"Lost" by Crippled Black Phoenix
Vegan music video shows human the abyss
The music video that comes with the Crippled Black Phoenix song "Lost" is a statement for all human-caused suffering – put together in eight minutes.
This post about a special music video that impressed us both very much was contributed to the blog by Matze. Please allow me to give you a precise reading recommendation and don't forget to check out the video!
Most vegans know films like "Earthlings", "Cowspiracy", and "The End of Meat". They all powerfully illustrate the global consequences of our actions, especially our diet. In the meantime, they have convinced many viewers of veganism and the good cause.
The British-Swedish rock band Crippled Black Phoenix has previously released a very similar statement in compact form: The music video for their song "Lost" shows strong, documentary-like images of the impact that human actions have on earth - on nature, animals, but also humans themselves. The artists made the clip in cooperation with the Portuguese director Guilherme Henriques. Some of the band members are also vegans and have repeatedly released songs with political statements.
What's behind the images of Crippled Black Phoenix's music video "Lost "?
The video is a definite must-see. This article is an urgent plea to watch it. Let it sink in, and then share it on the internet. When I first watched it, it affected me a lot. The images echoed in my mind for a long time.
Martin Luther King once said, "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity". The video starts with a very similar phrase: "The dangerous nature of an ignorant mind. The final fall of mankind".
Images of relentless poverty in the Third World, homeless people in America, racist attacks, the explosion in Beirut, devastating storms and floods, and the repetitive tortures we inflict on animals so we can bite into our unhealthy burgers show that ignorance is not only dangerous but will eventually lead to the fall of mankind. We are exterminating ourselves through our reckless behaviour.
Apocalypse in the Making
But what exactly is behind all this? Not everyone is bad, right?
The biggest problem is several vicious circles that are very difficult to escape from. Everything we do has global effects, and only global counter-effects can stop it.
It starts with the exponential growth of population. Humans have only themselves as opponents to keep the development of their population at a normal level that is in balance with nature.
We passed the billion mark of human population in 1804. The second billion has been exceeded only 123 years later, in the year 1927. Still, at the time of the oil crisis in the seventies, only four billion people lived on earth. We are currently on the verge of breaking the eight billion mark. In 2050, ten billion people will be living on earth. Each of them will need water, food and a place to live in dignity.
Vicious circle of progress
The first vicious circle is technological progress, which makes the land more fertile and increases the ability to feed more people. This, in turn, produces more intelligent minds: ten times as many as in the 19th century, which make ten times more technological progress.
With the progress of technology, we created more wealth and with it, in addition to population growth, and increased per capita demand for resources. This demand is always met through exploitation - either the exploitation of available sources and raw materials or the exploitation of other people.
industrialisation as a symptom
Industrialisation is widely seen as the engine of prosperity. In reality, industrialisation, and further on digitisation, are only a symptom. The real engine behind everything is free-market thinking in other words: money.
Capital, or wealth, is distributed very unevenly around the world. The top tenth of the population owns 85.2 percent of the money (66.6 percent in Germany). By contrast, the bottom half, the poorest, hold just one percent (1.4 percent in Germany). According to Oxfam, the 85 single wealthiest people own as much as the poorest 3.9 billion. That's the bottom half.
Capital is used to produce and improve wealth - but usually only when it pays off, that is, when it yields more than is invested. A course of growth and profit is set.
The greed for more
Money makes goods comparable and creates competition and markets situations, where the players heat up each other permanently. Without taking a break, This happens when markets are allowed to expand unregulated mostly.
This greed (or compulsive greed) is inherent in the system for more causes suffering: More people, more demand, more sales, more capital, better optimisation opportunities, more profit, more investment, greater resource consumption.
You can see the effects of this second vicious circle in the video of Crippled Black Phoenix. The balance of power is determined by money and thus provides the rich with more and more of everything and the poor with less and less - whether it's on a national level or globally. The global effect is also intensified by the fact that every step of refinement during the production chain makes the product more expensive by the same market rules. So the resource-rich countries in Africa and South America, that are at the beginning of the chain get the smallest piece of the cake. They have no choice but to squeeze and exploit their land and their people.
