New book on the Alamo sure to throw more gasoline on the flaming rage of those defending the myth of Texas

 

There is a new British royal family “tell-all” book out called Battle of the Brothers, which among other things tells us that former royal communications director and now chief aide of Prince William, Jason Knauf, was the source of much of the salacious gossip about Meghan Markle “not understanding” how she was supposed to “act,” was a “bully,” that she was a “sociopath,” and she and Prince Harry were “made” for each other because they were both “damaged goods.” But Knauf was likely not motivate to be a peacemaker, and not only because it is his “job” to put Prince William in the best possible light; we learn that he is Texas-born, and it is entirely possible that he poisoned people’s mind with a Texas racist’s ideas about what to “expect” from “black people.” I am frankly shocked (well, not really) that the royal family would actually hire anyone from a former Confederate slave state who has delusions of racial grandeur, and naturally feels Markle would in “normal” circumstances be his “inferior.”

That is isn’t the only questionable connection between the UK and Texas.  British pop singer Phil Collins is such a huge “fan” of the myth of the Alamo that he had collected hundreds of artifacts related to it, so much so that he believed them to possess some “cosmic” energy. The Daily Mail has likened him to be “one drumstick shy of a pair” in this regard. Collins apparently is so deeply committed to the “sanctity” of the “myth” of the Alamo that he donated his collection to a new Alamo museum. One thing that the Motown fan Collins doesn’t seem to understand is that the de facto result of the Texas “revolution” was the legalization and growth of slavery in that state, and indeed what many people seem to forget in all this “lone star” business was that Texas was not just a Confederate slave state, but practiced its own form of Jim Crow and lynching on its Mexican residents long before it came into vogue in other Southern states.

There is a new book just out entitled Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, written by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stafford that throws more gasoline on the flames of Texas hypocrisy:

The story of the Alamo is simple, right? Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, William Barret Travis, and a bunch of their friends come to Texas to start new lives, suddenly realize they are being oppressed by the Mexican dictator Santa Anna, and rush off to do battle with him at an old Spanish mission in San Antonio. They are outnumbered but fight valiantly to the last man, buying Sam Houston enough time to defeat Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto. As almost any Texan will tell you, their sacrifice turned the Alamo into the cradle of Texas liberty.

Except that very little of that tale is exactly true. On the other side is:

Revisionists tend to think the entire Texas Revolt was a bit more about protecting slavery from Mexico’s abolitionist government than it was about opposing Santa Anna’s supposed tyranny. Some think the whole thing was an American conspiracy to steal Texas from Mexico. Many don’t believe Crockett went down fighting, as John Wayne famously did in his 1960s movie The Alamo. Almost none of them believe Travis drew that fateful line in the Alamo sand.

Texas school children are required to be taught the “heroic” version of not just the Alamo, but of white Texas in general. The authors don’t hold back on what they believe the evidence actually shows:

Given the fact that its defenders were fighting to form what became the single most militant slave nation in history, that men like Bowie and Travis traded slaves, and that the “father of Texas,” Stephen F. Austin, spent years fighting to preserve slavery from the attacks of Mexican abolitionists, one would think the post-George Floyd era might have brought to Texas a long-overdue reevaluation of its history. By and large, that hasn’t happened.

The authors note that “Anglos” are still writing the history books, reporting the news, and making the laws in Texas. Minority opinion in Texas are lone voices in the wilderness. “How on earth can Texas still defend naming dozens of schools, roads, and towns after a brazen slave trader and swindler like Jim Bowie?” the authors ask. Even George P. Bush—the son of Jeb Bush and whose mother is Mexican-American—found himself so fiercely attacked by “traditionalists” for just suggesting recognizing the contribution of Tejanos, that he weaseled his way out of what was just a “suggestion.”

American Anglos had been allowed into Texas so long as they became Mexican citizens, learned Spanish and obeyed its laws. For the most part, these “Texians” had no intention of doing any of those things. There was a “clash of cultures,” ethnic hatred, and taxes. But as the authors point out, the true “underlying” theme of the Texas “revolution” was about money, and how one made it, to the objections of the Mexican government. Anglos had established “sprawling cotton fields” in east Texas, and to the Anglos it was under threat; but what was, exactly?

