“Before the Deluge” from Late for the Sky—Jackson Browne, 1974
Some of them were angry at the way the Earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge Her beauty into power.
And they struggled to protect Her from them, only to be confused
By the magnitude of Her fury in the final hour.
She floated her first messages to us on the breeze in the 1950s: smog alerts, air quality advisories. Most of us didn’t understand. Too subtle.
In the 60s, She gave up on the polite messages. She sent the warnings that Rachel Carson found in rivers and streams. Silent Spring alerted us that we were poisoning the Earth and Her creatures—including ourselves. By the early 70s, the Earth had gained enough allies to convince our government to help take care of Her: Earth Day, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency. While some disagreed (“Shut up, Chicken Little. The sky’s not falling.”) it looked like the polluters were going to lose. The Earth and Her allies were winning.
Then came:
- The 1973 “oil crisis.”
- The 1976 Supreme Court decision, in Buckley v Valeo, saying, “Money is speech.”
- The 1979 “energy crisis.”
Our government switched sides when Money started hollering. “Drill, baby, drill! Energy independence! Subsidies! Supply-side! Trickle-down!” As Money started winning, it got louder. “Drill, baby, drill! Exploration incentives! Jobs! The economy!” For more than forty years, Money has been yammering for more. “Drill, baby, drill! Deregulate! Privatize! Bailout!” And constantly, the whole time, “Hoax! The sky’s not falling!”
Now She’s really pissed.
You don’t need to be a scientist to understand how angry She’s become since the smog alerts and Silent Spring. Contaminated rivers and streams and smoggy air were just the beginning. Broken pipelines, cracked hulls, burning coal trains, exploding oil rigs, flaming tap water, poisoned food, oil-coated birds and animals, quakes, droughts, wildfires, storms like we’ve never seen before, several plastic debris collections the size of Texas floating in the Earth’s oceans, the Cuyahoga River on fire, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima.
Click anywhere in the graphic on the right to see a slide show. The mountains you'll see are slag piles. The bodies of water are tailing ponds contained by the world’s second-largest dam.
Earth’s friends have not only made zero progress since the 70s; we’ve seen unrelenting destruction. No matter how many wind farms and solar arrays we build, our fossil fuel industry keeps getting busier, going at it full blast, drilling, fracking, pipelining, removing mountaintops, spilling, burning, throwing more and more pollution into our oceans, our land, our water, our air.
Foundations keep trying to influence legislators, whose constituents keep sending them letters, emails, petitions. Scientists keep conducting studies and issuing reports. Envoys keep flying all over the place—conclaves, conferences, summits—arguing among themselves about protocols, targets, sanctions, blame. Earth’s defenders keep wasting time and energy arguing with Money about crap that doesn’t matter: Real or hoax? Man-made or cyclical? Can we even do anything about it? Where’s the point of no return? Two more degrees Celsius? Four? How soon will we get there?
Three small ideas:
- Stop calling for “clean renewable” energy. The wind and the sun are not renewable. Call them what they are: clean and infinite. They need no renewal. Say it right.
- Stop wasting time, effort, and resources on pointless blather and idiotic arguments. Concentrate on the issues that caught everyone’s attention in the late 50s to early 70s. The most adamant denier can’t deny that the problems we started attacking more than half a century ago were minor compared to where we are now. Our mistreatment of the Earth has gone far beyond those early warnings.
- Stop saying, “The Earth is dying! We’re killing the planet!” Tell the truth. We're making the Earth unfit for human habitation, we’re inflicting mayhem on Her creatures, but the Earth is not dying.
The Earth is unleashing her fury. She is rebelling. She will win Her rebellion. She will survive. We won’t. The creatures we leave behind will say, “Good riddance.” The Earth will shrug Her shoulders. She’ll dust Herself off and keep going without us.
Maybe it won’t happen for another million years or more. We may not see another century. It depends: Whose side will we take in Her revolution? With us or without us, either way, millennia from now, the Earth will still be turning, the wind blowing, the sun shining. Will our posterity survive?
Many of the Earth’s most visible friends are using the wrong tactics and language, wasting time, effort, and resources on the wrong arguments against the wrong people in the wrong places, fighting the wrong battles, and missing out on opportunities to connect with valuable and effective allies. So says an important new book.
About ten weeks ago here on Daily Kos, Dan Riker posted a review of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (Simon & Schuster, September, 2014). A couple other friends recommended the book to me as well. About a month ago I started reading it.
A few pages into the Introduction it hit me that this was probably going to be the most ambitious book I’ve ever read—and maybe the most disturbing. I was right on both counts. I had to close the book often and just think, re-evaluate. At times, the message was so depressing that I wasn’t sure I wanted to open it back up and continue. It brought me to tears more times than I want to admit.
