The Long Ecological Revolution

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 02, 2019 4:47 pm

Averting the White Gaze: How a Black Panther in Laikipia Came to Symbolise the Absurdity in the Conservation World

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The paradigm that we inherited (and still ignorantly embrace) firmly places a black man exclusively in the position of a ranger. In this context, “ranger” describes a non-intellectual participant in conservation who enforces policies created for the benefit of other people in other places, often to the detriment of locals.

Published 2 weeks ago on March 21, 2019 By Mordecai Ogada

In early February 2019, local and international media were awash with the story of how an American photographer named Will Burrard-Lucas had captured breathtaking photographs of the first black leopard seen in Africa in over 100 years. Reaction came in thick and fast on social media. It began in wonderment at the beauty of the creature, the quality of the photographs and the apparent magnitude of the achievement. This so-called discovery was further elevated when it got endorsed and parroted by the venerable National Geographic magazine.
For an individual who has been in the field of conservation for nearly two decades, the critical opprobrium generated was fascinating. The proposition began with a few of the uninformed questioning whether black leopards really exist, followed by consternation that nobody had ever seen this animal in a century and puzzlement over how a foreign photographer had the requisite knowledge to find and photograph the animal living in our midst.
People all over Kenya were stunned for different reasons. Many friends who know of my involvement in conservation practice questioned the arrogance of the “white gaze” in conversation and the racial undertones that accompanied the “discovery” of the black leopard. After a lot of thought and conversations, I came to the realisation that the ground is beginning to shift, and conservation will have to change a lot sooner than many people expected.
As the news of the findings made the media rounds, the protestations rose to a crescendo, with the informed rightly questioning the arrogance of the photographer making such a claim. These were accompanied by photos of black leopards taken in the area in the last few years, including one photographed in Ol Ari Nyiro conservancy in May 2007 and another photographed in Ol Jogi conservancy in August 2013.
The most powerful rebuttal, however, came from the NALOOLO blog written by John Kisimir, a veteran journalist, that shed light on the hitherto unmentioned field assistant, Ambrose Letoluai, who works with a San Diego Zoo research project in the area and who knew of this animal, saw it, and photographed it, long before showing Will Burrard-Lucas where to set his camera traps for the best shot. Ambrose correctly states that their research team (which includes both locals and foreigners) has sighted and photographed this animal several times over the last year, and it’s unacceptable for their work to be slighted in this manner.
People all over Kenya were stunned for different reasons. Many friends who know of my involvement in conservation practice questioned the arrogance of the “white gaze” in conversation and the racial undertones that accompanied the “discovery” of the black leopard. After a lot of thought and conversations, I came to the realisation that the ground is beginning to shift, and conservation will have to change a lot sooner than many people expected.

Noble white hunters and explorers

My training is in carnivore ecology and I have been involved in conservation research and policy work for 20 years now. Those aware of my writings and lectures on racial prejudice know my position on these matters, but nonetheless I was intrigued by the events around this single species discovery.
In a backhanded manner, Will Burrard-Lucas’ hubris and National Geographic’s inability to escape its “white explorer” origins inadvertently created awareness of an injustice and prejudice that was hidden in plain sight in our society for generations. It is worth stating here that “Geographical Societies” in the West are by and large bodies that were formed by wealthy people to fund and facilitate the white explorers’ voyages of “discovery” and plunder in the Global South. They are the ones who defied the likes of Henry Morton Stanley and others of his ilk. In recent years, I have dedicated time and energy in advocacy, trying to get this message across to an oblivious society that is blissfully unaware of the seamy underbelly of the conservation world. Therefore, the spectacle of sudden enlightenment among the Kenyan public was a moment that defies description. The story of the first black leopard photographed in “over 100 years” advanced the understanding of the depth of our societal oppression and an appreciation of the sheer magnitude of our challenge across space and time.
Our colonial history class taught us about European explorers, such as David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, James Augustus Grant, Pierre Paul de Brazza and Samuel Teleki, who came to Africa to explore the “Dark Continent” that we call our home. The education we received in school implied that these were brave souls in search of adventure. As a young student, I remember being intensely curious about the “why” question. Why did they come? Why here? Why for so long? Why the risk?
These explorers were coming to spread influence and political power, to plunder resources and to spread Christianity. The personal glory and self-gratification accrued after random acts of cruelty and arrogance was generally just a bonus that came with the territory. Besides the church and their home governments, these explorers brought great prestige to institutions like the Royal Geographical Society, which quickly became venues for enthralling talks of their adventures and repositories of specimens collected and artefacts looted from the lands being “explored”.
The consensus in conservation biology is that for anything to exist in Africa, it has to be discovered by a Caucasian. This isn’t a new phenomenon; since colonial days, lakes, mountains, rivers, valleys and even wild animals have been “discovered” and named by people from Europe. It is never questioned, just accepted. For those who think that these are relics banished to ancient history, we only need to look at the names around us. Restricting ourselves to the conservation sector, we see the names Grant’s gazelle (Gazella granti) and DeBrazza’s monkey (Cercopithecus neglectus) named after James Augustus Grant and Pierre Paul de Brazza, respectively. The Grevy’s zebra (Equus grevyi) was named after Jules Grevy, the president of France between 1879 and 1887.
Following the end of the Second World War in 1945, there was increased conservation activity in Britain’s East African colonies (the term “conservation” being used very loosely in this instance). This prominently involved the declaration of national park ordinances in Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda in 1945, 1948, and 1952, respectively. National parks were crucial instruments in the dislocation of Africans from selected areas and the creation of nature spaces for recreation by European settlers by expressly demarcating areas where no person (read: native) was allowed to enter. What escaped all but the most perceptive of historians is that the flurry of creation of national parks and other conservation structures that followed these ordinances was a sphere of influence that was designed to withstand the African independence wave that followed shortly thereafter.
These parks also provided a useful and relatively harmless employment opportunity to demobilised British soldiers with no skills other than shooting. Indeed, an examination of colonial game wardens’ reports from the mid-20th century reveals wardens with military backgrounds without exception. This set the stage for African wildlife conservation practice as a domain of white men with guns – a situation that has stood the test of time and which is becoming an anachronism that has survived the passing decades of decolonisation.
This position of dominion captured the imagination of Hollywood, and was celebrated in “noble white hunter” movies, notably Mogambo (shot in Kenya in 1953), Hatari (shot in Tanganyika in 1962) and Born Free (shot in Kenya in 1966), which featured George Adamson, the last relic of the military age who was killed by bandits in Kora in 1988. The latter years of the 20th century also saw the advent of the noble “white saviour” in the form of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (1984), and the “classic” Out of Africa (1985) starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep.

The ranger mentality

The paradigm that we inherited (and still ignorantly embrace) firmly places a black man exclusively in the position of a ranger. In this context, “ranger” describes a non-intellectual participant in conservation who enforces policies created for the benefit of other people in other places, often to the detriment of locals. Within this fallacy resides the mentality that ties conservation values and heritage to their attractiveness to tourists. The most obvious manifestation of this in Kenya is the existence of a Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife. In countries where heritage is regarded for its intrinsic value to its citizens, it is placed under the ministry of interior (security) or under natural resources.
This weakness is recognised by NGOs and their foreign supporters who seek to supplant the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) in the policy arena while almost exclusively restricting their support to operational materials and equipment. Like all other long-held beliefs, the ranger position is one that has numerous adherents who have invested significantly in it, resulting in a systemic malaise. The long drawn-out struggle to recruit a substantive Director-General at KWS has taken strange turns, with repeated advertisements and re-advertisements interspersed with long interludes of silence. The minister’s proposal seemed extreme given that poaching figures in Kenya currently stand at 69 elephants last year out of a population of 34,000 (an attrition rate of 0.2%) and 9 rhinos out of a population of approximately 1,000 (an attrition rate of 0.9%). The latter number is even lower than the 12 rhinos that were lost at the hands of KWS itself in a botched translocation exercise in July 2018.
Two recent events in the policy arena have revealed the systemic challenges that arise from the “ranger mentality” that pervades our statutory conservation authority. The first was an ill-advised attempt to re-introduce consumptive use of various wildlife species as game meat to be served in restaurants, kowtowing to a cabal of tourism investors that want to re-introduce sport hunting in Kenya. This was a case where the tourism industry asked for conservation policy to be changed to serve their purposes. If this question was approached from a conservation perspective, one would have questioned the feasibility of serving game meat in restaurants while prosecuting (and occasionally shooting) suspected poachers.
As expected, this initiative ran into strong headwinds, and seems to have been aborted without the task force having submitted their report following several months of discussions and “public engagements”. This was an attempt by the “rangers” to change the law to satisfy external interests at the expense of locals.
The second starkest and potentially most tragic example was the recent declaration by the Minister of Tourism and Wildlife that Kenya is going to fast track legislation to introduce the death penalty for poachers, proudly announced exclusively in foreign news outlets. As expected, there were choruses of praise coming from NGOs and “conservationists” all over the world at this “significant step” taken by Kenya to save wildlife.
The minister’s proposal seemed extreme given that poaching figures in Kenya currently stand at 69 elephants last year out of a population of 34,000 (an attrition rate of 0.2%) and 9 rhinos out of a population of approximately 1,000 (an attrition rate of 0.9%). (The latter number is even lower than the 12 rhinos that were lost at the hands of KWS itself in a botched translocation exercise in July 2018.) Neither of these numbers presents the “crisis” that dominates conservation news out of Kenya, and it beggars belief that the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife would act on the denigration of the state authority’s efforts in this manner.
Moreover, there is the well-known fact that Kenya has not carried out the death penalty since the hanging of the 1982 coup plotters, Hezekiah Ochuka and Pancras Oteyo Okumu, in 1987 for treason, so there is no chance that a death sentence can be carried out on a killer of a wild animal. It is, therefore, difficult to imagine what purpose this legislative move would have served, other than the ranger state seeking to please the perceived owners of our wildlife narrative.
When Save the Elephants reported (also in 2016) that a lone bull elephant had “bravely” entered Somalia after 20 years, BBC (again) parroted the same news with much fanfare. Nobody thought to question how they deduced that this elephant is the only one that had crossed into Somalia, or that it had last visited that country 20 years ago.
It is worth repeating that the most robust aspect of this perception of ourselves as rangers is the manner in which our citizens and institutions have all internalised it. KWS staff at all levels are regularly taken for security training, including high-level courses at the National Defence College. Yet they are law enforcers, not military personnel. I stand to be corrected but I am unaware of KWS staff ever being taken for conservation philosophy and ethics training at a similar level. The most likely reason for this is the lack of resources because our policy weakness and “operational” thinking doesn’t accommodate this. Our usual big NGO donors certainly wouldn’t fund it because a “thinking” KWS might wake up to the fact that they are killing and supplanting it. As we learned from the colonialists, black people in conservation in Africa are not supposed to think. They are the porters, rangers, trackers (and poachers). The unseen and unheard black man is not just a factor of photography, a subjective art form from which we can easily be deleted using Photoshop or movie editing software; it spills over into science as well, which is supposed to be objective observation.
In my carnivore ecology experience, I have come across what was described (by the BBC, no less) as a the “discovery” of a population of 100 lions in the Alatash region of Ethiopia in February 2016 by a group of scientists led by Dr. Hans Bauer of Oxford University’s wild carnivore research unit. One single lion’s roar can be heard across several kilometers. These were 100 lions. Ethiopia is a nation of around 90 million people. It stands to reason that some Ethiopian would have heard or seen the lions, their tracks or the remains of their kills.
When Save the Elephants reported (also in 2016) that a lone bull elephant had “bravely” entered Somalia after 20 years, BBC (again) parroted the same news with much fanfare. Nobody thought to question how they deduced that this elephant is the only one that had crossed into Somalia, or that it had last visited that country 20 years ago. It is accepted as true because it is reported by a white man in Africa. This is such a coarse and primitive premise that has been eliminated from most thinking and human endeavour in Africa, but still persists in conservation.
The real poachers
Our profession exists in a realm where the message is simple: All African wildlife is in peril and the source of the threat is black people. Just to be clear, this is not an aspect of citizenship, but race. There are hundreds of thousands of Africans of Caucasian extraction who routinely indulge in “hunting”, “culling”, “cropping” and other euphemisms for killing of wildlife, but however often they kill wildlife outside legal structures, the odious term “poacher” is never used in Africa in reference to anyone who isn’t black skinned. This is no accident – it is the existence of African conservation practice in a twilight zone where reality seeks to follow perception, rather than the logical reverse.
A fairly stark reminder of this is the way in which meat from wild animals is referred to as “bushmeat” when eaten by local black people, and called “game meat” or “venison” when eaten in upper-class circles dominated by foreign tourists. The most shocking thing to most people whenever I share this example is not the depth of this obvious prejudice, but the way in which societies all over the world (including ourselves) have come to accept it as the norm. This norm, in a nutshell, is the greatest challenge to conservation in Kenya, not poachers, not human populations, not law enforcement, or smuggling. My experience in the realm of wildlife management in Kenya has been largely in the arena of carnivore conservation and I have witnessed several instances of race-based, bare-faced entitlement to destroy our national heritage.
Three incidents come to mind. The first was a “conservationist” (sanctioned by KWS) carrying carcasses of cows into the Aberdare National Park in the year 2000 and hanging them on a tree, patiently waiting and shooting every single lion that came to eat the meat. I was the unseen and unheard black man who was an MSc student collecting tissue samples from the killed lions for research. I am not sure how many lions were eventually killed because I only survived one night. (A “normal” African man not suffering from bloodlust may have lasted longer.) It is a crying shame that this man served on the board of KWS until last year, and is currently the CEO of the largest wildlife conservancy in southern Kenya.
The second incident was years later, in 2009, when as a member of the KWS carnivore management committee, we fielded a request from another “conservationist” to shoot 50% of the hyenas in the Aberdare National Park because “they are killing too many young rhinos and buffalo”. I was taken aback by the temerity of the request, and I was glad that the revulsion that I and other committee members expressed carried the day.
The third incident happened in 2012 when as a member of the same committee, we fielded a request from another world-famous “conservationist” to kill lions in his private wildlife conservancy because he felt that they were killing too many Grevy’s zebra foals. Again, we rejected this request, but it never stops.
One thread was uniform across all these requests – they came from white men who are considered leaders in conservation, and all have sat on the Board of Trustees of Kenya Wildlife Service. Would KWS countenance such hubris from a black Kenyan? Is there any possibility that the recent ill-advised request to hunt wildlife to serve game meat in restaurants came from a black Kenyan? I think not.
To an observer from outside the profession, the difficult conundrum in which conservation finds itself would look like a situation we should be struggling to free ourselves from. However, there are factors that we must consider. The status quo has been in place for so long that there is a large contingent of local professionals who have learned how to negotiate it and find themselves very comfortable positions therein. These are positions and assignments that are well-remunerated and highly regarded without the burden of formulating, justifying or adjusting policy as necessary. This entails sitting in an office, travelling to attend (not give presentations at) conferences, being the “Áfrican face” wherever one is needed and appending signatures wherever and whenever one is needed by the foreign interests that really do hold the reins to our conservation sector.
In return for this, there is a lot of “discretionary” funding, business class travel, and handsome per diem allowances, not to mention slaps on the back and being referred to as a “good chap”, “fundi” or a “switched on” fellow. (Incidentally, the latter term is one strictly reserved for black people. It is a backhanded compliment that implies the subject is a relatively intelligent and active member of a largely indolent population.)
Under the current atmosphere, is it really a surprise that KWS was unable to recruit a substantive Director-General nearly two years after the resignation of the previous holder of the office whose qualifications were in banking? The most recent move by the Board of Trustees was to lower the qualifications required in the advertisement initially put out in November 2018. This wasn’t surprising either, because the intellectual weakness in our conservation sector still desperately wanted a ranger, not a leader at the helm of KWS.
We live in an imperfect world, and it is rife with injustices in almost every field, but the visceral reactions to The Big Conservation Lie continue to confound me even two years after its publication because of how illogical some of them are. I cannot speak to my co-author’s experiences, but I’ve had a few bizarre interactions with readers attempting to police my outrage…
On 13th March 2019, the weak intellectual core succumbed once again and a senior officer from the Kenya Navy, Brigadier John Waweru, was appointed Director-General of KWS by executive order. With due respect to him, it will take a while before a navy officer comes to grips with the challenges facing our conservation sector.
‘Why are you people so angry?’
I wouldn’t be so confident as to claim any cause-and-effect relation, but since the publication of The Big Conservation Lie, there have been questions raised in various quarters about the millions of dollars perpetually being sunk into the conservation “industry” and the returns on investment (or lack thereof). This book, which I co-authored with John Mbaria, has understandably elicited very strong reactions because of its content.
We live in an imperfect world, and it is rife with injustices in almost every field, but the visceral reactions to The Big Conservation Lie continue to confound me even two years after its publication because of how illogical some of them are. I cannot speak to my co-author’s experiences, but I’ve had a few bizarre interactions with readers attempting to police my outrage, mostly in the realm of “I understand that there are governance challenges, prejudice, and corruption in the conservation sector, but why are you people so angry?” Others would opine that everything said in the book is true, but for some reason would take issue with the pointed way in which we said it. The truth about these comments has only recently dawned on me – that it is normal to point out and have opinions on conservation policy challenges in Africa if you are white but not if you are black. Even if what you are saying makes perfect sense and is already in the public domain, the colour of your skin makes it unacceptable.
I have previously embarked on a mission to find writings (articles, books, chapters, etc.) by black Kenyan conservationists on the injustices and prejudices bedeviling the sector. There are none, and I would be delighted to be proved wrong on this. With all our high qualifications and senior-sounding positions, we are content to be rangers awaiting instructions on the destiny of our own heritage. Many of us mistakenly think that we are safe, but we are not. When 12 rhinos died in a botched translocation exercise in 2018, a number of senior and highly-qualified black “rangers” paid a heavy price for their part in an exercise that was solely based on a World Wildlife Fund power trip dubbed the “Kenya Black Rhino Action Plan” and not on government wildlife policy.
We are beginning to experience a paradigm shift, and there is a growing realisation that this whole conservation thing is really about us, and not about those who come to see what we have conserved. It showed up in the immediate response to the claims of the Laikipia leopard sighting being the “first in 100 years” and the backtracking from the photographer. This new thinking is especially true amongst the younger conservationists because, sadly, most of those above the age of 40 have been irretrievably defiled by the conservation establishment. However, the rest of us are enjoying something of a “perfect storm” with unrelated things occurring together to accelerate change. It is a story that is still fluid and happening. As a writer though, I appreciate the poetic justice of it all – how the arrogance of a white man claiming to have discovered a black panther in Kenya proved to be the trigger that woke up our sleeping masses.

