Only when the last tree has died, the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.
Cree Proverb
It is no longer just a single man - King Midas - whose greed turns everything he touches into gold. Instead, our societal relationship with nature, and with it the relationship of almost all individuals to nature, has long since been constructed in such a way that even the furthest reaches of nature bear a price tag if they are not completely destroyed.
Pre-industrial forms of agriculture are characterised by a diverse, small-scale use of land: meadows for forage production are interspersed with cropland and areas for fruit and vegetable cultivation. Even parallel land usage, such as orchards that are also used as grazing pastures, is widespread. This is a prerequisite for biodiversity, as wild plants and animals are able to find enough food year-round. However, with the advent of industrialised agriculture, these small paradises on earth are quickly disappearing. Instead of deserts composed of sand and boulders, Midas, the
Societal King of Destruction
creates monoculture, which uses pesticides to transform entire regions into deserts in which nothing but wheat, corn and sugar beet can survive. Therefore, it should not be surprising that city beekeepers now have a greater variety of flowers in their honeys than beekeepers in the countryside.
"Football is our life. King Football rules the world. We fight and give everything - until one goal after the other is scored." - In 1974 it was just a popular song in Germany, but it is becoming more and more a reality. Passive football watching is installed as absolutist
Midas, the Societal King of Destruction
: seven days a week it flickers on the screens, while fewer and fewer people play football themselves or support their small local clubs. At the same time, other sports are being marginalized, as is any other social activity. For example, a well-accepted, well-maintained and award-winning urban gardening project in Berlin-Wedding has to give way to yet another football academy for up-and-coming talents.
When oil was discovered at the beginning of the 21st century underneath Yasuní National Park in Ecuador, the Ecuadorian government proposed that the global community should pay 50% of the expected revenue from oil production. In return, Ecuador would not exploit the resource and thus protect the particularly biodiverse national park. The initiative Yasuní-ITT failed, in part due to Germany’s withdrawal from the project, and Ecuador has now gone ahead and approved oil production. Like
Midas, the Societal King of Destruction
, we choose to go for gold and overlook the preservation and protection of the last places that we have not yet completely subjugated.
More than half of Berlin’s 1.5 million apartments were destroyed during the Second World War. What remained was 75 million cubic meters of rubble, enough for 22 rubble mountains. The Teufelsberg [devil’s mountain] is one of them, and was for a long time the highest elevation in Berlin. The Arkenberge replaced it in 2015, because even without war as a cause, huge amounts of rubble accumulate annually as
Midas, the Societal King of Destruction
reduced the economic life of buildings to about 50 years. Therefore, there is no reason to allow for the technological life of the buildings to be much longer. On the contrary, the average lifespan of buildings are often less than 10 years.