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Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Amazon Standing

Financed by the Other Amazon Paying for Its Name

The Amazon rainforest must remain standing for global ecological sustainability, and Amazon company is the best source of finance given their expropriation of the Amazon name. It should be possible to pay to fully protect the Amazon rainforest while meeting local people’s needs. The best place to start is for online Amazon Inc. to pay on a sustained basis for its long overdue unpaid use of the Amazon name. Transforming Amazon Inc. into a purpose driven venture will make it stronger and more appealing, while providing a long-term source of finance to keep Amazon Standing.

EARTH MEANDERS
By Dr. Glen Barry

“There’s nothing about our model that can’t be copied over time… A lot of it comes down to the brand name. Brand names are more important online than they are in the physical world.” – Jeff Bezos

“The bill is due for Amazon company’s unpaid use of the mighty Amazon rainforest’s name.” – Dr. Glen Barry

The First Amazon

The Amazon rainforest is a global ecological treasure of unparalleled importance for Earth and all inhabitants. Over at least 55 million years vast evolutionary radiance has created a brilliant super-organism that powers the planet’s biosphere through the sum of the interactions of its parts.

The Amazon is rich in ecological diversity with a dizzying array of life across scales — from landscapes, downward to ecosystems, to plant communities and animal populations, including indigenous peoples, down to species and individual plants and wildlife, composed of their genetic sequences. From such complex yet decadent disorder emerges the primary bioregional ecosystem that powers the biosphere.

Though the Amazon as an ecosystem is more than the sum of these parts, all parts are required for it to remain fully intact and thus operational. The Amazon basin drains the slopes of the Andes through biodiverse mountain slopes into the vast lowland swamp forests. This vast plethora of micro-habitats contains stores of medicinal plants, cycles water and nutrients, and drives global climate.

Besides large-scale farming and logging, many
Amazonian rainforests are being slowly fragmented
for rural electrification and other activities

Loss of the Amazon as an intact whole will result in a major diminishment in climate buffering, disappearance of an unknown amount of genetic wealth potentially valuable for diseases such as coronavirus, deprive millions of indigenous peoples and settlers of their livelihoods, and may in itself crash the biosphere. Yet a variety of threats continues the European legacy of ecocide upon native nature and peoples, cruelly propagating the myth that destroying millions of year old ecosystems and their inhabitants is “development”.

Recently I wrote On Amazon fires: It’s the ecology stupid. Therein it is noted that Global Ecological Sustainability depends critically upon ending the logging and burning of old forests such as the Amazon and letting them recover, expand and reconnect. Earlier I have published peer reviewed science that is worth reading, identifying a threshold for how many ecosystems can be lost before the biosphere collapses: Barry, G. (2014), “Terrestrial ecosystem loss and biosphere collapse”, Management of Environmental Quality, Vol. 25 No. 5, pp. 542-563.

I have had the privilege to spend the month of February in Brazil, mostly in the Amazonia region. There I trekked into lowland tropical rainforests and was overjoyed to see big ancient trees and wildlife including spider monkeys, pink river dolphins, and anacondas. The river boat ride down a portion of the Amazon was an adventure. By the time I reached The Amazon river’s point of entry into the Atlantic Oceans, I was struck again and again by the generosity and kindness of the region’s peoples.

Dr. Glen Barry, Amazonia, 2020

Mostly I silently rejoiced in my long-felt ecological intuition that these Amazon rainforests are the global habitat that makes my and all life possible. Often I just sat in the jungle listening for long hours, fully feeling a bond with the diverse and dependent life therein. And I also saw firsthand the senseless devastation being wrought by agri-business and rural electrification.

And I became further resolved that it must be possible to meet development needs of Amazonians while keeping Amazon Standing.

This essay represents the beginning of efforts to develop a campaign to find and implement a way to finance sufficient socio-economic activities to ensure the Amazon remains standing. This must be done in a creative, sustained manner that protects native livelihoods and means meeting all basic needs and then some. Yet forgoes all commercial exploitation that destroys or diminishes standing primary forests.