Read more at: https://www.theelephant.info/culture/20 ... ion-world/


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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Thu Apr 04, 2019 1:08 pm

Population Bomb or Bomb the Population?
By John Steppling
Source: Counterpunch
April 4, 2019

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution”.

– Aldous Huxley, The Ultimate Revolution

Ending Militarism. Militarism in all its forms, from the prison-industrial complex to wars of occupation, is one of the most powerful obstacles to the achievement of reproductive, environmental and climate justice. Ending militarism is a point where our struggles can and should converge, where there are multiple overlaps. The list is long: Military toxins damage the environment and harm reproductive health. Militarism increases violence against women, racism and anti-immigration activities. Militarism robs resources from other social and environmental needs. War destroys ecosystems, livelihoods, and health and sanitation infrastructure. It is the biggest threatof all to sustainable social reproduction.

– Betsy Hartmann and Elizabeth Barajas-Román, The Population Bomb is Back with a Global Warming Twist

Eugenics was an American specialty. It inspired Hitler, and it was much studied and admired in the UK as well with support from H.G. Wells, GB Shaw, and Churchill. White supremacism is what drove colonial logic and practice and its still with us in the capitalist societies of the West, and things like mass incarceration are evidence of that. But it has also bled into other areas of study, and into the culture at large really. And one of the most pronounced expressions of the new eugenics (that claims not to be) are in the so called Population Bombers (named after Paul Erlich’s book).

But before getting to the “new” scientific racism of the Population Bombers, lets take a stroll down memory lane and visit the old scientific racism.

Since this is going to be a very truncated version of a complex and sadly extensive history, a good place to start might be Charles Benedict Davenport, the head of the American Breeders Association (ABA) which was started in Boston in 1903. And originally concerned with sweet peas, and not people. But they expanded to include a eugenics division in 1906 to, as Davenport put it…“emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood.” Membership was very prestigious. Alexander Graham Bell, and dozen presidents of major Universities, as well as scientists like Frederick Adams Woods, and Roswell H. Johnson. The legacy of Puritanism looms large here. As it does it most histories of the U.S.

Eugenics was immensely popular straight away. And while many literary types and faddists glommed onto the idea, the primary force behind Eugenics were outright racists like Woods, Davenport and Johnson. And the almost immediate trend for this discipline was toward birth control, and in particular sterilization. Now, the history of eugenics is fascinating and terrifying and I suggest reading Allan Chase’s seminal book The Legacy of Malthus, The Social Cost of New Scientific Racism. But I can only skim over some of this to lay the foundation for looking at the current Population Bombers. One item stuck me, and that was the very perfunctory training of young ladies from wealthy backgrounds who became ‘field workers’ for the new eugenics programs. In other words these young ladies after a few weeks study at Cold Spring Harbor, and Vineland, New Jersey, Training School for Feeble-minded Girls and Boys, venture forth into the cities and towns of America looking to identify signs of “criminalism, fecklessness, and those of bad blood. I mean what could go wrong, right?

There are so many trenchant details in this story, but before too long wiser scientific voices began to challenge Eugenics, and this pseudo science waned…a bit anyway. But lets just jump cut here to the Nazi death camps. That Hitler modeled his sterilization programs on those of California and that Nazi doctors were ruthlessly experimenting on children to determine their suitability or not for entry into the Reich, was enough to finally shut down talk of Eugenics, at least publically (Churchill never stopped enthusiastically defending it and he was likely far from alone in private gentlemen’s clubs, or at dinner parties.)

“The New Scientific Racism was soon to rise, like the Phoenix, from the flames which consumed the Old Scientific Racism that had lasted from Malthus to Hitler. Ironically, it was not by some new magic touchstone that the new scientific racism found the secret of eternal life, but in the basic myth that had formed the trunk on which Gobineau and Galton, Retzius and Spencer, Davenport, and Yerkes and East had added deadly new limbs after 1798. The mechanism of regeneration was, of course, the original Malthus myth, the pseudonatural “Law” that man’s ability to produce babies would always and forever be greater than his “finite” capacity to grow food. Therefore, unless the exploding human birth rates were slashed, our species faced famine and extinction. This “Law of Population” was purely a figment of Malthus’ imagination. Some seven decades before Malthus was born in 1766, the European Agricultural Revolution, “the greatest move forward in agriculture since neolithic times,” had proven—and continues to prove, abundantly, in our own times—that Malthus’ famous “Law” was a totally false description of the realities of food production and human reproduction on this planet. “

– Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus

The new scientific racism added pollution to the narrative. And indeed pollution was already a serious health issue. But the new population narrative simplified everything down to *People Pollute*. Period.

“As in the 1920’s, when the nation’s decent people were betrayed by their own education into accepting, as a scientific truth, the crude eugenic myth—”proven” by the civilian and Army IQ test scores—of “the decline in American intelligence,” and therefore decided to throw their support behind the anti-Italian, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic immigration restriction demands of the old scientific racists, the contemporary effects were tragic. Some of the best-educated and best-intentioned people in our society began to wear People Pollute buttons on their lapels, and to become true believers and vigorous fellow travelers in the pseudo-environmental crusades of the new scientific racism.”

– Allan Chase (ibid)

After WW2, the re-ascension of eugenics might be seen to start with Hugh Moore…the Dixie Cup tycoon of the early 20th century. He was to become the patron and supporter of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. And with Guy Irving Burch and Elmer Pendell, authors of a very influential Human Breeding and Survival.

The shift was from earlier Eugenics rhetoric about purity of native stock was changing to one in which sterilization was a tool of enduring peace and freedom.

America has never not felt affinity with pseudo scientific justifications for racism. But lets quickly trace the various iterations of the overpopulation theme. And another watershed in the new scientific racism was William Vogt’s The Road to Survival. Vogt was openly disdainful of non-white races and enthusiastically suggested policies of mass sterilization and that any aid given to developing countries should be contingent upon forced contraception. In fact he, like Mencken, advocated paying the poor and those with prison records to be sterilized. One of Vogt’s most admiring readers was Paul Ehrlich, then a student at the University of Pennsylvania. The new drive for sterilization, for population control, was funded in large measure by Hugh Moore. He also, outside of an organizational framework, ran ads in major papers advocating for reduced population. As Chase writes…

“Under such organizational banners as the Hugh Moore Fund and the Campaign to Check the Population Explosion, the Moore crusade for some years took one- and two-page advertisements in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Star, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Harper’s, Saturday Review, and Time. { } A true disciple of Vogt’s, Moore looked to sexual sterilization as the ultimate solution to population problems that could not be resolved by less traumatic methods. When Moore took over the presidency of the nation’s leading sterilization society in 1964, Lader writes, the salesman-showman of population control insisted that it change its name from the prissy Human Betterment Association (née Birthright, Inc.) to the more meaningful Association for Voluntary Sterilization, Inc. Things began to happen in a big way. Moore “raised money to move the office to a midtown New York suite just off Fifth Avenue, and employed an experienced executive director and staff.”

Moore blamed new babies, unchecked copulation, for the rise in pollution from the automobile, then undergoing a giant spike in use and ownership. He carefully chose not to blame policies that nixed mass transit for urban centers, or plans for any alternative to gasoline driven travel. The popularity of Moore’s campaigns made its way to the inner circle of the Kennedy presidency, and later that of Johnson. And most significantly this neo-Malthusian sensibility (by way of Burch and Vogt) made its way to University campuses. And Paul Ehrlich, then a professor at Stanford, wrote The Population Bomb (1968). And it seemed just scientific enough, but still accessible, and it boiled down very complicated and dense political analysis into one phrase, borrowed from the Pogo comic strip…We have met the enemy and he is us. And it became the catch phrase for a movement. The enemy is us, the people. Not corporations or class exploitation, or industry or war. No, just people.

Nixon even joined in, participating in Earth Day 1970, a mere few days before the invasion of Cambodia (and during his continued brutal bombing campaign of that same country). Nixon, who called anti war protesters “bums”, and this all only weeks before the murder of four students at Kent State by the National Guard. The new Malthusian environmentalists (along with the World Health Organization) were embracing a simple construct that argued *people pollute, nothing else*. Just people, nothing more and nothing less. They were careful in their marketing to avoid the taint of the older eugenics connections, however.

“Underlying the close working relationship between America and Germany was the extensive financial support of American foundations for the establishment of eugenic research in Germany. The main support was the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. It financed the research of German racial hygienist Agnes Bluhm on heredity and alcoholism as early as 1920. Following a European tour by a Rockefeller official in December 1926, the Foundation began supporting other German eugenicists, including Herman Poll, Alfred Gorjahn, and Hans Nachtsheim. The Rockefeller Foundation played the central role in establishing and sponsoring major eugenic institutes in Germany, including the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, eugenics, and Human Heredity.”

– Stefan Kuhl, The Nazi Connection

“Like the original Law of Population of Malthus, the Gobineau Cult of the Nordic, and the eugenic myth of the Decline of American Intelligence, the simplistic dogmas of the new People Pollute movement addressed themselves to chimeras rather than realities. They also helped hide the real causes and biosocial effects of environmental degradation from many educated but scientifically naïve Americans. Finally, in the classic traditions of scientific racism, the snappy slogans of Zero Population Growth and other wings of the People Pollute movement succeeded in pinning the blame for environmental degradation on the backs of its primary victims-—the poor…”

– Allan Chase (ibid)

From the beginning of this post Ehrlich iteration (the one that has surfaced somewhere in the 90s) of environmentalism by way of Malthus, the imagery and focus tended toward the pastoral. The lakes and rivers, the songbirds and national parks, and not on improving the conditions of the poor crammed into those urban slums that were growing across the country. The poor were blamed, essentially, for threatening the holiday locations of the affluent classes. The poor were blamed for being, well, poor (and dirty and eating badly).

It is worth tracing the evolution that arrived at Ehrlich and the post Ehrlich thinkers. The Tragedy of the Commons, by Garrett Hardin, a prof at UCSB, became a sort of companion piece to The Population Bomb. And this California professor was clear that the human population question required a retro fit of our morality. He advocated zero population growth. Following on this came a slew of new neo Malthusian visionaries, Robert Ardrey and Dr. Shelden Reed among others. The new population control advocates all firmly placed the blame on the poor and their excessive sexuality. America has alway been Puritan and there is no way to over-emphasize that fact. Paul and William Paddock were also staunch Malthusians whose desire, as they stated, was “to make America great”. Hmmmm. All of these voices are white voices. Every single one. The discourse for depopulating the third world reads a lot like Mandingo by way of Mein Kampf.

The eugenics movement biggest success, and one that had far reaching implications, came in the person of Margaret Sanger. The infamous founder of Planned Parenthood, would serve as one of the key leaders of group of new “scientific” racists that operated under institutional cover, and under cover of altruistic motive. So to back track just a moment…

“Thus, even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy of controlled human breeding will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”

– Sir Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy. 1948

Think Soylent Green.

“The most serious charge that can be brought against modern benevolence is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous
elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression. Philanthropy is a gesture characteristic of modern business lavishing upon the unfit the profits extorted from the community at large. Looked at impartially, this compensatory generosity is in its final effect probably more dangerous, more dysgenic, more blighting than the initial practice of profiteering.”

– Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, 1922

Like Vogt, like Hugh Moore, her patron, like Ehrlich and like Reed, Sanger was a voice for the normalising of white supremacist values and beliefs. All of these population bombers have one thing in common (besides being white) and that is a contempt, openly stated, for the poor and especially those with darker skin. Erlich was a staple on TV at the time (kind of the John Bolton of his day) and as his fame grew so his pronouncements became ever more openly racist.

Allan Chase wrote of Ehrlich….

As a moral philosopher, and as an open and blunt advocate of genocidal political policies such as the triage ploy developed by the Paddocks, Dr. Ehrlich has neither the intellectual and professional right, nor the moral authority, to speak for biology in particular and for the scientific community in general. Genocide remains genocide, whether advocated in a Munich beer hall in 1920 or in a Texas college auditorium in 1967—and neither the brown shirts of its earlier German advocates nor the graduate degrees and academic posts of its latter-day American proponents make it any less a political rather than a scholarly proposal.

So when today one hears certain dog whistle phrases….*carrying capacity*…that is pure Ehrlich. Dropping sterilization drugs into reservoirs for drinking water, or other such monstrous strategies and tactics were commonplace in the 70s. The pop bombers are mirror images of the anti communist neo cons in the Pentagon and State department. And both have most of the same goals.

And as Murray Bookchin pointed out (The Population Myth, 2010) …

The importance of viewing demography in social terms becomes even more apparent when we ask: would the grow-or-die economy called capitalism really cease to plunder the planet even if the world’s population were reduced to a tenth of its present numbers? Would lumber companies, mining concerns, oil cartels, and agribusiness render redwood and Douglas fir forests safer for grizzly bears if — given capitalism’s need to accumulate and produce for their own sake — California’s population were reduced to one million people?

