The self-maximising growth of private-money power over all life and life support systems – life capital in a word – to exploit for non-producer profit is not yet recognised as a master degenerative trend built into the ruling meta program of which Brexit and Trump are the latest Anglo-American expressions. Central to this unseen meta trend is the compulsive dismantling of life-protective law and rights whose masking justification has shifted from ‘globalisation’ to ‘nationalism’. 

The Left is befuddled. It sees the anti-Labour implications in both the financialised EU and the de-regulating Brexit with no coherent program to overcome both. The Right blindly follows the inner logic of the ruling economic model while Liberals offer only partial and incompetent market fixes for collective life capital sustainability. 

All fail to see Brexit’s giant step towards life capital degeneration and eco-genocide at the margins as environmental and civil commons are stripped of their public funding by privatisation and de-regulation. The cumulative carcinogenic conversion of organic, social and ecological life organisation into ever faster private money-profit sequences multiplying to the unproductive few is the predictable system result.

‘Brexit’ is now a house-hold word for anyone following world affairs. Yet its political, economic and cultural meaning for Britain, the US and globalisation itself is tectonic, and no-one on the public stage or even the academy seems to get it – even after the huge upset loss of majority by the Tory party and Prime Minister Theresa May in the recent election.

Even after the Tories and May carry on with Brexit exactly as before the election they lost, the literally poisonous dispossession of life-serving civilisation and revolution backwards that Brexit still leads are unfathomed by the commentariat.

A very powerful separatist power

“Brexit is Brexit”. No policy change is made. The PM and the Brexit forces are still in charge. May can be dumped as a brand change, but not a policy one. The ‘Schedule of Negotiations’ to leave the European Union proceeds as if nothing has happened. Even Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, risen from the dead, is so chuffed up by its spectacular rise it does not comprehend the Brexit coup d’etat still in motion.

Behind the scenes, there is clearly a very powerful separatist power, including the press-lord media and allied bank and corporate rich, with unbarred interests pulling strings – as we see ahead – but no-one talks about it, including Marxists.

Who keeps on forcing a counter-revolution that is itself not yet understood with only a decisive minority ever voting for a policy-less separatist project funded and evidently orchestrated only by the rich with ‘nationalist’ demagoguery out front?

Bribing the Northern Irish bigot rump, the Democratic Union Party (DUP), with public billions to vote for Tory Brexit in the House of Commons is the only way the Tories can get a majority. 

DUP is well known in the UK. It was formerly at war with the Catholic majority in Northern Ireland in virulent flag-waving aggression led by the extreme-right demagogue Ian Paislie, and is descended from Oliver Cromwell’s genocidal conquest sustained over centuries – more representative of the Brexit Tories than yet known.

The historic Brexit-Trump connection

The political and economic ignorance of Brexit means that there is little or no common life substance, historical bearings, or defined policy grounds analysis of what is happening. 

There is no connection of the dots – even 30 months after Brexit suddenly dominated the news cycle as a marketing site for mass discontent and diversion from Britain’s real problems. Even progressive websites have little interest in Brexit, which is exactly what is needed for its dominant and unnamed interests to keep on forcing the rush agenda through.

US websites focus on US news and developments, not yet seeing the historic Brexit-Trump connection. Their connection is, in fact, a de-regulating nationalist-masked juggernaut reversing what good has been accomplished to protect citizens, the environment and the planetary life cycles themselves from cumulative despoliation and ruin.

The European Union, despite its shocking neoliberal financialisation, has evolved binding life-serving norms far ahead of the rest of the world over 70 years. This is not reported in the English-speaking world empire for an obvious reason.

There are so many dots to join, and all of them are compounded by the unseen programme of Brexit – ever rising  inequality, publicly bankrupting tax cuts and subsidies to the corporate rich, cumulative dispossession of the poor by Tory ‘austerity’, runaway disease-causing industrial-chemical  farming  and ‘frankenfoods’ growing into epidemics of obesity and other ills, London financial enrichment as the public sector shrinks, banks are recapitalised by public money, and – most unseen of all – mounting pollutions by multiplying carbon and waste miles built into vast unneeded commodity transportations across oceans that the Paris Agreement does not touch.

Why Brexit is an historic fraud  

No-one on the public stage seems to know that the Brexit referendum ‘victory’ is legally non-binding from the start and has never been supported by the vast majority of British voters, with ever less support since the 37 percent peak of support in June 2016 referendum.

So it follows that Ms May is Brexit’s new leader, which she was once opposed, and she tells a big lie when she continually says that Brexit “is the will of the British people”. Her nose, and that of the Tory rich behind Brexit, grows longer when she keeps insisting on this falsehood after a British majority voted against her in the June 8 2017 election which she proclaimed the “defining election about Brexit”.

