De Weerzinwekkend Domheid van de Polderpers

De polderpers is even dom en kortzichtig als het publiek dat zij bedient met sensatie, gekenmerkt door een schrijnend gebrek aan context. Hetzelfde gaat op voor de Nederlandse politici en autoriteiten. Wie zijn deze relschoppers, deze hooligans, het schuim der natie? Ziehier het gezever over de journalistiek dat de NOS verspreidt:

Chris Bakker is verslaggever van de lokale omroep Studio040 in Eindhoven. Hij vertelt in podcast De Dag hoe bedreigend het zondag was om verslag te doen van de rellen in Eindhoven. Hij begaf zich anoniem tussen de relschoppers uit angst dat ze hem anders te grazen zouden nemen, en verbaast zich over de haat richting de pers. Journalist Peter ter Velde vertelt over de vele meldingen die er binnen zijn gekomen bij PersVeilig, een initiatief dat opkomt voor de veiligheid van journalisten. Hij is bezorgd dat het binnenkort een keer echt fout gaat. 'De persvrijheid in Nederland staat duidelijk onder druk.' 

https://nos.nl/artikel/2365945-podcast-de-dag-de-agressie-tegen-de-pers-in-nederland.html

Welke persvrijheid? Die echoput van elkaar napratende journalistjes? Deze gatekeepers van de macht, die in no time gecorrumpeerd zijn? Ik las vanavond sir David Attenborough's boek A Life On Our Planet (2020). Dat is pas journalistiek. Het laat de massale vernielzucht van het neoliberale kapitalisme zien, in stand gehouden door de gecorrumpeerde politieke en bestuurlijke hooligan's van de zogenaamde democratieën. Ooit een Nederlandse journalist gehoord, die durfde te zeggen dat als de macht zich misdraagt, de ondergeschikten dit ook doen? Een fragment:

2020 World population: 7.8 billion

Carbon in atmosphere: 415 parts per million

Remaining wilderness: 35 per cent 

Our impact is now truly global. Our blind assault on the planet is changing the very fundamentals of the living world. This is now the status of our planet in the year 2020.

We are extracting over 80 million tonnes of seafood from the oceans each year and have reduced 30 per cent of fish stocks to critical levels. Almost all the large oceanic fish have been removed. 

We have lost about half of the world’s shallow-water corals and major bleachings are occurring almost every year. 

Our coastal developments and seafood farming projects have now reduced the extent of mangroves and seagrass beds by more than 30 per cent. 

Our plastic debris has been found throughout the ocean, from the surface waters to the deepest trenches. There are currently 1.8 trillion plastic fragments drifting in a monstrous garbage patch in the northern Pacific, where currents cause the surface waters to circulate. Four other garbage patches are forming on similar gyres elsewhere in the oceans. 

Plastic is invading oceanic food chains and over 90 per cent of seabirds have plastic fragments in their stomachs. Aldabra is a nature reserve which very few people are permitted to visit. When I landed on the island in 1983, while making The Living Planet, the only flotsam on the beaches worthy of mention were the giant nuts of the coco de mer palm tree. Recently another film crew visited the island. They found humanity’s rubbish on every part of the beaches. Giant tortoises that live on the island, some over a century old, now have to clamber over plastic bottles, oil cans, buckets, nylon nets and rubber. 

No beach on the planet is free of our waste. 

Freshwater systems are as threatened as marine. We have interrupted the free flow of almost all the world’s sizeable rivers with over 50,000 large dams. Dams can also change the temperature of the water, drastically altering the timing of fish migrations and their breeding events. 

We not only use rivers as dumping grounds to remove our litter, but load them with the fertilisers, pesticides and industrial chemicals that we spread on the lands they drain. Many are now the most polluted parts of the environment to be found anywhere on the globe. We take their water and use it to irrigate our crops, and reduce their levels so severely that some of them, at some point in the year, no longer reach the sea. 

We build on flood plains and around river mouths, and drain the wetlands to such an extent that their total area is now only half of what it was when I was born. 

