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Fifty years of 'environmentalism' and we're less sustainable. So what do we do now?
Children's futures depend on us no longer dithering in search of hope, but instead throwing ourselves into last ditch action. Photo by Cassandra's Eye from the Your BC: The Tyee's Photo Pool.
Enviro experts battle despair as doom scenarios roll in.
Retiring after 40 years, one of Canada's intellectual eco-giants leaves behind a tremendous footprint.
People ready to sacrifice if they don't feel alone.
Did Earth rumble after the Rio+20 climate conference? Or was that the roar of a billion citizens letting go the expectation that polite dialogue and political process would restore Earth's ecological balance?
In any case, the global zeitgeist shifted, at least within environmental discourse. Future historians may mark the period from BP's 2010 oil spill disaster, through Fukushima, to the 2012 Rio failure as a state shift in ecological awareness.
Fifty years ago, in 1961, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, launching a new public discourse about ecology that reached an early zenith in 1972 at the first U.N. ecology conference in Stockholm. Today, we have armies of environment groups, swarms of ecology PhD graduates, environment ministers, conferences, science summits, green products, green travel, banners and blockades. But we are less sustainable than we were in 1961.
After 50 years of environmental efforts, the most troubling trends -- Earth's temperature, species diversity, soil health, toxic dumps, shrinking forest, expanding deserts -- appear worse. The testimony of our collective failure blows around us like a chilling polar wind. It is too late to save the 25,000 species that blinked from existence, or the 300,000 people who perished from climate-change impact, last year, and will again this year. We have not yet turned the empires of humanity back toward the paradise from which they were born.
Why?
Moving beyond hope
After Rio, a collective "gulp" rose among ecological scientists, journalists, bloggers, and commentators. Maybe we can't stop global heating or bee colony collapse. Maybe the systems feedbacks are more complex than our engineering can fathom. Maybe it's time for adaption.
The new mood arises from many events -- BP, Fukushima, Occupy, Arab Spring, Rio+20, and so forth -- but Rio signaled a tipping point for believers in the political process. U.K.'s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg pronounced the agreements "Insipid." Former Irish president and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, called the results "a failure of leadership." Ecology groups walked out. Indigenous leaders held their own meetings and called the official Rio "green economy" plan "a new wave of colonialism."
Writer/farmer Sharon Astyk wrote in Scienceblog, "Most of these events are about feeling good about pretending... [The] fundamental policy changes that would be necessary... aren't even on the table... caring is not enough."
At a rally in Canada to save a river from another dam, scientist David Suzuki said, "In elevating the economy above everything else, we fail to ask the most elementary questions: What is an economy for? How much is enough? Are there no limits? We're not asking the critical questions."
George Monbiot lamented in The Guardian, that the "promise to save the world keeps us dangling, not mobilising... Hope is the rope on which we hang." University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen went even farther in Counterpunch: "to be a hope-peddler today is... laziness... We have to believe in something beyond hope."
Urgent critiques of business-as-usual are attracting larger audiences. "My beef with the whole 'solutions' thing," writes James Kunstler in Rolling Stone, is that "the subtext to that particular meme is, 'Give us the solutions that will allow us to keep running our stuff the same way.'... The mandates of reality are telling us something very different."
After Rio, ecology writer Chris Hedges wrote "Time to get Crazy," warning that "Civilizations in the final stages of decay are dominated by elites out of touch with reality... [The] failure to impose limits cannibalizes natural resources and human communities... It all will come down like a house of cards."
Annie Leonard -- whose "Story of Stuff" remains one of the most-watched (relevant) videos on the Internet -- released "The Story of Change," in which she critiques "green" consumerism: "Can shopping save the world? No. Put down your credit card and exercise citizen action." She notes that successful social change campaigns focus on: 1. big ideas (like "changing economic priorities"); 2. working together; and 3. direct action.
"When will ordinary people rise up?" asks Share the World's Resources, a U.N. consultation group. "Leaders and policymakers [are] paying merely lip service." They now advocate "public uprisings and mass occupations."
Bill McKibben, who helped introduce global warming science to the public in 1989, observed that Rio "accomplished nothing." Like others, McKibben has embraced direct action and last year, he helped organize a mass protest of tar sands pipelines in the U.S., leading to 2,000 arrests. After Rio, in Rolling Stone magazine, McKibben demonstrated why 80 per cent of the known hydrocarbon reserves will have to remain in situ if we have any hope of keeping global heating below 2C°. He advocates divestment from oil corporations -- similar to anti-apartheid strategies successful in South Africa, but laments, "we may have waited too long."
