This money was made, was it really made, or was it merely aggregated as fees had from other holders of money? Let’s be generous and say some of it has truly been ‘wealth-creation’, which to define might be to say that a greater sum total of money value is now in existence than was the case before Ryanair had provided the services of which this money is the palpable profit for them having provided. And the sum total of the charges asked by Ryanair for those services which Ryanair provided so as to make this profit, on its own cannot account fully for the size of this profit.

I’m not sure whether this descriptionof ‘wealth creation’ is sound enough to hold up to scrutiny; but maybe we can use it as an attempt to explain how wealth creation via adding to the sum of monetary value somehow occurs in the course of the workings of thriving economic activity.

The case remains however that this profit of Ryanair’s is an indirect translation of resources mostly found in and mined out of the earth, by means of human and mechanical labour, a translation of these into monetary value. These items mined out of the earth include all their aeroplanes, and buildings, runways, hangars, tools, workshops, lots and lots and lots of things, right down to the clothing and footwear of their aircrews.

Of course there has been an enormous amount of processing done as labour to get aluminium ores to aeroplanes, and buildings and runways from stone and mineral quarries. But everything processed by labour represents creating money value, from and out of the foundational mining and harvesting, and through the test runs and safety checks, and then at the last out of the flights themselves.

All of this processing by labour entails along with a creation of wealth a creation of multitudes of waste product. Simply seen we might look at just the fuel which drives the aero engines. The fuel is derived from crude oil I guess. Processed to be jet fuel. Then it is spent in flights, which are the core business of Ryanair.

An aeroplane lands with fuel tanks greatly depleted; the fuel which was in them having been converted into exhaust fumes for the most part; and of course into energy, mostly dissipated as heat. Both exhaust and heat have gone into the earth’s atmosphere, as waste products.

There’s an equation of sorts arising out of this Ryanair business, and its making of profits and its use of raw material resources. Not an exact nor even an exactly calculable equation; but one which without doubt says that a good deal of that Ryanair money profit was made upon the back of and via a transfer into the world as ‘negative and inverse wealth’’ masses of unwanted stuff in the shape of waste products and pollutants.

Put bluntly, Ryanair has made money, whether made, or merely accrued from others, in some part, maybe in large part, from it having polluted with wastes in large amounts the planet in general. Their aeroplanes go across the world; and in this Ryanair is being not selective or biased since it spreads its pollutants out democratically, the whole world shares in them; yet the money made accrues solely to Ryanair and to its shareholders.

Does this not seem to be inequitable? That the money gains are specific to one entity but the negative inverse wealth, the wastes and pollutions, these are general and ubiquitous; yet both arise from the same single contemporaneous activity of providing flights?

Now let’s let Ryanair off the hook a little – it’s no exception – but just a very good illustrative instance. For is not this earth a general dumping ground for all industrialist fly tippers; is this ‘license to dump’ not fair game for every industry, whether concerning goods or services; all of which make or accrue their money profits by being allowed a general freedom to polute in general and wherever they find themselves?

The nuclear industry, civil and military both, are great sources of copy for media and are topics of conversation for select committees and provide sources for outbursts and anxiety from concerned activists; simply because the nuclear industries seem to be the bogeys, the obvious and clearly indicated sore thumbs of human economic activity. They are high profile and people don’t like them – especially when they lie decommissioned and stranded like hulks awaiting environmental clean up.

The Russians have on the shores of the Baltic an elephant’s graveyard for their ex-Soviet nuclear submarines which are past their sell by dates. No-one is cleaning them up. They are too expensive. We in Britain have our own Baltic nuclear elephants in the room. People generally focus on and obsess about these as being black spots.

Yet they are spots; and are not like say the plastics in the oceans; or the exhaust gases in the atmosphere, or the heat dissipations and such etc; all of which cover the planet altogether and are increasing and worsening whilst we focus and obsess on nuclear or on local fly-tipping of wastes.

Moreover the obvious and self-evident link with industrial activity, economic growth, and wealth-creation, which connects in every way with pollution and waste products spreading across the world; this link is just not emphasised in society: to be straight, it is avoided, played down, not mentioned, ignored; because to hold to account those who are most active in killing the planet, is to hold to account those persons who control things and who have most to lose. These connections are really just never publicly mentioned. It’s bad for business. Which is why we the populace, the consumers who drive the pollutant engines of commerce, are never knowingly deterred by being confronted with those deleterious miserable upshots of the great and failed consumerist experiment.

