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100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Today, I feel like that paltry thing in William Butler Yeats' poem, Sailing to Byzantium, a tattered coat on a stick, wondering what will the next forty years bring. I That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees, --Those dying generations--at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. II An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | To the holy city of Byzantium. III O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. IV Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come. John Francis Kinsella Earth Day, Paris, April 22, 2020 | | ---|---|--- # PROLOGUE No man is rich enough to buy back his past. Oscar Wilde |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | WHAT KIND OF A STORY IS THIS? Well I suppose some might call it meta-fiction. I mean by that much of it is true and the rest is fiction, but perhaps it's not fiction at all. You the reader will have to decide what part of my story is imagination and what is made-up, but be warned, remember the hackneyed saying that fact is often stranger than fiction. Against a background of uncertainty, asset prices had rocketed, and in spite of persistent bad news with Brexit, Trump, the Middle East, hunger, disease and climate change, markets continued to progress. Since 2008, following the crash of Lehman Brothers, the Dow Jones had re-emerged from the economic crisis, rising a dizzying 450%, with more and more billionaires chasing assets and property, pushing prices to unbelievable heights. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Democratic activists, ecologists, anti-climate change and extinction groups, collapsonauts, equal gender rights, anti-capitalist, and those opposing the neo-liberal model, along with political activists, were among those leading protests movements, forming what could be collectively called a save-the-planet-revolution. In the forefront were many determined and highly vociferous men and women, some writers, others actors, television and media personalities, and business men and women. Amongst them was Pat Kennedy, his family, friends and their families, a Clan of extremely wealthy men and women. They included Tom Barton and his wife Lola--a Colombian, mother of two young children. Tom had gotten rich by investing in Latin America--industry, minerals, oil, gas and agriculture. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Spanning two continent Latin America covered more than 19 million square kilometres with a population that would reach 500 million by 2050, offering limitless possibilities for business, but Tom Barton's ambitions ran contrary to those of many investors, his vision was one of equity, between the needs of men and the safeguard of the natural environment. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The Clan now collectively stood at the head of a diverse 100 billion dollar empire of cross holdings that straddled the planet, managed mostly by the men of the Clan, founders of the different businesses that constituted their respective family fortunes. The wives of such men had in the recent past been passive, apart from their engagement in charity, watching their husband's business from a distance, silently observing. Now that had changed, some wives enjoyed extravagant public lives, aboard their yachts, or in their outrageously extravagant homes, others were drawn to more serious roles, no longer content to look on, but since they had no legal role in their partners business activities, they joined one of the many in vogue movements to defend women's rights, minority rights, anti-somethings, often enrolled into the crusade to save the planet. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The unspoken question was, save the planet, okay, but from what, from whom, and for who? The Clan gravitated around Pat Kennedy, the head of a leading international banking and investment group, an empire onto itself. The INI Banking Corporation projected a clean image, those who visited the bank's gleaming glass and steel towers were greeted by images, conjured up by its public relations department, of an environmentally friendly business group, backed by glossy brochures, filled with bright images and descriptions of businesses in manufacturing, mining and agriculture, spread across a broad geographical spectrum, where factories and fields were filled with happy smiling workers. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The reality was different, not that Pat and his friends were slave drivers, exploiting the poor and the natural resources of their countries, but the bank invested in innumerable business through a vast network of markets, where few if any really knew where and under what conditions workers and resources were exploited. The bank was a triumvirate, and one of its headquarters rose out of the heart of the City of London, amongst the many towers that resembled a cluster of sparkling crystals. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Beyond those towers lurked a more sinister world, one driven by corruption, dirty money, narcotics, human trafficking, workers exploitation and a kingdom where the gig economy left a trail of human desolation, where knife crime was rampant, where a punitive state had forgotten many of its citizens and those who had made it their home. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | London was nevertheless far from the desolation of the kingdom's former manufacturing and mining regions, towns and cities forgotten in a wilderness of industrial ruin and social collapse, where large swathes of the UK's population struggled to survive. It was a contradiction when compared to the front page stories of the Daily Mail, filled with the adventures and love lives of the rich, royals, celebrities and footballers, their extravagant marriages, their ultra-spoilt children, their sumptuous villas, their yachts, jets, supercars, and wild holidays. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Those abandoned by the system looked on, separated by an impenetrable glass wall as the wild party continued, as Bojo fiddled and parliament tore itself to pieces in the UK's never-ending Brexit saga, not helped by the opposition, led by a sour old time Marxist, with his fifties style discourse, as though he and his party were trapped in a time warp, although any comparison would have been unfair to Karl Marx. It was more or less the same story a couple of hours in the Eurostar to the south-west of London, Paris, where Emanuel Macron pursued his surrealistic promises, where his equally heavy-handed punitive state hit the same forgotten classes that suffered in the same way as did their UK counterparts. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | It was a tale of two cities, both prisoners of the gig economy, with entire districts abandoned to gangs that controlled the illicit traffic of drugs and contraband cigarettes, prostitution and illegal immigration, where the only alternative for the disinherited young and forgotten was the kind of diliveroo job that made the Amazon economy work. A world of zero-hour contracts, few holidays, no sick leave, no hope, where businesses drove their workers to extreme limits under the threat of punishing penalties or job loss, which Ken Loach described as 'Labour that could be turned on and off like a tap.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The film-maker was a lifelong crusader fighting a losing battle against social injustice, in a society where nearly five million people worked in precarious jobs, relying on food banks and handouts to supplement near starvation wages. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Paris intramuros was the home of the bobos, an inner-city elite--champagne socialists, bankers, lawyers, IT engineers, architects, fashion designers, marketing and communications specialists, actors and artists, served by a low-paid precariat, living in the less well-off arrondissements and to a greater extent beyond the peripherique--the circular urban highway that separated the rich core from the poor periurban sprawl, both of which had been stripped of their industries, the bobos taking over the heart of the city and the best paid jobs, whilst the traditional working class disappeared or ended up on the pedals of deliveroo push-bikes. It was little wonder countless young people dropped out, choosing a life of indolence, drugs and petty crime. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Poverty, homelessness, inequality, the slow car crash of health systems, were symptomatic of globalisation, where the politically correct refused to look at the causes of pollution and climate change--the unrestrained growth of population and rampant immigration, the twin fuels of growth and globalisation. Pat was haunted by the idea his bank's image would be harmed by investigative reporters, exposing pollution and bad working conditions in the industries it financed, as was the case in many of its investments in Russian mining and metallurgy, Chinese manufacturing or Brazilian agricultural. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The bank funded the Fitzwilliams Foundation, headed by John Francis, through which it could bail itself out by developing projects via scientific and humanitarian agencies, dedicated to defending indigenous peoples and protecting their homelands from the encroachment of ruthless industrialists and criminal organisations. One such agency, a struggling underfunded association, headed by Alfonso Martinez, had been brought to the attention of the foundation, thanks to Anna Basurko, for its remarkable efforts and progress in defending the land rights of the Wayuu, a Native American ethnic group whose home lay on the Guajira Peninsula, situated in northernmost part of Colombia and north-west Venezuela. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Anna first met Martinez in Colombia during her research into marine archaeology off the Caribbean coast of the country. She had introduced him to Lola Barton who had expressed her concerns about the Wayuu Indians and their struggle against the vast coal mining complex that had despoiliated their region, transforming its people into dependent slaves. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Alfonso was a self-effacing Spanish lawyer dedicated to helping others. He had first worked with Franciscan missionaries, then set up an association to carry out what he discovered was to be his life's work. A native of the historical town of Tudela in Navarre, Alfonso had created a following in the wealthy region that bordered the Pyrenees, where the Basques had won their struggle for autonomy and built a solid experience in structuring the legal means to defend their rights against big government. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Alfonso's family had been marked by the brutality of the Spanish Civil War, his grandfather murdered in the massacres perpetrated by Franco's men. The war had pitched families against families and atrocities had been perpetrated by both sides--as in all wars, but Alfonso saw nothing was to be gained from reigniting the conflict, aside from preserving the memory of the victims and the need to avoid falling into the extremist trap. The story of the survival and courage of the indigenous peoples of South America, recounted by Anna, against the worse kinds of adversity, had fired Pat's imagination, and his realisation that perhaps there was a lesson to be learnt from their experience. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Concerned by sombre visions of the future, Pat had increasingly sought the experience and advise of his friend John Francis as to the future, not markets and economics, but the future of humanity as it stood. The response was not encouraging. The idea that he should protect his family and friends slowly took form. Quietly he set about a project he named Salvator Mundi, one that would not only offer protection, but an alternative future. He developed it as a business plan to attract a core of very wealthy and privileged investors, those seeking a doomsday safe-haven, ready to invest in a project that offered them the comfort and security they were used to. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Like Pat Kennedy those investors had deployed all their energy to build and protect their fortunes only to realise the world in which they lived was an increasingly dangerous, unstable, overcrowded and overpolluted place to live, and it was time to concern themselves with their own and their family's survival, far from the masses on whom their wealth had been built. The Doomsday clock stood at less than two minutes to midnight. Time was short, government solutions non-existent, as ecocide, pandemics, climate change and mass extinction stalked the planet. | | ---|---|--- # 2019 # MAY # 1 # A BOOK FESTIVAL |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | CAMILLE, LIKE MOST PARISIANS, had her weekend routine, especially Saturday mornings. After breakfast with Liam, she set off for the traditional food market across the square from their place where a vast choice awaited her, not only fruit and vegetables, but just about everything else--meat, charcuterie, poultry, fish, cheeses, bread and conserves, from every corner of France and beyond. Liam's business left them with few moments together and Saturday lunch was one of the few occasions they could enjoy alone. The colourful Marche d'Aligre offered endless ideas for lunch, especially in the 19th century food hall, where specialised vendors offered an extraordinary range of delicious mets. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | They were relatively new to the district and as she cut through the gardens in square Trousseau, she remarked for the first time a shop front on the opposite pavement, it bore the name PLANÈT DÉTECTION, and seemed a little out of place at a spot where fashionable cafes and boutiques were the norm. With curiosity getting the better of her, instead of going directly to the market, she stopped and peered into the shop window. It was filled with a variety of strange objects from another age mixed with the latest gadgetry in electronic metal detectors. She pushed on the glass door. It was locked. A man appeared, he looked a her questioningly, a fashionable young woman, perhaps she'd mistaken the shop for something else. He smiled, opened the door and welcomed her inside. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The place was a capernaum of tools and oddities, a newspaper cutting in a frame announced Chercheur de tresor. 'Can I help you?' the man asked. 'You sell metal detectors.' 'That's our business.' 'For treasure hunters?' 'Yes, as well as archaeologists and geologists,' he said amused at her curiosity. Camille had Pat Kennedy in mind, he'd been mulling over a vague project to explore Muisca Indian sites in the Altiplano of the Cordillera Oriental in Colombia. He'd developed an interest in Pre-Colombian archaeology after the discovery of an extraordinary jade mask and other artefacts during an undersea salvage programme he'd undertaken off the coast of the Alta Guajira. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The haul of treasure from the Espiritu Santo, a Spanish galleon, had unexpectedly yielded a cache of Mayan treasure, probably looted and on the way to Spain in 1708 when the vessel sank off the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Pat was flying in to Paris that evening from Hong Kong and they were expecting him the next day at their place, a large duplex Haussmannian apartment on rue Charles Baudelaire, a short walk from the Bastille, in the 12th arrondissement of Paris. * * * |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Early the next morning, a fine spring day and a welcome break from three weeks of almost continuous rain, Pat, who didn't stand on ceremony, turned up at the Clancy's apartment earlier than expected. Liam had left for his weekend run, ten kilometres along the banks of the Seine, and Camille proposed they take a walk around the street market where she hinted there was something he would be interested to see. Pat knew the market, he liked rubbing shoulders with the very mixed crowd, Parisians from every walk of life and every imaginable origin. He liked to feel he was in touch with the people, escape from his own often unreal world of finance and business. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The market was buzzing, a motley jazz band played on the street corner opposite the 19th century covered gourmet food market. On the esplanade was a brocante--a second-hand market--books, antique clutter, discarded decorative objects and general junk. They strolled past the stalls as Camille pointed him in the direction of rue de Charenton. 