The fact that two of the examples cited above appeared in Rolling Stone music magazine is itself an indication that a zeitgeist shift is underway. We hear a return to urgency, to fundamental values, indigenous voices, limits to economic growth, and genuine ecology as the context for any authentic or enduring solutions for humanity.
Gulp! Fifty years of "environmentalism" and we are less sustainable. So what do we do now?
Make fun, make trouble
Artists usually lead social zeitgeist changes. Rouget de Lisle's La Marseillaise rallied 18th-century French revolutionaries just as Tunisian hip-hop artist El General's "O Leader!" became the soundtrack for an uprising that toppled a regime and sparked a democracy movement. Virginia Woolf anticipated modern psychology and women's rights; the Yes Men brought street theatre back to activism, and Adbusters magazine aroused the Occupy movement.
Accepting bad news honestly appears part of the new mood. In the U.S., Justin Ritche and Seth Moser-Katz post the Extraenvironmentalists podcast, which they call "Doom without the Gloom," the tough love news with a sense of irony. "Is sustainability a farce," they ask, "when associated with a way of life that is out of touch with reality?"
Twenty-four-year-old singer Cold Speck from Etobicoke, Canada writes "doom soul" music, realism with rhythm. "We fall from a dying tree," she sings in "Winter Solstice," and her claim in the song "Holland," "We are many, we are many," rings convincingly. A fresh spirit moves globally, seeks a new way to live. The youth feel it instinctively. Witness 11-year old Ta'kaiya Blaney warn "if we do nothing, it will all be gone," from "Shallow Waters," a song she wrote and sang in the indigenous camp at Rio.
How to Boil a Frog, the funniest film ever made about collapsing ecosystems, advises people who care: "Make friends, make fun, and make trouble." Writer/actor Jon Cooksey plays half a dozen characters, including a lab scientist, who warns the audience, "This is the scary part. Are you ready? Global warming isn't a problem. It's a symptom of a much bigger problem."
State-shift
Three years ago, Earth systems scientist Johan Rockström and colleagues published "Planetary Boundaries" in the journal Nature, showing that human activity has pushed seven critical systems -- biodiversity, temperature, ocean acidification, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, land use, fresh water, and ozone depletion -- near or beyond critical tipping points. Furthermore, the report cautions, natural system feedbacks drive additional change and endanger other limits.
This year, Nature published "Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere," by 22 international scientists led by bio-paleoecologist Anthony Barnosky from the University of California. The team warned that human activity is likely forcing a planetary-scale transition, far beyond simple global heating, "with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience." Averting a planetary ecological crisis, they warn, now requires unprecedented human effort. "In a nutshell," said Canadian co-author, biologist Arne Mooers, "humans have not done anything really important to stave off the worst. My colleagues... are terrified."
In "the Way Forward" in Solutions Journal, William Rees, creator of "ecological footprint" analysis at the University of British Columbia, reminds readers: "Climate change is just one symptom of generalized human ecological dysfunction. A virtual tsunami of evidence suggests that the global community is living beyond its ecological means." Rees shows that the human ecological impact (utilizing the production from 2.7 global hectares per person) annually overshoots Earth's productive capacity (1.8 global hectares) by 50 per cent. "The human enterprise has already overshot global carrying capacity," says Rees, "and is living, in part, by depleting natural capital and overfilling waste sinks," including Earth's atmosphere. "Solutions," writes Rees, require that we "rewrite global society's cultural narrative” to replace a "culturally constructed economic growth fetish."
Double bind
Former World Bank senior economist Herman Daly proposed an ecological economics in the age of Rachel Carson, and published Steady-State Economics 40 years ago. In a recent essay, Daly critiques the IBM notion to "build a 'smarter planet' -- one that is 'smart' enough to obey our mindless command to keep growing." Rather, Daly suggests, "Let's make a smarter adaptation to the wonderful gift of the Earth, out of which we were created."
A decade ago the Business Council for Sustainable Development in Antwerp, Belgium, calculated: "Industrialised world reductions -- in material throughput, energy use, and environmental degradation -- of over 90 per cent will be required by 2040 to meet the needs of a growing world population fairly within the planet's ecological means."
