no one suspected was the home to a powerful civilisation, one that had developed in isolation, ignorant of the existence of a world outside. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Pizarro had been born in Trujillo, a small town in Extremadura in the west of Spain. He was the illegitimate son of a Spanish officer nicknamed 'the Roman'. Trujillo was the birthplace of a number of ruthless conquistadors, amongst them, in addition to Pizarro, was Francisco de Orellana who discovered the Amazon, Diego Garcia de Paredes who founded the city of Trujillo in Venezuela, as well as Francisco Pizarro's brothers--Hernando, Gonzalo and Juan. Legend said that twenty American nations were conceived in the womb of Trujillo. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Today, all that remained of that flamboyant era was an equestrian statue of Pizarro, erected on the Plaza Mayor, and the palace of the Marquis of the Conquest, built by Hernando Pizarro. There also remains a number of fine homes built in the 16th and 17th centuries by the Indianos, the hardy Spanish adventurers who made their fortunes in the New World. Pizarro was practically illiterate, he had spent half his life pig keeping before his fortune miraculously changed for the better in 1507, when at the age of 32 he joined a group of merchants leaving for Seville, Spain's point of departure to the New World. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The discovery of Seville was a shock for a peasant from a harsh impoverished region. The city, since the expulsion of the Muslims 15 years earlier, was in a state of effervescence. Palos, its port was the gateway to the New World, from where Columbus had sailed on his voyage of discovery. Adventurers, hard men like Pizarro, were motivated by gold, men of whom the Franciscan Friar Jodoco Rique wrote from Quito in 1534: 'The lust for gold is so great that neither work, disease, or death can stop them. I believe that if there was gold in the mouth of hell, they would not be deterred.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Pizarro's discovery of the Inca world and the incredibly rich court of its emperor, Atahualpa, his capture and execution, was the consequence of a rapid succession of unforeseeable events that neither the Spanish nor the Incas could have ever imagined. It was against a background of civil war, following the death of the supreme Inca, Huayna-Capac, when Francisco Pizarro, appeared, with a small band of men and horses. He found Peru in the last throes of a bloody war of succession that had set Atahualpa against his brother Huascar. To the Incas the appearance of the Spaniards could be compared to us today being suddenly confronted by Martians, astride huge fierce beasts, armed with strange and terrible weapons. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Pizarro came in the hope of finding riches, and not only did he find them, he also discovered an astonishingly exotic empire, the last remaining civilisation unknown to the Old World, one as great as Spain's, a vast new land of unimagined wealth and a population of 10 million souls, comparable in many ways to the Holy Roman Empire ruled by Charles V. The adventure commenced in September 1513 when Spanish explorers, after slashing their way through the dense tropical forests of Panama, beheld an ocean--the Pacific, el Mar del Sur, the South Seas as legend had it. That expedition, led by Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, counted amongst its men a young captain named Francisco Pizarro. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Soon a base was established, a town on the west coast of the isthmus, Panama, which became the port from which ships set out to explore the new lands on the Pacific façade of the New World. * * * Until the dawn of the 16th century, the peoples of the South American continent, and more precisely the Amazon, had lived in a hermetic world--their world, one that was changed forever when in 1500 a flotilla of strange vessels appeared at the mouth of that vast river and slowly made their way upstream. The flotilla was that of Vicente Yañez Pinzon, the owner and captain of Columbus's caravel La Niña who still held hopes of discovering India and the Spice Islands. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | As Yañez sailed up river he thought he had reached the Ganges. Along the banks were 'many painted people who flocked to the ships with as much friendship as if they had conversed with us all their lives.' After a skirmish he captured 37 men 'bigger than large Germans' as slaves. On the other side of the continent, Peru was discovered 24 years later on the first of Pizarro's three expeditions, which turned back after clashes with Indians along the coast, injuries and lack of supplies. In 1526, Pizarro's second and larger expedition set out from Panama in two ships accompanied by his pilot Bartolome Ruiz, 160 men and several horses, and sailed south from Panama. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | After dropping anchor at the Rio San Juan, the two ships separated and Ruiz continued south, crossing the equator into the South Pacific, there he sighted a large ocean-going balsa raft fitted with sails. It was the first sign of the existence of a developed civilisation. The raft's sails were woven in fine cotton and its cargo included Inca goods intended for barter. The goods, according to a report despatched to Charles, King of Spain, included: |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | '... many pieces of silver and gold as personal ornaments ... crowns and diadems, belts and bracelets, armour for the legs and breastplates; tweezers and rattles and strings and clusters of beads and rubies, mirrors decorated with silver, and cups and other drinking vessels. They were carrying many wool and cotton mantles and Moorish tunics ... and other pieces of clothing coloured with cochineal, crimson, blue, yellow and all other colours, and worked with different types of ornate embroidery, in figures of birds, animals, fish and trees. They had some tiny weights to weigh gold ... There were small stones in bead bags: emeralds and chalcedonies and other jewels and pieces of crystal and resin.' All of which was intended for trade with the peoples who inhabited the coastal regions to the north. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Ruiz kept three of the raft's crew to be taught Spanish and trained as interpreters for the exploration of their evidently rich land. On Isla de Gallo, after much wrangling as to their next step, Pizarro drew a line in the sand, and declared, 'There lies Peru with its riches. Here, Panama and its poverty. Choose, each man, what best becomes a brave Castilian. For my part, I go to the south.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Pizarro continued, sailing further down the coast of Peru with his small army of 62 horsemen and 106 foot soldiers. They reached the first Inca town, Tumbez, in 1528, which confirmed the existence of a greater civilisation beyond. To their astonishment they found themselves before a hitherto unknown rich kingdom, a city with llamas, pottery, metal vessels, fine clothing, in short an undiscovered civilisation, one that had evolved in total isolation from the rest of mankind. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The Inca empire stretched almost five thousand kilometres along the Andes, from what is now central Chile in the south to Colombia in the north. On one side lay the Pacific Ocean, to the other the endless Amazon rainforest. A vast domain, comparable to the Roman Empire at its apogee, under Trajan in AD117, which ran from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. The Inca emperor, Atahualpa, soon learnt these strange men had landed and were pillaging his lands, unfortunately for him, he was too concerned with his own war to be worried about a small band of marauders. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | In 1532, after leaving the coastal plain, Pizarro and his men headed inland into the sierra. Then, on reaching Cajamarca, a temple centre, they installed themselves in its main square which was surrounded on three sides by long buildings. Waiting for the strange newcomers was Atahualpa, camped a short distance from the centre with an army of 40 thousand trained soldiers. With just 150 men Pizarro realised he had marched into a trap. His only solution was to employ the tactics that had proven successful in the conquest of the Aztecs in Mexico. He invited the Inca leader to meet him in the vast 200 metres long main square. Atahualpa agreed. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Pizarro positioned his cavalry on both sides of the square, his foot soldiers hidden in the buildings flanking it. He then awaited Atahualpa's arrival in front of a stone compound situated in the centre of square where he had placed his cannons and musketeers. At midday the Inca army positioned itself on the plain outside of the temple and Atahualpa advanced as in a grand procession. Pedro Pizarro, a cousin of Francisco, a chronicler, described the scene: 'All the Indians wore large gold and silver discs like crowns on their heads. They were apparently all coming in their ceremonial clothes. In front was a squadron of Indians wearing a livery of chequered colours, like a chessboard. As these advanced they removed the straws from the ground and swept the roadway. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | They pointed their arms towards the ground to clear anything that was on it--which was scarcely necessary, as the townspeople kept it well swept. They were singing a song by no means lacking grace for us who heard it.' Pizarro persuaded the Inca to enter the square, which he did bringing 'with him five or six thousand men, unarmed except that they carried small battle-axes, slings and pouches of stones underneath their tunics'. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Following, on 'a very fine litter with the ends of its timbers covered in silver, came the figure of Atahualpa. Eighty lords carried him on their shoulders, all wearing a very rich blue livery. His own person was very richly dressed, with his crown on his head and a collar of large emeralds around his neck. He was seated on the litter, on a small stool with a rich saddle cushion. He stopped when he reached the middle of the square, with half his body exposed.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'The litter was lined with parrot feathers of many colours and embellished with plates of gold and silver.... Behind it came two other litters and two hammocks in which other leading personages travelled. Then came many men in squadrons with headdresses of gold and silver. As soon as the first entered the square they parted to make way for the others. As Atahualpa reached the centre of the square he made them all halt, with the litter in which he was travelling and the other litters raised on high. Men continued to enter the square without interruption. A captain came out in front and went up to the fort on the square which contained the artillery ... with a banner placed on a lance', which bore Atahualpa's royal standard. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Vicente de Valverde, a Dominican friar accompanied by an interpreter, 'went with a cross in one hand and his missal in the other. He advanced through the troops to where Atahualpa was.' The Inca was surprised not to see Pizarro, then, in an exchange during which he demanded the Spaniards return every object that they had stolen or consumed since their arrival in his kingdom, he threw the book the Friar had shown him on the ground. With that Valverde cried out, 'Did you not see what happened? Why remain polite and servile toward this overproud dog when the plains are full of Indians? March out against him, for I absolve you!' Pizarro gave the signal for the attack and the cannons were fired into the crowd and with the sound of trumpets the cavalry in their armour charged. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The terrified barely armed Indians fled before the horses, steel swords and armour, it was a massacre, the royal litter carriers were cut down amongst the of piles dead and dying, and Atahualpa was captured as the Spaniards pursued the Indians into their camp cutting down all they met. 'In the space of two hours--all that remained of daylight--all those troops were annihilated .... That day, six or seven thousand Indians lay dead on the plain and many more had their arms cut off and other wounds.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Atahualpa's army was sent home, but not before being relieved of their gold and silver by the Spanish, excited at the sight of so much treasure, something the emperor did not fail to notice. The Spaniards with their prisoner advanced to the Inca capital of Cusco, where Atahualpa organised a great reception for the invaders. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | It was at that point Atahualpa offered a ransom in exchange for his freedom. When asked how much, he replied a room full of gold. 'The room measured 22 feet long by 17 feet wide, and filled to a white line half way up its height--he described must have been about two estados (over 2 metres) high. He said that up to this level he would fill the room with various objects of gold--jars, pots, tiles and other pieces. He would also give the entire hut filled twice over with silver. And he would complete this within two months.' The Spaniards were astonished, the room measured 88 cubic metres. During the time needed to collect the gold and have it brought to Cusco the Spaniards received reinforcements from Panama. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Atahualpa imagined that once the storehouse was filled the Spaniards would leave with their loot and he would be released to rule his subjects. To accelerate the procedure the gold that lined the Temple of the Sun of Cusco was included and on Atahualpa's suggestion Pizarro sent his men to oversee the stripping of the temple. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The native chronicler Huaman Poma de Ayala wrote: 'These buildings were sheathed with gold, in large plates, on the side where the sun rises, but on the side that was more shaded from the sun the gold in them was more debased. The Christians went to the buildings and with no aid from the Indians--who refused to help, saying that it was a building of the sun and they would die--the Christians decided to remove the ornament ... with some copper crowbars. And so they did, as they themselves related.' The Spaniards prised off seven hundred plates, 'The greater part of this consisted of plates like the boards of a chest, three or four palmos (50cm x 50cm). They had removed these from the walls of the buildings, and they had holes in them as if they had been nailed.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'They reported seeing one golden sacrificial altar that weighed 19,000 pesos (570kg) and was large enough to hold two men. Another great golden fountain was beautifully made of many pieces of gold: it weighed over 12,000 pesos (360kg) and was dismantled for transportation to Cajamarca.' The Spaniards ordered the melting of the gold which was carried out by Indian goldsmiths in nine forges. Over eleven tons of gold objects many of them sacred treasures--vases, statues, jewellery and decorative objects, masterworks of Inca goldsmiths, the tragic inestimable loss of an entire civilisation. The gold and silver was shared between Pizarro and his men with the royal fifth put to one side for the King of Spain. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Horseman received 50 kilos of gold and 100 of silver, foot-soldiers half of that. Whilst Pizarro himself took seven times that of a horseman and in addition a throne of Atahualpa that weighed 83 kilos. Based on the present day value of gold, the treasure plundered from the Inca's in the form of Atahualpa's ransom can be estimated at about 500 million dollars, to which should be added the silver, precious stones and other objects. After sharing the spoils they decided, '... that Atahualpa must die ... ' accusing him of plotting to kill the Christians. He was sentenced to death and was executed in the square of Cajamarca. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | On Saturday, 26 July, 1533, Atahualpa was 'brought out of his prison and led to the middle of the square, to the sound of trumpets intended to proclaim his treason and treachery, and was tied to a stake. The friar was, in the meantime, consoling and instructing him through an interpreter in the articles of our Christian faith.... The Inca was moved by these arguments and requested baptism, which that reverend father immediately administered to him. His exhortations did much good. For although he had been sentenced to be burned alive, he was in fact garrotted by a piece of rope that was tied around his neck.' | | ---|---|--- # 15 # GOLD |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | PERU LAY BETWEEN THE ANDES and the harsh dry belt of coastal desert. To the west lay the vast empty Pacific, to the east the endless forests of the Amazon. To the south the wilds of Araucania and Patagonia with their vast empty regions marked by volcanoes, lakes and forests. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | It was a hard country dominated by three types of terrain, the coastal plain, the Andes, and the lowland jungle of the Amazon Basin. To the west the coastal plain was desertic, a phenomenon caused by the cold waters of the Humboldt current that flowed close to the coast where the land was warmer causing the moisture to evaporate from it rather than the inverse. Inland from the coastal plain was the harsh jagged snow peaked Andes, the second highest mountain range in the world, and its longest, creating a formidable barrier between the narrow coastal plain and rainforests of the Amazon, blocking the clouds from drifting westwards with their rain. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The result of this topographical morphology was the absence of the fertile expanses that were present in other regions of the world where different civilisations had sprung up. Most of its flat lands were made up of desolate puna montane grasslands and shrublands or too high for normal farming. To complicate matters Peru had few domestic animals, edible plants or trees outside its Amazon region. In their isolation the Incas predecessors had developed a unique series of civilisations over thousands of years, that came and went with the fortunes of the cyclic climatic changes that affected the whole Pacific façade of the South American continent. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | These civilisations, of which the remains have been discovered by archaeologists, include the Chavin culture that was parallel in date to that of the golden age of Greece. In the north was the Mochica civilisation, know for its pottery and textiles that survived in the desertic climate, and to the south was the Nazca civilisation. All of which were succeeded by the Inca who ruled all of Peru until Pizarro and his men erupted into their empire wreaking destruction, a disaster for Atahualpa, one which signalled the end of the Inca civilisation. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | At the same time another empire rose, that of New Spain, to which countless soldiers, adventurers and colonists were attracted by the lure of gold and silver. Peru was rich in deposits of gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc and oil. Today, Cajamarca is the site of Yanacocha, one of the world's most profitable gold mines. At the time of the conquest the source of the Inca's gold was unknown and remained a secret until 2001, when an Italian archaeologist, Mario Polia, discovered a report in the Vatican archives made by a missionary, a certain Andres Lopez. The report, dated from 1600, described a city called Paititi, filled with gold, silver and precious stones, situated deep in the Peru's Amazonian rainforest, the location of which remained a closely guarded secret deep in the Vatican's archive. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was inspired by the legend of Paititi to write his novel The Lost World. In fact many legends were attached to the mysterious city, amongst those was the idea it was an Inca refuge and many explorers set out to find the city sometimes described as Eldorado. One of them was the ill fated Fawcett expedition in 1925, led by Percy Harrison Fawcett that disappeared into the jungle and was never heard of again. Many other explorers and adventurers left their bones to rot lost in the dense humid rainforest of the Amazon, amongst them was a French-American expedition whose three leaders were killed by the Machiguenga Indians. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | More evidence came to light when satellite images revealed strange forms isolated in the depths of the jungle. It raised the question of how far the Incas had pushed the frontiers of their empire into the Amazon? The heart of their homeland surrounding Cusco was not rich in the exotic goods they coveted--feathers, animals, medicinal plants and hardwoods, all of which existed in abundance in the rainforest, if they knew how to find them, it was why they had certainly established trading posts deep in the jungle where they exchanged goods with the forest peoples. This led to the search for lost cities and certainly more than one of them survived the fall of Cusco, serving as refuges for those who fled the Spanish invaders who plundered Cusco, bringing death and disease with them. * * * |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Ken Hisakawa, Pat Kennedy's archaeologist friend from Columbia University in New York, set out with a small expedition from Iquitos to explore a site venerated by a local recently contacted Indian tribe. It was part of Pat Kennedy's patronage of Ken's research programme into how the Pre-Colombian peoples had survived the cataclysmic collapse of their world. The site was reached following a series of rivers and trails into the tangled jungle at the end of which lay the decayed remains of what had perhaps been an Inca outpost, a fortified city, a refuge deep in the jungle. There they discovered the walls of what had once been fine stone buildings, now overgrown by vegetation, roots and creepers, it reminded Ken of the temples he had explored in the Yucatan far to the north in Mexico. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The expedition used Lidar maps with 3D data developed from airborne and satellite imagery for their exploration zone. What they discovered was a site in the midst of what would have been a deforested zone, the remains of large buildings--now overgrown by the jungle, dwelling places, traces of what would have been gardens and fields, from which stone roads radiated out to other settlements. It was a remarkable discovery, proof that the Incas had continued to survive far from their heartland, vestiges comparable to other major archaeological sites. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Ken and his men did not linger long, once his men had sufficient photographic evidence, they packed their equipment and returned to the river. He feared the guaqueros or huaqueros--looters, and illegal miners, in search of gold, a metal valued by the Incas, for different reasons, panned in streams and rivers or dug from shallow pits in ore bearing seams. The Incas crushed the ore with granite pestles to extract the gold and reduced it in smelters fired with dried lama dung and hand held air tuyeres to reach the required temperatures. Sometimes it was allied with copper for the manufacture of temple and other artefacts. The Inca and their predecessors had achieved a high degree of skills in metallurgy as witnessed by objects that dated back to 1500BC. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The emperor who symbolised the sun and controlled the use of gold--a manifestation of his power, which was reserved for civic and ceremonial purposes by priests and high ranking members of Inca society. Gold was also valued for its immutability, an offering to the dead, as unlike silver and copper it did not tarnish and was not perishable like other offerings such as food and textiles. It was buried with emperors and nobles who were adorned by symbols and jewellery made from hammered gold sheets and wire, amongst the symbols were lamas, that represented the food, wool and transport needed in the afterlife. | | ---|---|--- # 16 # THE INCA EMPIRE |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | THE INCA EMPIRE WAS THE largest civilisation to develop south of the Caribbean. It succeeded earlier scattered cultures, emerging in the south-central mountains of Peru, then expanded across the western highlands and coast, conquering and absorbing neighbouring peoples, until it englobed a vast region that stretched from present-day Chile in the south, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador on the north, and from the Pacific to the Amazon forest. By the time Pizarro arrived, the Inca ruled over a population of an estimated 10 million souls, from their capital in the Cusco Valley. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Unfortunately for them their empire lasted just 100 years, brought down by civil war, disease and the arrival of the conquistadors who laid waste to all they saw, building New Spain on the ashes of the Inca civilisation and the bones of their leaders and priests. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | They left behind their monuments and their people, the common folk, but tragically no written history. Much of their artistic and cultural treasure was destroyed, their gold and silver treasures and artworks melted down, their temples raised to the ground to make way for the edifices of the Christian god. They believed their world was created at Lake Titicaca by the gods they worshipped, with the sky, the inner earth, the outer earth, the Sun, Moon, stars and planets, and in the divinity of their emperor, all of which was condemned to oblivion, replaced by the religion of the Spanish invaders--Christianity, based on sin, guilt, penance, hell fire and redemption. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The idea that at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, lost Indian tribes still lived in the remote Amazon rainforest, fascinated Pat Kennedy, whose existence would form the theme of Indians, a film that would show the world how men had once lived, and how they might live again after the collapse. They were called indigenous peoples, Indians, tribespeople, savages or chunchos. They were the original peoples of the Amazon rainforest, living in isolation, in scattered in small and different ethnic groups, mostly nomadic, speaking their own languages and dialects, with their own traditions and ways of life. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | They had been first seen by Europeans when the Spanish and Portuguese arrived, but they were long known to the Incas and their predecessors with whom they had exchanged goods, bartering the products of the forest--feathers which the Incas treasured, coca leaves and other plants, jaguar, crocodile and snake skins, in exchange for tools and ornaments--made from stone, copper or gold, textiles and sea shells. They were of little other interest to the Incas, since they had little of value, no towns or civilisations to conquer, they were nomads who evaporated into the forest when threatened. They lived by hunting, fishing and gathering plants and insects, some cultivated forest gardens in small clearings. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Certain had fled the predatory white men who came in search of gold, timber for homes and ships, and farmland. Then the invaders' gold and silver mines needed slaves, later came the rubber boom that also needed slaves, followed by loggers, cattle ranchers, oil palm, sugar cane, pulpwood and soya plantations, or oil, gas and mining companies, drug traffickers, and a new phenomena--tourists. There was even a proliferation of explorers and researchers of all shades who came in the name of science. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The list of intruders was long, the dangers many, and when it was not those bent on invading or stealing their lands or territorial reserves, their women, and killing those who resisted them, they were those who came to save souls--Evangelical churches, their mission to convert the forest peoples to the true god, frowning on their nakedness, their body paint and other heathen adornments. | | ---|---|--- # 17 # JOUVENCE PAT'S QUEST FOR LONGEVITY was driven by the idea that humans, like other creatures were genetically programmed to die, but if the key could be found to modify this programme, then perhaps life could be extended, and possibly extended indefinitely. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | He was emulating other billionaires, like Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who had set up their research firm Calico, or Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Peter Thiel founder of PayPal with Unity Biotechnology. Their laboratories like Sierra Sciences were studying ways and means to lengthen telomeres, the key it was hoped to extending cell life by reducing the biological ageing process. Reprogramming genes had been successfully achieved in animals, a process that could be soon applied to humans. The benefits were two fold, the first was staying young and living longer, the second was that any cure for ageing would generate unbelievably huge profits. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | In the meantime Pat's goal was to live long enough to live forever, to look beyond dying to a future of unlimited life. Pat did not believe in quacks and charlatans, but he did believe in rational science and its branch of gerontology and life extension. Like other billionaires he made more money than he could spend, he had everything he could desire, but not the time to enjoy it. Kings and emperor had searched for the elixir of life in their quest for immortality, and now, thanks to modern science, that dream was closer than ever before. The key was wellness, staying alive until breakthrough came. He was nearing 60 and if he could stay alive another 20 or 30 years, that breakthrough would extend his life until the next discovery. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | It was not an entirely hedonistic desire, because he also cherished the Christian idea he could make a better world for the survivors. Living longer in good health through genetic engineering. Living longer meant nothing if it was in a polluted overpopulated world being slowly destroyed by climate change. A better environment went with living longer. Some like Elon Musk aimed for the stars, colonising Mars, Pat Kennedy believed humanity's place was on Earth, a damaged Garden of Eden. His plan was to repair the planet, start again, after the collapse, with a smaller population, wiser, more intelligent, using science and the kind of long term planning that would go hand in hand with human longevity. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Like John Francis he believed short term political goals in democratic society were unadapted to the long-term needs of the planet, whilst authoritarian societies were built around the rule of leaders who perpetuated their rule around oppressive fixed ideological concepts in the interests of an autocrat or an oligarchy who cared little for the freedom of the individual. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Pat imagined an open society, the Athens of Plato and Socrates, but where slaves were replaced by machines, a sustainable society, one in which its members lived long and healthy lives, lives that were valued by all, as described by Plato in 380BC, in his dialogue The Republic, in which Socrates described a communistic, egalitarian city-state ruled by philosopher-kings--called guardians, made up of both men and women. Instead of procreating within a family unit, these leaders left the city once a year for a wild sex orgy. The resulting children, happily ignorant of their real parentage, would be raised by the state, to become the new generation of guardians. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Of course it was utopian and there had been many who dreamed of utopia, the Greek word for 'no place', which perhaps William Butler Yeats had in mind when he wrote his poem Sailing to Byzantium ... That is no country for old men .... |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The English lawyer, statesman, writer and Catholic martyr, Thomas More, born in 1478, beheaded by King Henry VIII, wrote Utopia in 1526, in which he describes a travellers account of an island ruled by General Utopus, a nation based on rational thought, communal property, a six hours working day--'the rest of their time, besides that taken up in work, eating, and sleeping, is left to every man's discretion; yet they are not to abuse that interval to luxury and idleness, but must employ it in some proper exercise, according to their various inclinations', no love of gold, no real class distinctions, no poverty, little crime or immoral behaviour, religious tolerance, and little desire for war. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | In the 20th century, George Orwell in his book Homage to Catalonia described another version of utopia, one which described the anarchist occupation of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. When rank was suspended and people addressed each other as 'comrade' in the anarchist's new but short lived world. Of course Huxley's Brave New World was another vision. Pat Kennedy had read them all and was determined to learn from them in his quest to survive ecocide and collapse. * * * Pat's yacht, Las Indias, was a constant reminder of corruption--not his, but its previous owners. The scandal surrounding it continued to echo in the media with the latest episode involving Riza Aziz--producer of the film Wolf of Wall Street, now charged with embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Riza Aziz, the stepson of former Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, had together with Jho Low, a Malaysian Chinese, ran a Hollywood production company called Red Granite Pictures. How he got involved with Low was a long story and not with a Hollywoodian ending, since he was now facing charges of money laundering to the tune of 250 million dollars. Exactly where the two unlikely crooks went wrong is not too difficult to pinpoint. It wasn't their underestimation of the law, it was their stunning naivety and extraordinary sense of impunity. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Aziz and his associates were carried away by an illusion of power and licence, the belief that his father, the prime minister of Malaysia and head of the political party that had ruled the country for 60 years, could do anything, and ended up by consciously or unconsciously confusing the money of the state with their own. The family had stood at the summit of the country's political power system since independence and was closely linked to Malaysia's hereditary ruling class. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Najib Razak, amongst many other things, was the chairman of 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), a state-owned investment firm that was established on his instructions in 2009, as part of his government's economic programme, an undertaking which up to that point was like many other sovereign wealth funds, nothing unusual. However, just six years later, it was revealed 1MDB had debts to the tune of a staggeringly unbelievable sum of money, 11 billion US dollars. Malaysia, a wealthy Southeast Asian Nation, ranked 41st in the world, a former British colony and still member of the Commonwealth, was reputed as being an above board democratic society, though there were many undertones of racism against its very large Chinese and Indian communities. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | It was embarrassing because part of the 1MDB money had been transferred from a bank account in Switzerland, in amounts of between 1.2 million and 133 million dollars, to a Red Granite Pictures bank account in the US. It seemed that Red Granite Pictures had used stolen 1MDB money to fund Hollywood productions, from Wolf of Wall Street to Dumb and Dumber 2 and Daddy's Home. The company escaped criminal prosecution by agreeing to pay a 60 million dollar fine, whilst insisting the payment was not an admission of wrongdoing. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | How Red Granite Pictures, a relative little known Hollywood film producer, had suddenly come up with 100 million for Martin Scorsese's film Wolf of Wall Street, was a mystery. But when Jho Low appeared at Red Granite with a million dollar birthday present for Leonardo DiCaprio--the Oscar presented to Marlon Brando for his role in On the Waterfront, the mystery became less mysterious. | | ---|---|--- # JUNE # 1 # A QUESTION OF CLIMATE JOHN FLEW BACK TO LONDON via San Francisco, where he stopped off to meet with Dee and Anna and discuss the plans for the coming exhibition of the Treasure of the Espiritu Santo. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | His visit coincided with a wave of wild fires that were sweeping across California said to be provoked by climate change. John was unmoved by such stories, and he explained to his friends his reasons for that. To his mind it was part of the natural cycle that had regularly occurred throughout the region in the past. Before the middle of the 19th century men knew little of what happened in many distant regions of the earth and especially the weather. California was explored for the first time by Europeans in 1542 who discovered a few small Indian tribes eking out a living by subsistence farming and concluded there was nothing of interest to Spain in the arid region. As a consequence California remained practically unexplored for the next two and a half centuries. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | San Francisco Bay was not discovered until 1769. Then in 1821 Mexico became independent and covered a vast area that reached as far north as today's state line with Oregon, and to the east Nevada, Utah and Arizona. Following the Mexican-American War, California became a new American state and its population was estimated at a few tens of thousands including Indians, Hispanics and American settlers, and it wasn't until the Gold Rush--1845-1855, did it reach 100,000 in the new Free State. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | It could therefore be seen that human records and memory relating to annual fires were extremely recent, and if they did occur they were inconsequential as the population was so small as to be almost non-existent compared to the 40 million Californians today living in a much smaller territory than the Mexican Cession of 1848--a territory of 1,370,104 km2. It was part of a story scientists specialised in paleo climatological were discovering. Recently, scientist's revealed that the East Asian Monsoon has been present for at least 145 million years, except during the Late Cretaceous, and the variations of CO₂ in the Earth's atmosphere had little effect, at least as far as humanity was concerned for the simple reason Homo sapiens were not even a twinkle in nature's eye. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | There was also a much more recent climate event called the Younger Dryas, which had caused a rapid cooling of the earth 12,800 years ago, when the temperature fell by 8oC. Many reasons for this had been put forward, but now the analysis of core samples, taken in the South East of the USA, pointed to the impact of a comet or an asteroid, which resulted in a mini-ice age. 'The point I am making is climate is a very complex phenomena,' John told Dee, 'there are few changes except when they are caused the impacts of celestial bodies, and when these happen they affect all life on earth, for example, the Younger Dryas event caused the disappearance of mega fauna species in North America and the decline in the population of recently arrived men from Asia.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'So you are saying climatic change is normal.' 'Yes, and unfortunately for us it always affects the fauna, that includes us, which is problematic, because of our huge numbers and the vast habitat we now occupy. 'Now don't get me wrong, I'm not a denier. It's evident that we are responsible for CO₂ emissions, pollution and the destruction of wildlife. But I'm also saying that populations of living creatures also rise and fall, sometimes very dramatically.' Dee recalled John Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath, which so vividly reminded them, California, like so many other regions of the US, was vulnerable to drought and dust bowl conditions. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the US suffered heat wave conditions in 1934 and 1936, the hottest summers on record, events that occurred once a century, causing devastation across the American heartlands of the Great Plains, from Montana to Texas, as the result of a combination of heatwaves, drought and farming techniques, where endemic prairie vegetation was replaced by monocultures of maize and wheat crops that favoured dust bowl conditions, forcing farmers and their families to flee their lands. Today, with climate change at hand, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will cause temperatures to rise more than 2oC and dust bowl conditions will become more frequent, according to some estimates every 20 years, bring crop failures and famine to those who depend of US cereals. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | It was a depressing thought, fortunately, at that moment, Anna arrived with a broad smile interrupting their conversation with the good news of something directly concerned with her own work, the announcement that archaeologists had discovered the anchors of Hernan Cortes' ships off the coast of Mexico at Vera Cruz. Anna's field was undersea archaeology, which explained her enthusiasm, plus the fact we had commenced to explore the vestiges of a culture that had its roots in the Inca civilisation, born across the border from what is today Colombia, in Peru, conquered by Pizarro, a second cousin of Cortes. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The anchors were found under a metre of sediment in the Gulf of Mexico, near Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, the settlement Cortes founded when he landed, now known simply as Vera Cruz. The discovery coincided with the 500th anniversary of the Conquista, an anniversary the descendants of the ancient civilisations they destroyed saw as the darkest day in their history. The anchors were identified by wood parts made from a species of oak that grew in northern Spain used to build the fleet the conquistador scuttled in 1519, when Cortes burnt his bridges to prevent a mutiny, though not before salvaging the materials needed to build a settlement at Villa Rica. Cortes conquered the Aztecs and Francisco Pizarro went on to conquer the Incas and execute their last tragic emperor, Atahualpa. | | ---|---|--- |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | # 2 # CLIMATE AND ARCHAEOLOGY THE CLIMATE WAS OF NO consequential importance to the planet Earth in the sense that since its cooling it had always been swept by winds and storms and by heat and cold. However, today, change could be of huge importance to humanity, its present occupiers, living at a moment in time when the climate smiled on human society and provided it with an abundance of food and water. It hadn't always been like that. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The forces that influenced the climate of the planet were in constant flux. The climate was influenced for example by the orbit of the earth around the sun, which varied according to forces active in the solar system, then there was the rotation of the Earth itself with its wobbles, the orbit of our satellite the Moon, the active molten heart of our planet, the tectonic movement of the continents and volcanic action at the edges of the plates that formed those continents, spewing from time to time huge quantities of gases high into the atmosphere. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | In the third millennium humanity added its hugely increased activity to the equation, by the release of fossil carbon into the environment, the result of its energy needs that had increased in leaps and bounds over the course of the last one or two thousand years as men progressively learnt how to better harness nature for their needs. Before that time men lived within the natural ecosystem, in a sustainable equilibrium, like the other creatures with whom they shared the Earth. With the Neolithic Revolution man abandoned his nomadic life as a hunter-gatherer to settle in the first small agricultural communities that sowed wheat and barley, cultivated small gardens, and raised the sheep and cattle they had domesticated to provide meat, milk and skins. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Çatalhoyuk, in Turkey, one of the largest and most populated Neolithic settlements, was discovered in 1958 by a British archaeologist, James Mellaart. It bore witness to the birth of human civilisation. It led archaeologists, anthropologists, paleo-environmentalists, climatologists, botanists, architects, geologists, geophysicists and chemists, to ask a fundamentally philosophical question, why did Homo sapiens sapiens, after 200,000 years of nomadic life, suddenly sedentarise to become farmers. Many archaeologists frowned when they were likened to Hollywood's Indiana Jones, but Anna Basurko had seen a few very colourful colleagues, any one of whom could have easily filled the role, though admittedly few wore pith helmets. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The chance of discovering a tomb like King Tut's was low, but certainly not negligible. Today, the discoveries were highly scientific, thanks to the use of DNA by anthropologists, or strontium-90 by geologists to determine the age of rocks and minerals. Archaeologists also used Lidar imagery for large scale surveys, and satellite archaeology on a regional scale. Archaeology was in fact part of a much wider discipline--anthropology, which studied all aspects of the human species, both ancient and modern, over the entire existence of the civilisations that evolved during the course of human history. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Throughout the 19th century, archaeology was almost always associated with the discovery of treasure--Troy, Mycenae, Angkor, the Valley of the Kings, Aztecs, Maya and Incas, Eldorado and Lost Cities, and of course royal tombs filled with gold and silver. In retrospective, it was regretfully more to do with looting than scientific research, carried out by well-intentioned amateurs and adventurers, with tombs pillaged, temples ransacked, and archaeological evidence trampled on, as documented by Heinrich Schliemann's maladroit excavation of Troy--often the case in the 19th and early 20th century when gentlemen archaeologists were the only ones with the means, education and curiosity to develop the science. * * * |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | There were many explanations why civilisations collapsed. In the case of the Maya, in around AD900, the most important factor was climate change compounded by the relative high density of their population and its associated agriculture. They were in fact victims of their own success. With maize the staple diet of Maya city dwellers, a system of monoculture developed which was more vulnerable to climate change. The one hundred year long dry period between AD800 and AD1000 suggested by archaeologists, which led to the collapse of Maya civilisation and migration to the north of the Yucatan, was confirmed by paleotempestological--the study of past tropical cyclone activity, thanks to paleoclimatological and oxygen isotopes identified in sediment cores from the Great Blue Hole off the coast of Belize--the world's largest sinkhole, spanning 1,500 years. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | This was corroborated by the study of bones from Maya sites in Belize dated to periods spread over one thousand years, from Middle Preclassic to Terminal Classic periods. A further period of drought between 1020 and 1100 AD, corresponded with the collapse of Chichen Itza, equally due to crop failures and famine. The conclusions of the research data pointed to the fragility of human societies exposed to crop failures induced by climate change--especially those that were very dependent on monocultures, which would have led to famines and unrest in large Maya population centres and almost certainly conflict between cities. | | ---|---|--- # 3 # A MINI CRASH |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | THE SAME LAW ALSO APPLIED to businesses, that of sudden and catastrophic change, as witnessed by the announcement of swingeing cuts at the Deutsche Bank's City headquarters. Liam Clancy sympathised with those caught up in the sudden upheaval, it reminded him of his own story, when he was terminated at Anglo-Irish in Dublin more than a dozen years earlier. People who he thought were his friends, those with who he spent the day in the office, went out to lunch and dinner with, had fun together, suddenly ignored him. It served as a lesson, made him realise who his real friends were. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Outside the Deutsche Bank that Monday morning, were Lehman Brothers-like scenes as the bank pulled out of equity markets and more than 3,000 staff members--most of them in the trading division based at Winchester House, the London Wall HQ of DB--a stone's throw from the Bank of England and from INI's City HQ at the Gould Tower, were told to report to the auditorium to be fired. Trading in equities was an increasingly tech driven sector that had changed considerably since the days when the Golden Boys ruled the City of London and Wall Street. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Nearly 40% of those employed in the City HQ of DB suddenly found themselves on the street. It was at 11am precisely when the axe fell, when the unfortunate victims discovered their security passes were no longer valid, and with no other choice they headed for local pubs or wine bars, like Balls Brothers on Austin Friars, a block away from their now former place of work. They carried cardboard boxes and white envelopes, some of them with tears in their eyes in search of a corner where they could cry into their beer or wine and order a nostalgic farewell lunch of bangers and mash, many of them wouldn't easily find another job in the City. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Already, senior employees in New York had been been forewarned, when they discovered they could no longer log into the bank's system over the weekend. Come Monday morning the bad news was confirmed when traders from the equities floor were terminated soon after arrival. The bank dumped 74 billion dollars worth of assets into a bad bank in its restructuring effort after years of scandals and crises as it struggled to get back to profitability. The human cost was a loss of 16,500 jobs worldwide, just over 20% of the banks employees, an unprecedented event for Deutsche. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Was it the precursor of what would happen when the next economic retraction occurred, whatever its cause? What was certain was the lower ranks would bear the brunt, while those ensconced at the summit of their glass towers would wince when their wealth fell a few hundred million or billion dollars, euros, pounds or whatever, then retreat to their island homes to wait-out the crisis. | | ---|---|--- # 4 # AMAZONIA DAN BRISCOE INFORMED THEM there were about 300 tribes living in Brazil, some 900,000 people. Most of the tribes were formed by groups of less than 1,000 individuals, in all just a small fraction of the vast country's population--mixed and remixed after 600 years of Portuguese-Brazilian history and colonisation. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Brazil's government had recognized nearly 700 territories for its indigenous population, totalling about 13% of the entire country and nearly all of that was in Amazonia, though a great many of the indigenous peoples lived in other regions, for example in the savannahs, Atlantic forests of the south, and the dry interior of the north-east where the first European colonists arrived in 1500. 'The Amazon rainforest is so huge that it beggars the imagination,' Dan Briscoe told Camille and her friends. 'Its vast canopy spreads 3,000 kilometres, uninterrupted, from its eastern edge to the Andes lowlands, the home to about 10% of the world's plant and animal species, a pristine wilderness.' They nodded, their eyes fixed intently on Dan. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | He laughed. 'That's where we've got it all wrong. Far from being untouched, the landscape and ecosystem of the Amazon has been shaped by humanity for thousands of years. Long before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, millions of people lived there, building vast earthworks, growing food and producing fish on farms and in lakes. Today, we don't fully understand why those societies disappeared, but studying their way of life could give us clues to how we put the rainforest to use without destroying it. The first Europeans to explore the Amazon in the 1500s spoke of cities, roads and cultivated fields, amongst them was the Dominican friar Gaspar de Carvajal who accompanied an expedition in the early 1540s, and reported seeing towns and large buildings. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'What happened to all that we don't exactly know, but we can guess. Many of the people who lived there died of disease, others, like the Guarani, one of Brazil's largest tribes, were chased from their lands,' Dan told them. 'The Guarani, what happened?' 'Their lands have been transformed into vast cattle ranches and plantations.' It was a fact. Others tribes like the Yanomami still occupied millions of hectares of forest, whilst the smallest tribe consisted of just one man, the sole survivor of his people, now living in the last remaining house of sticks and leaves on the edge of what was left of his people's forest home. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The peoples of Amazonia, were unique, living in many regions of Brazil and its neighbours. There were few other regions of the world where tribes of men and women continued to live isolated from so-called civilisation. People who until recently were fancifully described as 'lost tribes', today 'uncontacted peoples', that is without ever having contact with the world outside of their ancestral home, living in total isolation, often motivated by fear following centuries of often brutal even murderous colonisation. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The government of Brazil had adopted a no-contact approach, on the supposition the Indians would choose isolation given the choice. Historically contact with the outside world had often proven to be disastrous for isolated tribes, and those who had chosen isolation had despite government promises of protection, seen miners, loggers, and hunters encroach on their homelands. The Upper Amazon, over 80,000 square kilometres of unbroken jungle, was a priceless treasure, the home to the largest concentration of biodiversity on earth. It was also terra indigena, a space inhabited and exclusively possessed by indigenous people, the home to some 40 uncontacted Amazonian tribes, pockets of indigenous communities with little or no exposure to the trappings and disease of the modern outside world. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The region's natural riches were prey to Brazil's landless poor who penetrated into protected territory to fish its rivers or poach endangered species. Loggers cut down the dominant species--kurana and cedars with impunity. Drug traffickers used the region to set up their transit points on the way to Central America--clandestine airstrips cut into the remote jungle. | | ---|---|--- # 5 # A GARDEN OF EDEN IN THE LAST CENTURY THE INHABITANTS of a vast jungle region of western Amazonia, where Peru meets with Brazil and Bolivia, were enslaved by rubber barons. In 2020, the survivors' home, a Garden of Eden, were threatened by new dangers--wildfires and deforestation. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Not surprisingly, Pat Kennedy learnt, the Catholic church sided with the tribespeople, as always the church's vocation had been to save souls, hopefully not in the same way as Friar Diego de Landa had in the Yucatan--deliberately destroying in an autodafe the near totality of the Maya's unique cultural heritage, their codices, books written in Maya hieroglyphic script on bark paper. The record of the Catholic church in Latin America was not glorious, used as an oppressive force by the conquistadors, bringing the choices of obedience or eternal damnation, death and slavery, for those who rebelled against the authority of their exploiters. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | In modern times the Catholic church was faced with competition, as often strange evangelical movements and sects expanded their mission across the Amazonia, some setting up storefront missions amongst the wooden shacks in the shanty towns that sprung up around legal and illegal mining and logging camps. Amongst these was a sect called the Israelites of the New Universal Pact whose followers believed that Peru was the promised land and were dressed like time travelling transfuges from biblical times. Even Jair Bolsonaro was a follower of an evangelical movement. Certain saw the destruction of the forest as a divine retribution for the sins of man as in the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah or the seven plagues of the Old Testament. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Others promised salvation to 'naked savages', arriving in jet planes, equipped with modern technology and fists full of dollars, preaching a new vision of salvation in a fight to save the lost souls from the devil to create a heaven on earth in the untouched forest. The Amazon Basin stretched from the Andes in the west to Brazil's Atlantic coast, a vast ecosystem threatened by the relentless expansion of the human race, where the strong oppressed the weak, with Jair Bolsonaro encouraging land grabbers, loggers and miners, who with their rapacious appetites were plundering the protected lands Brazil's indigenous peoples. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | It was part of a long story of destruction that commenced at the beginning of the 20th century, when the rubber baron, Carlos Fermin Fitzcarraldo, who had inspired Werner Herzog's 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, ruled that corner of the Amazon. Today, a province in Peru bears his name, which also adorns the town's main avenue, schools and monuments, celebrating the rubber boom that brought death and destruction to entire tribes as the rubber tappers took control of the forest in the region of Madre de Dios. Stories are told of how Fitzcarrald tricked thousands of tribespeople to meet on a river islet, where they were massacred, leaving the bodies to rot in the river. Those who escaped fled into the forest where they hid in fear far from so-called civilisation. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The killing of indigenous peoples defending their territories continued. The shooting down of their leaders was a common occurrence, murdered in attacks by gangs working for agribusinesses in their unabated determination to illegally exploit the natural resources of indigenous peoples and their lands. Whilst the indigenous peoples of Brazil saw their forests ransacked, millions of hectares of the Chiquitano dry forest, in neighbouring Bolivia, were consumed by the fires started by cattle raisers, encouraged by their now former president Evo Morales, the country's first indigenous leader, in his misguided plan to create new pastureland by massive slash-and-burn clearance for cattle farming and beef exports to China. | | ---|---|--- # 6 # ALONE IN SPACE |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | AS THE FIRST ARTIFICIAL OBJECT, Voyager-2, quit the solar system and penetrated into interstellar space, after covering 18 billion kilometres, the creatures that made it swarmed all over the face of a planet they called Earth. During the 40 years since Voyager-2 left on its epic journey voyage, the Earth's numbers almost doubled, multiplying like a virus, and were now on the verge of destroying their host unless a remedy to stop their almost exponential growth was found. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Seen from afar, those creatures that inhabited the planet Earth, who called themselves Homo sapiens, members of the primate family according to their scientific classification, were endowed with a certain form of intelligence. These primates in their present state of development were divided into a number of different social classes, principally: intellectuals, capitalists, workers and farmers. Their tribes were organised under various forms government headed by a leader, often symbolic. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Man, as they were collectively called, had evolved from his primitive state of hunter-gatherer into so-called civilisations, large groups sharing a common culture living in geometrically variable territories, exploiting the natural sources of the seas and lands that surrounded them, namely forests, plants, animals and minerals, and as man's population grew, his environment was altered, leading to numerous existential problems including changes in the Earth's climate. * * * |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'At the point where we are now,' Kyril told his friends, 'even if the climate goals set by international agreements are met and global net zero emissions are achieved, the time lag needed to offset the effects of increased temperatures means the world will soon be faced with rising sea levels and extreme climatic events, for decades and perhaps centuries to come.' His words were a reiteration of numerous scientific reports published for all to read. 'If the objectives of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, COP21, are not reached,' said Kyril hammering home his point, 'sea levels will continue to increase.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | COP was the acronym for Conference of the Parties, the name that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, went by, a multi-lateral meeting of governments that took place each year in different cities around the world. The first COP took place in 1992, but one of the most notable was COP21, held in Paris in 2014, when an historical landmark agreement was reached with a commitment to combat climate change signed by 195 nations. The conference concluded global warming was real, driven by human activity, and above all by the exponential growth of human populations. |