Rescuing A Planet Held Hostage
By Frank Joseph Smecker
12 December, 2009
Countercurrents.org
As the world continues to heat up so, too, does the political world in a conflagration of dialectical polemics. It’s absurd to debate over how severe global warming is or is not while ice shelves, the size of American states, fissure off into the ocean; while tundra permafrost melts, taking with it entire neighborhoods; while mountain glaciers recede into obsolescence; while entire shorelines vanish with every lashing of the rising tides. Global climate change, no matter how intense it is, should be more than enough of a wake up call for each and every one of us, admonishing that our cultural behavior just doesn’t cotton well with the innumerable other communities that arise out of unique places on this planet.
Even if global warming were not happening, the dominant culture would still be systematically dismantling the ecological infrastructure of this planet. Industrial production is also efficient annihilation -- it’s an accelerated process of production that turns the living into the dead at a rate faster than the lifeworld can rejuvenate. This is not sane, healthy or sustainable behavior by a long shot. And as the world’s leaders put on their show at Copenhagen, geared with platitudes and promises as hollow as a holiday gift box, the president of one of the largest contributing countries to greenhouse gas emissions has passed through the COP15 with a jovial wave and a smile to collect his Nobel Peace Prize, while promulgating to the world that sometimes, just sometimes -- speaking about the western occupation of Afghanistan -- wars are just and moral. The coup de grâce is even more of a brow-raiser: the evening Obama got on his plane to receive his trophy, his administration requested that the DoJ reject a lawsuit filed by convicted terrorist Jose Padilla against attorney and torture memo author, John Yoo. Wasn’t Adolf Eichmann arraigned and held accountable for “just doing his job?” Are universal, moral principles being usurped by unchecked, unhinged power?
Meanwhile stories of Tiger Woods and his connubial mishaps, balloon-boy and, CNN’s 2009 Hero-of-the-Year getting pick-pocketed blanket the headlines. This is absurd. In the midst of all of this, a student in my history class asked: “In your own opinion, are we going to be okay? Is the human population going to be able to function in the distant future?”
It is very easy for one to not think too hard, to not reflect on history and not honestly assay the total atrocities of industrial behavior to assume that we'll make it through these times unscathed. Such an assertion is very easy to promote especially if one has emerged from a culture that normalizes the atrocities in addition to conditioning one to presume that such behavior is normal, natural, and that no other way of living in the world is possible.
Too many people, the world over, assume that it is ridiculously absurd to live without civilization, without technology and without capitalism and global commerce. The truth is, we can all live healthy, fun and long lives without computers and cell phones, without automobiles, airplanes, scratch-off tickets, and Grizzly Bear, Lil’ Wayne and The Antlers albums ready for download off of ITunes and more. However, we can't live without clean air, water and nutritive food. The other truth is that we can't continue to live the lives we've been conditioned into living and have a clean and intact planet, too. The rate of production, where it stands today, greasing the cogs of commerce that so many people refer to as economy, converts the living into the dead at a horrific pace that is dismembering the planet's ecological infrastructure. Everyday, a week ago, 120 species went extinct. Yesterday 120 species went extinct. Today, 120 species are going to vanish forever and, tomorrow, 120 species will go extinct. This will not stop until the dominant culture stops commodifying habitat and life.
Every single mother's breast milk has dioxin in it. Salmon runs no longer fill to the brim, North America’s rivers and, 95 percent of the oceans’ large fish have been removed forever. Every river, brook and stream in the continental US is tainted with carcinogenic material and plastics in the world's oceans now outweigh phytoplankton by at least six times. Did you catch that? For every pound of phytoplankton, there is at least six pounds of plastic replacing them.