The answer to these questions is a categorical no. Vast bison herds were exerminated on the westem plains long before the plains were settled by farmers or used extensively by ranchers — indeed, when the American population barely exceeded some sixty million people. These great herds were not crowded out by human settlements, least of all by excessive population. We have yet to answer what constitutes the “carrying capacity” of the planet, just as we lack any certainty, given the present predatory economy, of what constitutes a strictly numerical balance between reduced human numbers and a given ecological area.

One of the problems today, when one tries to argue with the advocates of the Green New Deal, or with other population bombers (Chris Hedges is one, David Attenbourgh is one, and so is Bono) is that for Western whites, especially for citizens of the U.S., there is an almost uncanny pull in these draconian race purity proposals- and maybe that is the Puritan legacy, or maybe Manifest Destiny. But the U.S. has been waging war against the third world for sixty years or eighty, depending on how you count. Libya, Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Rwanda, Uganda, Zaire, and on and on and on. Of course there were at least two white nations destroyed, the former Yugoslavia, and more recently Ukraine. But the drive is both anti communist AND racist. It is colonial and in part its useful to see how Israel is the perfect reflection of American values, only without as much pretense. Most US politicians would love to be able to say what Israeli politicians do. Admiration for fascism, suggestions for genocide and ethnic cleansing. Israel is the American ruling class with the mask torn off.

“Viewed from a distance of two decades later, the predictions made by many neo-Malthusians seem almost insanely ridiculous. We were warned, often in the mass media, that by the 1980s, for example, artificial islands in the oceans would be needed to accommodate the growing population densities on the continents. Our oil supplies, we were told with supreme certainty, would be completely depleted by the end of the century. Wars between starving peoples would ravage the planet, each nation seeking to plunder the hidden food stores of the others. By the late seventies, this “debate” took a welcome breather — but it has returned again in full bloom in the biological verbiage of ecology. Given the hysteria and the exaggerated “predictions” of earlier such “debates,” the tone today is a little calmer. But in some respects it is even more sinister.{ } But the most sinister feature about neo-Malthusianism is the extent to which it actively deflects us from dealing with the social origins of our ecological problems — indeed, the extent to which it places the blame for them on the victims of hunger rather than those who victimize them.”

– Murray Bookchin, The Population Myth, 2010

Even back in the early years of the Ehrlich cult, some saw the warning signs.

“We “are going to have to adopt some very tough foreign policy positions,” Ehrlich explains, and limiting our own families will let us do that “from a psychologically strong position … We must use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control.” Exactly what kind of power, or whether we would use it globally, or simply in countries which food shipments and “green revolutions” might save from starvation, is unclear. But he hints at a time when we might put temporary sterilants in food and water, while some of his more adventurous colleagues, no doubt impressed by pinpoint bombing in Southeast Asia, would spray whole populations from the air. If we’re so willing to napalm peasants to protect them from Communists, we could quite easily use a little sterilant spray to protect them from themselves.”

– Steven Weissman, Ramparts, 1970

Ian Angus, the sanest voice on this topic I think….wrote several years back (Return of the Population Bombers, Climate & Capitalism, July 2012)…

“Populationist ideas are gaining traction in the environmental movement. A growing number of sincere activists are once again buying into the idea that overpopulation is destroying the earth, and that what’s needed is a radical reduction in birth rates.

Most populationists say they want voluntary birth control programs, but a growing number are calling for compulsory measures. In his best-selling book The World Without Us, liberal journalist Alan Weisman says the only way to save the Earth is to “Limit every human female on Earth capable of bearing children to one.”

Another prominent liberal writer, Chris Hedges, writes, “All efforts to staunch the effects of climate change are not going to work if we do not practice vigorous population control.”

In the recent book Deep Green Resistance, Derrick Jensen and his co-writers argue for direct action by small groups, aimed at destroying industry and agriculture and reducing the world’s human population by 90% or more.

And the famous British naturalist Sir David Attenborough’s tells us that “All environmental problems become harder, and ultimately impossible, to solve with ever more people.”

Attenborough is a patron of Optimum Population Trust, also known as Population Matters, an influential British group that uses environmental arguments to lobby for stopping immigration.”

This reasoning is so simplistic, so duplicitous and inane that one is hard pressed to know how to answer it. I mean population is not this thing, like water filling a tub. Thats first off. Second, fertility is dropping drastically and sperm counts for men, in the advanced nations of the West, is in free fall. Bookchin noted, perceptively, that there has been a shift in tone from the traditional Ehrlich era neo-Malthusians, to a new age Voodoo ecology in which the writing is acutely metaphorical…man as a cancer on the planet…or, *Gaia* etc. And this is a perceptive observation. My experience with trying to debate the subject of *overpopulation* {sic} is that I am met with a nearly religious or quasi mystical tone, one that Bookchin labled *eco theism*. And this is worth pondering. One of the reasons Zombie films (and all post apocalyptic narratives, really) are so popular and durable is that the audience WANTS the destruction of EVERYTHING. They harbor fantasy stories of starting over. Reconstruction dramas set in a sci fi style code — though tellingly none of them seem to ever seriously deal with sanitation. And clean water seems amazingly easy to find in these films and novels.

“The road to survival, therefore, does not lie in the neo-Malthusian prescriptions to eliminate surplus people, nor in birth control, but in the effort to make everybody on the face of the earth productive. Hunger and misery are not caused by the presence of too many people in the world, but rather by having few to produce and many to feed. The neo-Malthusian doctrine of a dehumanized economy, which preaches that the weak and the sick should be left to die, which would help the starving to die more quickly, and which even goes to the extreme of suggesting that medical and sanitary resources should not be made available to the more miserable populations – such policies merely reflect the mean and egotistical sentiments of people living well, terrified by the disquieting presence of those who are living badly.”

– Josue de Castro, The Geography of Hunger

There is also, alongside the racism, a decidedly misogynist element in population bombers of the current incarnation. One of the curious aspects of the arguments I have had on this topic is the oddly faux mystical defeatism of the bombers. They are awfully sanguine about their coming extinction. I have heard in every debate something along the lines of ‘well, capitalism isn’t going away any time soon’ or ‘we can’t wait around for your revolution’. Not only is this curiously passive and accepting of doom, but it’s also dishonest. People are lying to themselves on some level, though honestly its often hard to know the parameters of this dishonesty.But however that works, the new Population Bombers are providing a humanitarian justification for, what Weissman called, the old game of empire.

“Not only is the individual woman responsible for her own children’s emissions, but for her genetic offspring’s emissions far into the future! Missing from the equation is any notion that people are capable of effecting positive social and environmental change, and that the next generation could make the transition out of fossil fuels. It also places the onus on the individual, obscuring the role of capitalist systems of production, distribution and consumption in causing global warming.”

– Betsy Hartmann and Elizabeth Barajas-Román, The Population Bomb is Back With a Global Warming Twist

Social reproduction is crucial to understanding who gets to be healthy, who sick, who has access to water and who doesn’t. Numbers tell one none of that. But remember, the murder of activist and conservationist Berta Caceres, in Honduras, can be laid directly at the feet of loyal Democratic Party icon Hillary Clinton. And this is the same Democratic party that is trying to sell the New Green Deal.

Now, back in 1952 John D. Rockefeller organized a meeting of leading academics, public health experts, Planned Parenthood leaders, social scientists and demographers. At the end of three days or so there emerged a new organization dedicated to population issues (and sterilization!) — but the entire story is very much worth reading..here.

It is important because to really understand the role of western Capital in the developing world, you have to dig into what the World Bank is doing, and where the Rockefeller’s put their money and focus. And where the western based NGOs choose to focus their energy.

Let me quote Weissman…

“With support in the White House and agreement among their friends (the trustworthy American managers in the international agencies), everything seems to favor the new interventionism of the big business internationalists. Everything, that is, except a new-found popular preference for non-intervention, or even isolation. But if overpopulation per se becomes the new scapegoat for the world’s ills, the current hesitations about intervention will fall away. Soon everyone, from the revolting taxpayer who wants to sterilize the Panther-ridden ghettos to the foreign aid addict, will line up behind the World Bank and the UN and join the great international crusade to control the world’s population. Let empire save the earth.”

Betsy Hartman and Elizabeth Barajas-Román (ibid) noted that ” Overconsumption by the rich has far more to do with global warming than the population growth of the poor. The few countries in the world where population growth rates remain high, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, have among the lowest carbon emissions per capita on the planet.”

And there are many other serious scientists that have called into question the Population Bombers logic…Fred Pearce is one here and a shorter overview of militarism and the environment.

And this interview with Betsy Hartman is very important.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/YtNYnuQHprA?list=PLI8qk ... TsUsd9JKrf[/youtube]

There is an unfortunate attraction in the reductive neo Malthusianism of Ehrlich and his progeny. Even people I would never have suspected of being drawn into the new scientific racism of the population bombers seem unable or unwilling to examine the bigger picture, the role of Western capital, not just in terms of militarism, but also in the rather obvious strategies to depopulate certain demographics and to colonize resources. As I’ve said before, impartial expert is an oxymoron. One reads all manner of extreme predictions, most drawn in almost cartoon fashion but couched in this new grammar of eco-science. Or, more usually junk science. The legacy of eugenics is vastly under-appreciated and rendered opaque. Anywhere the US financial elite are sticking their fingers in a place where one might not want to lend support. And the same for this new eco-theism, one that ridicules any objection to their findings and beliefs. The real hubris in this topic resides on the side of the bombers. Questioning the new orthodoxy is anathema. And these tendencies are directly aligned with the new (ish) growing global fascism. The environmental problems are dire, but I worry far more about having to live life in an internment camp operated altruistically by the World Bank or Pentagon.

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/populatio ... opulation/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 12, 2019 1:54 pm

Nature is Unnatural
APRIL 11, 2019

excerpts:

The real threat of environmental calamities is being both exploited by western Capital as the engine of new Green corporate endeavours, and is becoming a psychic retreat, a kind of night-terrors but for the adult. (“Sleep terrors are episodes of screaming, intense fear and flailing while still asleep. Also known as night terrors, sleep terrors often are paired with sleepwalking. Like sleepwalking, sleep terrors are considered a parasomnia — an undesired occurrence during sleep. A sleep terror episode usually lasts from seconds to a few minutes, but episodes may last longer.Sleep terrors affect almost 40 percent of children and a much smaller percentage of adults”.{ Mayo Clinic Patient Care, Symptoms and Causes}.

I have personally met with very few people who believe in the most dire predictions (the earth will end in two decades, etc) who have anything remotely practical to say about these beliefs. Most still are saving for their children’s tuition or their own retirement. And yet there is an almost theistic tone to their beliefs, and an anger at those who approach these predictions with anything like credulity.

****

The sense of submission to the crises, then, marks a de-coupling from Marxism and probably from any variety of anarcho libertarianism, or really other radical political positions. It is surrender to power, to one or another pre-digested subject positions. The tyranny of enforced opinion.

Image
Folkert de Jong

I have said before that part of the appeal of post apocalyptic fiction and film is the desire FOR end times. Steven Schlozman a Harvard medical school child pyschologist says…

“I talk to kids in my practice and they see it as a good thing. They say, ‘life would be so simple—I’d shoot some zombies and wouldn’t have to go to school,'” Schlozman says. In both literature and in speaking with patients, Schlozman has noticed that people frequently romanticize the end times. They imagine surviving, thriving and going back to nature.” (Scientific American, Daisy Yuhas, 2012)

And this is hugely important. Its a very big factor, in fact. The fantasy of reconstruction. Of getting to start over. And it also elides with new age imagery and style, that having to do with going back to the land. But lurking in this surrender to the crises is a surrender to fascism, too. And this in turn is tied into the theistic quality of the warnings and admonitions. For I have been chastised for my wife and I having had children recently. And it is instructive to examine this to the degree that what is being advocated (not having children) is utterly nihilistic, and also suggests a strange death cult reverberation — no more children! The alibi is that the people who admonish child bearers are only *concerned* about the suffering of the children. Now, this would suggest all manner of cognitive dissonance (many of those concerned finger waggers are parents themselves, usually of older children), for one the idea that there is a firm timetable out there and second, and more importantly, *that nothing can be done*. And I hear this a lot, ‘it’s too late’. We have crossed the point of no return. We have breeched some imaginary planetary limit for populations.

Image
David Herbert

The pull of helplessness is part infantilism and part cynicism. Political cynicism, as Adorno reminds us, is just another mode of conformity. And the infantilism is bound up with a more complex set of phenomenon; the projection of missing fathers, or missing mothers, the screen damaged psyches now of several generations that can no longer read or differentiate aesthetically, and the narcissism of a society that has had to incorporate their own class marginalization and re-tool it as something else. And in a sense this is what the bad green phenomenon, the bad green end of times phenomenon is doing. The ‘it’s too late’ refrain is posture of importance. One is raised above the debate. But there is a pernicious backdoor, psychologically, to this — and that is that beneath the proclamation is uncertainty. That sense of playing a role in gatherings, on social media, anywhere. A role that is just that.

****

What I have found, though, at least in terms of the population question, is that those who fear numbers of people are impervious to argument. Simply utterly impervious. Again suggesting a deeper psycho social register of complaint at work. Ehrlich’s work, and his infamous IPAT equation is completely indifferent to class, ethnicity, gender, or history. The internal make up of the numbers doesn’t matter, and to the more enthusiastic defenders of Ehrlich the internal make up doesn’t matter because they know the make up. The image in the minds of most is not Connecticut or Dallas, but Lagos and Sao Paulo and Jakarta. The global south is the target. And none of the factors that mitigate numbers — the western corporate extraction of resources for use IN the west, or the pollutions from militarism tied into Western capital, is discussed. And in media and in schools these numbers are recited as if gospel. That alone should make any leftist pause, but for many it does not.

****

The crises is Capitalism. It is a collective trauma that one is forced to return to. California wild fires, started by Pacific Gas & Electric lines that fell — lines put up around 1920. A hundred years ago. The levees in Louisiana, neglected, breeched when Katrina hit. The loss of insects directly tied to Monsanto. To decades of negligent or non existent oversight. Unregulated capitalism. The former colonial holdings, in Africa, in the Caribbean, in Asia and South America — countries yet to step out from under the boot heel of Western imperialism and capital. And throughout the world, the U.S. military lays waste to land, water, humans.

http://john-steppling.com/2019/04/nature-is-unnatural/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 22, 2019 5:03 pm

THE MANUFACTURING OF GRETA THUNBERG – FOR CONSENT: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX [ACT I]

Wrong Kind of Green Jan 17, 2019 350.org / 1Sky, Avaaz, B Team [Managed by Purpose - the PR Arm of Avaaz], Greenpeace, Social Engineering, United Nations, Whiteness & Aversive Racism, World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
By Cory Morningstar

January 17, 2019

“What’s infuriating about manipulations by Non Profit Industrial Complex is that they harvest good will of the people, especially young people. They target those who were not given skills and knowledge to truly think for themselves by institutions which are designed to serve the ruling class. Capitalism operates systematically and structurally like a cage to raise domesticated animals. Those organizations and their projects which operate under false slogans of humanity in order to prop up the hierarchy of money and violence are fast becoming some of the most crucial elements of the invisible cage of corporatism, colonialism and militarism.” — Hiroyuki Hamada, artist


Image
1958: “17-year-old Bianca Passarge of Hamburg dresses up as a cat, complete with furry tail, and dances on wine bottles. Her performance was based on a dream and she practised for eight hours every day in order to perfect her dance.”


The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent has been written in six acts. [ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V • ACT VI] [Addenda: I]

In ACT I, I disclose that Greta Thunberg, the current child prodigy and face of the youth movement to combat climate change, serves as special youth advisor and trustee to the burgeoning mainstream tech start-up, We Don’t Have Time. I then explore the ambitions behind the tech company We Don’t Have Time.