What was it they feared losing? In the pamphlets and newspaper articles that swirled through the revolt, it was always called “property.” The inarguable fact is that there was only one kind of property the Mexican government ever tried to take from its American colonists, and it tried to do so repeatedly. In the ten years before the Alamo, this single disagreement brought Texians and Mexican troops to the brink of warfare multiple times. So, what did the Mexicans want to take? It wasn’t the cotton. Or the land it was grown on. It was the third leg of the Texas economic stool, the “property” in which Texas farmers had invested more money, more working capital, than any other asset: the slaves.

The book goes on to debunk the many myths of the Alamo, citing evidence—much of it from the testimony of Mexican soldiers who were actually there—that Crockett didn’t fight to his last bullet, but was killed trying to surrender, and that when it was clear the battle was lost, many of the defenders took to their heals like jackrabbits, only to be hunted down and killed. Typically ignored is not whether these men supported slavery or not personally, but the fact their actions were de facto to maintain and enlarge the “property” of slavery in the state; as noted before in another post, eventually over 150,000 slaves were still in Texas by the end of the Civil War. Another truth is that the Texas “revolution” came just a decade before the Mexican-American War, which both Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant called a shameful war of aggression by a stronger nation against a weaker one. In fact, it is entirely possible that the “revolution” was fomented in Washington D.C. by those seeking to gauge the ability of Mexico to defend its territory north of the Rio Grande.

The authors note that for 50 years, the Alamo was largely ignored and left in decrepit condition; the 50^th anniversary of the battle passed virtually unnoticed in 1886, when a San Antonio newspaper called for the observation of “prominent anniversaries of Texas histories.” This led to the creation of the De Zavala Daughters and then The Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the latter whose leader, wealthy socialite Clara Driscoll, wanted to demolish the “Long Barrack” where the fighting took place—not in the church as many believed, where in fact the non-combatants (mainly women) hid. Aldina De Zavala, who was the granddaughter of Lorenzo De Zavala, who was of Mexican descent and a prominent political figure in the founding of the “republic,” initially led the effort to restore the site, but Driscoll wanted much of it torn down and made into a theme park “commemorating” the Alamo.

The battle between the two raged for decades until the Georgia-born Oscar Colquitt became governor in 1911. Colquitt was a typical Southern racist. In response to border violence during the Mexican Revolution, Colquitt was responsible for sending out Texas Rangers to “restore order”—meaning “massacring Mexican and Tejano civilians by the dozens.” The authors note that Colquitt found the story of the Alamo useful, as way “to glorify the victory of Texas over the hated Mexicans. It served the governor’s tough anti-Mexican talk, and he hoped, would subtly excuse the Rangers’ atrocities.”

Although Colquitt failed in court to preserve the Long Barrack in its original form—Driscoll, who wanted that park built on the grounds, succeeded in having much of it torn down, leaving behind a ten-foot high relic of wall that essentially means nothing. Although Colquitt lost that battle, he won the “battle” for its “interpretation,” which has never really changed in the minds of “traditionalists.” Unsurprisingly, as with the various “Daughters of” organizations around the country, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas continue to defend the racist myth to their last breath against all those pesky “revisionists.”

Texas is inching closer demographically to a Democratic voting majority, but you’d never know it because of the radicalization of the Republican right, in which minorities have been rendered virtually invisible. In the 2014 governor’s race, Democrat Wendy Davis received just 38.9 percent of the vote, yet in 2018 Lupe Valdez—seemingly the “weaker” candidate because she is a dark-skinned Latina—won 42.5 percent of the vote. Currently only 41 percent of the state’s population is non-Hispanic white, and Gov. Greg Abbott—who will be running for a third term in 2022—has in a recent press conference declared the state to be under “invasion,” and the “invaders” are coming to your house. In the same press conference, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick linked immigrants to “future crime.” Both have been attacked for the same rhetoric that inspired the El Paso mass shooting, and it is time for Latino voters to get a grip on reality, especially in a state that led the attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act, and is attempting to take away their right to vote—even for white Republicans who hate them.

