WOW!! Thank you for this, Oliver Kornetzke!! So well articulated, expansive in scope and awareness, and wisely connecting the dots that are essential, absolutely essential!, for us to know, absorb, and act upon out of the consciousness of a higher good for all of life on this beautiful hurting planet Earth that is our home. — Molly
What Truly Upsets Me...
What truly upsets me is not only the immense and needless human suffering that the pursuit of oil has already caused—and will continue to cause—at the hands of a small minority of greedy, cynical, short-sighted parasitic human beings—mostly men. It is also the catastrophic environmental damage and irreversible loss of biodiversity that an illegal war for oil against Venezuela would inflict. Human suffering is tragic and immediate; ecological destruction is often quieter, slower, and often ignored—but it is just as devastating, and far more permanent.
Venezuela sits at one of the most ecologically important crossroads on Earth. It lies at the northern edge of South America, where the Amazon Basin, the Andes, the Orinoco River system, Caribbean coastal ecosystems, and vast tropical rainforests converge. Although these systems are most often described as functioning like a single organ—such as “the lungs of the planet”—they are more accurately understood as a planetary-scale regulatory system, a biological engine that moderates climate, redistributes energy, and sustains life far beyond its borders.
Forests in this region slow the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere by locking it into wood, roots, and soils over long periods of time. Just as importantly, they operate as a massive water-recycling system. Trees pull water from the ground and release it into the air as water vapor, forming vast plumes of moisture that rise into the atmosphere. These moisture flows are carried by prevailing wind patterns and jet streams, seeding rainfall across much of South America and extending into Central America, the Caribbean, and parts of North America. When these forests are degraded, this atmospheric moisture supply weakens, leading to drier conditions and more extreme weather far from the source.
The Orinoco River and its tributaries amplify this global influence. The river delivers enormous quantities of freshwater and nutrients into the Atlantic, altering ocean salinity and surface temperatures. These changes affect regional ocean currents, which in turn influence weather systems, hurricane formation, and rainfall patterns across the Caribbean and the eastern seaboard of North America. River outflows also fertilize marine ecosystems, supporting fisheries that sustain millions of people far beyond Venezuela’s borders.
Together, land, air, and water systems in this region act as a stabilizing force within Earth’s climate. They help regulate heat distribution between the tropics and higher latitudes, dampen temperature extremes, and reduce the intensity of droughts and floods. Disrupting this system does not produce isolated damage—it sends cascading effects through atmospheric circulation and ocean dynamics, altering weather patterns, water availability, and food security across large portions of the globe.
The biodiversity of Venezuela and its surrounding regions is beyond staggering. A single hectare of tropical rainforest can contain hundreds of tree species, thousands of insect species, and vast communities of fungi, bacteria, and microorganisms—often more biological diversity than exists across entire temperate countries. What makes this diversity so valuable is not just the number of species, but the depth of specialization among them. Each species represents a unique solution to problems life has been refining for hundreds of millions of years: how to resist pathogens, how to regulate internal body chemistry and temperature, how to detoxify poisons, how to store energy, how to survive drought, flooding, nutrient scarcity, and other extremes.
These solutions are encoded in biological structures, enzymes, and chemical compounds that humans cannot fathom alone nor invent from scratch. Many modern medicines already originate from rainforest organisms—antibiotics derived from fungi and bacteria, cancer treatments based on plant alkaloids, antivirals inspired by microbial defense mechanisms. Beyond medicine, biological systems have informed advances in materials science, engineering, and energy efficiency, from water-repellent surfaces to lightweight structural designs. Countless species in these ecosystems have never been studied at all. When an ecosystem is destroyed, these possibilities do not merely diminish—they disappear permanently, often before science even knows they existed. This is not simply an environmental loss; it is the irreversible erasure of biological knowledge, innovation potential, and future human resilience.
Oil extraction and war always magnify destruction. Infrastructure such as pipelines and access roads slices continuous forests into isolated fragments, breaking ecological connectivity. Once fragmented, populations become smaller, more vulnerable to disease, and less genetically diverse, accelerating extinction even without direct clearing. Roads open previously inaccessible regions to logging, mining, and poaching, triggering cascading waves of exploitation that extend far beyond the original disturbance. Oil spills introduce toxic hydrocarbons into soils and rivers, poisoning fish, amphibians, insects, and the microbial communities that form the foundation of aquatic food webs. These toxins bioaccumulate, moving up the food chain and ultimately affecting human populations that depend on these waters for their food and drinking supply.
Unlike human infrastructure, ecosystems cannot simply be rebuilt once destroyed. A rainforest is not merely a collection of trees; it is a finely layered system composed of soils, root networks, fungi, insects, plants, animals, and climate interactions that evolved together over immense timescales. Soil itself is a living system, built slowly through the accumulation of organic matter and microbial activity. When forest cover is removed, soils often erode or chemically degrade, making regrowth increasingly difficult or impossible. Once these feedback systems collapse, the environment can shift into a fundamentally different and far less productive state.
Life on Earth took approximately 3.8 billion years to reach its present level of complexity. Multicellular organisms required hundreds of millions of years to evolve, diversify, and stabilize. Tropical rainforests emerged over tens of millions of years under relatively stable climatic conditions, shaped by continental drift, long-term rainfall patterns, and evolutionary competition among species. Rivers carve landscapes over geological time, creating floodplains, deltas, and wetlands that coevolve with the organisms living within them. When such systems are destroyed in decades—or in some cases, days—they cannot be meaningfully recreated within any human or technological timeframe. No technology, no artificial intelligence, and no amount of money can replace an ecosystem assembled through deep time. Once lost, it is gone not just for generations, but for the foreseeable future of life on Earth. In short, gone forever.