The multiple fraud is, however, important to keep alive. If the majority of the British people have never in fact supported Brexit nor the Great Repeal Bill, May still takes forward to EU negotiation without any defined policy whatever, and she has a lost election that was about Brexit, then the whole house of cards on top of which she is visible queen falls into the bin of history where it now should go.

But who connects across the sudden and secretively funded and orchestrated 30-month movement of Brexit through all the lies it has spun – including the £350 million a day to be saved for the iconic but crumbling National Health Service (one fraudulent claim that has been noted in the corporate media)? 

Who questions the legitimacy of the whole affair at all levels – including the leading liar rewarded as Foreign Minister even as his fellow cabinet members and the independent press show he is unfit to hold high public office?

Who brings up the connected facts that the big losers of Brexit are the 90 percent of farmers requiring its agricultural subsidy to survive, the young professional classes and students losing their precious passports to EU jobs and travel, the competitive green exporters who meet the strict EU market standards for renewable and non-toxic products which Big-Ag-Food specialise in, and the many millions very much in favour of the independent EU Court of Justice and of Human Rights with 60 years of legal standards and precedents on workers’ and citizens’ rights – not to mention the further millions who support EU Organic Agriculture and Endangered Species Directives leading the world against profitably ecocidal practices.

The cruel health, education and social cutbacks

Who connects the widespread feeling that ‘things have gone wrong’ which the Brexit referendum capitalised on by scapegoating the EU to the real causal factors of the long Great Recession brought on by Wall Street and the and the cruel Tory health, education, public service and social cutbacks to pay for it? Cause-effect thinking has been suspended all around by the Brexit diversion.

Who is behind it all? Boris Johnson’s and Nigel Farage’s London financial pals are front-line candidates but are not named, and the billionaire press tub-thumping for them and Brexit has sustained the great diversion from the UK’s real problems. May and Johnson can even abet mass murder with no press follow-up as they approve billions of dollars of licensed armament sales to Saudi Arabia for its biblical eco-genocide of the poverty-stricken Yemini people.

Yet the unspeakable point about Brexit across domains is to make profit for life-destructive London sovereign again, against all international laws and regulation.

In the official background, Britain’s Electoral Commission has had to investigate Brexit’s voluminous and shady private financing. They have little chance of success, given a campaign-long time-limit on disclosure, and other blocks. 

Private London financial interests

Transparency International has run into them too. There seems to be nothing on Brexit’s backroom origins before the double-talk lobby group, ‘Britain Great in Europe’, began its slickly promoted media-spectacle campaign, with even its master slogan a brazen falsehood.

The mass media conversation is especially empty on the very big private money stakes that are at work in Brexit. After all the media’s major advertising spaces are bought by these very wealthy interests at very high returns. No-one in this company wants people to read that Brexit entails the legal erasure of  EU market rules protecting human rights, the environment and London financial inspections.

Private London financial interests are especially unexposed. Vast “investment banking, cross-border sales of securities, Euro liquidity to clearing houses, non-performing loan recognition, coverage and write-offs” all escape the planned independent EU inspection and supervision on these very defined issues at exactly the same time as Brexit started.

The EU Central Bank’s mandate to investigate and supervise “the business model, risk management, and capital, liquidity and funding” of private-profit bank and financial institutions via a rigorous “Supervisory Review and Evaluation Process” led by elite teams of professional accountants inside must strike terror and rage in the high echelons of the City. 

Blaming a “too tolerant” Opposition

All such independent intervention, regulation and accountability is anathema to the unregulated daily trillions in hard currency substitutes that are bet and switched daily in the US-UK global financial matrix which can fabulously enrich London agents and hollow world economies overnight.

Few observe that Brexit is based on a non–binding referendum unsupported by two-thirds of the population, interrupted by a terrorist attack days before the June 8 2017 election to decide the Brexit go-ahead. Such terror attacks invariably spike polls upwards for governments, and May made political capital out of the event by blaming a “too tolerant” Opposition and the “public sector” as failing to stop the terrorists.

Even with almost all former UKIP votes, the Tory PM lost the majority counted to be overwhelming to cement Brexit in. To be exact on the historical figures here, the original 17, 410,742 voters supporting Leave (in a rush referendum whose wording itself changed in the spectacle process) hardly exceeded a third of the electorate (46,500, 001) as enumerated by the UK Electoral Commission. 

Moreover, no mainstream media ever featured the 12,948,018 voters left out, nor the fact that those not voting later voted 2:1 against Brexit once the results were known.

In the June election, May and the Tories lost any majority whatever. Even with a snap election against the promised 2020 date to exploit a 20+ percent poll lead; even with illegal financing and non-stop misrepresentations of the facts headlined in the press-baron media; and even with a sudden terrorist attack right before the election.