In ACT II, I illustrate how today’s youth are the sacrificial lambs for the ruling elite. Also in this act I introduce the board members and advisors to We Don’t Have Time. I explore the leadership in the nascent We Don’t Have Time and the partnerships between the well-established corporate environmental entities: Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, 350.org, Avaaz, Global Utmaning (Global Challenge), the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum (WEF).

In ACT III, I deconstruct how Al Gore and the Planet’s most powerful capitalists are behind today’s manufactured youth movements and why. I explore the We Don’t Have Time/Thunberg connections to Our Revolution, the Sanders Institute, This Is Zero Hour, the Sunrise Movement and the Green New Deal. I also touch upon Thunberg’s famous family. In particular, Thunberg’s celebrity mother, Malena Ernman (WWF Environmental Hero of the Year 2017) and her August 2018 book launch. I then explore the generous media attention afforded to Thunberg in both May and April of 2018 by SvD, one of Sweden’s largest newspapers.

In ACT IV, I examine the current campaign, now unfolding, in “leading the public into emergency mode”. More importantly, I summarize who and what this mode is to serve.

In ACT V, I take a closer look at the Green New Deal. I explore Data for Progress and the targeting of female youth as a key “femographic”. I connect the primary architect and authors of the “Green New Deal” data to the World Resources Institute. From there, I walk you through the interlocking Business & Sustainable Development Commission and the New Climate Economy – a project of the World Resources Institute. I disclose the common thread between these groups and the assignment of money to nature, represented by the Natural Capital Coalition and the non-profit industrial complex as an entity. Finally, I reveal how this has culminated in the implementation of payments for ecosystem services (the financialization and privatization of nature, global in scale) which is “expected to be adopted during the fifteenth meeting in Beijing in 2020.”

In the final act, ACT VI [Crescendo], I wrap up the series by divulging that the very foundations which have financed the climate “movement” over the past decade are the same foundations now partnered with the Climate Finance Partnership looking to unlock 100 trillion dollars from pension funds. I reveal the identities of individuals and groups at the helm of this interlocking matrix, controlling both the medium and the message. I take a step back in time to briefly demonstrate the ten years of strategic social engineering that have brought us to this very precipice. I look at the relationship between WWF, Stockholm Institute and World Resources Institute as key instruments in the creation of the financialization of nature. I also take a look at the first public campaigns for the financialization of nature (“natural capital”) that are slowly being brought into the public realm by WWF. I reflect upon how mainstream NGOs are attempting to safeguard their influence and further manipulate the populace by going underground through Extinction Rebellion groups being organized in the US and across the world.

With the smoke now cleared, the weak and essentially non-existent demands reminiscent of the 2009 TckTckTck “demands” can now be fully understood.

Some of these topics, in addition to others, will be released and discussed in further detail as addenda built on the large volume of research. This includes stepping through the looking glass, with an exploration of what the real “Green New Deal” under the Fourth Industrial Revolution will look like. Also forthcoming is a look at the power of celebrity – and how it has become a key tool for both capital and conformity.

[*Note: This series contains information and quotes that have been translated from Swedish to English via Google Translator.]





A C T O N E


“How is it possible for you to be so easily tricked by something so simple as a story, because you are tricked? Well, it all comes down to one core thing and that is emotional investment. The more emotionally invested you are in anything in your life, the less critical and the less objectively observant you become.” — David JP Phillips, We Don’t Have Time board of directors, “The Magical Science of Storytelling”

http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/01 ... l-complex/

Much more to this at link
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Wed Apr 24, 2019 1:48 pm

Why Green Pledges Will Not Create the Natural Forests We Need
Nations around the globe have pledged to increase their forest cover by planting millions of trees. But new research shows much of this growth would be in monoculture plantations that would be quickly cut down and do little to tackle climate change or preserve biodiversity.

BY FRED PEARCE • APRIL 16, 2019

Experts agree: Reforesting our planet is one of the great ecological challenges of the 21st century. It is essential to meeting climate targets, the only route to heading off the extinction crisis, and almost certainly the best way of maintaining the planet’s rainfall. It could also boost the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of inhabitants of former forest lands.

The good news is that, even as deforestation continues in many countries, reforestation is under way in many others. From India to Ethiopia, and China to Costa Rica, there are more trees today than there were 30 years ago, saving species, recycling rain, and sucking carbon dioxide from the air. The Bonn Challenge, an international agreement struck eight years ago to add 1.35 million square miles of forests (an area slightly larger than India) to the planet’s land surface by 2030, is on track.

But what kind of forests are they?

A damning assessment published earlier this month in the journal Nature brought bad news. Forest researchers analyzed the small print of government declarations about what kind of forests they planned to create. They discovered that 45 percent of promised new forests will be monoculture plantations of fast-growing trees like acacia and eucalyptus, usually destined for harvesting in double-quick time to make pulp for paper.

There are growing concerns that the reforestation agenda is becoming a green cover for the further assault on ecosystems.
Such forests would often decrease biodiversity rather than increase it, and would only ever hold a small fraction of the carbon that could be captured by giving space for natural forests. Another 21 percent of the “reforestation” would plant fruit and other trees on farms as part of agroforestry programs; just 34 percent would be natural forests.

“Policymakers are misinterpreting the term forest restoration [and] misleading the public,” the study’s two main authors, geographer Simon Lewis of Leeds University and tropical forest researcher Charlotte Wheeler of Edinburgh University, commented in a blog. It is, they say, a “scandal.”

Forestry and climate experts say that monoculture timber plantations have their place, but that they must be in addition to the 1.35 million square miles of restored natural forests, not instead of them. These experts also say that an important component of reforestation is supporting policies that help trashed forests and degraded lands regenerate naturally into jungle or woodlands, thus promoting significant carbon storage and fostering biodiversity. Richard Houghton, an ecologist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, has estimated that if degraded tropical forests were allowed to regrow, they could capture up to 3 billion tons of carbon annually for as much as 60 years, potentially “providing a bridge to a fossil fuel-free world.”

The world’s forests are home to half of all terrestrial species. Their foliage recycles rainfall to keep the interiors of continents from turning into desert, and they store CO2 that would otherwise add to global warming. Their restoration is fast becoming a global clarion call, essential for protecting biodiversity and climate.

Image
A tree plantation near São Paulo, Brazil. SHUTTERSTOCK

Environment groups such as The Nature Conservancy and World Resources Institute (WRI) trumpet the environmental potential — and economic rationale — for putting reforestation at the heart of “natural solutions” to climate change. Such new forests “can provide 37 percent of cost-effective CO2 mitigation needed through 2030” to hold down warming, an international study headed by Bronson Griscom of The Nature Conservancy concluded.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has called for the planting and protection of 1 trillion trees worldwide. The United Nations recently declared the 2020s would be the “Decade of Ecosystem Restoration.” As well as the promises made in Bonn, reforestation is central to fulfilling many countries’ emissions pledges made at the Paris climate conference in 2015.

But there are growing concerns that the reforestation agenda is becoming green cover for a further assault on the world’s ecosystems, and that this will undermine its ability to deliver for climate.

Reforestation is happening. Many countries in temperate lands have been gradually increasing their forest cover for decades. Europe has a third more trees than it did a century ago, as they encroach onto unwanted farmland. Some of the biggest expansion has happened in Eastern European countries such as Romania and Poland since the collapse of communist rule, when state collective farms were abandoned. In New England, forests have recolonized 15,400 square miles, an area 1 1/2 -times the size of Massachusetts, since the mid-19th century.

Many Chinese farmers who took money to plant trees said they would cut them down when the subsidies stopped.
But if there is a date when reforestation took flight as a global policy project, it was probably 20 years ago, when China blamed massive floods along the Yangtze River on deforestation. In 1999, Beijing banned further deforestation on Chinese soil and launched its Conversion of Cropland to Forest Program, sometimes called “grain for green.” Today, it claims the program has paid more than 100 million farmers across the country to plant trees and has restored more than 108,000 square miles of forest.

The effectiveness of the program has often been questioned. One important component, the “great green wall” project, which aims to halt spreading deserts across northern China by planting 100 billion trees by 2050, has been called a “fairy tale” by some Chinese ecologists. They claim five out of six seedlings have died. Geographer David Shankman, professor emeritus at the University of Alabama and a long-time observer of China’s reforestation programs, told Yale Environment 360: “I am not confident of long-term success.”

A 2016 study of the overall Chinese program by Lucas Gutiérrez Rodríguez of the Center for International Forestry Research in Bogor, Indonesia, found the published research was skewed and variable. The impacts on biodiversity were sometimes negative. On Hainan Island, for instance, the reforestation program replaced traditionally biodiverse farming systems with monocultures of eucalyptus and rubber. And many farmers who took money to plant trees on their land said they would cut them down again when the subsidies stopped. But Rodríguez agreed that, despite its failings, China had seen “a substantial increase in forest cover and associated carbon stocks.”

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A tree-planting project in Gansu Province, China. Authorities aim to plant 100 billion trees by 2050 to halt the spread of deserts in northern parts of the country. WANG HE/GETTY IMAGES

Other developing countries have also made the transition from deforestation to reforestation. Costa Rica saw its forest cover decline from 75 percent in 1940 to 20 percent in the late 1980s, mostly through clearance for cattle ranches. But with the government paying land users to nurture new forests of native tree species, cover has since recovered to more than 50 percent.

Nepal has seen a remarkable development of community forests. Some 17,000 autonomous community forest user groups, with rights to manage their forests and control access, have driven a rise in national forest cover of around 20 percent in the past three decades. Those new woodlands are largely composed of native species.

In Niger, on the edge of the Sahara desert, farmers have overturned decades of advice from government agricultural advisors and begun nurturing rather than removing trees on their land. The grassroots movement began in the mid-1980s in a single village, says Chris Reij, then of the VU University, Amsterdam and now at WRI, who uncovered it. Farmers in Dan Saga in the Maradi region of the country discovered by accident that they got better grain yields if they let trees grow; the trees stabilized soils, helped retain nitrogen, and dropped leaves that maintained soil moisture. Word spread. Today, the practice extends across 12.3 million acres and 200 million trees.

Increasingly, governments are becoming convinced that forests can be a boon for rural livelihoods. Since the Bonn Challenge was launched, 58 countries have made formal pledges on reforestation, covering more than 650,000 square miles that they say will eventually capture the equivalent of almost half-a-year of global industrial CO2 emissions.

In Brazil, 82 percent of the promised restoration is actually monoculture plantations rather than natural forest.
Other non-Bonn commitments — for instance as part of Paris climate pledges — extend the total reforestation in tropical countries alone to 1.1 million square miles, says Lewis. Countries with commitments exceeding 38,000 square miles include Brazil, China, India, Ethiopia, the United States, Nigeria, Indonesia, Mexico, Vietnam, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But Lewis says many of these promises are misleading. His and Wheeler’s analysis of plans submitted to the Bonn Challenge secretariat and elsewhere, found that in Brazil, for instance, 82 percent of the promised restoration is actually monoculture plantations rather than natural forest. In China, the figure is 99 percent.

Long-maturing natural forests will eventually store typically 40 times more carbon than a plantation harvested once a decade. “Plantations hold little more carbon, on average, than the land cleared to plant them,” says Lewis. The same would apply to proposed plantations of forest to provide biomass for burning in power stations.

Agroforestry — defined as the integration and cultivation of trees on farms — is rather better, holding typically six times more carbon than monoculture plantations, though only a seventh as much as natural forests. Many African countries are committed to reforesting primarily through agroforestry, encouraging smallholders to plant non-timber trees such as mangoes, cashew, or cocoa in their fields.

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A man harvests candlenut on an agroforestry farm in the province of West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. AULIA ERLANGGA/CIFOR

Backed by $1 billion from the World Bank, the Africa Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative aims to restore 386,000 square miles of forest by 2030, much of it on farmland. The model is Ethiopia, where in the wake of disastrous drought in the 1980s farmers have planted 2.5 million acres of trees among their crops in Tigray province alone.

Some nations have made big promises for restoring natural forests. They include Vietnam and India, both of which plan to meet more than 60 percent of their promised extensive reforestation this way. Under its 2018 draft forest plan, India intends to raise forest cover from the current 24 percent to 33 percent.

Even so, Lewis concludes, the preponderance of countries that plan to meet their commitments primarily through plantations or agroforestry means that they will only capture a fifth as much carbon as they would if they restored natural forests. He estimates they will capture around 16 billion tons, compared to the 200 billion tons that a recent IPCC report estimated would need to be removed from the atmosphere this century to help hold warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

“If deforestation could be reduced, Africa could quickly become a significant carbon sink,” says one biologist.
But these calculations leave out one additional component, says Edward Mitchard of Edinburgh University, a co-author of Lewis and Wheeler’s paper. Largely unnoticed, many degraded forests are regrowing, capturing carbon and often retaining much of their old biodiversity. Mitchard has tracked how, as African farmers head for jobs in cities, their old fields are consumed by jungle. “If deforestation could be reduced, Africa could quickly become a significant carbon sink,” he told Yale e360.

Other researchers take a similar line. Philip G. Curtis, a consultant with the non-profit Sustainability Consortium, has estimated that only about a quarter of annual deforestation is permanent. Much of the rest — whether lost to fires, shifting cultivation, or logging — will eventually recover. One assessment estimates that the world contains some 7.7 million square miles of degraded land suitable for forest restoration, a quarter of it for closed forests and the remainder for “mosaic” restoration in which forests are embedded into agricultural landscapes.

Others argue that successful forest restoration will require much greater involvement — and control — by forest communities. If badly managed, taking land for reforestation can result in outright “green grab,” as earmarked land is handed over to outside corporations or even NGOs, according to Rebecca McLain a spokeswoman for the Center for International Forestry Research. “Tenure rights are often key.”

But the bottom line, says Lewis, is that “to stem global warming, deforestation must stop. And restoration programs worldwide should return all degraded lands to natural forests.” The danger, he says, is that by trying to smuggle tree plantations into global agreements on restoring real forests, governments are in danger of undermining what could still become the greatest story of ecological redemption in the 21st century.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/why-gree ... ts-we-need
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Wed Apr 24, 2019 5:07 pm

EXTINCTION REBELLION OR SOCIALIST REVOLUTION
Wrong Kind of Green Apr 24, 2019 Neo-Liberalism and the Defanging of Feminism, Pacifism as Pathology, Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism
Architects for Social Housing

April 24, 2019

By Simon Elmer

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On Easter Sunday, after a week of protests and over a thousand arrests, Extinction Rebellion’s political circle coordinator, the climate change lawyer Farhana Yamin, announced that the week of protests in London would now be ‘paused’ as commuters went back to work and shop. This would show, she said – although she didn’t say whom it would be showing – that ‘we are not a rabble’.


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Above: L-R: Jennifer Morgan, Greenpeace International, Al Gore, The Climate Reality Project, Generation Investment, Farhana Yamin, Track 0, Extinction Rebellion. Yamin helped “midwife” the Paris climate agreement

This is not language that anyone who has organised or participated in popular protest, and has seen their efforts dismissed as the actions of a ‘rabble’ by politicians, newspapers and the BBC the following day, would ever use. Its implications are that any popular protest that can’t be switched on and off by its leaders, or at least its lawyers, is a rabble. As such, the statement is taking great care to differentiate the Extinction Rebellion protests from, most contemporaneously, the 23 weeks of Gilets Jaunes protests in France.

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And, indeed, where the protests of the Gilets Jaunes have been a genuinely popular uprising that has avoided leadership and allegiance with already existing political parties or unions, has so far refused to be dragged to the negotiating table by offers of concessions from politicians, and has physically stood up to the violence of the French police, Extinction Rebellion, in contrast, appears to have a leadership – although it’s not clear who that is at present – and, according to its official announcement, is directing its protests specifically towards the negotiating table. It is also very deliberately non-confrontational with the British police.

