Man & Planet: A Study of Our Environmental Madness & How We Got Here

By Anthony North

From climate change to pollution, Anthony North surveys green issues, environmentalism and ecology, separating fact from fantasy before delving into deep history and psychology to explain why we damage nature and the planet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthony North
• Release date: Dec 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781370054190

Anthony North

Thinker & Storyteller****7,453 Words to Save the UK and I,Writer are now FREE. Scroll down to find them.*****1955 (Yorkshire, England) – I am born (Damn! Already been done). ‘Twas the best of times ... (Oh well).I was actually born in the year of Einstein's death, close to Scrooge's Counting House. It doesn't mean anything but it sounds good. As for my education, I left school at 15 and have had no formal education since. Hence, I'm self-taught.****From a family of newsagents, at 18 I did a Dick Whittington and went off to London, only to return to pretend to be Charlie and work in a chocolate factory.When I was ten I was asked what I wanted to be. I said soldier, writer and Dad. I never thought of it for years – having too much fun, such as a time as lead guitarist in a local rock band – but I served nine years in the RAF, got married and had seven kids. I realized my words had been precognitive when, at age 27, I came down with M.E. – a condition I’ve suffered ever since – and turned my attention to writing.Indeed, as I realized that no expert could tell me what was wrong with me, I began my quest to find out why. Little did I realize it would last decades and take me through the entire history of knowledge, leaving me with the certainty that our knowledge systems are inadequate.****My non-fiction is based on P-ology, a thought process I devised to work with patterns of knowledge, and designed to be a bedfellow to specialization. A form of Rational Holism, it seeks out areas the specialist may have missed. I work from encyclopaedias and introductory volumes in order to gain a grasp of many subjects and am not an expert in anything, but those patterns keep forming. Hence, I do not deal in truth, but ideas, and cover everything from politics to the paranormal.When reading my work I ask only: do I make sense? Of course, an expert would say: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I agree. And an expert has so little knowledge of everything.I also write novels and Flash Fiction in all genres.

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Man & Planet:

A Study of Our Environmental Madness & How We Got Here

By Anthony North

Copyright: Anthony North 2019

Cover image copyright: Yvonne North, 2019

Smashwords Edition

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission

Other books by Anthony North

Beginning in 2019 I’m publishing 14 volumes of my fiction, inc 7 novels in most genres, & 21 works of non-fiction covering cults, politics, conspiracies, religion, disasters, science, philosophy, warfare, crime, psychology, new age, green issues & all areas of the unexplained, inc ufology, lost worlds and the paranormal. Hopefully appearing at the rate of one a month, check out the latest launch at my bookstore at http://anthonynorth.com or buy direct from Smashwords for all devices at: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/anthonynorth

In addition to the above, you may like my ‘I’ Series – 8 volumes of flash fiction (horror, sci fi, romance, adventure, crime), 4 volumes of poetry & 5 volumes of short essays from politics to the unexplained. Available from same links as above. Also check out my bookstore for news of my books out in paperback.

CONTENTS

Chapter One - The Dodo People

Chapter Two - Dawn of the Eco-Warrior

Chapter Three - Rationalizing the Irrational

Chapter Four - A Short History of Farming

Chapter Five - The Noble Savage

Chapter Six - Defining the Problem

Chapter Seven - Enter the Greens

Chapter Eight - The Backlash

Chapter Nine - Hot Air

Chapter Ten - Stench, Fumes & Malady

Chapter Eleven - The Green Revolution

Chapter Twelve - Sameness

Chapter Thirteen - Looking For Answers

Chapter Fourteen - Rise & Fall of the Nation State

Chapter Fifteen - From Collectivism to the Individual

Chapter Sixteen - The New Totalitarianism

Chapter Seventeen - The Non-Eco Ego

Chapter Eighteen - A Bigger Man

Chapter Nineteen - Operation Earthkill

Chapter Twenty - Masocology

Chapter Twenty One - Homo Anxious

Chapter Twenty Two - Lost Horizons

Chapter Twenty Three - The End

Content By Subject

Bibliography

About the Author

Connect With Anthony

Chapter One - THE DODO PEOPLE

I cannot cry. Emotion is difficult for me.

I'm hiding, here, evading them. The shadows shroud me in the vain hope that they will pass me by. But this is unlikely - they are good at what they do; very good.

So maybe I'm not hiding, but waiting - waiting for the inevitable pain as I am hit; the dreamy suffering as I await my end; and that end itself - the end of not only me, but all or my kind who have ever lived.