A story in Buzzfeed after the election wondered why so many Latinos in Texas voted for Trump despite him calling them an “infestation,” and so many in the Fox News orbit calling them “diseased” and a danger to the “culture.”  One Latino voter for Trump ironically pointed out that “We are teachers, we are lawyers, we are doctors, we are everything. We aren’t just the people who are cleaning your house.” That’s all fine and dandy, but what was Trump saying you “really” are? Rapists, violent criminals, drug dealers, etc. And yes, most white Republicans you voted with believe that too. Much of the Latino Republican vote is a bigoted “reaction” to being lumped in with “one of them”; but what they don’t seem to realize that it doesn’t matter if you have a college degree or are a veteran—you are what ignorant people “see.”

There are some recent books that attempt to portray the reality of racial injustice in Texas, such as The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas and Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, the latter which recounted how as many as 600,000 U.S. citizens of Mexican descent were literally rounded-up and “deported” with little more than what they could carry during the Depression—a crime just as heinous as the Japanese internment (and perhaps even worse), but never spoken of, and certainly a canker sore on FDR’s record for not attempting to stop.

The anger aroused by the attempt to tell the truth about Texas is seen on Amazon’s item page for Forget the Alamo; 33 percent of the reviews are those one-star reviews from “unverified” purchasers, meaning people who are just reacting to the book’s descriptions or previews. The only “verified” one-star reviewer had just this to say: “Just as there were no rank and file soldiers on either side fighting to free slaves during the Civil War, there were no Texans fighting to preserve slavery or Mexicans fighting to end it during the Texas Revolution. Both fights were for Independence.” The problem with that argument is the way it can be applied to WWII: the Germans at home didn’t “know” their countrymen were slaughtering 6 million Jews, and millions more in Poland and on the Eastern Front for “Greater Germany.” And on the “other side,” it could also be said that allied soldiers were not fighting to end the Holocaust.

The U.S. Supreme Court avoids a shameful self-inflicted wound in ACA ruling

 

The U.S. Supreme avoided a shameful and disastrous self-inflicted wound on its credibility by turning aside yet another effort to strike down the Affordable Care Act today. Justice Stephen Breyer presented the majority decision, summarily dismissing the plaintiffs’ arguments that they are “harmed” by the law as specious. 

In 2018, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor made the absurd ruling in the case brought by Texas and other states supported by the Trump administration that the individual mandate was “inseverable” from the rest of the law, and thus the entire law must be struck down. O’Connor claimed that since no one is now “forced” to buy insurance because of the lack of a penalty, that automatically reduced the “pool” of persons seeking insurance through the law, thus it no longer had reason for being—even the minimum level of coverage requirement was not a “sufficient” reason for keeping the law. 

This rationalization made no sense whatever, and didn’t even address the plaintiffs’ plainly fraudulent claim of “harm.”  The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals partially upheld the district court ruling, but also upheld the plaintiffs’ claim of “standing,” which the Supreme Court rejected out-of-hand in remanding its decision to the Fifth, instructing it to dismiss its own plainly faulty ruling. Justice Breyer observed that

Unsurprisingly, the States have not demonstrated that an unenforceable mandate will cause their residents to enroll in valuable benefits programs that they would otherwise forgo. It would require far stronger evidence than the States have offered here to support their counterintuitive theory of standing, which rests on a “highly attenuated chain of possibilities"…No one claims these other provisions violate the Constitution. Rather, the state plaintiffs attack the constitutionality of only the minimum essential coverage provision. They have not alleged that they have suffered an “injury fairly traceable to the defendant’s allegedly unlawful conduct.”

