The Long Ecological Revolution

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri May 24, 2019 1:19 pm

by JOHN STEPPLING FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
“Greta is able to see what other people cannot see, { } She can see carbon dioxide with the naked eye. She sees how it flows out of chimneys and and changes the atmosphere in a landfill.”

– Malena Ernman (mother of Greta Thunberg), ‘Scenes from the heart. Our life for the climate’

“If you want to be more ecologically minded, good for you. But don’t be under the bizarre American illusion that your individual action is a substitute for collective action, for systemic change.”

– Umair Haque (Medium May 2019)

“Capitalism is in danger of falling apart.”

– Al Gore

“A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this?”

– Phillip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

There is a clear problem with most environmental discussions or debates. The problem is, in short form, a lack of class analysis.

This is most evident in the manufacturing of the overpopulation argument. But it is prevalent in nearly all discussions about global warming or rising sea levels or most anything relating to planetary ecology, really.

What is bothersome here is that the voices I am hearing warning of mankind’s immanent demise are mostly ruling class voices.

Leakey says..“I am increasingly convinced that in the tropics, and particularly in the poorer nations, protecting nature everywhere is an effort with diminishing returns. I believe that protected areas (that is areas of land set aside by governments and governed by national statutes) such as national parks and national forests are the best targets if nature is to be protected. “

So give up on the poor, can’t save them. And Leakey goes on …“Whilst state-owned wildlife land, designated as national parks, is vital, in some countries private land may also be secured by state laws that allow for private ownership of title. Thus an individual can use such land for wildlife and nature protection for the duration of the term of the title and this can be equally as secure as a national park.”

Ok, so create spaces for the rich to be safe from the restive natives.

And finally Leakey writes….“Not all countries have constitutional provision for private ownership of land, and instead occupancy and land use are regulated by lease hold. In respect to conservation, this is certainly a better option than group-owned or community-owned land where in time wildlife could be untenable given governance arrangements on community-owned assets.”

As a general trend what I am hearing is the validation of what amounts to royalist wisdom and the dangers of community control of anything. The message is ‘we can’t risk it, the danger is so extreme that the practical solution is to allow the elite class to control the planet in order to save it.’ The elites and/or corporate control. All the so called New Green Dealsolutions are there, it seems, to save capitalism before saving the planet.

Now, one of the curious contradictions in the climate discourse is the selective trust in certain institutions. The western based (and funded) NGOs have a pretty long track record now of craven support for U.S. government foreign policy decisions. Take Amnesty International’s (AI) recent comments on Venezuela.

Chuck Kauffman from Alliance for Global Justice observed vis a vis AI’s near fascistic litany of lies….“They don’t seem to even care about their credibility anymore.” The open naked Imperialist aggression against Venezuela, and the attendant propaganda slandering Maduro, is now a staple of all the candidates for the Democratic Party. And, Amnesty is also co founder of Global Campaign for Climate Action…a group that also receives monies from the Pew trust, the creepy AVAAZ, the World Wildlife Fund, and Union of Concerned Scientists. Now, just a quick word on the UCS. On the board sits William K. Reilly, former appointee by George Bush to head the environmental protection agency. There are also members that sit on the Council for Foreign Relations, a nuclear scientist who writes on security issues, a lawyer for the US Dept. of Energy.

And yet, many people rightly concerned about global pollution and over industrialization seem to have no problem accepting the word of these same western backed NGOs when it comes to issues of ecology. They know Amnesty lies, but if the topic is climate change, they leap onboard. Clive Splash (He currently holds the Chair of Public Policy and Governance at Vienna University of Economics and Business, appointed in 2010. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Environmental Values) writes… “The existing institutions of modern economies are those supporting economic growth. The growth priority has been made clear by the over 3500 economists supporting a climate tax and opposing structural change. Similarly, Lord Stern is the academic figure head of the New Climate Economy, a concept created by members of the Davos elite, with its ‘Better Growth, Better Climate’ reports. Their explicitly stated concern is that: “In the long term, if climate change is not tackled, growth itself will be at risk.” Change is coming and the corporations and billionaires are fully aware of this. They have been actively lobbying on climate and environment since Johannesburg (Earth Summit 2002) and were a dominant force at Paris. They have also long been seeking to control the environmental movement for their own ends.”

Again, we hear that echo of the ruling class (Lord ….LORD Stern?!) and the anti communist agenda at work here. Leave it to the elite class, the captains of Capital, to decide policy. And the first order of business is to save capitalism and that means to save growth. The poor are there to be slaves, not to decide policy. What one sees in Extinction Rebellion and in the Greta Thunberg brand is described pithily by Clive Splash…” When hegemonic power is threatened it captures the movement leaders and neutralises them by bringing them into the power circles and takes the initiative away from radical revolutionary change.”

One of the refrains I have heard (and have had directed at me) is well, we can’t wait for socialism. This is a natural response from a very frightened populace. And it is exactly this response that the ruling class counts on. The infiltration of radical movements has a long sordid history. Ask the Black Panthers. Today the very real threats and dangers of global warming and over industrialization are being funneled into places that shift the blame from the ruling two or three percent and onto its victims. This is of course exactly what the overpopulation alarm does. I see headlines such as *Humans Plunder the Planet* but not *Ruling Class Plundering Humanity AND the Planet*. I see books such as Climategeddon — amusingly penned by a former author of diet self help books and…wait for it….a high ranking Scientologist. But I have had people quote Wollersheim to me. Next stop the Sea Org.

More trenchant was this week’s bit of Imperialist green concern from war friendly candidate Elizabeth Warren, who expressed worry that global warming might effect the readiness of America’s military. (death of irony moment?) On twitter Club de Cordeliers noted…“Under Warren’s proposal, each murdered child will be stamped with the slogan: This Killing Achieved with Net Zero Carbon Emissions.”

That the U.S. military is the greatest consumer of petroleum products worldwide seems beside the point. Or, lets return briefly to Greta Thunberg — who can probably just be referred to as *Greta* these days without risk of confusion. She held up a cute homemade sign for a selfie …tweeting it to jillions of followers. The sign read ‘Let Russia Strike for Climate’. Apparently the *Greta* is getting good advice from Hillary Clinton or Bolton or Elliot Abrams, someone — who knows. She is certainly to be considered *NATO friendly* at this point. The visibility that Elizabeth Warren commands, and that which Greta commands now, too, is an indication that one should be highly credulous. The giant electronic telecom giants and the mainstream electronic media, social media, TV, all of it is in the hands of a relatively few people. These narratives, all of them, are vetted for ideological compliance with corporatism, Imperialism, and a de-facto racism or better put, white supremacy. Visibility is earned, and it’s not arbitrary. And if a *Greta* suddenly appears, rest assured she has handlers. I mean its simply a given, and there are no exceptions.

So there are several problems looming that tangentially connect to overpopulation alarms. One of them is a recolonizing of Africa (and the recolonizing of former communist countries continues apace, as well). But here Africa in particular is viewed as a huge resource for raw materials sought after in the West. The re-colonizing takes several forms but here is a typical example.

As Cory Morningstar observed vis a vis this …“Can you imagine @WWF promoting the sterilization of women living around national parks in Europe or the US? The fact they consider it acceptable in India and Africa is racism, pure and simple.”

The white west (and Bill and Melinda Gates leading the charge) are rather unapologetically determined to stop the global south from reproducing. Sterilization and vasectomy suggestions (voluntary of course) are to be found in countless U.N. sponsored (and USAID sponsored) pamphlets and directives for missions in Africa.

The new alarmist propaganda tends toward sensationalizing what are a few basic truths, sometimes half truths, and building a sort of screenplay to a disaster movie out of these. The influence of Hollywood apocalyptic film and TV cannot be over-emphasized, actually. For those films are both unconscious projections of the ruling class, and the audience embrace of this stuff speaks to unconscious fears as well. The elite producers of this crap fear the marauding masses (zombies) and the bourgeois audience fear black sites and Bloody Gina’s reprisals if they stray too far off message (like voting for a third party). A good deal of the new environmental panic is not based on the actual (and I hasten to emphasize real) problems and crises, but are more the conditioned response from audiences trained for thirty years, at least, to kitsch media entertainments. People see life unfold like an action movie. Sea levels can’t just rise and destroy infrastructure and crops, wash away beach front property, no, they have to completely submerge Baltimore, Oslo, and London. The sum effect of this is actually to have the real and severe problems in retreat.

Watch Madonna’s Eurovision performance (in Israel where she was never not going to perform), with lyrics like “not everyone is coming to the future, not everyone is gonna last.”



There is now coming out of Hollywood a near endless stream of dystopian ‘end of times’ films, which (as I have noted before) are reconstruction fables as well. But now the end of times includes the rehabilitation of Big Brother. The state emerges as a sort of necessary mechanism for culling the herd. Madonna was also sporting blond plaited hair and an eye patch. So maybe it’s just me but this new volkish imagery is growing and being used in ways that familiarize the public with fascist motifs.

“Thus, when we are talking about “völkisch” or “Überfremdung,” we are automatically producing images that are inevitably linked to a fascist past. “Überfremdung” describes the fear of being flooded with foreigners, a foreign infiltration. The Duden dictionary explained the term in 1934 as “the intrusion of alien races.” ( ) What is concerning about these “poor words” in the first place is the imagery inherent to them, one that conveys fascism without speaking it. Such words are racist in establishing a hierarchy of ethnicity and, in that way, they have the potential to createm or exacerbate, false divisions between and within societies. The word “völkisch” creates a sense of belonging, an imaginal feature to help distinguish between the in-group and the out-group. The word “Überfremdung” works similarly by implying that there is an abundance of strangers invading the ‘German race.’ What seems to have changed, however, is the definition of the out-group or the enemy. Promoted by PEGIDA and the AfD, the new threat are Muslim immigrants and the idea of the “Islamization” of the Western culture. Thus, this becomes a powerful example for the political myth of the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West.”

– Alexa Lenz (Public Seminar)

“The ideological road to National Socialism was paved not by Nietzschean self-awareness and self-overcoming, but by völkisch self-congratulation.”

– Roderick Stackelberg (Idealism Debased)

The first volley in the reclamation of volkish language was Bush’s use of the word “Homeland” when he created a new security service. Quite a few people noticed the connection to the German word Heimat. The far right parties in Europe now appropriate a good deal of Nazi symbology, while the even more virulent racism of a Macron (or Sarkozy) is ignored. PEGIDA and the AfD, in Germany, are really pretty much openly using Nazi rhetoric and symbol ( both of which are technically against the law).

“Cassirer (1973) analyzed three potential techniques that enabled the myth of Nazism: the magical use of words, the use of rituals and, finally, the recourse to prophecy. Nazi politicians managed to charge words with feelings and violent passions, therefore transforming their semantic meaning to convey magical imagery.”
Alexa Lenz (Ibid)

I will only add, here, as a sort of thought experiment, that one compare the TIME magazine cover of Greta, with the photos in, what Remco Ensel, in an excellent monograph on the Dutch “Heimat” portrait photography called *Dutch Face-ism”, an expression of Völkisch Nationalism circa WW2. (or the VICE lead photo, or even Greta’s facebook portrait).

Now I know there are many people who will perceive this as an attack on Greta. It’s not. I am certain this young woman has almost zero awareness of any of the implications of her exploitation. And remember, too, that one of the most common rhetorical tactics of fascist apologetics (pretending to be liberal) is to re-state your argument incorrectly and then to respond to their manufactured distortion. It’s a version of straw man arguing. Couple this with the convenient appellation *denier*. If you say, wait, there were no rape camps in Serbia. You are immediately labeled a denier. It matters not at all that you would be correct in saying this. The corporate ruling class take over of many green movements has a sum effect of reducing rights. For that is the logic of fascism. Remove rights but create space for the self expression of resentments. Property rights will remain untouched.

The opportunistic proprietor class capitalist sees enormous profit in Green endeavours now. Just as Mike Pompeo sees melting arctic ice as an “opportunity”. Never underestimate the capacity for brutish insensitivity in the lower functioning humanoids that serve as representatives of the ruling elite. It is bottomless, in fact. Bolton, Pompeo, Abrams, Kushner, Biden…this is the Troglodyte political class.

Brian Davey wrote about Thunberg, vis a vis her appearance in Katowice at a climate gathering:

“What’s more it is richest 5% of the planet that consume 50% of planetary carbon – so the very people who are promoting this campaign must cut back the most. Instead they want to expand the economy. But how is this to be made compatible with reducing carbon emissions?

It isn’t – but a careful looks at the language of nature financialisation refers to carbon neutrality, not zero carbon. This is “convenient language when one of the main pillars of the business model is the sale of carbon offsets – rationalizing a continuance of the same carbon based lifestyle by constructing a faux fantasy one, that anyone with monetary wealth, can buy into.”

– Brian Davey (Credo; Economic Beliefs in a World in Crises)

This is a bit like buying indulgences in the Medieval Catholic Church. So perhaps what is needed is a Martin Luther of environmentalism.

The ruling class and its marketing apparatus recognized early on that Green language would serve as cover while they re-tooled their industries. Green took on those magical connotations. Cut to Greta’s mother explaining that her daughter was *different*, i.e. magical. She could *see* carbon dioxide. Trust me there will be green Angels, soon, helping further carbon neutrality.

