Bombing the Great Barrier Reef.
Let’s face it: Politics and global exploitation of earth’s riches have resulted in our entire environment being extremely fragile or even completely destroyed. There are some selected areas that have been proudly declared as being protected zones – however, presently less than 2% of the world’s oceans are under some kind of protection and even those are not sufficiently taken care of. And if you’ve been wondering about the earth’s land mass – only about 12% are protected; they consist of national parks and nature reserves.
The U.S.A, Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, and island states across the Pacific and Caribbean are among those advancing calls for more marine environments to be placed under legal protection, providing sanctuary for threatened species, habitats and ecosystems.
One of the best known and the world’s biggest protected area is the Great Barrier Reef which attracts 2 million visitors a year and has a huge impact on the economy. It presents the world’s largest network of coral structures, is rich in marine life and stretches more than 3,000 km (1,800 miles) along Australia’s northeast coast.
As reported by The Guardian, two American fighter jets dropped four unarmed bombs into Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park last week, when during a biennial joint training exercise called Talisman Saber, which brings together 28,000 US and Australian military personnel over three weeks, something went wrong: “Two AV-8B Harrier jets, launched from the aircraft carrier USS Bonhomme Richard, each jettisoned an inert practice bomb and an unarmed laser-guided explosive bomb into the World Heritage-listed marine park off the coast of Queensland state on Tuesday, the US 7th Fleet said in a statement on Saturday. The four bombs, weighing a total 1.8 metric tons (4,000 pounds), were dropped into more than 50 meters (164ft) of water, away from coral, to minimize possible damage to the reef, the statement said. None exploded.”
Environmentalists are aghast and nobody is certain if the bombs will eventually pose an environmental risk and who can tell if they were indeed unarmed. Australian Senator Larissa Waters described the dumping of bombs in such an environmentally sensitive area as “outrageous” and exclaimed to the Australian Broadcasting Corp., “Have we gone completely mad?… Is this how we look after our World Heritage area now? Letting a foreign power drop bombs on it?”
Indeed, how could anybody in the US or Australian military even come up with the idea of playing war games in a protected area, or play those inane war games at all? And how can a training aimed to kill and destroyed be called a ‘game’ to start with? Had the exercise not gone wrong, they would have exploded those bombs in the nearby vicinity with possibly not a thought just how much damage could be caused and the Australian government consented for that lunacy to take place.
The Australian Government’s website states:
“The variety of life along the Reef’s vast expanse is immense. The Reef’s extraordinary biodiversity and the interconnectedness of species and habitats make the Great Barrier Reef and surrounding areas one of the most complex natural systems on Earth.
Maintaining a healthy and diverse Great Barrier Reef ecosystem is important so it is better able to withstand, recover and adapt to impacts and stress. A productive and healthy Reef environment provides essential resources such as fish and prawns and supports many industries.”
All hogwash when it comes to politics and power?
“We have to save ourselves from our own minds. This mind was created for a certain reason: to save us from the animals. For centuries we were in danger; now we are in danger from our own destructive weapons.
This is a great moment in the history of mankind, and perhaps in the whole history of the universe, because we only suspect that there are some planets where life may exist, but there is no certain proof. It may be that only on this earth has life come to such a point that a few people have become buddhas, a few people have come to know the universal secret of life. To destroy it is so idiotic, is so against the universe!
The only way is to find something within you which can overpower your mind. Otherwise the mind knows nothing else except destruction; that was the function it was created for. It is not its fault, but it is continuously afraid for no reason at all. Sometimes it knows that there is no reason to be afraid; then it starts asking, “Why is there no reason to be afraid?”
Mind knows only one language – that is of fear, danger, and how to survive and make yourself safe against an antagonistic universe.
Even a great man like Bertrand Russell wrote a book, Conquest of Nature. The same fear of the mind – we have to conquer. This idea has to be changed. The idea should be that now we have to rejoice in nature, we have to find the mysteries and secrets of nature, and we have to go beyond mind. This artifact is not our nature.
That’s what we are doing in meditation.
Meditation is finding something in you that is superior to the mind. Only then can the mind be prevented from destroying humanity and this beautiful planet. It was perfectly okay to be destructive up to now, but now the situation and the context is totally different.”
Osho, Tuning In, Ch 1, Q 2
Bhagawati, Osho News
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