THE COST OF LIFE

“I think the American people should see that the corporations abandoned them long ago.  That people will have to build their own economies and rebuild democracy as a living democracy. The corporations belong to no land, no country, no people.  They have no loyalty to anything apart from the base-line—their profits.  And the profits today are on unimaginable scale, it has become illegitimate, criminal profit—profits extracted at the cost of life.” Vandana Shiva

I heard the screech of the red-shouldered hawk.  Searching, searching for food in the barren wasteland we, humans call home.  Mother Earth:  poisoned, plundered, robbed; a land that has been bulldozed and beaten into submission.  “What to eat?”screeches the hawk. This is the man-made landscape of suffering in a world of avarice and greed.  The hawk surveys the land from her metal antennae perch. No trees in sight to sit upon.  A barren land, no food in sight; the hawk moves on, crying out her anger and frustration.

In every direction, land developers are laying claim to wetlands, beaches, and pine forests.  They say they will replace the land they destroyed with a natural landscape but all that we see are lawns, and the humming of water sprinklers to keep the lawns alive.  This is Florida, a subtropical paradise. We will be a land of velvet green useless lawns, high priced homes, big box stores, and toll roads that take you to nowhere.  A Disney World where few bugs exist because pesticides have eradicated most of them.  The promise of pest-free living creates a world of magical thinking.  Yet, people wonder where have the honey bees gone?  Where are the fireflies?  Where are the butterflies?

There is a saying, “Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.”  Green lawns need water, lots of water.  And the cattle ranches residing on those ancient wetlands will need lots of water.  Our hamburger addiction means that the cattle industry has priority.  The destructive nature of cattle-raising is a result of a cattle industry utilizing large amounts of land, water, and grain crops.  Grain crops could feed more people.  Instead the grain goes to cattle.

A once free natural resource, water, has become a commodity.  This commodity bottled in plastic has created a huge environmental problem.  The disposal in landfills of all these plastic bottles is part of the problem.  Plastic bottles take some 400 years to disintegrate.  Meanwhile landfills are overflowing and needing to find more land.  In Florida we have our Mt. Trash-mores, our modern day middens of unwanted objects, aka garbage.  Treasures once worshipped on the altar of capitalism.

In my hometown land developers are building hundreds and hundreds of homes on wetlands and pine forests.  I am curious about the thousands of people who are supposedly moving into our small city.  Where are they coming from?  How do we know that all these people will be buying homes and moving into an area that has few job opportunities.   Maybe they are wealthy retired folks?  Where will the poorer folks go to live since housing will be so expensive?  Will they be living in tents on the street like in Los Angeles? Not in my backyard, say the wealthy homeowners.

Is this all purely land speculation by land developers?  Across Florida it appears that a lot of land will be bulldozed, thousands of wildlife (animals and vegetation) killed in order to make room for a massive human population boom.  One of several reasons why people move to Florida is because of the natural environment.  Will people want to move here, as the environment becomes more and more degraded, filled with dead and dying wildlife,  blue-green algae (cyanobacteria)covering our rivers and canals?

Meanwhile, men and women of lactology (scientists who study human milk feeding) are disemboweling human milk to make a more perfect substance for babies and children.  Because they believe that nature cannot be trusted and its presence means that it is free to exploit.  Do they consider the ramification of such exploitation?  Not only are they exploiting a substance, but they are exploiting women and babies while pretending to support breastfeeding.  They will create a huge network of milk banks.  They just know that human milk in a bottle is equivalent to breastfeeding.  Of course one must pasteurize the substance and since it has to be cleaned up one has to add back the substances that were destroyed by pasteurization.  Those additives will be almost like the real substances in human milk because now modern science has genetic engineering.

Like water, human milk has become a commodity.  The corporation buys up the water for a token price or sometimes gets it for free.  The human milk industry does the same thing.  This commodification requires plastic packaging-bottles-and therefore creates an environmental problem.  Plastic, endocrine disruptors, leach various chemicals into the contents of the bottles. Consequently these products also create health issues depending on the kind of plastics used and the environmental conditions in which they are stored.

Water in bottles is promoted as better for your health than the soda pops or energy drinks and it is a better choice.  Human milk in a bottle is considered better than infant formula and it also is a better choice.  What once was a free substance has now become something that must be purchased.  Now the ownership and control of water and human milk resides with the corporations.  Economic independence and even survival, itself, becomes very difficult; when what nature provides is no longer free.

After 70 years of creating supposedly better and better infant formulas, scientists still recognize that infant formula cannot duplicate breastfeeding.  Tragically, many infants die because the general public has no real understanding of the protective nature of breastfeeding for both babies and mothers.  Just as the corporate world of greed clear-cuts Amazon forests in “ignorance” to the health of the planet; the human milk industry strips human milk into various components looking for a magic bullet to sell to consumers.

Is the corporate world ignorant of the ramifications?  The reality is that the corporate world is not so ignorant.  Rather they have made a choice, to present their bought and paid-for science as scientific truths.  The corporate ideology is profits before people.  Destroy a pine forest in speculation and watch the vultures feast upon the lifeless victims of forest life.  Destroy breastfeeding and replace it with a plastic bottle of denatured human milk and additives.  Watch the vultures circling overhead as women and children suffer the consequences of breastfeeding destroyed.  Can one ever replace what has been destroyed?

Copyright 2020 Valerie W. McClain