The greatest challenge of our generation is to find a viable way to fully protect the Amazon.

Time for the Other Amazon to Step Up

Imagine if you can that there was a large organization that has benefited from the unreimbursed use of the Amazon name, and could help fund keeping the Amazon rainforest standing. Surely, in such a case, there would be tremendous potential to harness sustainable funding for Amazon rainforest protection, and there would be a huge public outcry that the company pay a significant portion of their revenue for the right to use the Amazon name.

Wait, what of Jeff Bezos’ Amazon online store? He reportedly named it Amazon because it was “exotic and different”, and the Amazon River was the largest in the world, and he planned for Amazon company to be so as well. Given the tremendous corporate and personal success realized by Amazon and Jeff Bezos, it is perfectly reasonable to suggest that the company pay to protect the threatened Amazon rainforest after which it is named.

Mr. Bezos himself has expressed how critical branding is to online success, and he has certainly benefited richly from the sentiments evoked by his use of the Amazon name.

Indeed, given Mr. Bezo’s hundreds of millions of dollars spent on new homes in recent months, isn’t financing by Amazon company to protect the Amazon rainforest long overdue? It’s a justice, equity, and ecological sustainability thing Mr. Bezos. How can you have so much, benefiting from the globally recognized name of an impoverished region, for which you have never paid?

Some would say that Amazon having made so much money without paying anything to Brazil and neighboring countries is the very exemplar of white and billionaire privilege. 

Don’t get me wrong, Jeff Bezos has built Amazon (the company referred to as Amazon Inc.) into an amazing company. I spend considerable amounts of money with Amazon Inc., making purchases almost daily given the convenience, selection, and speed of delivery. And EcoInterent’s services are hosted on the Amazon cloud, which is truly amazing in its own right.

But come on, at some point growth becomes greed. Already there is a backlash against the richest man in the world, and how it has come at the expense of local merchants and the climate. And then there is the fact that Amazon Inc. simply pilfered their name from the greatest ecosystem in the world that is mortally threatened.

Bezos’ recent commitment of funding to address climate change is welcome and appropriate given Amazon’s huge carbon footprint. Yet an additional massive, sustained investment in Amazonia rainforest protection is still appropriate given the past and ongoing benefits accrued from the expropriation of the Amazon name in particular and all it connotes.

With all due respect Mr. Bezos, how much is enough? How many more lavish homes do you intend to buy this year, as our global home and your company’s namesake, the Amazon, is destroyed because of lack of conservation finance. At what point does the existential threats to global ecological sustainability become more or at least as important to you, the richest person in the world, than delivering ever more consumer goods faster?

We get it Mr. Bezos, your Amazon may not be legally required to pay for use of the Amazon name for your branding. But it is the classy, ethical, and just thing to do. And it protects your future as well.

There will be consequences of Amazon failing to act to protect its namesake. Already popular sentiment is shifting against the company given its size and extravagance of its owners. How much better to make the company a purpose driven organization rather than only a consumption growth machine.

Pressure campaigns are possible, but hopefully are not needed, assuming the goodwill of a man and company that has benefited so much from expropriating of the Amazon name. Some would say theft, like so much else that has been forcefully taken from the Brazilian people.

Big old trees in expansive primary
forests power the biosphere.
Dr. Glen Barry, Amazonia, 2020

Amazon Standing Trust Fund

It should be possible to pay to keep the Amazon rainforest fully standing. And in a manner that provides decent livelihoods for all inhabitants. Surely there is more worth to be found in a live than a dead forest. Particularly ancient naturally evolved old-growth forests. All that is required is sustained investments in Amazonian alternative development models and governance depending on protecting and not destroying old, natural forests.

What I am proposing is that Amazon Inc. and/or Jeff Bezos establish an endowed trust fund committed to full protection of the Amazon Rainforest. “Amazon Standing” would use the interest on the endowment to fund non-extractive efforts for local peoples and governments to benefit economically and culturally from permanently standing and intact primary rainforests.