‘Brexit’ is a major political operation

All things considered, it is difficult to avoid concluding that ‘Brexit’ is a major political operation to end the established order of government from within ruling circles – a coup d’etat – which has proceeded by stunning positional switches, policy-empty promises, leadership flip-flops and lies, all outside of Parliamentary control, never supported by even 40 percent at any stage, and with no binding legitimacy any step of the way.

One is reminded here that such coups within the established political order have been recurrent in recent years against social democratic systems – as the EU is – in Brazil (with times more population and real wealth than the UK), as well as Argentina, Honduras, Paraguay, and Haiti.

In this way, the long-established form of the UK’s EU governance in economic matters is overthrown for secretive and carte blanche rewrite covered up nationalist slogans stirring imperial ego and pride. Yet who connects this built-in coup agenda to the transnational bank and corporate goliaths who most benefit from holus-bolus privatising, de-taxing and de-regulating the UK economy?

The best way to divert any public from the hard facts of a coup by the unproductive rich is to attack a familiar enemy or scapegoat, and beat a nationalist tribal drum and bigot prejudices of superiority  to unify the many reliably ignorant dupes of the stratagem. The technique works across continents.

I have formally explained the inner syntax of this fallacy in a logic journal as the ad adversarium fallacy. Anyone can see it once it is exposed. In the Brexit gambit, the popular enemy has been a combination of EU nabobs grinding down poor countries to pay private banks, arrogant bureaucracy and oppressive regulations beyond tolerance, and – after years of catastrophe – globalising rules hollowing out the true nation and its glory across time. 

The Trump-Brexit connections – an explosive cocktail

The Trump-Brexit connections are clear. They make for an explosive cocktail. Both are recognised as populist nationalisms, but not the very powerful private interests they mask which in Brexit are relatively invisible in the media of record. Least of all is the cover-up itself recognised, never the logical disorder by which the mask is sustained. Almost always only personalities are engaged and yay-boo sides presented, while the actually determining policies and interests at a social-structure level are whited out.

The ad adversarium track-switch of thought drives the whole bandwagon diversion, and a nationalist mask over the real issues of private money interest versus common life interest is what is ultimately repressed and unspoken. Every step of the great lies and catastrophes of our time express some variation of this inner logic with ‘freedom’ versus ‘dictatorship’ the main ad adversarium switch of ‘globalisation’ which is now in question (but never defined), with Trump and Brexit the leading the charge of the new mask in place of the old to divert the public from what is really going on, again.

In short, the ‘nationalist’ mask is now adopted to distract the roll of real grass-roots outrage onto a convenient scape-goat kept down by political correctness before, with militant ignorance and – in Hannah Arendt’s lucid phrase – ‘negative solidarity’ – to gain supreme rule for the historical moment.

What is diverted from by this master-switch of thought is transiently game-winning for the blaming party, but ruinous in fact to the common life interest of the nation. In the case of Brexit more clearly than even Trump, the system payoff is the dominion of non-productive financial rule, de-regulation, de-taxation and privatisation of the nation’s natural and social wealth, and war state methods to sustain and advance the life-blind system of unaccountable money-party rule. 

Abolish life-serving law and regulations

Systemically understood, the UK and US ‘nationalist’ movements abolish life-serving law and regulations to engineer economic circuits to serve private money powers as the nation’s ‘freedom’. There are four degenerate trends:

1. sweeping income-tax reductions to private corporations and the rich to the lowest level in history of 10-15 percent (the “incentive” card);

2. ever more privatisation and corporate public ‘partnership’ schemes that cost the public 30 to 50 percent more in hidden profit-levies, poorer services and upkeep investments (the “eliminate red-tape” card);

3. rising armed-force spending for pervasive policing at home and war-criminal threats and occupations abroad to enforce the growing life-system depredation (the ‘get tough’ card);

4. systemic deregulation as the need for more consumer, social and ecological life standards become more urgent (the “freedom” card).

There is certainly a widespread feeling in the UK that the movement of foreign-speaking cultures into everyday poorer Britain for social benefits and low-wage competition with UK workers has inflamed anti-EU passions.

Inflamed anti-foreign passions

A similar widespread feeling has inflamed anti-foreign passions in Britain in the past – with the xenophobic Enoch Powell who much impressed the City-based leader of  Brexit, Nigel Farage. Yet such ability to raise primal resentments against the foreign Other cannot justify a political counter-revolution against an evolved system leading the world in environmental, labour, and human rights.

Much too has been made of ‘Brussels’ as an oppressive foreign rule choking Britain in ‘bureaucracy and red tape’. But this is the standard complaint against any public regulations perceived to lower private profits by increasing costs.