But there is another issue cutting across much of this, and that is a strange new war on children (and on motherhood in the global south, and black mothers in the U.S.). Although *new* is the wrong word. Whether by design of just as a natural tendency in the residual Puritans of America, the media message has been of late to normalize cruelty to children. From tearing babies from the arms of immigrant mothers and dropping them into cages, or the arrest of suspension of due process in Israeli arrests of children and youth, to the spike in jail time for minors across the U.S. In the 1990s, incarceration of minors rose 311 %.

“Across the United States, thousands of children have been sentenced as adults and sent to adult prisons. Children as young as eight have been prosecuted as adults { } Some 10,000 children are housed in adult jails and prisons on any given day in America. Children are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted in adult prisons than in juvenile facilities and face increased risk of suicide.”

– Equal Justice Initative (Children in Prison 2018)

The rates for youth have declined slightly over the last few years but mostly due to teenagers aging out of the statistics. That ANY child was ever tried as an adult is all by itself a horror. In the U.S. infants born to black mothers die at twice the rate of those born to white mothers. Poverty is the obvious first reason, but structural racism…the stress of increased contact with the criminal justice system also undermines the health of the newborn.

“67 percent of black women who are incarcerated are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses. So the majority of black women and girls are not incarcerated for violent offenses…( ) There’s a large percentage of women who are single mothers. I’m fortunate to have a significant other that supports me and supported me when I was behind the walls. But most women don’t have that. So they’re forced to take care of their children alone. And so when you’re forced to take care of your children alone, you don’t have the type of credentials that you need in order to access a job that’s a livable wage. And that’s the type of wages that you can take your family on vacations, and enroll your kids in extracurricular activities, you tend to find some non-traditional ways to make money.”

– Nicole Hanson (Rattling the Bars, Real News Network)

“Neglect is often considered to be a failure, on the part of a caretaker, to provide adequate supervision, emotional nurturance, appropriate medical care, food, clothing, and shelter for a child. This definition also aligns with a definition of poverty, where poverty is considered to be inadequate food, shelter, and clothing.”

– Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2014.

Child neglect is then, almost by definition, synonymous with poverty. Those damn poor people just can’t take care of their kids. And yet they breed so much, ya know? Maybe it wouldn’t be such a darn bad thing if we clipped the men…know what Im saying, Earl?

In fact one of the side bar implications in Melinda Gates programs is to strongly associate pregnancy with disease (not for rich white people, of course). And the overpopulation argument feeds in this directly.

There is not enough space to even scratch the surface here to list the inequalities operative in racial hierarchies in the U.S. What is important here to start to recognize the codes at work. Walter Benjamin famously said that “The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.” But more importantly, at the end of that same essay (Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) he added…

“Its (mankind) self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”

Capitalism has abandoned humanity. A shamefully neglected infrastructure has exacerbated the effects of global warming. The loss of jobs, mostly to robots, engenders confusion and anxiety, but also deep resentment. And we are well past the time when anyone thinks robots provide superior service. The need to keep escalating conflict, both at home with a militarized and racist police apparatus, and abroad via a gargantuan military whose size defies all rational comprehension. The suffering inflicted on the world by the U.S. and its proxies (Saudi Arabia, Israel primarily) is so enormous that it is hard to grasp it in its totality. And this confusion breeds reaction. The confusion seems not, however, to breed questioning.

“When capitalism reaches its point of diminishing return, it deliberately creates a crisis or an appearance of a crisis in order to stage a ritual of a rebirth. The crisis is designed to corner everyone to rely on the capitalist framework for survival. This functions to divide people into two groups: a group which sees through the mechanism and a group that insists on solving the “crisis” no matter how (meaning solving it according to the acceptable ways). The establishment destroys the anti-capitalist momentum while co-opting dissident voices, giving them credentials, awards, positions in the hierarchy. The process eliminates enemies while augmenting the capitalist hierarchy.”
Hiroyuki Hamada (in conversation with me)

The real problems of ocean acidification, plastic pollution of those same seas, and the endless over production of certain crops that destroy land and poison pollinating insects, these problems are simply the result of needless and pointless industrial growth, a growth that has no rational need driving it. Hunger exists in a world of surplus food. The engine is maximizing profit. And why do so many people seem to just reflexively trust *science*? Trust without even a cursory check on who funds the study, or the institution. And the manufacture of fear is a staple of the ruling class. Fear of germs (from Asia or Africa of course), or asteroids, or the ignoring of obvious failures which goes back to thalidomide. That and the very imperfect world of statistical analysis (see Harvard and Yale sociologists circa 1986 and the spinster’s beware warning) etc. The point is only that while it is clear global warming and pollution present enormous challenges, ones that may change the way nearly everyone on the planet lives, there is also clarity that a crises in Capitalism is forcing an increasing propaganda machine to validate the class hierarchies, and which is rehabilitating the most obscene thinking of the colonial and Victorian era. People are being indoctrinated to experience domination of salutary. Junk science abounds everywhere (facial recognition anyone? blood splatter?) but when it comes to climate and Green issues the bourgeois populace simply does not want to hear it. Which leads me to the idea of a cultic group think going on. And maybe this is tied into the acute narcissism of the boomers. Because just anecdotally my experience is that they WANT disaster. It provides self importance. They demand action and responsibility, but the most dire warnings are received with a barely suppressed pleasure.

The liberal white American today cannot tolerate the world going on around them with people they have been trained to see as inferior. Fear of the dark skinned global south (I mean Melinda Gates actually has a brochure in one of her projects to teach African women how to hold their baby, because I guess, you know, thats something they clearly don’t know about), they fear the numbers, they fear fecundity (something that has dropped precipitously in the advanced West), they fear being in close proximity to the poor, the ‘other’ (migration), and they fear exposing their children to this ‘threat’, most of all. Consider that there is a huge movement on the right to ban abortion. And yet, largely, these same people are thrilled with Bill & Melinda Gates work to stop African reproduction. So its clearly not too many people, its just too many black people.

The new Volkish body politic is conflating global warming and the poor.

“…the “longing for myth” reflected the pervasive experience of “dislocation and disorientation” precipitated by industrialization, revolution, and the dissolution of community values in the abstract conception of secular society, compounded by the fragmentation of German society “along confessional, social, and territorial lines”; the splintering of traditional social and cultural bonds gave rise to the desire for an “aesthetic-religious imagery” that would “unite modern society just as Greek mythology had supposedly once united the polis.”

– Nicholas Huzsvai (honors thesis, unpublished)

Over two million people languish in nightmarish prisons in the U.S. Most for non violent crimes. And today the target is increasingly children and women of colour. But people respond with arguments of distraction, just as they are narcotized by screen distractions. The children not targeted for jail are given anti depressants.

And Gabor Mate has written (following Robert Bly) that fathers and mothers both today work twice as long and with less security and for less money than they did three generations ago.

“Quite the opposite is true now. Far from being helped, working women are actively penalized if they wish to extend the time they are at home caring for their children. For men, it is not even considered reasonable to think of “interrupting” their careers in order to share in that process. Society does little to establish expert and compassionate day care for those children during whose early years the parent(s), for one reason or another, cannot avoid the necessity of working outside the home. Poor women, especially in the U.S., are economically terrorized by the welfare system into entrusting their infants to appallingly inadequate care situations, and then must spend hours daily traveling to low-paying jobs that barely allow their families a subsistence income.”

– Gabor Maté. (Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder)

Leading to what Bly called “the rage of the unparented”. This is America, then, today. Children are targeted by law enforcement — think of the use of gang injunctions, prop 21 in California — which, again, allowed for minors to be sentenced as adults. California has in fact been the leading laboratory for terrorizing youth.

“The collateral consequences of an adult conviction are severe. An adult criminal conviction stays on a youth’s permanent record, which can prevent him or her from voting, securing housing, getting financial aid or public benefits, and finding a job. Further, the juvenile justice system is intended to be rehabilitative, whereas the adult criminal system is not. Youth tried in adult court lose the opportunity to access many of treatment and rehabilitative options available in the juvenile system.”

– National Center for Youth Law

Poor women, and particularly black and latino women, have been zeroed in on by the justice system and now are the fastest growing segment of the carceral state. Their children are warehoused, usually chemically warehoused if they prove in the least disruptive. But this only mirrors in much harsher way the white children of the affluent. For even the petit bourgeois youth is afflicted by a culture of screen addicted distractions and coercive infantile propaganda and entertainments. And they are likely the children of parents who were also distracted and anxious. And the parents of those parents. Three or four generations now who have not been provided with any sense of community.

A quick glance at the statistics: Children 0 to 5 years, over 600,000 are on one of the following: ADHD medication, anti depressants, anti psychotics, and anti anxiety drugs. But if you look at kids 6 to 17, there are SEVEN MILLION being medicated. I was told by a friend that in the run up to the millenium, in a gallup poll, that a majority of people welcomed an apocalypse of some kind — and the reason given was a belief that nothing was going to get better. They were expecting only worse to come. And of course they were largely correct.

Hollywood has been normalizing a mix of the sadistic and the sexual for going on fifty years, only now the spectre of Big Brother looms over everything, and this is presented as a virtue. There is in this new mythos forming around end-times thinking, an erotic representation of duty to power, and it elicits a kind of frisson. Fascism is now being updated, and it serves up a menu of catastrophe and individualism. Daily life is a combination of drudgery, tedium, meaningless work, and insecurity. And parents are weary of their neurotic complaining children. In sum I think people in the West no longer dream Utopian

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/23 ... ch-mythos/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Wed Jun 05, 2019 4:04 pm

No Empires, No Dust Bowls
Ecological Disasters and the Lessons of History
by Hannah Holleman
(Jul 01, 2018)

Image
Buried machinery in a barn lot; Dallas, South Dakota, May 1936

Hannah Holleman is an assistant professor of sociology at Amherst College and the author of Dust Bowls of Empire, forthcoming from Yale University Press.

Today we are living in a new Dust Bowl era, defined by egregious levels of inhumanity and profound shifts taking place in the earth’s land, climate, and water systems. Like the 1930s Dust Bowl, contemporary ecological crises are associated with high levels of racialized social inequality, imperial expropriation, social dislocation, and fascistic politics. Accordingly, scholars and scientists are now studying the 1930s disaster as an analogue to our current period, as they seek to understand the dangers posed by climate change, land degradation, and freshwater scarcity. They are studying agricultural technology and practice, government policies, and migration patterns—and they are warning us to be prepared.

However, by treating the 1930s Dust Bowl as merely the outcome of poor policy, a regional phenomenon isolated from broader social issues, a case study in New Deal administration, or a purely climatological disaster, most of these analyses miss the crucial lessons from this period, which connect it to the present not as an analogue, but an antecedent. An honest and historically informed look at the present situation reveals the imperial system of capitalism as the primary driver of “dust-bowlification,” then and now. The racialized division of nature and humanity at the heart of this system cannot be transcended without transcending the system itself. No sustainable agricultural or social policy stands a chance against the overwhelming destructiveness of the existing social order.

However, a major barrier to an environmental politics that takes history seriously is the persistent segregation of the environmental movement and the prevailing belief among mainstream environmentalists, especially in wealthy countries, that a reformed capitalism can solve the problems outlined above. Likely because they themselves are unlikely to bear the costs of these crises, too many environmentalists and policy-makers have failed to face the violence and injustice behind the ecological devastation now dispassionately reported by organizations such as the United Nations, World Bank, and many environmental NGOs.

Some continue to hope that the same political and economic elites who led us into the new Dust Bowl era will somehow lead us out, placing historically unfounded hope in international climate agreements and voluntary efforts by industry and individuals. They are effectively joining forces with the defenders of capital’s bottom line rather than those on the frontlines of capitalism’s catastrophes, who are fighting for a different world altogether. In the meantime, land and water grabs, the documented increase in violence against earth and water protectors, renewed attacks on indigenous sovereignty and environmental protection, the persistence of slavery and human trafficking, and an unprecedented number of refugees illustrate that at the systemic level, capitalism shows no signs of putting people and the planet ahead of profit.1

It is my hope that activists will take to heart the lessons of the 1930s Dust Bowl, briefly sketched below, and stop repeating the devastating mistakes of self-identified progressives and environmentalists of previous eras who promoted or made peace, however uneasy, with the racialized, imperial class system organized around production for profit. Not only because ecological justice demands it, but because the alternative—expecting capitalists or a reformed capitalism to save us—just will not work. We have more than a hundred years of historical experience since the idea of “greening” capitalism was proposed—from the first global dust bowl to today—as proof.

Preconditions of the First Global Dust Bowl
In the 1830s, the U.S. government under President Andrew Jackson hastened the violent removal of indigenous peoples from their lands, especially in the southeast of the country, to Indian Territory. To make way for the expansion of a plantation economy based on slave labor and white supremacy, the government promised indigenous nations land and life in the area “as long as the grass grows or the water runs, in peace and plenty.” Jackson, Donald Trump’s favorite president, wrote, “there your white brothers will not trouble you; they will have no claim to land.”2

However, as history teaches us, no such Trail of Tears can ever lead to “peace and plenty.” Rather, Northern industrialists and Southern planters joined forces to demand further white territorial expansion, including, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the lands promised and held in Indian Territory by tribes removed from the southeast by Jackson’s army. The accelerated expropriation of native lands for white settlement was the precondition for the expansion of cash crop agriculture and resource extraction across the continent. This expansion led to ecological devastation and human misery on a vast scale and set the stage for the socioecological disaster on the southern plains that a few decades later would be known as the Dust Bowl.

Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes that “at the end of the Civil War the US Army hardly missed a beat before the war ‘to win the West’ began in full force. As a far more advanced killing machine and with seasoned troops, the army began the slaughter of people, buffalo, and the land itself, destroying natural tall grasses of the Plains and planting short grasses for cattle, eventually leading to the loss of topsoil four decades later.”3 Northeastern elites like Massachusetts senator Henry Dawes promoted the privatization and allotment of remaining tribal lands held in common in the 1880s to make way for white settlement and promote the interests of private capital, especially railroads, manufacturers seeking cheap raw materials (like cotton), extractive industries, bankers, and land speculators.

Westward expansion in this period was part of the renewed seizure of indigenous land underway around the world. The new imperialism that took off in the wake of the U.S. Civil War and abolition of slavery encompassed wars of conquest waged by colonial powers for the expansion of white territorial control, as well as the removal of indigenous peoples from their lands to make way for white settlement. Anglo-European and U.S. imperial regimes learned from one another, shared expertise, and developed a trans-imperial approach to the administrative challenges associated, from their perspective, with taking up “the white man’s burden” on a global scale. As a result, their policies of land theft—including the privatization and expropriation of indigenous lands held in common—looked similar, whether employed in French Algeria under Napoleon III and then the Third Republic, or the Cape Colony under Cecil Rhodes, or Indian Territory in what would become the state of Oklahoma.4

Harry Magdoff explains that by the start of the First World War, “as a consequence of this new expansion and conquest on top of that of preceding centuries, the colonial powers, their colonies, and their former colonies extended over approximately 85 percent of the earth’s surface.”5 This is the period in which the United States seized Hawai’i, Alaska, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Marshall Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands, and waged a war of atrocity against the Philippine Republic.6 The gospel of colonial expansion, which W. E. B. Du Bois identified as the “new religion of whiteness,” taught its followers that “whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”7 The new imperialism was thus underwritten by “the doctrine of the divine right of white people to steal.”8

One result of this phase of capitalist globalization was the racialized division of nature and humanity on a world scale, resulting in what historian David Anderson has called the “first global environmental problem,” described in the 1930s as another “white man’s burden.”9 This was a massive soil erosion crisis associated with colonial land use changes, especially the expansion of cash crop agriculture and deforestation, and the integration of the first global agriculture and food regime.

Dust Bowls of Empire
As scholars of racial capitalism, colonialism, and white settler colonialism have shown, capitalist development depends on a racialized division of humanity. This process is mirrored in the racialized division of nature. Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster explain that the division of nature under capitalism is central to the system’s ecological rifts:

Capital accumulation requires the continual expansion of the division of nature as well as the division of labor. The division of nature is no longer, however, a social division of nature, in which the earth’s different landscapes and species are utilized by human beings within a context that maintains the reproduction of nature itself. Instead, it is a detailed/alienated division of nature that breaks the circle of natural processes, creating ecological rifts. Nature is remade in such a way as to promote a single end: the accumulation of capital, irrespective of the lessons of rational science and conditions of sustainability.10

The racialization of the division of nature was part and parcel of the new imperialism. Lands and people were identified as the natural property of white men, and modes of land tenure that differed from capitalist property relations (likewise identified with whiteness), as well as the people practicing them, were treated as backward and exploitable or expropriatable.

At the heart of every major ecological crisis of capitalism has been the idea that (white) property owners, businessmen, and policy-makers can do with the land as they please in the name of profit, and assume access to land and resources further afield once they have destroyed the areas where they started. In the United States this attitude was summed up by Teddy Roosevelt, who remarked that in the view of the American settler, “when he exhausted the soil of his farm, he felt that his son could go West and take up another…. When the soil-wash from the farmer’s field choked the neighboring river, the only thought was to use the railway rather than the boats to move produce and supplies.”11

By the 1930s, colonial soil scientists described the massive soil erosion problem then plaguing colonies and frontier regions around the world, including the U.S. Southern plains, as the result of the imperial “rape of the earth” of preceding decades.12 This ecological crisis, predicated on the attempted domination and decimation of entire cultures, involved a then-unprecedented level of destruction and erosion of the living soil complex upon which practically all terrestrial life depends. Lush and lovely prairies, woodlands, pampas, and forests were shorn of their protective layer and the landscape scraped bare to make way for the desolate monoculture of capitalist agriculture.

By the end of the 1930s, tens of thousands of people had been displaced on the U.S. Southern plains and elsewhere, after decades of so many lives being mutilated or sacrificed on the altars of profit and white supremacy.13 One U.S. official called the Dust Bowl “the most spectacular mass sacrifice to strictly commercial mores in the history of mankind.”14 This disaster developed in spite of decades of warnings about the growing problem of soil erosion and broader land degradation across the colonial world, as well as its impact on communities losing their livelihoods. There was already a large body of knowledge about how to prevent erosion, as well as shared expertise across colonial contexts about how to remediate it, adequate technology, and many conservation-oriented elites working to address the growing ecological crises of the new imperialism. However, as with the ineffectual climate conferences held in recent decades by the United Nations, world leaders in the 1930s could not ultimately prevent or resolve the crisis of soil erosion because of their commitment to maintaining the global social and economic status quo—the racialized class system in which we still live. Like dust-bowlification today, the ultimate source of the crisis was social, not technological, and thus required social change to address. Prominent British colonial soil scientists Graham Vernon Jacks and Robert Orr Whyte, authors of The Rape of the Earth, recognized even then that this refusal to disturb the status quo would make it impossible to truly address the global crisis of soil erosion:

Where land-utilization practices are firmly established and have become the basis of the country’s economy, the adoption of a new land-utilization programme conforming to the limits imposed by the natural environment, may well involve a social and political revolution.

Therein lies the supreme difficulty of applying effective erosion control. We now know fairly precisely what agricultural, pastoral, forest and engineering principles must be adopted to stop the earth from rotting away beneath our feet, but we cannot, or dare not, apply them forthwith on a scale commensurate with the gravity of the situation.15

While in the United States New Deal agricultural programs addressed some of the technical problems of agriculture, and met some of the needs of down-and-out white settlers—the Tom Joads depicted in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath—the broader social conditions that allow for such destruction have remained in place. This is why, as I argue and illustrate in great detail in my forthcoming book, we now face even worse ecological crises than in the 1930s—a new global Dust Bowl.16

The New Global Dust Bowl
At the heart of the new Dust Bowl are land degradation, climate change, and freshwater scarcity. It is the result of increasingly extreme expropriation—in both scale and technique—of the land, of the planet’s hydrocarbon deposits, and of freshwater systems. Industrial agriculture has contributed significantly to each of these problems, as “heavy [fossil-fueled] tilling, multiple harvests and abundant use of agrochemicals have increased yields at the expense of long-term sustainability.”17 These practices have masked the effects of land degradation, especially in its most destructive form, the loss of soil to erosion. Because of the ongoing mining of the soil for profit, the earth has lost a third of its arable land to erosion and pollution since the 1970s. Plant and soil biologist Duncan Cameron has warned that “you think of the dust bowl of the 1930s in North America and then you realize we are moving towards that situation if we don’t do something.”18

While soil erosion receives little attention in the media—perhaps because, as one scientist said, “soil isn’t sexy”—the problems caused by climate change are more widely covered.19 The earth’s warming climate is driving a shift in the global hydrological or water cycle that is essentially making wet places wetter and dry places drier—with awful ecological and social consequences. NASA’s Earth Observatory cites the alteration of the hydrological cycle as one of “the most serious Earth science and environmental policy issues confronting society.”20 According to World Bank economist Richard Damania, “when we look at any of the major impacts of climate change, they one way or another come through water…. So it will be no exaggeration to claim that climate change is really in fact about hydrological change.”21

At the same time, freshwater resources are being degraded by pollution and over-tapped by unsustainable agricultural practices, which, in conjunction with climate change and inadequate infrastructure serving poorer areas, is reducing the availability of freshwater to life-threatening levels. A 2016 study published in Science Advances indicated that already, “about 66% [of the global population] (4.0 billion people) lives under severe water scarcity…at least 1 month of the year…. The number of people facing severe water scarcity for at least 4 to 6 months per year is 1.8 to 2.9 billion…. Half a billion people face severe water scarcity all year round.”22

Scientists working at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University and NOAA predict that in arid regions such as the U.S. Southwest, “the levels of aridity seen in the 1950s multiyear drought, or the 1930s Dust Bowl, [will] become the new climatology by mid-century: a perpetual drought.” The possibility of “perpetual drought” raises again the terrible specter of the Dust Bowl, but this time with no obvious way back, given the “locked-in” nature of climate change.23

Such warnings by scientists indicate the severity of both current and expected crises, given that the Dust Bowl is considered by many as one of the more extreme humanmade ecological and social disasters in history. However, we now confront the reality, given the trends explained above, that dust-bowlification is an increasingly likely and ordinary threat in the face of climate change.24 That what is happening today is a direct continuation of the colonial past is illustrated in part by the great social distance between those making decisions and those most affected—and by the fact that one group of people may forcibly impose such destruction on others. As a recent report by Tamra Gilbertson for the Indigenous Environmental Network and Climate Justice Alliance stated:

Communities especially impacted include the frontline communities of peoples living directly alongside fossil-fuel pollution and extraction overwhelmingly: Indigenous Peoples (IPs), Black, Latino, Asian and Pacific Islander communities, working class, poor and peasant communities in the United States, Canada and around the world. These peoples are forced to sacrifice their lives, livelihoods and health for the sake of projects to extract and burn fossil fuels and dump the resulting toxic waste and…have been facing the reality of the climate crisis for decades. In climate disruption and extreme weather events, these communities and indigenous tribal nations are hit first and [worst].25

However, there is no serious New Deal on the horizon for the poor and non-white world most impacted by socioecological crises in the new Dust Bowl era.26 Rather, international environmental politics, as represented by the most recent climate negotiations, have hung much of the world out to dry—or drown. Moreover, the very people suffering most under current conditions and forced to seek safety away from home are also scapegoated viciously by political and economic elites oozing racist anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment across Europe, Britain, North America, and beyond.

No Empires, No Dust Bowls
A key lesson from all of this is that when we talk about ecological crises like climate change, biodiversity loss, water pollution and scarcity, and soil degradation, we are necessarily talking about systemic social problems with long and brutal histories under capitalist development. When scientists describe the increase of Dust Bowl-like conditions under climate change, they signal a particular kind of violent ecological and social change. The projected crises have violent consequences. But equally violent are the social forces, historical developments, policies, and practices that produce such massive socioecological crises in the first place.

Mainstream environmentalism, which first developed in the colonial context, has often instead ignored the historical origins of current crises. Failure to address this history allows too many environmentalists and policy-makers “to safely put aside present responsibility for continued harm done by that past and questions of reparations, restitution, and reordering society.”27

Rather than adjusting to injustice, a tendency toward accommodation in the face of oppression that Martin Luther King Jr. and others warned against, we must meet the imperial system of capital head on, in all its manifestations. Collective resistance against police brutality, immigrant-bashing, toxic forms of masculinity and heteronormativity, prisons, attacks on indigenous sovereignty, military aggression and bombing of defenseless communities, and the segregation of the global environmental movement are essential if environmentalism is to have any relevance in the struggle to build a better world and avoid the catastrophic deepening of the global ecological rift. At the heart of the matter is that allowing the accumulation of injustice to continue makes inevitable what Foster calls the “accumulation of catastrophe.”28 Environmental justice demands solidarity with those on the frontlines rather than those defending the bottom line of capital. We do not need a “greener” version of such barbarism. Peace with the system means no peace for the planet.