Sufficiently endowed, such an approach has great potential to shift the economics against large-scale extractive industries which are only marginally profitable.

Without massive investments the Amazon rainforest will continue to fall at an unconscionable rate. Slowly yet inexorably the last remnant large natural ecosystems will be dismantled; liquidated for all the wrong reasons, sending shock waves throughout the global ecological system.

And moving us a step closer towards Biosphere Collapse and the End of Being.

It is not OK for one of the largest companies to name itself after Earth’s largest and most important ecosystem without having some stake in its protection. Imbuing Amazon Inc. with social merit beyond consuming ever more, faster, will make it a force for social good.

Transforming Amazon Inc. into a purpose driven venture will make it stronger and more appealing, while providing a long-term source of finance to keep Amazon Standing. There is tremendous reputational risk to Amazon Inc. and Jeff Bezos of not immediately beginning to pay for the use of Amazon as their brand name.

The bill is due for Amazon company’s unpaid use of the mighty Amazon rainforest’s name. Significant funding can be provided willingly to keep the Amazon rainforest standing while meeting local needs, or all sorts of campaign measures are likely.

Amazon will have earned its name based on merit and not merely size.

Expect to hear more about what it takes to keep Amazon Standing and the rainforest movements efforts to get Amazon Inc. to embrace and finance protection of its namesake.

Monday, February 10, 2020

Vile Chinese Authoritarian Tyranny Threatens All

The Chinese system of government has shown monstrous disdain for free speech, truth, and basic human rights; most recently bringing disease upon its citizens and threatening the health of the entire world. It is time for Chinese Democracy, and for totalitarian communist tyranny to end, starting with President Xi Jinping’s resignation.

Hong Kong protestors foretold the type of Chinese deception that has caused the coronavirus epidemic

“A healthy society should not have just one voice.” – Dr. Li Wenliang

“There are no rioters, only a tyrannical regime” (沒有暴徒 只有暴政) and “Five demands, not one less” (五大訴求 缺一不可) – Hong Kong Democracy Protestors

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” – Winston S. Churchill

“The Chinese communist party cannot be trusted to tell the truth and must step down.” – Dr. Glen Barry


To start, let me express my most sincere condolences for Chinese and other victims of the Wuhan Coronavirus. The whole world hopes for swift containment and recovery. Yet this is a manmade crisis that with a decent, functional government could have been avoided. Instead Wuhan, China, and the world are terrorized by a disease spawned by the Chinese government’s disdain for truth and stifling of free speech.

The coronavirus epidemic did not arise out of nowhere. It is the logical consequence of a deeply authoritarian government, a casual disregard for truth and freedom of speech, and Xi Jinping’s recent strengthening of tyrannical rule. Xi and the Chinese government bear full blame for the coronavirus outbreak and must be held to account.

Failed Chinese Communist Dogma

Most cultures have a combination of a storied and horrifying past and China is no different. Throughout Chinese history epic human constructs and monumental battles have been wrought upon the back of the degradation of the common person. Even within the past century the nation has jumped between enlightened thought and despotic tyranny, at any time seemingly moments away from further wide-scale state genocide.

Contemporary China is a plutocratic criminal state based upon banning free speech and other human rights, in a vile system that imprisons its citizens, so that the small group of Chinese communist party leaders and their families can live opulently. The term “communist” which implies equality has long been nonsensical in such an inequitable and corrupt system.

A maelstrom of threats emanates from Red China that threatens to kill Chinese and global citizenry under the mantra of dated, self-serving communist dogma (which few believe, and fewer adhere to). The communist party (which is in fact neither) maintains its grip on power through the constant threat of an iron fist in its citizens’ face.

There is an epic battle underway between liberal democracy (now with its own tendencies towards authoritarianism), and the communist police state that is Red China. At stake is all humanity’s basic human rights and dignity, freedom of thought and speech, liberty and privacy, and protection from dangerous government secrets.