Incendiary devices, automatic weapons and militarized robots quake the homes of innocent tribal members in the Middle East while 14,000 people die biweekly in the developed world from preventable cancers, while another 1900 die every week from pharmaceutical related deaths. For every word I type, more than an acre of forest is clearcut from the planet. And deserts expand as fast as ice shelves melt. At what point do we awake from the business-as-usual haze to do what’s necessary to stop this all from happening any further, before we find ourselves shit-out-of-luck, without an inhabitable planet? It is baffling to even acknowledge that we’ve let it get this out of hand.
If humans do survive after the ensuing century -- because we have no less than a hundred years tops if we continue destroying the planet at the rate at which we are now (let's not forget about the unpredictable swiftness of feedback loops), then life will not look anything like it does today. A future primitivism, a spectrum of peoples living in diversely unique places, employing technics advanced no further than the handicraft, artisan level, engaging in economics no more extensive than the face-to-face subsistence level, will be what it takes for humans to live sustainably in any kind of future. Most people now will not voluntarily take up this lifestyle. This is why the immediate outlook is sobering and, realistically, not an inviting future for everyone. Things are going to get a hell of a lot worse -- even moreso if they are to get any better. However, I’m a firm believer that if we are honest about this unsettling truth rather than enshrouding it behind empty optimism and hope, we can start broadening discourse; we can start talking about these atrocities so we can advance awareness about these atrocities so we can all take the action needed to stop these atrocities. If we deny any of it, if we shrug this all off as a speed bump on a positive path to Progress, nothing will ever get better.
We are in the middle of unprecedented turmoil, tectonic social shifting alongside the rapid decay of our life-support system. Without a planet, without a real physical world, there is nothing. No learning, no sports, no art, no fun, no music, no love to be made. Nothing. More than just economic and political reform and market adjustments need to be undertaken immediately if we want to secure a future for a fecund, life-providing planet.
The notion of limitless growth -- a deluded and pernicious fantasy -- is reality for most of the leaders who are “representing” the communities of the world at this moment. There is never enough money to be made, never enough development to be done, never enough stuff to be produced and, never enough economy to be grown for these people. This is scary and it is what is exacerbating our most threatening problems. In the real world there is a time when enough is enough, when we have to respect limits. If elected officials won't recognize this, we must. And we must do whatever is necessary to stop those in power from stealing from the poor and dismembering the planet. There are always more of us than there are "elected" officials and CEOs. It is silly for us to sit back on the sidelines and watch as spectators while those in power destroy the future for us, our children and loved ones, as well as for every other sentient being that claims this planet as home.
We the people do have the final say, every day. We just need to realize this and act upon it. This was the case for the Abolitionists, for the German resistance, for the Algerian resistance, for the Bolivian indigenous in 1998, for the Black Panther Party, CISPES, AIM, Martin Luther King Jr., Tecumseh, the French Resistance, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade of Alliance and so many more brave collectives and individuals. There are a thousand other ways of changing the system other than voting. Put it this way, if voting really changed the spectrum completely, voting would be illegal. No doubt. For this reason, alongside the fact that we've been doing this voting thing for hundreds of years and nothing really, really good has come solely out of it, is enough reasoning for us all to reclaim personal agency and work together as communities from within our communities to reclaim sane and sustainable ways of living. I always feel urged to remind readers that 95 percent of all revolutions are nonviolent. There is a lot of fun, inclusive and social stuff to be done.
Once everyone begins to realize, to paraphrase Derrick Jensen, that the rules laid down by those in power are nothing more than just the rules laid down by those in power, that they hold no intrinsic moral or ethical value, the sooner we can all become the free human beings we were born to be. If global ecological ruin and climate change is not enough to move people into action then, well, we have a very frightening future ahead of us. I urge people to follow what is happening in Copenhagen right now. The past week has proven that the world's elected officials are not going to be making any decisions that are in the best interests of the people and communities of the planet, human and nonhuman. The solutions presented thus far have included market-based mechanisms and more discourse. Clearly, our future is in the hands of powerful elite and private institutions unless we rescue it. And I believe we can, if only we awake from the nihilistic and apathetic haze of our times to act together.