Research can find no sustainable example of such bureaucratic oppression. For example, the new EU regulation against massive throwing away of fish catches in falling-stock seas is despised by Michael Gove, the Brexit supporting secretary of state for the environment. But his family business has long profited from this no-cost waste and  ignored the ecological necessity that the EU Common Fisheries policy prescribes.

Fury has been poured on ‘bureaucratic’ regulation against destroying of hedges and trees (animal and bird habitat), and for imposing genetically engineered seeds and methods on the countryside that become genetically dominant and contaminate other crops and natural ecocycles – two of the EU most condemned regulations in the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy and Organic Agriculture Regulations.

Life-protective rule of law

More sweepingly and eco-blindly, George Eustace, the current Tory agriculture minister, publicly repudiates the precautionary principle itself as “the wrong way to go”. He wants to erase this central EU and scientific principle for corporate ‘risk assessment’ and other profit-friendly evasions of environmental responsibility.

As always with Brexit leaders, there is no coherently defined policy to replace the life-protective rule of law of over 45 years in the European Community and European Union. All specific meaning disappears into vague PR sound-bites and slogans like ‘opportunity for innovation’, ‘lower regulatory burden’, and ‘less red tape’.

So too the financial suits behind Brexit. They want no regulations or costs for their specialty of trillions-a-day currency speculations (enabled and protected by public infrastructures), not even a small fraction of one percent proposed by the tiny Tobin tax over 40 years, with near-unanimous public support.

The big banks and speculators have avoided – even after the 2008 collapse from historically unprecedented private big-finance fraud and predatory greed – any regulation requiring them to actually have the money they spend on derivative and other speculations to pay for their titanic gambles to enrich them alone with their biggest failures paid for by public bailouts.

If the ‘democratic accountability’ of private banks and big finance promised by the EU and laboured on since 2008 by European experts (including British citizens) on behalf of the peoples of 26 nations destabilised by the greatest financial fraud in world history is stopped by Brexit, the City’s financial funnels into  the productive economy’s lifeblood will continue as usual.

City inducements and threats

The overdue EU Capital Requirements Regulation and Directives on reporting and supervising “risk management and capital, liquidity and funding” of each of the City’s big banks is intolerable to their long dominant culture. 

This upcoming supervision and regulation of London-cum-Wall Street by qualified international public servants – who are not subjugated to City inducements and threats – was under attack as soon as it was announced in 2015, with Brexit as the vehicle of overwhelming political pressures. 

The new $500 million Goldman-Sachs building in central London provides US-global back-up and partnership in the ‘too big to regulate’ scheme of an era of big-bank rule (or ‘financial fascism’, in the words of one EU minister).

Brexit and the Great Repeal Act are the master dodge by ‘the masters of the universe’ inside London against any incorrigibly independent and globally expert regulation in situ and backed by 70 years of international institutional experience.

Diversion to the populist enemy 

No one evidently connects across the dominant financial forces most of all gaining by Brexit clearance of over half a century of democratic civilisation and binding life-protective norms at all levels.

Indeed there seems no media or political connection made of Brexit to the Big Banks and Big Agri-Chemical Food. They have overwhelming interests in stopping the evolved rule of EU law from regulating out their US-style methods and predatory profits.

The de-regulated system has cumulatively degenerated from production and reproduction of life means with cumulative gain – life capital – to ever-growing consumption and waste of social and ecological capital as far more profitable for private investment. 

Even the universal life support systems of breathable air, clean water, living oceans, rivers and aquifers are being degraded and despoiled at once.

Not even the same demagogic method in Trump and Brexit movements for massive de-regulation of an already insufficiently regulated and collapsing global life support base is deconstructed. 

Desperate ignorance of dispossessed masses

Instead, the ancient method of powering a movement against a vague enemy diverts everywhere – especially the desperate ignorance of dispossessed masses and the self-serving mendacity of the opportunistic well-off. If the divert-to-the-enemy movement is given enough publicity without public analysis of its derangement, it can undo a lot of life-coherent civilisation to benefit top dogs and their packs in unseen ways.

In the US, for example, the accepted enemy of Russia is the only diversion which has worked against Trump’s own spectacular success with this same population-firing psychological operation. The argumentum ad adversarium explained above is a universal, always diverting from a substantive life-and-death issue at stake to the evils or foibles of a well-known enemy of the audience who is being gulled.

If many have been dispossessed and are looking for a scapegoat, the animating diversion works like black magic. It is the master track-switch of history and wars hot and cold. Yet the designated enemy must have some bad karma for this ‘psy-op’ to prevail, over time and against exposure. 

For example, the European Central Bank’s post-2008 financial torture of Greece and other poorer EU nations has been so life-blindly vicious on behalf of big private banks that the bemused Left stumbles in its next steps. “Financial fascism”, the term deployed by Italy’s long-serving Economic Minister, Giulio Tremonti, is not easy to disagree with.