Even though this was the weakest challenge yet to the law, it was perhaps surprising that Clarence Thomas concurred in the majority 7-2 decision, this time not following the petty, childish dissent of Samuel Alito, who made the absurd claim that “Today’s decision is the third installment in our epic Affordable Care Act trilogy, and it follows the same pattern as installments one and two. In all three episodes, with the Affordable Care Act facing a serious threat, the court has pulled off an improbable rescue.” But Thomas surprisingly felt the need to explain his break from Alito, writing “The plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that the harm they suffered is traceable to unlawful conduct. Although this Court has erred twice before in two cases involving the Affordable Care Act, it does not err today.”

There was nothing “serious” or “improbable” about the majority decision, especially when the dissenters relied on false arguments and acted like sore losers. Alito claimed that he was “impressed” by the “lengths to which this court has been willing to defend the ACA against all threats,” including the claim that states bore a “costly burden” of taxes—meaning the taxing authority of Congress that Chief Justice John Roberts had upheld in the 2012 decision. 

But Alito’s argument that that individual mandate was a “tax”—after having argued that it was not in 2012—that harmed individuals was simply throwing a rubber ball at a wall hoping it would “stick.” The Republican 2017 tax “reform” law had already rendered the point moot by reducing the penalty for being uninsured to “zero,” and thus the plaintiffs had no “standing” because they could not prove they had been harmed; one suspects that the reason the individual mandate was allowed to remain on the books by the 2017 law was to serve as a “rationalization” to bring this absurd challenge to the law.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who represents a low-wage, low-benefit state that apparently hates half its citizens so much that he thinks they should just go away the “natural way” without affordable health care, made the pitiful argument after the decision that the ACA represented a “massive government takeover of health care,” despite the fact that only 10 percent of the total population is insured by the law. Paxton, like most extremist Republicans, is really bemoaning the ACA’s requirement of minimum standards of coverage, which has hurt Texas-based insurance scams. His argument is that states don’t have to care one wit about whether their citizens live or die because they don’t have access to adequate medical care.  The anti-ACA crowd wants to play “God,” and it is an evil “god” they want to be.

The majority of the Supreme Court clearly did not want to be seen as the villain in throwing 31 million people off affordable care, and returning to a time when health insurers either stopped providing individual coverage for those whose employers did not provide insurance, or charged impossible premiums. Before the ACA, the only “options” were “mini-medical” plans whose premiums often cost more than the actual “benefits,” or be refused care for lack of insurance, or end-up in the emergency room and find themselves impossibly in debt for the rest of the “lives.” The only people who want to go back to that are people who lack any gram of empathy for their fellow humans.

For now, insurers still may not refuse coverage to people with pre-existing conditions or charge them unaffordable rates. Nor can they put a “cap” on the amount of benefits, and the law reduces annual out-of-pocket liability. Of the 31 million people who are currently covered by the ACA, almost half are covered through expanded Medicaid. And yet the large majority of Republicans oppose the law, which shows us the divide between people who think that affordable health care is a “right,” and those who think it is a “privilege”; what makes it more “ironic” is that white voters (mainly Republicans) think that it is both their “right” and their “privilege” to have affordable care—and to deny it to the mainly minority “undeserving.”

Returning to "normal" life after the pandemic doesn't necessarily mean a return to "normal" life politically or socially

 

After sixteen months of various degrees of lockdown due the coronavirus pandemic, we are allegedly nearing “normal” life. The governor is pronouncing June 30 as the “reopen” date for the state, depending on vaccination rates. I’m not exactly sure what that means for myself personally, since being one of those “essential” workers means that this hasn’t exactly been a long paid vacation; I’ve had to take the same long bus ride every work day with the same rude people who think they don’t have to follow the rules of behavior (who want to make you “fearful” of being called a “racist” if you` point out the rules about wearing headphones and respecting the people sitting around you), and once in town, there is nowhere to go but the office building because there is no place to sit, just places to stand for a few minutes or to just walk about to waste time. `

Since I have to use my legs for most of my transportation needs, what the weather is like is always a concern to me, and the local weather report—which generally is only reliable within 12 hours whenever there is a “chance” or “probability” of precipitation—is probably the most important “news” of the day for me. I have always been fascinated by numbers; I recall in a college classroom one day we had a guest speaker who seemed to be impressed by the fact that I was writing down every word she said—until she observed that the guy sitting next to me couldn’t stop chuckling, because he could see that I was just doodling rotisserie league “fantasy” baseball statistics.

