“Only when the last tree has died, the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.” -- Cree Indian Proverb

“Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.” ~George Carlin

“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” ~ Native American Proverb

“Always drink upstream from the herd.” -- from “A Cowboy’s Guide to Life”­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

Friday, April 22, 2021 is the 51st Anniversary of Earth Day in the United States. April 22 is that 1/365th fraction of a year when the compassionate, thinking and scientifically-grounded activists (who understand, revere and respect Mother Earth and are therefore not inclined to rape her) are momentarily allowed to have a chance to publicly appeal to the for-profit polluters in the corporate ruling elite/investor classes in Big Oil, Big Finance, Big Agribusiness, Big Tobacco, Big Mining, Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Weapons, etc, etc. (The Pentagon, by the way, is the biggest polluter on the planet.) The fading hope of the activists, of course, is that the ruling classes that have the money, power and propaganda machine that could change things for the better will finally listen to reason: ie, that the rapidly-accelerating environmental degradation that is degrading the earth and its creatures must be taken seriously.

April 22, 2021 is International Mother Earth Day

In 2009 the General Assembly of the United Nations, recognizing the likely irreversible tipping point of global air, water and soil degradation, designated April 22 of every subsequent year as International Mother Earth Day. The designation was approved unanimously, even by the delegates from the United States, the nation that coddles some of the biggest corporate polluters on earth. (America’s 4 % of the world’s population uses up and throws away 30% of the world’s resources.

The UN leaders said “We are strangling the planet -– strangling ourselves.” They indicated that the world has been held captive for too many years by the seductive notion of predatory capitalism. “We don’t own the planet, we belong to it, and we must put people and the well-being of the planet at the centre of our attention and recognize good stewardship of the planet and our dwindling resources as a shared responsibility.”

“It is only right that we, as sisters and brothers, take care of Mother Earth. Mother Earth, after all sustains our very humanity.”

The Earth Day leadership urges listening to the voices of indigenous people, small farmers and local, non-corporate food producers, who, with their sustainable, organic farming methods, could provide healthy food, while at the same time focusing on the predatory global trade policies  the of multinational corporations  “Our decision today marks one more symbolic step in changing the dominant mindset that has brought us so close to self-destruction.”

The Question: Do We Want Woodstock or Auschwitz?

“When people do whatever they want to do, you get Woodstock. When governments do whatever they want to do, you get Auschwitz”-- from Doug Newman’s The Fountain of Truth: http://www.thefot.us).

Enlarging on Newman’s metaphor, I would add that when good people do whatever they want to do you get sustainable living, but when ruthless, greedy and remorseless (and, therefore, often criminal) industries do whatever they want you get the poisoning of the planet, like what happened at Nagasaki, Love Canal, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukashima, and the massive oil spills everywhere, especially most destructively in the Gulf of Mexico, courtesy of Exxon-Mobil/British Petroleum/Deepwater Horizon/Halliburton all of which have resulted in permanent ecologic disasters.

When virtually every exploitive multinational corporation does whatever it wants to (and then hightails it out of town when the resources are gone and only the toxic residue remains), the result is contaminated water, poisoned fish, floating islands of plastic debris, poisonous landfills that are leaking into the ground water.

And, particularly for those of us living in northeastern Minnesota, there are serious threats to the long-term health of the air, the soil and the water (ie, the lakes, rivers, marshes and wild rice beds) from the proven-to-be dangerous schemes of transnational sulfide mining corporations like Swiss-based Glencore/Polymet, Chile’s Antofagasta/Twin Metals that will inevitably add to the poisoned ground and surface water and various contaminated zones in our region’s waterways (especially the St. Louis river flowage) if such poisoning is allowed to occur. For more on this issue, click on: http://duluthreader.com/articles/2017/07/20/10617_corporate_sociopaths_out_of_northern_minnesota

And when the nuclear energy and the military-industrial complex does whatever it wants to do, one gets the unnecessary bombing of Nagasaki; the permanent contamination of nuclear weapons’ testing sites in Southwest US and the many atolls in the Pacific Ocean that cruelly displaced indigenous psople; the masses of prematurely dead and dying civilian and Gulf War veterans, and the thousands of malformed babies, from the lethal “friendly fire” radiation poisoning from the hundreds of tons of American armor-piercing radioactive uranium (“DU”) weaponry that will continue to poison the desert sands – and the people - of Kuwait, Iraq and now Libya for millions of years to come.

And now, if there is such a thing as the Japanese Emperor “Hirohito’s revenge”, the radiation poisoning of us American and Western hemisphere “downwinders” across the Pacific of our food, water, air and animals from Fukushima, not to mention America’s acknowledgement that there is nowhere to safely put America’s radioactive nuclear waste.

I can think of no better way to close this Earth Day essay than with the lyrics of a powerful song written and performed by Joe Paulik, who is a truly back to nature environmental activist and folk-singer (and, I am proud to say, friend of mine) who is based in Grand Marais, Minnesota. The lyrics to his powerful “Tree Preacher” are below. The 11-minute song powerfully exposes the “corporate rape” of Mother Earth. Joe would surely have won some award for this song if he hadn’t been based in northern Minnesota. “Tree Preacher” is the title song from Joe’s 4th CD (2004). The album which has many other great songs, can be ordered online at https://www.joepaulik.com/albums.phpV.

