Soylent Scream

SOYLENT SCREAM
By Mauro Oliveira

This year the Soylent Corporation held the highest of classified meetings of its board of directors. Soylent is the world’s largest producer of packaged foods and controls the majority of the ocean’s fishing fleets as well hemispheres of farmland. THE Corporation is literally the largest conglomerate of monopolies that has for decades consumed thousands of rising companies in an insatiable quest for supreme market position and power. And with that power, comes the loyalty of the most connected politicians on Earth.

So in the 2015 ultra-secret emergency meeting, the board of directors of Soylent, each sat as alone as any human being ever could be, and read the solemn report, the most extensive of its kind, that the board had commissioned three years earlier. The report was an inch by inch study of the health of the resources Soylent used to do business. Seven oceans and six continents were scrutinized for overall viability and health. The 2015 report told the directors that their main commodity, ocean biology, which was being used to create food in the world, was now threatened beyond the scope of even the most conservative models. Simply put, the super secret research and executive summary stated one inescapable fact; the Oceans are dying rapidly.

Lawyers for the king of the mega-giants quickly argued and persuaded the resulting catatonic directors that news of the findings must not ever reach the public for the chaos that would ensue would be unmanageable even for the most oppressive governments. And of course it would tragically hurt “the bottom line”.

So a lot of you right now know that I’m referring to the movie “Soylent Green”, a 1972 film starring Charlton Heston, a raw street cop in New York City. However, the movie takes place in 2022, not 2015 as I painted above. In 2022 the City of New York is beleaguered in alleys crammed with the homeless and corporate control of almost every aspect of daily living, which for the 99.99% it is portrayed, Life is just a step above death.

Water and food are extremely scarce and expensive. The masses spend emotionally charged hours waiting in line for weekly food supplies by the Soylent Corporation (Ahem… Monsanto, Nestle, DOW, etc.) in pre-packaged cracker-like meals called Soylent Yellow, Soylent Brown and others. Food riots break-out frequently and the state comes down hard with mechanized riot control and the good ole jack-boot cop. And the whole of the outdoors scenes are wrapped in a toxic yellow smog.

So Heston investigates the murder of a Soylent director, who basically had too much ability to care and had become “unreliable”. The director himself agrees that he should be murdered; the kind of statement one might expect eavesdropping on a Merck Pharmaceutical meeting led by Donald Rumsfeld. The “known knowns”.

During the shake down of the director’s wealthy condominium (the murder-crime scene), Heston confiscates what his father and police researcher (Edward G. Robinson) later discovers is the Soylent 2022 Annual Stockholders Report. The report has the grave news that the oceans are dead and Soylent must now feed humanity with dead humans and so Soylent Green is “born” (twisted pun).

SO why did I start this article, and my story, in 2015? Well first, we all have seen how Hollywood has painted and predicted scenarios that years later became eerily and sometimes even suspiciously true. Soylent Green is one of those movies in many ways, especially with slum-like precincts of New York which remind me of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or the Barrios in many African cities. The riot scene could be any major city in the United States…certainly Boston, the WTA in Seattle or Occupy Oakland. But I didn’t grab your attention over these matters. I would like you to focus on the 2015 and 2022 state of the Oceans.

My coffin-nail point is this: if in the year 2022, Soylent is told the Ocean is dead, then earlier, say 5-10 years earlier, Soylent’s unlimited financial power would have generated a report that told the Worlds most powerful men, that the oceans WERE DYING. That research and report would have been generated, say, around 2015. By using today’s state of the ocean knowledge as the basis for the Soylent 2015 report warning of a failing ocean that forewarned the Soylent 2022 report of the oceans demise, we can make a comparison that I believe is worth noting and taking seriously.

So I present a partial, REAL WORLD analysis, of the health of the “Soylent commodities” in 2015, as reported to all of us by the experts and the 15 nano-seconds of media fame that most of this news receives.

Now I am no newcomer to this subject; 25 years ago I began to research species populations and extinction in the world. Somewhere around 30-32 years before Soylent Green’s infamous 2022 Dead Ocean report, I had read a statement by Jacques Cousteau where he said he believed we only had 10 years to reverse the course of civilization (pollution, overpopulation, over-fishing etc.) or face catastrophic collapses of our oceans. His calculations would have put the beginning of the end around 2000-2002. Maybe even in 2001, when we were all so busy being the kind of species that would watch a parlor trick and MISS that the oceans had begun to seriously die.

