\u201cIf liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,\u201d George Orwell wrote as a preface to his novel, Animal Farm.<\/p>\n
This bit of wisdom seems like the sort of rallying cry that the founders of End Ecocide in Europe (Endecocide.eu<\/a>) would have<\/p>\n come up with, had Orwell not preempted them. And even greater efforts will be needed in the near future to stop those profiteers who care nothing about the ecologies they decimate as long as their efforts show a profit. In fact, the more these mega-polluters despoil, the faster people who care about the Earth coalesce around a common goal, becoming a voice with which to be reckoned.<\/p>\n That voice has never been louder. Starting from modest beginnings \u2013 as a subject for debate by the United Nations (UN) International Law Commission \u2013 the End Ecocide movement gained a powerful, historical voice when, in 1970, a troubled Professor Arthur Galston proposed a \u201cnew international agreement to ban Ecocide<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n Galston, the inventor of Agent Orange, had an intimate knowledge of Ecocide. His formula would ultimately be responsible for the destruction of more than 5 million acres (2 million hectares) of what had previously been lush Vietnamese forests, pasture lands and mangrove swamps.<\/p>\n Nor did the destruction stop there. In time, this crime against the natural world would also spawn misfit children in the human world \u2013 children whose deformities not only prevented them from living a full life but, in many instances, prevented them from living at all.<\/p>\n Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, co-inventor of the atomic bomb which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII, Galston might have said of his invention: \u201cNow I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.\u201d Instead, he proposed a new international agreement to ban Ecocide, which he defined as \u201cthe willful destruction of the environment\u201d.<\/p>\n![\"Ecocide\"](\"http:\/\/www.endecocide.eu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/170887154.jpg\" "\\"Ecocide\\"")
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