Tuesday 26th of November 2024
Home » Blogs » Gus Leonisky's blog

mega unsustainability.......

Often seen as marvels of the human ascendancy, the world’s great cities are in mortal danger as the resources that keep them alive stagger, dwindle and give out.

Today the world has 45 megacities – conurbations holding more than ten million citizens apiece – and some 500 smaller cities each of a million or more souls. Together they are home to well over more than half of the human population, rising to 7 billion by mid-century.

 

By Julian Cribb

 

 

For all their glorious diversity of culture and design, our cities share one thing in common: they are equally at risk of sudden collapse. Not one of them can feed itself – and few provide enough water internally for the needs of their population.

A typical megacity of ten million or so people – like Mumbai, London, Nagoya, Hyderabad or New York for example – occupies an area of about +/- 1000 square kilometres. But to feed and water ten million people requires an area of land and water outside the city of 2750 square kilometres. The total ‘urban footprint’ is thus nearly four times the size of the city itself.

All that food and water has to reach the city along increasingly fragile supply chains which stretch for thousands of kilometres around the globe, across other countries and oceans.

Furthermore, our cities exist within a profoundly disturbing global reality: that it currently takes about 2.75 hectares of the Earth’s productive area to support the average human – yet the Earth itself only has 1.5 hectares of biologically productive land and water to sustain each one of us Global Footprint Network. This means that today’s big cities are inherently unsustainable.

Yet urban citizens, blithely shopping in supermarkets that seem to bulge with food and drink, are blind to this primal fact, or else dismiss it. There is scant awareness that the world is already, effectively, out of accessible fresh water, is losing fish, forests and farm soil at shocking rates and is increasingly exposed to climate-driven famines. As recent history has shown, supermarkets can empty of food in 48 hours or less, if the supply chain snaps. By the end of the week, a city of 10 million may starve, unless urgently resupplied.

A disturbing scientific paper in Nature recently warned that the risk of simultaneous harvest failures in several of the world’s major grain growing regions was climbing. Global heating not only increases the strength and frequency of droughts and famines, it said, but also the probability of their occurring in more than one foodbowl at once. That can seriously dislocate the food chain that feeds the megacities. And every city on Earth will feel the pinch in soaring food prices, if not outright scarcity.

Water also underlies the frailty of urban civilisation: at present some two dozen major cities face serious scarcity. These include places such as Beijing, New Delhi, Los Angeles, Cape Town, Sao Paulo, Moscow, Lahore, Istanbul, Mexico City, Jakarta, Cairo and Tokyo. Water is essential to food production as well as domestic drinking. By 2050, water scarcity will affect at least 20 megacities, housing one third of the human population.

Such warnings place the future of our megacities in a chilling light. Not one of them is prepared for what humans, with our unassuaged hunger for resources, have already set in train. The assumption that food and water will always be plentiful is a universal delusion soon to be exploded.

Today’s cities are ‘socially constructed realities’, meaning that most of their occupants view them as economic powerhouses, engines of growth and technological progress, seats of government, centres of learning or healing and fountains of culture, entertainment and the arts. Yet all these ‘realities’ can vanish in a flash if food and water supplies fail.

Nowadays, many people are aware that a collapse of global civilisation is possible – as the UN warned in its 2022 Global Risks report. They are asking: when will this collapse begin? How will we know it has started? Will there be enough forewarning to save ourselves?

There is no easy answer to such questions as collapse depends on many variables, especially on how effectively and fast nations and governments respond worldwide. At present, it is fair to say, they are completely unprepared. There is no global plan of action. There is not even a set of viable national plans of action to save us.

Just as the climate tipping points are signposts to an uninhabitable world, the first failure of a megacity will be a thunderous warning that global civilisation is in the collapse zone. A failed city of ten million will spew out refugees like a human volcano, precipitating horrors on affected regions like nothing since the famines and wars in Europe, India and Asia of last century, only on a scale four times larger. This will unleash a deadly domino-chain among neighbouring cities and countries, leading to a global economic crash and a spate of government failures.

Is there anything that can be done to prevent this from happening? The answer is yes – but it needs to happen now – and fast.