It’s a three-part book, five years in the making, impressively researched, with sixty pages of endnotes. The book’s first two parts mostly describe the problem: its causes, “solutions” that haven’t worked, the results of the failures, and the reasons why. I’m glad I made it through the depressing stuff to “Part Three: Starting Anyway.”
As her subtitle makes clear, Klein sees deregulated capitalism as the villain behind the fossil fuel industry’s destructive disrespect for the Earth and for us and for all Her creatures. Klein states the case on pages 18 and 19 of the Introduction
…[W]e have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism.
…[T]he actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe…are extremely threatening to an elite minority.
…[M]arket fundamentalism has…systematically sabotaged our collective response to climate change.
If deregulated capitalism is the enemy, and if the enemy of my enemy is my friend, American environmentalism has plenty of friends and should be making a lot more connections, should be joining up with the people fighting income inequality, battling alongside the groups calling for a minimum wage increase, reaching out to the recent movement toward unionization, giving louder and stronger support to the environmental justice movement. Those calling for stricter regulation of the financial industry, the people fighting privatization, the prison reform movement, all these and more are up against the same enemy, deregulated capitalism. The necessary
re-regulation involves a lot more than limiting carbon emissions, outlawing mountaintop removal, and keeping drillers and miners away from public land and the Arctic Ocean.
The major point of This Changes Everything is that everything about the system must change. This will happen a lot faster if the environmentalists and all the others battling the same enemy all join up and fight together. Deregulated capitalism oppresses people.
It especially oppresses those who live in what Klein calls “sacrifice zones,” where drilling, mining, transporting, and burning fossil fuel doesn’t bother people and places that matter all that much to extractivists and energy companies and their shareholders and customers. Klein makes a strong case that the environmental movement can be a unifier in the fight going on right now in the sacrifice zones.
A clear look at where we are now can lead us to wonder just how effective the dozens of large American environmental organizations have been. Klein, in fact, calls out many of these groups. She praises several (examples include Greenpeace, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal” program) but she names many who’ve been not only ineffective but counterproductive. She rails against several who’ve accepted funding from—and even invested a portion of their own funding in—the fossil fuel industry. (On page 196, she lists half a dozen or so of these organizations and describes their questionable relationships.)
Klein cites the Nature Conservancy, probably the world’s largest and wealthiest green group. In 1995, the Conservancy talked Mobil (now ExxonMobil) into donating 2300 acres in Texas as a preserve for the Attwater's prairie chickens who bred there and whose population was dwindling. In 1999, the Nature Conservancy commissioned their own gas well in the preserve, closer than Mobil’s wells to the breeding ground. The well pumped its riches into the Conservancy’s treasury for about four years. In 2003 the well ran dry. In 2007, they drilled a new well, for oil this time. By 2012, no Attwater prairie chickens remained in the area. The preserve had become a “sacrifice zone.”
Klein also brings up the outsized role of religion in this battle, explaining that the monotheistic religions believe God created the Earth, and then created us, and gave us “dominion” (Genesis 1:26, Psalm 8:6). This philosophy puts us above and separate from the Earth. The various Indigenous Peoples’ spiritual relationship with the Earth is exactly the other way around. We are of the Earth, not separate from Her. We are as much a part of Nature as ants and elephants. She is the Source of Life. We are obligated to respect Her and care for Her and recognize that She has dominion, not us. Christianity and capitalism believe we are entitled—yea, verily, commanded, some would say—to take from Her everything She has.
“Communities with strong ties to the land,” says Klein, “have always, and will always, defend themselves against businesses that threaten their way of life.”
Indigenous organizations and local communities whose people are connected to the land—farmers, herders, fishers, hunters—have often succeeded by pushing back hard against extractivists on the ground in a global movement that Klein calls “Blockadia.”
- A community fight against a gold and copper mine in Greece has stymied the operation.
- Protests against shale gas exploration in Romania have succeeded.
- The Elsipogtog First Nation thwarted seismic testing for a proposed fracking operation on their land in New Brunswick, Canada.
- Indigenous groups in the US and Canada led the first attacks against the Keystone XL pipeline.
After Texaco (now Chevron) devastated a huge tract of Ecuador’s rain forest in the late 90s, grassroots Ecuadorians formed Acción Ecológica. Chevron today is still fighting a $9.5 billion judgement. In 2008, Ecuador adopted a new Constitution that grants Constitutional rights to the Source of all Life. Article 71 says:
Nature or Pachamama, where the life is created and reproduced, has a right that its existence is integrally respected as well as the right of the maintenance and regeneration of its vital cycles, structures, functions and evolutionary processes. Every person, community, people or nationality can demand from the public authority that these rights of nature are fulfilled.