The Soylent 2015 report might have even mentioned Cousteau’s warning in the work’s introduction or prologue. Also mentioned there might be Bill Clinton, who ironically, in 2000, had signed the Oceans Act. He had formed the Coral Reef Task force, which failed miserably…or worse, to warn the American people what MUST have been in plain site. As reported in mainstream media, science today tells us that 92% of the Coral on Earth is going to be extinct or nearly extinct by 2030-35.

In the signing speech, Clinton praised the work that had been done in National ocean management for nearly thirty years, following the Stratton Oceans report in the 1970s when Soylent Green was filmed. Clinton’s praises were morally misguided and dishonest, as our Oceans had only steadily accelerated in decline. As the world wildlife fund recently reported to us, basically since the Stratton report, over 50% of the Life on planet Earth has died. NOT species, but the populations of those species. I am 54 years old, so less than ½ of life on Earth remains since I was ten. When my children reach my age there will be much less than ½ of that ½. The problem even with that equation is that all this is exponential and predictions 100 years from now show up tomorrow. Like the arctic ice melt did. Like global warming did. Like the extinction rate did.

All of these real-world horrors would have been mentioned in the Soylent Corporation’s 2015 report in lock-step with the Soylent 2022 dead ocean report timeline.

Obliterations of species have been accelerating since the dawn of the industrial revolution but by this year, the year of my fictitious, yet realistic Soylent 2015 report, extinctions are clearly exponential. Some of the notables of late were the magnificently intelligent Yangtze River Dolphin, known as the Baiji, which was last seen in 2006.

Down to just 92 individuals, science has declared that the Baja Porpoise, known as "Vaquita", will be extinct by 2018. Yet another rare dwarf dolphin found off New Zealand is said to have less than 40 males alive.

An entire continental shelf of starfish died of the north American west coast in 2013. With the starfish were near complete losses of oyster and other mussel grounds and there has been an explosion of death in the whales, sea lions, dolphins, manatee, sardines, jack mackerel and hundreds of if not thousands of other life forms.

And its just as horrific on land. Under 24 hour armed guard, “Sudan”, the last male Northern White Rhino in the world, has not successfully mated with any of the three remaining females. A separate species, The Western Black Rhino went extinct two years ago this coming October. Thousands of species the world over are rapidly reaching their ends that historically happened with hundreds, if not thousands of years between extinctions. Even the majestic elephant is being poached every 15 minutes and researchers warn they may be extinct in the wild in just five years! The giraffe’s populations, by expert calculations, are modeled to be extinct just five years later.

Terrestrial milestone events taking place since the turn of this century are the collapses of bee, bat and butterfly populations. Amphibians and reptiles are down as much as 50% since 1999. These are all grim losses that so clearly highlight how fast the web of life can unravel. When it comes to killing Life on planet Earth, sometime, somewhere, we already HAVE gone over the falls. It is not just possible that humanity will fulfill Soylent Green’s script; it is probable.

The amount of plastic reaching the ocean each day, JUST from Los Angeles, is over 10 metric tons—like grocery bags, straws, soda and water bottles—carried into the Pacific Ocean. Globally, humans allow nearly 10 million metric tons of plastic to enter the ocean every year. (On average each year, every “American” contributes about 185 pounds of plastic to that figure; enough plastic EACH YEAR to circle the world 4 times)

Since the creation of plastics about 100 years ago, it has been breaking down in sunlight, saltwater, rain and air and it never ends, never goes away. Today nano-plastic and disintegrating plastic elements can be found in any sample of ocean ANYWHERE. As it breaks down, plastic gets forever tinier. Fish, whales, dolphins, sea lions, turtles and other marine life ingest plastic along with sea birds. Quite literally, the entire ocean has been shown to be eating plastic. And as one of man’s greatest toxins, plastic is killing Life on Earth as it travels up the food chain.

The 2015 Soylent report would have included the findings of the National Academy of Sciences, who found that 90% of seabirds had plastic in their guts. That figure had risen from about 30% just a few years earlier and the increase was accelerating.

To top the bad news, the Soylent report authors would have highlighted one especially grim fact; that recently, in 2015, science recorded and confirmed the worst. Plankton, the foundation of the World’s Food Chain, AND CORAL, are ingesting plastic elements and micro-beads. It clogs, weakens and kills them. This revelation is punctuated by the fact that plankton populations have declined already by nearly 50% in 50 years. The realities and repercussions of this are going to come crashing down on us far worse than Fukushima did. If that’s possible.