 

Tree Preacher

Watch the video (while following along with the lyrics below) of Joe Paulik’s band singing the important Earth Day song at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yot4VCgO24Q

Howl distant wind,

Make your presence felt and call from within,

Every woman man and child with a conscience

To join together and pray

Growl insistent wind

Flex your muscles raise your voice above the din,

‘Til every grown-up who has eyes that they can see with

Every person who has ears that they can hear with

And understands what you say

Take this seed home son and sow it.

Don’t burn your house down just to heat one meal.

Pack this in your pipe and smoke it.

You offer a loving gift

But they rape, beat and steal you blind.

And so I went to the city.

Seemed like one big accident.

All disarray; a pimp’s display on some big table.

Step right up, ignore the warnings on the labels.

When I got to my sister’s house she cried

“Oh it’s all over town;

The local factory’s leaking poison in the ground.”

Don’t drink that water if you plan to stick around.

And all these teachers want our kids on medication

In the name of higher grades and education.

It’s all the rage now; make some chemical alterations

On some unsuspecting minds.

We don’t know where to throw it.

In the food or down the drain; please explain.

Should I bury or explode it?

It’s impossible escaping the food chain.

Oh what’s this all about?

My niece’s pointed to that building beyond the house

By the river where the smoke comes pouring out.

And so I went to have a talk there with the owner.

Past the guard dogs and the barbed wire enclosure,

By some tanks that said you’ll die from their exposure.

And I let myself in.

I said “hi how ya doin’?

How’s your family; how’s their health; is it ruined?

Are ya happy, are ya lookin’ good on paper? 

Are ya baffled by the screams when ya rape ‘er?”

Then a client walked in.

And I said to him.

“You’re a fool and you don’t know it.

You’d sell your mother while you’re nursin’?

And he replied “just stay cool man don’t blow it;

We’re reading you loud and clear.

You’d like to survive.

But we’re making a living here

Not staying alive.”

I saw it on TV.

It’s like a prison where the inmates get to leave.

It’s like an asylum of scientific refugees.

It’s all protected and secure on an island.

And so I went to see if I could get inside it,

Past the floodlights and the dogs and all the fences,

Through the doorway by the guard without his senses,

Up the stairway to the rooms behind the steeple,

To the people who build people out of people,

And I let myself in.

“Hello, my name is Joe.

Won’t you tell me what your doing isn’t so?

I’m not sure if you’re a member of my species,

But if you quit this and just played with your own feces,

That would be far less obscene.”

He’s in hell but he don’t show it.

He’s all miracles from Halloween.

Just give him cells man he can grow it.

He’ll clone the unclonable.

He’ll patch all your genes.

I’m chokin’ on this smoke.

Heed this warning said the prophet or you’ll croak.

And when you’re dead you’ll have some really tough explaining,

Which in a sick way I guess might be entertaining,

Like when no one gets the joke.

Wish I could say I didn’t mean that;

I was just shootin’ the breeze.

When I need something I can scream at

For my therapy I preach to the trees.

Sayin’ howl raging wind,

Make your message felt and call from within,

Every person with a heart they’ve learned to follow,

Every child looking forward to tomorrow,

Join together and pray.

Growl raging wind,

You speak our language now: level, slash and spin,

‘Til every person who has ears, hears and listens

To every child who has eyes that tear and glisten

From their world torn away.

Then howl healing wind,

Make your presence felt and call from within,

Every man who has a heart that he can feel with,

Every woman blessed with hands that she can heal with,

To join together and pray.

Dr Gary G. Kohls lives in the USA and writes articles that deal with the dangers of fascism, corporatism, totalitarianism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, and Big Pharma’s over-drugging and over-vaccinating agendas. In addition,his columns deal with cultural movements that threaten democracy, war, civility, health, freedom, the future of the children and the sustainability and livability of the planet.

Dr Kohls is a board member of the National Health Federation (www.thenhf.com) and is a past member of Mind Freedom International, the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. He is a signatory to and/or an advocate of the principles of the Great Barrington Declaration, the World Doctors Alliance and Americas Front Line Doctors.

 

Dr Kohls practiced holistic medicine and preventive psychiatry for the last decades of his medical career, largely helping the psychologically-wounded, over-medicated survivors of psychiatry that had often been mis-diagnosed and over-medicated with cocktails of neurotoxic, frequently addictive psychiatric drugs that had never been tested for safety when used in combinations.

 

His Duty to Warn columns have been re-published around the world for the last decade. Dr Kohls frequently writes about Big Vaccine’s over-vaccination agendas and Big Medicine’s over-screening, over-diagnosing and over-treating agendas.

 

Many of Dr Kohls’ columns have been archived at a number of websites, including:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls;

http://freepress.org/geographic-scope/national;

https://www.lewrockwell.com/author/gary-g-kohls/?ptype=article; and

https://www.transcend.org/tms/author/?a=Gary%20G.%20Kohls,%20MD