How to stave off ecological default?

Man is a dual structure from the standpoint of modern science — particularly physics, quantum physics — in that matter and field are complimented by man’s field structure. At the outset of quantum physics its 20th-century prophet, the Ukrainian Volodymyr Vernadsky, determined for the first time in world history that man is a quantum system. Theosophy has it that man is triune, made up of body, soul, and spirit. These three components constitute what we know as a human being. There was a time in history when man existed in perfect harmony with nature; he was part of it and depended on its evolution.

Vernadsky formulated the basic ecological law, one that determines our biosphere, in general terms. In material, physical terms this law boils down to man living in harmony with his environs. As it was, man wanted to get the better of Mother-Nature, to satisfy his mercantile needs. Man began to rock the boat of natural balance set over millions of years. Result: impeding global environmental disasters.

ECOCIDE IN UKRAINE: BEGINNING

In 1992, Moscow-based news agency Golos published a Russian version of Ecocide in the USSR: Health And Nature Under Siege by Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr. This publication coincided with the USSR’s collapse. Here was a superpower falling apart, whose population was placed the world’s third, after China and India, whose science and technology ratings had kept it the world’s socialist superpower facing the only matching capitalist rival, the United States.

This book was the first scholarly publication to demonstrate an unbiased approach, by foreign scientists, to a mind-boggling tangle of differences between man and nature, between progress in science and technology, on the one hand, and human health and well-being, on the other hand. Academician Sergei Zalygin wrote in the foreword to the Russian version entitled “Another Warning”: “The planet Earth is dying. Perhaps the first to die will be all those countries that recently made the socialist camp, among them Russia, once a socialist [super]power, now a restructured country.”

The environmental analysis this book offers makes one’s hair stand on end. Such attitude of the government toward the environment, natural wealth, the top-level bureaucrats’ indifference to the man in the street is hard to digest. In terms of population, Ukraine ranked second after the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic. Ukraine then had 51.839 million residents compared to the RSFSR’s 288.6 million. Ukraine’s economic growth indices were similar to those of the RSFSR.

Let me share with you some health care statistics that demonstrate Ukraine’s progress over the 20 years of national independence. These figures reflect the domestic environmental and economic situation.

Back in 1989, the natality rate averaged 7.6 percent, with 22.7 percent mortality per 1,000 infants. At the time, the average life span was 69.5 years (64.8 for males and 73.6 for females). Now everyone knows the average life span in Ukraine, in view of the pension reform.

There is no comparing physical conditions. Ukraine has been tagged as a country with a rampant depopulation process since 1993. Each year it loses as many people as those inhabiting Bila Tserkva. Another horrible statistic: some 40 percent of healthy babies per 100 deliveries. All this is proof that the Ukrainian nation is getting extinct.

Several years ago, Dr. Hennadii Opanasenko offered Dzerkalo Tyzhnia a health care analysis after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Almost all former Soviet republics, save for several ones where Buddhism prevails, registered depopulation. This is proof of the significance of national spirituality, awareness of ethnic roots in building national health.

ENDOECOLOGICAL CELLULAR DEFAULT

Characteristically, polluted environment is registered in many regions of Ukraine where people can hardly exist. Mother Nature is seriously afflicted by man. Too bad, considering that man is her inalienable component. Man breathes her air, drinks her water, and eats her foods; man receives from her everything that keeps him alive. In return, man has made every effort to poison her, developing toxins, causing deadly chain reactions, thus weakening his own system, contracting various diseases, shortening his life span. Now it is necessary to cleanse one’s system of all these toxins, with an eye to the food, water, air, and so on.

Claude Bernard wrote: “The living body, though it has need for the surrounding environment, is nevertheless relatively independent of it. This independence which the organism has of its external environment, derives from the fact that in the living being, the tissues are in fact withdrawn from direct external influences and are protected by a veritable internal environment which is constituted, in particular, by the fluids circulating in the body.”

In other words, one has to have one’s system regularly cleansed to keep it ticking and holding the fort.

Children are especially sensitive to the environment, what with their systems struggling to evolve. Here the important thing is to keep the system clean, so the baby can grow as a healthy communal member. To this end, juvenile endoecology could be regarded as a separate pediatric trend that allows for environmental effects.

Therefore, keeping the environs clean is a major prerequisite in raising a healthy child. Here one has to consider the risks involved in the kind of air the child breathes, the kind of food and water this child consumes. The bad thing is that this child will inevitably consume endotoxins, natural poisonous substances. At an early age these toxins may have a bad effect on this child because his system is too weak to resist them. These toxins may penetrate the child’s blood system, getting there a wee bit by wee bit. However, once there, one toxin in enhanced by another. This poison is carried by blood flow, leaving these toxins in blood vessels and cellular tissues. Such ecologically stimulated diseases manifest themselves depending on the local environs and lifestyle.