At the level of the realpolitik of the only beneficiaries of Brexit, European Union life-protective law and regulations themselves are attacked as the problem. The private money-sequencing mind in control cannot compute that European Community regulations and norms have managed, over 70 years and better than any other continent, to develop life-coherent regimes of production and products not systemically poisoning and destroying people’s health and environments.

A US-style attack campaign

This has long been a secret outside the EU. In America, only a few have the research backgrounds to know it. This is why Brexit run in a US-style attack campaign has almost succeeded in the leading the greatest step backwards in the evolution of homo regulans, the differentiating intelligence of the species.

Unrelated to Brexit in the press are facts such as UK air pollution kills 50-60,000 people annually with the highest pollution content of all 28 EU states in violation of the EU standards with the EU now issuing a “final warning” before stiff fines against mass killing  – revealingly at the same time as Tory PM May is forcing Brexit as the “wide-open eyes” and “will of the British people”.

It is “oppressive EU regulatory burdens” which are alone set to solve the problem. The EU Ambient Air Quality Directive is exactly researched and covers all known emission sources, including all forms of factory and traffic emissions and the specific pollutions and acidifications, a decades-advanced scientific document with the standard feedback documentation and incremental enforcement that normally characterise EU regulation and norms.

Yet government action on the worst lethal air pollution by the EU over decades is only one of many life-protective regulatory actions that Brexit stops. Less seen are the faster-rising deaths and diseases from junk-food obesity and cumulative ecological ruin by US-style toxic Big Agri-Food processes and products increasingly feeding Britain. 

They also pervade organic and ecological life organisation with growing chemical inputs, concoctions and wastes.

Chicken meat sanitised only by chlorinated water

Yet already Tory demands have been made for UK hygiene standards to be changed from EU to US rules so as to permit chicken meat sanitised only by chlorinated water, to allow beef raised with growth hormones, and to free genetically engineered substitute foods or GMO’s from production and label restrictions. 

Already Big-Agri-Food US-style is setting up to compete outside the EU – Brexit’s “wider engagement with the world” – by far lower food, animal welfare and environmental standards.

These are the dark side meanings of the “glorious new market opportunities”, “lack of red tape”, and “regulatory flexibilities” promised by Brexit.

The EU Environment, Public Health and Food Safety Committee is also moving to restrict advertising and sale of  high fat, sugar and salt (HFSS) foods and beverages to children with the UK set to comply just when Brexit is force-moving negotiations to end EU standards in Britain.

Even more pervasive noise pollution is exactly targeted at source by EU regulations, including on auto-vehicles, lawn-mowers and boat motors (compare Brexit-supporter Donald Trump’s Harley-Davidson inaugural salute and full-blasting 6-foot amplifiers in hotels). But where in the ad-filled media have you ever read about this EU standard of civilisation?

Our carbonised world

In renewable energy too, EU Directives lead the UK and the world again by a strict Renewable Energy Directive which requires 20 percent renewable energy in all 26 states by 2020. 

This may seem inadequate in our carbonised world where the air and oceans acidify and trillions of carbon miles are built into transcontinental commodity shuttles while only downstream ‘climate change’ is targeted. In deeper fact, destabilised hydrological and weather cycles increasingly destroy the very conditions of life. At least the EU Directives are not more markets in rights to pollute which do not reduce carbon gases.

The Tory UK’s planned exit from the most developed rule of life-protective law is set to spike carbon-miles further by every “wider trading opportunity” it brings  outside of short-miles Europe where the distance between London and Berlin is a very small fraction of the carbon miles to and from Chicago or Toronto. 

Brexit is yet another crank up of the de-regulating US model where big finance, agri-food and military-industrial drivers rush further out of control at a tipping point of cumulative stress on local and planetary life supports.

For the wider view, EU life standards have evolved over many decades of painstaking regulation of material processes and products to be a social immune system of the most productive and efficiently recycling system in the world.

Hollowed out the public sectors

This is despite of their deadly internal conflict with Wall-Street financialisation since its 2008 crash, which has since hollowed out the public sectors of the developed world by at least $26 trillion in transfer of money demand from the public to private banks and unproductive private financial accounts.

The argument that the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) is one of the most burdensome EU regulations has been a hot topic of discussion in the run up to the EU referendum, where the UK voted to leave the EU.

REACH was over 20 years in the making and involved leading British scientists. It has instituted regulations across domains in licensing processes and commodities in the legal market, to stop every man-made chemical life-insult now pervading the world in tens of thousands of forms.