Human enterprise finds itself in what ecologist and systems theory pioneer Gregory Bateson called a "double bind." Our economic system demands growth, but Earth's capacity requires restraint. If we shrink our economies, we face hardship, but if we keep growing, we face ecological collapse, a classic double bind. Bateson pointed out that when such an impasse occurs in nature, communities of organisms get creative, pulling options from the random, to evolve a radical new way of living. Those not up to the creative task, simply perish.
Whatever the environment community does at the next "summit," it might as well be new and creative. Joining the charade won't likely help. Perhaps it is time for a boycott or a counter-summit in a separate location, guided by indigenous leaders.
Moving beyond hope to action is a good sign for our social movements. Hope is a useful frame of mind, but not a strategy. Systems ecologist Pille Bunnell, a professor at Royal Roads University in Canada, says hope must be activated: "Hope is a manner of living and acting in the present that does not foreclose the future we desire." Farmer-writer Wendell Berry takes up the question of appropriate hope in the poem "Sabbaths 2007":
hope must not depend on feeling good ... stop dithering.
The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?
Tell them at least what you say to yourself.
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seth
40 weeks ago
Big Oil's Green Movement is the problem!!!
Greenie superstar George Monbiot
"..This year, the environmental movement to which I belong has done more harm to the planet's living systems than climate climate change deniers have ever achieved. .."
Big Oil's wholly owned Big Green movement has been unleashed to stop clean and green zero environmental footprint nuke power from saving our worthless asses. Nukes could supply 100% of our energy needs within 15 years ending replacing expensive fossil fuels at a 40% per annum return of investment to the nation as a whole, saving the lives of millions annually from air pollution and ending the threat of a global warming disaster saving the lives of billions more.
Just to show the stupidity of this Fascist cause, watch this 20 July 2012 video by new nuclear startup entrepenueur and former U of Ottawa Professor David LeBlanc on his Thorium reactor version and how useful it will be in making the Tarsands the cleanest oil on the planet. Despite commitments from Canada's Fascist governments for $10 billion in funding for wacky dreamland carbon capture and ethanol scams, not a dime is available for Dr LeBlanc's breakthrough design. Big Oil knows that giving a inch to nukes would rapidly put it out of business so how Canada's ticket to future is being tossed out so the Fascists can stay simpatico with their Big Oil cronies.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-BXg18fAIk&feature=relmfu
The only thing stopping the fossil to nuke conversion is Big Oil's 100% owned media and politicians selling themselves to keep the gravy train running while the world slowly melts.
Hakuin
40 weeks ago
Not everyone anti-oil is crypto pro-oil, Seth
I for example oppose any power source that represents a greater threat than benefit.
KWD
40 weeks ago
Humanity is running in to a
Humanity is running in to a wall of physical laws that will "rewrite global society's cultural narrative” and will force the evolution of a “new way of living”. It’s unlikely that our “communities of organisms” will suddenly get creative and replace their "culturally constructed economic growth fetish” on their own volition.
Despite the fact the global population and economic growth is slowing, it’s not happening at a rate that will prevent the collision. The laws of physics are immutable. The outcome is inevitable.
A move to nuclear/alternate energy will not change the direction we’re on nor avert the collision. In a finite world, endless growth is impossible.
The question is, when we hit the wall, how much of humanity will perish?
What will I tell the young? I’ll tell them what I tell myself: Take your thumbs and eyes off the electronic gimmickry. Pay attention to the obvious.
Frank
40 weeks ago
Good column
The attempt to take in all of the data is overwhelming. The problems themselves are overwhelming.
People, well, right-wing people still believe in the mantra, "Don't worry, the rich and the large corporations will save us".
And until their own lifestyles are severely shaken up there will be no shaking that foundation of their belief system and nothing will get done.
Here in BC we have a premier willing to sell out our environment for an extra bag of gold and there's a sizeable chunk of the population that agrees with her. For too many people its always about the money.
Our economy is an artificial construct that is not based on natural, physical laws. So as it now begins to hit that wall called reality what do we see?
Cue those who think the problem is pensions, minimum wage laws and lazy Greek hairdressers.
The wilful refusal to see the stresses on our natural system is astounding to me. That men like Harper and Romney are the ones so many follow shouldn't give anyone hope for the future.
rangerkim
40 weeks ago
He says, "Those not up to the
He says, "Those not up to the creative task, simply perish."
The difference between those human organisms and the others is that humans can think in the abstract; whether they do or not is another argument.