I understand that oil is embedded in modern society—from fuels to synthetic fibers to plastics. But none of these are prerequisites for existence. Humanity lived for tens of thousands of years without oil extraction, and civilization flourished long before fossil fuel dependence. To argue that oil is indispensable is to confuse modern convenience with absolute necessity. What is truly indispensable is a stable climate, clean water, fertile soil, and diverse living natural ecosystems. Once those are gone, no level of technological sophistication can ever compensate.
We exist on one small planet orbiting an ordinary star in an unremarkable corner of a vast universe. Earth is not a grand cosmic centerpiece; it is a thin, fragile layer of life clinging to the surface of a rock, suspended in an infinite cosmic expanse that is overwhelmingly empty and hostile. Every breath we take, every drop of water we drink, every ecosystem that feeds and stabilizes us exists within this narrow margin where physics and chemistry happen to allow life at all. As far as we know, this is the only place in the universe where that has ever occurred.
Even if life exists elsewhere—and we do not yet know that it does—it is separated from us by distances so vast that they are effectively meaningless to human survival. There is no refuge beyond this planet, no escape route, no second Earth waiting in reserve. There is no backup system. Everything humanity has ever known—every culture, language, work of art, scientific discovery, and human relationship—exists entirely here. Once this environment is destabilized beyond recovery, there is nowhere else to go.
Despite this reality, we humans are actively dismantling the only life-support system we will ever have. We are trading long-term planetary stability for short-term profit, exhausting ecosystems that took millions of years to form in exchange for decades of material excess. This destruction is not accidental, and it is not evenly shared. It is driven largely by a small number of powerful actors whose wealth insulates them from the immediate consequences, even as those consequences are pushed onto future generations and the world’s most vulnerable populations. This is ecological suicide—and societal suicide—rebranded as economic necessity and sold as inevitability. But it is not inevitable. It is a choice. Our collective choice.
We must find every possible way—not merely as Americans, but as human beings—to stop the needless destruction of both human life and the natural world in the pursuit of oil and wealth. Any rational advanced species with even a minimal instinct for self-preservation would recognize that destroying the systems that sustain it is pure madness. Stewardship is not an abstract moral ideal or a luxury for prosperous times; it is a practical and essential requirement for survival. To protect biodiversity, forests, rivers, oceans, and climate systems is not to sacrifice human progress—it is to make our progress possible at all.
We were never meant to grind this planet down to exhaustion. We were meant to learn how it works, to recognize the limits that make life possible, and to protect the delicate balance that allows those limits to hold. Every stable climate, every fertile river basin, every forest and reef that still stands is not an obstacle to human progress—it is the precondition for any future worth having.
The question before us is not whether we have the intelligence or the technology to change course. We already do. We understand how ecosystems collapse, how climate systems destabilize, and how quickly damage becomes irreversible once critical thresholds are crossed. We know what must be protected, and we know what must be phased out. What we lack is not knowledge, but the collective will to act before delay becomes denial and denial becomes collapse and death.
This is the defining test of our species. Not whether we can extract more, consume faster, or grow wealthier for a brief moment in time, but whether we can stop ourselves before it is too late. Whether we can look clearly at the consequences of our actions and choose restraint over greed, cooperation over short-term profit, and life over destruction with inertia. This is a desperate plea to end the madness—not tomorrow, not after one more quarter of economic growth, but now—while precious forests still stand, rivers still flow, and the systems that sustain all of us can still be repaired.
This plea is not radical. It is not new. It is not secular, partisan, or ideological. The call to understand the world, respect its limits, and care for it is a core tenet of every moral framework worth subscribing to.
In Christianity, humanity is called to stewardship—to “tend and keep” creation, not to exhaust it. Creation is described as good, deliberate, and entrusted, not disposable. In Judaism, the principle of bal tashchit explicitly forbids needless destruction, extending moral responsibility not just to people but to land, trees, and resources. In Islam, humans are described as khalifa—guardians or trustees of the Earth—accountable for how they protect balance—mizan and avoid corruption—fasad. In Hindu and Buddhist traditions, the natural world is inseparable from moral action; harm to ecosystems is harm to the interconnected web of life, and restraint is a virtue essential to wisdom. Indigenous moral systems across the world—from the Americas to Africa to Australia—center responsibility to future generations, often measured in centuries, and definitely not quarterly profits.
Even outside religion, the same principle holds. Enlightenment humanism, secular ethics, systems theory, and environmental philosophy all converge on the same conclusion: complex systems must be understood and respected to endure. Stoicism teaches restraint and harmony with nature. Utilitarian ethics recognizes that destroying the foundations of life maximizes suffering. Scientific realism makes the point unavoidable—physical limits are not beliefs, and ignoring them carries consequences regardless of ideology.
To care for our shared home is not in conflict with faith, reason, or morality. It is foundational to all of them. Any creator worthy of the name would want care for what was created. Any moral system that values life, continuity, and responsibility demands it. To argue otherwise is not conviction—it is contradiction: a rejection of the very teachings, principles, and values so often claimed in word but abandoned in action.
Preserving the only home we will ever know is not an act of idealism or sacrifice. It is the most practical, urgent, and universally grounded responsibility we share. If we cannot unite around this—across religions, philosophies, and cultures—then the failure is not one of belief systems, but of our willingness to live by them.
I refuse a war in Venezuela—no more blood, no more lies, no more ecosystems sacrificed on the altar of oil and profit.
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