The world’s cities need to:

  • Re-use 100% of the water and nutrients they presently waste, and recycle them into new food locally.
  • Ban all food disposal to landfill and sewage disposal to rivers or oceans. Introduce circular economies that waste nothing.
  • Plan for a world in which global resources of food and water may undergo periodic, sharp shortages and where food chains shatter without warning.
  • Put food and water security ahead of all other urban concerns, including transport, development, health, education, local government, recreation.
  • Foster the rapid growth of industries such as hydroponics, aquaponics, biocultures, sky farms, agritecture, entomoculture, synthetic meat and novel protein and plant foods.
  • Educate all citizens to waste nothing, to recycle food ‘waste’, and grow more of their own food wherever they live.
  • Dedicate unused urban areas to food production on rooftops, sidewalks, round schools and hospitals, up the sides of buildings, between roads and under bridges.
  • Share the best ideas with sister cities at lightspeed via the internet and social media.

Such measures will not prevent the collapse of global civilisation. But they may cushion the shock for individual megacities when it happens and save countless lives.

Given the immense creativity, thought and effort that has gone into building our cities, it is astonishing how little care, forethought and ingenuity has gone into seeing they survive in the long run. What happens to cities individually will define what happens to the human species as a whole.

The dream of ‘urban renewal’ in the current century does not mean more parks, arts centres, malls, cosy apartments and gleaming architectural monoliths. For, without secure food and water, none of those things matter.

The city is the cornerstone of human civilisation. It must have a renewable foundation of food and water – or else it is built on quicksand.

https://johnmenadue.com/cities-in-mortal-danger-foreshadow-the-human-fate/

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE TODAY.............

collapse.....

 

The Collapse of the West, Spring/Summer 2023    

 

No longer is it a matter of speculation whether or not the “West” is in free fall. It clearly is, and it is clearly intentional. The Great Covid Show, brought to you by the usual suspects, seems to have created the right conditions for the “Great Reset.” There were some hiccups, because an operation so vast and all-encompassing as the Great Covid Show was beyond the technical and intellectual capabilities of the US neocons and their foreign cronies, including the WEF, the WHO and the EU.

The Russian Special Military Operation in the Ukraine has complicated matters. Like in a game of chess, Russia is forcing the US and its vassals to make moves they had not planned or had counted on making only later in the game. Such moves are definitely not to their advantage. That is why governments are making such drastic decisions in so many different fields, and all at the same time.

They had planned to drastically reorganize agriculture, following the example set by the Bolsheviks after 1929, when they started to evict and exterminate the kulaks. Instead of collectivization, the latter-day Bolsheviks want giant corporations to dominate agriculture. But the essence of these schemes is the same: the small and intermediate farmers need to be dislodged either voluntarily or by brute force. Seemingly somewhat earlier than what the original script called for, the Dutch government has started a war on farmers, which like in the former USSR, may result in widespread food scarcity, if not famine.

In the same hardheaded fashion, with an obedient Germany leading the pack, US client states in Europe, are currently committing economic suicide by cutting off their industry from reliable sources of affordable energy, forcing both producers and the public to rely on wind and solar energy. All of this is being done in the name of the so-called Green Agenda, so as to reduce carbon and nitrogen emissions. At the same time, the believers in anthropogenic climate change are promoting environmental destruction on a truly gigantic scale wherever lithium and other minerals needed for the manufacture of electric batteries are found. Like every plank in the platform of the Great Reset mafia, the official climate change narrative is held together by the most flagrant contradictions.

The most glaring contradictions occur in the day-to-day functioning of governments, especially in the EU. Like the government of the Netherlands, most of these routinely take decisions that are in clear or implicit violation of the constitution and other legislation.

In spite of the countless contradictions in terms of politics itself, official political discourse and the intrinsic contradictions underlying most political decisions, it is a miracle the US Empire still manages to stay alive. Perhaps that also explains why AI is currently being rolled out: in the hopes that it will help maintain US power. However, it must be doubted whether AI will prove to be able to function in an environment where legal, linguistic and lexicographic confusion and contradiction have become the norm.

