A Reality Check From the Brink of Extinction
By Chris Hedges
October 19, 2009 "Truthdig" -- We can join Bill McKibben on Oct. 24 in
nationwide protests over rising carbon emissions. We can cut our consumption
of fossil fuels. We can use less water. We can banish plastic bags. We can
install compact fluorescent light bulbs. We can compost in our backyard. But
unless we dismantle the corporate state, all those actions will be just as
ineffective as the Ghost Dance shirts donned by native American warriors to
protect themselves from the bullets of white soldiers at Wounded Knee.
"If we all wait for the great, glorious revolution there won't be
anything left," author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen told me
when I interviewed him in a phone call to his home in California. "If all we
do is reform work, this culture will grind away. This work is necessary, but
not sufficient. We need to use whatever means are necessary to stop this
culture from killing the planet. We need to target and take down the
industrial infrastructure that is systematically dismembering the planet.
Industrial civilization is functionally incompatible with life on the
planet, and is murdering the planet. We need to do whatever is necessary to
stop this."
The oil and natural gas industry, the coal industry, arms and weapons
manufacturers, industrial farms, deforestation industries, the automotive
industry and chemical plants will not willingly accept their own extinction.
They are indifferent to the looming human catastrophe. We will not
significantly reduce carbon emissions by drying our laundry in the backyard
and naively trusting the power elite. The corporations will continue to
cannibalize the planet for the sake of money. They must be halted by
organized and militant forms of resistance. The crisis of global heating is
a social problem. It requires a social response.
The United States, after rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, went on to
increase its carbon emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels. The European
Union countries during the same period reduced their emissions by 2 percent.
But the recent climate negotiations in Bangkok, designed to lead to a deal
in Copenhagen in December, have scuttled even the tepid response of Kyoto.
Kyoto is dead. The EU, like the United States, will no longer abide by
binding targets for emission reductions. Countries will unilaterally decide
how much to cut. They will submit their plans to international monitoring.
And while Kyoto put the burden of responsibility on the industrialized
nations that created the climate crisis, the new plan treats all countries
the same. It is a huge step backward.
"All of the so-called solutions to global warming take industrial
capitalism as a given," said Jensen, who wrote "Endgame" and "The Culture of
Make Believe." "The natural world is supposed to conform to industrial
capitalism. This is insane. It is out of touch with physical reality. What's
real is real. Any social system-it does not matter if we are talking about
industrial capitalism or an indigenous Tolowa people-their way of life, is
dependent upon a real, physical world. Without a real, physical world you
don't have anything. When you separate yourself from the real world you
start to hallucinate. You believe the machines are more real than real life.
How many machines are within 10 feet of you and how many wild animals are
within a hundred yards? How many machines do you have a daily relationship
with? We have forgotten what is real."
The latest studies show polar ice caps are melting at a record rate
and that within a decade the Arctic will be an open sea during summers. This
does not give us much time. White ice and snow reflect 80 percent of
sunlight back to space, while dark water reflects only 20 percent, absorbing
a much larger heat load. Scientists warn that the loss of the ice will
dramatically change winds and sea currents around the world. And the rapidly
melting permafrost is unleashing methane chimneys from the ocean floor along
the Russian coastline. Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more toxic than
carbon dioxide, and some scientists have speculated that the release of huge
quantities of methane into the atmosphere could asphyxiate the human
species. The rising sea levels, which will swallow countries such as
Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands and turn cities like New Orleans into a
new Atlantis, will combine with severe droughts, horrific storms and
flooding to eventually dislocate over a billion people. The effects will be
suffering, disease and death on a scale unseen in human history.
We can save groves of trees, protect endangered species and clean up
rivers, all of which is good, but to leave the corporations unchallenged
would mean our efforts would be wasted. These personal adjustments and
environmental crusades can too easily become a badge of moral purity, an
excuse for inaction. They can absolve us from the harder task of confronting
the power of corporations.
The damage to the environment by human households is minuscule next to
the damage done by corporations. Municipalities and individuals use 10
percent of the nation's water while the other 90 percent is consumed by
agriculture and industry. Individual consumption of energy accounts for
about a quarter of all energy consumption; the other 75 percent is consumed
by corporations. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste
production in the United States. We can, and should, live more simply, but
it will not be enough if we do not radically transform the economic
structure of the industrial world.
"If your food comes from the grocery store and your water from a tap
you will defend to the death the system that brings these to you because
your life depends on it," said Jensen, who is holding workshops around the
country called Deep Green Resistance [click here and here] to build a
militant resistance movement. "If your food comes from a land base and if
your water comes from a river you will defend to the death these systems. In
any abusive system, whether we are talking about an abusive man against his
partner or the larger abusive system, you force your victims to become
dependent upon you. We believe that industrial capitalism is more important
than life."
Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental regulation
as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are
responsible for our personal impoverishment as well as the impoverishment of
our ecosystem. We remain addicted, courtesy of the oil, gas and automobile
industries and a corporate-controlled government, to fossil fuels. Species
are vanishing. Fish stocks are depleted. The great human migration from
coastlines and deserts has begun. And as temperatures continue to rise, huge
parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. NASA climate scientist James
Hansen has demonstrated that any concentration of carbon dioxide greater
than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere is not compatible with
maintenance of the biosphere on the "planet on which civilization developed
and to which life on earth is adapted." He has determined that the world
must stop burning coal by 2030-and the industrialized world well before
that-if we are to have any hope of ever getting the planet back down below
that 350 number. Coal supplies half of our electricity in the United States.
"We need to separate ourselves from the corporate government that is
killing the planet," Jensen said. "We need to get really serious. We are
talking about life on the planet. We need to shut down the oil
infrastructure. I don't care, and the trees don't care, if we do this
through lawsuits, mass boycotts or sabotage. I asked Dahr Jamail how long a
bridge would last in Iraq that was not defended. He said probably six to 12
hours. We need to make the economic system, which is the engine for so much
destruction, unmanageable. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger
Delta has been able to reduce Nigerian oil output by 20 percent. We need to
stop the oil economy."
The reason the ecosystem is dying is not because we still have a dryer
in our basement. It is because corporations look at everything, from human
beings to the natural environment, as exploitable commodities. It is because
consumption is the engine of corporate profits. We have allowed the
corporate state to sell the environmental crisis as a matter of personal
choice when actually there is a need for profound social and economic
reform. We are left powerless.
Alexander Herzen, speaking a century ago to a group of Russian
anarchists working to topple the czar, reminded his followers that they were
not there to rescue the system.
"We think we are the doctors," Herzen said. "We are the disease."
***
CODEPINK Presents
An Event Tonight with Zoya
"Resisting the U.S. Occupation of Afghanistan"
With
Eve Ensler, Rick Reyes & Jodie Evans
Thursday, October 22nd - 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM
Venice United Methodist Church - Peace Hall
1020 Victoria Avenue, Venice 90291
Featuring Zoya, a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of
Afghanistan (RAWA), Afghan war veteran Rick Reyes, CODEPINK co-founder Jodie
Evans & playwright, performer & V-Day founder Eve Ensler.
Suggested Donation of $10
*No One Turned Away For Lack of Funds
For more information, please contact Whitney:
whitneycodepink@gmail.com - (310) 827-4320
See and buy treasures brought back from Afghanistan!
For more information and to RSVP, follow this link:
https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/424/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=5369
*In lieu of monetary donation, bring pairs of new or gently used shoes for
Friday's "Walk In Our Shoes" protest, to be donated to local shelters.
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