John Bell & John Zada, Al Jazeera: The lost forests of the Middle East
Environmental problems across the Middle East contrast harshly with a forgotten past.
With thousands of tonnes of rubbish piling up on the streets and no place to go, Beirut has become a place for political confrontation.
The rubbish created a suffocating stink in the summer heat, resulting in a serious health hazard for millions of residents. When the crisis became insufferable, many Lebanese poured into the streets to demand a better government.
The need for improved politics in Lebanon and the Middle East is an understatement. When a society is unable to take care of such basic necessities as rubbish disposal, its government is either absent or in deep rot.
WNU Editor: Regular readers of this blog know that I am a sceptic on man-made global warming .... but on man made pollution .... that is a different story. On my first visit to China in the mid-1980s, the first thing that I noticed were the hills and that after being stripped of the their trees were turning into nothing but sandy-clay eye-sores. On my other trips in Asia, Middle East, Latin America .... the pollution was just terrible, and I always got into discussions on this topic .... but no one ever cared. I know about how green the Middle East was a few millennia ago, that lions and other wild animals existed in these regions but were driven into extinction to feed the Roman Empire's need for wild animals in the arena. The destruction of forest land and the fragile ecosystems that have existed for thousands years .... ditto there to. I sometimes wonder on how the destruction of the environment transformed these societies to what they are today .... and its linkage to wars, conflicts, and mass migration. My gut is telling me that if this destruction never occurred, it would be a very different place today.
1 comment:
Distrust of science because of personal observation, bias, lack of scientific training and/or manufactured uncertainty is very difficult to overcome. Scientists in this country often believe that their work is not only under-appreciated but under attack. When science produces new products it is most often considered a social good. When science produces results that go against conventional wisdom, political orthodoxy,religious or business beliefs it is often labeled junk or worse.
Few if any business channels, political pundits, entrepreneurs, or business plans could go forward if the factual basis for their underpinnings were put to the same level of required factual basis as the public and interest groups hold scientific findings and scientists.
If science had to meet the proven fact level for action by government, business, or personal decisions then it would be a whole bunch cheaper and easier for scientists to get published and be lauded for their genius.
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