As if it written in the script of Soylent Green, The Fukushima facts are an UNFOLDING sur-reality of nails, one after the other, in the coffin of the Pacific. But radiation doesn’t stop there, the atmosphere and soils the world over, not to mention EVERYTHING ALIVE, is bombarded with deadly radiation that apparently, tragically, is not going to stop. The next, and possibly last generation, will likely be forced underground in something like a final fallback.

The 2015 Soylent report would no doubt have much more accurate information about what Fukushima is doing to Life on Earth than most any citizen anywhere, as media and governments so successfully buried investigations, monitoring and TEPCO’s ongoing handling of the mega-catastrophe. But what Soylent AND the public DID KNOW was that Radiation from Fukushima had shown up in all tuna samples off the west coast of the United States in 2012 and today seaweed all along the pacific rim is tainted with fukushima’s trademark- radioactive cesium. Mysterious die offs and disappearances of entire fish populations, sea lions, mussel beds and as this article is being written…whales, is plaguing the pacific. And Soylent, like the public, would also know that Fukushima isn’t going to end for decades, if not hundreds of years. The end of Fukushima’s radiation may be long after the end of humanity.

Soylent’s 2015 report would include the Starfish that were nearly wiped out in North America’s west coast and a large part of the east coast in a mysterious die off in 2013. Nearly 1/3rd of Florida’s manatees were wiped out in the same year along with thousands of dead dolphins in mysterious die-offs all over the world. Going into that year, the southern pacific Jack Mackerel stocks had fallen from 30 million metric tons to just 3 in just twenty years.

Soylent no doubt would have procured the eight-country investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists focused on the fishing industry. The 2013 conclusion was that what had happened to the southern Pacific Jack Mackerel was a clear foretelling of bigger and faster collapses of fish stocks in all the world’s oceans.

Another interesting layer of Soylent Green is a Catholic Priest and his church that are interwoven into the plot but in a way that presents the Religious as helpless and the church as leaderless. Perhaps this part of story is because in the Roman Catholic King James Version of the Bible, there are clear references to the devastation upon the lands and in the oceans in what is known as “The Tribulation”, or “End Times”, which is the logical point in history that the original Soylent Green movie takes place.

Theologians tell us that in the Book of Revelations the exact time in history when the tribulation “End Times” is to take place is not known but the duration of the devastation IS known and that is seven years. In this last apocalyptic book of the Bible, chapter 8:9 reads that 1/3 of the Creatures on land and in the Sea will die in that time. In Revelation 16:3 however, the Bible states that ALL life in the Sea will die.

I hesitate to spend too many words quoting the Bible when science itself is CLEARLY pointing to the same path, the same destiny. And there are other places in the world to look for confirmation. Hopi and other Native American Prophecy speak of a great cleansing of Life, the closing of the old world and the difficult times of transition into the new. The lore says that mankind has gone thru times of great cleansing before and that people today are the decedents of the survivors of those cataclysms.

If there is one thing I have learned that we can count on, that is that human civilization, especially governments, cannot see the big picture. Why? Because government can only be counted on to serve the rich and powerful, who are the most to blame for the destruction of our environment, for the profits of that destruction is in their pockets.

We are now so clearly headed into the next cleansing, purification, “End Times” and “Tribulation”. IF we are to have a portion of humanity survive THAT, then something unique to our history must happen. Humans must act as if our survival is threatened and humans must act to survive. Especially WOMEN and the youth of the world, need to rebel. Not one more sheet or piece of plastic can come off a production line. Oil must no longer burn, mechanized farming must stop, all forms of logging, mining, fishing…. ALL OF IT, must now halt. Banks and money are useless now and sheer resistance to MANKIND must hold the line until the ultra-elite and their militaries are worn down from the upcoming massacre of many of us good people, that is sure to take place……BEFORE WE…. the Human Being, have our moment…. the one we have been waiting for. Our evolution is at hand. AND SO is our extinction.

For the record, Soylent Green does not end well and in fact the entire human race’s future is left in a very uncomfortable uncertainty. Just like now.

Mauro Martins de Oliveira is the Founder and Executive Director of SOL Communications, Inc, a non-profit organization that umbrellas direct action and education projects. He has been arrested 4 times in the last two years during non-violent civil disobedience related to the XL-pipeline, tar sands and the US drone assassination program. He has been recognized by the Clinton White House and the United Nations for his contributions to their humanitarian projects. Recently he was the only male speaker/presenter at the West Coast Eco-Feminist Conference.