With politicians and state and corporate media in the “West” dutifully referring to “our democracy,” “Western values” (supposedly defending human rights), “transparency” and “the rule of law,” while actually doing and advocating everything that is diametrically opposed, it would seem that sooner or later AI must break down. After all AI, like the electronic system that it is, functions on the premise that “0” is “0” and that “1” is “1”. When “0” can also mean “1” and “1” is sometimes “0”, collapse is inevitable. How is it going to tell when “democracy” means “rule by popular majority vote” or its opposite, rule by a corrupt clique of criminals, as is the case in modern “democracies?” Moreover, given the fanatical determination with which reliable sources of energy everywhere in the “West” are being abandoned, precisely now that everything that sustains life depends on electronics, the entire system increasingly resembles a house built on quicksand.

Wherever one looks in Europe, collapse is just around the corner. Today, driving on Germany’s once famous Autobahns is sort of an ordeal. Once upon a time, one could enjoy the view of splendid and sometimes spectacular landscapes while driving relaxedly on the smooth surface of impeccably maintained superhighways. With a total length of more than 13,000 kilometers, Germany has the fourth network in the world, only preceded by Spain, the US and China. There are 50 million cars in Germany, but the network is also intensively used by foreign truck drivers delivering and picking up merchandise and in summer and winter by millions of foreigners on their way to holiday destinations. The Autobahn network is used very intensively, but maintenance has long been neglected and as a result, extensive stretches of highway need to be narrowed in order to enable road and bridge repairs. This causes long and time-consuming traffic jams all over the country from early morning to late at night. Add to that the fact that many drivers hail from non-Western lands, where the proverbial German discipline and respect for rules and regulations are not taught from an early age, and it is clear that driving on the Autobahn consumes inordinate amounts of time and energy. As a matter of fact, the German highway system seems very near the breaking point.

Upon drawing this conclusion it occurred to me that the German federal highways are a symbol for what is happening all over Europe: the very pillars that sustain state and society are breaking down. Of course, for those with eyes to see, the collapse has already set some time ago, perhaps two decades, if not earlier. Just like those three WTC towers that collapsed on 9/11, the collapse begins hesitantly and then accelerates. Like in the case of the WTC towers, the widespread destruction that takes place in the “West” today is planned. However, in a number of fields the collapse had already begun long before in the form of corruption. With corrupt people moving from one field of endeavor to another, corruption spreads even faster and eventually becomes systemic.

For instance, academic corruption may lead to plagiarism and the manipulation of research data. Mrs. Ursula von der Leyen, MD, the unelected president of the EuSSR, has never been able to shake off the odor of academic fraud (committed when writing her dissertation) that surrounds her. It came as no surprise to learn that she has been making secret deals with the Pfizer company for the supply of untested vaccines and to force these on an unsuspecting public during the Great Covid Show. Once corrupt, always corrupt, as one might say.

While fraud increasingly destroys the value of academic research, academic education itself is also under attack. The Dutch education minister intends to reduce the creditrequirements for freshmen by half. This means that more students will be allowed to stay on to become sophomores, with the predictable final result that university degrees will devaluate even further.

Corruption in the field of medicine has become apparent during the Great Covid Show, to the point where today no physician can be trusted. To put it simply, family doctors and specialists alike are essentially drug pushers in the service of Big Pharma. There are still some honest and decent doctors out there, but these are hard to find.

Like academic research, education, politics and medicine, the judicial system is riddled with corruption and in free fall. Just take the recent case against Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, who was accused of being an antisemite, on the basis of the flimsiest evidence imaginable. Although this eloquent and influential critic of the covid policies decreed by the German government was acquitted, the public prosecutor nonetheless has decided to appeal and to press ahead trying to put Doctor Bhakdi behind bars at any cost. For a public prosecutor to proceed in such a manner, in complete denial of the fact there is no evidence that supports the case, is more than a travesty of justice: it s turning justice into a silly joke. It is indeed concerning that no one raises an eyebrow, which is a telling illustration on how far the judicial system in Germany (and for that matter in the rest of Europe) has been corrupted.

