Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

Posted on November 14, 2011 | 4 Comments

Picture by Franke James. Her artwork is fabulous; please visit her site to see more. Her arts funding was cut earlier this year by the Harper government because her work criticizes Canada's actions on climate change.

Hallowe’en is over; Christmas begins. Soon–much sooner than most of us are prepared to think–Canadians will be wrapped in blankets on the couch cradling cups of hot cocoa or eggnog, watching reruns of one of the many versions of A Christmas Carol. We will empathize with Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim (or at least I think so–have I been misreading it all along?), and drown in a pleasant soup of good feelings at Scrooge’s annual transformation.

I find it puzzling, then, that we are as a nation so determined to emulate Scrooge in every way.

Take, for instance, this recent Globe and Mail piece, In Harper’s Canada, Will We Give More of Ourselves to Get Lower Taxes?

Umm, what? Translation: In Harper’s Canada, will we give more so we don’t have to give so much? A more absurd question could hardly be posed. If we as Canadians insist on giving less, what are the chances we will use the extra money to give more? Have any previous tax reductions resulted in an increase in charitable giving? As the author of the piece himself acknowledges, no: previous tax breaks have shredded our social net and, if anything, decreased our charitable giving.

“As Stephen Harper moves toward rewriting this country’s social contract, he presents each of us with a moral question.

“If we want lower taxes, are we prepared to give more of ourselves to others?”

In fact, as the article later makes clear, we aren’t being presented with any sort of moral question; the social contract is being rewritten bit by bit without any input from Canadians on the entirely faulty assumption, which we already know is faulty, that private donations will pick up the slack.* But of course people give less when the social safety net disappears: if there is nothing there to catch you when you and your family fall, you will keep every bit of extra for yourself (or spend it on fancy toys while you can–consumer debt has skyrocketed in this same period). By slashing social programs, each one of us is made meaner through fear.

Oh, but it gets worse: “But in an era where fiscally restrained governments confront rising need created by economic turmoil, the private sector must do more. And the private sector is each of us.”

Excuse me? The government is fiscally restrained? Then why on earth is tax reduction even on the table? Which is it: are we being asked to give more so we can be rewarded with a pat on the head via tax break, or are we being asked to give more because the government is out of money? If the government is out of money, the last thing they should be contemplating is tax breaks. We need to raise taxes.

At the same time that Canada is rewriting the social contract (i.e. eliminating our supposedly-costly safety net) for citizens–the ones who vote for them–we continue to subsidize private industry to the tune of many billions of dollars annually. According to a 2008 Kairos study, the federal government gave $8 billion dollars in subsidies to the oil and gas industry alone between 1996 and 2002. That’s a million dollars a day, according to Kairos. Meanwhile, studies show that these subsidies create no jobs because the industry is so heavily mechanized–our tax money buys them machines so they don’t have to hire workers.

Isn’t this supposed to be a free market economy? Don’t companies survive or fail based on their merit? Why are our children’s educations and the health of our planet’s climate being sacrificed via slashing social programs to keep bad companies afloat?

Worse again? In 2011, the federal government cut $222 million from Environment Canada’s annual budget, mostly affecting climate science positions and programmes, although that funding creates jobs and costs less than one year’s worth of oil and gas subsidies.

Do we have a fiscal problem? No: we have a priority problem. Canadians pay taxes (moreso than corporations; corporate tax rates in Canada in 2000 were 28%, and as of January 1 2012 will be 15%. Yes, boys and girls, they’ve fallen by almost half) to the federal government, who distributes them to large international corporations while crying poor when it comes to supporting individual Canadians. We transfer money from the people saving the earth to the ones wrecking it. We transfer money from the budget for crayon for our kids’ kindergarten classes to Exxon’s budget for buying earth movers.

Between 1994 and 2007, Canada gave $203,000,000,000 to bail out corporations. Two hundred and three billion dollars!** Are we poor, or are we rolling in cash?

Canada used to be a socially progressive country with a healthy safety net; for the past 20 years we’ve coasted on this reputation, though no nations but our own fall for it any longer. We undermine international climate negotiations, push tar sands oil into as many countries as we can for our own gain and damn the consequences, slash social programs while raising corporate welfare–in effect forcing Canadians to subsidize private industry, block the Robin Hood tax, cut arts funding and funding to charitable organizations, eliminate public funding for political parties (thereby cutting off any parties without corporate sponsorship at the knees), and force students to carry an ever-larger load of their own education costs–turning them into debt slaves for decades. Oh, but we still have quasi-universal health care and some of our jurisdictions now allow gay marriage. That’s great, Canada. Very impressive.