This appears to be based on a prior agreement with the Metropolitan Police Force. From both Extinction Existence spokespersons and the Met there have been widely reported statements about the light-touch the police have taken towards protesters. There have been claims, from people I spoke to on Waterloo Bridge on Wednesday night, that there are simply ‘too many’ protesters for the Met to clear; that the ‘passivity’ of the protesters, as one tabloid reported, has disarmed the police; that police have been ‘really, really nice’, as I heard a protester with a microphone tell the listening crowd from a parked truck, to those they have arrested; and that the police ‘don’t do kettling anymore’.

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Now, this is all rubbish. The Met alone has 50,000 officers, and even without the various other armed forces the Mayor of London and UK government can draw on, they could quite easily clear away the protests on Waterloo Bridge, Oxford Circus, Parliament Square and Marble Arch in a matter of hours, and they could do so, as they usually do, under the cover of darkness having sealed off the relevant streets from the press, media and public. They could also quite easily charge each and every protester, no matter how passive they are, and issue them with a dispersal order making their return to the sites of protest a criminal offence. And I can report from first-hand knowledge that a cop spraying someone in the face with CS-gas or punching them in the throat compels even the most peace-loving hippy to raise his or her arms in protection, and that’s all it requires for a charge of ‘Assault PC’. Extinction Rebellion requires that all participants ‘maintain nonviolent discipline both externally and internally’, which may be very admirable but does not dictate how violent the police are in return. As for not kettling anymore, that’s exactly what the police did in Oxford Circus, although it didn’t stop them allowing Emma Thompson through (and presumably back again) to address the press from the pink yacht moored there.

Extinction-rebellion-peaceful

So the otherwise inexplicable circumstances that have permitted a truck and a yacht to block two of the major thoroughfares in London for a week can only be explained as a result of a prior agreement between the leadership of Extinction Rebellion and the Metropolitan Police Force, most likely through the accommodations of the London Mayor, who likes to depict himself as an environmentalist while doing nothing to curb CO2 emissions and authorising the destruction of our green spaces for new developments.

Something very similar to this happened in July 2017 when the Tories Out! demonstration was held in London, and the whole thing kicked off in Portland Place, just up the road from Oxford Circus, with an even bigger truck than the one Extinction Rebellion parked on Waterloo Bridge. At the time I wondered how the organisers of the march had got permission for such an occupation, but it quickly became clear that, behind its ostensibly ‘grass-roots’ and popular appearance, this was a Labour Party-organised event that had appropriated the language and spectacle of street protest to serve its parliamentary aspirations.

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Earlier that year, in February 2017, a demonstration against Donald Trump, also purporting to be popular, was held in Parliament Square, on which had been erected a huge stage, with a lineup of musical acts, performance poets, a gospel choir and speakers from the Houses of Parliament. Again, I was struck by the fact that this ‘protest’ was in a Government Security Zone, where the Metropolitan Police Force has free reign to arrest and otherwise assault you on the mere suspicion that you’re about to do something anti-social let alone illegal, and that holing a march there requires prior authorisation from the London Mayor – who had in fact given it. And, once again, it turned out that this ‘popular’ protest was in fact organised by Owen Jones, the Socialist Workers Party, the People’s Assembly against Austerity, Unite the Union, Momentum, and other fronts for the Labour Party.

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To its credit, Extinction Rebellion has distanced itself – at least verbally – from any political party or pre-existing organisation, such as the Green Party or Greenpeace, and in this it has common ground with the Gilets Jaunes. And in doing so it is strategically different from the so-called ‘grass roots’ Labour fronts that have reduced the equally effusive housing movement of 2015 to the obedient acolytes for Jeremy Corbyn of 2019. But apart from its adoption of the spectacle of street protest, which has presumably drawn into these protests far more people than are aligned with the umbrella organisation, Extinction Rebellion also clearly has more than a few quid behind it. The first thing I thought when I saw the pink yacht moored in Oxford Circus was not: ‘What a great way to block the busiest high street in London!’, but: ‘Who’s got a yacht to spare?’ (though I have no doubt it will be returned by the police to its rightful owner – the right to property being the only human right observed in the UK). So, where’s the money coming from?

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On its website Extinction Rebellion says that its raised £180,000 in the past six months, some of it from donors, a lot from grant funds, even more from crowdfunding. This doesn’t strike me as anything like enough to pull off the stunts it has. And even if it is, it doesn’t explain the far greater influence it has on the London Mayor, the Met, Transport for London, the media, and all the other forces of the establishment that might otherwise have been expected to rally in organising opposition to it, as they have for instance, in silencing the protests against London’s housing crisis and homelessness.

A clue might have been let slip last Thursday when, on the advertisement that is wrapped around the front and back pages of the London Evening Standard, beneath the headline: ‘Fourth day of chaos from climate protests’, Adidas has taken out a double-page spread with the sales-pitch: ‘We can’t change the world in one day. But we can take the first step.’ This was followed by a masterpiece of salesmanship specifically designed to appeal to the youth market:

‘For the past 6 years we have been working on a product that you’ll never throw away. A shoe that is made to be remade. You buy them – wear them – and when you’re done you give them back to us. We remake them. It is our first step. A statement of intent to end the problem of waste. We have a problem with plastic waste. We buy, we use, we throw away. But there is no away. Every piece of plastic ever made is still in existence somewhere on our planet. In our ecosystem. Poisoning our earth. Before this makes-use-waste e-system changes everything, we must change it.’


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For some time now I’ve been arguing that protesting is the new clubbing, and just as multinational corporations very quickly turned the underground scene of acid house and rave into a form of stadium rock in the 1990s, so the same corporations – which shape and mould our desires and future far more than the Houses of Parliament – have cottoned on to the fact that in the 2010s the newest popular social phenomenon on which they can capitalise – and in doing so subsume that phenomenon into a reaffirmation of capitalism – is protest.

Why else, if not in order to appeal to a teenage consumer market, has Extinction Rebellion chosen a 16-year old Swedish girl in pigtails to be its global spokesperson? Protesters might argue that in doing so they are using the strategy of mass marketing against itself, but in that struggle there can be only one winner, and its name is Adidas, Nike, McDonalds, Coco-Cola, etc.

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But besides finding new markets for their environment-consuming commodities, why else would multi-national corporations be interested in climate change?

As the West loses its grip on the world, and the economies of formerly impoverished countries like India, Brazil and China expand at exponential rates, the demand on the world’s resources increases. As we watch the Communist Party of China buy up vast tracks of land in Africa and across the world, the call on such rapidly industrialising economies to halt production, curb expansion and reduce emissions is more likely to find acceptance amongst a European and North American middle class experiencing a drop in its standard of living for the first time since the Second World War if that call is aligned with green politics, in which the approaching disaster (for us) of the West losing its economic pre-eminence in the world is equated with an environmental catastrophe the whole world is facing.

Emmanuel Macron tried something similar in France when he justified the raising of taxes for the working classes by arguing that it was necessary to save the environment. And, to their credit, the Gilets Jaunes saw through and rejected his attempt to capitalise on the environmental crisis. The vast sums of money donated to the rebuilding of Notre Dame de Paris in France by France’s billionaires in the same week that Extinction Rebellion has been calling for a drastic reduction in CO2 emissions in Britain has revealed the extent of the French President’s lies.

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Extinction Rebellion’s demands to have our global climate and ecological state declared an ‘emergency’, to ‘act now’ to reduce carbon emissions, and to form a ‘citizens assembly’ to oversee that action, attributes the environmental disaster we’re facing to abstract forces. But in reality, the changes to the environment that threaten our continued existence are not caused by ‘humankind’ or ‘greed’; nor are they a product of the ‘anthropocene’. This newly popular term, which has been adopted by Extinction Rebellion, attributes the current state of the natural world to the humanist, anthropological and a-historical abstraction called ‘man’, with which environmentalists and feminists alike are so disgusted. However, a growing body of research argues that the environmental changes threatening us are not a product of man but of capitalism, for which the corrective term ‘capitalocene’ goes some way to attributing the ecological deterioration of the world to the historical particularity of capitalist relations of production and capitalism’s structural need to expand in order to generate profit.

Despite this, nowhere in their demands have Extinction Rebellion named this economic cause or called for its change, presumably because doing so would align them with social and political forces from which Farhana Yamin’s negative description of a ‘rabble’ has taken care to distance them. As Extinction Rebellion state in their list of principles: ‘We avoid blaming and shaming – we live in a toxic system, but no one individual is to blame.’



Some of us disagree. The rabble that, for the 23rd week running, have protested in France against the capitalism they have identified as the cause of the rising inequality to which they are not alone in being subjected, and of which the environmental disaster we are facing is a bi-product, saw through Macron’s attempt to place that disaster in the service of monopoly capitalism. As the leadership of Extinction Rebellion meets with politicians this week to discuss their demands, will they risk alienating the class and corporate interests that have given them this platform by aligning their environmental demands with the social, political and economic revolution that alone is capable of averting this disaster?

What is becoming increasingly clear is that capitalism will either be overthrown and superseded or it will lead us to extinction as a species. If it is not to be just another ideology of liberalism to which Extinction Rebellion unfortunately bears numerous points of resemblance, an environmentalist project must at the same time also be a revolutionary project.

Further reading:

The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – A Decade of Social Manipulation for the Corporate Capture of Nature [ACT VI – Crescendo]:

http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/02 ... crescendo/

http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/04 ... evolution/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sun May 05, 2019 12:04 pm

Yellow vests v Extinction Rebellion
Climate protestors’ leader accidentally gives away the ruling class’s agenda.
Proletarian writers

Saturday 4 May 2019

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Parliament recessed for Easter and suddenly central London was occupied by a motley group of all singing and all dancing eco demonstrators, with a distinctive new brand: Extinction Rebellion.

Its logo, austere and yellow, is the same colour as that of the rebel yellow vests in France, but the similarities end there. With a few exceptions (that prove the rule), the yellow vests are working class, while the Extinction Rebellers are middle class.

Reflecting their different class position, yellow vests and Extinction Rebellers also have different demands. Most obviously, the yellow vests want to abolish President Emanuel Macron’s new carbon taxes so they can afford to use their cars to go to work at their low-wage jobs – jobs which outside the big urban areas are often a good distance from their homes. Their children’s’ schools are often also very badly served by public transport.

In contrast, the Extinction Rebellers want to increase carbon taxes, as they want everyone (except the elite on urgent business) to walk, bicycle or use the (in many places non-existent) public transport system.

As to the state itself, the yellow vests want President Macron to resign, but they do not just want him replaced. They want a whole new French constitution or ‘sixth republic’, which they want to have both a parliamentary and Swiss-style referenda element.

Above all, the yellow vests are tired of ‘democracies’ that deliver nothing for the masses, and instead they want a government that works in the interest of the working ‘people’, not the ‘elite’.

In contrast, Extinction Rebellion asks for no constitutional change, and though it shows preference for the Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green, Scottish National and Clwyd Cymru parties, it is willing to work with whatever government is in power.

And certainly, May and Hammond’s brand of Toryism sees the same sort of advantage as Macron does in hiding increased taxes and austerity for the working class along with substantial grants to new green capitalists behind the need to ‘do something’ about climate change.

One of Extinction Rebellion’s ostensible founder-leaders, Dr Gail Bradbrook, let this slip in a heated exchange with Adam Boulton on Sky TV, when she revealed that a couple of her Extinction Rebellion colleagues had met with junior ministers and advisors, who had assured them that the government needed a ‘social movement’ just like Extinction Rebellion to help create the atmosphere that would enable the Tory government (or any other) to push through unpopular carbon taxes and similar innovations, which are always more onerous on the working classes.

Dr Bradbrook was totally oblivious to how she had revealed Extinction Rebellion as a government patsy, while Boulton was so irritated with Extinction Rebellion for blocking Waterloo Bridge that he did not push her on it either.

But then the media itself is either a patsy, or so obtuse that it might as well be.

Clearly, Extinction Rebellion was given carte blanche to close down swathes of central London for over a week, and the question to ask is: when has an anti-war, pro NHS or housing demo been given similar freedom?

Sure, there were 1,000 arrests, but except for the handful of demonstrators who disrupted the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), the police operated a catch and release policy, so that all the arrested were back demonstrating with hours.

This piece of theatre alone should show even the most political naive, that the Extinction Rebellion leadership is working hand in glove with the bourgeoisie, but for those a little slower on the uptake, there was also the stage-managed appearance via train of Saint Greta Thunberg of Sweden.

Looking like a twelve-year-old 1950s schoolgirl, the sixteen-year-old Greta, climate change activist extraordinaire, was whisked to Westminster, where Labour’s Jeremy Corby, the LibDems’ Vince Cable, the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas et al came to listen to her words of wisdom, and even the ‘governing party’ sent a representative in the shape of environment minister Michael Gove, to take a seat near the prim, pontificating wunderkind.

Greta told them that she spoke for the future, that they had all been slackers and had to pull their socks up if they were going to save the planet in the time she and David Attenborough gave them. All the bourgeois politicos agreed that they wanted to save the planet, but none of them seemed to have much of an idea as to how they could embark upon on such a task, let alone accomplish it. (Though carbon taxes affecting the working class and individuals declining to use plastic were both put high up on their ‘to-do list’).

If the issue were not so serious, it would be comical, but it is not, for one thing is certain: nothing in the capitalists’ playbook can save the planet. In the end, whatever capitalists spout, they just cannot see beyond making a profit, no matter what the cost to the rest of us.

And to any Extinction Rebel reading this: the first step to saving the planet is understanding that if you want to be really Green you have to be really Red.

http://www.cpgb-ml.org/2019/05/04/news/ ... rebellion/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri May 10, 2019 11:47 am

Extinction Rebellion Training, Or How To Control Radical Resistance From the "Obstructive" Left
Cory Morningstar, Wrong KInd Of Green 09 May 2019

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Extinction Rebellion is a Corporate Led "Evironmentalist" Movement Aimed at Bypassing and Isolating the Left, and Muting Critics of Capitalism

Extinction Rebellion (XR) officially launched on October 31, 2018. On November 2, 2018, a video was uploaded to the Extinction Rebellion YouTube account. The video documents the training session held by XR co-founder Roger Hallam: “This was filmed at the Extinction Rebellion Local Coordinator training in Bristol. Roger Hallam explains some the key dynamics of building a mass movement from the level of personal resilience to creating system change.”
This article was originally published by our comrades at Wrong Kind of Green , who remind us that the road to hell is paved (and brightly lit) by corporater profits and compromised NGOs. Wrong Kind of Green is a consistent and reliable source of information on the machinations of the nonprofit industrial complex.
Here, it is critical to remind oneself, that this is the XR mass organizing model for the mobilization of a global citizenry. Consider between the official launch on October 31, 2018 , in the UK, to December 6, 2018, it grew to over 130 groups, across 22 countries. By January 29, 2019, the Extinction Rebellion groups spanned across 50 countries. On April 27, 2019 XR reported they were nearing 400 branches globally.

The global expansion is being led by Margaret Klein Salamon [Source ], founder of The Climate Mobilization, who launched the Extinction Rebellion US Twitter account on October 31, 2018 – the same day as the launch of Extinction Rebellion in the UK. The Extinction Rebellion demands are not only complementary to The Climate Mobilization’s emergency strategy now in motion; they are a mirror image of it with the slogan, “Tell the Truth”. [Further reading: The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: The House is On Fire! & the 100 Trillion Dollar Rescue, ACT IV ]

Training the XR Local Coordinators

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Above: Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam

During the training session, Hallam draws a chart with three circles. The small circle on the top signifies Extinction Rebellion – people that want to get things done. The middle circle is quickly identified as the contentious one. This circle identifies the “mostly obstructive”, highly political, a “hard left”, which must be bypassed in order to reach the bottom circle. The bottom circle, the largest in size, represents the non-political citizens, the target audience of XR: “The people who’re shitting themselves and want something to be done but aren’t highly political.” [Source : XR Local Coordinator Training]

Hallam:

“I’m just going to finish on something that’s a bit of a taboo subject, okay? But it’s another major issue you’re going to find when you organize, which is difficult, political people.