Inequalities in the system
It is not Bolsonaro who has let the rainforest burn, but the people who eat their beef steak for dinner, previously fed with Brazilian soy. Every electric car, no matter how green it is in principle, also contains a bit of red from the blood that was spilt for its raw material extraction. And even in the industrialised countries themselves, housing is becoming more and more unaffordable, and crises like the Corona pandemic reveal, the inequalities in the world's health care systems as if seen through a magnifying glass - creating even more significant disadvantages for the poor.
There are concepts to counteract. But if these are not promoted by artificial (i. e. political) measures, they cannot prevail against the efficiency of the existing processes of exploitation and profit. Where the money sits, so does the influence. An industry - once it is functioning efficiently - does not change quickly. The lignite phase-out and the reform of the auto industry are just two fatal examples from our society here.
"But we're not lost yet," some will think to themselves. After all, there are already promising approaches.
Unfortunately, however, a giant wave is still ahead of us - the climate crisis. Put simply; global warming is caused by the exploitation above of the earth's resources. This has been proven. Hundreds of thousands of studies show this.
Climate and Greenhouse Effect
Human emissions are responsible for 2.2 W/m² of energy increase, whereas the second most potent effect, the influence of the sun, is only at 0.1 W/m². The result is a rise in the average temperature on earth of 0.2 degrees per decade with an upward trend. We cannot even say that we did not know about it for a long time. Christoph Fourier already described the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere in 1824. In 1896, Guy Stewart Callendar predicted global warming caused by human-emitted CO₂.
But our free-market system has no means to respond to such abstract effects. So we did nothing.
If 0.2 degrees of warming sounds little, or even pleasant to some, then we should probably visualise the effects of it more concretely. Most of the implications are already noticeable today. Here in this country, for example, water shortages can be expected in many regions during the summer months. Drought has also led to more and more forest fires in recent years.
Forest fires and melting poles
In Germany, forests are currently the most affected ecosystems. Vegetation designed for effective timber production by spruces and pines cannot cope with the already elevated temperatures and is dying. We have to reforest and use tree types that used to grow in warmer areas. That takes decades. Viticulture, by the way, started something similar decades ago and has long since been using other grape varieties on existing slopes.
Internationally, the consequences are already far more severe. Everyone has seen pictures of melting poles and the increasingly intense and frequent Caribbean hurricanes. However, the Sahara and Sahel zones in Africa are most affected. It is expected that by 2050, large parts of many African countries will be uninhabitable. Climate refugees will flow north en masse outnumbering the Syrian refugee wave of 2015 by several orders of magnitude. And Europe will want to protect its borders.
The danger of tipping points
Finally, there are some unknowns in the climate models, so-called tipping points, which trigger when certain warming levels are reached and further accelerate the greenhouse effect by leaps and bounds. For example, if the Siberian permafrost thaws, large amounts of the highly active greenhouse gas methane are released. The warming of the water changes the dynamics of oceanic movement, and climate-critical effects such as the gulf stream break off. Melting of the polar ice caps leads to more absorption of the sun rays and further heating of the earth, the so-called ice-albedo feedback. A final example is the increased water evaporation at the surface of the oceans. It leads to more water vapour in the atmosphere (water vapour feedback). Steam is the gas with the highest contribution to the greenhouse effect, even ahead of CO₂.
Although the climate crisis will be the defining catastrophe of the next 100 years, there are, as you can see, numerous other symptoms of our ailing society. Unless we change some things fundamentally and systematically, we will not find the means to stop the train that is heading straight towards the abyss.
A significant change of direction is needed to stop the impending doom. Humankind can do it. It has developed a system that has brought us so much progress and prosperity. It can also bend it in a direction that masters both - taking care of the environment, animals and the poor on the one hand while improving the quality of life, driving science to new discoveries, or letting humans colonise another planet on the other hand. But for that to happen, a lot has to change around the world in the next 30 years. We haven't even started yet.