But anyways, I’m interested in precipitation figures, so that I can “assure” myself that once we reached the “normal” amount, why might expect some “relief.” At the end of April the amount of precipitation recorded at Sea-Tac Airport was an inch above normal, but at the end of May, even though it should still have been .16 above normal, the NOAA numbers showed that it was actually well over an inch below normal. There certainly must be a mistake. But no; it appears that the new “normal” is the average amount of precipitation over the previous decade, which has gone up from 37.49 to 39.34 inches. I prefer the old “normal” to the new one, but so it goes with global warming and climate charge: “normal” never stays the same.

So when things do get back to “normal,” will it really be so? We may get through the pandemic, but there are many things that are “abnormal” in politics and society today, and there is no reason to believe that “normality” will overcome what has become “abnormal” any time soon. It is quite possible that what sane people regard as abnormal may become the new “normal”—we won’t really know one way or the other until the 2022 mid-term elections, or beyond.

Abnormal behavior, it seems, is the “norm” at the present time for much of this country. Just a few days after there were multiple mass shootings across the country over a six-hour period, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson signed a  law that makes it illegal for local and state law enforcement to enforce federal gun laws, which one suspects is itself is unlawful and certainly must be decided in court. No doubt supporters of the law are counting on the U.S. Supreme Court backing it; with a 6-3 right-wing majority, it seems “safe’ to pass such an insane law now. “Violations” of a “citizens” right to own any weapon they choose without restriction is punishable by a fine of $50,000; “normal” people are pointing out that this amounts to “defunding” the police if they choose to obey federal law.

You rarely hear of gun violence in Europe, save that committed by neo-fascist groups; gun violence is not “normal.” But in this country, gun violence is “normal.” In 2020, there were over 600 mass shooting events, and over 19,000 victims by gun violence—both numbers the highest in memory. According to the Washington Examiner, one of the law’s supporters, Mike Brown,  claims that unrestricted gun rights is “critical to the preservation of our Republic”—meaning the white nationalist version of it. Brown runs a “Frontier Justice” shooting range, which of course implies lawless “wild west” vigilantism. Brown also claims that such laws are “necessary” because “some people may not spend a lot of time thinking about the Second Amendment.” Of course if they did, some of those “people” might wonder why all these guns around are not actually doing much “protection” for people being killed by guns.  

Meanwhile, my old “pal” Thom Hartmann, who I discussed in my very first post and who is the reason why I started this blog, recently had one of his operatives send me one of his posts to my inbox entitled “Rightwingers are Surfing on Trump’s Bullying & Getting Away With It.”  Quite true; Trump is a bully who has made bullying and every kind of self-obsession “normal” behavior in which only those who also share his traits belong in his new world order. This requires a dearth of empathy or compassion for anyone outside Trump’s own skin—and that “skin” is as thin and flimsy as tissue paper. Trump delight in causing “fear” and “pain” apparently has no limits because there are no lines he cannot cross for his most fanatical supporters, who seem greater than their actual numbers because they are louder and more threatening than those who just want to get on with “normal” life.

It is this “fear” of Trump’s abnormal supporters that drives most Republicans to at least publically support him; but on the other hand, there are Republicans who were already “bullies” who simply kept their proclivities under wraps until it was released not necessarily by Trump himself, but by Republican voters—most of the them nursing racial, nativist grievances and ugly stereotypes—who not only approved of Trump’s tendency to violent words and actions, but “finally” felt free to act out on their own impulses, as we have seen with the increase in ”Karen” incidents in this country. This is the “new” version of the “old” normal, when white racial grievance festered during the civil rights era, not just in the South, but in other major cities where “integration”—particularly in public schools—caused a great deal of anguish among white parents. Just in case anyone needs a refresher, the school busing issue was the reason for this famous frame that occurred in Boston, where some local “rednecks” gave a black lawyer the “business end” of what their idea of America was.