Yet in the eyes of the state, to express doubts or concern about such matters is a sin. Just recently, the Dutch state spy service AIVD has issued a report stating that about 100,000 Dutch citizens distrust the state and the government, which allegedly makes them “conspiracy theorists.” Increasingly and almost openly, it is being suggested that such people need to be subjected to psychiatric treatment. Any sane person would not trust the government more than the government trusts him, and no doubt many people are faithful to that principle, but apparently the government of the Netherlands which is, of course, a “democratic” country, begs to differ.

There are more than enough reasons for distrusting the government, not only of the Netherlands, but of all EU nations. The German government, dominated by the Greens, has become the belligerent, self-destructive lapdog of the US, set on chasing out industry and humiliating, impoverishing and decimating native Germans. The Italian government, headed by Giorgia Meloni, elected because of her solemn promises to halt the illegal immigration of grossly unqualified, uneducated and hostile black Africans and Muslims, now actively encourages such people to come to Italy. French president Macron, who looks and acts like a homosexual adolescent who married his mother, has consistently been carrying out policies to destroy the French middle class. The Dutch government has presided over the impoverishment of the middle class, to the point where today, 400,000 schoolchildren are living beneath the poverty level, and whose parents are unable to pay for breakfast and new clothes.

The German government is seriously considering to outlaw the conservative AfD party. This comes as no surprise in a country that has a venerable tradition of forbidding parties deemed unwelcome in its democratic system. For many years, the Communist Party was outlawed in West-Germany. In the Netherlands, the conservative party FvD is expecting a decision to be outlawed in the near future. This is all in line with the Ukraine, defending “Western values” against the evil Russians: Zelensky has simply outlawed eleven parties. Long live Democracy!

Not surprisingly, among the population quite a bit of anger has been building up for some time, with the anger in creasing each and every time governments issue a new decree further limiting freedoms or increasing prices.

Since France has always been a nation where the middle class is strong and the working class militant, and where people are ready to take to the streets to voice their indignation and anger, it is hardly surprising that during the past years it has seen mass demonstrations by the Yellow Vest movement and people protesting against drastic pension cuts. Having seen how those peaceful demonstrations were brutally and ruthlessly repressed by the police and assorted goon squads, now the North Africans and black Africans from the banlieues, the suburbs have taken a different approach. Since at least some 15% of Metropolitan France’s 65 million inhabitants are North African (Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian) or black, and most of these live in the big cities: Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Lille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, now that they are coming on stage, things look quite serious.

The wave of urban warfare in France means that the collapse has now entered a new phase, that of organized and coordinated anti-state violence with racial undertones.

North African Muslims and African blacks are seen participating in what looks like a civil war against state, cultural and commercial targets and against white Frenchmen. Therefore, the current eruption of violence not only has the makings of a civil war, but rather of a race war.

Whatever triggered the current wave of violence, it should also be seen as a logical consequence of decades of French policies decreed at the behest of the unelected EU Commission.

What has been happening in France could easily take place in other EU nations tomorrow, for the simple reason that conditions in many places are similar to those in France. Many EU member states, notably Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium also have Muslim minorities of 10 to 15%. Like many working-class neighborhoods and suburbs in France, parts of the Swedish cities of Stockholm, Göteborg, Malmö have long been inaccessible for the police. The same goes for a number of cities in Germany, including Berlin and the Ruhr area. Even under the very noses of the commissars of the Fourth Reich in Brussels, entire neighborhoods of that city are no-go areas.

It has been suggested that the events in France are part of the “Great Reset” propagated by the WEF.

Actually, that “Great Reset” is a just another term for a lot of destruction, disease, death, war, misery and fear. It would seem the Four Riders of the Apocalypse have sent their vanguard to prepare the terrain and they will show up soon. In this respect, it is to be noted that the slogan “build back better,” so prominent and so ubiquitous just a few years ago, has completely vanished from state propaganda everywhere.

In order to “build back better,” everything needs to be broken down first. Evidently that is not what the rulers of all those “democratic” states in the “West” have been telling their “voters.”

But not to worry, the “West” is composed of “value-based” societies under “the rule of law,” were “equity” and “diversity” and “human rights” are being upheld, where “carbon and nitrogen emissions” are being limited, and where “fake news” and “disinformation” are banned.

https://www.unz.com/article/the-collapse-of-the-west-spring-summer-2023/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW...............