Canada is well on its way to becoming Victorian London, complete with smog, extreme poverty, female subservience, eradication of job security & rights for workers, usurious interest and crippling debt, and a sentimental and totally ineffective reliance on private charity to provide for the needs of individuals and families fallen on hard times. I guess we’re still missing those prisons & workhouses….

No, wait: Harper’s taking care of those, too.

~~~~~

*An American stat, just to complement the Canadian stat and show that this is not a uniquely Canadian phenomenon. Lower tax rates do not result in greater charitable giving. Period. Bury the idea, and move on.

**This lovely figure comes from a right-wing think tank, no less, and represents total corporate subsidies between all three levels of government.

→ 4 Comments

Posted in Big Picture

Tagged

Ecology, Economy, and Ego

Posted on October 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

When spotted owls were threatened with extinction, we cried and passed laws. When whales were threatened with extinction, we screamed and wrote international treaties. Now, when polar bears are going extinct, we rage.*

But when bumblebees threaten extinction on us we panic.

Why?

Because what’s big, ultimately, is expendable. It’s what’s very very small that matters, ecologically speaking; our world belongs to the bugs, the worms, and mold. We are visitors only, and while we like to look down on the rest of the planet because it could never have been Shakespeare (as if you or I were ever capable of being Shakespeare either–but I digress), the fact is, Shakespeare could never have been, could never have breathed nor eaten nor grown, without the bacteria, decomposers, insects, and photosynthesizers that made it all possible. Not to mention all of the, you know, actors and set designers and stuff.

Polar bears are very cool, don’t get me wrong, I want to live in a world with polar bears. But if polar bears were to go extinct tomorrow, their ecosystems would hobble along until a new status quo establishes itself. Whereas if plankton disappear (and they might), every aquatic ecosystem on earth is toast.

I went down to Occupy Toronto at St. James Park last Saturday, just as they were setting up the tents and tarps. A sign reading “Abandon Greed, Kindness is Worthwhile” greeted me and stuck a goofy grin on my face that stayed all afternoon. People were smiling, friendly, laughing, playing guitars and singing in a rainy 10C. Two mics let people give short speeches to the crowds, and the diversity of speakers and opinions was heartening and lovely. Buy local! Find the love within! Let go of fear! Do God’s work and help the poor! Tax corporations! Remember we are already on occupied land; native rights are important too! Health care for all! Forgive student debts! Build wind and solar! Solve climate change! Stop pollution! Racism kills! Listen to my hip-hop song about the revolution! There’s flouride in the water! Stop buying crap!

Disorganized, yes, but my activist heart sings because all of these conversations ARE related and important and we’ve needed these disparate communities to sit down and talk to each other about how they’re related and how to fix it for at least fifty years. The same system that gives banks millions of dollars for depriving average folks of education and a home, while doing nothing to help those average people, is the same system that gives corporations inalienable rights to destroy the atmosphere and climate upon which human civilization depends. The same mechanisms that send some kids to Harvard and Yale send other kids to the army or jail. That 1% on top doesn’t just depend on corrupt government (but hey, it doesn’t hurt); it also depends on sexism, racism, environmental degradation and externalities, cheap foreign labour and globalization, debt slavery, fossil fuels, and, yes, the internalized terror that keeps most of us from doing more than making a largely futile x on a piece of paper every four or five years. (“Why don’t you just vote!” the columnists scold. “Has it occured to you that we’ve tried that and it hasn’t worked out particularly well!” we reply.) It’s all related. No meaningful solutions will come until all sides have come together and discussed the common sources of their problems.

Regardless:

As with ecology, so with the economy: the big need the small. The charismatic carnivores of the economic system–billionaires, millionaires, banks, and in a global sense much of the first world–intimately rely on and cannot function without the producers and decomposers–mothers, teachers, janitors, manufacturers of clothing, farmers, plumbers, etc. The charismatic carnivores have done a pretty good job of convincing the rest of us that we need them–their money, their ‘jobs,’ their ‘investments,’ their continued presence gracing our lucky countries–but nothing could be further from the truth. They need us.

If every CEO on earth vanished tomorrow, how would it affect your life? Now imagine a world tomorrow without waste collectors, truck drivers and electricians. Our society could not function. The 2009 garbage strike in Toronto brought the city to its knees.

Generally speaking, your contribution to society is in inverse relationhip to the size of your paycheque. If, as a mother, your paycheque is $0, congratulations: you are truly indispensable and will, as a partial reward, spend your lifetime hearing about how your personal choice should in no way affect anyone else’s tax share and, by the way, please keep the brats out of any restaurant where you order at a table from a menu.

Every so often, literal charismatic carnivores wipe out the underpinnings of their own species by devouring their prey to near extirpation. The prey population collapses, then the predator population collapses, then both rebound, and balance is restored. Again, as with ecology, so with the economy: every so often the charismatic carnivores devour the underpinnings of their prosperity by pushing the working class to the point of collapse; but human beings, being human, generally respond by fighting back and swiping a few fangs from the carnivores’ mouths. And you get slave revolts. Class warfare. The civil rights movement. Feminism. The anarchist rebellion in Spain. The Magna Carta. The American Revolution. The Arab Spring. You get Occupy Wall Street and its many, many derivatives. Whenever the very small (economically speaking) remember that the rich need us, but we don’t need them.**

Just like bears need bumblebees, but bumblebees could manage just fine without the bears.