Our assault on freshwater systems has reduced the animals and plants that live in them more severely than those in any other habitat. Globally, we have reduced the size of their animal populations by over 80 per cent. The Mekong River in Southeast Asia, for example, supplies a quarter of all freshwater fish caught around the globe, and provides 60 million people with valuable protein. Yet a combination of damming, over-extraction, pollution and overfishing has led to a diminishing catch, year by year, not just in volume, but in terms of the size of the fish. In recent years, some fishermen have had to use mosquito nets in order to catch something edible. 

Currently we cut down over 15 billion trees each year. The world’s rainforests have been reduced by half. The top driver of continuing deforestation, which doubles that of the next three greatest cases combined, is beef production. Brazil alone devotes 170 million hectares of its land, an area seven times the size of the United Kingdom, to cattle pasture. Much of that area was once rainforest. The second driver is soy. Growing soy uses some 131 million hectares, much of it in South America. Over 70 per cent of this soy is used to feed livestock being raised for meat. Third is the 21 million hectares of oil palm plantations, mostly in Southeast Asia. 

The forests that still remain are severely fragmented having been intersected by roads, farms and plantations. In 70 per cent of them, the edge of their tree cover is no more than a kilometre away at any point. Few deep, dark forests are left. 

Insect numbers, globally, have dropped by a quarter in just 30 years. In places where pesticides are heavily used, this percentage is even higher. Recent studies have shown that Germany has lost 75 per cent of the mass of its flying insects, and Puerto Rico has lost almost 90 per cent of the mass of the insects and spiders living in the canopy The insects are by far the most diverse group of all living species. Many are pollinators, essential links in numerous food chains. Others are hunters and are the dominant factors in preventing preventing populations of plant-eating insects from becoming plagues. 

Half of the fertile land on Earth is now farmed. More often than not, we have abused it. We overload it with nitrates and phosphates, overgraze it, burn it, overburden it with unsuitable varieties of crops, and spray it with pesticides so killing the soil invertebrates that bring it to life. Many soils are losing their topsoil and changing from rich ecosystems brimming with fungi, worms, specialist bacteria and a host of other microscopic organisms, into hard, sterile and empty ground. Rainwater runs off it as it does off a pavement and so contributes to the excessive floods that now so frequently submerge the heartlands of many nations that practise industrial farming. 

Seventy per cent of the mass of birds on this planet today are domesticated. The vast majority are chickens. Globally, we eat 50 billion of them each year. Twenty-three billion chickens are alive at any one moment. Many of these are fed on soy-based feed derived from deforested land. 

Even more startling is the fact that 96 per cent of the mass of all the mammals on Earth is made up of our bodies and those of the animals that we raise to eat. Our own mass accounts for one third of the total. Our domestic mammals – chiefly cows, pigs and sheep – make up just over 60 per cent. The remainder – all the wild mammals, from mice to elephants and whales – account for just 4 per cent.

Since the 1950s, on average, wild animal populations have more than halved. When I look back at my earlier films now, I realise that, although I felt I was out there in the wild, wandering through a pristine natural world, that was an illusion. Those forests and plains and seas were already emptying. Many of the larger animals were already rare. A shifting baseline has distorted our perception of all life on Earth. We have forgotten that once there were temperate forests that would take days to traverse, herds of bison that would take four hours to pass, and flocks of birds so vast and dense that they darkened the skies. Those things were normal only a few lifetimes ago. Not any more. We have become accustomed to an impoverished planet. 

We have replaced the wild with the tame. We regard the Earth as our planet, run by humankind for humankind. There is little left for the rest of the living world. The truly wild world – that non-human world – has gone. We have overrun the Earth. 

I have spent the last few years speaking about this wherever I can – the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Economic Forum, to financiers in London and the festival-goers in Glastonbury. I wish I wasn’t involved in this struggle, because I wish the struggle wasn’t necessary. But I’ve had unbelievable luck and good fortune in my life. I would certainly feel very guilty if, having realised what the dangers are, I decided to ignore them. 

I have to remind myself of the dreadful things that humanity has done to the planet in my lifetime. After all, the Sun still comes up each morning, and the newspaper drops through the letterbox. But I think about it most days to some degree. Are we, like those poor people in Pripyat, sleepwalking into a catastrophe?