No. 103
August 2025
Do we humans and all life on Earth,
have a right to a worldwide healthy environment?
The Polluter-Industrial Complex
By Barbara Ellis
~ 13 companies make huge profits from the destruction of the rainforests.
According to Olivia Lai at earth.org, “As of 2021, forests still cover about 31% of the world’s land area, but they are disappearing at an alarming rate. Since 1990, the world lost 1.3 million square kilometres of forest due to deforestation… which threaten every inhabitant of the planet: human, animal, and plant.”
~ 20 countries profit most from ocean plastic pollution.
Vibor Cipan, (viborc.com), writes that research published in Science Advances “suggests that more than 1000 rivers account for a staggering 80% of global riverine plastic emissions into the ocean.”
~ US’s EPA wants to dismantle controls on emissions of greenhouse gases.
Zack Colman, writing for POLITICO, July 23, 2025: “The Trump administration plans to argue that federal law does not require agencies to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, in a move designed to derail virtually all U.S. limits on climate pollution.” These include “carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases [that] threaten human health and welfare.”
What does The International Court of Justice say?
According to Louise Osborne, reporter for DW (Deutsche Welle), “The International Court of Justice ruling on climate inaction [July 23, 2025] could see badly affected states seek reparations from big polluters. Outlining the obligations of states to protect the human rights of citizens being impacted by rising global temperatures, ICJ President Yuji Iwasawa said a ‘clean, healthy and sustainable environment’ is a human right.” Osborne adds, “In other words, the ruling paves the way for countries, groups or individuals being impacted by extreme weather and other climate impacts to sue high-emitting nations, including over past emissions.”
Historically, freedom from pollution has been the right of the wealthy, who live upstream from the rivers their factories pollute, upwind from the polluted air. Daniel Faber explains the situation in his 2008 book, Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice: The Polluter-Industrial Complex in the Age of Globalization (Nature’s Meaning). “In this process of capital restructuring, it is the most marginalized segments of society –poor people of color and the working class that suffer the greatest force of corporate environmental abuses.”
We seem to be learning, as an Earth Tribe, that our little globe spinning through space has finite resources. We do not have unlimited land, water, or air. When there were only about 20,000 homo sapiens on the planet, some 200,000 years ago, it would have been hard to imagine that someday, people would be paying for water. But here we are, running out of not only water to drink and bathe, but to grow our food. And the land capable of sustaining food crops is either being inundated by unseasonably early rains, wiping out seedlings, or later, sitting parched and cracked in the rainless rising heat. It is time to act for the good of Earth, not for the greed of a few. It is time to take astrophysicist Stephen Hawking’s 2017 prediction to heart: that we now have only 92 years before we become extinct! Let’s go, people! The clock is ticking.
All images are Public Domain