I remember what it was like for my mother. She was tracked down relentlessly by those animals - chased to exhaustion; sadistically taunted before the strike; laughed at as she died, with me watching from close by.

It was harrowing to watch them, their blood lust at frenzy; and my mother, so philosophical in the inevitability of it all.

She had warned me it would come. We had done nothing wrong, but, it seems, we had become a prize - a symbol, if you like. And for maddening reasons, our fate was sealed and we simply had to go.

And go we did; first by the thousand; then, as we became more rare, by the hundreds. Eventually it was by the tens, for we were rare to track down. And now ...

… just me.

And they are coming. I can sense them. I know they are nearby.

Was that a rustle of the twigs? Is this a pungency I sense - a bloodlust close by?

And now the eyes, a sense of satisfaction as I am seen; and a hand raised, a weapon ready.

Goodbye.

The above event happened – maybe not exactly as depicted; and I’ve placed human feelings onto how the victim saw it - human feelings that were clearly impossible for the creature involved.

That creature was the Dodo. A symbol of a species known to be driven to extinction, the Dodo was indigenous to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Related to the pigeon, it was, however, larger than a turkey. With a bulky body and short wings, it was clumsy and flightless. But one endearing quality it had was that it was trusting and unafraid of man - which was an error. By the late 17th century, man had driven the Dodo to extinction.

There is no greater symbol with which to begin a book about man and his relationship to his environment. For the Dodo symbolized the damage man can do. Yet it also symbolizes something else - for as we continue, it will become apparent that the Dodo really had a twist in its tail.

Most people's understanding of nature was defined by Lord Tennyson in 1850, when he wrote of: 'Nature, red in tooth and claw.' In a letter written in July 1856, city dweller Charles Dickens had similar sentiments: 'What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature!'

Such views are modern - the product of an ongoing Industrialism and urbanization. Go to pre-industrial times and a very different view emerges. Consider the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who wrote, in 'Politics': 'Nature does nothing without purpose or uselessly.' Even as late as the 16th century we find Leonardo da Vinci writing in his notebook, saying of nature: 'In her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.'

Thus we have two opposing views of nature, hundreds of years apart. In the modern, popular view, nature is cruel and chaotic, whilst in times long ago, the natural world was ordered and balanced. However, both views are due to the inevitability of nature - as Horace said in his 'Epistles': 'You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she'll be constantly running back.'

Nature is inevitable. Wherever life exists - wherever life CAN exist - that life is nature, and it will blossom in every which way it can. In times past this was accepted and was part of the order of things. In the Industrial Age, it is a problem and man sees its onward march begrudgingly.

But man needs nature. He needs the trees and plants to provide an adequate oxygen mix in the air to breath. He needs the waters or he would thirst; he needs the abundance of flora and fauna or he will starve. Going to the very small, there are micro-organisms in their thousands which can make man ill, but millions which protect us from illness. Even the little bugs are essential to us or we would die.

Ever since man evolved a mind to think, he has known this.

For most of his existence, his understanding led him to live as one with nature. But in his recent existence - that speck of time known as history - his view of nature has changed. Rather than being as one, Ivan Turgenev gave us the new place of man in nature in his novel 'Fathers and Sons': 'Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it.'

In the immediate pre-industrial world, even Christianity understood the importance of nature. As the Morning Prayer from the 1662 'Book of Common Prayer' says: '0 all ye Green Things upon the Earth, bless ye the Lord.' But they were blessed for their usefulness to man, not man's usefulness to nature.

This arrogance of man's overlordship of the natural world can even be expressed in people who are aware of the problems. In his 1969 'Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth', futurologist Buckminster Fuller warned: ‘... there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.'

Those who understand the beauty of the genetic code, the unique balance of the planet, or the remarkable coincidences involved in life appearing in the first place might disagree. There is an instruction book - but arrogant man wasn't made privy to it.

For any instruction book required for man to INTERACT with nature, this book will provide much food for thought. But in a word, all we need is common sense. The problem is put in Isaiah in the Bible: 'Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place.'

How has man fared regarding this common sense respect for nature? The philosopher Cyril Joad: 'It will be said of this generation that it found England a land of beauty and left it a land of beauty spots.'

This was written in 1931. Voices were crying, but unheard, the rape of the natural world continuing, unheeded. By 1980 the rape was increasing, the voices screaming. Consider the warning of Native American campaigner Russell Means at