Okay, so I’m going to do a little chart here.

You usually find, like most of us people in this room, that are really political, but we’re really practical because we want to get some things done. Okay?

And then below us, in inverted commas, there’s another group of people that are really political and don’t want to get things done, because they’re so political. (lots of laughter). I will separate those people out in a minute.

And then below that, this is like a thousand times bigger, they really want to do something well there actually not political, you see what I mean.

These people really want to get things done. Then they go down here and try to involve these people, and these people basically grind it to death.”

Hallam speaks of the dangers posed by the “extreme hard left” viewpoints, “extreme intersectionalism ” (“we need to be all perfect and that sort of stuff”), extreme desire for diversity, “extreme veganism”, etc. His examples are deliberately misleading and ridiculous. His mention of anarchism provokes more laughter.

Hallam concedes “and often they’re right” yet has zero interest in empowering this group to further empower the bottom “non-political” masses targeted by XR. Rather, his aim is to recruit the ones that can be persuaded into adopting pragmatism, while silencing those that refuse to conform.

In the Rebellion business, ethics isn’t a driving force, rather it is a detriment:

“Look, all the most effective movements have a central concept and that concept is balance. Balance the pragmatic need and the ethical imperative to change society versus the need to be eternally ethical.”

The message is clear – target the practical and pragmatic. Distance yourself from the self-centered “purists”.

“They’re [the 20%) not actually interested in political effectiveness. They’re interested in a political approach that makes them feel good.”

Although XR claims , “We are working to build a movement that is participatory, decentralised, and inclusive” – this runs in stark contrast to XR’s own conduct:

“The name of the game is to bypass these people, or at least recruit the little bit of them that get it … and go down here. And that’s how we’ve managed to mobilize thousands of people in three months. By having a public meeting. And if the public meeting is constructed around participative principles, you won’t have the SWP [Socialist Workers Party] guy standing up at the end. Everyone’s feeling good and he does a rant about how it has to be socialist, otherwise it’s rubbish. Which brings everybody down. It happens over and over again. And how we do that, we don’t have a Q & A. Q&A’s encourage nerdy people and absolutists, (laughter), we all know this, right? I mean you can have a Q&A if you’re super confident and you’re in a group of people that are generally like, in the real world, but if you have a public meeting 8o% of the people will be normal people, who are basically interested in the issue, and 20% of the people will be political absolutists. And they will there to appropriate your energy.”

And this ideology upheld by Hallam is the very foundational ideology being taught, encouraged and nurtured by Extinction Rebellion. Hallam: “This is how you mobilize lots of people.”

This , in essence, forms the key strategy of Extinction Rebellion. To isolate radical voices and to dominate the narrative. While targeting the non-practical and pragmatic. A narrative and an orchestrated campaign that serves the ruling class. To give a faux sense of inclusion, while mocking those who have, first and foremost, an allegiance to the Earth. Framing those who recognize that the very capitalist system destroying all life on our finite planet, will not and cannot be magically reformed to save us, as “political absolutists”. As Hallam effectively frames those identified in the middle circle as not “normal”, he seeks assurances from his students by ending sentences with a pleasant “yeah?” and “okay?”, at which point – largely due to the power of conformity in a group setting – they agree. Laughter ensues. There is no challenge to Hallam’s diatribe. The deliberate framing of those that do not conform as “obstructive” is effective social engineering.

Although Extinction Rebellion takes no position against capitalism, Hallam has no issue with taking a swipe at socialism. Using the Mondragon experiment in Spain as an example, Hallam explains that the central concept must be balance, “not socialism or anything”.

These are the main points captured by/for the XR Local Coordinators :

“They’re [the middle group] not interested in political effectiveness, they’re interested in things being perfect and good. This is not a personal judgment, but it won’t help.”

The majority, to be herded like cats (GCCA/TckTckTck – Global Call for Climate Action) are “[T]he people who’re shitting themselves and want something to be done but aren’t highly political.”

“Don’t have a Q & A. This allows the extreme people who want it to be one way to bring everyone else down.”

“80% are normal people [and] 20% political absolutists. There to appropriate your energy.”

“It’s not about climate change information, it’s about the emotional way that we say it – needs to create that emotional response, personal reactions are incredibly powerful.”

For XR leadership, the enemy of Rebellion is not corporate dominance such as Unilever or Volans (as recently confirmed by XR Business). The enemy of Rebellion is not the capitalist economic system devouring everything in its path. The enemy of the Rebellion is the radical activist, prepared to defend the Earth “by any means necessary”.







Pacifism as Pathology

“In certain situations, preaching nonviolence can be a kind of violence. Also, it is the kind of terminology that dovetails beautifully with the ‘human rights’ discourse in which, from an exalted position of faux neutrality, politics, morality, and justice can be airbrushed out of the picture, all parties can be declared human rights offenders, and the status quo can be maintained.” — Arundhati Roy, How to Think About Empire

Hallam recommends to his students that they study: “The Psychology of Persuasion “, “The Radical Think Tank” (“How to Win “), and “This is an Uprising ” by Mark Engler (with glowing forewords by 350.org’s Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein ).

Here, is another orchestrated and ongoing effort to further pacify the working class in servitude to the state. One would be wise to toss “This is an Uprising” and instead read “Bloodless Lies: Book Review of This is an Uprising ” (November 7, 2016). This is an excellent example of what those enmeshed in the non-profit industrial complex do not want you to read.

Rather than educating citizens why it is paramount that we become revolutionaries in order to protect the last vestiges of the natural world, Hallam encourages his newly-minted coordinators to embrace the role of “generalists”. [XR Generalists: “run meetings, be good with people, know how society changes, etc.; Revolutionary theorists – hard work is already done!; Books to read – This is an Uprising (Mark Engler)”] [Source ]

The Elites in Service to Capital

As touched upon in the conclusion of the Manufacturing Greta Thunberg for Consent series, ACT VI, Extinction Rebellion ties to some of the world’s most powerful NGOs at the helm of the non-profit industrial complex (Avaaz, 350.org, Greenpeace et al.). A largely white-led movement serving white power.

XR co-founder Gail Bradbrook, is also highly influential with decade-long ties to the tech industry . In his workshop, Hallam chuckles when he laments, “Like Gail, she’s got these connections with the elites. She’s on the phone with George [Monbiot]”. Bradbrook’s “connections with the elites” is no exaggeration. Featured in “The Financial Times”, the prestigious publication writes of Bradbrook : “Clad in a crimson coat and matching hat as she dashes between fundraising discussions with a London hedge-fund owner and meetings to rally Extinction Rebellion volunteers…” Indeed, “activism” has never been so en vogue, and a £50,000 donation by a hedge-fund owner to Extinction Rebellion [Source ], raises no eyebrows whatsoever. It is safe to say that the hallowed out remnants of Western environmentalism have reached a new stage of commodification and normalization of such. This is not rebellion. This is business. Of course Bradbrook is not the only elite at the helm.

Image
Above: Farhana Yamin at the prestigious Extinction Rebellion headquarters [Photo: Vice ]


Farhana Yamin is “one of the movement’s leading voices” in Extinction Rebellion (Financial Times). Yamin who “spent 27 years in UN climate negotiations” and “helped midwife the 2015 Paris Agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions” serves as a board member/trustee to Greenpeace. [Source: The rise of Extinction Rebellion, The Financial Times, April 12, 2019 ]

“Yamin, the international lawyer, who is also a trustee of Greenpeace UK and will soon take up an advisory role at the World Wildlife Fund, wants to build a bridge with existing organisations to forge a much bigger “movement of movements”. “We need to tap into the new form of leadership that’s being asked of us now,” she says. [Source: “Extinction Rebellion, inside the new climate resistance”, The Financial Times, April 10, 2019 ]

Former Vogue “climate warrior” (2015), Yamin is the founder and CEO of Track 0: “Track 0 is an independent, not-for-profit organization serving as a hub to support all those transitioning to a clean, fair and bright future for future generations around the world compatible with the goals set out in the Paris Agreement. We convene leaders and provide strategic research, training, advice, communications and networking support to governments, businesses, investors, philanthropies, communities and campaigns run by civil society.”

tweet by FY

Partners of Track 0 include GCCA (TckTckTck), CAN (Climate Action Network), Avaaz, ClimateWorks (The Climate Group, We Mean Business), The Rockefeller Foundation, E3G (founder of GCCA), The Prince of Wales Corporate Leaders Group, European Climate Foundation and Chatham House. [Full list ]

Advisory members of Track 0 include Sharon Johnson, “CEO Havas Media Re:Purpose”. This is incredible yet not surprising as Havas created the 2009 TckTckTck campaign a decade ago. Other advisory members include Betsy Taylor (served on boards of One Sky which merged with 350.org, Ceres, The Climate Mobilization, etc.), and Bernice Lee, Director, Climate Change at World Economic Forum.

One can glance through the Track 0 “Individuals & Organizations on Track ” section to understand who is considered “on track” for “net zero” by Yamin et al. Certainly not those obstructionists found in Hallam’s middle circle.

In addition to founding Track 0, Yamin is an associate fellow at Chatham House and a member of the Global Agenda Council on Climate Change at the World Economic Forum.

Partners of Track 0 include GCCA (TckTckTck), CAN (Climate Action Network), Avaaz, ClimateWorks (The Climate Group, We Mean Business), The Rockefeller Foundation, E3G (founder of GCCA), The Prince of Wales Corporate Leaders Group, European Climate Foundation and Chatham House. [Full list ]

Advisory members of Track 0 include Sharon Johnson, “CEO Havas Media Re:Purpose”. This is incredible yet not surprising as Havas created the 2009 TckTckTck campaign a decade ago. Other advisory members include Betsy Taylor (served on boards of One Sky which merged with 350.org, Ceres, The Climate Mobilization, etc.), and Bernice Lee, Director, Climate Change at World Economic Forum.

One can glance through the Track 0 “Individuals & Organizations on Track ” section to understand who is considered “on track” for “net zero” by Yamin et al. Certainly not those obstructionists found in Hallam’s middle circle.

In addition to founding Track 0, Yamin is an associate fellow at Chatham House and a member of the Global Agenda Council on Climate Change at the World Economic Forum.track 0 tweet 1another tweet by FY

Yamin served as an adviser to the European Commission on the emissions trading directive from 1998-2002, later serving as special adviser to Connie Hedegaard, EU Commissioner for Climate Action. “She is lead author of three assessment reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on adaptation and mitigation issues. She continues to provide legal, strategy and policy advice to NGOs, foundations and developing nations on international climate change negotiations under the UNFCCC.” [Source ]

As discussed in “A Decade of Strategic and Methodical Social Engineering”, while the International Policies and Politics Initiative and GCCA controlled the “movement” at COP15, the same forces also controlled the message via the Carbon Briefing Service (CBS). The news service was launched by Jennifer Morgan (WWF, WRI, Greenpeace,etc.) and Liz Gallagher (E3G) in late 2014 with additional funding by the ClimateWorks Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Oak Foundation, the Villum Foundation and Avaaz. [Source ] Yamin was a participant of the invitation only group. [Source ]

In 2015 Yamin attended a week-long retreat hosted by Avaaz. [Source ]

Those who have read my past work as well as the Greta series, will know Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund are both founders of GCCA (TckTckTck) – and are both at the helm of this faux movement. These NGOs and others at the helm of the non-profit industrial complex are tasked with creating another “Paris moment” momentum needed for the coming financialization of nature to be implemented in 2020 (#NewDealForNature) – as well as the unlocking of monies needed for the fourth industrial revolution (to save capitalism itself).avaaz

CF endorses Avaaz
Above: Avaaz endorsement by Christiana Figueres [Source: Avaaz website]


Here we witness the social-organizational psychology experts grooming tomorrows “new champions “, “global shapers ” and “new power ” “thought-leaders ” as determined and ultimately dictated by the world’s most powerful elites. In the 21st century, psychology is not only an extremely important tool in influencing public opinion, it is now considered to be perhaps the single and most important tool. The necessity to comprehend the mental processes, desires and social patterns of the populace at large cannot be understated. Working in lock-step with controlled media and the best marketing executives foundation money can buy, today’s faux activists, thought-leaders and media lapdogs are the very mechanisms of modern-day perception. – The Pygmalion Virus in Three Acts [2017 AVAAZ SERIES | PART II]

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[Further reading : The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – A Decade of Social Manipulation for the Corporate Capture of Nature, ACT VI – Crescendo]

+++

In 1966, Stokely Carmichael stated: “And that’s the real question facing the white activists today. Can they tear down the institutions that have put us all in the trick bag we’ve been into for the last hundreds of years?”

This is the real question facing legitimate activists today. Are we tearing down the institutions, or keeping them propped up? Extinction Rebellion has been tasked with the propping up of the very institutions we must dismantle. There is a reason manufactured “environmentalists” and celebrities are recognized as key influencers. It is a deliberate undertaking that Hallam recommends “Rules for Revolutionaries” (based on US Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential run), rather than highlighting true revolutionaries such as Marilyn Buck, Malcolm X, or the land defenders on the frontlines today. The ones who often receive no press (until they are murdered). The ones that would belong to Hallam’s middle circle. It is a burying of radical political resistance. A reframing of resistance – into an obedient compliance. Note that Rules for Revolutionaries is written by Zach Exley , current advisor to US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It is notable that praise for the book , from a bevy of authors includes Robert B. Reich, author of Saving Capitalism.

The influencers for the ruling classes are worth their weight in gold.

Emotion – Not Information

Another critical imperative Hallam highlights for mass mobilization is “emotion – not information”. Hallam laments that the people who will lead the “rebellion” will be young people:

“The last thing to reiterate is the emotion – not the information … so the people that are going to lead this rebellion are going to be young people, 14 & 15 year olds …omg – a 14 year-old is in tears, right?, on television, about what’s happening…”

Thus, a key strategy for XR was (and continues to be) “How to engage with younger people – youth mobilisation, talks in schools/colleges, figuring out how to engage on ‘youth’ social media.” [Source ]

We Mean Business is ecstatic over the climate strikes. As is Christiana Figueres.

Figueres, an anthropologist, economist and analyst having studied at London School of Economics and Georgetown University presided over the negotiations that led to the 2015 Paris Agreement. For this achievement Ms. Figueres has been recognized as “forging a new brand of collaborative diplomacy”. With almost four decades of experience in multilateral negotiations, high-level national and international policy, coupled with extensive involvement in the corporate/private sector, in 2016, TIME magazine named Figueres one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Today, Figueres serves as vice-chair of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy ; member of the board of directors of ClimateWorks; World Bank Climate Leader ; B Team leader, leader of Mission2020 (“exponential transformation” focusing on six sectors that will play a key role in municipal governments and “Green New Deals”); and board member of the World Resources Institute .

Emma Thompson


Emma Thompson for Global Optimist. The initial funding for Global Optimist, a project of Christiana Figueres, was provided by We Mean Business
Christiana Figueres (top right corner) podcast series: It’s Going To Be Tremendous
Christiana Figueres (top right corner) podcast series: It’s Going To Be Tremendous
When the oppressor and the oppressed find themselves cheering as one , this is indeed “tremendous” for the elites. Yet, as the designs of the ruling elites take hold, which is already well under way, we will soon recognize that the citizenry themselves were grossly manipulated to usher in a nightmare that would only further their own demise.

[Further reading : So who exactly is Christiana Figueres?]

we mean business 3
Above: The We Mean Business newsletter, April 30, 2019
April 30, 2019 : “Welcome to the April edition of the We Mean Business coalition newsletter…Amid fresh waves of protests demanding accelerated climate action, more and more businesses and policy makers are stepping up and delivering the level of systemic change required to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.”