So we know that the unadaptable will die. The most unadaptable humans in this 21rst century are our business and political leaders; the so-called 1%. In fact they are so unadaptable that they will go to increadible lengths to ensure nobody else can adapt.
If they are going to perish anyhow, perhaps we should think about helping them along.
OhCanada
40 weeks ago
It is everyone's responsibility!
Stop pointing fingers to big oil, the rich etc. Those mindless idiots who go shopping as a hobby to make the rich richer just as responsible as anyone, or the commuters puffing out gas day and night, or using more water than you should etc. etc. We are ALL responsible.
Paul Crutzen received his Nobel price for his work on eliminating CFCs from the ozone. He has come up with 3 possible outcome as climate change is becoming more obvious to the simple folks.
1. Our response to limiting emissions is too slow or unco-ordinated to avert great climate shifts, which destroy Earth’s life support systems and destabilize our global civilization. As a result humans are thrust into a protracted Dark Ages far more mordant than any that has gone before, for the most destructive weapons ever devised will still exist, while the means to regulate their use, and to make peace, will have been swept away. These changes could commence as soon as 2050.
2. Humanity acts promptly – on individual, national and corporate levels – to reduce emissions, and so avoids serious climatic consequences. Based on current trends, we will need to have commenced significant decarbonising of our electricity grids by around 2030, and to have substantially decarbonised transport systems by 2050. If we are successful, by 2150 or thereabouts greenhouse gas levels will have dropped to the point where Gaia can once again control Earth’s thermostat.
3. Emissions are reduced sufficiently to avoid outright disaster, but serious damage to Earth’s ecosystems results. With world climate on a knife-edge, Crutzen’s vision of internationally agreed geo-engineering projects becomes mandatory. Civilizations will hover on the brink for decades or centuries, during which period the carbon cycle will need to be strictly controlled, by large and small geo-engineering projects alike.
You don't know what you have until it is gone and when it is gone you can never get it back. Perhaps that will be the wake up call for humanity.
Cynic
40 weeks ago
I don't subscribe to the "our
I don't subscribe to the "our collective failure" guilt trip. Let's ascribe blame properly to those who deserve it. The elite are responsible, controlling human activity by controlling the money supply, maintaining the debt-based banking system that drives the growth imperative. So let's get rid of the mea culpas and focus on the perpetrators.
Fiat lux
40 weeks ago
History's human disasters
History's human disasters have always been licenced by faith, forced on people by special interests.
These scientists, writes and philosophers can wring their hands, moan and groan till the cows come home, nothing will, or can, change under the present monetary system.
The governments are giving free hand to privately owned banks to "create" money from the air that licences and pays for the destruction.
That's all and that simple. Until this racket is eliminated, there's no hope for any improvement.
What people will have to realize, and come to grips with one day, is the simple fact that real economics are physical realities, but monetary economics are just another, destructive religion that has nothing to do with facts and realities.
So when people are talking about "economic needs", the first question that should be asked is, are they talking about real economics, of fraudulent monetary games, designed to steal and destroy ?
Ed Deak.
Dan the socialist
40 weeks ago
Humanity won't do nothing
Humanity won't do nothing until it is far to late. Were a selfish, stupid, greedy, ignorant, arrogant species and all that is to decide is if we will all but extinct ourselves through environmental destruction and the pollution or through nuclear war which seems like it will happen within a decade or two between China/Russia against the bullies south of the 49th...
binary
40 weeks ago
First things first...
1. "When will ordinary people rise up?"
Right. As soon as I've paid off my student loan.
2. Economic restraint?
Absolutely. But please let there be one more job opening for me so I can pay off said loan.
3. Follow Indigenous leaders? Funny money system?
Both remind me of that Native Indian prediction about how when the last tree, fish and river is gone only then will we realize we can't eat money. Too true. But in the meantime, I eat what money gets me. And so until I learn how to sustain myself and my family on a balcony garden alone (and I refuse to hunt down Stanley Park squirrels), I'm in the running for the money, honey!
4. What to tell the young?
Hmmm...
"Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus..."?
Or is it "put your head between your knees and pucker up"?
Pick your poison.
Have a great Friday folks and remember, eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we...
Hakuin
40 weeks ago
Hmmm
Can we fortify our little corner of the world? It's no protection from a ruined biome, but can we hold out for a while and see if fortune favours?
