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100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'On the Jari River! You know where that is?' he said glancing at Dee and vaguely pointing eastwards. 'South from the Tuma-Humac Mountains that separate French Guiana from Brazil, the plantations were started in 1967.' Dee was none the wiser, and furrowed his brow as if trying to visualise the geography northern Brazil. Anna had talked about it many times, but geographically it remained vague. As for Henrique It was history, long before he was born. 'Who was Ludwig anyway?' he asked. 'An American billionaire, enormously rich, his fortune was made in shipping.' 'Yeah, I seem to remember that, but what was he doing in the Amazon anyway?' 'I'm not really sure, but you know his idea to make plantations there wasn't the first.' 'Oh.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'The first, in modern times, was none other than Henry Ford. He tried to set-up rubber plantations, at a place he called Fordlandia, where he bought two and a half million acres, much further into the interior than Jari.' 'Fordlandia! I've read about that, goes back quite a way?' 'Yes. It wasn't such a big project as Ludwig's, about seven thousand acres of rubber trees were planted, they should have been ready for tapping in 1936, but one disaster followed another. In the end, after spending over ten million dollars, Ford sold out to the Brazilian government, for a twentieth of that sum in 1945. I guess he wanted to control the source of rubber for his car tyres. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'Anyway it was a fiasco, just as Ludwig's was to end up forty years later. The only difference was that Ludwig's project was on a very much bigger scale and surprisingly looking back most of mistakes were the same!' Dee looked at Ennis, he had stopped talking, looking at the river boat passing on the swell of a large passenger boat heading for the terminal at Manaus. 'The weather's changing?' 'No, it's just the swell.' 'So what happened with Ludwig?' 'Well Ludwig bought three million acres in northern Para, on the north side of the Amazon, about 200 kilometres from the island of Marajo. He planned plantations of a fast growing Indian tree known as Gemilina arborea. They'd calculated that there would be a shortage of wood fibre for the paper pulp industry.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'Was he wrong?' said Dee smiling. 'You know he was! There's no shortage now or in the near future, but then Brazil imported all of its paper pulp from the USA, illogical when you think of the vast forests resources in Amazonia, wasn't it?' 'What about Borneo?' 'You don't need to cut down all the forest, that's what I tell them. A couple of hundred thousand hectares can supply all the wood you want. They don't need to need to push the Dayaks into slum towns and run down villages where's there's no work. Anyway it wasn't only pulp wood plantations that Ludwig planned, he also envisaged vast rice paddies, the biggest in the world, mining and livestock operations and workers townships, as well as 2,500 miles of roads and about fifty miles of railroad track.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'Sounds a bit like big agribusiness,' said Dee frowning. Well Ludwig wanted to avoid the mistakes Ford made. But everything that could go wrong went wrong from the start, Murphy's Law. I'm not making excuses, even if I had been there, it wouldn't have made any difference!' he laughed. 'You know those god dammed bulldozers, even scrapped off the top soil, and practically all of Gemilina seedlings failed,' he said shaking his head. 'The rest were attacked by disease.' 'Disease?' 'Not only that, anyway, less than a quarter of the planned plantations had been actually planted, and the success rate of those was fifty percent below what they had calculated.' 'How was that?' asked Ennis, accepting a beer from the steward. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'I suppose the real reasons were a lack of botanists and experienced silviculturists in tropical forestry.' 'What happened then?' 'Ludwig ploughed ahead with his plans and a paper pulp mill was built in Japan.' 'Yeah, I more or less remember that when I was with the New York, they ran several stories on it.' 'Well, as you know, the mill was built on a couple of barges. They towed all the way from Japan, across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, then across the Atlantic and finally down the Amazon to the Jari River.' 'Yes, quite a pharoahonic achievement.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'You're right, the barges were beached at the final destination, a ready prepared site on the banks of the river. The mill was started up on time, but the plantations had fallen way behind schedule, so the mill lacked raw material. Because the plantations could not provide all the wood needed, so they started cutting down the natural forest to fuel the power generating plant that fuelled the mills boilers for steam to run the power generating turbines.' 'What about the rest of the project.' 'Well then they hired some Japanese agronomists, but they also ran into trouble.' 'Are you saying there was some kind of sabotage?' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'That's really difficult to say, but my opinion there were too many coincidences. The whole thing was a complete economic disaster after Ludwig had poured in hundreds of million of dollars. They were hiring and firing project directors one after the other, in total over a period of fourteen years, there were about thirty of them.' 'And you were one of them?' 'Yes and no, I wasn't one of the project directors, I was hired as a consultant to put order into the forestry projects and plantations. I visited it several times.' 'And after that?' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'Well the whole thing practically came to a standstill. Ludwig could not obtain any more money from the Brazilian government to extend his operations for a second stage of the pulp mill. Finally he threw in the towel and sold out to a consortium of companies.' 'What about the plantations then?' 'Well they didn't exactly give up, but the Gemilina plantations were abandoned in 1982, too expensive. It wasn't what could be called an outstanding success story!' Ennis said slapping his knee and laughing. | | ---|---|--- # JULY # 1 # COAL |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | IT WAS AS IF THE MINUTE HAND of the doomsday clock hand ticked several seconds closer to midnight. Pat re-read the report in the South China Post to convince himself it was real, a report on the growing number of new coal-fired power plants being built in China. It seemed incomprehensible, but the numbers surpassed the totality of all old coal-fired plants being decommissioned by the rest of the world, and this in spite of China's pledge to limit the use of coal power. China's programme was so out of alignment with the Paris agreement it had signed that it cancelled all the benefits that could be gained if every other country in the world decided to abandon coal. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | To make matters worse, China had at the same time embarked on the planning, financing and construction of more than 300 new coal-fired power stations overseas, most in developing countries, including Turkey, Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt and the Philippines, and in flagrant disregard for the declared objects set by the Paris agreement. The expected life of such power stations was half-a-century. It was confusing and difficult to understand, but the underlying reason only went to confirming John's explanation. The choice was eat or starve, live or die. It was not a difficult choice to make, eating and living was now, starving and dying some time in the future, and in the interval perhaps a miraculous solution could be found. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Without energy, China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, would collapse into anarchy, a chaos even greater than that caused by China's Communist Revolution and its aftershocks--the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which altogether cost according to some estimates one hundred million lives--the price to pay for problems past leaders had been unable to solve. The untold truth was the world's nations were well on track to produce vast quantities of coal, oil and gas, quantities way beyond the reductions pledged to limit the rise in global temperature. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | In fact, the estimated fossil fuel production for 2030, would be 50% above the level set by scientists to prevent a temperature rise of more than the 2oC fixed by the Paris climate agreement, which if not met would expose hundreds of millions of people to the dangers of extreme heat, drought, floods and poverty. It was a lose-lose situation, either way the poor would suffer. Without energy to pump water, supply electricity, to drive transport, they would die. With fossil generated energy and the hazards that came with it, those who lived in countries like Bangladesh would die of heat or in floods as the climate changed and the sea rose. To think of the poor having access to clean renewable energy sources was an illusion. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Many experts had expressed their concern that even if the cuts foreseen in Paris agreement were respected, the planet was heading for a catastrophic 3-4oC rise. The trouble was after more than two decades of climate policy awareness, fossil fuel production levels continued to rise at an alarming rate. The reasons were clear, fossil fuels played a vital economic role in almost all countries. Build sustainable green energy producing power plants was easily said, especially when it rolled off the glib lips of those who had no idea of scale. China had invested more than 244 billion dollars in energy projects abroad since 2000, who else could muster such vast sums, who could provide the technology to build clean energy alternatives? |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | John knew the answer and it cost Pat's new friend, Kyril, not a brass penny to protest. | | ---|---|--- # 2 # ECOCIDE 'The trouble with getting into a rat race,' the American comedian Jackie Gleason once said, 'is that even if you win you're still a rat.' AS THE IMAGES OF THE FIRES RAGING in the Amazon were flashed across the world and Jair Bolsonaro transformed into an ecocide, the forests of neighbouring Colombia were burnt to make space for cattle ranches and coca plantations. The region of Colombia between the Andes and the Orinoco River was threatened by rampant deforestation, as each year its natural parks lost vast tracts of primary forest to land grabbing ranchers and loggers in the absence of government presence and action. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The international media concentrated its reports on Brazil, but ignored the growing crisis in neighbouring Colombia's Amazonian forests, the home to many indigenous communities. Colombia had lost nearly 200,000 hectares of forest in 2018, much of it in national parks and protected regions, less than in the two previous years when nearly 300,000 hectares of secondary and primary forest were sacrificed to the chainsaw. Then, in 2019, in spite of protestation, a further 100,000 hectares were lost in the Tinigua, Serrania de Chiribiquete and Sierra de la Macarena National Parks and in the Nukak National Natural Reserve. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Following the peace agreement, signed in 2016, between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia--the Farc and the government, the guerrillas left the Amazon, creating a vacuum in their wake. Then taking advantage of the newly found peace process, large cattle ranchers and loggers moved in, forcefully preventing indigenous peoples from occupying their own ancestral lands, backed by gunmen and private militias hired to do their dirty work. * * * |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Bleeding heart luvvies and their fellow travellers in pursuit of causes, rarely gave thought to the consequences of their actions, including organisations like Greenpeace, which was almost certainly the best known non-governmental environmental activist with bases in some 40 odd countries, whose objective was to 'ensure the ability of the Earth to nurture life in all its diversity', a very laudable cause. At times it seemed as if their goal was to perpetuate their own existence. As with many such organisations, they needed easily identifiable enemies, targets, to whip up the enthusiasm of their supporters and above all donors. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | As with certain other NGOs, Greenpeace did not accept funding from governments, corporations, or political parties, but financed its amorphous organisation through funds raised by millions of individual supporters and foundation grants. With nearly 200 permanent salaried staff, most of whose day-to-day existence depended on their end of the month stipends, the operating costs of Greenpeace, that is to say remunerations and charges, which absorbed more the half of the funds raised. Many critics accused it of being motivated by politics rather than science, which was certainly true, in a time when any personality, political or otherwise, could get a boost from associating themselves with any green or politically correct cause. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Patrick Moore, an early but now former member of Greenpeace, criticised its stance on GMOs, notably a new strain of rice, claiming it had 'waged a campaign of misinformation, trashed the scientists who were working to bring Golden Rice to the people who need it, supporting the violent destruction of Golden Rice field trials.' Kyril confessed it had lost its way and had become a 'sad, dogmatic, reactionary phalanx of anti-science zealots who care not for evidence, but for publicity'. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Golden Rice, a form of normal white rice genetically modified to provide vitamin A, conceived to counter blindness and other diseases in children, struggled to gain approval, an essential food that would have saved millions of lives lost to malnutrition, and protected countless other children in countries like Bangladesh, India and China. Kyril put the blame for the obstacles blocking genetically modified strain of rice at the door of certain ecological action groups, and more especially with Greenpeace and their action against genetically modified crops. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The Greens said, not only was Golden rice an ineffective tool to combat Vitamin A deficiency, it was also environmentally irresponsible, posing risks to human health, and compromising food security. Its development was criticised for diverting resources from the fight against global poverty. Kyril pointed to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, an agreement designed to ensure the safe handling, transport and use of living modified organisms, which was instrumentalised to forestall the introduction of the new strains. He attributed the delay and obstacles to the development of Golden Rice to overcautious regulation, with the cost borne by the poor in suffering, starvation and blindness. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Finally, after millions of dollars and years of effort, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand approved Golden rice as safe for consumption and it would soon be approved by regulators in the Philippines and in Bangladesh. In the same way Jair Bolsonaro was pilloried by Green movements and the rest of the eco-warriors. To understand why Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil in January 2019, it was necessary to look at the previous military regime, and its successors--namely Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula, and Dilma Rouseff, Brazil's first female president who succeeded Lula in 2010. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Lula succeeded Fernando Collor de Melo, the first President democratically elected after the end of the Brazilian military government, which ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. Collor resigned in 1992, following charges of corruption and Brazil welcomed a new era. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a socialist, head of the Workers Party, the antithesis of corrupt politics, arrived as a knight in shining armour with the promise to rid Brazil of its endemic disease, corruption, a scourge that had eaten at its political base for generations, for as long as anyone could remember, and more. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Since colonial times, Brazil had been dominated by a small class of very wealthy elites, oligarchs who could do whatever suited them, especially when it came to helping themselves to the country's assets, and they usually did, an example was Petrobras, Brazil's largest state-owned company, which was plundered on a vast scale, even by the country's unenviable standards, by political leaders and private businesses. The fight against corruption was one of Lula's main strengths in the 1990s, but soon after he took office in 2003, corruption started to eat into the Workers Party government. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The deception of the poorer classes was profound when first, Lula was found guilty of clientelism and corruption, and second Dilma Roussef was impeached, ostensibly for mishandling of the economy linked to a vast scandal involving Petrobras. Between about 2004 and 2014, the state-run energy firm Petrobras, Brazil's largest company, and one of the largest corporations in the world, was caught up in one of the country's most astonishing corruption schemes ever, and whilst Rousseff was the chairwoman of the company's board. It seemed that no matter which party was in power the rot continued. But with the socialists it was worse, because in addition they they were accused of economic collapse the result of their reckless spending, which had nevertheless improved the lot of the poorer classes. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The arrival to power of the former army captain, Jair Bolsonaro, raised the question--why did the Brazilians elect corrupt politicians to power? The answer was clientelism--and clientelism went hand in hand with corruption, not only that but corruption could be overlooked if elected leaders achieved goals seen as a more important objective, with voters backing politicians who 'steal but get things done', those who enjoy a reputation as efficient public managers while accumulating private wealth through corruption, with some voters choosing candidates based on identity, and others on the basis of religious or kinship preferences. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Jair Bolsonaro professed conservative values, including the use of strong arm methods to contain the rampant crime that damaged his country and hurt its image. Head of the Social Liberal Party, he presented himself as an untainted anti-establishment politician, a politician free from corruption, loyal to past conservative traditions, one who would restore law and order. In short he represented the white middle classes who had seen their position decline under Lula and Delma. Brazil's place in the world had regressed under the Workers Party, which explained Bolsonaro's victory with many middle-class voters turning their backs on Lula's party as the economic crisis that gripped their country hit them hard and living standards fell. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Bolsonaro promised to remedy the economic situation by allowing mining and agricultural companies to expand their activities into previously protected areas of the country, such as the Amazon Forest, and by reducing aid to indigenous people's land protection agencies. The frontiers of Brazil were another problem, especially those with Venezuela, where the military were deployed to control the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Maduro's bankrupt socialist system, causing numerous problems for border towns. South America was not the US, and even less Europe, where refugees could be cared for. Refugees were not wanted, employment was already scarce and sharing was not to be reckoned with. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | European and US champagne socialists, ecologists and well intentioned good-doers with their politically correct convictions, could not get their heads around the realities of Brazil, a continent sized country, geographically nearly three times the size of India, twice that of the EU, practically the same size as the US, and 30 times bigger than the UK. With a diverse and volatile population of 200 million spread across its vast and often hostile territory, it was not an easy country to manage politically or economically, despite its vast wealth. | | ---|---|--- # 3 # LESSONS OF THE PAST PAT KENNEDY WAS NOT ALONE in believing lessons of the past were vital to understanding the survival of human civilisation. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Studies had shown that deforestation in Central America was nothing new, all past civilisations had cut down large swathes of original forest to provide for the needs of their populations. In the case of the Maya, they clearcut the forest to plant maize, for firewood, and for construction materials to build their monumental temples and buildings. But when cyclic climatic change brought drought around AD900, it coincided with soil erosion and the depletion of forestry resources, bringing war, collapse and the abandonment of cities. Today, some 1,000 years later, the forest had repossessed its domain, but in spite of its apparent density and wealth, the impact of resource depletion could still be felt as could the underlying soil's ability to store carbon. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The analysis of sediment cores from lakes in the Mayan lowlands of Mexico and Guatemala, showed the existence of deforestation and soil erosion even in pre-Maya times, when the primary tropical forest was cut to provide farming land. Inevitably, as the centuries passed, erosion intensified with the densification of population centres and the intensification of agriculture, witnessed by palaeoenvironmental records, this not only affected forest cover, but also exposed the humus to tropical rains which increased soil losses by run off. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Today, visitors to the land of the Maya often saw the dense forest cover as primary forest, which was not the case. In cutting down the primary forest the Maya fundamentally modified the ecosystem and hundreds of years after the disappearance of their civilisation and the abandonment of depleted agricultural lands, nature repossessed its domain, but the forest never recovered its pristine primeval state. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | A further complication unexpectedly upset the hopes of reforestation. Secondary forests, even after hundreds of years growth, could no longer sequester the same quantity of carbon as primary forests, a finding that had implications for those who imagined replanting forests would solve carbon storage problems. In any case tree planting projects, if the UK was anything to by, were not promising, as it had missed its targets every year since they were set in 2013, a message that underlined the urgent need to preserve primary forests. | | ---|---|--- # 4 # RAINFORESTS |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | A LOT WAS WRITTEN IN THE PRESS and talked about on the media about the destruction of tropical rainforests, though little was said about the precise role those forests played in the functioning of local and global weather--thanks to their absorption and creation of rainfall and exchange of atmospheric gases. Indians would open with a presentation of the Amazon forest and how it created between 50% and 80% of its own rainfall. Matt's idea was a simple introduction for viewers of what scientists called a biotic pump, where the evaporation or transpiration caused a reduction in atmospheric pressure as clouds form, causing moist air to be drawn to regions where evaporation is at its highest. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | With the loss of forest cover a rise in temperatures followed with the result biotopes in Equatorial regions were transformed into drier forests and expanded savannas. In this way viewers could see how tropical rainforests played a vital role in climate regulation, through the surface albedo--a measure of energy and surface reflectance, by absorbing more heat than bare soil. So when moisture from trees and vegetation rose into the atmosphere it condensed as rain and created a local cooling effect. Therefore loss of forest cover meant less heat absorption and less moisture rising into the atmosphere. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Any change impacted local climate and effected weather patterns that in turn influenced adjacent regions. Consequently, the continued destruction of the rainforests would inevitably affect the global climate leading to greater instability and extreme weather conditions. Civilisations in tropical regions like those of the Maya and Khmers depended on large scale agriculture and deforestation, not only for food production, but also wood for construction, firing bricks and pottery, and kindling. The same was valid for the Amazon basin where pre-Columbian societies developed, where their success led to local climate change, less rainfall and as a result less food, all of which was compounded by global climatic cycles, like El Niño, which went a long way to the decline of those societies. * * * |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'To put things into perspective,' Kyril explained, 'that is in terms of geological time, we are living in an interglacial period, between two ice ages. People forget the ice sheets that cover the poles have expanded and retreated many times in the past, as have our glaciers. 