'There,' she said pointing to a building at the junction where the market tailed off, where the more impecunious stall holders offered overripe fruit and no longer fresh vegetables to not so well-off less regarding shoppers. A banner announced a Festival du Livre et de la Presse d'Ecologie. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The building looked like some kind of a school, and it was. A rather grimy white modern stucco façade with large metal framed windows. A black and white poster over the entrance announced '100ecs', a cultural association, and on either side more colourful banners depicting what looked like a smouldering forest, welcomed visitors with the words, Entree Libre--free entrance. 'A book festival,' announced Camille. 'I'd like you to meet a friend, one of the organisers.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | It was not a big deal, a couple of dozen stands where publishers and booksellers laid out their wares, works covering a broad spectrum of subjects linked to ecology and the environment. Nearly all were in French, which didn't stop Pat exploring them in his constant search for information that would prove or perhaps disprove his sombre vision of the future. It was not that he was a pessimist, in fact by nature he was an irrepressible optimist, but he was above all a realist, and what he observed, together with the information that was accumulating day by day, reminded him of the period leading up to the catastrophe of the Second World War, when Chamberlain and his appeasers hoped against hope that all would turn out for the best, whilst Hitler laid his plans for war. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | It wasn't just the multiplication of conflicts, but the steady flow of bad news, it could have been put down to the media, but from where he sat with the information resources he had at his disposal, everything pointed to a dark future. There was of course the much spoken about climate change and the loss of biodiversity, but there was also overpopulation, a major contributing factor to the pollution of natural resources--land, sea and air, the threat of disease with repetitive epidemics of Ebola and Sars, then there was war and civil strife, an uncontrolled flow of immigration, those fleeing hunger and overpopulation, the list was long and was growing longer by the day. 'Pat, let me introduce you to Catherine, she's the organiser of the festival.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Catherine was a dark haired woman of fortyish whose English was approximate and who quickly suggested Pat meet the star speaker of the event, Kyril Kyristoforos, who was scheduled to preside on a televised discussion panel later in the day. Kyristoforos was more than an activist, rather an eco-celebrity, the founder of Gaia, a foundation dedicated to the safeguard of the natural environment. He was widely known for his highly successful TV documentary films on polar expeditions, the African savannah, the rainforests of South America and South East Asia. He was also an active campaigner against big agribusiness, pesticide and chemical-laden fertilizer producers, plastics, and petrochemicals. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Gaia was neither a company nor a trust, but a combination of both, and tax exempt. In simple terms, it was a non-profit philanthropic corporation. Its vocation was to back organisations, institutions, or individuals dedicated to the betterment of human society, through science, education, culture, and in particular the preservation and protection of the biosphere by reducing human impact to sustainable levels. How it did that depended on the funds it could raise, and Kyristoforos beyond his eco-celebrity status spent a good part of his time with people like Pat Kennedy persuading them to back his projects, fund raising was a competitive business. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | He was surrounded by a TV team, his team, in preparation for the conference he was to chair later that day to mark the high point of 17th festival, which would serve to launch his new Rainforest TV series. He looked across at Pat as Catherine whispered in his ear and immediately recognised the banker, even dressed in his universal easygoing weekend wear. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Of course Kyril spoke perfect English, a slight mid-Atlantic accent, which solved any problems Kennedy may have had with French. Kyril was used to meeting decision makers, politicians, businessmen and renowned scientists. But it was not everyday he spoke to a very rich man, that is one as rich as Pat Kennedy. Most of the people that gravitated around Kyril were in media and publishing, some were in politics, and most hoped something would rub off the celebrity in their favour. Pat on the other hand was a potential backer, a source of sponsorship, cash. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Each country had its iconic green leader, heading a crusade to save the planet, a popular hero with his documentaries, books, press articles and commentaries, his pet projects to avert disaster, and his changing political affiliations. A few were known internationally like David Attenborough, whose BBC wildlife series was a planetary hit. There were others like Michael Moore or Al Gore, and personalities lesser known outside their countries or language spheres. Kyril thanks to the international success of his wildlife films and documentaries had gathered a large following, not only in France, but also much of Europe. His film Rainforest had won prestigious awards in Cannes, at the International Wildlife Film Festival in Montana, the Jackson Wild Summit and the Greenpeace Film Festival. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Capturing audiences was a combat, an everyday battle for funds, the competition fierce, as it was amongst businesses for green celebrities whose endorsement was worth a million words. Hollywood stars bet their careers on backing humanitarian and green movements, at the forefront were stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Judith Paltrow, Willie Nelson, Cameron Diaz, George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Cindy Crawford. Sting was not a newcomer to the ecological movement, already in 1989, he with his wife, Trudie Styler, created the Rainforest Foundation. He had even a Colombian species of frog named after him, Dendropsophus stingi. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Kyril had started his career as an actor fresh out of drama school, his career was brief, however, his acting skills served him well when he joined a humanitarian foundation as its public relations manager, at first organising seminars, conferences and publications. It was when he started to produce short promotional videos, low budget, he came into his own, with his photogenic looks and aura he was a natural. He soon found backing for his first TV reportage, an expose on rapacious logging operations in the Congo, which established him as a defender of the rainforest, its peoples and wildlife. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Like all actors he was a chameleon, who, when he shed his green mantle, became a businessman, at the head of the vehicle he had created, Gaia, a foundation dedicated to saving the planet Earth. He asserted humanitarianism and ecology went hand in hand, he also approved the presence of showbiz with its power to reach out to the public, even LGBT movements, no one could afford to be seen dodging the trend. Beyond that the driving force was his own burning ambition, the kind that drove politicians, adventurers and carpetbaggers. * * * |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Was he a guru? Well he wasn't a spin doctor. Some kind of Messiah, who had set himself up to save humanity from itself? Not really. A self-appointed eco-warrior? Perhaps, there were plenty of them. But, all other things aside, Kyril Kyristoforos was a charismatic mediatic figure, his detractors called him Saint Kyril, though he only wore sandals when he had to. The same went for his jacket, which he shed, often slung over his shoulder, once he had the attention of his audience, hypnotising them with his sincerity, not unlike those evangelists that could be seen Sunday mornings on Bloomberg TV or CNBC when markets were closed. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Certain activists and their followers saw their existence as an end in itself, and that end justified their existence, not their declared objective, forgetting that an organisation was of moral value, if and only if, it refrained from treating its declared objective as a justification for its own existence. It was not rare to see the charismatic leaders of such organisations become sacred totems, religious symbols, with their loyal followers who defended the beliefs, litanies and canons of the organisation and its leader, blind to any alternative argument. They of course had their share of scientists, experts--real and pseudo, communicators, organisers and fund raisers, who with their foot soldiers carried the combat both at home and in the field. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Therein lay the difference, Kyril was closer to capital markets than the Bible. Pat couldn't and wouldn't stay for the conference, pleading an unavoidable engagement, instead, to Kyril's great satisfaction, Pat invited him to dinner that evening at the nearby Le China, which the ecologist accepted. Dinner with a billionaire banker was an opportunity he couldn't afford to pass up, an evening with Kennedy was better than the one he'd planned with his grabbing producers, media reporters, sycophants and fawning followers, which could be put off for another day. | | ---|---|--- # 2 # AN IRISH HERO |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | IT WAS BY PURE CHANCE that Pat Kennedy had happened upon the story in the Irish Times, that of Roger Casement, executed by the British for treason. Like all Irishmen, Pat of course knew the story of Casement's role in the Uprising of 1916, what he didn't know were the details of his career as a diplomat in the British Foreign Office. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Strange though it may seem, it filled some of Pat's blanks in the history of Hong Kong and Britain's colonies in South East Asia, where the atrocities in Amazonian served to build Britain's ambitions to corner the rubber market by introducing rubber tree plantations in Malaysia to produce the raw material needed by Dunlop for its tyres, invented by a Scot--John Boyd Dunlop who had lived most of his life in Ireland and died at his home in Dublin's Ballsbridge in 1921, but that's another story. Pat's interest in Casement's story was linked to a project that was taking form in his mind, one that was linked to Colombia, where he had spent several weeks the previous year with his friends salvaging the treasure of the Spanish galleon, the Espiritu Santo. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Thanks to his friend Tom Barton, Pat Kennedy had discovered the Cordillera Oriental, Colombia's branch of the Andes that swept down to the Amazon rainforest, a place Pat had visited under strange circumstances a couple of decades earlier. The Cordillera had now become the focus of Pat's project and the story of Sir Roger Casement, an Irishman, in the Amazon, spurred him on, though it was not his intention to end up at the end of a rope. * * * A Dubliner, Casement started out in life by working for the Eider Dempsey Line, one of the important imperial British shipping companies that carried passengers and freight between Liverpool and the ports of West Africa including the Congo Free State. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | He then worked for Henry Morton Stanley and the African International Association, an instrument of Belgium's King Leopold II, its chairman, as was Stanley, who was immortalised by his words: 'Doctor Livingstone, I presume?' In 1890 Casement, after he had become disenchanted by colonialism, met Joseph Conrad. Both believed European colonisation would bring moral and social progress to the continent and free its inhabitants 'from slavery, paganism and other barbarities,' a vision they later regretted. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Conrad was to express his change of conviction through his powerful and much acclaimed book Heart of Darkness, in the same way as Casement, who, after after joining the British Colonial Service, was appointed consul and commissioned to report on the attrocities committed against Africans enslaved by the rubber industry in the Belgian Congo. The best part of a century later Heart of Darkness was adapted and transposed into Vietnam by Francis Ford Coppola in his cinema classic Apocalypse Now. Casement was described by his friend the sculptor Herbert Ward in a letter: 'No man walks this earth at the moment who is more absolutely good and honest and noble-minded.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | In 1906, he was posted to Brazil, first as consul, then consul-general in Rio de Janeiro, where he was appointed to a parliamentary commission charged with investigating reports of inhuman treatment inflicted on the Putumayo Indians by the Peruvian Amazon Company--PAC. The story of Casement's mission was told by Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner for literature, in his book, El sueño del celta, and its English version The Dream of the Celt, an account of the Irishman's life and how he set out into the deep dark heart of the Amazon jungle and its endless expanses bordering the Rio Putumayo, in pursuit of truth and justice. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | In September 1910, Casement left Iquitos and travelled upriver to La Chorrera, where he spent nearly two months investigating the atrocities committed against the Putumayo indigenous people by ruthless rubber tappers. His conclusions were laid out in the Putumayo Report, which had a resounding effect in London when it was presented in 1911, earning Castlemain a knighthood. The crime was discovered in 1908 when Walter Hardenburg, a young American engineer, left home for the Amazon, where the rubber boom had launched a number of ambitious projects including the construction of a railway. Instead of joining the railway project he was embarked on a terrible adventure that would mark forever the history of the Amazon. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | In January Hardenburg and his travelling companion were caught up in a battle between Peruvian armed forces, reinforced by men of the Peruvian Amazon Company, against a group of Colombian caucheros. Hardenburg and his friend were captured, their baggage stolen, and they were held prisoners. During his forced sojourn in the jungle, where he was harshly treated, he witnessed countless hideous atrocities against the Indians which he recorded. Then in June 1909, Hardenburg travelled to London to bear witness before the Anti-Slavery Aborigines Protection Society who published his account, which shocked British opinion, and successfully lobbied the government to investigate the crimes committed 'at the behest of the agents of a great joint-stock company with headquarters in London.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The fact that the Peruvian Amazon Company was a London registered company with three British directors, John Russell Gubbins, a friend of Peruvian president Augusto Leguia, Herbert Reed, a banker, and Sir John Lister-Kaye, an English baronet, forced the government to action. An investigation was launched and Roger Casement quit London for the Amazon where he was appointed consul and empowered by the Foreign Office to undertake an enquiry into the alleged atrocities. Pat Kennedy couldn't help being struck by Hardenburg's words in his book The Putumayo, The Devil's Paradise: |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'The influence of the Incas did undoubtedly extend into the forest regions in a degree, as evidenced by remaining customs and nomenclature, but the Incas did not establish order and civilization in the forests as upon the highlands. The Incas and their predecessors built a series of fortresses which commanded the heads of the precipitous valleys leading to the forests, whose ruins remain today, and are marvels of ingenuity in megalithic construction.' Hardenburg witnessed chained Indians transporting huge bales of raw rubber in the most primitive conditions constantly beaten and tortured by the PAC's slave drivers. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The PAC, also known as the Anglo-Peruvian Amazon Rubber Co, was run by Julio Cesar Arana, a Peruvian entrepreneur and politician, who raised capital for his venture in London, and counted eminent Britons on its board of directors, including Sir J. Lister Kaye, an English baronet. The PAC was accused by Hardenburg of practices that amounted to the barbaric slavery of the indigenous peoples in the Putumayo region of the Amazon rainforest. A Select Committee of the House of Commons published a paper on the investigations in 1913, in which the British Board of Directors of the PAC was declared not criminally responsible under the Slave Trade Acts. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Juan Alvaro Echeverri, an anthropologist at the National University of Colombia, reiterated the findings, which he published in the Irish Journal of Anthropology, an article describing his research into the genocide practised against the Putumayo Indians between 1900 and 1930 when they were almost totally wiped out during the rubber boom, a period they called the Basket of Darkness. The harsh reality was rubber had become a vital raw material for the developed world at that time, supplying armies and industries with tyres, belts, clothing and endless other products. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | When Hevea Benthamiana, Hevea Brasiliensis and Hevea guyanensis were discovered on the banks of the rivers Putumayo and Igaraparana in the late 19th Century, it brought a wave of explorers and adventurers to a region that now straddles Peru, Brazil and Colombia, in the indigenous territories of the Witotos, Boras and Andoques tribes. PAC set up its base at Iquitos, far from the government in Lima, where it took less time to reach Lisbon in Portugal, across 'the region of the Amazon Valley--a region nearly as large as the whole of Europe without Russia', via the Amazon River, than undertake the almost impossible journey to Lima overland or via the treacherous Straits of Magellan. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The remoteness of Iquitos allowed men like Julio Cesar Arana to act with complete impunity. It was a time of the Mission Civilisatrice, when Europe believed native peoples needed to be civilised, a pretext for subjecting them to the most odious conditions. Hardenburg witnessed hunting expeditions to capture Indians, many of whom looked 'thin, cadaverous and attenuated, they looked more like ghosts than human beings', as his photos witnessed. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Casement was experienced in the matter, his report into abuse of the people in the Congo State ended King Leopold's reign as its de facto ruler. Leopold II of Belgium had governed the vast country as his own private estate, where according to conservative estimates six million native Africans were killed by Leopold's agents, either starved on the rubber plantations or killed when they refused to accept slavery on plantations, logging or in the search for ivory. His transformation into an anti-imperialist came in part from the fact that he was an ardent Irish nationalist, who saw his country like the Congo as being oppressed by an imperial power, manifested in his letters by his contempt for Victorian imperialism. One of the crimes committed by Arana's men: |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | '... took place during the carnival of 1903, and it was an abominable and horrible crime. Unfortunately, around 800 Ocaina Indians arrived in La Chorrera to hand over the products they had harvested... After these were weighed, the man who led them, Fidel Velarde, picked out 25 of the men, whom he accused of laziness. This was the signal for Macedo and his accomplices to order that sacks dipped in gasoline be placed on the Indians like a tunic and set on fire. The order was dully obeyed and one could see the dreadful image of those miserable (Indians) screaming loudly and piteously as they ran towards the river hoping to save themselves by plunging in, but all of them died.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Casement's Blue Book--a parliamentary report entitled Correspondence on the Treatment of British Colonial Subjects and Native Indians Employed in the Collection of Rubber in the Putumayo District, was published July 1912. It provoked of outrage and incredulity at the idea a British-registered company was responsible for the maltreatment of hundreds of innocent Indians. In 1913, after Casement retired from the diplomatic services, he entered Irish nationalist politics. This ended when he was arrested on a deserted beach, not far from McKenna's Fort, near Banna Strand, in Ireland, on his way back from Germany on Easter Thursday 1916, the day before the Dublin Rising, after an unsuccessful attempt to solicit help from Germany for the rebels cause. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The scene was described by an eyewitness, Pat 'Aeroplane' O'Shea: |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'Advancing along the middle of the road marched a company of RIC, helmets on their heads, and carbines on their shoulders and ammunition pouches slung on their belts. However one disliked them, one could not but admit that they were a fine body of men as they strode along, looking neither to right or left and lest of all at the man in civilian clothes who walked in the centre and whose great height almost dwarfed them all. Nobody, not even his ignoble escort, knew the identity of this stranger whose proud and erect mien drew and held the attention of all. He was of middle age, handsome, with pale complexion, black hair and moustache turning grey. He wore a cheap looking and obviously ready-made suit with a white handkerchief peeping out of the breast pocket. He wore no beard. He wore no overcoat so that his manacled hands were in plain view. On his head he wore a cap with a wide flat top. As far as dress went, his was a shabby figure. One thing was recognised by all. The man who left Tralee by the 10.30 train that morning was a personage, but all guesses were very wide of the mark - especially those relating to the prisoner's nationality.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | That man was Sir Roger Casement, who was tried for high treason and hanged in Pentonville Prison in London on August 2, 1916. The slave driver, Julio Cesar Arana, died at the age of 88, penniless, in a small house in Magdalena del Mar, near Lima in 1952, after his properties in the Putumayo were transferred to Colombia. As for the victims of the PAC and others who exploited the native peoples, it took a century before someone stepped up to apologise. In 2012, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos offered the apologies of the nation to the indigenous peoples who suffered as a result of the rubber boom during which it was believed that at 100,000 died, probably very much more, decimated by the greed of the rubber companies and others who exploited the forests of the Amazon. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | | | ---|---|--- # 3 # A QUEST IT WAS BECOMING DIFFICULT TO SORT the wheat from the chaff. Information polluted by fake news was on overload as the internet revolution continued to explode with knowledge, news and nonsense, reaching out into every distant corner of human society, across the entire planet, empowering every single citizen interested in the world around him, its destiny, his destiny, his family's destiny. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Hightech companies, like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others never heard of, controlled the information we received, the movies we watched, the food we ate, the products we consumed, our communications, the mails and messages we sent, photographs and videos we exchanged with our families and friends, with our employers, our banks, fiscal authorities, doctors and health services, all transferred via cable networks, over the ether, via satellites, open to snoopers, hackers and spies of every imaginable kind. News was controlled by an ever tighter and smaller circle of large media companies, while a multitude of independent bloggers and commentators inundated us with fake news, disinformation, and subversive propaganda of every political shade and colour. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Peter Pomerantsev, a senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, wrote: More information was supposed to mean more freedom to stand up to the powerful, but it's also given them new ways to crush and silence dissent. More information was supposed to mean a more informed debate, but we seem less capable of deliberation than ever. More information was supposed to mean mutual understanding across borders, but it has also made possible new and more subtle forms of conflict and subversion. We live in a world of mass persuasion run amok, where the means of manipulation have gone forth and multiplied, a world of misinformation, disinformation, fake news, dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, deep fakes, ISIS, Putin, trolls, Trump, it was endless. * * * |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Pat Kennedy believed that collapse was inevitable, not imminent, but near, all the signs were there--climate change, runaway demographics, pollution, disease, war and strife. He felt it was part of his duty to his family, friends and associates to set about developing a survival plan, but when he stopped to think, he realised that if he lived to the age of his grandfather, he had another 30 or so years ahead of him. Most mortal men would have been satisfied with that, but not Pat. What would be all his wealth be worth to him if he was dead? |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | He remembered his visit to Xi'an, the capital of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a united China, who with his vast wealth and power had built a tomb guarded by the now famous life-sized Terracotta Army, a city from which he would rule in the afterlife, however, in the meantime, to forestall the risk that the afterlife was just a dream, Qin sought the elixir of eternal life, mercury pills, which unfortunately for him only hastened the end of his mortal existence. Immortality was an age old dream, but in 2020 there was a glimmer of hope and certain scientists thought the key to longevity lay in our genes which controlled our biological clock. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Though brought up a Catholic in Ireland, Pat was not a believer, superstitious, but definitely not a believer, as for Chinese elixirs he had about as much faith in them as the holy water his mother brought home from Lourdes. But he did believe in science, and the progress medical science had made during his life time was remarkable by any measure. Pat had everything a man could want, power, wealth, an elegant wife and two beautiful children, he owned homes in Hong Kong, London, Paris, New York, the Caribbean, a mega-yacht, a transcontinental jet or two, and above all robust health, but as he approached the age of 60, the thought of his own mortality made a sombre mark on his otherwise extraordinary rise to success--one day he would die. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | He with Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, had two things in common--they were immensely rich and they would die. What was the point of surviving doomsday if he was to die of old age and decrepitude like the many nameless beggars he saw on the streets of London. What was the point of saving the planet, restoring it to its once pristine state, if he was not there to enjoy it? Was death inevitable when he controlled such vast wealth? The two things went together, survival and longevity, longevity and survival, in conditions that permitted him to enjoy life and the trappings of wealth far from danger. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Pat's bank, INI Hong Kong, was the majority shareholder in LifeGen, a biological research institute based in Sophia Antipolis, a science and technology park that lay between Nice and Cannes, in the South of France. LifeGen's principal field of research was molecular biology and genetics and more precisely the biological clock, the mechanism that controlled the age process in the human body. Understanding the underlying cause of ageing was essential if the ageing clock was to be be reversed, restoring characteristics of youth to aged cells and tissues. Pat learnt two factors influenced the ageing process: epigenetics and genetics, and defining their functioning was essential if they were to be opened to reprogramming. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The idea that those who would live to 200 or more had already been born, convinced Pat to invest, like Alphabet's life-science company, Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences, in life extending research. LifeGen's goal was to slow and even reverse the aging process, through technology, big data, genomics and by applied regenerative medicine to replace or regenerate human cells, tissues and organs. Life extension research was a field that governments and intellectuals disapproved, it was normal, philosophers had spent 2,500 years explaining and justifying death, religions had invested big in their afterlife beliefs, as for pension funds long life was anathema. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Pat had sufficient proof that life could be extended through techniques to rejuvenate the human body by increasing science's understanding of the biology that controls lifespan and harnessing related technologies. It was a serious advantage to commence life with a good set of genes, which he believed he had, and to be far from the horribly polluted environment of China, far away, perhaps in Ireland, or on the Altiplano of Colombia, which was in the realms of the possible. * * * |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Ekaterina, John's wife, knew something about collapse, she was Russian and had lived in the former USSR. When she was a girl, her parents had always impressed on her that life under Communism was good, offering all the benefits of education, health-care, work, accommodation, plentiful food, sport and culture. Perhaps there had not been the same broad choices of goods the Western consumer society offered, but they were protected by the state on a fairly egalitarian basis. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | That utopic version of Communism was already fading when Mikhail Gorbachev arrived, the Soviet economy was already starting to experience serious difficulties, a consequence of the Cold War. Slowly, things started to go downhill, but when collapse came, it happened overnight, after 70 long years of Communist rule by the successors of Lenin and his Bolshevik movement, a sudden catastrophic rupture, the capsizing of ship. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | People were soon half starving, no heating, no light, electricity down most of the day, and no fuel at the petrol pumps. It was not unusual to see people walking down the middle of the streets, old men and women pushing wheelbarrows, the few car there were had practically disappeared from view, as had the buses and trains. Even trees started to disappear from the streets and parks, when with each new day freshly cut tree stumps bore witness to the state of desperation as Muscovites sacrificed their greenery for firewood. With one devaluation after the other, the rouble collapsed, savings evaporated, salaries and pensions went unpaid, factories shut down. The lucky ones who had managed to get out of Russia sent their families dollars. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | As 2020 approached, things were of course better, a casual visitor to Moscow or Petersburg might have got the impression they were in any other European city, but behind the monuments, fine hotels, bright shops and traffic, outside of the cities the Russian economy was stagnating, those at the bottom were still struggling, the unwilling victims of low wages, under and unemployment, poor pensions, and run down public services. 'If it wasn't for our resource, oil and gas,' Ekaterina reminded John, 'we'd be a poor third world country. The next time you see a TV documentary or news programme on Russia, look carefully at the details and you'll see what I mean. 'It all happened so quickly and should serve as a lesson to those who think they are safe from calamitous collapse and disorder. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'Why do you think rich oligarchs and politicians hide their money in the City or in Switzerland?' she asked him. | | ---|---|--- # 4 # A PHILANTHROPIST PAT BELIEVED THE ANSWERS TO TODAY'S problems lay somewhere in the past. At the same time he agreed with Jack Ma of Alibaba, who told the World Economic Forum in Davos, 'Be in love with the government. But don't marry them.' Towards the end of 2018, Ma suddenly announced his decision to step down from his everyday role in his company, to focus on education and philanthropy. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | It seemed like a good idea to Pat, and for the same reasons. Ma, however, feared that his power and popularity had made him a target of the Communist Party, which was not Pat's case, who apart from a few very special occasions had not sought to cosy up to China's power apparatus, even though he was unavoidably close to certain of them, through Lili's family. Foreign CEOs had come under increasing pressure to give the Party a role in their firms and sooner or later INI would be pushed by the Party to give its nominees a role in business decisions, as with time, Hong Kong was destined to to lose its semi-autonomous status and become just another Chinese city. That process would be complete in 27 years when he would be a very old man and his bank, probably be a Chinese bank. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | He had achieved more than he could have imagined in his wildest dreams and it was time to turn his attention to other things, and not just philanthropy, in which he was already active through art, culture and scientific research. Certain high profile entrepreneurs could be an embarrassment or a threat to Beijing's inner circle. There was the case of Huawei's CEO and founder, Ren Zhengfei, whose popularity had reached a level that could threaten the Party after he had built the world's largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment and second largest manufacturer of smartphones. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | But when Huawei was suddenly caught in Donald Trump's gun sights, Ren Zhengfei was transformed into a popular hero, defending China against the American imperialist dictates, something that did not necessarily go down well with Beijing. * * * Pat was a latecomer to China though he came with a very considerable experience, fifteen years in the upper echelons of a major international banking corporation, with regional headquarters in different European capitals--Dublin, London, Amsterdam and Moscow. Six years later he was married to Lili Wu, daughter of a prominent Chinese family. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Now CEO of the INI Banking Corporation Limited which he had transformed into a Chinese bank that wholly owned and controlled its different international emanations, though Moscow had a specific structure. At the same time he and the Wu family were the bank's largest shareholders, enjoying undisputed control of the group. His closest advisers included Angus MacPherson--his second and group general manager, an old China hand, and John Francis a close friend, an eminent historian and economist. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | What would have been a Chinese puzzle to many was explained by Angus and John--a model, launched by Deng Xiaoping in the late 70s, which nonetheless left many questions. Was it a Singaporean-style autocracy, or perhaps a state organised capitalist structure as some suggested was Japan. Certain saw it as a kind of Neo-Confucianism mixed with market economics. John Francis didn't see it as a post-Soviet Russian economic model, one where an oligarchy had seized public assets in what was probably one of the greatest organised thefts of the 20th century, creating a robber-baron inspired form of socialism. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Pat did not analyse things that way, in fact he didn't analyse very much of anything, in a sense he was like Lili and hundreds of millions of Chinese, he accepted what he saw and got on with his business, building a vast fortune and expanding his empire as had many Chinese industrialists in post-Imperial China, before WWII in Shanghai, Canton and Hong Kong. It wasn't something entirely new, it was the same free wheeling Confucian model of business and industry that had existed for centuries, under the authoritarian rule of the Son of Heaven, the Emperor, exploiting the vast obedient hard working masses that had always existed, guided by a strong hand. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | It was a system familiar to anybody who had studied Chinese history, literature and revolution. A struggle between the masses and their rulers, one that Pat observed in the streets below his eyrie on Hong Kong Island, where tens, even hundreds of thousands of demonstrators flooded onto the streets, manifesting their disapprobation of Beijing's policies and encroaching power. | | ---|---|--- # 5 # RIO PUTUMAYO PAT ARRIVED AT THE RESTAURANT first, accompanied by Liam and Camille, they had a table reserved in a discreet corner, separated by Chinese screens. Kyril arrived punctually and after exchanging greetings with Liam, whom he had briefly met before with Camille, they settled in and were soon chatting like old friends, exchanging stories about their adventures in strange and distant places. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | They returned to the Clancy's place after dinner where a map of Colombia was produced. As Kyril ran his finger over the green coloured topography, Pat's mind wandered back to his first visit to that country, over two decades earlier, one he would never forget, and under circumstances best not mentioned. Kyril talked about nearby Venezuela, which reminded Pat of the Farc and drug cartels, revolutionaries and criminal gangs that had survived decades in the dense mountainous jungles of southern Colombia, resisting well armed modern military forces, thanks to the inaccessibility of those regions. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | In the same way the indigenous peoples had survived for thousands of years, retreating deep into the rainforests when threatened, fleeing the Conquistadors, escaping from slavery and the terror wreaked on the villages of their ancestral homelands. 'Have you ever heard of Roger Casement?' Pat asked. Kyril wrinkled his eyebrows. 'Hardenburg?' He smiled, 'Yes, I see, you're well informed. I remember Casement now, sent to Putumayo by the British government.' Pat beamed, Kyril had done his homework. It seemed to Pat Kennedy there was a lesson to be learnt from the indigenous peoples, one that would allow farseeing men to seed the rebirth of humanity. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | They examined the map of southern Colombia and the countries that straddled the upper reaches of the Amazon. Pat ran his finger over the map, searching for Putumayo, starting where the river's multiple tributaries drained the Andes, flowing out across the vast plane that extended 5,000 kilometres to the Atlantic, across primary rainforest, swamps, savannas and drylands. He was surprised by the vastness of the region. His finger stopped over an odd tongue of Colombian territory that penetrated into Peru and Brazil, and read aloud, 'Leticia.' Then moving to the north to a meandering blue line, he declared triumphantly, 'Rio Putumayo.' 'Yes Pat. That's the spot. Tres Fronteras. Where Brazil, Colombia and Peru meet on the banks of the Amazon River.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | It was more than 1,000 kilometres as the crow flies from the Pacific, separated by the 6,000 metre high peaks of the Andes. To the west, the Atlantic, a journey of 3,500 kilometres by riverboat to the mouth of the Amazon. The distance between the two oceans was about the same as that between New York and Seattle, and it was far from being the widest point of the South American continent. 'How can you get there?' asked Pat. 'By small plane via Quito and Iquitos, though if you've got the time or a lot of things to transport, by the Amazon.' 'The Amazon?' 'Yes, it's navigable for ships up to 9,000 tons, from the Atlantic as far as Iquitos.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Pat eyes lit up. It meant Las Indias could reach Leticia or Iquitos. His yacht had a displacement of 3,000 tons, and the Sundaland II 1,900 tons, a research ship that belonged to one of his companies. 'Actually Leticia is in Colombia at the bottom of the Amacayacu National Park,' Kyril informed him. 'It's where I'd like to make my next documentary film.' Pat looked up, fixed his eyes of Kyril. 'Interesting. I'll look at Rainforest tomorrow. Kyril did not press him. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | In the few short hours Pat had known the ecologist, he realised his ambitions were neither political, nor financial gain. That afternoon Camille had outlined Kyril's story for Pat, he had paid lip service to Macron and Sarkozy, but after realising he was facing immovable obstacles he quickly distanced himself from the backstabbing world of politics with its spin doctors and special advisers, a toxic environment that could only harm him and his cause, as the promises made to his followers would never be met. He preferred to pursue his career as a symbol, a figurehead of the French ecological movement, which even if he realised he was fighting a lost war, was a suitable substitute whilst waiting for something better to turn up. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Away from the cameras and press, Kyril admitted to Pat the difficulty, even the impossibility, of implementing the measures necessary to prevent the disaster that stalked humanity. To his mind only a worldwide ZPG policy could save humanity from the apocalypse. Pat felt a surge of vindication listening to Kyril--though he made a mental note to look up the meaning of ZPG. Here was a man with a clear vision, here was a man who could serve his plan, a familiar face seen in TV documentary films covering nature and ecology, a man admired by millions for his independence and apolitical position. | | ---|---|--- # 6 # DISAPPEARING FISH |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | JOHN WAS PLUNGED INTO HIS morning copy of The Guardian, an article by George Monbiot caught his eye, it was part of the background anguish caused by the continued attack on the environment by lobbyists who couldn't wait to get UK coastal waters back from European trawlers, not to save them from further depletion but to exploit them even more. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Monbiot wrote: 'The shocking and distressing fact is that the waters around the UK were once among the most abundant on Earth, and are now among the least. Armies of bluefin tuna once stormed our coasts, harrying shoals of mackerel and herring many miles long. Halibut the size of barn doors and turbot like tabletops came into shallow water to feed. Cod commonly reached almost two metres; haddock grew to a metre. Plaice were the size of road atlases. Pods of fin whales and sperm whales could be seen from the shore, while Atlantic grey whales, now extinct, roamed our estuaries. Gigantic sturgeon poured up the rivers to spawn, pushing through traffic jams of salmon, sea trout, lampreys and shad. On some parts of the seabed the eggs of the herring lay six-feet deep.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Those days were long gone and in the interest of feeding an ever growing population, all roads pointed to an intensification of trawling the seas, even if total depletion lay on the horizon. There were so many factors it was impossible to grasp the meaning of a situation that was beyond the understanding of any single man, especially one not trained in science. John was convinced man was destroying his environment, the evidence was everywhere. Which on the other hand did not blind him to the fact that a mountain of shit in the form of misinformation was pumped out by journalists, half-baked environmentalists and politicians. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Sustainability was the buzz word. The need for more renewable energy sources, the need for wind power and hydroelectric dams was hammered home by everybody from Greta Thunberg to Bill Gates and Al Gore. John saw so many alarmist or contradictory reports dumped on his desk at the Fitzwilliams Foundation he'd stopped reading them. He did however remembered one that had caught his eye, a report by research scientists at the School of Environment at Washington State University, a renowned institution specialised in 'research and understanding of the Earth's complex and dynamic physical, structural, biogeochemical, ecological and biological systems, and impacts of land use and climate change'. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | The report, entitled Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Reservoir Water Surfaces: A New Global Synthesis, was relatively technical, but beyond the chemistry, it confirmed what certain scientists suspected, water reservoirs created by dams were an important source of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The facts were there, dams significantly altered water, nutrients, ecosystem dynamics and fluxes in river networks, resulting in the release of one billion tons of methane emissions into the atmosphere, the result of decomposing of organic matter, created by the artificial retention of water in great lakes and waterways and in the proliferation of vegetable and microbial matter. This represented 1.3% of anthropogenic emissions, which was greater than biomass burnt in forest fires and agricultural activity. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Methane remains in the atmosphere about ten years, compared to CO₂ which remains present for hundreds of years, but methane has a greater heat retaining power than CO₂, making for a greater impact on global warming since one ton of methane produces the same average warming effect as nearly 90 tons of CO₂, though for a shorter period of time, and in any case methane is finally converted into CO₂. When the full life cycle is taken into account, natural gas, which is primarily methane, produces the same amount or more greenhouse emissions as other fossil fuels. The message, John explained to himself, did not lay in the figures, but in the complexity of our planet's climate and our difficulty in understanding it. Bad decisions could have dramatic effects. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | His philosophy was based on a planned reduction in the population of the planet, ZPG, zero population growth, which would automatically reduce the effect of our impact on the natural environment as Paul Ehrlich wrote back in 1968 in his book The Population Bomb. John had read the book at that time, when studying at the LSE in London. He smiled to to himself, it was one of the few advatanges of age, he could compare the past with the present, and he could vouch for the veracity of the predictions made by Ehrlich. |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | In 1968, when John, following the Flower Power movement and Hari Krishna, visited India for the first time, its population stood at 530 million, in 2020 it was 1.4 billion with growth rate of 1.26%, and by 2050, based on its present day age pyramid with 44% of the population under 25 years old, it would reach 1.7 billion. In 1968 Ehrlich wrote: |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | 'It has been estimated that the human population of 8000BC was about five million people, taking perhaps one million years to get there from two and a half million. The population did not reach 500 million until almost 10,000 years later, about AD1650. This means it doubled roughly once every thousand years or so. It reached a billion people around 1850, doubling in some 200 years. It took only 80 years or so for the next doubling, as the population reached two billion around 1930. We have not completed the next doubling to four billion yet, but we now have well over three and a half billion people. The doubling time at present seems to be about 35 years. Quite a reduction in doubling times: 1,000,000 years, 1,000 years, 200 years, 80 years, 35 years.' |
100-seconds-to-midnight.epub.txt | Erhlich wasn't far off the mark, in 1968 it stood at 3.5 billion, in 2010 it had doubled to 7 billion, an effective doubling time of 42 years. And there was little sign it was slowing. The doubling time mathematically speaking, for an annual growth rate of 1% was 70 years, for 2% 35 years, and 3% 24 years. The population of the African continent is 1.34 billion, the growth rate 2.49%, which translates into a doubling every 28 years, which means a 2.68 billion in 2048. Of course the growth rate was falling, but at present it stood at 1.1 for the entire planet which meant well before 2100, to be precise 2080, it would reach 15 billion, and if they all wanted the life style of the average European, their needs would be the equivalent to that of a population of 45 billion. | | |