Russia’s noted Academician Vlail Kaznacheev comments on the endoecological fatigue syndrome and offers the following example: “No-threshold outer ecology is when the external process reaches the organism’s innermost spheres, concentrating hundreds of new chemical factors. Each of these may be a toxin. Put together, they form a level of no-threshold decompensation. This is what we call the no-threshold ecology syndrome, which spells fatigue (chronic trauma) that alters the nosology picture, depending on the kind of disease.”

Endoecological fatigue syndrome manifests itself in all age groups, when people, especially children, suffer a misbalance between the intestinal, lung, genito-urinary, tissue bacteria; when the interaction of bacteria/virus-protozoan factors changes. All this builds man’s solid endoecological foundation which originally serves as a shield, but then turns into a monster that gnaws away at man’s inner system. One can have a clean bill of health with this monster doing his deadly job. It has been clinically established that with age the viscosity and fluidity of intracellular and intercellular plasma and blood colloids starts changing rapidly, with viscosity rising, quickening the ageing process.

Also, it has been established that thermodynamic alterations cause the cells to “inform” each other about such changes, no matter how distanced from each other, using this emission and field flows. There is an increasing genetic default in cells varying in age. Previously this phenomenon was seldom on record. Today, it can encompass over 15 percent of the cells, when the organism appears to display a normal macromolecular genetic cellular structure, where the cells show normal division (without classical genetic defects). However, implementing this genome presents certain information problems, considering the changes in the organism’s information sphere. Genetic factors can’t be implemented normally and this phenomenon causes a genetic default within the cell, rather than mutation. This genetic default is an endoecological phenomenon that becomes even more threatening in the 21st century. During 70 years of life the human organism produces and consumes some seven tons of blood and the whole cellular mass constitutes more than 20 tons. I’m talking about generative cells.

All these facts are proof that endoecological epidemics can have a variety of inner mechanisms that, by their own specifics, have to do with changes in the inner environment and breaches in cellular defense barriers. In the early 20th century, there was 70 percent acute and 30 percent chronic morbidity. This ratio reversed in the early 21st century. We are witness to the planet’s ecological balance being dramatically and quickly upset, with necrosphere, rather than noosphere, in the making.

NATION’S ECOLOGICAL DEFAULT

Ukraine’s environmental problems are part of its Soviet heritage. Here one finds a deep-reaching difference between man (society) and nature. Here the point on the agenda is how to meet the historical civilizational challenge and survive. Mankind must change for the better, return to its spiritual roots, regain individual and communal environmental consciousness. It is necessary to build an essentially new civilizational structure that will incorporate all positive humankind experiences, including Ukraine’s ethnic history.

At present, two-thirds of this planet’s population are struggling to stay alive rather than live a normal life. UN experts estimate today’s world economy efficiency at about two percent. This is our ecological default. US financial tycoons came up with the Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity). This boils down to 80 percent of the planet’s population being expendable material, from the standpoint of the world’s capital reproducibility, and that these people will cease to exist within this century.

It is true that the biggest problem is limited natural resources and uncontrollable birth rate worldwide.

Ukraine’s main environmental problems, after two decades of national independence, can be assessed by analyzing health care and life span statistics. In Ukraine, the average life span is less than 60 years, compared to 70 years in Sweden, Iceland or Switzerland.

Should the Ukrainian political leadership wage a selective policy, disregarding the people’s interests, by the year 2025 Ukraine’s population would be down to 37 million. UN forecasts read that, by mid-21st century, Ukraine will have some 26 million residents. Ukraine’s National Academy of Medical Sciences warns that the schoolchildren’s morbidity rate has increased by almost 27 percent over the past decade, that only 7 percent have a more or less clean bill of health.

Over the years of national independence, the Ukrainian political leadership hasn’t adequately considered this country’s environmental problems. A graphic example is how official Kyiv has handled the Chornobyl issue since the 1986 disaster under the Soviets. This year Ukraine marked the 25th anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster. Little has been done by way of making up for this catastrophe on the official level. The current cabinet’s attitude to the problem makes it clear that man has failed to arrive at the right conclusions in the aftermath of this 20th-century worldwide ecological catastrophe. One ought to compare what happened at Chornobyl to what then happened in Japan, to see the difference between the official and popualr approach.

The state is unable to secure safe environs these days. This is what the ecological default of a nation is all about. In fact, those currently in power cannot discharge their basic function of keeping the people safe and sound.

Dr. Mykhailo Kuryk (Ph.D. in physics, mathematics) is the director of the Institute of Human Ecology at the National Academy of Science of Ukraine