Yet in every case of life-serving norm and regulation in which the EU leads the world in pollution reduction the EU’s detailed and scientifically validated regulations actually do reduce pollutions and life hazards by exact targeting and enforcement. This includes limiting the near-pervasive commodity toxification and invasion, subsidised and also normalised elsewhere as supporting ‘the free market’ and ‘growth’. 

The regulations require life-coherent standards to be applied step-by-step. This is in contrast with the regulation-bashing and swashbuckling ignorance of the Brexit-Trump forces who claim to support ‘sovereignty’ and ‘freedom’.

Conclusion

Brexit exemplifies the pathogenic pattern which is not seen by the private ad-driven press, the corporatised academy, or the captive state. The life-and-death meaning is blinkered out. The binding power of all EU life standards is abolished in equivocal style by the omnibus Great Repeal Act. The loss of voting rights are arrogantly ignored. The progress of life-serving democratic civilisation is reversed.

The macro-economic pattern is carcinomic. Masked as ‘Great Britain’s sovereignty’, unprecedentedly dominant private transnational money sequences grow and multiply in nano-second speculations, unproductive titanic takeovers and debt-powered dispossessions to metastacise unseen into all corners with no defined policy, democratic mandate or committed life function whatsoever.

This Author

Professor John McMurtry is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and author of the three-volume study, Philosophy and World Problems of UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems. His most recent book is The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: from Crisis to Cure. The original source of this article is Global Research. Copyright © Prof. John McMurtry, Global Research, 2017

“India has seen killings spike against a backdrop of heavy-handed policing and the repression of peaceful protests and civic activism,” according to the Defenders of the Earth report released by the UK-based organisation Global Witness. 

According to the report, 16 people were killed in India in 2016 alone in environmental cases, which is almost three times more than the 2015 count of six. India ranks fourth in the world – after Brazil, Columbia and the Philippines. 

What India has in common with these countries is not just the abundance of natural resources and the potential for their exploitation, but the presence of political regimes which have managed to align state and corporate interests against the interests of the environment. 

To lose sixteen dedicated and brave environmental justice advocates to targeted violence should be a matter of grave introspection for our media, within our Parliament and most definitely within our courtrooms. 

Of these sixteen deaths, ten are suspected to have been perpetrated by police officers, emphasising the divide between State and environmental interests.

Found hacked to death

In February 2016, Manda Katraka, a citizen from the Dongria tribe in the Niyamgiri Hills in Odisha was killed in a fake encounter killing by the police, possibly to suppress the tribal protests against mining activities in the region. 

The following month Adangu Gomango, a highly respected tribal leader in the state of Odisha, was found hacked to death, outside his house where he had slept the previous night.

The local community seems to be of the belief that Gomango’s work, advocating for tribal land rights under the Forests Right Act, and consequent tensions with several opponents to these efforts, might have culminated in his murder. 

In August, Dashrath Nayak and Tudu Mahto were shot and killed during protests. They were among two thousand people who had gathered to protest against Inland Power Ltd in Ramgarh, Jharkhand. 

The protesters claimed the company had acquired land without adequate compensation or providing promised employment. The police, according to eyewitnesses, turned and fired on the crowd indiscriminately.

Use bullets against unarmed citizens

In September 2016, several thousand villagers from Badkagaon, Hazaribagh in Jharkhand attended a peaceful, unarmed sit-in to protest against a forcible land acquisition for the National Thermal Power Corporation. 

On October 1, 2016 the police arrested, Nirmal Devi, a Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) who had led the protests.

The crowd attempted to prevent the arrest and in response the police opened fire, killing Mehtab Ansari (30), Ranjan Kumar Das (17), Abhishek Roy, (19) and Pawan Kumar (17). The traumatic event created an environment of fear in the village, and effectively suppressed the protests. 

The police justified their actions by claiming the right to self defence, arguing throaty they feared physical harm from the villagers. 

A fundamental requirement in claiming self defence is to show that the response was proportionate. It is disturbing that the police seem to use bullets against unarmed citizens with impunity.

Courageous forest officials

There are also examples of the state evicting local communities under the guise of environmental protection, such as the communities living in shanty towns at the border of Kaziranga National Park. There is a dispute over whether the communities are encroaching upon the territory of the park. 

Last year, in Banderdubi village, the town witnessed several excavator machines accompanied by around two thousand police offers and several elephants, which had arrived to demolish the houses. Fakhruddin and Anjuma Khatun were shot and killed. 

At the same time, several courageous forest officials, who protect the forests from poaching every day, have been murdered in the line of duty. 

In Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, a forest official was crushed by a lorry carrying illegally mined sand along the Chambal river, as he attempted to stop the vehicle. 

Sand mining is prohibited without environmental clearances under law, but the powerful sand mining mafia continue to engage in widespread illegal quarrying. 