Notes
↩ Maria Cristina Rulli, Antonio Saviori, and Paolo D’Odorico, “Global Land and Water Grabbing,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 3 (2013): 892–97; Jampel Dell’Angelo, Maria Cristina Rulli, and Paolo D’Odorico, “The Global Water Grabbing Syndrome,” Ecological Economics 143 (2018): 276–85; Cyril Mychalejko, “Land Grabs Soar, Worsen Land Conflicts and Climate Change: Report,” Telesur, June 14, 2016; May Bulman, “Human Trafficking and Slavery Affecting ‘Every Large Town and City in UK,’” Independent, August 10, 2017; Gwyneth Rees, “Human Trafficking: Modern-Day Slaves ‘Within Plain Sight,’” BBC Wales News, February 25, 2018; Jonathan Watts and John Vidal, “Environmental Defenders Being Killed in Record Numbers Globally, New Research Reveals,” Guardian, July 13, 2017.
↩ Zach Schonfeld, “Understanding Donald Trump’s Weird Obsession With Andrew Jackson,” Newsweek, January 5, 2017.
↩ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Boston: Beacon, 2014), 144.
↩ R. J. Thompson and B. M. Nicholls, “The Glen Grey Act: Forgotten Dimensions in an Old Theme,” South African Journal of Economic History 8, no. 2 (1993): 58–70.
↩ Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 35.
↩ Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, 163.
↩ W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” [1920], Monthly Review 55, no. 6 (2003): 44–58, 45–46.
↩ Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” 55.
↩ David Anderson, “Depression, Dust Bowl, Demography, and Drought: The Colonial State and Soil Conservation in East Africa during the 1930’s,” African Affairs 83, no. 332 (July 1984): 321–43, 327; Graham Vernon Jacks and Robert Orr Whyte, The Rape of the Earth: A World Survey of Soil Erosion (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), 249.
↩ Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Ecology in the 21st Century,” World Review of Political Economy 1, no. 1 (2010): 142–56, 152; John Bellamy Foster referred earlier to the “division of nature” as the “the disconnection of natural processes from each other and their extreme simplification…an inherent tendency of capitalist development” (The Vulnerable Planet [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999], 121).
↩ Theodore Roosevelt, “Opening Address by the President,” Proceedings of a Conference of Governors (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1909), 9. Conference of Governors on the Conservation of Natural Resources held in Washington, D.C., May 13–15, 1908.
↩ Jacks and White, The Rape of the Earth, 1939.
↩ “Dust and Drought,” Smithsonian American Art Museum, http://americanexperience.si.edu.
↩ Russell Lord, “Progress of Soil Conservation in the United States,” Geographical Journal 105, nos. 5–6 (1945): 159–66, 162.
↩ Jacks and Whyte, The Rape of the Earth, 38.
↩ Hannah Holleman, Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of “Green Capitalism” (Yale University Press, forthcoming).
↩ Jonathan Watts, “Third of Earth’s Soil Is Acutely Degraded due to Agriculture,” Guardian, September 12, 2017.
↩ Oliver Milman, “Earth Has Lost a Third of Arable Land in Past 40 Years, Scientists Say,” Guardian, December 2, 2015.
↩ John Crawford, “What If the World’s Soil Runs Out?” interview by World Economic Forum, Time, December 14, 2012.
↩ Steve Graham, Claire Parkinson, and Mous Chahine, “The Water Cycle and Climate Change,” NASA Earth Observatory, October 1, 2010, http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov.
↩ Chris Mooney, “World Bank: The Way Climate Change Is Really Going to Hurt Us Is through Water,” Washington Post, May 3, 2016.
↩ Mesfin M. Mekonnen and Arjen Y. Hoekstra, “Four Billion People Facing Severe Water Scarcity,” Science Advances 2, no. 2 (2016).
↩ Richard Seager, “An Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America,” Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Earth Institute, Columbia University, http://ocp.ldeo.columbia.edu; Richard Seager et al., “Model Projections of an Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America,” Science 316, no. 5828 (2007): 1181–84.
↩ Joseph Romm, “Desertification: The Next Dust Bowl,” Nature 478 (2011): 450–51, 450; Joe Romm, “My Nature Piece on Dust-Bowlification and the Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security,” ThinkProgress, May 24, 2012, https://thinkprogress.org.
↩ Tamra Gilbertson, Carbon Pricing: A Critical Perspective for Community Resistance, vol. 1 (Bemidji, MN: Indigenous Environmental Network/Climate Justice Alliance, 2017), 12.
↩ Chris Mooney, “World Bank: The Way Climate Change Is Really Going to Hurt Us Is through Water”; Somina Sengupta, “Hotter, Drier, Hungrier: How Global Warming Punishes the World’s Poorest,” New York Times, March 12, 2018; Pamela Worth, “Where Climate Change Hits First and Worst,” Catalyst 14 (2015): 8–11, 22.
↩ Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, 5.
↩ John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe,” Monthly Review 63, no. 7 (December 2011): 1–17.

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Thu Jun 13, 2019 3:01 pm

Green Groups Silent as Solar Company Plans Destruction of Mojave Wildlands
June 10, 2019
The Department of Interior in early June released its draft environmental review indicating that plans to replace 11 square miles of intact desert wildlands in southern Nevada with the Gemini Solar project would result in significant impacts on wildlife and outdoor recreation. The project proposed by Arevia Power would install photovoltaic solar panels on land that is currently home to rare plants, desert kit fox, tortoises and other wildlife. Photovoltaic solar panels are just as easily installed on rooftops, parking lot canopies, and on already-disturbed lands, calling in to question the need to sacrifice desert wildlands to generate electricity. (California has installed over 8,000 megawatts of distributed solar generation with relatively modest policy incentives.)



Arevia Power's plans to destroy these Mojave wildlands will displace or kill nearly at least 260 desert tortoises, and dozens of kit foxes and burrowing owls, according to the draft environmental impact statement. The area is also home to rare plants, including the beleaguered threecorner milkvetch. According to the Department of Interior report, "[m]itigating for threecorner milkvetch habitat loss is no longer possible. Habitat conservation is the method needed to ensure the long-term survival of this species. Threecorner milkvetch is currently state-listed as critically endangered." The project would also disrupt the Congressionally-designated Old Spanish National Historic Trail.

Despite Arevia Power's plans to destroy an area of wildlands half the size of Manhattan, environmental groups have largely been silent on the project. Clean energy is indeed the answer to cutting our dependency on fossil fuels, but many environmental organizations have yet to build the intellectual courage necessary to consistently inject nuance into national discourse on the deployment of renewable energy and define a sustainable path for our clean energy transition. Some major environmental organizations submitted scoping letters* to the Department of Interior earlier in the environmental review process, but none have come forward with public statements regarding the Gemini Solar project. Only in Nevada can you plan to mow down an area nearly twice the size of Yosemite Valley and fail to draw a public voice of dissent sufficient to fill a letter to the editor (although I concede that southern Nevada's largest newspaper is owned by a major donor to President Trump).


Screenshot from the Draft Environmental Impact Statement shows

(*Scoping Comments were submitted by Defenders of Wildlife, Center for Biological Diversity, and the Wilderness Society to the Department of Interior, although these groups have not issued public statements. The Wilderness Society urged politicians to bulldoze more of our public lands for clean energy in a blog post that ironically notes that "we have barely scratched the surface: less than 5% of the nation’s renewable power comes from public lands." The Wilderness Society urging the sacrifice of wildlands to combat climate change would be like the ACLU advocating warrantless searches and wiretaps in response to a terrorist attack. The Sierra Club did not submit comments. Smaller, grassroots organizations have submitted letters and have been more vocal, including Basin & Range Watch and the Desert Tortoise Council.)

Clean energy may reduce carbon emissions, but it can still be disastrous for biodiversity; scientists have regularly identified habitat conservation as the key to preventing extinction and improving the resilience of species already under pressure by the effects of climate change. Famed scientist E.O. Wilson wrote in a 2016 New York Times editorial that:
"The disappearance of natural habitat is the primary cause of biological diversity loss at every level — ecosystems, species and genes, all of them. Only by the preservation of much more natural habitat than previously envisioned can extinction be brought close to a sustainable level."
Compounding the problems surrounding Arevia Power's plans to destroy desert wildlands is that the Department of Interior decided not to update its Resource Management Plan in southern Nevada. The result is a relative free-for-all on public lands: the Federal stewards of our public lands have not decided through a recent public process what we as a society want to protect or exploit. This gives developers of all varieties an advantage because "multiple use" is the default on most public lands that are not protected. Multiple use, however, is a misnomer because once a developer builds an open-pit mine, solar power project, or natural gas well pad on public lands, it severely limits the number of species that can benefit from that land. The loss of that land to a developer also means that we humans cannot enjoy that land for a vast number of other uses, including camping, hiking, wildlife watching, etc.

By the end of this year, the Department of Interior could issue a final decision approving Arevia Power's plans to wipe out 11 square miles of wildlands, and that would only be the latest in the ever-exploding sprawl of southern Nevada. The public can submit comments on this project through the difficult-to-navigate Department of Interior website, but ultimately the silence of nature's advocates and local elected officials will determine whether this sacrifice is permitted or not. If it is built, we will be able to power our televisions and refrigerators with supposedly guilt-free clean energy, and some seemingly anonymous* investors will profit greatly. We will lose thousands of acres of Mojave plant life and critters that have survived for millennia on those lands. But we have only barely scratched the surface, right?

(Arevia Power's website lists 1044 10th Avenue, Redwood City, California as its contact address. That address resolves to a $1.2 million, two-bedroom home. As of 2019, it did not have any rooftop solar panels.)

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Jun 18, 2019 3:49 pm

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Thomas Sankara: Imperialism is the Arsonist of Our Forests and Savannas.

[This speech was first given at the first International Silva Conference for the Protection of the Trees and Forests in Paris. It has been since been disseminated by revolutionaries through many means as a way to underscore the necessity of social revolution and an environmental focus. Now more than ever this speech is necessary to internalize, as we face profound and previously unseen danger regarding environmental crises in capitalism. Comrade Thomas Sankara died in service of this task, and the very least we can do is pay tribute to what it is he died for, and internalize the lessons of the Burkinabè revolution. As always, the following has been made available here for the purposes of study and struggle.]

My homeland, Burkina Faso, is without question one of the rare countries on this planet justified in calling itself and viewing itself as a distillation of all the natural evils from which mankind still suffers at the end of this twentieth century.

Eight million Burkinabè have painfully internalized this reality for twenty-three years. They have watched their mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons die, with hunger, famine, disease, and ignorance decimating them by the hundreds. With tears in their eyes, they have watched ponds and rivers dry up. Since 1973 they have seen the environment deteriorate, trees die, and the desert invade with giant strides. It is estimated that the desert in the Sahel advances at the rate of seven kilometers per year.

Only by looking at these realities can one understand and accept the legitimate revolt that was born, that matured over a long period of time, and that finally erupted in an organized way the night of August 4, 1983, in the form of a democratic and popular revolution in Burkina Faso.

Here I am merely a humble spokesperson of a people who, having passively watched their natural environment die, refuse to watch themselves die. Since August 4, 1983, water, trees, and lives—if not survival itself—have been fundamental and sacred elements in all action taken by the National Council of the Revolution, which leads Burkina Faso.

In this regard, I am also compelled to pay tribute to the French people, to their government, and in particular to their president, Mr. François Mitterrand, for this initiative, which expresses the political genius and clear-sightedness of a people always open to the world and sensitive to its misery. Burkina Faso, situated in the heart of the Sahel, will always fully appreciate initiatives that are in perfect harmony with the most vital concerns of its people. The country will be present at them whenever it is necessary, in contrast to useless pleasure trips.

For nearly three years now, my people, the Burkinabè people, have been fighting a battle against the encroachment of the desert. So it was their duty to be here on this platform to talk about their experience, and also benefit fromt he experience of other peoples from around the world. For nearly three years in Burkina Faso, every happy event—marriages, baptisms, award presentations, and visits by prominent individuals and others—is celebrated with a tree-planting ceremony.

To greet the new year 1986, all the schoolchildren and students of our capital, Ouagadougou, built more than 3,500 improved cookstoves with their own hands, offering them to their mothers. This was in addition to the 80,000 cookstoves made by women themselves over the course of two years. This was their contribution to the national effort to reduce the consumption of firewood and to protect trees and life.

The ability to buy or simply rent one of the hundreds of public dwellings built since August 4, 1983, is strictly conditional on the beneficiary promising to plant a minimum number of trees and to nurture them like the apple of his eye. Those who receive these dwellings but were mindless of their commitment have already been evicted, thanks to the vigilance of our Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, committees that poisonous tongues take pleasure in systematically and unilaterally denigrating.

After having vaccinated throughout the national territory, in two weeks, 2.5 million children between the ages of nine months and fourteen years—children from Burkina Faso and from neighboring countries—against measles, meningitis, and yellow fever; after having sunk more than 150 wells assuring drinking water to the 20 or so districts in our capital that lacked this vital necessity until now; after having raised the literacy rate from 12 to 22 percent in two years—the Burkinabè people victoriously continue their struggle for a green Burkina.

Ten million trees were planted under the auspices of a fifteen-month People’s Development Program, our first venture while awaiting the five-year plan. In the villages and in the developed river valleys, families must each plant one hundred trees per year.

The cutting and selling of firewood has been completely reorganized and is now strictly regulated. These measures range from the requirement to hold a lumber merchant’s card, through respecting the zones designated for wood cutting, to the requirement to ensure reforestation of deforested areas. Today every Burkinabè town and village owns a wood grove, thus reviving an ancestral tradition.

Thanks to the effort to make the popular masses aware of their responsibilities, our urban centers are free of the plague of roaming livestock. In our countryside, our efforts focus on settling livestock in one place as a means of promoting intensive stockbreeding in order to fight against unrestrained nomadism.

All criminal acts of arson by those who burn the forest are subject to trial and sanctioning by the Popular Courts of Conciliation in the villages. The requirement of planting a certain number of trees is one of the sanctions issued by these courts.

From February 10 to March 20, more than 35,000 peasants—officials of the cooperative village groups—will take intensive, basic courses on the subjects of economic management and environmental organization and maintenance.

Since January 15 a vast operation called the “Popular Harvest of Forest Seeds” has been under way in Burkina for the purpose of supplying the 7,000 village nurseries. We sum up all of these activities under the label “the three battles.”

Ladies and Gentlemen:

My intention is not to heap unrestrained and inordinate praise on the modest revolutionary experience of my people with regard to the defense of the trees and forests. My intention is to speak as explicitly as possible about the profound changes occurring in the relationship between men and trees in Burkina Faso. My intention is to bear witness as accurately as possible to the birth and development of a deep and sincere love between Burkinabè men and trees in my homeland.

In doing this, we believe we are applying our theoretical conceptions on this, based on the specific ways and means of our Sahel reality, in the search for resolutions to present and future dangers attacking trees all over the planet.

Our efforts and those of the entire community gathered here, your cumulative experience and ours, will surely guarantee us victory after victory in the struggle to save our trees, our environment, and, in short, our lives.