 

The new “normal” includes the invading the Capital building to attempt to overthrow an election, calling insurrections “peaceful patriots” just out for stroll in the park, to hold sham recounts six months after an election to give credence to an abnormal man’s belief that he will be “reinstated” in the White House come August. The new “normal” hopes to carry on in the future with neo-fascist governors like Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem, and making it “normal” to pass laws that allow Republicans not only to rig elections, but protest their own rigged elections if they lose them on the federal level, and to invalidate election results they don’t like and declare themselves the “winner”—or at least that is what the language in many of these new “normal” election laws seem to allow them to do.

Is this the “republic” that people with fascist tendencies want to be the “normal” way of running a country, “protected” by the firepower of extremist militias? They keep talking about “freedom,” yet what they want is to be their own personal “dictator” oppressing anyone they hate. They apparently want to be fascist black shirts who uphold other dictatorships who have “republics” in their official country names, like Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Botswana, Chad, China, The Congo, Cuba, North Korea, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, Uganda, Vietnam, Yemen and Zambia. None of these countries can be said to be ruled by “the people,” but by authoritarians who feed into the hatreds of certain elements of the population who are willing to carry out violence against the opposition. This is what Trumpists want to do with this country—and what they don’t realize is that they will lose their own “freedom” as well.

Who knows where the new “normal” will take us. Jason La Canfora of CBS Sports tells us that Packer management’s “petty ways” is “hard to watch.” Yeah; I checked out his twitter page, and while this “concerned citizen” says the “right” things about BLM and other so-called “liberal” interest groups, of course he has his anti-Latino blind spot just like the rest these fakers; one of his “favorites” that he wants people to check out is the anti-immigrant hate group FAIR, whose founder, John Tanton, has expressed his intention to maintain a white supremacist country. These are the kind of supporters Aaron Rodgers attracts; this probably explains why he only gets upset when white teammates are cut. Oh, you think no one has “noticed” that?

Preventing the destruction of the planet would seem to be "simple," yet for humans it is just too "hard"

 

In testimony before Congress in 1981, the Reagan administration’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, said “I do not know how many future generations we on count on before the Lord returns; whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.” Many wondered what exactly Watt meant by that, and he “clarified” his views a few months later in the Washington Post: “My responsibility is to follow Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns.”

I’m not sure what Jesus’ views on the environment actually were, but I’m sure they didn’t include the following: “If the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used.” Watt was finally forced to resign when he “joked” about the composition of a federal commission on coal leasing: “We have every mixture you can have. I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple.” And there are those who have the gall to wonder why fewer and fewer people in this country call themselves “Christians.”

So we know that “conservatives” have no respect for the environment, see the land as being in existence only to be plundered and exploited, and regard climate change as a ”hoax.” What isn’t a “hoax” is that as discussed by the environmental group Footprint Foundation, there are five massive “patches” of plastic garbage floating about in the oceans today, one the size of Texas. With a garbage truck’s load of plastics dumped into the ocean every minute, it is estimated that 12 billion metric tons will be polluting the world’s oceans by 2050. Every year, this waste has been killing as much as 1 million sea birds, 100,000 sea mammals and turtles, and “countless” fish, according to the foundation.

But as they say, out of sight, out of mind. Perhaps many of us were fascinated by animals in our youth, especially if you lived in rural areas surrounded by creeks, meadows and forested areas. But we put away “childish” things, yet as “adults” we seem to become less “mature” about these things. The 2020 World Wildlife Fund Living Planet Report tells us that “The global Living Planet Index continues to decline. It shows an average 68 percent decrease in the population sizes of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fishes between 1970 and 2016. A 94 percent decline for the tropical subregions of the Americas is the largest fall observed in any part of the world.”