Jim Ryan
40 weeks ago
Our Collective Fault
Sorry, I'm with Cynic on this one. We all consume way more "stuff" than we need. What has come to be known as Retail Therapy is practiced in some form by most of the world's middle classes and the planet is having a tough time dealing with the fall-out.
KWD
40 weeks ago
Actually
Jim, I think you're with OhCanada. Cynic believes only the elite are the perpetrators.
In any event, binary has it figured out. No one will willingly yield pleasure for pain ... poor, working class or well-heeled will respond the same ... me and my lifestyle come first.
rangerkim
40 weeks ago
Humanity won't do nothing, but ...
... maybe some humans will do something
Y'all have fallen into the trap of American individualism; everyman is capable of doing everything for himself, therefore when something goes wrong it's every ones fault.
Not correct at all, least because individualism is a fanatasy. It makes no sense whatsoever that every person must take some kind of action to prevent this catastrophe.
Look, some people just want to raise good kids, some people just want to raise good food. (and others just want to raise holy hell) There is nothing wrong with wanting to be an excellent parent or farmer, both take a lot of effort and a high level of a particular kind of knowledge. I don't want even the best parent flying a jet airplane, I don't want my dentist calculating live-wieght loads on the new Port Mann while he's in my mouth. And I don't want Harvey the plumber (or whatever the hell his name was) making national economic policy.
Leadership, even good leadership, must by it's very nature be a very small percentage of the whole. Perhaps even only 1%. It's not the number that is so offensive and dysfunctional, it's the actual individuals who currently comprise the 1% that are criminal. If we had good leadership then I believe most of us would be happy just getting on with what it is we want to do. I still wouldn't know how a toaster works, whether it was a fancy hi-tec from Black&Decker or just a screen over a fire, I would be happy to have a good breakfast with those I love and head off to work, again, it matters not whether I headed off to an office or a field, in a bus or a wagon, only that I had good work that contributed to the greater good. This is all fancy philosophy but that is precisly what an individual can do. The point is that all we can do is what we are capable of doing, and that is perfectly fine.
Leaders must lead. The rest of us follow, or not. Anarchy is the term for a circumstance in which everyone is trying to be a leader. I am not going to follow our current leadership but that doesn't mean that I demand others follow me or even that I know what we SHOULD do. I do know, though, what we shouldn't do.
As much as I respect what is going on here at Tyee I don't see alot (some, I admit) of leadership. I think the task for most of us 99% is to make the space for good leadership to show up. And one huge and important contribution to that end is to get rid of those charlatans running the show today .. in any way possible.
RickW
40 weeks ago
Perhaps it's time we DID move "beyond Hope"...
...and beyond Kelowna, beyond Kamloops. Instead, we move in the other direction, destroying a good chunk of the limited farmland in BC in the process.
Hakuin
40 weeks ago
Sorry ranger
Any who want the job are by definition untrustworthy. If only we could forcibly draft the suitable, and only release them if they behave well and earn it.
wvdk
40 weeks ago
The value of the three R's
That old adage is still true. Don't wait for corporations to provide you with 'green' products and services. They're just trying to capitali$e on people's heartfelt green intentions by selling bu!!$h!t green stuff. Don't wait for govt. to pay someone to do your green for you (and tax you for it). I and my family have cut way back on our consumption and carbon footprint. It's not that complicated: reduce, reuse recycle. I can report that life is still great. It takes work, but life is still great. Savin' money too. And better positioned than those whose life revolves around acquiring shiny stuff.
Cynic
40 weeks ago
KWD, I'm beyond belief.
KWD, I'm beyond belief.
KWD
40 weeks ago
Cynic
I agree!
rangerkim
40 weeks ago
Hakuin
You might be on to something there.
I agree that trust IS the main issue. That doesn't detract from the point that we don't want, nor should we expect even our most trusted plumber, dentist, accountant, homemaker. ect. ect making long term serious socio-political decisions.
And this is not something we can, responsibly, turn our backs on. Someone has to make the decisions. It behoves us to ensure that we have the most capable and credible person possible. There is a world of difference between leading your family in the 3R way and providing a free and fair economic environment that ensures a 3R economy.
Hakuin
40 weeks ago
"the most capable and credible person possible."
the human being who is that in regards to making unilateral decisions on the scale we are discussing does not exist. At most our figureheads should be moderators of panels.
Anyone who craves a king is an imbecile, and should be strung up next to any would-be kings.