State Terror and the Rights of Man

The litany of contemporary Chinese tyranny runs the gamut of conceivable intrusions upon human well-being meant by the state to inspire terror. Minority, ancient cultures such as the Uighurs and Tibetans are imprisoned in their own homelands and brain-washed to love red China’s promise of imprisoned consumption. Entire ancient cultures are being eliminated in acts of slow-motion genocide.

Much of China is constantly surveilled as a dragnet of cameras connected to sophisticated machine learning databases permeates every crevice of individual’s lives. What sort of vile voyeuristic artificial intelligence seeks to spy upon every action of their citizenry? What a depraved system that deems to algorithmically score the social worthiness of the myriad types of human self-expression, as if obedience to authority is the only measure of a person.

How long until drone assassins use this surveillance infrastructure to wage war upon individual thought, murdering free thinkers for daring to believe in free speech and the rights of wo(man)?

In China we are witnessing the fulfillment of Orwell’s big brother and it is terrifyingly real and dangerous. This escalating assault upon the hard-fought rights of man must not stand.

China will be free. Hong Kong protests will grow and spread to China post-coronavirus

In Hong Kong a proud, un-servile people demand the rule of law, the maintenance of freedom of speech, full democratic rights including to vote, and freedom from the constant threat of state violence. This modern proclamation of the rights of man; and simple, sincere requests to be heard and to vote, face unremitting police violence. We must all stand with Hong Kong as this is the proxy struggle between truth and lies, justice and injustice, freedom and tyranny, and decency and vileness.

There is not a moment to waste. The human family chooses now between a future of bright democratic liberty or dark autocratic tyranny.

Filthy Live Markets and State Secrets

And now the filthy, vile habit of slaughtering wildlife of all types in brutal “live markets” for falsely purported benefits – including a limp dick – has the world poised on the brink of pandemic. This widespread Chinese bloody, unsanitary mess has no counterpart in the world for incubating new diseases. Virtually anything that is alive including endangered species are at risk of a merciless, brutal death before being thrown in the cooking pot.

What sort of despotic, self-serving force knowingly allows viral outbreaks to exponentially cascade out of control to maintain power and save face for a while? People speaking truthfully of the virus outbreak such as Li Wenliang and others have been silenced and even imprisoned by government censors. If those giving notice had been heard early in the disease’s spread, almost certainly coronavirus would have been stopped before spreading widely.


Free speech could have limited the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak

The monstrous manner the Chinese system allowed the Wuhan Coronavirus to knowingly spread shows the evil, self-serving, and insecure nature of Chinese power. Limp dick indeed.

Thankfully at this moment the coronavirus mortality rates are low. But as exponential growth in the spread of the disease continues, the greater risk is overwhelmed medical facilities and social disorder. Weeks into exponential growth of new cases and mass quarantines, the Chinese government has been too proud to accept WHO and CDC assistance. Now avoidance of a global pandemic appears to require further Chinese totalitarian human rights atrocities.

Chinese Ecocidal Tyranny

China is the central organizer and buyer for the global trade in illegal logging of ancient forests. Globally all standing rainforest are threatened by the insatiable greed of a corrupt government that will do anything to amass further power. The only relief for Chinese citizens from brutal tyranny is to consume ever more cheap throwaway consumer goods based upon the destruction of dwindling ecosystems.

While paying lip service to climate change, the Chinese government ramps up its coal use, and backs away from controlling the size of its population (itself a component of the coronavirus’ spread). Chinese crowded conditions across degraded over-populated landscapes create optimal conditions for the spread of diseases as Gaia fights back.

Chinese growth alone threatens to pull down the biosphere.


China is the center of the global illegal rainforest logging market

Truth Matters

The Chinese system of government is a monstrous taint upon humanity’s progression towards realization of universal human rights, and equitable and just ecological sustainability, based upon scientific truths and the inherent rights of men and women to be free.

The Chinese government’s spying, imprisonment, ecocide, police brutality, and callous disregard for the health of their own citizens (indeed the global population) makes the communist party an illegitimate government.

