Nexus - 0201 - New Times Magazine-pages

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years,” admits Dr Alexander Balin of Copsa Mica’s occupational health clinic. ‘Then they have to be taken away or else they will die”. year old Christian conditioning that nature is dangerous chaos that needs to be subdued. So for the last few thousand years, mankind has been subduing virgin forests into bonfires, plateaus into parking lots and the wild beasts of the field into alligator shoes, elephant foot wastepaper baskets and rhinoceros-horn aphrodisiacs. For the first time in the history of the human species we need to collectively wake up and start healing ourselves and this planet. Otherwise the only course left is towards the genocidal grave we’re digging with each tree we fell. “If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. This we know, that the Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the Earth — Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” American Indian Chief Seattle to the US Government, 1854. [J] The politicians, of course, are running around desperately fingering each other to find a slower-thinking scapegoat for the garbage in their own backyard. The Czechs blame the East Germans, the East Germans blame the Poles, the Poles blame the Hungarians — it's a sorry-go- round of rationalisations that fingers everyone but the 2,000 Submitted by Robert L Coleman, taken from “The Earth Spits Back” ode AM 19