The WWF asks us why does this “matter”? It matters “because biodiversity is fundamental to human life on Earth, and the evidence is unequivocal—it is being destroyed by us at a rate unprecedented in history. Since the industrial revolution, human activities have increasingly destroyed and degraded forests, grasslands, wetlands and other important ecosystems, threatening human well-being…most of the oceans are polluted, and more than 85 percent of the area of wetlands has been lost.”

Of course, some people may be “concerned” about this on a surface level, but again, since most of this is “out of sight,” it is mainly “out of mind.” Few people actually “see” how this affects them, so it is not a “big deal” for the moment. But the report tells us that “Species population trends are important because they are a measure of overall ecosystem health.” It notes the explosive changes in the past 50 years in global trade and population growth, especially in urban areas. Until 1970, the planet’s regeneration processes were able to keep up with the human footprint, but no longer: “To feed and fuel our 21st century lifestyles, we are overusing the Earth’s biocapacity by at least 56 percent."

The report notes that the threat to biodiversity does have severe consequences on human life. We may look at just one of the variables that effects sea food; besides the destruction of habitat by pollution, the warming of sea water that potentially kills off phytoplankton that absorbs carbon dioxide, produces 50 percent of the Earth's oxygen, feeds anything from the next level of plankton to young fry to whales just starts getting the “ball” rolling. There has been some disagreement about how global warming effects phytoplankton, but the “bad” scenario is that warm water forces it to migrate to colder water in northern and southernmost regions, leading not just to the slow death of fisheries in temperate and tropical regions, but decreasing oxygen content in the oceans while increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to the decrease of phytoplankton in those parts of the ocean to absorb it. 

On land, the apparent significant decline in insect populations which serve as sustenance for many “higher” species of life is also a matter of concern, as is the population of pollinating insects (bees). Because insect populations are effected by the weather, populations often see "boom and bust" cycles. But ecologist David Wagner has called the apparent decrease in insect populations and the near extinction of many species "a death by a thousand cuts," mainly from human activity that effects habitat and the use of pesticides that kill more than their intended targets.

Furthermore, the world’s “natural capital”—i.e. natural resources—has “declined by nearly 40 percent since the early 1990s, while produced capital has doubled and human capital has increased by 13 percent. This basically means that whatever has been taken from the earth is simply not being replaced. What are we doing to reverse the trend? We talk big about “recycling,” but it is more wishful thinking than fact. The report notes that policy makers do not seem to know how to “interpret” all of the information—or worse, “they choose not to tune in at all. A key problem is the mismatch between the artificial ‘economic grammar’ which drives public and private policy and ‘nature’s syntax’ which determines how the real world operates. Together this evidence shows that biodiversity conservation is more than an ethical commitment for humanity: it is a non-negotiable and strategic investment to preserve our health wealth and security.”

Of course it all sounds “simple” to deal with, but naturally it isn’t because it means that human beings have to change their habits. For example, how many people actually reuse those “reusable” bags that some retail stores occasionally provide? Hardly anyone does, right? Me personally, I do keep all such bags, but usually for purposes other than “reusing” them on shopping trips. In any case, the answer to the question of reversing current trends does, as usual, require “urgent and unprecedented conservation action, and make transformational changes in the way we produce and consume.” Unfortunately, “decades of words and warnings have not changed modern human society’s business-as-usual trajectory.”

The reports goes on, and on, about the usual warnings: 1 million plant and animal species threatened with extinction in the coming decades, the continuing destruction of terrestrial habitat for human use, reducing human impacts on climate change and pollution, reducing the overexploitation of sea life and endangered land animals, stopping the importation of invasive species that destroy native species—you know the drill. Even the deepest parts of the ocean are affected by human waste; in fact, today only 13 percent of the world’s oceans is regarded as “pristine.”

The current pandemic can also be blamed in part on the human destruction of habitat, if in fact it is true that the coronavirus originated in bats. Humans should not be interacting with bats at all unless they have either invaded their habitat, and destroyed their habitat and forced them to “introduce” themselves to human habitat.

The report concludes with the question of “What kind of future world do we want?” It can’t just be one where “we” thrive—but where “nature also survives and thrives.” It is all so “simple”—yet so hard.