We Mean Business – “a coalition of organizations working with thousands of the world’s most influential businesses and investors.” The founding partners of We Mean Business are: Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) (full membership and associate members list ), CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), Ceres, The B Team, The Climate Group, The Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group (CLG) and World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD).

The Climate Group was incubated by Rockefeller Brothers Fund as an in-house project that later evolved into a free-standing institution.

Together, these groups represent the most powerful – and ruthless – corporations on the planet, salivating to unleash trillions of dollars for the fourth industrial revolution. This, coupled with the financialization of nature, will create new markets, reboot global economic growth, and most importantly, rescue the global economic capitalist system that is destroying our biosphere.

We Mean Business, February 20, 2019: “People are desperate for something to happen.” Twitter
We Mean Business, February 20, 2019: “People are desperate for something to happen.” Twitter
Christiana Figueres, B Team Leader [Source]. The B Team is a founder of We Mean Business
Christiana Figueres, B Team Leader [Source ]. The B Team is a founder of We Mean Business
Emotion To Mask Information: BioEnergy Carbon Capture Storage

“The Institute has a unique and unrivalled membership including governments, global corporations, private industry and academia. Amongst its representation, are the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Japan and Australia, and multinationals such as Shell, ExxonMobil, Toshiba, Kawasaki and BHP.” — The Global CCS Institute, website

In the May 3, 2019 Extinction Rebellion newsletter (#20), the subject line reads “Parliament meets our first demand!” In the body of text: “There’s plenty of more obvious good news, though – most prominently Parliament’s declaration of climate and environment emergency.” What XR does not share with the public is that the UK CCC climate legislation was a victory for the carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry. In similar fashion to the financialization of nature, carbon capture legislation and projects are making huge strides behind closed doors – with zero opposition .

Global CCS Institute, May 2, 2019 , Twitter:

“The Institute welcomes @theCCCuk report, which recommends that the UK commits to cutting its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to net-zero by 2050 and highlights the crucial role #carboncapture and storage needs to play to achieve this goal. #NetZeroUK #climateaction”

A zero emissions industrial civilization is not possible. For the continuance of industrial civilization, CCS is a necessity. This is the promise of unabated business as usual. The future of energy will be dominated by the burning of our remaining forests, coupled with CCS. Akin to the depleted uranium left for future generations to contend with, CCS will inject the increasing CO2 into the ravaged Earth. This is the gift to be left to Greta Thunberg and the youth she inspires. A gift to span generations.

More than this, “net zero” does not mean zero emissions. And it never did. Yet another inconvenient truth is that ‘The terms ‘net zero emissions’ and ‘carbon neutrality’ are interchangeable. This is the beauty of language and framing.

working group

carbon capture

“Carbon Neutral is a term used to describe the state of an entity (such as a company, service, product or event), where the carbon emissions caused by them have been balanced out by funding an equivalent amount of carbon savings elsewhere in the world.” Carbon neutrality is most often sought/achieved through carbon offsetting (purchasing offsets, trading and projects).

Question by Richard Branson’s The Elders NGO to Farhana Yamin (2014): How is carbon neutrality different to ‘net zero emissions’?

Answer by Yamin: “The terms ‘net zero emissions’ and ‘carbon neutrality’ are interchangeable.”

Q: Global News, Dec 3, 2018: What is net-zero emissions?

A: Catherine Abreau, executive director of the Climate Action Network: “In short, it means the amount of emissions being put into the atmosphere is equal to the amount being captured.”

Militarism – as one of the key drivers of climate change, ecological devastation, and death of millions, remains a non-issue . The global “green new deals” guarantee further imperialism and an escalation in wars. These realities have been deliberately and successfully removed from the conversation. They are buried in the 20% circle with the purists.

“The evidence makes it clear. CO2 needs to be removed from the atmosphere, known as carbon dioxide removal (CDR), using negative emissions technologies (NETs) to meet global warming targets. Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is emerging as the best solution to decarbonise emission-intensive industries and sectors and enable negative emissions.” — March 14, 2019, Bioenergy and Carbon Capture and Storage, The Global CCS Institute



“[F]or BECCS technology to be truly effective in reducing CO2 emissions, massive tracts of arable land need to be cultivated and these are not always available, or easily utilised.” — The Global CCS Institute

Emotion to Mask Information: The Financialization of Nature

paris this may

natural capital partners

The next phase for the implementation of the financialization of nature commenced April 29, 2019 with the IPBES Global Assessment gathering (the IPCC for Biodiversity).

The “first global biodiversity assessment in 14 years”, will be released on May 6, 2019, with the expected “summary for policymakers” section. We can expect a top “scientific endorsement” for a full package of financialization of nature policy tools, including global metrics for valuation, commodification and offset schemes.

The five-day gathering was held last week at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, ending on May 4, 2019.

There were no protests.

John Elkington
Above: John Elkington : Co-founder of Volans, B Team expert (founded by Richard Branson, The B Team is a co-founder of We Mean Business), member of the WWF Council of Ambassadors, and Extinction Rebellion Business signatory (along with Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion)
Together, these deals read like the biggest land grab since Britannia ruled the waves. This is the big deployment of measurement and financial instruments that the corporate sector, finance and ruling classes have developed. Every little bit of sequestration will be used to further satisfy natural capital ambitions under the guise of climate protection.

The public face of this grotesque undertaking are the campaigns “New Deal For Nature” and “Voice For The Planet”. These are being led by WWF – co-founder of GCCA. The NGOs comprising the GCCA have played the lead role in orchestrating the global mobilizations for climate change over the past decade, in full servitude to their funders.

The “Voice For the Planet” is especially egregious , as it is presented by the World Economic Forum “Global Shapers” youth group.

The gross exploitation of youth for capital expansion rivals only the gross exploitation of Indigenous peoples. The appropriation and utilization of Indigenous imagery to promote market solutions is long documented .

The world’s most powerful corporations and NGO partners appropriate Indigenous culture imagery for emotive branding as they unleash and uphold market “solutions” which further displace Indigenous peoples. They undermined the 2010 Indigenous led People’s Agreement and then buried it. They speak of Indigenous protection – while they actively promote “green” marketing schemes and “green new deals” that will further displace Indigenous peoples. That will further accelerate the ongoing genocide of Indigenous Peoples.

indigenous image #1

indigenous image #2

green new deal poster
Promotional illustrations /video for Green New Deal by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis for support of the New Green Deal
They exploit the global youth to steal the natural world the beneath their feet.

They exploit the love for nature – to further enslave nature.

As GCCA co-founder WWF aids and abets Indigenous displacement , beatings and deaths, under the guise of conservation, GCCA partners are silent. This is the normalizing of a continued colonization repackaged under the guise of conservation and “green”.

Industrial civilization – is the enemy of the natural world. We defend industrial civilization – or we defend the planet. This is the choice. The question is, which side are we on?

And the answer to that question is perhaps the most terrifying thing of all.

Image
“No One Believed in Capitalist Schemes and Promises Any More” part of the new “Scenes from the Revolution” series. Acrylic on canvas, 30″x30″, Artist: Stephanie McMillan

https://blackagendareport.com/extinctio ... ctive-left
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon May 13, 2019 1:29 pm

Socialism and ecology

ecologyRegarding the issue of climate change, or rather the management of the environment and the planet's resources, one thing is clear: poor workers and countries will, as always, be called upon to pay for the damage caused by out-of-control pollution. Elementary needs are threatened: water, food supply, a healthy and livable environment, especially in cities where class segregation is more pronounced. Along with unprecedented social inequalities, the current society is a nightmare for workers and nothing suggests an improvement.

For the communists it is clear that any alternative development and energy consumption policy will develop in the fight against oil and energy monopolies, which reason in terms of profits for their private shareholders and not of environmental sustainability.

Social and ecological problems therefore go hand in hand and cannot be de-correlated, on pain of losing the class dimension of the question, without which ecology has no sense from a social point of view or interest for the lower classes, and without which no policy can get out of the restricted reformist, and therefore ineffective, sphere of the fight against pollution.

The ecological transition must aim at creating better jobs, good quality jobs and safeguarding the ecosystem. "Saving the planet" is wishful thinking if you do not become aware of the need to subvert the economic system, in order to change something at the environmental level. In this perspective, the privatization of resources and public services goes against the same objectives that the bourgeois rulers, in words concerned about the climate, flaunt in favor of television cameras, while privatizing all the privatizable.

In countries with mature capitalism, the issue of climate change therefore depends directly on the question of the change in the economic system, ie the transition to socialism. Every other vision is purely idealistic and disconnected from reality: wanting to change the climate without wanting to change the structural economic causes that degrade it reveals the purest political slogan, good for feeding the press during the big media meetings whose negotiations give birth to nothing, from Copenhagen 2010 in Paris 2015.

The ecological question is a subordinate of the social question, as such it must be treated. And for this reason it calls into question the concept and practice of economic planning . Only a logic of social production plan and therefore in the exploitation of resources, which is an alternative to the market anarchy determined by the logic of capitalist profit, can in fact guarantee concrete steps forward in the direction of safeguarding the planet's resources.

Therefore, to be realistic and serious, the ecological question necessarily presupposes taking control of the economic levers on the part of the working classes. Without it there can be no planning that determines the reorientation of capital and investments which - taking into account first of all the aspects of reindustrialisation and qualitative innovation of the product process that are indispensable to get out of the crisis and renew society - integrate the ecological variable into the 'processing of production processes in the light of democratically determined social production objectives. Certainly it is not the case today in the West where speculation, accumulation, private profits and cortotermism determine the economic choices of the States in an anti-democratic way - therefore anti-worker and anti-social.

Eliminating the specter of overproduction - structural to the capitalist mode of production and a harbinger of cyclical crises that throw the working class and all workers out of business - is equivalent to planning the production of socially useful goods, calibrated using the available raw materials and ecologically weighted production processes based on social sustainability, to be established politically outside the private profit fence.

Let's see concretely how the communists today solve this problem. For example, the People's Republic of China is regularly stigmatized for its environmental management, but what no one says - because it is always fashionable to demonize the communists - is that:

The pollution index of Chinese cities is well below that of almost all of the Indian, Pakistani, Iranian, African and Bangladesh metropolises, and roughly the same level as that of Mexico City. Yet China has a much higher rate of growth, due to its consistency, quality and quantity, than that recorded in these countries. It achieves formidable economic / social goals for a population to which real improvements in living conditions are provided that these countries do not guarantee at all to their citizens.
This means that China uses the resources available in a more effective, balanced and controlled manner. It achieves its extraordinary goals with a relatively better environmental impact than its competitors in development and performancenot comparable economic / social. And on a closer look even with respect to its Western partners, who are in full economic crisis, therefore in full social regression, but instead aggravate their ecological impact. Let me be clear, China is a country that has 1 billion 300 million inhabitants which in 40 years has become the second world economic power: in absolute terms Chinese emissions are very high. But can a country and its ruling class be blamed for having worked so hard to extract themselves from the blackest poverty and colonial slavery (China was the poorest country in the world in 1949) even at the cost of temporarily degrading the environment? No of course. Especially when in relative terms socialist China has been more virtuous than its neighbors and even capitalist Western governments.
It should also be emphasized that China is the world leader in the development of the solar and alternative energy sector, it actively and concretely explores the feasibility of a replacement energy source for the future, not just in words. The investments are colossal and the planning, evaluation and verification of this technology is careful, without falling into idealism, without committing the mistake of relying solely on renewables, as economically not yet sustainable. Except for the purpose of stopping economic / social development. Obviously no communist and democrat can realistically side with such a point of view, worthy of fanatical ecologists, dreamers of bucolic worlds, intellectuals of happy decreases.
The XXII Five-Year Plan has established the design of new cities that are entirely functional from an ecological point of view, the long-term goal is the building of eco-sustainable cities for millions of inhabitants with a view to a new green urbanization.
China is completing the most ambitious reforestation program on the planet, as certified by the UN.
Thus, while in the collective imagination the media construct the negative image of China suffocated by smog, reality tells us that Chinese planning, compatibly with its development needs, is a model of social / ecological management that works: both from development point of view, both for environmental awareness. Chinese socialist politics takes concrete form in effective legal provisions. And now that the basic needs of the population are beginning to be met evenly, a reconversion towards a qualitatively superior development model that is new and more environmentally friendly can be put on the planning table.

This demonstrates in practice that only conscious planning, which takes prerequisite of taking control of productive means and credit, is able to take into account environmental interests concretely, without the need for fine words and vaporous speeches from Nobel prizes.

1) http://www.internazionale.it/notizie/20 ... quinamento

http://rue89.nouvelobs.com/2015/09/03/n ... nde-261042

2) http://www.qualenergia.it/articoli/2015 ... ro-il-2030

3) http://omissisnews.com/cina-rimboschime ... uinamento/

http://www.unric.org/it/attualita/26573 ... olti-paesi

4) http://www.cinaforum.net/boom-settore-ecologia/

https://lottobre.wordpress.com/2015/12/ ... -ecologia/

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While the environmentalists wait of the populace to be infected by 'biophilia' or dump the problems their societies created on others this is the real deal, this is materialist analysis.
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue May 21, 2019 5:18 pm

THE MANUFACTURING OF GRETA THUNBERG – FOR CONSENT: THE NEW GREEN DEAL IS THE TROJAN HORSE FOR THE FINANCIALIZATION OF NATURE [ACT V]
Wrong Kind of Green Feb 13, 2019 350.org / 1Sky, Avaaz, B Team [Managed by Purpose - the PR Arm of Avaaz], Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carbon Markets | REDD, Celebrity [Capitalism | Humanitarianism | Neoliberalism], Conservation International, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Natural Resources Defense Council, Nature Conservancy, Neo-Liberalism and the Defanging of Feminism, Oxfam, Pacifism as Pathology, Purpose [Public Relations Arm of Avaaz], Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Foundation, Sierra Club, Social Engineering, TckTckTck, United Nations, USAID, Whiteness & Aversive Racism, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, World Resources Institute, World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
This is ACT V of the six-part series: The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: The Political Economy of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex



February 13, 2019

By Cory Morningstar



In ACT I of this new body of research I opened the dialogue with the observations of artist Hiroyuki Hamada:


“What’s infuriating about manipulations by Non Profit Industrial Complex is that they harvest good will of the people, especially young people. They target those who were not given skills and knowledge to truly think for themselves by institutions which are designed to serve the ruling class. Capitalism operates systematically and structurally like a cage to raise domesticated animals. Those organizations and their projects which operate under false slogans of humanity in order to prop up the hierarchy of money and violence are fast becoming some of the most crucial elements of the invisible cage of corporatism, colonialism and militarism.”


The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent has been written in six acts. [ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V • ACT VI] [Addenda: I]

In ACT I, I disclosed that Greta Thunberg, the current child prodigy and face of the youth movement to combat climate change, served as special youth advisor and trustee to the foundation established by “We Don’t Have Time”, a burgeoning mainstream tech start-up. I then explored the ambitions behind the tech company We Don’t Have Time.

In ACT II, I illustrated how today’s youth are the sacrificial lambs for the ruling elite. Also in this act I introduced the board members and advisors to “We Don’t Have Time.” I explored the leadership in the nascent We Don’t Have Time and the partnerships between the well established corporate environmental entities: Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, 350.org, Avaaz, Global Utmaning (Global Challenge), the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum (WEF).

In ACT III, I deconstructed how Al Gore and the Planet’s most powerful capitalists are behind today’s manufactured youth movements and why. I explored the We Don’t Have Time/Thunberg connections to Our Revolution, the Sanders Institute, This Is Zero Hour, the Sunrise Movement and the Green New Deal. I also touched upon Thunberg’s famous family. In particular, Thunberg’s celebrity mother, Malena Ernman (WWF Environmental Hero of the Year 2017), and her August 2018 book launch. I then explored the generous media attention afforded to Thunberg in both May and April of 2018 by SvD, one of Sweden’s largest newspapers.

