Solution to the Environmental Crisis: Awareness and Resistance

I have been sending out a high volume of action alerts from environmental groups to my email friends lately and I would like to explain some of the reasons why I think they are important and that responding to the environmental crisis warrants urgent attention.

The corporate toadies in the US government and their mouthpieces in the media are leading a frantic push to open up much of America’s public lands to oil and gas development. Many of these lands are critical habitats for many species as well as areas of rich biodiversity. I heard eminent academic and founder of modern sociobiology, E.O. Wilson, say that there is a rule in biology which posits that for every tenfold increase in the physical size of a habitat, the number of species which reside in that habitat doubles.

      Suppose that public lands are made available for oil and gas development and the supporting apparatus which reduces the size of some habitable land that is tenfold the size of what it will be when they are through decimating it. Think of the impact if there is a twenty- or even thirty-fold reduction. By turning public lands over to private developers your government, in accordance with the will of their corporate puppet masters, are predictably eliminating the number of species to one half, one quarter, perhaps even one eighth. Couple this with the fact that they want to do this in areas of rich biodiversity and critical habitats. How many species are you willing to let the oil barons and the captains of industry wipe out?

Humans have only discovered about 2 million species on Earth, out of a population of species which potentially numbers in the billions. Just look at the wealth of knowledge about our lives and our world that has been generated from studying the narrow subset of life forms that we have been able to find. The highly capitalized and intensely vertically integrated monster firms of the fossil fuel industry are already making record profits. Are we willing to let them destroy potential cures for cancer or clues to unlocking the mysteries of life just so their shareholders' ludicrous wealth will increase by some margin?

      We can’t even begin to measure the impact of industrial societies on the planet, and we certainly can’t quantify it in terms of its cost to future generations. Don’t be swayed by all this talk of free markets. Free markets are by nature discriminatory arrangements. Free markets discriminate against those who are unwilling to pay, but they also discriminate against those who are unable to pay through no fault of their own due to a history of structural discrimination, institutional racism, and resource exploitation. Markets also discriminate against those who suffer due to costs that the market operators cannot incorporate into their information matrix. Markets also discriminate against those who are unable to pay because they haven’t been born yet.

      Oil prices are high because of conflicts in Nigeria and West Asia and because of financial speculators who are creating supply shortages for the purposes of driving prices artificially higher. Systematically destroying Mother Nature’s legacy to future generations is not going to solve the problem. We have to stand strong and do what we can to protect the natural environment from industrial development.

      If adjusted for inflation, median income in this country has been too volatile to be a reliable contributor to enhanced social welfare for most of America’s working class. In addition, most of the wealth in this country is being concentrated into the hands of the wealthiest citizens. There are simply disparate benefits to industrial development. The richest 10% of Americans have over 70% of the wealth. Industrial development and economic growth is simply not likely to create a better life for you and your children. 20% of GDP comes from the financial services industry alone, and most of that production is from speculators playing number games to try to turn a profit. Stop being bated with this carrot on a stick called economic growth.

      You live in a rigged market society which is little more than a command economy operating under a not-too-thinly constructed façade. The money is not going to trickle down if we open up our natural sanctuaries to robber barons. What you pay at the pump is not going to get much cheaper because you let our natural world be destroyed. Stand up, fight back. Start here: http://www.wecansolveit.org/....

  -Nate