Fiat lux
40 weeks ago
Our present so called
Our present so called "democracy", where governments are elected to act as dictators for certain periods is a good example of imbecility.
The only difference I can see between them and other dictatorships I've experienced and lived under is that in our system we can have a so called "opposition" whose main role is to blow hot air, with the government taking absolutely no notice, but making everybody happy that we're "free".
The nazis called their then Reichstag, or parliament the "Quatschbude", or "Yapping shed" and burned it down.
At least our Quatschbudes haven't been burned down yet, which is surprising, considering all the hot air being blown by both sides.
Ed Deak.
wvdk
40 weeks ago
a great recession can be good.
Now that we've picked almost all of the planet's low-hanging fruit, the boom that it fueled is winding down. Growth rate will likely continue to decline. the ongoing 2008 - ? recession has resulted in less consumption and pollution. The economic downturn is hard on many people, but good for the environment. While some choose to practice 3R, many more will soon be forced to. 3R at home gives one the moral authority to take political action calling for public 3R incentives.
alive
40 weeks ago
in real life...
rangerkim
Very nice to have dreams about leaders and how they should act; but the reality is that our leaders are selected by the inner sanctum of parties and coronated by the media, which in turn tries to make the lazy voters go vote for them.
It is not a matter of moving beyond anything but the stupidity of the average voter.
There have always been true dedicated people running for office, but only very occasinally do they get any "press" -- and consequently have a slim chance of getting elected.
Fiat lux
40 weeks ago
What we need is something
What we need is something like the Swiss system, where people can vote on referendums several times a year and if anybody can collect 50,000 signatures, the issue goes to popular vote and not decided by a few bought pimps with dictatorial powers in their hands.
E.g. Some Swiss govts. and some unions have been drooling for years to join the EU, but the people always shot it down.
Look what they've missed !!!!!!!
Ed Deak.
mjscox
40 weeks ago
population reduction
Too many people for the planet to sustain at current levels (including those millions who don't have enough to eat or drink, those starving in African camps, those living in shanty towns or next to railroads or in the streets). We cannot deliberately kill off millions to save the planet, obviously, but we are doing that, by letting them starve to death, letting thousands of children die daily from malnutrition, dysentry, thirst. Will it come to a time when we find an excuse for a war which pushes us into genocidal actions which really are about killing "them" to save "us"? Can we forsee a time when we develop an aerosol or viral drug which sterilizes a population?
The rich and powerful of the wealthier nations are not going to allow their populace to rise up, beyond the usual protests and occasional riots; they certainly will not allow the poor of the less well off nations do anything to restrict the extraction of their resources for our consumption, even if it means waging proxy wars to obtain those resources.
And incredibly people in the wealthy countries, people who are educated and know whats going on, continue to make babies! What I don't understand is how the biological urge to procreate is so strong that it overcomes the certainty that your child or children face a terrible, harsh future unlike anything we've seen since the Plague years or the more recent influenza epidemics, only much worse. So if those who know this continue to make children, what can we expect of those whose lives are dependent on their children, or who simply don't know better, or whose religion demands continued production of children?
All of the environmental problems can be traced back to over-population. Until we reverse the continued growth of people being born, whatever actions we take individually, or as nations or by international cooperation, will only be band-aid solutions applied to a planet with multiple, suppurating wounds.
Jeffrey J.
40 weeks ago
Timely Article from Greenpeace Co-Founder
It is always a great privilege to read Rex Weyler (early co-founder of Greenpeace, who also penned a great biography of the movement, and another biography of whale researcher Dr. Paul Spong).
Weyler echoes a movement which is rapidly growing: there is no hope. It's over. The juggernaut can't be stopped.
UVic Prof Michael M'Gonigle makes this same argument. As does Guy McPherson. And Derrick Jensen. And Paul Kingsnorth.
For an expanded discussion of the futility of hope, there is a very recent interview with Kingsnorth and M'Gonigle. A tad long but well worth a listen.
http://www.extraenvironmentalist.com/episode-46-recovering-environmentalists/
Morally, we are facing what people faced in the 1930's Europe, when facism arose in Italy, Spain and Germany. Corporate and institutional evil was unleashed upon the population, but 'no-one was in charge'. Ditto Canada and the US in 2012. But the evil and destruction continue. While we all stand back and watch. Public activism is not allowed. You must obey.
Can we learn from history?. Apparently not.
