Money Over Morality: Being Righteous For The Wrong Reasons

They say money is what makes the world go round but yet, in true fact, money is what tears the world apart. Many people have imagined a world without it but obviously our global system could not realistically run; however, the way money is treated on global scales is what is really crumbling the Earth. The world military expenditure grows every year while the disbursement of funds on poverty and world famine shrinks rapidly. As the fish are drowning in a plastic ocean and the trees are dropping like flies, money always takes priority. Although all this chaos is surrounding us, we still manage to turn the other way, we’ll only appreciate what we have when they’re gone and by then it will be too late. Every faith and religion has one basic message and they are all summed up as “Regard the Earth as a human body” and us people must act like the organs, working interdependently to save our home instead of being comatose and seeking out to destroy it for our temporary benefit.

The Amazon Rainforest, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, situated in northwestern Brazil, is commonly referred to as “The lungs of the Earth” and for good reason; The Rainforest itself is the provider of twenty percent of the worlds whole oxygen supply. Despite this, the Amazon is losing the equivalent of nearly one million football fields per year and roughly seventeen percent of the forest has been destroyed over the past fifty years and at this rate, you could see them vanish altogether in your lifetime. All of this, all of this destruction is all for one eventual reason, money. It is our responsibility as a human race to keep our home a safe, clean and thriving environment, our main objective in life must not be to strive for a worthless-valuable item. Money means power yet it is always a weakness. As the Amazon burned continually, Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian president, did not merely permit the fires but had encouraged and fueled them. Deforestation is Bolsonaro’s objective by tree logging or simply burning huge masses of the rainforest that the Brazilian government wants to make use of. Bolsonaro is ready to wipe out millions of species, destroy one of the Earth’s most valuable treasures and dislocate the unknown tribes that live there. This is a reasonable sacrifice for Bolsonaro as he is ready to abolish his country's or rather one of the worlds most treasured wonders in order to gain money. The rainforest provides oxygen for the whole planet, it trapps carbon dioxide for the whole planet and is the most important ecosystem in the whole planet and all of this is done for free. Brazil does not profit by this, therefore Bolsonaro takes advantage of the resources that the rainforest provides. He ignored illegal logging and encouraged setting huge areas of the rainforest on fire just because of the potential-destructive money there is to be gained.

Another fire crisis that flooded the media was the Notre Dame fire back in April of this year. The cause of dreadful fire is yet unknown but it received an enormous global reaction since day one. Regular people and billionaires have donated a minimum of seven hundred and fifty million euros in the ten days after the disaster. These figures have been mentioned to be far higher than the actual cost of the repairs of the collapsed spire and the roof of the church. Although the great generosity of the donors was in good intention, many argue that the multi-millions spent on repairs could have been spent elsewhere. The money spent on one building is much higher than the cost to clean the ocean for one year, at a cost of five thousand to twenty thousand dollars per day, it would cost between one hundred and twenty two million and four hundred and eighty million for a year. Granted this seems a lot and these figures do not even include equipment, labour or disposal costs; but we must understand that this is our fault and our responsibility to correct it. When people seem to care so much about a church, why shouldn’t they care for seventy one percent of the Earth?

Every year, the world military expenditure rises while more important issues such as money spent in order to prevent world famine decreases. In 2018, the world military expenditure rose to 1.8 trillion dollars. This is almost a three percent increase from 2018 according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The data states that the United States, China, India and France were the biggest spenders and together contributed to sixty percent of the globes military spending that year. This excessive spending is due to the fear and hatred countries have towards each other, the thought that the number of bombs and weapons a country has, equals some sort of protection. This waste of funding could be used to solve problems like famine and poverty. Instead of money being spent out of cowardness and hatred, it could be spent on the improvement of people's lives. The United Nations stated that it would cost roughly thirty billion dollars per year to end world hunger, now this amount does not sound like much when you compare it to the six-hundred and sixty billion dollars the United States spends on defence per year. Weapons of mass destruction are apparently more important than the wellbeing of the human race; the abolishment of our planet is more important than the improvement of the Earth.

We must understand that our endangered planet will not self-heal and by making the correct decisions, there is still an opportunity to fix it. Whether it comes to saving the rainforests of the earth, focusing the world's money on more important matters such as helping others less fortunate or adjusting the trillions spent on weapons of destruction. The money that is used to make bombs around the globe can easily change the world in a beneficial way. Countries of the globe have stop drifting away from each other instead of uniting, the people of the world must accept that our planet is not a shooting range and that the money we make does not determine our value.