Greetings!

I found a lovely video about how lifespan has evolved according to money income. It is a simple Cartesian graph, 2 axis, 2 parameters, and the idea is that as time goes on, more income gives us more quality of life. This is the idea of Hans Rosling’s study “200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes”.

It is fantastic what you can do with technology these days. To process thousands of millions of pieces of data through a computer, give them order, coherence, bind them together, and bring out stats to know how to act. But you know what they say, stats are like bikinis, they let us see a lot… but hide that which is essential. We cannot ignore the world demographic processes which show that the exaggerated income of the few is due to the decrease in the quality of life and basic natural needs of the human being, as a whole. When millions of people emigrate from their native lands due to lack of resources, they must survive at all costs. And it was like this (the West’s lack of moderation, the decadence) how we went on pushing away the people from their lands, from where they lived and survived, taking them out of context and inserting them in the system with no previous consulting whatsoever. You now have to work in order to buy food and pay the rent; and put on some clothes, would-ya?

Today, that collateral damage does not bother us at all… or at least it doesn’t, given the levels of education we received when we were young on mass media communications, freedom of speech, capitalism, cooperativism… on the contrary, school these days is a reflection of what society will demand from us…

Today, the collateral damage is that the biggest protected territory in Peru is being invaded by a road that threatens to destroy the lives of thousands of native people. (Read the article here if you want, it is in Spanish though! Sorry). Native fools –some think- that interrupt “progress”, standing there… with their customs, with their wisdom, with their culture…

But the process in South America started much longer ago, in the height of colonialism. Where a few tricked the world and kept the biggest piece of the cake of this new virgin lands, filled with life and resources.

“Argentina’s environmental history starts with one of the most serious ecological catastrophes taking place in this country: the destruction of the incaic terrace-agricultural system, in the hands of the Spanish conquerors. This ecological unbalance was the prime tool used to consolidate a conquest that, in any other way, would have resulted politically unstable. Because the only way a few men could make durable their dominion over the entire people, was by destroying their means of survival.” – Antonio Elio Brailovsky. Memoria Verde. Historia Ecológica de la Argentina. Editorial Sudamericana S.A. Buenos Aires, 1991.

“AH! A little distance from his surroundings would be great for the reader” – Vincent Marques.

Huge hug,

Brian Longstaff.-

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