~~~~~

* Please note that all of these species are still facing extinction. We’ve been enormously unsuccessful at rescuing our victims.

**Not a plea for the extinction of the rich, just for a little mutual perspective and humility.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Big Picture, Hope

Tagged , , , , ,

Thanksgiving

Posted on October 7, 2011 | Leave a comment

This has been a good couple of weeks to be a leftie, eh?

Occupy Wall Street just keeps growing–and I wish them much luck and the donation of several outdoor heaters, because I’m sure it’s getting cold in NYC at night. Watching the march and the protests online Wednesday evening (you really don’t need cable for anything important) was amazing.

I tried to explain to Frances what was going on, and why they were angry, and how it all happened (“Well, see, some people at the banks did some really bad things and it got the whole economy in trouble–the “economy” is all of the things that people buy and sell put together–so the banks were fine but regular people lost their homes and jobs and a lot of them in America don’t have the money for food and medicine any more. So they are all getting together so they can talk to the government about changing it, because they are very angry and very scared”). She stared at them for a while, and asked, “Why are they all yelling? It’s making a lot of noise,” and then sat down with her stuffed brown squirrel toy and tried to explain to him why some squirrels hate black squirrels, and why they shouldn’t.

“Squirrel racism,” I said. “Yes,” she replied.

“Did they talk to the government yet?” she asked me later. “Did they win?”

“Umm, not quite yet. They’ve been out there for a few weeks already and will probably be out there for a while longer.”

The green movements have signed on, the labour unions are joining in–this is good stuff. Rumours are going around that the White House may actually not allow the Keystone pipeline after all–this after Transcanada has already started mowing up endangered habitats in preparation, for which they are being sued.

You can just picture me madly waving my little green flag over in the corner, cheering.

Meanwhile, in Canada–the Tories aren’t getting the Ontario majority they’d banked on just six months ago. I’m writing this on Thursday, before any of the results are in, so I’m being cocky but:

Ever since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, I’ve wanted to do work that would make the world a better place. Now, when I was five, I wanted to follow in the family tradition and be a missionary–this does not work as well when you’ve left the Church.

I went to University for Environment and Resource studies, never really expecting it to lead to a job that earned more than $20k/year (remember this was 1994), but I didn’t care. I was prepared to be broke pretty much forever if only I could make a difference on issues I cared about. That I graduated and found work that paid relatively well (not fabulous, but when your expectations are poverty-level it takes little to exceed them) surprised no one more than me–but the work itself was uninspiring. The whole system seemed set up to prevent the kind of meaningful changes we all knew needed to be made: environmental assessments focus on trivial projects over those with real impacts, so I spent my time writing screening reports for bridge repairs over drainage ditches or posting signs or building fences; government silos and committee culture mean it takes years to come to the slightest bit of agreement on anything, by which time there’s an election and a new government and you start over from scratch; too much consulting work is focused on how to mitigate a project rather than evaluate whether or not it should proceed. It’s disheartening.