The Chinese communist party cannot be trusted to tell the truth and must step down. It is up to every Chinese and non-Chinese citizen to demand democratic reform and an unraveling of authoritarian single party tyranny. China will only ever fully realize its greatness when it is a democracy and its citizens can express themselves freely and be heard.

Never has it been more important to stop buying Chinese goods as a means of depriving such a monstrous political system of its wealth.

Imperfect Democracy

On the other hand, stands Western style imperfect quasi-democracy that glorifies militarism, was built upon racism, and depends upon a foundation of elitist over-consumption at the expense of nature. Liberal democracy is the worst form of government ever, except for all the alternatives.

Yet in America’s and Europe’s unrealized testbeds of democracy one finds a sense of freedom that remains unparalled in human history. And continues perpetually to better itself and overcome past evils. Clearly the systems of government found in the United States and Europe are far preferable to Red, or shall we say Dead, China.

In America you have the right to be free, and that means something, and it is worth fighting for such liberty for the entire human family. Yet none of our freedom is guaranteed as long as some remain unfree,

All humans are born radically free and are meant to enjoy forever an unfettered personal liberty.

For the most part citizens in liberal democracies are free from random state violence (though it does occur, particularly for non-whites). Except for the constant barrage of advertising for democratic over-consumption, diminished but not yet banished religious idolatry, and military dogmatism; generally, those living in liberal democracies are not programmed as to how to think.

In Western Democracy there exists personal and societal space to seek and find truthful thought. To listen to the music and read the books you like. To say and write what you wish. To move about mostly freely. To vote your desires. And to make something of yourself based upon personal merit.

Certainly, the project of Western Democracy remains incomplete. Expenditures on militarism to fund continued global resource thievery ensure that education, health care, job training, and other social needs remain unmet. The promise of equal rights for all races and sexes remains incomplete.

And vile, filthy authoritarianism in the face of environmental scarcity is bearing its ugly face in no less than Brazil and the United States, where environmental rollbacks threaten ecosystem collapse.

Yet the choice is clear. Democracy, despite its faults, is the far preferable system over vile authoritarianism, wherever it bears its heads, and most particularly now in communist China.

Humanity stands at a pivotal juncture as the coronavirus threatens mass murder because of the communist party’s lust for power and rejection of those who speak truth. We recommit to human rights, democratic values, and to together finding a way towards ecological sustainability; or we descend into the techno-invasive, violent and disease ridden, police state future as espoused by Chinese capitalism.

Bring Necessary Manufacturing Home

“Made in China” is synonymous with a system that wages surveillance, torture, murder, and disease upon its own under-paid, over-worked, and ultimately disposable citizens. No longer can state murder and torture be paid for with the ill-gotten gains of selling cheap consumer goods in the West.

It is time to bring back locally to the place of consumption all necessary manufacturing from China and discontinue the rest.

China Will Be Free

For the welfare of the human family, let’s demand a Chinese political system that tells the truth and lets its citizens speak freely.

That shuts down live markets massacring wildlife, creating the filthy environment that incubated coronavirus and other diseases, and threatens to do so again. That rebukes and dismantles the state driven spying and flawed judgements upon everyday lives of its citizens. And that implements a new Democratic China of liberty, freedom, truth, and basic human decency absent from the current vile and evil Communist Inc.

Let’s demand a Chinese government that lets people speak freely so that never again will Chinese tyranny threaten global health.

And let us hope that despite such a horrendous, irresponsible system of government; that the coronavirus is brought under control to avoid more Chinese suffering and a global pandemic.


President Xi Jinping has failed the test of leadership causing the coronavirus to needlessly spread and is called upon to resign immediately

President Xi Jinping and the entire senior communist party leaders are called upon to resign immediately, given their mishandling and attempt to cover-up a disease of their own making. They have failed the test of leadership and their corrupt, power-hungry leadership is not fit for the challenges the country faces containing coronavirus.

Green Liberty is humanity’s shared future. Think of your children. Your planet. And your loved ones. And embrace human rights, democracy, and ecological sustainability for all. Before Dead China gets you.