Klein offers this report from another sacrifice zone:
[O]il companies have pumped hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of crude out of Nigeria, most from the Niger Delta, while consistently treating its land, water, and people with undidguised disdain. Wastewater was pumped directly into rivers, streams, and the sea; canals from the ocean were dug willy-nilly, turning precious freshwater sources salty, and pipelines were left exposed and unmaintained, contributing to thousands of spills. In an often cited statistic, an Exxon Valdez-worth of oil has spilled in the Delta every year for about fifty years, poisoning fish, animals, and humans.
…Meanwhile, more than half of Delta communities lack electricity and running water, unemployment is rampant, and, in a cruel irony, the region is plagued by fuel shortages.
(December 3, 2014, update: “
Thousands of Barrels of Shell Oil Spill Into Niger Delta” [
http://www.voanews.com/... ] )
Such reports from the sacrifice zones seldom reach us. And anyway, what would it mean to us, Shell’s customers?
Ecuador’s Acción Ecológica has connected with the Nigerian rebellion. Indigenous groups and other local grassroots organizations all over the world have reached out to likeminded groups in the sacrifice zones. Meanwhile, we don’t hear much about the wealthiest and most powerful of the American green groups rushing to ally themselves with the work of Blockadia activists around the world who could become important partners and who could share their ideas and tactics. (Perhaps Blockadia’s success stories are another example of news that doesn’t reach us from the sacrifice zones.)
Yes, many green organizations here in the US jumped on board when they saw the Keystone XL pipeline’s Indigenous protesters attracting attention and gaining a foothold; but similar opportunities arise elsewhere and often, with little notice from environmental NGOs in the US.
More sacrifice zones are being established, and their boundaries are expanding; they’re getting closer to home. Klein reports that “in February 2014, it emerged that none other than Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson had quietly joined a lawsuit opposing fracking-related activities near his $5 million Texas home, claiming it would lower property values.”
Klein quotes a 2013 Wall Street Journal report that says, “…more than 15 million Americans live within a mile of a well that has been drilled and fracked since 2000.”
As the sacrifice zones expand and approach, indirect pressure alone against deregulated capitalism—emailing and petitioning our legislators, calling on the Untited nations to act—has failed. When it comes to getting the attention of politicians everywhere, Blockadia-style direct pressure against unregulated capitalism on the ground has been the most effective starting point. As with the Keystone XL pipeline, direct pressure must be step one. Get everyone’s attention first, then go with the emails and petitions.
It will take nothing short of fear—a unified, angry, on-the-ground uprising—to overcome Money’s clout. Addressing this point, Klein says:
A resurgent climate movement could…light a fire under the call to kick corporate money out of politics—not just fossil fuel money, but money from all the deep-pocketed barriers to progress….Such a rallying cry could bring together all of the various constituencies that would benefit from reducing corporate power over politics…
Aren’t we all members of one or another of those “various constituencies” that Klein urges to “come together” and “light a fire” and raise “a rallying cry”?
Central planning, that thing everyone despised when the communists were doing it, has become the bailiwick of Wall Street and the multinationals, and it happened gradually, by default, simply because we let deregulated capitalism take over. Totalitarian communism failed. Totalitarian capitalism is in charge now, and not just here in the US. With the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetatary Fund, capitalism’s central planning and its insistence on “austerity” (ours, not theirs) has gone global.
For about four centuries, Western Europe colonized the world, exploiting cheap labor and plundering resources. The colonies are “independent” now, but look around. Deregulated capitalism and its global corporations exploit and plunder using the same old colonial arguments: “We’re here to help. We’re rescuing you from poverty. Look how much better off you are. We’re taking care of you.”
Totalitarian communism said the same things.
Look around again. It’s happening right here in the USA. Instead of colonies, we have sacrifice zones. Wells get drilled and pipelines get routed where the people and the land “don’t matter.” Fossil fuel burners and their drifting dust and their air polution get zoned—where else?—into low-income neighborhoods. Lease-holding frackers say to the landowners, “Look how much better off you are. We’re taking care of you.”
The Earth is unleashing Her fury. Her revolution has no sidelines. We all live here together. If you do nothing, you’re doing exactly what Money wants you to do. Failing to actively join the winning side—the Earth’s side—is exactly the same as joining Money’s side, which will eventually be the losing side. Will the Earth’s victory be so devastating that She anihilates all of us and goes on without us?
Which side is right? Is it the side that believes in our dominion over the Earth and insists that we continue to “forge Her beauty into power” and extract all the treasure God hid for us within the Earth? Or is it the side that holds to its Earth-Mother spirituality? Are the capitalists taking care of us, or are they raping our Mother?
What would happen if the next People’s Climate March met up near Fort McMurray, Alberta?