In ACT IV, I examined the current campaign, now unfolding, in “leading the public into emergency mode”. More importantly, I summarized who and what this mode is to serve.

In ACT V, I take a closer look at the Green New Deal. I explore Data for Progress and the targeting of female youth as a key “femographic”. I connect the primary architect and authors of the “Green New Deal” data to the World Resources Institute. From there, I walk you through the interlocking Business & Sustainable Development Commission and the New Climate Economy – a project of the World Resources Institute. I disclose the common thread between these groups and the assignment of money to nature, represented by the Natural Capital Coalition and the non-profit industrial complex as an entity. Finally, I reveal how this has culminated in the implementation of payments for ecosystem services (the financialization and privatization of nature, global in scale) which is “expected to be adopted during the fifteenth meeting in Beijing in 2020.”

In the final act, ACT VI [Crescendo], I wrap up the series by divulging that the very foundations which have financed the climate “movement” over the past decade are the same foundations now partnered with the Climate Finance Partnership looking to unlock 100 trillion dollars from pension funds. I reveal the identities of individuals and groups at the helm of this interlocking matrix, controlling both the medium and the message. I take a step back in time to briefly demonstrate the ten years of strategic social engineering that have brought us to this very precipice. I look at the relationship between WWF, Stockholm Institute and World Resources Institute as key instruments in the creation of the financialization of nature. I also take a look at what the first public campaigns for the financialization of nature (“natural capital”) that are slowly being brought into the public realm by WWF. I reflect upon how mainstream NGOs are attempting to safeguard their influence and further manipulate the populace by going underground through Extinction Rebellion groups being organized in the US and across the world.

With the smoke now cleared, the weak and essentially non-existent demands reminiscent of the 2009 TckTckTck “demands” can now be fully understood.

Some of these topics, in addition to others, will be released and discussed in further detail as addenda built on the large volume of research. This includes stepping through the looking glass, with an exploration of what the real “Green New Deal” under the Fourth Industrial Revolution will look like. Also forthcoming is a look at the power of celebrity – and how it has become a key tool for both capital and conformity.

[*Note: This series contains information and quotes that have been translated from Swedish to English via Google Translator.]



A C T V



March 10, 2014:

“…the divestment campaign will result (succeed) in a colossal injection of money shifting over to the very portfolios heavily invested in, thus dependent upon, the intense commodification and privatization of Earth’s last remaining forests, (via REDD, environmental “markets” and the like). This tour de force will be executed with cunning precision under the guise of environmental stewardship and “internalizing negative externalities through appropriate pricing.” Thus, ironically (if in appearances only), the greatest surge in the ultimate corporate capture of Earth’s final remaining resources is being led, and will be accomplished, by the very environmentalists and environmental groups that claim to oppose such corporate domination and capture.” — McKibben’s Divestment Tour – Brought to You by Wall Street [Part II of an Investigative Report, The “Climate Wealth” Opportunists]



A GREEN NEW DEAL – FOR MOBILIZATION

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November 12, 2018, A New Global Architecture: Børge Brende [Far left of panel], President, Member of the Managing Board, World Economic Forum and panel [1]. “Shaping a New Global Architecture” session at the World Economic Forum, Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils 2018. Copyright by World Economic Forum / Benedikt von Loebell

The “New Deal” of the 1930s has always been a point of pride in the American psyche since its implementation by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his four terms in office after the Great Depression. Since that time, various people and programs have attempted to appropriate this term in furtherance of diverse platforms as a means to portray the concept as beneficial to a populace. In that regard, a fairly recent phrase that has borrowed from this terminology is the “Green New Deal”. This term first surfaced during 2007 by the NY Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman and was then used by London accountant Richard Murphy to describe a full scale change in our economy to an environmentally sound capitalist system. As the term has never been fully embraced by the establishment, it still resided right below the surface of mainstream economic discourse among many people, as it serves as a potential improvement within the current economic system. Only recently though, in 2019, has the “Green New Deal” reached apoplectic proportions as far as its usage and reached a fevered pitch by those who are touting its ability to shift the paradigm from fossil fuels to a pancea of “green technologies” in the near future.

Prior to 2018, the term had become most recognized and associated with the Green Party as part and parcel of its platform. By June 2018 however, traces of how this would soon serve to be the vehicle that would launch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the stratosphere of a superstar would start to surface.

On June 27, 2018, Democracy Now, a popular mouthpiece for the halls of power in the domestic psuedo-left movements reported the following:

“In a stunning upset and the biggest surprise of the primary season this year, 28-year-old Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat 10-term incumbent Representative Joe Crowley in New York in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. Crowley is the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, and he’d outraised Ocasio-Cortez by a 10-to-1 margin. Crowley was widely viewed as a possible future House speaker. Yet Ocasio-Cortez defeated Crowley after running a progressive grassroots campaign advocating for “Medicare for All” and the abolition of ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.”

Following her victory on June 26, 2018, Cortez would acknowledge that the only reason she ran for the seat, was at the bequest of the Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress who had approached Cortez a year and a half earlier, in 2016. [Video interview, June 27, 2018, 9m:42s in]:

The Young Turks: “Last, two things real quick. You’re among the first Just Democrat candidates ever in history. Umm, how much of a, of a help was that organization to you?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: It was enormously important. I wouldn’t be running if it wasn’t for the support of Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress. Umm, in fact it was it was these organizations, it was JD and it was Brand New Congress as well, that both, that asked me to run in the first place. They’re the ones that called me a year and a half ago after I left Standing Rock and said ‘hey would you be willing to run for Congress?’ So I wouldn’t be here, um, and I wouldn’t have run if it wasn’t [for them].”


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October 26, 2018: Brand New Congress, Green New Deal

Most of the people involved in founding the Justice Democrats (launched in January 2017) and Brand New Congress (founded in 2016) came from the aftermath of the Bernie 2016 campaign. As an example, Saikat Chakrabarti co-founder and former executive director of Justice Democrats, as well as a co-founder of Brand New Congress, served as the campaign chair during Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 campaign. Today, Chakrabarti serves as Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff. Prior to co-founding Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress, Chakrabarti was the director of organising technology for the Bernie 2016 Campaign.

Our Revolution, a political organization launched by Bernie Sanders in 2016, [touched upon in ACT III of this series] also endorsed Ocasio-Cortez. On January 23, 2017, it was reported that Justice Democrats would partner with Brand New Congress.

One name that sparks curiosity is Zack Exley. In addition to serving as current advisor to US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Exley is a co-founder of both Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress. Previously, he served as the senior advisor to the Bernie 2016 campaign and the organizing director for MoveOn. Exley, Open Society Fellow, is co-founder of the New Consensus public relations and communications firm and the ascribed “policy arm of Justice Democrats.” [Source] New Consensus, co-author of The Green New Deal document with the Sunrise Movement and the Justice Democrats, is identified by Think Progress as “the muscle supporting Green New Deal efforts”.

Exley, co-author of “Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything”, was also co-founder of the New Organizing Institute (launched in 2005) which recruited, trained and supported US political candidates. New Organizing Institute, funded by Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation among others, partnered with MoveOn.org (co-founder of both Avaaz and the New Organizing Institute) and several other NGOs in 2011 before the institute was dissolved in 2015.

It is worth noting that Avaaz first polled its members on a Green New Deal in 2009.

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One day after Ocasio-Cortez won the Democratic nomination for her congressional district on June 27, 2018, a New Green Deal led by Ocasio-Cortez was highlighted by Grist in which they referenced an email interview between HuffPost and Ocasio-Cortez the week prior:

“What sets Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal apart is her plan to meet the target by implementing what she called a “Green New Deal,” a federal plan to spur “the investment of trillions of dollars and the creation of millions of high-wage jobs.”



Though the slogan harks back to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal program of infrastructure spending and labor reforms, she compared the program she envisions to the tens of billions of dollars spent on armaments manufacturing and the rebuilding of Europe after World War II.”



‘The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan,’ she told HuffPost by email last week. “We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy, but this time green energy.”

On June 30, 2018, Grist would reference the Green New Deal as proposed by Ocasio-Cortez again:

“The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan’, she said by email. “It will require the investment of trillions of dollars and the creation of millions of high-wage jobs. We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy but this time green energy.”

Here we must pause for a moment to deconstruct the above. First, the above plan and language mirrors that in the strategy document “Leading the Public into Emergency Mode: A New Strategy for the Climate Movement” [laid out in ACT IV of this series] being led by organizations whose affiliations with the Democrats, the Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez campaigns are publicly disclosed. Second, we must recognize that behind large institutions and media outlets such as Grist, branded as both “left” and “progressive”, are power structures subservient to capital. Grist CEO is Brady Walkinshaw. Prior to his role of CEO in 2017, Walkinshaw, a former US State representative, worked as a program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Before his tenure at the Gates Foundation, Walkinshaw, a Fulbright scholar of the US State Department, worked as a special assistant to the World Bank. Within the Grist board of directors is 350.org founder, Bill McKibben – defacto foot soldier for Bernie Sanders and the Democrats in general.

CLIMATE NEXUS: A NEW GREEN DEAL IS COMING
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November 7, 2018: Climate Nexus (a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors), Green New Deal
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On February 7, 2019, Climate Nexus (a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors) [2] announced via its “TOP STORIES” that a “New Green Deal is Coming”:

“Here It Comes: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) will unveil a landmark resolution calling for a transition to renewable energy and the creation of thousands of new jobs today in Washington, DC. The highly-anticipated Green New Deal legislation follows months of protest and calls for an aggressive and just transition off fossil fuels from young activists in groups like the Sunrise Movement.”

From 2013-2016, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors ten million dollars for Climate Nexus.

The Blended Finance Taskforce [see ACT IV of this series] is comprised of fifty icons of finance including the MacArthur and Rockefeller Foundation.

As touched upon in act IV of this series, the People’s Climate March, which took place on September 21, 2014, was led and financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, Climate Nexus, 350.org, Avaaz/Purpose, Greenpeace, US Climate Action Network (USCAN) and GCCA/TckTckTck (founded by twenty NGOs with 350.org, Greenpeace, Avaaz and Oxfam at the helm). In relation to the current set of circumstances, 350.org (incubated by the Rockefeller Foundation) would again serve to be an instrumental vehicle to propel the Green New Deal as the catalyst to unlock the 100 trillion dollars required to unleash the “fourth industrial revolution”. This project, of unparalleled magnitude, is the vehicle to save the flailing global capitalist economic system and bring in the financialization of nature.

GREEN NEW DEAL – DATA FOR PROGRESS
“A Green New Deal is popular among American voters and can mobilize them in 2018.” — A Green New Deal Policy Report by Data for Progress, September, 2018 [Emphasis in original]



Data for Progress Website

“Key Finding 7: The kids are alright – Though some of the proposals we examine are currently unpopular nationally, that may change in the future. We find that four of the most radical proposals we analyzed are vastly more popular with younger voters than they are with the general public.” — Data for Progress, Polling the Left Agenda

In July 2018, polling conducted by Data for Progress, a partner in the Green New Deal with the Sunrise Movement and 350.org, showed a whopping 41% of people under the age of thirty would support a candidate that campaigned on a jobs guarantee and clean energy. The support exhibited by this age bracket constituted approximately twice that of the group comprised of people age 45 and above. [“Forty-eight percent of voting eligible adults said they would be more likely to support a candidate who was running on 100% renewable energy by 2030. Notably, this is significantly faster than even the most progressive legislation currently in Congress.”] By targeting the youth, in addition to its 30-45 demographic, the promise of green jobs and clean energy were the clear winners.

“In this case, at least, time could be a weapon for the Sunrise Movement. Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center projected that millennials were poised to overtake baby boomers as the largest adult generation in the U.S., as well as its biggest eligible voting bloc.” [Source]



“What year were you born? (Sunrise is building a movement led by young people; we ask for the year you were born so that we can help you find the best opportunities to engage. You can answer “prefer not to say” as well, but knowing this really helps us!)” – Sunrise Movement Website



September 6, 2018: 350.org, Green New Deal, Data for Progress

“All electricity consumed in America must be generated by renewable sources, including solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, sustainable biomass, and renewable natural gas, as well as clean sources such as nuclear and remaining fossil fuel with carbon capture.” — New Green Deal Policy Report by Data for Progress, September, 2018 [p. 5]

For the Green New Deal’s foray into the American consciousness, a new movement would be required. This would be the Sunrise Movement. A youth movement created under the direction of the Sierra Club from which it received a $50,000 grant. Par for the course of “youth grassroots activism” Sunrise already has a hefty budget and a full time staff: “In relation to other environmental groups, the Sunrise Movement is relatively small. Its officials said they have about 16 full-time staff and that they’ve raised about $1 million since its founding.” [December 3, 2018]

Sunrise Movement is the rebranded US Climate Plan (now defunct) founded by Evan Weber and Matt Lichtash.

Lichtash is a strategy and executive office specialist at the New York Power Authority. He is the founder of Carbon Capital.



WESLEYAN, ISSUE 2, 2017

In 2017, Weber was named by Grist as one of “50 emerging green leaders to watch for” citing his work with U.S. Climate Plan, the organization founded by he and Lichtash in 2013 under the direction of Michael Dorsey.

SustainUS alumni [“WE TRAIN YOUNG PEOPLE TO LEAD“] Dyanna Jaye would be identified as one of the Sunrise Movement co-founders following the April 2017 rebrand, as would Varshini Prakash and Sara Blazevic from the Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network.

“Sunrise is a movement led by young people and young people will be prioritized for housing, travel support, and other needs, as people typically left out of the political process by our institutions. That being said, we welcome people of all ages to participate in Sunrise actions in different ways.” — Sunrise website

The president and executive director of the Sunrise Movement is Michael Dorsey. Having served eleven years on the Sierra Club national board, Dorsey is co-founder and principal of Around the Corner Capital—an energy advisory and impact finance platform. He serves as an advisor to ImpactPPA, equity partner in the solar firm Univergy-CCC, co-founder and director of Univergy-CCC’s India division (Univergy/ThinkGreen), and a full member of the Club of Rome. His political background is extensive having served under the US administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He also served on Senator Barack Obama’s energy and environment presidential campaign team. [3]

“We must end all emissions from fossil fuels. The full U.S. economy can and must run on a mix of energy that is either zero-emission or 100 percent carbon capture by mid-century* [*citation].” — New Green Deal Policy Report by Data for Progress, September, 2018 [p. 5]

Sunrise received a collaborative grant from USCAN with Power Shift Network, SustainUs and the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. Another primary funder thus far of Sunrise is the Sustainable Markets Foundation. The Sunrise address is shared with US Climate Action Network and Sierra Club (50 F St NW, Washington, DC 20016), where Sunrise trainings have been held by USCAN board members.

“One factor working in their favor was that the group didn’t start from scratch. Some of the architects of the Sunrise Movement included activists from organizations such as 350.org — which also provided some early financial support.” – Inside the Sunrise Movement (it didn’t happen by accident), December 3, 2018

Prior to the Sunrise Movement, the framework of a youth led mobilization in service to capital expansion had already been identified by those at the helm. In that role, people such as Jamie Margolin, youthful founder of Zero Hour were developed by the establishment. In being trained by the likes of Al Gore (founder of Generation Investment with Goldman Sach’s David Blood), Margolin was propelled to celebrity status in a mere few months by utilizing magazines that feed the insatiable American appetite for celebrity fetish (Vogue, People, Rolling Stone). This exposure, coupled with social media recognition by “eco celebrities” (individuals with grotesquely indulgent lifestyles yet lionized as environmental stewards due to their comparatively menial philanthropic endeavours, such as Leonardo DiCaprio) is a tried and true method of manufactured celebrity.

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a lot more to this at link

http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/02 ... of-nature/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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