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen:

I come to you with the hope that you are taking up a battle from which we cannot be absent, we who are attacked daily and who are waiting for the miracle of greenery to rise up from the courage to say what must be said. I have come to join with you in deploring the harshness of nature. But I have also come to denounce the ones whose selfishness is the source of his fellow man’s misfortune. Colonial plunder has decimated our forests without the slightest thought of replenishing them for our tomorrows.

The unpunished disruption of the biosphere by savage and murderous forays on the land and in the air continues. One cannot say too much about the extent to which all these machines that spew fumes spread carnage. Those who have the technological means to find the culprits have no interest in doing so, and those who have an interest in doing so lack the technological means. They have only their intuition and their innermost conviction.

We are not against progress, but we do not want progress that is anarchic and criminally neglects the rights of others. We therefore wish to affirm that the battle against the encroachment of the desert is a battle to establish a balance between man, nature, and society. As such it is a political battle above all, and not an act of fate.

The creation of a Ministry of Water as a complement to the Ministry of the Environment and Tourism in my country demonstrates our desire to clearly formulate the problems in order to be able to resolve them. We must fight to find the financial means to exploit our existing water resources—drilling operations, reservoirs, and dams. This is the place to denounce the one-sided contracts and draconian conditions imposed by banks and other financial institutions that doom our projects in this field. It is these prohibitive conditions that lead to our countries’ traumatizing debt and eliminate any meaningful maneuvering room.

Neither fallacious Malthusian arguments—and I assert that Africa remains an underpopulated continent—nor the vacation resorts pompously and demagogically christened “reforestation operations” provide an answer. We and our misery are spurned like bald and mangy dogs whose lamentations and cries disturb the peace and quiet of the manufacturers and merchants of misery.

That is why Burkina has proposed and continues to propose that at least 1 percent of the colossal sums of money sacrificed to the search for cohabitation with other stars and planets be used, by way of compensation, to finance projects to save trees and lives. We have not abandoned hope that a dialogue with the Martians might lead to the reconquest of Eden. But in the meantime, earthlings that we are, we also have the right to reject a choice limited simply to the alternatives of hell or purgatory.

Explained in this way, our struggle for the trees and forests is first and foremost a democratic and popular struggle. Because a handful of forestry engineers and experts getting themselves all worked up in a sterile and costly manner will never accomplish anything! Nor can the worked-up consciences of a multitude of forums and institutions—sincere and praiseworthy though they may be—make the Sahel green again, when we lack the funds to drill wells for drinking water a hundred meters deep, while money abounds to drill oil wells three thousand meters deep!

As Karl Marx said, those who live in a palace do not think about the same things, nor in the same way, as those who live in a hut. This struggle to defend the trees and forests is above all a struggle against imperialism. Because imperialism is the arsonist setting fire to our forests and our savannas.

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen:

We rely on these revolutionary principles of struggle so that the green of abundance, joy, and happiness may take its rightful place. We believe in the power of the revolution to stop the death of our Faso and usher in a bright future for it… .

This fight can be waged. We must not retreat in face of the immensity of the task. We must not turn away from the suffering of others, for the spread of the desert no longer knows any borders.

We can win this struggle if we choose to be architects and not simply bees. It will be the victory of consciousness over instinct. The bee and the architect, yes! If the author of these lines will allow me, I will extend this twofold analogy to a threefold one: the bee, the architect, and the revolutionary architect.

Homeland or death, we will win!

https://anti-imperialism.org/2018/02/26 ... -savannas/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 22, 2019 3:35 pm

Image
Pentagon Has Emitted Over a Billion Metric Tons of Greenhouse Gases in Its War on Terror
With over 800 military bases in more than 80 countries, the Pentagon remains the “world’s largest institutional user of petroleum” and “producer of greenhouse gases.”

by Kevin Gosztola


June 18th, 2019

By Kevin Gosztola

Shadowproof — The United States military has emitted over a billion metric tons of greenhouse gases since the beginning of the global war on terrorism in 2001, according to a report from Brown University’s “Costs of War” project.

It is equivalent to the annual emissions of 257 million passenger cars, “more than double the current number of cars on the road in the U.S.”

With over 800 military bases in more than 80 countries, the Pentagon remains the “world’s largest institutional user of petroleum” and “producer of greenhouse gases.”






The Pentagon is not transparent when it comes to fuel consumption or greenhouse gas emissions. However, the project used the Department of Energy’s emissions data for the report’s estimates.

In 2017, the Pentagon’s greenhouse gas emissions were about 59 million metric tons. That same year, this was more than Finland (46.8 million metric tons), Sweden (50.8 million metric tons), or Denmark (33.5 million metric tons).

At least 400 million metric tons of greenhouse gases are a result of consumption in war zones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria.

According to the report, “From 1998 to 2017, the U.S. purchased 2.4 billion barrels of petroleum fuel. Since the 9/11 attacks, annual fuel purchases have averaged more than 120 million barrels of all types of fuel. Between 2010 and 2015, the armed services purchased an average of 102 million barrels of fuel per year from the DOD.”

It is estimated the Pentagon consumed more than 85 million barrels of “operational fuel” in order to power its fleets of ships, aircraft, and combat vehicles. They also used the fuel for “contingency bases.” In total, $8.2 billion was spent.

Since 2001, the [Pentagon] has consistently consumed between 77 and 80 percent of all U.S. government energy consumption,” the report notes.

Installations that support operations, as well as military non-armored vehicles, are notorious in their guzzling of fuel. There are apparently 60,000 HUMVEEs that remain the U.S. Army’s fleet. They get about “four to eight miles per gallon of diesel fuel.”

Domestic and overseas military installations account for about 40 percent of the Pentagon’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The report briefly details how jet fuel is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Image
Credit | Watson Institute’s Cost of War project

Aircraft are responsible for hundreds of tons of C02. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan involved massive airstrikes, and materials were flown to setup bases for occupations.

“Similarly, the U.S. war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, which began in August 2014, has entailed tens of thousands of aircraft sorties for various missions—from reconnaissance, to airlift, refueling, and weapons strikes. A B-2 Bomber on a mission from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri might be refueled many times.

The project cites the following example from January 18, 2017: “Two B-2 Bombers, accompanied by 15 KC-135 and KC-10 aerial refueling tankers made a 30-hour round trip mission from Whiteman Air Force Base to Libya to drop bombs on ISIS targets in Libya.”

As the report mentions, the project did not account for emissions caused by the “burning of oil by sabotage” or the destruction of oil infrastructure. Nor did it account for energy consumed in the process of reconstruction efforts or the impact of deforestation.

“In Afghanistan, war-caused migration and illegal logging appear to be the chief cause of deforestation. The causes of deforestation in Iraq are complex but include war.”

While the U.S. military has plenty of resources to move to renewable energy, it has remained dependent on petroleum, which is a boon for the oil and gas industry.

Switches to renewable power generation between 2011 and 2015 have only offset less than one percent of the Pentagon’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The closure of U.S. military bases in addition to the end of wars would go a long way toward diminishing the U.S. government’s gigantic carbon footprint. Any plan to address climate change should contemplate demilitarization, given what is outlined in this report.

As Alice Slater, the New York director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, wrote for The Nation, U.S. military bases are not only responsible for such massive amounts of greenhouse emissions but also devastating impacts caused by pollutants and toxic weapons.

“From Agent Orange in Vietnam, depleted uranium in Iraq, and munitions dumps and firing ranges in Vieques, Puerto Rico, to a toxic brew of poisons along the Potomac River, communities and soldiers as well as children born subsequent to exposure to these toxins are suffering a broad range of illnesses and inherited genetic damage, while the U.S. government ducks any accountability for the harm caused by its mindless dumping and reckless burial of untreated toxic military wastes,” Slater described.

Countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia that have been impacted the most have been largely unable to convince or pressure the U.S. military into funding clean-up projects.

When one adds the toxic effects of U.S. military bases to the enormous amount of emissions over the past couple decades, it becomes clear a climate plan should include climate reparations for affected countries too.

Feature photo | U.S. Army Reserve Soldiers during a training exercise in Fort Irwin, Calif., June 10, 2019. Photo | Dvids

https://www.mintpressnews.com/pentagon- ... or/259324/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Jun 28, 2019 3:49 pm

The Monkey’s Face
by John Steppling / June 24th, 2019

The more reified the world becomes, the thicker the veil cast upon nature, the more the thinking weaving that veil in its turn claims ideologically to be nature, primordial experience.
— Theodor M. Adorno, Critical Models, Columbia University Press, 1963

Year after year
On the monkey’s face:
A monkey’s face.
— Basho (translated by Earl Miner)

Nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.
— Raymond Williams, Culture and Materialism, 2005

It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something — a form — in common with it.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921

What I am seeing of late is that the Climate Crises is destroying environmentalism. What I consider real environmentalism. The Climate discourse is quickly being taken over by monied interests whose desire is to save capitalism before they save the planet. They fly (in jets, often private) to conferences in which avacados (or whatever) are flown in from California (or wherever). And there is aristocracy, literally, in attendance. It feels almost required. The British or Dutch Royals, if we’re talking carbon footprints, are tracking in with size 12 Florsheims– while the indigenous activists who toil and are persecuted in places such as Honduras, or Colombia, are not invited. They are of another way of life, the life of actual concern for nature. These conferences are a kind of ceremonial environmentalism.

And the branded progressives of the Democratic Party, Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, feint to the left with tepid rebukes to the establishment, but quickly tack to the right with praise for blood-drenched ghouls like Madeleine Albright and even Gloria Estefan, whose father, in fact, was a bodyguard for Batista. Who “fled” Cuba (meaning fled the evils of communism) and thereby should be seen as a role model of some sort for young liberals and (yes) environmentalists… because brand loyalty being what it is, etc etc.

Meanwhile back at the conference, there is the issue of packaging. And I want to examine the packaging industry for a moment. Everything comes in a package. That is mass production at work. You can buy small yogurts that amount to five spoonfuls and then you must throw out the plastic container. The world is awash in plastics. And not only are plastics destroying the oceans and marine mammals and fish, pliable plastic is downright poisonous to the human beings. And this has been known for some time now. I first read about BPA and the effects of plastics in the early 90s.

CertiChem and its founder, George Bittner, who is also a professor of neurobiology at the University of Texas-Austin, had recently coauthored a paper in the NIH journal Environmental Health Perspectives. It reported that “almost all” commercially available plastics that were tested leached synthetic estrogens—even when they weren’t exposed to conditions known to unlock potentially harmful chemicals, such as the heat of a microwave, the steam of a dishwasher, or the sun’s ultraviolet rays. According to Bittner’s research, some BPA-free products actually released synthetic estrogens that were more potent than BPA.{ } According to one study, the pesticide atrazine can turn male frogs female. DES, which was once prescribed to prevent miscarriages, caused obesity, rare vaginal tumors, infertility, and testicular growths among those exposed in utero. Scientists have tied BPA to ailments including asthma, cancer, infertility, low sperm count, genital deformity, heart disease, liver problems, and ADHD.

— Mariah Blake, Mother Jones, 2014

And yet, like Big Tobacco did for years with cigarettes, the packaging industry has buried this information. People overwhelmingly eat from containers made of pliable plastic.

The toxicological consequences of such exposures, especially for susceptible subpopulations such as children and pregnant women, remain unclear and warrant further investigation. However, there is evidence of associations between urinary concentrations of some phthalate metabolites and biological outcomes (Swan et al. 2005; Swan 2008). For example, an inverse relationship has been reported between the concentrations of DEHP metabolites in the mother’s urine and anogenital distance, penile width and testicular decent in male offspring (Swan et al 2005; Swan 2008). In adults, there is some evidence of a negative association between phthalate metabolites and semen quality (Meeker & Sathyanarayana) and between high exposures to phthalates (workers producing PVC flooring) and free testosterone levels.

— Richard Thompson et al, Royal Society of Biological Medicine, 2009

Ah, the fertility drop off, which would be an elegant segue if I didn’t want to stick with packaging just a bit longer.

The new Climate Crisis…or Climate Emergency, feels increasingly distant from radical environmentalists of an earlier time. And I think part of the problem in wrapping one’s head around this crisis is that one has to tie together so many different topics: Fertility, mental health, dropping literacy, infrastructure neglect, pollution, militarism, Big Agra and Big Pharma, as well as digital technology and the psychology of contemporary westerners. A psychology mediated in huge part by lives increasingly spent staring at screens. And rather than expend the effort to actually connect these threads I find most people gravitate toward a simplistic and generalized position on the environment. And that position feels increasingly shaped by a marketing of fear.

The question then is how to frame a climate discourse that is not predicated on narrow almost tribal loyalties, and not deferential to the institutions of western capital. I mean, presuming that the earth actually does face mass extinction over the next fifty years (or, pick a date, say a hundred years) then one would want a sober clear dialogue with those who best know what is going on to make the earth warmer (and I think even so called deniers grant that earth is getting warmer… and the question would be how much warmer, for what reason and with what consequences. ) The problem is, who does know best what is going on? I see, increasingly, movie stars or celebrity politicians, or just celebrities, joining in the new branding of *climate emergency*. Why there is Mark Rufalo and Don Cheadle. There is Arnold with Greta. There is Barry with Greta. The world increasingly is presented as if Annie Liebovitz photographed everything for us. And I can find you the scientists who now have claim to their kind of celebrity, and I can find those who contradict them, even if they are not so called sceptics.