A few years ago, I cracked into freelance journalism by writing articles about renewable energy–solar and wind. I dug deep into the academic literature, as I had access to academic libraries at the time; I interviewed the experts and activists on both sides; I read reports and checked their footnotes and references back through three or four levels to figure out exactly what was said by who when based on what evidence; and concluded that anti-renewable sentiment was based on a large steaming pile of crap. For the articles I wrote, I was paid the princely sum of $50. Freelance journalism does not pay well, at least not in Canada, not when you’re starting out–but it wasn’t about the money.

Then the Liberals passed the Green Energy Act, the FIT program started, and I saw a job posting for a management position working on renewable energy approvals–and I jumped at it, and here I am. Living in my lovely small town with my daughter who is as happy as I’ve ever seen her, doing work every day that makes the world better, cooler, safer for my daughter. I even get paid more than $20k/year to do it, though it was a pay cut from the government job. (Worth it, too.) Then the provincial Tories turned wind energy into a political football and we got kicked around for a year for votes, and wondered what would happen on October 7 if they cancelled the GEA and FIT program as promised with all those big leads they had in the polls….

But here we are. The program is safe, for now, and I get to keep working hard every day to make the world a meaningfully better place.

So thank you, Ontario. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I will be spending this Thanksgiving weekend feeling very grateful indeed–because what I have, right now, is all I ever really wanted.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Big Picture, Hope

Tagged

my open-window policy

Posted on October 6, 2011 | Leave a comment

This isn't my house, no, but you get the idea

I have been thinking, lately, about weeding my driveway.

It is paved, yes; and apparently the impermeability of asphalt has been vastly overstated, as there are weeds growing through the cracks all over the bloody thing. Oddly, I don’t want to weed it. I like it. All of those supposedly fragile bits of green cracking their way right up through our technological magnificence. Take that! they say. Ha! Some Masters of the Universe you turned out to be.

I have been thinking about raccoons, too.

We have no garage; therefore, the garbage is kept outside; therefore, raccoons eat it. This does not philosophically bother me. After all, simply by putting something in the garbage, I’ve declared it to be a useless thing of no further value to anyone, and as such, I’d rather it find a good home in the warm belly of a living creature than sit, unrotting, in a landfill for 500 years. That this places me outside of mainstream North American opinion I am well aware. I don’t like the mess, but honestly, how can I complain? We came in, chopped their homes to the ground, and now we expect them to slink away quietly like friendly and cooperative wildlife and make a home for themselves somewhere we don’t have to be inconvenienced by the needs we prevent them otherwise from filling. I say, if our occupied human communities showed this grit … actually, when our occupied human communities show this grit, we call them terrorists and blow them up. In any case, my sympathies are firmly with the raccoons.

Which doesn’t mean I enjoy scraping rotting food off of the patio stones once a week, so I caved eventually and found a heavy rock to place on the lid. The raccoons, clever devils, chewed a hole near the bottom of the plastic garbage can and spilled it all over the patio stones anyway.

Frances says that raccoons are “messy little composers” and that if she were a raccoon, she would do the considerate thing and take away what she’d like to eat in a garbage bag, and eat it neatly after climbing through the crack in the front steps where we suspect the raccoons hide out in poor weather. That would be very much like a Frances-raccoon, but it’s not like the actual raccoons, who make a mess.

I admire them. They’ve made a life for themselves in hostile surroundings, and proven to be clever and much tougher than we are.

My home was never going to be separate from nature anyway. There’s bugs in the walls, eh? Ants, spiders, millipedes. Let them stay. Why not? There’s air–air’s nature, right?–there’s water, and water’s definitely nature, even chlorinated and filtered. There’s Frances’s little pots of half-starved seedlings on the windowsill. There’s the wood beams in the walls–that’s nature–the steel posts–nature too. Gypsum, concrete, cotton; nature, nature, nature. And, of course, there are the warm animal bodies themselves: two guinea pigs, two primates. And apparently a couple of raccoons eating silently under the front steps.

I am a sorry excuse for a suburbanite. I like my civilization happily permeable, hopelessly intermixed with nature–because the suburbs are nature, just mangled to within a bare millimetre of their lives. I like to think of the human nature of my little home and the non-human nature of its surroundings knotted together like the warp and woof of a woven fabric.