'The last glacial period,' he reminded them, 'when the ice expanded, occurred between about 120,000 and 11,500 years ago, and since that time we have been living in a period scientists call the Holocene.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | He went on to explain how geological records, in terms of ice cores drilled in polar regions, demonstrated glacial periods were colder, dustier, and generally drier, whilst interglacial periods were wetter and warmer. Evidence of which appeared through the changes observed in marine and terrestrial life in fossil records around the world. The reasons for these cycles were many and included variations in the Earth's orbit around the sun which changed the amount of solar radiation received. Other variations were caused by the ice-albedo effect, that is the reflection of solar radiation. Another was atmospheric CO2, which is what was commonly called the greenhouse effect. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'Emissions of CO2 created by the burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of CO2 absorbing forests,' said Kyril continuing his lesson, 'has caused the temperature to rise and sets in motion climate change and rising sea levels as ice sheets and glaciers melt. | | ---|---|--- # 5 # VALE DO JAVARI AFTER A LONG TREK PAST towering tornillo trees and mashonastes erect on their huge splayed buttresses, their trunks disappearing high into the canopy, beneath a lattice work of branches decorated by epiphytes and orchids, they wearily shuffled into a clearing close to a river. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The location was set in a region to the south of Leticia, situated in the Brazilian State of Acre, called Vale do Javari, where the Rio Itui joined the Rio Itaquai, one of the most remote and uncharted places left on the planet, where the mysterious Flecheiros Indians lived, whose poisoned arrows targeted all those who entered their territory. Vale do Javari was the home to an estimated 1,350 uncontacted people, including the Flecheiros who painted their faces and bodies red and cut their hair in the familiar bowl cut of the Indians. They lived by hunting monkeys, tapir, peccaries and turtles as well as fishing in the many torrents, rivers and streams, gathering manioc and plants, and cultivating small gardens in forest clearings. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The production team's objective was to film another group, known as the Caceteiros, clubbers, who contrary to the Flecheiros used clubs as their weapon of predilection for hunting and defence, they numbered about 150 individuals and lived in malocas, changing campments from time to time. Most lived in total isolation further upriver, however, the maloca they hoped to film with the help of the FUNAI, had more recently opened up to contact with the outside world. From their starting point in Leticia, they set off along the sinuous Rio Javari that separated Peru from Brazil. The maloca they were informed lay about 100 kilometres upstream, about four hours by boat and a trek of a few more hours in the jungle. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | By now they had learnt the distances in the Amazon were vast, they had started 1,000 kilometres to the north in the Colombian Chiribiquete park, and now in Brazil they were surrounded by tens of thousand of square kilometres of jungle, endless rivers--all greater than any European river, where there were to all intents no roads or anything that resembled a town or a village. Fortunately for them a base camp had been set up in advance by an entreprising local Indian family group that had emerged from the forest and set up a permanent home on the river bank to the north. They now acted as guides, boatmen and porters for forest officials, ethnologists and the occasional hardy reporter from scientific revues--lucky enough to get a permit to visit the reserve. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | There was nothing to complain about, apart from the heat and the fatigue, it was like a well organised tour, however, Dan Briscoe warned them, the easiest part was over. The next day they set out over a barely visible trail for their first contact with the Indians, a semi-nomadic group, who until a couple of years before had had no contact with the world outside. HG was familiar with the sight, one she had seen so often in the jungles of Sabah in the north of Borneo. It was as if a meteorite had fallen on the jungle, the burnt remains of trees, twisted in agony, their blackened branches pointing to the sky, the low lying vegetation burnt off, but amongst the ashes the green shoots of yuka, sweet potatoes and bananas were appearing. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The small family hunter-gatherer group of three dozen or so people had cleared about a hectare of forest to plant their food. This was slash and burn farming to supplement hunting, fishing and foraging, an age old lifestyle, where the group moved on once the game consumed and the soil depleted, which was often the case in tropical forests where nutrients were stored in the biomass and not in the thin layer of humus formed by the decomposition of leaves and other plant material by microorganisms, forcing the community to move on from season to season, clearing another site where they could repeat the process and where there was more game, in the same way as had their ancestors over countless generations. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The Indians, in their protected areas with basic medical care, prospered, and the same scene was repeated everywhere, as huge dominant trees went under the axe to create clearings, crashing down, bringing the canopy and smaller trees with them. As a consequence the small population grew, as did their gardens, dotting the forest, as could be observed from satellite images. Soon the Flecheiros and Caceteiros would disappear, on the one hand were the threats from intrusion, illegal loggers and miners, and on the other the lack of sustainable farming techniques as the indigenous peoples' numbers grew and threatened their own habitat. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Ever since the arrival of European colonists at the beginning of the 16th century, the peoples of the Amazon had been victims of brutality, slavery, violence, disease and genocide. It has been estimated that between 10 and 20 million Indians had once lived in thousands of tribes across the vast region that now englobes much of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil. The first Europeans colonists brought multiple diseases to the Americas--measles, smallpox, influenza and bubonic plague, which devastated the local population and caused the collapse of farming. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The total population of North, Central and South America at the time Christopher Columbus arrived had been estimated at around 60 million, and now confirmed by extensive archaeological evidence, found not only in population centres, but also in the vestiges of slash-and-burn agriculture--terraced fields, large earthen mounds and vegetable gardens spread over vast territories. The consequences for the Indigenous populations were catastrophic, according to some estimates disease caused the death of 56 million, over 90% of the total population of the Americas--peoples who had evolved in isolation from Eurasian and African populations for many thousands of years, shielded from the diseases that stalked those then distant populations. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | As a consequence of this apocalyptic calamity millions of hectares of lands won from forests and jungles by the pre-Columbian Americans were swallowed by encroaching reforestation as nature retook possession of it lost territories.. In the centuries that followed, death by diseases was transformed into genocide, hundreds of thousands more Indians killed, hunted and enslaved in mines and plantations, their lands emptied to make space for European settlers. By the middle of the 20th century the indigenous populations of Amazonia were disappearing at the rate of one tribe a year. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Today, there still remains an endemic racism towards Indians in Brazil, who in law were still considered minors and still fighting to gain control over their ancestral lands, a difficult task as Brazil is one of the two South American countries which does not recognise the ownership of tribal lands. * * * When Francisco de Orellana, a Spanish conquistador, sailed up the Amazon in 1541, he did not find Eldorado, but he did report the existence of an unknown civilization composed of large villages and farms lining rivers banks and described seeing the outlines of large cities in the distance. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | However, Orellanas's successors found nothing to confirm that report, that is until Eduardo Neves, a Brazilian archaeologist made a surprising discovery, something he described as terra preta de indio, 'dark Indian earth', a mixture of charcoal and nutrient-rich earth, a contrast to the usual poor yellowish-orange soil of the Amazon. Archaeologists believed this dark earth was the result of slash and burn methods to open clearings in the forest for agriculture and homes. By adding smouldering organic waste, like animal bones, excrement and straw, the soil was enriched with higher crop yields supporting larger populations in an otherwise not very fertile environment. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | This terra preta was often found associated with archaeological remains, like potsherds, proof that ancient civilizations had existed in pre-Columbian times, the vast majority of which were wiped out by diseases brought by the Conquistadors. Ken Hisakawa also described how newly developed methods were employed to determine variations in the vegetation relative to different types of soil. By studying light spectrum data collected by satellites, it was possible to detect subtle differences in how light was reflected off trees, enabling scientists to analyse photosynthetic activity in the biomass relative to small variations in leaves specific to terra preta sites. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | This process helped identify terra preta sites across the Amazon, proof that the land had been once occupied and farmed by unknown civilisations, clear evidence that the Amazon basin was much more densely populated in pre-Hispanic times than previously thought. The idea that unknown archaeological mysteries lay hidden in the depth of the vast Amazon rainforest not only excited Pat, but carried a warning that disease and strife could destroy a civilisation. | | ---|---|--- # 6 # ANOTHER WORLD THAT EVENING, HG TOLD HER FRIENDS of the struggle of the indigenous peoples in her homeland, those who lived in the rainforests of Borneo and Peninsula Malaysia. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | She saw Malaysia as a construct of the colonial power that had ruled different parts of it, together and individually, for different periods over more than two centuries. The story began when the British set up a trading post on the island of Penang in 1771, then fighting the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and French, for control and possession of different parts of the region. Once in control the British installed their own system of rule, dividing and redefining its different parts to suit their own ambitions, until the Wind of Change brought independence to the colonies, with London finally quitting its last regional foothold, Brunei, in 1984. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Malaysia's indigenous peoples formed a mosaic of ethnic groups--nomadic forest dwellers, shifting cultivators, fishermen, sea peoples, immigrants and invaders, all mixed together living in the territories of Peninsula Malaysia and Borneo, the latter shared with Indonesia and Brunei. On the peninsula were the Orang Asli, the original people of Malaysia ... well those before its present day inhabitants. They were progressively joined by Malays from the north and other peoples who migrated there from northern Asia, many, many, centuries ago, and finally Chinese, Indians from the Subcontinent, and a scattering of Brits--a few of whom put down permanent roots. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The problem was some were more equal than others, the Malays called themselves Bumiputra, 'sons of the soil', that is to say Malay, different, 'purer' than the other components of the population, such as Chinese or Indians. The Bumiputra also included the Orang Asli, the true indigenous peoples, who, in spite of that supposed privilege, suffered from multiple discriminations. Those discriminations and impositions, included forced relocation from their ancestral lands, and 'integration', including conversion to Islam. The Islamic Council of one of the Malaysian states, Kelantan, publicly declared its goal of converting all Orang Asli to Islam. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Until recently many Orang Asli had led their nomadic way of life in their forest home as they had for countless generations. That changed when they became victims of miners and the palm oil producers, when loggers moved in with chainsaws and bulldozers, to clearcut the forest and make way for industry.. Thousands of hectares of forest disappeared with all its rich diversity--gone in an instant were the trees, plants, animals, birds, insects, fish--forever. 'What happened to the people?' Camille asked. 'Some were settled in a few prefabricated concrete buildings, on plots of land designated by officials, far from anywhere,' HG replied. She told of how the Orang Asli were uprooted, torn from a way of life, one that outsiders had difficulty to understand. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'The government talks about schools, electricity and home comforts,' she said describing their drama. 'The forest was their home, their school, their source of food, now they are forced to live off handouts. They are lost in a world that is alien to them, unable to read or write. 'Perhaps the young ones want to change, but schools are too far away, as for their old folk they are faced with neglect, living in misery, in jungle slums, despised by villagers and with little or no hope of integration or finding a job. 'Many fall ill, suffer from depression and malnutrition, loss of immunity, poisoned by insecticides from the plantations, without care, doctors or clinics, forced to watch their old people and children die.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The mines--bauxite, clay, coal, copper, feldspar, gold, gravel, ilmenite, iron ore, kaolin, limestone, mica and tin, brought contamination in their wake, from tailings, chemicals and other discharges from mineral processing, polluting the rivers and streams, with the surrounding vegetation poisoned by toxic rain runoff. There was a headlong scramble to exploit the country's soil without any thought to the future, as manganese was added to a long lists of mineral exports--with more than a million tonnes a year going to feed China's voracious appetite. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The price paid by the indigenous peoples was high, their rights trampled on, a way of life gone, their ancestral identity obliterated, forgotten, all in the name of the consumer society, the needs of Europeans, Chinese and Americans, most of whom have never heard of Malaysia, not to mind its original people, the Orang Asli. In HG's own state, Sabah, the forest cover fell from 50% to 15% as 1.4 million hectares of forest were clearcut to make way for oil palm plantations, a terrible disaster for the unique wild life of North Borneo, devastating the already reduced habitats of orangutans and even rarer rhinos and pygmy elephants. * * * |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | HG told them of the bright red haze that invaded the skies of towns and villages in Borneo and Sumatra every year. Scenes that reminded her of a Hollywood movie, a world invaded by Martians, but this was no movie, it was terrifyingly real, as the toxic red haze from the fires that raged across ancient rainforests, turning entire regions into a living hell. Each year when the dry season arrived, smoke, laden with carbonised particles of burnt vegetation, filled the sky, soot settled on the roofs of houses and on the streets as people wearing scarves and surgical masks tried to go about their daily lives. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Fires spewed a toxic haze over Indonesia's islands for weeks on end in one of the country's worst wave of pollution ever. Amongst the culprits were pulpwood and palm oil producers responsible for the fires on their concessions, once virgin rainforest. For decades Jambi, in Sumatra, a region known for its paper pulp mills and oil palm plantations, was the centre of vast fires caused by deforestation, a process that accentuated the age old slash and burn techniques used by local farmers, wreaking havoc on the biosphere as the vast island's population exploded and industrialists invaded the forest. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The annual phenomena coupled with drought, caused by creeping climatic change, made life unbearable for humans and animals, spelling doom for Sumatra's unique wild life as pollution made the air unbreathable. The economic effect was immediate, cancelled flights, closed schools, hospitals overburdened as far away as Singapore where thousands of vulnerable people suffered from acute respiratory infections aggravated by the haze that spread to Malaysia and Borneo. HG was too young to remember the origins of the catastrophe, which could be traced back to the 1970s, when logging became a vast industrial enterprise, followed by the arrival of pulpmills, then oil palm plantations, as Indonesia, in order to feed and provide jobs for its population, started to mine its primary forests. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | John Ennis remembered his first visit to Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, in the mid-seventies, when the population of the vast archipelago approached 110 million. In the intervening years it had grown to 270 million and by 2050 the country would have to provide for 366 million, compared to some 40 million in 1900. To his mind one didn't have to look far to understand the problems of climatic change, it wasn't plastic, air pollution or CO2, it was the human population of the planet, which would soon have multiplied not far off ten fold in a couple of centuries, a raging disease that was destroying the natural biosphere of the planet. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | If we consider, from the appearance of modern early man to the invention of agriculture, about 12,000 years ago, from the start of the Pleistocene to the end of the Holocene, it is estimated that the total world population never exceeded one million, a very small number compared to other species, like for example herbivores that swarmed across the savannas in countless millions. Historical speaking the human population grew very slowly from this critical point in human history until 1800, passing from one million to one billion. From then, the start of the Industrial Revolution, it took a sudden and dramatic upswing. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | What caused this sudden explosion? It was not a lack of food, the absence of which had never been an important factor in human history, if ever it lacked it was mostly for political reasons--war and conflict. If we stopped to think that around 100 billion people in total lived on the planet throughout all human existence, it meant that today's population, that is at this precise instant, is equivalent to 8% of the total number of people ever born--eating, consuming, polluting, mining and generally plundering the planet's resources at a never before seen rate. As the plague of human locusts spread, it was no wonder the natural planet was facing an extinction crisis. | | ---|---|--- # 7 # WAR FOR SURVIVAL |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | AS THEY STRUGGLED THROUGH the rainforest, the silence was suddenly broken by piercing whine of a chainsaw. Their guide stopped, lifted his hand as a sign of warning. 'Illegal loggers,' Dan whispered. It was difficult to say how far away they were. Illegal logging was everywhere, even in protected zones, where small gangs of loggers, equipped with a few chain saws, winches to haul the logs to the nearest navigable stream, and a boat capable of towing the timber rafts, operated with near impunity. The gangs targeted exotic hardwoods like the Ipe, Handroanthus spp., one of the Amazon's most valuable tree species, exported at up to 2,500 dollars a cubic meter. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | As loggers moved into virgin territories--complex biotopes that took hundreds of millions of years to evolve, they started by selective cutting, which encouraged and facilitated clearcutting, transforming the forest into farmland--after the remaining plants, tree stumps and roots were burnt, opening the way to extensive monoculture. * * * |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Dan Briscoe detested armchair ecologists, who in the television studios of their big cities--London, Paris, Rome, Berlin or Madrid, dispensed lessons to the general public, brainwashing the collective conscience with their politically correct ideas, with visions of the world seen through rose coloured glasses, whose knowledge and experience of ethnological diversity was in reality near to zero. Well-doers, who confused ethnic diversity with what they saw on their visits to popular market places in London's East End, or for the better-off amongst them, brief vacations in Rajasthan, ballooning in the Serengeti, or luxury cruises on the Nile. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Their knowledge of the rainforests went about as far as that of their nearby parklands, where they swooned over the beauty of nature, the trees and fields they admired, epitomised by the bucolic scenes painted by 19th century artists, Vincent van Gogh or Jean-François Millet & company, fields of golden wheat, harvests and the sun-kissed faces of happy peasants. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Natural! Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only were cities like London, Paris, Rome, Berlin or Madrid surrounded by profoundly altered landscapes, but so were the entire landscapes of the countries they represented. The primary forests of oak, ash, maple, birch, beech, poplar, elm and pine that once surrounded them, fell under the axe, one, two or three thousand years ago, and the wildlife that lived within them exterminated. Even humble foxes and badgers were still being exterminated as vermin. Not only that, coal mines, slag heaps, centuries of waste to land fill, damaged waterways and coast lines, endless towns and cities, railway lines, road, airports, the list was long, indelibly marked the land. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Much of Europe and its western isles were once covered in dense primary rainforests, where trees were decked with moss and lichen, their trunks surrounded by ferns and temperate plants, where wild horses, elk, bears, wolves, wild boar and deer roamed, where countless species of small animals and birds lived in their branches. The hills and moors--where we walk and recite verse eulogising our 'fair land', had been devastated by our ancestors, transformed into barren hills, dotted with their dark satanic mills, by our industries, and even by royalty's Highlands homes, where they shot grouse and hunted stag in the deeply altered biospheres of their estates. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The answer was not fragile mono-species plantations, but the regeneration of the natural habitat with all its variety and riches, something that would take generations, without being driven by industrial nurseries and forestry businesses. Activists never ceased to call for more homes to house growing populations, building on the green belts that surround large cities. It was a vicious circle, more people meant less unconstructed land, and less space for ancient endemic species of animals and plants, little wonder insects and birds were disappearing. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | It was time for activists to focus on the real cause, mankind and its teeming millions, swarming like proverbial locusts, eating everything that lay in their path, on the land, under the land, in the seas and in the air, now crouched ready to spring into space and colonise the Earth's celestial neighbours. * * * Alfonso's main fear came from the mercenaries, those hired by the agribusiness companies, who arrived in boats and vehicles, cutting trails into the forest in the direction of small semi-nomadic groups of forest dwellers, like the Yuri and Passe who alerted by the animals and birds, fled deeper into the forest abandoning their malocas. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The expedition and its film crews could not flee into the jungle leaving their material behind, besides they wouldn't get far, they knew nothing of the hostile world surrounding them. The target of mercenaries was primarily the Indians, but they would not hesitate to attack those who helped or protected them, setting fire to homes and laying forest gardens to waste, a warning to quit the zone the loggers had targeted, to crush and discourage all resistance. Small tribes like the Bocas Pretas, a relatively recently contacted group of just 150 souls, whose name came from their black tattoos made with the juice of the genipap tree, were forced to flee their camp when illegal loggers, gold miners and poachers, empowered by the arrival of Jair Bolsonaro, surged unhindered into their territory. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | This situation was compounded as lobbyists clamoured for legislation that would allow commercial mining in indigenous territories, where, Bolsonaro had declared to the UN General Assembly, reserves of gold, diamonds, uranium, niobium and rare earths could be exploited and bring development and prosperity to indigenous communities. 'Indians want to grow and to develop, just like any human being,' he declared. 'Most other countries have decimated their Indians. We want them to walk alongside us--because they are Brazilians, just like us.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Not all Brazilians were against Bolsonaro, on the contrary many saw him as on being on the side of progress, theirs was a vast and almost empty land, of humans that is, but what kind of progress--and for which humans, in a country once declared, 'a land without men for men without land'. Brazil's 1988 constitution gave indigenous communities the exclusive right to vast areas, and protected reservations, such as the 1.9m hectare Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau territory in Rondonia State. Progressively, under Lula and his successor Dilma, the situation of the indigenous populations improved, but then, with the arrival of Bolsonaro, it looked like big agribusiness would take priority as Brazil was projected to become the biggest soya bean and beef producer on the planet. | | ---|---|--- # 8 # ON THE BRINK |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | PAT WATCHED HELPLESSLY, after months of protests Hong Kong had reached the brink of a total breakdown, vehicles were torched, Molotov cocktails were thrown at police cars, an MTR station was sackaged, shopping malls were broken into and police fired teargas at the crowds of demonstrating students gathered in the streets. The intensification of the violence came after police shot a protester at close range, a scene caught on camera. The police later told the media rioters had doused a man with petrol and set him on fire, a story that was unverified. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Pat feared it was all going to end badly when roadblocks and barricades were set-up on main roads and protesters rampaged through Central District, the main business area--home to some of the world's most expensive real estate and luxury stores, across Kowloon and the New Territories. Riot-police fought with drawn batons, clubbing demonstrators to the ground near the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, as banks and shops shut their doors and even the venerable Jockey Club was forced to cancel its evening programme of races, a rare happening in the city. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Schools and universities were closed as students wearing banned face masks armed themselves with rudimentary weapons, slings and catapults, stock piling bricks and stones, ready for street warfare as chaos descended on the city with explosions echoing through the streets and smoke plumes rising above the crowds whilst the sound of screams and gunfire reverberated off the glass towers. In three days over 80 people were admitted to hospitals for injuries sustained in the confrontations with the authorities. To add to Pat Kennedy's worries was the attempt by Hong Kong exchange to take over the London Stock Exchange, with a bid of 37 billion dollars. London and Hong Kong were two of the most important financial centres in the world and both were wracked by political turmoil. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The importance of the LSE was reflected in the fact that it together with the Bank of England and Lloyds made it one of the three pillars of the City of London which dated back to the 16th century. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Already the much smaller London Metal Exchange had been bought by the Hong Kong group in 2012, a deal approved by regulators. However, times had changed and Britain would need to control such important assets after Brexit. The iconic Square Mile generated some 60 billion pounds a year, which made it the most important single sector of the UK's economy, and that in the hands of Beijing that would not make for a good post-Brexit start, though it comforted the ineffable Johnson's vision of building a 'buccaneering' Britain, after revealing his plan to create a Singapore-like state on the doorstep of the EU, offering low-taxes and regulation, an idea that would not ingratiate Berlin or Paris. * * * |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | As news filtered through from the Mainland that a disturbing number of Chinese billionaires were disappearing or committing suicide, Pat couldn't help thinking he could end up like them. One of them, a certain Guo Wengui, a billionaire property developer, sought asylum in the US, after claiming to be the victim of corrupt high level Communist Party government officials, who countered his accusations by accusing him of acting against the state. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | In the background were worries about Chinese corporate debt which had climbed to an estimated 19 trillion dollars, difficult to imagine, the 12 zeros nearer astronomers units for measuring distances across the solar system than earthly matters. What was less difficult to imagine was the disaster another financial crisis would create, a huge recession with highly indebted Chinese companies taking a beating, though the US, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain were not far behind. This time around they would be impossible to rescue as central banks had few if any silver bullets remaining in their arsenal. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Low or negative interests rates had fragilised institutions and a sudden event, a terrorist attack, war, epidemic, revolution, could provoke a meltdown of already overvalued markets where risk taking had risen in an effort to boost yields. At the same time government and high quality corporate bonds with negative yields continued to grow as investors such as pension funds, insurers, and financial institutions sought safe places to store their wealth. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | It was a warning, a flashing light, investors were supposed to get paid interest on their investments, the kind of a deal where you invested 100 dollars and got 90 back in ten years wasn't how it was supposed to work. Something was clearly wrong and Pat, who compared to his London and New York fellow bankers could see the clouds of teargas rising above the streets below from his office or even his Victoria Heights apartment window, quietly instructed his managers to offset risks by hedging options. The problem lay in the fact that low and negative interest rates encouraged more borrowing, as politicians like Boris Johnson started off with wild spending promises, anything to get elected, which gullible voters would have to pay for one way or another at some future date. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | It was not difficult to imagine a sudden detonator, the Middle East was more than ever a powder keg with a very short fuse as Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia faced each other off in an eternal struggle for domination. There was the treaty for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, currently pointing at Iran's programme to develop, the ultimate form of dissuasion, eyed by Saudi Arabia, possessed by Israel and Pakistan. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Little known to the public, the bomb was already present in the Middle East, more precisely at the Incirlik Air Base in south-east Turkey, in fact there were some 50 tactical nuclear weapons on the base, leaving Washington vulnerable to blackmail by Erdogan as the Turkish forces pushed into Syria thanks to Donald Trump's disastrous decisions, overturning decades of Washington's often maladroit efforts to keep to keep the lid on an explosive situation, decisions that now undermined US interests, giving Moscow's a free hand and giving new life to the criminal Assad and his regime. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | As the UK procrastinated in its waltz, Brexit or not to Brexit, its financial sector continued its vocation of being the world's laundromat as the ill-gotten gains of crime, corruption and blatant theft continued to swill through the City of London. The National Crime Agency estimated that more than 100 billion dollars of dirty money flowed through the UK every year. The Russian Central Bank and the IMF, estimated that much of that money came from Russia, and over 80% of it had passed through British Overseas Territories, notably the British Virgin Islands over the course of the previous decade, through which a total of 80 billion laundered dollars were invested in above board overseas businesses and assets. | | ---|---|--- # 9 # UNREST |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | VETERAN BRITISH NATURALIST David Attenborough, took on the role of whistleblower, warning that failure to tackle climate change would lead to massive social unrest. Which, perhaps encouraged politicians, in a headline grabbing a communication, to announce Britain would be the first G7 country to set a goal of zero carbon emissions by 2050. It was hallucinating to watch as countries vied to out do each other in their one-upmanship rhetoric. Transient politicians with short term goals, who rolled out their glib tongued platitudes and policies, revealed how totally out of step with reality they were. Thirty years was an eternity in politics, the blink of an eye in human history, a millisecond when it came to geoclimatic events. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Meanwhile Prince Harry set off for the Google summer camp, after Prince Charles had added his grain of salt at Davos, and Boris Johnson declared the UK would clean up its act with the promise of zero emissions. What would happen in reality was quite another thing. By 2050, Charles would certainly be dead or dribbling at the mouth, like Johnson, and what Harry would be doing was anybody's guess, if he was still around he would going on 70, and his brother King William an old man. In human history 30 years was not a long time, but in the 20th and 21st centuries there has been an acceleration of events, starting with the transformation of China. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | One had only to look back 35 years when at the end of 1984 Margaret Thatcher signed a pact with Beijing, when Deng Xiaoping--the architect of modern China, was paramount leader, agreeing to hand back Hong Kong in 1997. Until 1984, the subject of market economy in China was taboo. Then in October of that year, for the first time, policymakers introduced the idea, paving the way for and market-oriented reforms and the development of a socialist consumer economy. Shortly after that date John Francis revisited Hong Kong and travelled for the first time to Mainland China, Canton and Beijing, where he discovered the first signs of a market economy, when most of that vast country was a backwater, still entrenched in Maoist ideas. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The history of Britain's presence in Hong Kong commenced with gunboat diplomacy, when in 1839 it forced China to hand over Hong Kong island. The Second Opium War ended in 1860 when China was forced to hand over Kowloon. Followed by the New Territories which were ceded to Britain in 1898. It was only in the 1980s when Britain finally realised it could not defend its vestiges of empire that London finally introduce a degree of home rule with an early form of legislative assembly, though Zhou En-Lai, Beijing's foreign minister, threatened invasion if UK gave Hong Kong self-governing status and democratic institutions. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Though LegCo was democratically elected, with a degree of autonomy as a Special Administrative Region of China, it was crystal clear that Beijing had no intention letting Hong Kong go any further. In fact at the end of the 50 years agreed with London, the SAR would be fully integrated into China. The new LegCo law at the root of the unrest in 2019, foresaw powers enabling China to extradite any person from Hong Kong, charged with an offence carrying a penalty of seven or more years imprisonment. In addition, China could demand the individual's assets in Hong Kong be frozen. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | A bad deal considering the manner in which Beijing handled the case involving a Hong Kong bookseller, a certain Gui Minhai, who in a closed-door trial was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for espionage and providing intelligence overseas. Something that did not surprise Pat Kennedy, and even less John Francis and Pat O'Connelly. For John it was the action of an oppressive authoritarian regime, for Pat O'Connelly another affront to intellectual freedom. Pat Kennedy, who had no illusions about Beijing, saw it as another bad business sign on the horizon. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Gui Minhai was the second of five Hong Kong-based publishers linked to the independent book store Causeway Bay Books who went missing in late 2015. Gui's publishing company, Mighty Current, was known for provocative titles and had been discussing the publication of a book entitled Xi Jinping and His Mistresses. Not a good thing. Gui was kidnapped by Chinese agents in Thailand and transferred to China, where the other four booksellers then reappeared, and in a trial broadcast on state television, confessed to illegally selling books, that is lurid books that did not please the authoritarian rulers of China. Despite all the talk about democracy and human rights, what mattered more to London or Washington was their assets in Hong Kong. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | John had explained to Pat Kennedy how the West had erred in the development of relations with post-Mao China, imagining with trade it would become more open, more progressive and more democratic. The West had not foreseen the fusion of Communism with Confucianism and Western capitalism, a mutation that produced a new political-economic model--authoritarian capitalism. A model that combined the worst of tradition with communism and capitalism, one that demanded total obedience to the state, a system that had recreated the personality cult, around the figure of Xi Jinping, a system that would inevitably swallow Hong Kong whole, in one bite. | | ---|---|--- # 10 # GUETHARY |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | PAT 'DEE' O'CONNELLY WAS PLEASED with his latest acquisition, a vast Belle Époque villa set in a splendid six hectare park with a spectacular view of the Pyrenean valley landscape. It lay on the edge of Guethary, a small picturesque seaside town situated between St Jean de Luz and Biarritz, fifteen minutes from the airport, an exclusive spot favoured French fashionistas, showbiz and other personalities. It was quiet, sedate, far from the bling of the Cote d'Azur and its tourist masses. His decision was of course to do with Anna, who had warned him she had no intention of quitting her family and San Sebastian for Paris. The property, fit for a lady, was part of his plan to convince her theirs was not just a passing affair. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Guethary, just half an hour from San Sebastian by the autoroute, was well served with several flights a day from Biarritz Airport to Paris and London, with nearby San Sebastian Airport serving Madrid and Barcelona. Camille who had just arrived for a few days in the Basque Country felt at ease in the large house, though it seemed a bit big for Dee and Anna, a contrast to her parents who were downsizing--their chateau in Sommieres was being converted into a museum and hotel complex. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | That evening Liam arrived from Paris together with John and Ekaterina who joined them for a concert at Saint-Nicolas de Guethary, a 16th century church. It was part of the small town's classical music festival with a programme that evening of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Rachmaninov, under the direction of Bertrand Latour, to be followed by a late diner at Les Freres Ibarboure. Eating before the concert wouldn't have been a good idea. The church was typically Basque with three longitudinal wooden balconies, which in past centuries had been reserved for the menfolk--those who hadn't left to conquer new worlds for the glory of Spain's kings. |