Prologue

On May 23, 2025, the European Central Bank issued a timely ecological and political warning that should not be ignored: “The degradation of natural ecosystem,” says ECB, “slows growth and leads to financial instability. Water scarcity, natural flood protection and water quality are most critical. Surface water scarcity alone puts almost 15% of the euro area’s economic output at risk.”

In addition, ECB advised that, “Under an extreme but plausible drought with a 25-year return period, nearly 15% of economic output would be at risk. This is caused by a shortfall in water supplies coming from rivers, lakes, reservoirs and upper soil layers, and amplified by persisting drought conditions, excessive withdrawals and unsustainable consumption.”

Water and very few crops

The ECB warning applies to America and the rest of the world. We should not take water for granted. Water is a gift of perfect functioning nature. But modern humanity and especially its industries and large farmers act under the illusion and hubris that they control nature. They pollute rivers, seas, creeks, and the land and even the air we breathe. Corporations and large farmers have grabbed the most fertile largest sections of land for their private industrialized farming, cultivating very few crops: rice, wheat and corn. Without the variety of plants and insects that balance each other in undisturbed nature, the monocrops are inundated by crop-eating insects. This gives an excuse to large agribusiness and farmers to spray synthetic rains of toxic chemicals poisoning the land, insects, birds, wildlife and the crops grown for human food. In response to this and other ecocides, wounded nature sends dry weather and droughts that often last for years. Drought is a global threat to ecosystems, water supplies, agriculture and food, including the prices people pay for food.

The Titanic transformation of weather

But the gravest crime of human beings in recent times has been their impact on the planet. Their agriculture and industry and wars are triggered by the burning of fossil fuels: petroleum, natural gas and coal. Big ag managers and manufacturers and users of cars, trucks, buses, leaf blowers, yachts, and ships and armies and navies and air forces are burning petroleum to make their machines useful. Greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of petroleum, natural gas, and coal warm the planet, changing the nature of life on Earth. We politely call this Titanic upheaval climate change. I describe it as climate chaos. It is in fact a universal ticking bomb, the explosion of which is threatening and harming people the world over, even risking the viability of Mother Earth. Rising global temperatures are melting the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, warm the ocean water, which kills corals and makes the life of marine mammals (sea lions, dolphins, whales, leopard seals, polar bears, manatees and sea otters) difficult. They have a hard time searching for food. Warming ocean water is threatening the basic foods of marine mammals, zooplankton, fish, squid, shellfish, and sea grass.

Rising global temperatures are also thawing lands in permafrost, which may release gigantic amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and speed up higher temperatures and destruction and death. Moreover, global warming is exacerbating the adverse effects of other anthropogenic activities like deforestation and drilling for crude. These human interventions in the natural world foul the weather.

The Amazon rainforest, for example, “is a living, churning, breathing engine of weather.”

The billions of Amazon trees inhale greenhouse gases and exhale oxygen, thus enhancing life and slowing down the rising of the temperature from anthropogenic climate chaos. Unfortunately, money, greed, and willful ignorance fuel the fires and logging and drilling of the Amazon forest.

In February 1992, I remember departing from the Amazon and seeing from the rising airplane fires all over the beautiful forest. Those fires transform the forest to temporary farms for peasants or gigantic business growing animals and soybeans for the rich northern countries.

Next to the farming of the Amazon, there’s extracting of oil, not merely in Brazil. Ecuador is selling off large sections of its Amazon forest to petroleum companies. This has infuriated the indigenous people of Ecuador. Some of them visited California, reminding the state of its imported oil drilled in their lands. One of those indigenous leaders, “Juan Bay, president of the Waorani people of Ecuador, said that his delegation’s coming to California was “important so that our voices, our stance, and our struggle can be elevated” and urged Californians to reexamine the source of their crude from the Amazon — “from Waorani Indigenous territory.”

Amazon oil has become an ecocidal and political weapon against the indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest. According to Amazon Watch, a nonprofit environmental organization:

“The Amazon is rapidly becoming a new frontier for oil production. It holds nearly one-fifth of the world’s recently discovered oil and natural gas reserves, primarily in offshore Brazil and Guyana. At the same time, interest and investment are resurging in onshore exploration. This coincides with the Amazon biome reaching an existential tipping point: deforestation, climate disruption, and ecosystem degradation threaten to transform vast rainforest areas into dry grasslands and savannah, putting the biome, its peoples, and the planet at risk.

“Fossil fuels are the leading cause of climate change – and in the Amazon, they are also a major driver of deforestation. Ecuador is the largest onshore producer of Amazon crude in the rainforest region. While its share of the Amazon is relatively small – about 135,600 km² – it is one of the most biodiverse and home to thirteen Indigenous nationalities, including some living in voluntary isolation. After sixty years of oil extraction, the impacts are severe: road building, oil spills, toxic wastewater dumping, gas flaring, and industrial infrastructure have all contributed to rampant deforestation, contamination, biodiversity loss, and the erosion of Indigenous health, autonomy, and territory.”

War

The astonishing reversal in Ecuador, from giving rights to nature in 2023 to drilling for oil in the lands of indigenous people, is telling of the insidious power and corruption of petroleum. Simultaneously, Americans returned Trump to power, who immediately reiterated climate change was a hoax, thus wrecking government policies designed to lessen the impact of bad weather and higher temperatures in America.

The war in the Middle East between Israel (supported by the US Air Force) and Iran / Persia was not entirely unpredictable. Israeli prime minister Netanyahu has made a career in leading America to fight Israeli wars. Once again, he was eminently successful in convincing Trump to follow him. Israeli and American bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites is acting like an additional gigantic drilling for crude. Its destructive effects are local and global. And, of course, like other wars, this war between the fanatic religions of Israel and Iran, are certain to intensify the already harsh consequences of conventional climate chaos – and much more.

We still don’t know the extent of the damage Israeli and American bombs caused to the Iranian nuclear program. But Iran threatens it may withdraw from “the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty… which underpins the global non-proliferation regime. However, the scale of the current Israeli [and American] attack has made that threat—and the subsequent weaponization of Iran’s nuclear program—eminently credible…. the scale of Israel’s attacks carried out against multiple targets in Iran, including in the capital of Tehran, may convince Iranians that acquiring a nuclear weapon capability is the only way to deter similar aggression in the future.”

True, Iran will do its very best to build a nuke. Time, therefore, is now to finally abolish nuclear weapons, otherwise they will incinerate us. Fanatics in Israel and Iran and the United States want to blow up the planet so they can meet Jesus. This unpleasant reality, beyond strategic and diplomatic considerations, ought to motivate all persons the world over who trust science and civilization to work together in ending Israeli bombing of Iran and the US government finally telling Israel enough is enough with warmongering. The US should make certain to Israel it will no longer fight its wars.

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