Amazon Inc vs. Amazon Forest

Amazon, Inc vs. Amazon Forest: The Former
One Man Wins, The Latter – All Life Loses.

by Stephen Cocconi

For many the fact that the Amazon Rain forest is half a world away, allows them to exercise the old human prerogative “out of sight – out of mind.” Having been only 3 miles from the edge of a 287,000 acre blaze – The Rim Fire – in 2013; I saw firsthand the kind of devastation to an environment and the choking off of breathable air they can wrought. So why, in God’s name, are we destroying that largest single forest which produces the most terrestrial oxygen on our planet? One answer: Greed!

Now, almost all of you have ordered something from Amazon.com. Endless varieties of consumer goods as “cheaper” prices. Glorious right? Unless your job was one of the many retail positions that were lost or one of those who saw your manufacturing function move overseas to countries where near slave labor conditions exist, you otherwise think yourself clever, or at least lucky, to find an item at a lower price. Well, the ultimate victor in this garden or gluttony are those who control the system and like vampires, draw off the differential between what something actually cost to produce – earth resources and cheap labor – into a largess they consume heartily: profit. Mr. Bezos and friends do not produce ANYTHING! They merely manage the funneling of energy. They take from the earth uninhibitedly, and then with the use of a sleight of hand called money, convert it into political power.

Only in Nature there is no such fantasy intermediary. The economics of nature does not produce surplus. The Law of the Conservation of Energy tells us that. A resource can only be converted from one substance to another. There is no extra, or profit. Unfortunately, we take wood and burn it making carbon dioxide. We mine metals and make engines for machines which produce carbon monoxide. Neither of which can we breathe or eat. We take oil from the ground and convert it into plastics and then chlorofluorocarbons, which begin to destroy the ozone that shields us from the harmful wavelength of solar radiation. All this, so we can consume mass quantities of “creature comforts” which should be more accurately categorized as “creature toxins”. Thus, man’s invention of money is a mass psychosis. A product of magical thinking that for thousands of years humans have built their systems upon in order to deceive themselves that they aren’t destroying the planet they need to survive. It is not that money “doesn’t grow on trees” it is that money cannot create a tree.

But the medium of money is how we collectively grant power to one person or one group of persons to take more than they produce. It is a similar way that our animal biological dictates to form dominance hierarchies happens in human societies. Unfortunately, what money does is it removes the regular dethroning of weak dominants by use of its ability to hire others to protect it. In nature, a top dog or a lion, or a stallion is regularly replaced every generation when a contender comes along who defeats it for herd leadership. Yet with inheritance laws granting the transfer of money, property and power to individuals who never had to struggle to the top, weak and feeble leadership is preserved while at the same time suppression of the herds prowess is done by henchmen. This is the distortion of nature that humans have created. Bezos may have fought his way to the top, but not before he used others to make sure he got there. So any analogy that the human system matches directly with the “ways of nature” is preposterous. It is more accurate to say that human nature has bested the system.

And, we are killing ourselves in the process!

As the Amazon rainforest is cut for logging, burned for cattle grazing pastures or mining gold and other minerals, we chop away the lungs of our planet. And, since no business entity seems to find it profitable to replant forests, then simple arithmetic will conclude that unless we radically change our ways, we doom our species and thousands more to a slow demise. To do this requires a radical change of mind and dropping the habit of conspicuous consumption behind us. We already have enough. Let’s leave some to our children. How, instead of cutting down the Amazon forest, let’s cut off Amazon Inc. There is nothing more prime than to deliver than change.

For all we consume, we kill ourselves in increments. A dollar can’t make an ecosystem.

So the next time you go online and think you’re getting it cheaper. Just remember all that as you burn through your money, we are burning through the rainforest.