Prosecution and subsequent conviction

In Guntur in Andhra Pradesh, Dadli Lazar and Sheik Baji Sahid, two forest guards on duty in the Nallamala forest were murdered by a gang of timber smugglers, after having caught them in the act. 

Although the guards had called for backup, support arrived too late and the attackers had fled. 

In the Chapra forests in Madhya Pradesh, Jagdish Binjwar was killed by locals felling trees in the forest, who killed him with an axe. 

Prosecution and subsequent conviction in such cases has been low. However, last month the Gujarat High Court ordered the reopening and retrial of the criminal case against those accused of murdering environmental activist Amit Jethwa in 2010. 

Jethwa had filed a public interest litigation in the Gujarat High Court against illegal mining around the Gir National Park, and was shot by hired sharp-shooters outside the courthouse a few days after filing the case.

Speaking up against powerful companies

The main accused are a former Member of Parliament and his nephew. The High Court ordered that a new judge be appointed to try the case, due to the former judge having failed to protect the witnesses from being threatened and the trial having been compromised by the political influence of the accused. 

This might seem like a small victory in these trying times. But it is testament to the fact that the judiciary remains our last bastion in ensuring environmental justice.

It also reminds us that members of civil society can still contribute to legal non-profit organisations, in order to maintain the state’s accountability to its citizens. 

However, speaking up against powerful companies can have dire consequences, as witnessed recently by the Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) threatened by a powerful energy and mining company against journalists who published investigative reports about tax evasion and improper windfalls by the company. 

SLAPPs are lawsuits usually initiated by financially and politically powerful organisations, intended to prevent detractors from criticising them by intimidating them with high legal costs and damages for defamation and the possibility of jail time for criminal defamation. 

Questioning environmental wrongdoings 

To prevent the chilling effect of such SLAPPs, we must continue to financially and vocally support independent journalists, environmental activists, legal non-profits who by questioning environmental wrongdoings ensure that we have a functioning democracy.

Having witnessed such a horrifying year for environment related casualties and human rights violations, it is crucial for the Indian establishment to reflect and decide for itself the parameters of the development it seeks. 

On one hand, we see marginalised communities being victimised by the state-corporate nexus, willing to even kill its citizens in extreme cases, with minimal conviction rates. 

On the other hand, we see underpaid forest officials falling victim to criminal conflicts over our rapidly declining forest resources while the people who profit from such illegal activities remain largely unscathed.

For all our government’s vision regarding Smart Cities and attracting foreign direct investment, sooner or later it will have to admit the simultaneous reality of sacrificing the rights of marginalised citizens in the trade-off. 

The urban Indian elite

The urban Indian elite benefit most from India’s industrial growth while exerting most strain on India’s limited forest, mineral, water and energy sources.

They must therefore to recognise their privilege, and be willing to lend their voices to and in turn amplify the voices of the affected communities. 

We cannot aspire to be a developed nation while allowing ourselves to also be the fourth deadliest country in the world in terms of environment-related killings.

This Author

Mrinalini Shinde is an environmental law researcher based in Cologne, Germany and has previously practised as an environmental lawyer at the National Green Tribunal in India. Along with legal practice, she has experience working in new media, non profits and start-ups. Mrinalini is Climate Tracker‘s legal adviser.

In a recently published scientific study ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines’ the authors Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo document the accelerating nature of this problem.

‘Earth’s sixth mass extinction is more severe than perceived when looking exclusively at species extinctions…. That conclusion is based on analyses of the numbers and degrees of range contraction … using a sample of 27,600 vertebrate species, and on a more detailed analysis documenting the population extinctions between 1900 and 2015 in 177 mammal species.’ Their research has found that the rate of population loss in terrestrial vertebrates is ‘extremely high’ – even in ‘species of low concern’.

In their sample, comprising nearly half of known vertebrate species, 32% (8,851 out of 27,600) are decreasing; that is, they have decreased in population size and range. In the 177 mammals for which they had detailed data, all had lost 30% or more of their geographic ranges and more than 40% of the species had experienced severe population declines. Their data revealed that ‘beyond global species extinctions Earth is experiencing a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization. We describe this as a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.’

Illustrating the damage done by dramatically reducing the historic geographic range of a species, consider the lion. Panthera leo ‘was historically distributed over most of Africa, southern Europe, and the Middle East, all the way to northwestern India. It is now confined to scattered populations in sub-Saharan Africa and a remnant population in the Gir forest of India. The vast majority of lion populations are gone.’

Why is this happening? Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo tell us: ‘In the last few decades, habitat loss, overexploitation, invasive organisms, pollution, toxification, and more recently climate disruption, as well as the interactions among these factors, have led to the catastrophic declines in both the numbers and sizes of populations of both common and rare vertebrate species.’

