UNITY through DIVERSITY might be also applicable to INFORMATION (7)

The dynamics of civilization has become determined de facto by the
discovery made by some privileged brains who have managed to observe
the surrounding reality with the intention of making today use and
tomorrow better use of natural things and phenomena. Along millennia
several enlightened humans have been able to identify one after
another more and more aspects of the whole causality that has
determined the natural environments where humans were first learning
to settle down - taking into account the increasing knowledge they
had about the natural circumstances. But pretty soon afterwards most
humans in every settlement constituted were obliged to learn how to
behave more and more restrictively in accordance with regulations
conceived and imposed by those cleverer individuals who claimed very
aloud - and convincingly - that they were the owners of natural and
man-made circumstances but give the masses permission to live there
and also to work for improving these circumstances.

Therefore the information gradually integrated in the domain of one
or another civilization has been necessarily the source of motivation
for increasing the discovery and invention of more and more causal
interactions of those aspects of the surrounding reality that might
increase faster and faster the efficiency and efficacy of the human
utilitarianism which started as tool making by means of hand work and
has culminated until today in the generalized automation technology
needed indispensably for assuring the

Therefore the main features of the civilizing adventure have been
conceiving discovering and inventing causal interactions of phenomena
needed for modernizing the civilizing concern according to criteria
formulated by the common sense of the owners of every terrestrial
environment, who are always ready to claim that they are really
highly civilized humans, and to argue that they are deeply interested
in maintaining the functionality of civilizing processes which sooner
or later will bring happiness to all humans. Sometimes, these well
educated philanthropists dare to include the masses as part of
humankind.

The whole civilization has caused the emergence of another world
(located inside the biosphere) gradually integrated exclusively for
human purposes. During the last centuries this world has become the
huge homosphere whose dynamics is frankly:

1. increasingly contradictory with itself because billions of
humans are unable to satisfy decently - as if they were civilized
fellows - their survival needs;

2. increasingly incoherent with the need, and not simply
possibility, of pushing ahead the humane development of human
capabilities because an increasing number of technological and
methodological processes are nowadays conceived, designed and
implemented for replacing human workers by automatic devices and also
for changing the performance of the masses by means of modern
'educational' courses that aim at training and taming beings who were
born for being elements of the masses, but still need to be
conditioned properly and systematically for willing to be happy
while learning to live miserably as buyers and consumers of
everything, anything and nothing in accordance with the rules that
will assure the successful manifestation of the Global Free Market.

3. increasingly incongruous with the planetary possibilities
because the economic development - conceived by means of an
exhaustive exploitation of everything in order to increase the
monetary profits ad infinitum - continuously augments the level of
pollution of the terrestrial features that are only limited
possibilities for the existence of humans;

4. increasingly inconsistent with the need of protecting the
biodiversity that characterizes the manifestation of life in our
unique planet because the monetary interests that are determining the
world wide economy intends rather dogmatically not only to make
homogeneous everything but also to exploit exhaustively the organs,
features and anatomic components of other animals. The number of
endangered species is increasing faster and faster.

Anyhow the INFORMATION accumulated through diverse kinds of permitted
(#) COMMUNICATION among humans shows quite evidently that the whole
civilizing adventure has become a catastrophic ambiguity as it has
been generated by intelligent decision making conceived and
implemented by very clever and highly civilized humans

*************************
(#)

Diffused by Steve Kurtz <kurtzs@freenet.carleton.ca>
From: "FoEI Media Coordinator Niccolo Sarno "
22 Nov 2002

PUBLIC RIGHT-TO-KNOW UNDERMINED IN NEW POLLUTION TREATY

FRIENDS OF THE EARTH INTERNATIONAL (Press Release)

Amsterdam, 21st November, 2002 -- Negotiations on a new international
treaty to increase the public's right-to-know on sources of pollution
enter the final stages with a United Nations meeting in Geneva next
week.

(#) But environmentalists are warning that key chemicals and
radioactive waste are likely to be excluded from the treaty,
following lobbying from industry and the conservative positions taken
by governments.

Delegates are discussing the new protocol under the 1998 Aarhus
"public participation" Convention, which will require participating
countries to collect and publish information on quantities of
pollutants released from certain industrial sources and probably from
diffuse sources such as traffic.

The meeting follows a two-year process involving countries from
Europe, Central Asia, the US and Canada, as well as representatives
from environmental NGOs, including Friends of the Earth, and
representatives from the chemical industry (CEFIC).

The information will be compiled in to "Pollutant Release and
Transfer Registers" or "PRTRs". Such registers are already used in
the UK and US and are believed to have helped drive down pollution
levels and provided both the public and authorities with useful
information.

A number of key issues are still to be resolved, including which
chemicals are to be listed, with suggestions that many chemicals
linked to cancer should be excluded. Decisions are also still to be
made as to whether the disposal or storage of hazardous chemicals
on-site should be included. The exact list of industries and
activities covered is also still to be finalized, but countries are
overwhelmingly opposed to the inclusion of nuclear facilities under
the treaty.

Environmentalists have pushed for a more ambitious treaty, whilst
recognizing that a comprehensive pollution register cannot be
achieved in one single stage. But European Union countries have
opposed the more ambitious elements proposed in the initial draft.

Friends of the Earth Pollution Researcher, Mary Taylor, speaking for
the NGO coalition European ECO Forum, said : "The protocol should be
a step forward for many countries, but the lack of ambition -
particularly from the EU - is dismal. The public should have the
right to know what chemicals are being discharged by companies and
where they are being stored. Protecting certain sectors such as the
nuclear industry from public scrutiny, or avoiding the inclusion of
cancer-causing chemicals, is scandalous."

For more information contact in the UK:

Friends of the Earth Pollution Researcher Mary Taylor at +44-20-7566 1687

-- 
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