Distracted MassesVol. 1 Issue #2 Oct. 2014 | Page 51

Notes on Combating Ecocide 1. A) The three international financial institutions created in pattern of global resource consumption and extraction. The Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944 are the World U.S. military-industrial complex accounts for 10-20% of Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World U.S. mineral consumption. Trade Organization. 5. A) The multilateral agreement on investment (MAI) is the B) The World Bank’s function is to provide basic banking creation of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and services for international business and for state owned Development that wishes to dismantle barriers to proprieties such as lending, holding, and transferring investment all over the world in order to create a more money. The International Monetary Fund’s basic function is open global economy. to loan money to the governments of developing countries so they can improve their economic and social standards. B) The defense exclusion in the MAI is the continuation of The World Trade Organization sets international trade the protection of military spending and arms protection. policies and pushes towards a more capitalistic freemarket system worldwide. C) Without the defense exclusion the MAI would be more equitable in that every legislative decision that is C) A bunch of rich white guys created these organizations. incompatible with the MAI would be thrown out. 2. A) Structural Adjustment Programs are plans that are made for developing countries by the international banking community so they can produce more capital from the exportation of resources and other commodities that are within these countries. 6. Geddick’s solution to ecocide is social protest. By joining movements like Flood Wall Street or some conservation group and attending their meetings is one way people can participate in trying to solve the problem of ecocide. B) Globalization privatizes profits because state owned business as well as independently owned business earns the largest amount of money for a small amount of people. The unfair or lack of distribution of this money creates higher social costs (medical care, education, social security, etc) in countries whose governments have accepted globalization. 7. A) The new geography of conflict is the conflict that is occurring in newly formed regions in Africa and Southwest Asia, but conflict is not limited to these areas. 3. A) Geddicks means that a nation, which is a group of people who have strong ethnic ties, are culturally similar, and share the same language, are more likely to be in conflict with a state, which is an area defined by borders that are controlled by a sovereign government, than another nation, and a state is less likely to be in a conflict with another state. C) Klare suggests that the alternative to resource wars is the establishment of a global system of resource conservation and collaboration. B) Conflicts between nations and states are usually presented to the public through the media which is usually controlled or strongly influenced by the state. This control factor causes nations to be misrepresented by the press. Often times nations who are seeking independence or are fighting for some other cause are presented as creating a rebellion or an uprising. Words used to describe nations by the media usually are not the preferred descriptors of the nations themselves (guerrilla forces vs. FARC, armed insurgents vs. martyrs, terrorists vs. Taliban). B) These conflicts are new because of the technology that allows for the quick transfer of resources and the instantaneous networking of intelligence. 8. A) Leopold’s sequence of the evolution of ethics includes the relation between individuals, the relation between individuals and society, and the people’s relation to land and animals. B) Human relations with land and animals has existed from the beginning of time and has evolved into different ethical perspectives throughout the globe. There is not one global perspective that all of humankind has accepted as to what the relation between the people and the earth is but there are many different views as to what it should be and the combination of these views has reached the third turn in the sequence of the evolution of ethics. C) Leopold argues that the core change in ecological 4. The U.S. military-industrial complex extracts uranium, consciousness that is necessary to heal the cleavage consumes the product, and then extracts more for further between conservationists is an internal change in use. The extraction of titanium is another example of this intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions. [51]