Further, however, the authors warn ‘But the true extent of this mass extinction has been underestimated, because of the emphasis on species extinction.’ This underestimate can be traced to overlooking the accelerating extinction of local populations of a species.

‘Population extinctions today are orders of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions. Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so Earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume.’ Moreover, and importantly from a narrow human perspective, the massive loss of local populations is already damaging the services ecosystems provide to civilization (which, of course, are given no value by government and corporate economists).

As Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo remind us: ‘When considering this frightening assault on the foundations of human civilization, one must never forget that Earth’s capacity to support life, including human life, has been shaped by life itself.’

When public mention is made of the extinction crisis, it usually focuses on a few (probably iconic) animal species known to have gone extinct, while projecting many more in future. However, a glance at their maps presents a much more realistic picture: as much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once shared Earth with us are already gone, as are billions of populations.

Furthermore, they claim that their analysis is conservative given the increasing trajectories of those factors that drive extinction together with their synergistic impacts. ‘Future losses easily may amount to a further rapid defaunation of the globe and comparable losses in the diversity of plants, including the local (and eventually global) defaunation-driven coextinction of plants.’

They conclude with the chilling observation: ‘Thus, we emphasize that the sixth mass extinction is already here and the window for effective action is very short.’

Of course, it is too late for those species of plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects and reptiles that humans have already driven to extinction or will yet drive to extinction in the future: 200 species yesterday. 200 species today. 200 species tomorrow. 200 species the day after. And as Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo emphasize, the ongoing daily extinctions of a myriad of local populations.

If you think that the above information is bad enough in assessing the prospects for human survival, you will not be encouraged by awareness or deeper consideration of even some of the many variables adversely impacting our prospects that were beyond the scope of the above study.

While Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo, in addition to the problems they noted which are cited above, also identified the problems of human overpopulation and continued population growth, as well as overconsumption (based on ‘the fiction that perpetual growth can occur on a finite planet’) and even the risks posed by nuclear war, there were many variables that were beyond the scope of their research.

For example, in a recent discussion of that branch of ecological science known as ‘Planetary Boundary Science’, Dr Glen Barry identified ‘at least 10 global ecological catastrophes which threaten to destroy the global ecological system and portend an end to human beings, and perhaps all life. Ranging from nitrogen deposition to ocean acidification, and including such basics as soil, water, and air; virtually every ecological system upon which life depends is failing’. See ‘The End of Being: Abrupt Climate Change One of Many Ecological Crises Threatening to Collapse the Biosphere’.

Moreover, apart from the ongoing human death tolls caused by the endless wars and other military violence being conducted across the planet – see, for example, ‘Yemen cholera worst on record & numbers still rising’ – there is catastrophic environmental damage caused too. For some insight, see The Toxic Remnants of War Project.

In addition, the out-of-control methane releases into the atmosphere that are now occurring – see ‘7,000 underground gas bubbles poised to “explode” in Arctic’ and ‘Release of Arctic Methane “May Be Apocalyptic,” Study Warns’ – and the release, each and every day, of 300 tons of radioactive waste from Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean – see ‘Fukushima Radiation Has Contaminated The Entire Pacific Ocean – And It’s Going To Get Worse’ – are having disastrous consequences that will negatively impact life on Earth indefinitely. And they cannot be reversed in any timeframe that is meaningful for human prospects.

Apart from the above, there is a host of other critical issues – such as destruction of the Earth’s rainforests, destruction of waterways and the ocean habitat and the devastating impact of animal agriculture for meat consumption – that international governmental organizations such as the UN, national governments and multinational corporations will continue to refuse to decisively act upon because they are controlled by the insane global elite. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane’ with more fully elaborated explanations in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice‘.

So time may be short, the number of issues utterly daunting and the prospects for life grim. But if, like me, you are inclined to fight to the last breath, I invite you to consider making a deliberate choice to take powerful personal action in the fight for our survival.

If you do nothing else, consider participating in the 15-year strategy of ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. You can do this as an individual, with family and friends or as a neighbourhood.

If you are involved in (or considering becoming involved in) a local campaign to address a climate issue, end some manifestation of war (or even all war), or to halt any other threat to our environment, I encourage you to consider doing this on a strategic basis. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

And if you would like to join the worldwide movement to end violence in all of its forms, environmental and otherwise, you are also welcome to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

We might be annihilating life on Earth but this is not something about which we have no choice.

In fact, each and every one of us has a choice: we can choose to do nothing, we can wait for (or even lobby) others to act, or we can take powerful action ourselves. But unless you search your heart and make a conscious and deliberate choice to commit yourself to act powerfully, your unconscious choice will effectively be the first one (including that you might take some token measures and delude yourself that these make a difference). And the annihilation of life on Earth will continue, with your complicity.

Extinction beckons. Will you choose powerfully?

This Author

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.