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Time's Up!: An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis
Author(s): Keith Farnish (Author)
- Publisher: Green Books
- Publication Date: February 11, 2009
- Edition: Illustrated
- Language: English
- Print length: 192 pages
- ISBN-10: 190032248X
- ISBN-13: 9781900322485
Book Description
This is not an environmental book, even though it is concerned with the environment. It is not a book to save the world, even though the world is clearly in trouble. Ultimately, Time’s Up! is a book about survival; about ensuring that every individual human has the means to save herself or himself from the global crisis that is unfolding. People know that the climate is changing, that species are being removed from the Earth at a rapidly increasing rate, that entire ecosystems are becoming shadows of their former richness; they know, but they do not understand. The global environmental crisis is closing in on humanity from all directions, yet the crisis barely registers on this culture’s list of problems. As we stand, humanity is doomed to a collapse that will leave only a few nomads, and a toxic, barely survivable Earth in its wake. So why is nothing being done beyond changing light bulbs, recycling and buying organic food? It’s certainly not for a lack of good reasons. Humans have no motivation stronger than survival, yet the culture that dominates “the culture we call Industrial Civilization” has created a set of priorities that value financial wealth, the possession of superfluous goods and short, cheap thrills, above that most basic need. In short, we are prepared to die in order to live a life that is killing us. Time’s Up! is all about changing this. It describes what our actions are doing to the very things on Earth that we depend on for survival, at scales that we rarely contemplate. It arms us with the tools to free us from the culture that has blinded us for centuries, and which will allow us to live lives that will give the Earth, and ourselves, a future. Time’s Up! proposes something radical, fundamental and frightening; something longterm, exhilarating and absolutely necessary; something totally uncivilized.
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About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Time’s Up!
An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis
By Keith Farnish
Green Books Ltd
Copyright © 2009 Keith Farnish
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-900322-48-5
Contents
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
Part One: The Scale of the Problem,
Chapter 1: One Ten-Millionth of a Metre,
Chapter 2: One Millionth of a Metre,
Chapter 3: One Thousandth of a Metre,
Chapter 4: One Hundredth of a Metre,
Chapter 5: One Metre,
Chapter 6: One Hundred Metres,
Chapter 7: Beneath and Beyond,
Part Two: Why It Matters,
Chapter 8: What Are We?,
Chapter 9: Who Are We?,
Chapter 10: Why Does It Matter?,
Part Three: Making The Connection,
Chapter 11: Why Connect?,
Chapter 12: How to Connect,
Chapter 13: Why Can’t We Connect?,
Part Four: How to Survive,
Chapter 14: You Are the System,
Chapter 15: Making the Change,
Chapter 16: Being Ourselves,
Afterword,
References and Notes,
Index,
CHAPTER 1
One Ten-Millionth of a Metre
Breathe in, and your body starts a battle. Countless micro-organisms hitch a lift on every stream of air being pulled into your lungs, seeking out a place where they can embed themselves and multiply. Once inside, every potential form of nutrition is fair game: blood cells, fat cells, skin, bone marrow, lymphatic fluid – all hosts for the army of invaders that just want to find a way of increasing their numbers. You are alive because your body has evolved ways of fighting them off. No medicine can match the efficiency of your own army of defenders across such a vast range of attackers, without killing off its host as well.
HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS, is a beautiful thing to look at; rather like a three-dimensional cog with rounded buds spread across its spherical surface. In cross-section the central capsid, which contains the genetic material responsible for allowing HIV to fight off all but the most sophisticated drugs, is coffinshaped. So beautiful, so appropriate, but so terrible that it is able to cut through an entire country in just a few years, leaving a scarred, distressed and dying landscape of human beings in its wake.
In South Africa, 19% of the population of 44 million are infected with HIV. In Lesotho, 23% of the two million inhabitants have HIV. In Botswana, 24% of the population of just under two million – that’s nearly a quarter of every person in this tiny country; adults, children, even new-born babies – have a virus that will eventually kill most of them. Over a million of these tiny viral entities could fit, side by side, on this full stop. We may have evolved defences against the oldest and most common viruses, but human evolution is a slow process; we have no natural defences against HIV.
Here is another statistic. The World Health Organization estimate that Dengue Fever, caused by four types of closely related virus, is a risk for around two-fifths of the world’s population. Without treatment, Dengue Fever is deadly in 20% of cases, and there are around 50 million cases of the disease every year. Dengue Fever is spread by mosquitoes, as is Yellow Fever, which kills 30,000 people a year. Japanese Encephalitis is also spread by mosquitoes, but develops in pigs and birds before being passed to humans by the same species of mosquito that infected these other animals. This kills around 15,000 people a year and leaves another 25,000 permanently paralyzed.
Influenza is not spread by mosquitoes; it is spread by birds, humans and many other mammals, including domestic dogs and cat