Now as I research this piece I run into sites where I have to subscribe to read the article. New Scientist, for example. Someone explain how that works…we are looking into the possible termination of human life, right? But you want to charge me a subscription fee?

I digress. Okay, now, I want to again note the invaluable work that Cory Morningstar has done. And rather than excerpt her detailed research on who is behind the various co-opting measures that western Capital has employed in creating the new narrative on the climate emergency, I will just link to her latest article here.

I mean honestly, Coca Cola is going to help save the planet? If you only read the Global Shapers section you will arrive at a pretty clear idea of how this all works. My point is that once you have The Climate Reality Project, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, Procter and Gamble, Reliance Industries, Oando, GMR Group, Hanwha Energy Corporation, Rosamund Zander and Yara International *investing* in saving the planet, you know something is wrong. The *Climate Emergency* is coming to obscure a host of other environmental and social problems. A recent report on links between fracking and cancer seems to get only minor attention. Or the aforementioned plastics problem — which does get attention from the perspective of ocean pollution but far less to none in terms of human and especially infant health. When there is a clear and recorded drop in IQ scores and when educators bemoan the state of academics and student skills, and when there are spikes in early onset of Alzheimers and autism and for that matter depression and anxiety, the scope of what can be included under the label of *environment* increases dramatically. This is not to even begin discussing U.S. Imperialism and the defense industry.1

And I am not even going to get into the effects of Depleted Uranium here.

The U.S. military hides statistics on its petroleum usage and its disposal of chemical waste, and, of course, the severe consequences of all the current ongoing U.S. wars (see Cholera in Yemen just for starters). The socio-political landscape is seeing the rise of global fascism as well as a continuing migration of wealth to the very top tier of the class hierarchy. Homes are being built with servants quarters for the first time in over a hundred years. It is a return to both Victorian values and social structure and in a wider sense a return to feudalism. The homeless camps that circle every American city speak to the extreme fragility of the social fabric in the West today. A fragility that is both planned and exploited by the ruling classes. The environment includes those people sleeping on the sidewalks of American cities. It includes a terrorized inner city black population, terrorized by ever more openly racist police departments (militarized under Obama) that routinely abuse power and often simply execute the vulnerable populations — populations that are growing.

And, of course, the dependency of the population of the West on its smart phone use. A new generation is always coming out and replacing the perfectly fine earlier generation of phone. Apple, Samsung, et al are massive polluting agents. So called *e waste* is gigantic. And it has accelerated the mining for rare earth minerals. Where is the discussion about this on these new green conferences? The idea of a future is still based on something like the old cartoon show The Jetsons. It is the entrenched belief in technology to solve everything, including global warming it seems.

Here another link to Wrong Kind of Green and the investment in fear.

The target demographic is youth. And the Greta phenomenon is the first volley of that campaign. The Gates Foundation is busy indoctrinating and grooming the young in Africa. Microsoft does the same: see here.

As does the U.S. military.

But “Climate Works” is quite simply behind nearly everything to some degree.

The issue of credibility looms as significant here. While I think everyone agrees that the planet is getting warmer, the marketing apparatus of global capital exaggerates and sensationalizes nearly everything. Extreme heat in India, dozens of deaths in Bihar. Well, the poor die in Bihar all the time, and in the past they have died from heat, too. New Delhi has had brutal heat for a hundred years in May and June. Now it’s getting worse. And there is little question it will continue to worsen. But articles are written as if they were scripts for Hollywood disaster films. The Raj used to move to the hill stations in summer to avoid the heat on the Indian plains. The poor are always the first to suffer when anything happens. Even when the exceptional event does occur it is hard to trust its exceptional qualities. And this might well be the final state of brain lock to which the Spectacle has brought us.

There is a growing conformity of opinion and a moral indignation that follows should one disagree, or even, often, simply ask questions. I have several times been referred to the NASA climate page. And I am shocked, really. On the page is one article on how the U.S. Navy is preparing for global warming. I mean the mind reels, honestly. Should I believe without question what NASA and the Navy tell me about the environment? The Navy, you know, the ones who torture and murder dolphins and whales.

Here is another side bar follow up on the military.

Let’s take the IPCC, whose voice and influence is far reaching here. They authored the *Climate Bible*, and are widely respected and endlessly quoted. Who is the IPCC?

The Panel itself is composed of representatives appointed by governments. Participation of delegates with appropriate expertise is encouraged. Plenary sessions of the IPCC and IPCC Working Groups are held at the level of government representatives. Non-Governmental and Intergovernmental Organizations admitted as observer organizations may also attend. Sessions of the Panel, IPCC Bureau, workshops, expert and lead authors meetings are by invitation only. About 500 people from 130 countries attended the 48th Session of the Panel in Incheon, Republic of Korea, in October 2018, including 290 government officials and 60 representatives of observer organizations. The opening ceremonies of sessions of the Panel and of Lead Author Meetings are open to media, but otherwise IPCC meetings are closed.

The IPCC is a child of the UN. It is, of necessity, a political organization. And as such there are a host of very suspect relationships involved. The most obvious is that poor countries are given technology and training, and money often, by the UN. Or rather, these gifts are largely administered by the UN. The developing nation must follow the UN guidelines and answer to the UN. This is a bit like the environmental version of economic austerity. There is also the fact that climate skeptics are now simply stigmatized and ridiculed. Usually by non scientists, even if said skeptic IS a scientist. Such is the desire (nearly pathological desire) for consensus in the West today. The point is that the IPCC is both political, western-based and UN-funded, and the UN uses the work of the IPCC to chart its climate course and allocation of funds. The UN, itself, of course is U.S.-based and does nothing to offend its host.

The IPCC has direct and significant ties to the WWF, Greenpeace, and the Environmental Defense Fund; in other words the corporate green opportunists. There is massive financing behind these groups. The IPCC also has had numerous accusations lodged against it regarding dodgy definitions of peer review (and for the record, peer reviewed material is actually no more likely to be true than non peered review material.(See Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, here.

And just to cover more of who runs government organizations, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is headed by retired rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet (lead administrator) while the Chief of the NOAA is Neil Jacobs, previously chief Atmospheric scientist for Panasonic Avionics {sic} (and still to be confirmed the CEO of Accuweather Barry Myers). The previous head of the NOAA, appointed by Obama, was Jane Lubachenko who called the IPCC an embarrassment. Just to keep your score cards up to date here. Also…the NOAA is tasked with managing U.S. satellite programs (through sub-organizations — The Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service — NESDIS) who collects data for the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force, among others. There are several sub-sub-services like National Coastal Data Development Center. The point being this is, again, the U.S. military in good measure. And most intelligent people I know distrust most everything that the military says, and with good reason — they have a long history of lying through their teeth.

And this ties into the notion of personal responsibility. Solutions to our environmental crisis have been reduced to “life style changes” which have also become the en vogue activism of the day. It is a line of thinking that is accepted and even endorsed by corporations, banks and neoliberal governments because it poses no real challenge to their power or their ongoing destructive practices. To the mainstream, tweaking one’s lifestyle is all that is needed. Buy an electric vehicle or use a bicycle. Don’t take a plane on your vacation. Buy reusable bags. Choose organic only. Go vegan. Buy reusable straws. While there is nothing wrong with doing these things in general, they must be understood as individual choices that are based on privilege and that have little impact in addressing urgent crisis our biosphere is facing right now.

What they do manage to do is deliver an added punishment on the poor and working class, people who are struggling to make ends meet. It places an unfair level of guilt on ordinary people whose impact on the environment is relatively negligible compared to the enormous destruction caused by the fossil fuel industry, mining companies, plastic and packaging production, shipping and the military industrial complex. Seldom (if ever) questioned are the basic foundations of the current economic order which is driving the decimation of the biosphere for the benefit of the wealthy Davos jet set.

— Kenn Orphan, Counterpunch, March 2019

Again, a difficulty in grasping the environmental crises in its entirety is that there are literally mountains of material to read and absorb. But it is clear that the U.N. (on Rockefeller land by the by) is really not to be trusted. It provides, at times, a platform for revolutionary voices, but more often it works against change. The very existence of the Security Council is a working definition of anti-democratic. Speaking of Rockefeller, here is another bit of sidebar history.

One of the interesting details from Ralph Richardson, circa 1976, is the interest of the foundation in ‘weather modification’. That’s fifty years ago now.

I mean, make of that what you will. And this also again raises issues of credibility. There are countless activists who claim geo-engineering is going on, that HAARP is behind it, and that chemtrails are evidence this, etc. For anyone who is not a scientist there is simply no way to verify or disprove any of this. It sounds crack-pot, though I can’t honestly tell you it is. But it does cause one a momentary shudder to note that the Rockefeller Foundation was interested in weather modification over fifty years ago. But my point here is broader, in a sense. I have written several times (and on my blog often) that contemporary life in the West feels unreal, that people in general exhibit almost trance like inabilities to reason or think or calculate. And I think that addiction to screens, to digital technology, to the internet itself (and I am as guilty as anyone) has led to a serious erosion in autonomous thought. And accompanying this erosion is a particular American brand of self righteousness Even on the left. This is a society of acute group think, and of shaming and stigmatizing. Dissent is, we know, actively attacked by the surveillance state, and censorship is growing on all fronts, and on the left I feel a chilling embrace of Puritanical moralism. The Climate Crises…maybe that should be in quotes….is becoming a nearly religious movement in which heretics are to be digitally burned at the stake.

Why is there such a growing hostility to credulity? Why do people seem not to care in the least that most of the world’s largest corporations are *investing* in climate cures. Not donating to climate cures but investing in them as business opportunities. And alongside this overarching investment in global warming is a recruitment and indoctrination of youth. The military is only one branch of the marketing that targets the young. Microsoft and the Gates Foundation proudly trumpet their target demographic; poor kids of the global south.

Now there is another discussion here, and oddly enough the arch conservative Aussie journalist Andrew Bolt distilled it a few years ago…

It’s that global warming is an apocalyptic faith whose preachers demand sacrifices of others that they find far too painful for themselves. It’s a faith whose prophets demand we close coal mines but who won’t even turn off their own pool lights. Who demand the masses lose their cars, while they themselves keep their planes. It’s the ultimate faith of the feckless rich, where a ticket to heaven can be bought with a check made out to Al Gore [to purchase offsets from a company he owns]. No further sacrifice is required. Except of course, from the poor. ( ) If the planet really is threatened with warming doom, why don’t you act like you believe it?

— Andrew Bolt, The Herald-Sun, November 17, 2010

Now Bolt is a profoundly reactionary voice, but he’s not entirely wrong here at all. Or rather he is wrong about global warming, but he is not wrong about a new cultural cultic following of armchair nihilism.

I have had people tell me it’s selfish to have more children. I have had them tell me to stop flying, or to stop eating meat (actually I’m already a vegetarian). But the point is this sort of individualistic nonsense masks a certain very stark hypocrisy. The problem is that this is not an individual problem. So two things seem to be ignored: the first is that industrial civilization has been going on for a long time and it began to hurt the planet and atmosphere from the first day. And two, this historical long range amnesia is connected to the Hollywood-fication of all thinking. People literally perceive the world as if Dwayne Johnson was going to rescue it. . You get the idea. Angelina Jolie now delivers speeches at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is going to run for office (or, is, cough, thinking about it). American politics is a clown show operating at the lowest possible common denominator.

The point is that environmental destruction has been going on a long time. And the industrial revolution intensified the harm and civilization never looked back. The greenhouse emissions theory may or may not be completely true or accurate. But it also doesn’t matter, really. Society itself is unravelling. People are sick, depressed, even increasingly suicidal — and the U.S. seems to want to wage even more war. The madness of this is stupefying — and it again underscores the need for a political vision that begins with a platform that says STOP WAR. All war, all of it. That men like John Bolton or Mike Pompeo are in positions of authority, that such men can manipulate their power to create military conflict speaks to the utter and absolute depravity and decadence of the Capitalist system (of course, in a wider sense Bolton and Pompeo are just following the mandate of the ruling class, something they learned and perfected long ago). Capitalism cannot survive. I have no idea if the planet can survive, but I suspect it will, though with rather substantial damage and suffering. But the hierarchical profit-driven capitalist system cannot. The new feudalism is here, already, but it’s not sustainable. And western capital is helping with the rise of new ultra nationalist fascist leaders across the planet. Nature is, I believe, more resilient than mortals think. Humans may not survive each other, however.

Then there is this:2

Again, there is always a question of credibility, of who to believe, and to remember these are models, computer models, and hence open to error, and behind any such numbers are the always lurking racism of the West, and sexism. But the Pew report does suggest that, as Roger Harris put it, the overpopulation ideologues may have just woken up to a demographic winter. By 2100 white people will be a stark minority in the world. Might this have anything to do with Bill and Melinda Gates obsessive birth control measures in Africa and India? Make America white again!

The climate emergency is disproportionately pushed by three or four mainstream outlets. I’m just noting this, really: the Guardian UK, Globe & Mail, The Independent, and Washington Post. And the Guardian can criticise what they see as institutional hypocrisy on the part of the World Bank for funding coal-burning sites but they say nothing against U.S. NATO aggressions, and they repeat the lies of the U.S. state department and Pentagon, as well as Israel, and this nowhere registers as cognitive dissonance (and honestly, George Monbiot, he who cares so for the planet, is also among the most egregious apologists for western Imperialism one can find).

…capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, or of the age-old social tendency to ‘truck, barter, and exchange’. It is a late and localized product of very specific historical conditions. The expansionary drive of capitalism, reaching a point of virtual universality today, is not the consequence of its conformity to human nature or to some transhistorical law, or of some racial or cultural superiority of ‘the West’, but the product of its own historically specific internal laws of motion, its unique capacity as well as its unique need for constant self-expansion. Those laws of motion required vast social transformations and upheavals to set them in train. They required a transformation in the human metabolism with nature, in the provision of life’s basic necessities.

— Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, May 2, 2017

Wood earlier notes Marshall Berman’s ideas of the Enlightenment’s inherent duality; a desire for universality and immutability, contingency and fragmentation. And that this was somehow a response to the ephemeral and ever shifting perspectives of modern life, aka Capitalism.

That duality feels more like schizophrenia today. Or bi-polar disorder. The shifting ephemeral experiences and shocks that Walter Benjamin described with Paris are now dulled computer-generated flat screen cut-out dolls.

I am reminded of a succinct capsulation of Mike Davis’ book Late Victorian Holocausts by William Wall on his blog…

Davis makes a convincing argument for seeing these late-Victorian famines in places as diverse as India, China, Brazil, Ethiopia and Egypt, as structural products of capitalism, the result of a nexus of improved communication by railroad and telegraph; the destruction of pre-existing communitarian (and therefore anti-capitalist) balances such as the ”iron granaries” of China; the demand for raw materials and foodstuffs to feed European industrial development; a fanatical belief in what we now call neo-liberalism but which was then called laissez-faire; the desire to exploit the labour surpluses that occurred when starving peasants abandoned land and moved to industrial centres; endemic racism (‘it would be a mistake to spend so much money to save a lot of black fellows’ – commented Lord Salisbury) combined with the Malthusian dogma that famines were a gift from God to keep human reproduction within the limits of our capability to produce food.

Pertinent at this moment, I think. Oh and food… it is worth pointing out the realities of food waste at this point.

Our calculations show that food surplus is increasing and food deficit is decreasing globally (Figures 2 and S4). Between 1965 and 2010, the food surplus grew from 310 kcal/cap/day to 510 kcal/cap/day, and the food deficit declined from 330 kcal/cap/day to 120 kcal/cap/day (moderate PAL). The amount of surplus food is increasing especially in most of the OECD countries, e.g., food surplus in the United States has increased from 400 kcal/cap/day to 1,050 kcal/cap/day between 1965 and 2010. Food availability has increased over the last few decades, whereas biophysical food requirements have remained almost constant.

— Diego Rybski and Jürgen P. Kropp, Environmental Service and Technology, 2019

and

Americans waste an unfathomable amount of food. In fact, according to a Guardian report released this week, roughly 50 percent of all produce in the United States is thrown away—some 60 million tons (or $160 billion) worth of produce annually, an amount constituting “one third of all foodstuffs.” Wasted food is also the single biggest occupant in American landfills, the Environmental Protection Agency has found.

— Adam Chandler, The Atlantic, 2014

There is more than enough food, in other words. But here is a very short primer on food dynamics…

The early 1900s saw the introduction of synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides, innovations that have become a hallmark of industrial crop production. In just 12 years, between 1964 and 1976, synthetic and mineral fertilizer applications on U.S. crops nearly doubled, while pesticide use on major U.S. crops increased by 143 percent. The shift to specialized monocultures increased farmers’ reliance on these chemicals, in part because crop diversity can help suppress weeds and other pests.

Chemical and pharmaceutical use also became commonplace in newly industrialized models of meat, milk, and egg production. Antibiotics, for example, were introduced to swine, poultry, and cattle feed after a series of experiments in the 1940s and 1950s found that feeding the drugs to animals caused them to gain weight faster and on less feed. By 2009, 80 percent of the antibiotic drugs sold in the U.S. were used not for human medicine but for livestock production. ( ) Largely as a result of consolidation, most food production in the U.S. now takes place on massive-scale operations. Half of all U.S. cropland is on farms with at least 1,000 acres (over 1.5 square miles). The vast majority of U.S. poultry and pork products comes from facilities that each produce over 200,000 chickens or 5,000 pigs in a single year, while most egg-laying hens are confined in facilities that house over 100,000 birds at a time.

— Johns Hopkins Center for a Liveable Future, 2016

Obesity has tripled since 1975 according to the WHO. In 2016 close to two billion people worldwide were clinically obese. There has also been a dramatic increase in childhood obesity. Capitalism is a system that only considers profit, you see. It does not consider our health, our quality of life, and certainly not planetary survival.

Food industry monopolists are behind the dismal economic reality of rural America. According to data compiled by the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2012, the four largest food and agriculture companies controlled 82 percent of the beef packing industry, 85 percent of soybean processing and 63 percent of pork.

— Anthony Pahnke and Jim Goodman, Counterpunch, 2019

Globally, what Vandana Shiva calls food imperialism, is also bankrolled by the same corporate forces and money that are coopting the Environmental movement. Cargill, Pepsi Cola, Bayer, Uniliver, Syngenta, Dupont, et al… (oh and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos) and this form of cultural imperialism also tries to erase history, as do all Imperialist projects.

The industrial west has always been arrogant, and ignorant, of the cultures it has colonised. “Fake Food” is just the latest step in a history of food imperialism. Soya is a gift of East Asia, where it has been a food for millennia. It was only eaten as fermented food to remove its’ anti-nutritive factors. But recently, GMO soya has created a soya imperialism, destroying plant diversity. It continues the destruction of the diversity of rich edible oils and plant based proteins of Indian dals that we have documented.

Women from India’s slums called on me to bring our mustard back when GMO soya oil started to be dumped on India, and local oils and cold press units in villages were made illegal. That is when we started the “sarson (mustard) satyagraha“ to defend our healthy cold pressed oils from dumping of hexane-extracted GMO soya oil. Hexane is a neurotoxin.

While Indian peasants knew that pulses fix nitrogen, the west was industrialising agriculture based on synthetic nitrogen which contributes to greenhous gases, dead zones in the ocean, and dead soils.

— Dr. Vandana Shiva, Counterpunch, 2019

If there is a possible future, it is one without corporations. Which means, really, a classless society, and that means, really, communism or socialism. It means, as I have said before, that equality is the real green. The climate discourse today is often mediated by those arrogant voices of both right and pseudo left America, the bullying aggressive believers in “science” … the belief in science by non scientists. And honestly, many scientists today are very narrowly focused and rather myopic outside of their specialization. The best scientists I have known are those most suspicious of their profession or practice.

For Thomas Kuhn, scientific hypotheses are shaped and restricted by the worldview, or paradigm, within which scientists operate. Most scientists are as blind to the paradigm as fish to water, and unable to see across or beyond it. In fact, most of the clinical medical students I teach at Oxford, and who already have a science degree, don’t even know what the word ‘paradigm’ means. When data emerges that conflicts with the paradigm, it is usually discarded, dismissed, or disregarded.

— Neel Burton, MD, “The Problems of Science”, Pyschology Today, 2019

Now, the flip side of trying to interrogate science is overcoming the blatant anti-science propaganda put out by the far right, and more significantly, perhaps, by the oil industry (Lee Raymond, when he was CEO of Exxon, spent huge amounts of money to propagate climate denial papers and disinformation). The Koch brothers donate huge amounts of their vast fortune to further an anti science right wing propaganda, as does Rupert Murdoch and the heinous FOX news empire.

Everything is political. Science is political. Our emotional lives are political. I just think it is important to remember that. The system wants the population both confused and at odds with each other. And remember too that social media is almost by design a toxic environment. The negative is rewarded and reinforced. And it has resulted in a populace that is highly defended (and resulted in more withdrawn and isolated people, especially among the young). An already aggressive society is now more aggressive

J.D. Simpkins, A Staggering Number of Troops are Fat and Tired, report says, Military Times, October 3, 2018. [↩]
Anthony Cilluffo and Neil G. Ruiz, “World’s Population is Projected to Nearly Stop Growing by the end of the Century“, Pew Research Center, June 17, 2019. [↩]

https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/06/the-monkeys-face/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 11, 2019 8:52 pm

Ecologism and Marxism

private test.png* Taken from Samir Amin, La loi de la valeur mondialisée (Le temps de cerise - édition Delga, Paris, 2013), pp. 102-105.

The point of view of the dominant currents of ecologism, in particular naturally that of "fundamentalist" ecologism, is not that of Marxism, although both rightly denounce the destructive effects of the current "development".

Ecologism attributes these destructive effects to the adhesion of "modernity" to a philosophy defined as "Eurocentrism" or "Prometheism" according to which "the human being" would not be part of nature but would claim to subject it to the satisfaction of its own needs. This thesis brings with it a fatal cultural corollary. Because it incites adherence to "another philosophy" that puts the accent on humanity's belonging to nature, its "mother". From this point of view, and in contrast to the philosophy considered as "Western", the eulogy of philosophies that claim to be alternative and better is done, such as that obtained from a particular reading of Hinduism. A reckless praise, which ignores how the practice of the "Hindu" society has not been (and is not) different from that of the so-called "western" societies,

Marx develops his analysis on a completely different ground. He attributes the destructive nature of capital accumulation to the logic of capitalism's rationality, driven exclusively by the search for immediate profit (short-term profitability). Marx explicitly demonstrates this in Book I of Capital.

These two methods of reading history and reality determine different judgments about "what to do" to face the challenge of the destructive effects of "development". Ecologists are inclined to "condemn progress" and thus reach post-modernists in their negative judgment of scientific discoveries and technological advances. This condemnation in turn inspires an unrealistic way of imagining the future. In fact they construct projections on the exhaustion of such or such natural resource (fossil energies for example), and generalize the validity of such conclusions, necessarily alarmist, with the assertion, right in principle but irrelevant as an operating principle, that the Planet resources are not infinite. They deliberately ignore the possible scientific discoveries in the future that could frustrate this or that alarmist conclusion. Of course, the remote future remains unknown and the guarantee that "progress" will always allow us to find the solution to the unknown challenges that await us will never exist. Science is not a substitute for faith in eternity (religious or philosophical). Placing the debate on the nature of ecological challenges and ways to tackle them on this ground leads nowhere.

Instead, if we place the debate on the terrain prepared by Marx - the analysis of capitalism - we can also advance in the analysis of the challenges that lie ahead. Yes, there will still be, in the future, scientific discoveries from which new technologies for managing the riches of nature can be derived. However, what we can say with certainty is that, as long as the logic of capitalism imposes on society the submission of its choices to the exclusive needs of short-term profitability (which capitalization implies), the technologies that will be implemented for application of new technological advances will not be chosen if not based on their compliance with short-term profitability, and therefore will lead to an increasingly high risk of ecological unsustainability. It will therefore only be when humanity will have built a method of managing the company that will take into account, as its founding principle, the values ​​of use and will have replaced it with the current management focused on the exchange value associated with the valorisation of capital, which the conditions for better management of relations between humanity and nature will be brought together (1). [...]

The choice of environmentalists for the wrong terrain to discuss these issues leads to an impassenot only theoretical, but above all political. Because this choice allows the manipulation by the dominant forces of the capital of any resulting political proposal. We know in fact how alarmism allows the societies of the imperialist triad (2) to preserve their privileges of exclusive access to the planet's resources and to prevent the peoples of the suburbs from being able to meet the needs of their development - be it "good" or "bad". On the other hand, it does not correctly counter to the "anti-alarmist" discourses by signaling the - indisputable - fact that they are produced by "lobbies" (such as the car). The world of capital has always worked like this: the lobbieswho defend the particular interests of segments of capital face each other without end. At the lobbies of the partisans of the energy-intensive choices they now oppose the lobbies of capitalism "green". Ecologists will not be able to get out of this labyrinth except by understanding that they must become ... Marxists.

1) As a concrete example of ration calculation and analysis conducted in terms of use value (therefore of social purpose) on which to base alternative ecological policies for the exploitation of the planet's resources, Samir Amin indicates the "ecological footprint" whose unit of measure is the global hectare and not the currency. Cf. pp.98-99

2) By imperialist triad Amin means USA -Europe-Japan, or the set of countries where the dominant financial oligopolies are located

https://lottobre.wordpress.com/2019/07/ ... -marxismo/

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 25, 2019 2:47 pm

A bit dated, but....

Blinded by the Stars?
Celebrity, Fantasy, and Desire in Neoliberal Environmental Governance
Robert Fletcher
Department of Environment, Peace, and Security
University for Peace
Cuidad Colón, Costa Rica
Paper Prepared for Symposium “Capitalism, Democracy, and Celebrity Advocacy,”
University of Manchester, UK, 19-20 June 2012

Abstract

The growing prominence of celebrities within the global environmental movement—and their
power to shape and advance this movement’s aims—has been a burgeoning focus of recent
research. Thus far, such analysis has viewed the phenomenon primarily through a political
economy lens, contending that celebrity is harnessed to further the agenda of a mainstream
environmental movement that has become increasingly conjoined with neoliberal capitalism, as
expressed in the mounting enthusiasm to address ecological decline through corporate
partnership and incentive-based market mechanisms. This presentation draws on psychoanalytic
research to offer the complementary suggestion that celebrity also functions as a form of
transference helping to sustain the fantasy implicit in this neoliberal vision “that capitalist
markets are the answer to their own ecological contradictions” (Büscher 2012:12). Through
transference, the charismatic authority conferred to larger-than-life celebrities helps to conceal
the gaps between Real and Symbolic in this vision and thus obfuscates contradictions inherent in
the execution of neoliberal environmental strategies. From this perspective, cynical suspicion
concerning celebrities’ authenticity may paradoxically enhance their authority, and thus this
analysis helps to explain counterintuitive findings that widespread ambivalence towards
celebrities does little to diminish their power to shape public sentiment.

http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/wp-cont ... rnance.pdf

20 pp
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 27, 2019 3:14 pm

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Thomas Sankara: Imperialism is the Arsonist of our Forests and Savannas

[This speech was first given at the first International Silva Conference for the Protection of the Trees and Forests in Paris. It has been since been disseminated by revolutionaries through many means as a way to underscore the necessity of social revolution and an environmental focus. Now more than ever this speech is necessary to internalize, as we face profound and previously unseen danger regarding environmental crises in capitalism. Comrade Thomas Sankara died in service of this task, and the very least we can do is pay tribute to what it is he died for, and internalize the lessons of the Burkinabè revolution. As always, the following has been made available here for the purposes of study and struggle.]

