Michael Chenoweth

MONEY AND GREED – THE DEFINING QUALITIES OF THE MODERN WORLD

“Americans have dollar signs in their eyes.”

That profound observation came from an eleven-year-old Hungarian boy in our home in 1999, after he had been living with us for about a month.

How insightful.

In America, and increasingly in the rest of the world, everything else is secondary to money.

People with the ability to do so will destroy entire ecosystems, and will exploit, displace, and even kill other humans, just to be able to acquire more money. Money, expressed by lobbyists, is obviously the driving force behind many of the decisions of the US Congress.

It is a sad commentary on the failure of humanity’s nobler possibilities.

Our history is replete with examples of this tendency.

The early Spanish fleets of exploration were followed immediately by exploiters, “Conquistadores,” who destroyed native cultures and populations throughout the Americas and returned to Europe with ships filled with gold and silver looted from the pre-Columbian cultures.

Local leaders throughout the Americas were overpowered, or corrupted, to give the foreign forces access to their national wealth.

The patrimony of the Americas was stolen, melted down and used to enrich the nobility of Europe. The preexisting local populations and cultures, Aztec, Inca, and others, were merely obstacles to be overcome in the quest for riches.

We continue, today, to destroy the Amazon rain forest for money. Despite a growing awareness that the Amazon contains yet-to-be-discovered plants and animals, and that it generates a large fraction of the oxygen we breathe, it is being rapidly cleared to enable humans to raise cattle and soy beans and make more money.

We are decimating the global ocean, not only by exploiting fisheries to extinction, but also by using the ocean as a repository for all of our toxic wastes we don’t want to pay to properly detoxify.

We now realize that the Vietnam War was much more about protecting access to oil in the South China Sea than it was about the rights of the South Vietnamese people. It cost 58,000 American military personnel their lives and killed uncounted hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. As a veteran of that war, who lost friends and men in my units during the course of the conflict, I am particularly depressed by that revelation.

The overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was unquestionably about who would control the oil and nothing else. It cost over 4,000 Americans their lives and, in the process, killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. It casually destroyed cultural treasures that were thousands of years old. American troops, either through ignorance or disregard, built a firebase on top of the ruins of the Tower of Babel. American troops guarded oil company offices in Iraq, while leaving the history museums unprotected. As a result, the museums were looted and their treasures vandalized, with only a few ancient items being rescued by museum personnel.

In eastern Ecuador, oil companies are invading native American reservations in the Amazon forests to exploit oil resources. Their roads open the area to invasion by squatters, who fight with the native tribes and drive them from their supposedly protected tribal lands. The oil companies leave the jungle, including its soil and water, polluted and devastated by their nasty residues, and its forest destroyed not only by the oil companies but subsequently by other exploiters who follow in their wake.

In Indonesia, tropical forests have been stripped of their trees, used to make plywood for concrete form lumber which will be used only once in Japan, and then will be thrown away. The head of a major timber export company is appointed as the head of the agency responsible for protecting the forest. Whole ecosystems are destroyed and their human populations driven out. More of that nation’s native forests are being clear-cut to establish palm plantations for the production of palm oil.

In Africa, unique and endangered wildlife populations are being exterminated, hunted either for fun or as ‘bush meat’ to generate money for hunters. Companies that run extremely profitable businesses exporting minerals, such as diamonds and uranium, and agricultural products such as cacao and coffee, are exploiting children as laborers.

The money generated by raping the environment almost automatically corrupts governments, wherever it touches them.

Little by little, we are destroying the planet, and, in the process, wiping out one population of powerless natives after the other, often with the collusion of national governments who put their own enrichment ahead of the welfare or even survival of their own citizens and unique cultural heritage.   

The only standard that seems to be applied to decide whether these actions will be allowed is how much money they will produce for everyone who can get a piece of the action.

THAT BRINGS US TO PERU.

The latest example of this ugly human trait is in the mountains of Peru.  In the high mountain Cajamarca region, 3,500 meters above sea level, an American company, Newmont Mining Corp., is mining gold. They have a project there called the “Conga” mine.

The prevailing attitude seems to be: "Forget the local population. They are powerless and don’t matter. There is money to be made!  MONEY. MONEY. MONEY. Yippee."

There is only one little hiccup. The gold seems to have accumulated at the bottom of the four lakes that are the water supply for the people who live there.

