Banking by Abdalhalim Orr & Abdassamad Clarke

Author:Abdalhalim Orr & Abdassamad Clarke [Orr, Abdalhalim & Clarke, Abdassamad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Diwan Press
Published: 2014-08-01T18:30:00+00:00

Usury and Its Effect on the Environment: a Local View

An article in a recent issue of ‘Natural World’, the magazine of the Royal Society for Nature Conservation, begins in the following way:

“Let us get one thing straight from the beginning. The battle for the countryside has been lost. The struggle now taking place is a last despairing attempt to salvage something from the wreckage …

“Most of the old order – the great wetlands and woodlands, moors, heaths, hedgerows and flower meadows – have been swept away and replaced by new landscapes which are all too often dreary, disfigured and hostile to wildlife.

“Endangered, damaged, lost, destroyed ... even in the dispassionate statistics of scientific record books the same bleak words ring out again and again. They are the sounds of nature being driven under; hammer blows for crumbling habitats and vanishing species…

“Who could have foreseen 30 years ago that the countryside would be overturned not by urban sprawl but by the ponderous momentum of modern agriculture? But market forces, allied with new technology which can wring every last ounce from the land, have transformed the face of rural Britain. A triumph for farming, a catastrophe for wildlife ...”

“The miracle is”, the writer concludes, “that anything has survived at all.”1

The figures speak for themselves. Now in the 1980’s in Britain, 40% of the natural woodlands have been lost, as have two-thirds of the natural coastline of England and Wales, 95% of the hay meadows, 80% of the chalk grassland, at least 30% of the upland grassland, heath and blanket bog, and over 50% of the marshes and wetlands, along with widespread pollution and canalisation of waterways.2

And this situation is reflected in every country in the world.

The above-mentioned writer puts the blame on the “ponderous momentum of modern agriculture”, referring in particular to “market forces” and “new technology”. Let us look a little closer at these so-called “market forces” as they apply to agriculture, and it will be apparent how usury, and this usurious economy that we have been talking about today, has its effect in ultimately destroying the environment.

I would like to take one example from Norfolk, the Broadland grazing marshes, which illustrates this process on a local level, and it is a process which is happening in greater or lesser degree all over the country, and for very much the same reasons. Small, locally-based farmers are being forced to give up traditional low input-output farming practices, which are conducive to a clean conservationally high-value environment, for intensive semi-industrial alternatives, which in their turn destroy the unique plant and animal systems which give the area its particular value and attraction. The reason behind them doing this is, quite simply, because the pressure is on for them to increase production so that everyone can get their money moving and pay off their loans, always with the extra pressure of interest included, of course. The banks, as we have seen, have to get their money on the move in order for them to be able to make their own money and pay off their own debts.

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