My homeland, Burkina Faso, is without question one of the rare countries on this planet justified in calling itself and viewing itself as a distillation of all the natural evils from which mankind still suffers at the end of this twentieth century.

Eight million Burkinabè have painfully internalized this reality for twenty-three years. They have watched their mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons die, with hunger, famine, disease, and ignorance decimating them by the hundreds. With tears in their eyes, they have watched ponds and rivers dry up. Since 1973 they have seen the environment deteriorate, trees die, and the desert invade with giant strides. It is estimated that the desert in the Sahel advances at the rate of seven kilometers per year.

Only by looking at these realities can one understand and accept the legitimate revolt that was born, that matured over a long period of time, and that finally erupted in an organized way the night of August 4, 1983, in the form of a democratic and popular revolution in Burkina Faso.

Here I am merely a humble spokesperson of a people who, having passively watched their natural environment die, refuse to watch themselves die. Since August 4, 1983, water, trees, and lives—if not survival itself—have been fundamental and sacred elements in all action taken by the National Council of the Revolution, which leads Burkina Faso.

In this regard, I am also compelled to pay tribute to the French people, to their government, and in particular to their president, Mr. François Mitterrand, for this initiative, which expresses the political genius and clear-sightedness of a people always open to the world and sensitive to its misery. Burkina Faso, situated in the heart of the Sahel, will always fully appreciate initiatives that are in perfect harmony with the most vital concerns of its people. The country will be present at them whenever it is necessary, in contrast to useless pleasure trips.

For nearly three years now, my people, the Burkinabè people, have been fighting a battle against the encroachment of the desert. So it was their duty to be here on this platform to talk about their experience, and also benefit fromt he experience of other peoples from around the world. For nearly three years in Burkina Faso, every happy event—marriages, baptisms, award presentations, and visits by prominent individuals and others—is celebrated with a tree-planting ceremony.

To greet the new year 1986, all the schoolchildren and students of our capital, Ouagadougou, built more than 3,500 improved cookstoves with their own hands, offering them to their mothers. This was in addition to the 80,000 cookstoves made by women themselves over the course of two years. This was their contribution to the national effort to reduce the consumption of firewood and to protect trees and life.

The ability to buy or simply rent one of the hundreds of public dwellings built since August 4, 1983, is strictly conditional on the beneficiary promising to plant a minimum number of trees and to nurture them like the apple of his eye. Those who receive these dwellings but were mindless of their commitment have already been evicted, thanks to the vigilance of our Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, committees that poisonous tongues take pleasure in systematically and unilaterally denigrating.

After having vaccinated throughout the national territory, in two weeks, 2.5 million children between the ages of nine months and fourteen years—children from Burkina Faso and from neighboring countries—against measles, meningitis, and yellow fever; after having sunk more than 150 wells assuring drinking water to the 20 or so districts in our capital that lacked this vital necessity until now; after having raised the literacy rate from 12 to 22 percent in two years—the Burkinabè people victoriously continue their struggle for a green Burkina.

Ten million trees were planted under the auspices of a fifteen-month People’s Development Program, our first venture while awaiting the five-year plan. In the villages and in the developed river valleys, families must each plant one hundred trees per year.

The cutting and selling of firewood has been completely reorganized and is now strictly regulated. These measures range from the requirement to hold a lumber merchant’s card, through respecting the zones designated for wood cutting, to the requirement to ensure reforestation of deforested areas. Today every Burkinabè town and village owns a wood grove, thus reviving an ancestral tradition.

Thanks to the effort to make the popular masses aware of their responsibilities, our urban centers are free of the plague of roaming livestock. In our countryside, our efforts focus on settling livestock in one place as a means of promoting intensive stockbreeding in order to fight against unrestrained nomadism.

All criminal acts of arson by those who burn the forest are subject to trial and sanctioning by the Popular Courts of Conciliation in the villages. The requirement of planting a certain number of trees is one of the sanctions issued by these courts.

From February 10 to March 20, more than 35,000 peasants—officials of the cooperative village groups—will take intensive, basic courses on the subjects of economic management and environmental organization and maintenance.

Since January 15 a vast operation called the “Popular Harvest of Forest Seeds” has been under way in Burkina for the purpose of supplying the 7,000 village nurseries. We sum up all of these activities under the label “the three battles.”

Ladies and Gentlemen:

My intention is not to heap unrestrained and inordinate praise on the modest revolutionary experience of my people with regard to the defense of the trees and forests. My intention is to speak as explicitly as possible about the profound changes occurring in the relationship between men and trees in Burkina Faso. My intention is to bear witness as accurately as possible to the birth and development of a deep and sincere love between Burkinabè men and trees in my homeland.

In doing this, we believe we are applying our theoretical conceptions on this, based on the specific ways and means of our Sahel reality, in the search for resolutions to present and future dangers attacking trees all over the planet.

Our efforts and those of the entire community gathered here, your cumulative experience and ours, will surely guarantee us victory after victory in the struggle to save our trees, our environment, and, in short, our lives.

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen:

I come to you with the hope that you are taking up a battle from which we cannot be absent, we who are attacked daily and who are waiting for the miracle of greenery to rise up from the courage to say what must be said. I have come to join with you in deploring the harshness of nature. But I have also come to denounce the ones whose selfishness is the source of his fellow man’s misfortune. Colonial plunder has decimated our forests without the slightest thought of replenishing them for our tomorrows.

The unpunished disruption of the biosphere by savage and murderous forays on the land and in the air continues. One cannot say too much about the extent to which all these machines that spew fumes spread carnage. Those who have the technological means to find the culprits have no interest in doing so, and those who have an interest in doing so lack the technological means. They have only their intuition and their innermost conviction.

We are not against progress, but we do not want progress that is anarchic and criminally neglects the rights of others. We therefore wish to affirm that the battle against the encroachment of the desert is a battle to establish a balance between man, nature, and society. As such it is a political battle above all, and not an act of fate.

The creation of a Ministry of Water as a complement to the Ministry of the Environment and Tourism in my country demonstrates our desire to clearly formulate the problems in order to be able to resolve them. We must fight to find the financial means to exploit our existing water resources—drilling operations, reservoirs, and dams. This is the place to denounce the one-sided contracts and draconian conditions imposed by banks and other financial institutions that doom our projects in this field. It is these prohibitive conditions that lead to our countries’ traumatizing debt and eliminate any meaningful maneuvering room.

Neither fallacious Malthusian arguments—and I assert that Africa remains an underpopulated continent—nor the vacation resorts pompously and demagogically christened “reforestation operations” provide an answer. We and our misery are spurned like bald and mangy dogs whose lamentations and cries disturb the peace and quiet of the manufacturers and merchants of misery.

That is why Burkina has proposed and continues to propose that at least 1 percent of the colossal sums of money sacrificed to the search for cohabitation with other stars and planets be used, by way of compensation, to finance projects to save trees and lives. We have not abandoned hope that a dialogue with the Martians might lead to the reconquest of Eden. But in the meantime, earthlings that we are, we also have the right to reject a choice limited simply to the alternatives of hell or purgatory.

Explained in this way, our struggle for the trees and forests is first and foremost a democratic and popular struggle. Because a handful of forestry engineers and experts getting themselves all worked up in a sterile and costly manner will never accomplish anything! Nor can the worked-up consciences of a multitude of forums and institutions—sincere and praiseworthy though they may be—make the Sahel green again, when we lack the funds to drill wells for drinking water a hundred meters deep, while money abounds to drill oil wells three thousand meters deep!

As Karl Marx said, those who live in a palace do not think about the same things, nor in the same way, as those who live in a hut. This struggle to defend the trees and forests is above all a struggle against imperialism. Because imperialism is the arsonist setting fire to our forests and our savannas.

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen:

We rely on these revolutionary principles of struggle so that the green of abundance, joy, and happiness may take its rightful place. We believe in the power of the revolution to stop the death of our Faso and usher in a bright future for it… .

This fight can be waged. We must not retreat in face of the immensity of the task. We must not turn away from the suffering of others, for the spread of the desert no longer knows any borders.

We can win this struggle if we choose to be architects and not simply bees. It will be the victory of consciousness over instinct. The bee and the architect, yes! If the author of these lines will allow me, I will extend this twofold analogy to a threefold one: the bee, the architect, and the revolutionary architect.

Homeland or death, we will win!

https://anti-imperialism.org/2018/02/26 ... -savannas/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Wed Sep 11, 2019 1:50 pm

The climate crisis is a working class issue — and the working class has the power to stop it! Show solidarity with climate strikes and protests September 20-27!
Sep 10, 2019

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The climate crisis is a working class issue — and the working class has the power to stop it! Show solidarity with climate strikes and protests September 20-27!

The facts are irrefutable. Rainforests burning, glaciers melting. Hurricanes are occurring with higher frequency, increased ferocity and a wider territorial reach. No one can seriously argue against the existence of a climate crisis.

Internationally and domestically, the impact falls disproportionately on the most oppressed. The Bahamas have been clobbered while in Brazil. President Bolsonaro burns rain forests, decimating Indigenous populations Climate-related disasters force millions to migrate, only to be subjected to inhuman, concentration camp conditions. Environmental racism means communities of color suffer most from pollution and are most vulnerable when disasters hit.

Of the 17 hottest years on record, 16 have occurred since 2001. People with multiple sclerosis, spinal chord injuries and other disabilities are especially vulnerable to extreme heat events due to increased temperature sensitivity that limits or prevents the body’s ability to sweat to cool down.

Only the rich have the means to escape the consequences of the climate catastrophe. We have to ask, who is responsible for it — and who can fix it.

Can capitalism fix the problems it creates?

Some in the climate movement would simply put the blame on “human activity” without putting it squarely on the fossil fuel companies and the wealthy class — or the world’s biggest polluter, the Pentagon. A worker who needs a gasoline-burning vehicle to get to work or gets their electricity from a coal-fired power plant is somehow as responsible for climate change as big oil, big coal, the auto industry, utility firms and the banks they borrow from.

And some would even suggest that appealing to the profit motive — convincing capitalists that weaning themselves off fossil fuels is good for business or subjecting them to “climate pricing”— can solve the crisis. That’s naive thinking. Capitalists caused global warming and they can hardly be trusted to reverse it.

The ruling class calculates short-term economic gain without regard for the huge carbon footprint their profit-taking actions are leaving. Coal and oil barons want to sell the non-renewable, carbon-burning products they extract from the ground. Auto companies want to make vehicles that draw the highest price, not those with the lowest carbon emissions. For military contractors, destruction = profits.

Or how about the utility companies. First Energy lobbied the Ohio state legislature for a bill that bailed out nuclear and coal-fired power plants (including its own) while eliminating incentives for renewable energy sources like solar and wind power. First Energy is a major campaign donor to the legislators who passed House Bill 6.

What the bosses don’t say is that some of them welcome climate change. This summer million acres of glacier melted in Greenland and arctic Norway, uncovering vast mineral resources and oil reserves.The bosses can’t wait to get their hands on them, hence Trump’s threat to take over Greenland. Blinded by dollar signs, they won’t admit that wealth comes at great environmental cost.

Working class solidarity to save the environment

The climate crisis is in every way, shape and form a working class issue. The wild weather patterns and resulting un-natural disasters leave their heaviest mark on workers, the poor and communities of color. Only the rich have the means to escape the consequences.

Young workers have a lot on their plate — dead-end jobs, unpayable student debt, police abuse, you name it they are dealing with it. But one of the youth’s gravest worries is the climate crisis and what it portends for their very existence — and for all beings on Earth.

The working class does have the power to protect life on the planet. It is labor who produces everything. Nothing moves without us!

Environmental activists, mostly youth, have called for “climate strikes” September 20 and 27. Student strikes may be far more widespread than workplace strikes this time around. But the strike is still know as the weapon of labor, wielded at the point of production to force change.

Strikes have won higher wages, pensions, union recognition and the like. But there are also political strikes, such as May Day 2006, that forced the defeat of an anti-immigrant bill in Congress.

We need to keep the climate strike conversation alive beyond September 20-27— not just in schools but on the job and in unions. We need to fight environmental racism, defend Indigenous land claims and demand self-determination for oppressed nations suffering the heaviest impacts.

The climate crisis is a working class issue and only the working class and the oppressed have the power to reverse it.

https://workersolidarity.net/2019/09/10 ... ass-issue/
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