No problem. Let’s just build another lake and drain the lakes where the gold is believed to exist. 
Gold mining processes, incidentally, involve deadly toxic substances, like mercury and cyanide, used to remove the gold from the ore. On January 30, 2000, a cyanide spill near Baia Mare, Romania, at a gold mine operated by an Australian company, dumped enough cyanide (estimated at 100,000 tonnes) into Sasar River and then the Sommes River to contaminate the drinking water supplies for millions of people and kill fish downstream in Hungary's "Golden Tisza" River and in the Danube in both Hungary and Serbia.  This has been referred to as "Europe's worst fish kill." Eighty percent of the fish in the Tisza River died.

Needless to say, the people who live in the Cajamarca are less than thrilled with this exploitation of their region. A local plebiscite, held recently, resoundingly rejected the mine.

One interesting question is, who owns the gold? And how did they obtain that ownership?

Other questions: How did the Newmont Mining Corp. get the rights to go after it. 

Where are Peruvian President Ollanta Humala and the government of Peru on this issue?

If the previous Alan Garcia government approved the mine, how was that approval obtained?

What has been the role of the Peruvian government in the decision and approvals to have a foreign company come in and take the gold that is in the Cajamarca?

Who owns the Peruvian company that is partnering with Newmont Mining Corp.?

How far have we really come from the Conquistadores?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/25/us-peru-newmont-conga-idUSTRE7AO1N020111125

http://www.nodirtygold.org/cajamarca_peru.cfm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-15884119

As an American environmentalist, I have also to ask, where are the America-based environmental organizations on these issues of exploitation of native populations, in Peru and elsewhere? 

Where is Human Rights Watch, Environmental Defense, World Wildlife Fund? 

Where are Audubon, Sierra, the Rainforest Action Network, and other organizations that we would expect to speak out when resources or human populations are threatened?

Is their silence due to indifference or ignorance or economic inability to devote time and resources to addressing these issues?

I am forced by these events to begin thinking about the underlying concepts of our society.

We have been through the contest between democracy and communism, and at least for the present, democracy is ahead.

We have moved from times when all property was ‘owned’ by the king, to today’s concepts of private ownership of property. The idea of private ownership of property has spread to many countries around the world. Even Cuba is reported to have embraced it.

We are beginning to see that private property ownership is resulting in most of the property being ‘owned’ by a shrinking elite class of very wealthy persons, for whom the usual rules either don’t apply at all or are waived whenever those rules get in the way of what the owners want to do. 

In the United States, recent reports are that the wealthiest one-fifth of the population own 84 percent of the property, and that percentage is increasing.

We have also observed, or should have recognized, that private property ownership is an inadequate model for decision-making where it comes to protection of ecosystems and natural resources that are essential for the continued existence of primitive cultures and unique ways of life.

Justice William O. Douglas, in a often-quoted 1972 Supreme Court opinion, Sierra Club vs. Morton, asked rhetorically whether trees should have “standing.”

He said, ”The critical question of "standing" would be simplified and also put neatly in focus if we fashioned a federal rule that allowed environmental issues to be litigated before federal agencies or federal courts in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers and where injury is the subject of public outrage. Contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation. This suit would therefore be more properly labeled as Mineral King v. Morton.”

That same private property ownership concept is a fundamental part of our capitalist system. Our economic system is the most successful in history in promoting progress in science, technology and the accumulation of wealth, and private ownership of property is undoubtedly a driving force. 

It has benefits for all of us that need to be protected. But at the same time, it has inherent defects that we need to recognize.

We need to figure out how to provide protections for issues and resources and interests that are not protected under the private property ownership model.

Private ownership of property developed hundreds of years ago, when resources were relatively abundant and the global population was relatively small, compared to our present seven billion people. Then, populations were fairly stable, and most people lived their entire lives within a few miles of their birthplace. Now, in the twenty-first century, our population is highly mobile and the most mobile among us find a variety of ways to exploit areas occupied by others.

IF, and it is a very big “IF”, we are really as smart as we like to think we are as a species, we need to figure out a new model, to replace the private property model, for decision making where those decisions impact natural resources and native cultures. We need to figure out how to preserve the good qualities of our economic models and how to replace their deficiencies with new approaches that will protect resources for future generations to enjoy as we do today.

I do not pretend to have answers to the questions that are raised here.