Out of sight; out of mind. What the eye does not see the heart does not grieve over. Least said soonest mended. All these, and coming in a conspired concerted concord of silence, emanating from those who have most to lose from them having to put their hands up and admit to a methodical and excessive gain via a destroying of habitats and environments, of worlds in fact.

There’s a song and its words go:

“Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die”

This lyric is the received stance on the pairing up of the Siamese twins of pollution and production, of wastes and productivity, of consumption and wanton deterioration. We are assured we all want to sort the problem; but are all happy to accept that no-one is seriously going to attempt it. It is part of the developed world’s malaise; that it no longer will stare obvious facts in the face. Instead there’s a kind of lamentable and sentimental wistful regret about ‘unfortunate’ things which are thus mentalised into a category similar it its fatalism to our attitudes to Acts of God.

Ironically we all carry with us in our feeble hearts that mental apprehension, which equates with what might be called a Church of England way with words, and which pollutes our inmost conscience and so nullifies our firmest resolutions. This the way which says to itself that we are ‘saddened’ and ‘disappointed’ in ‘events’ and hope for ‘better things to come’ and so on and so on. Nothing concrete; nothing specific is stated, nor considered, just so much wind; nothing is meant but a revelation of our desperate ennui for accepting ‘sai la vie’.

Many of us as a consequence have lost that foresight to see that actions and inactions have their consequences; and that for us to avoid duties and responsibilities on which we ought to act or else desist, is for us to atrophy in our characters and so to allow ourselves acquiescence in widespread decline and general social degradation.

And so it becomes more easy daily for us to bypass the pressing, even the essential, questions and problems of life, and of the world, and so carry on regardless with our too frequently self-absorbed lives and their trivial pleasures, and so to dismiss serious thought, proper consideration about what we ought to be doing, doing for our own sakes, for our children’s sakes ,and importantly for the sake of those peoples elsewhere in the world who suffer bearing the brunt of the mal-effects our dolours are assisting.

I believe that we as advanced consumer societies are deliberately being shielded from realising such concerns by a broad-based concord of conspiracy, applied across the whole of The Western World, and which hides from us, and diverts us away from, and tells us all is OK and so on, as if we were a flock of penned sheep or else string-worked puppets. The truth is kept from us so that we continue our lives happy to be consumer-fodder for those deceivers and malefactors, those who have the sway, the power and influence, and also the means to sort these pressing problems of the world and of our race and of all our floras and faunas. But these people simply do not want to sort these issues out; because they do not care about them sufficiently in their hearts to want to do so. They want to carry on regardless – doing what they do care about excessively; making money, creating wealth, as like Ryanair and as like all industry and commerce; and continue to spew out their wastes and messes onto the planet generally; so that they continue to enjoy their pristine apartments and snappy suits, whilst dumping in everyone else’s backyards.

A lovely lady I knew called Rose, she is now dead, used to say to me how she got livid at people she saw who kept their homes spotless and wore smart and debonair clothes, expensive scents and perfumes tiepins broaches, make up, hair and so on, but as soon as they left their own front doors they would treat everywhere else around them as if a stinking rubbish tip. They would litter, spit, deface, defile, insult, deride, mess and treat all as if cheap and nasty. I guess most of them were entrepreneurs? Entreprenuers certainly fit the bill and run par for the course.

Here is Lord Tennyson writing a poem upon The Lotus Eaters, a group of shipwrecked men having become enchanted on Circe’s Isle, and who spend their days in a smooth soothing lethargy of serene daydream, and they go spooning about themselves getting home to their wives and families but never caring to raise a finger to obtain these ends. Seems to me to be our case here in The West:

“A land where all things always seem'd the same!

And round about the keel with faces pale,

Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,

The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.  

Branches they bore of that enchanted stem,

Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave

To each, but whoso did receive of them,

And taste, to him the gushing of the wave

Far far away did seem to mourn and rave

On alien shores; and if his fellow spake,

His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;

And deep-asleep he seem'd, yet all awake,

And music in his ears his beating heart did make.  

They sat them down upon the yellow sand,

Between the sun and moon upon the shore;

And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland,

Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore

Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar,

Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.

Then some one said, "We will return no more";

And all at once they sang, "Our island home