Excellent coverage in a time of ruin.
RickW
40 weeks ago
But Don't We HAVE to Have Leaders?
Otherwise "nothing gets done"!
How many times has that phrase been uttered?
lynn
40 weeks ago
Terra Incognita
An excellent article that poses a good question but I don't agree with the false assumption of the article or by those quoted within it that hope is about a kind of positivity and pretending.
Actually it's quite the opposite of that.
It's more akin to what Keats called "negative capability": to be in doubt, in uncertainty, but to remain open and flexible enough to move beyond the old structures. To see with new eyes in order to innovate a truly new world...a new philosophy of 'life'. Any true economic or environmental revolution, is, of necessity preceded by a change in how we see and value life on this planet. No wonder Rio failed. Cart before horse. It used all the old tools of the status quo, the old political machinery of an industrial, capital-based world. It could only induce more dithering and more reticence.
As Cornell West writes:
“Hope and optimism are different. Optimism tends to be based on the notion that there's enough evidence out there to believe things are gonna be better, much more rational, deeply secular, whereas hope looks at the evidence and says, "It doesn't look good at all. Doesn't look good at all. Gonna go beyond the evidence to create new possibilities based on visions that become contagious to allow people to engage in heroic actions always against the odds, no guarantee whatsoever." That's hope. I'm a prisoner of hope, though. Gonna die a prisoner of hope.”
― Cornell West
That's the true 'active' heroism of hope.
It's the heroic measure of risk that hope demands of us -
If we are to come through.
I'm not optimistic, but I gladly remain a prisoner of hope. Hope may not be strategy but it is strategic to outcome. Think of the Resistance Movement during WW2, the Civil Rights Movement....they had to have thought that it was worth the risk....that it was worth dying for...for that small chance....that small hope.
Moving beyond optimism. I get it.
Beyond hope? Why, then, would you even bother to post? Might as well just play a long game of Scrabble into the waiting dark.
Hope is no damn naive Pollyanna, nope, nope, nope. It's Rocketman willing to venture into the bleakest of futures on the remote chance of changing the outcome. It's kinda crazy in an Evel Knievel... or Thelma and Louise way. It can stare right into the Abyss and find that even for the ride alone, it is still worth the try.
Jeffrey J.
40 weeks ago
Terra Incognita
Lynn raises a pivotal issue. And it is THIS issue that we must examine. Never in my life did I see the day where we must now consider an approach to life different than natural born optimism and hope and exuberance. Never.
But that day has come. It is hugely complex, mostly because it is relatively rare. The possibility of the end of society as we know it. To develop an adaptive strategy and philosophical grasp of such a trajectory is a huge undertaking.
Humans were not designed to live in such circumstances. But here we are. Good luck to all of us trying to make sense of an evil structure.
Fiat lux
40 weeks ago
There are no bigger optimists
There are no bigger optimists as I am, after having survived WW2 and all ideological regimes, having seen all the changes and studied the reasons for history's disasters for over 60 years.
Always cased by forcibly introduced and induced faith by ruling sectors to disguise enslavement and mass destruction as "freedom" and "heroism".
The main cause of present and coming disasters is the use of two contradictory measuring systems within the the same economic system, again for the purposes of mental and physical enslavement, and the elimination of human rights and democracy.
We have legal physical measurements to define all dimensions for trade, the same and strictly protected all over the world.
1m or 1kg are the same here as in India and Africa and in any other place.
Then we have a monetary system which is legally permitted to change those legal measurements on the demands of gamblers on the stock and money markets and at the whim of self appointed ruling sectors for their use for the artificial distortion of realities for criminal purposes, fraudulently called "wealth creation".
Until humanity comes to demand the use of physical realities for economic purposes, ensuring human rights and democratic decision making, it can kiss their proverbial asses goodbye.
To cut it short, humanity has always been used and ruled by fraud and it is about time for awakening and the shaking off of mental chains by forcibly induced "faiths" and beliefs.
Ed Deak.
BrianWhite
39 weeks ago
Doing little things and sharing them can help break the system.
I just started work on "pallet gardening" where the pallet garden will integrate water recycling, composting, compost tea and vertical gardening. With potential for hydroponics and aquaponics later. I have been thinking of this for years. Actually doing stuff is what will make a difference. We are all bad at doing stuff! Join in and we can move personal local production and comsumption to the next level. Playlist is at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL00C41C26C91A76BB&feature=view_all