I’m not going to keep non-human nature out of ‘my space’ no matter how hard I try, so why not welcome it in?

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Non-human Neighbours, Visual

Tagged

Global Psychologists for Sane Policy

Posted on September 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

I'll bet you this housefly-sized frog knows better

Hello, and welcome to my new think tank.

On Monday, 117 people were arrested for standing on the wrong patch of a paved, public area in Ottawa, Ontario, after trying to access their democratically-elected government.

Meanwhile in Alberta, an undisclosed number of tar-sands executives furthered environmentally-destructive projects that will ultimately kill Canadians via smog and others globally via climate change, and furthered the collapse of Canada’s international reputation, and are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for the accomplishment. (Information on salaries at the upper-levels is hard to come by, but a high-school grad working labour in the field makes $00,000-200,000/year. You’ve got to figure their bosses are earning a lot more.)

You know what? That’s just fucking nuts, and I don’t need to be a trained psychologist to say so.

And neither do you!

It got me to thinking–if the bad guys can do it, so can we, right? I mean, a mechanical engineer headed up the Global Climate Coalition; the Renewable Energy Foundation in the UK is an anti-wind front group funded by wealthy landowners living close to proposed wind projects and staffed by non-experts with a long pedigree on anti-wind activism; the Greening Earth Society was a front of the Western Fuels Association–no bias there–with a bunch of coal industry expats on board; Fred Singer headed up the Science and Environmental Policy Project which had as its chair the very same Frederick Seitz who churned out the misleading “science” on the health effects of tobacco for a couple of decades, convincing millions that cigarrettes wouldn’t kill them.

And yet they write up their tidy little press releases on attractive letterhead and sign it very officially, “So-and-So, Head, Made Up Front Group for Coal Lobby,” and the press, pressed for time and apparently none too skeptical these days, runs it. Without comment, without interpretation, without investigation, thus leading the public to believe that the Global Climate Coalition, for example, could correctly distinguish the climate from a kitchen grease-fire.

I have exactly the same credentials in psychology as they have in climate science: which is to say, I’ve read a bunch of pop psychology books, I know some psychologists, I have many excellent and wonderful friends who have been through the psychiatric wringer (irony: those who are actually nuts appear to be universally worth knowing, except for the psychopaths and narcissists; so when did the term become derogatory?). I have subscriptions to psychological magazines. No, I’m not a psychologist, but do you need to be a psychologist to know that it’s completely bananas that our society would rather drive our cars off a cliff than stop driving? That we won’t for the love of the holy trinity touch the sacred treasures of the super-rich for fear of the impacts on the Mighty God of the Economy, but we’ll gladly wrest bread from the mouths of hungry children without apparent reflection that their parents probably, you know, bought that bread, so reducing their ability to buy bread may also not be so great for the GDP? Do I need psychological training to know that there is something fundamentally broken in the brain of anyone who can state with a straight face that since it isn’t entirely politically expedient at this exact moment to ask people to pay the true cost of the things they buy since they’re so used to deep deep discounts that they might revolt, so the global carbon cycle’s just going to have to sit tight and wait until we feel like dealing with CO2?

I don’t think I do.

I think I can safely say that this is crazy.

For the love of Prozac, according to climate experts and scientists, western industrialized nations have until 2020-2025 to decarbonize. That’s not “stabilize carbon emissions” or “reduce carbon emissions by x% below 1990 levels,” that’s “STOP EMITTING ALL CARBON COMPLETELY, FOREVER.” That’s nine years, give or take, and that doesn’t save the climate, it just gives us 66% odds of avoiding complete catastrophe. And the government of Canada, god love ‘em, has approved a new coal plant to be commissioned in 2015.

That is fucking nuts.

Oh, but it is a marginally cleaner coal plant that will pollute about as a much as natural gas plant–and we fully expect the global climate, apparently, to pat us on the head, give us an A for effort, and let us off the hook.

So. Welcome to the Global Psychologists for Sane Policy. I am your Host and Head, Chief Diagnosticator of Official and Institutional Stupidity. Please join me. It’s not hard. All you have to do is hurl epithets at world leaders and corporate masterminds running the planet into the ground for a measly thirty pieces of silver, and you probably do this already. If you’d like I’ll give you a title and you can make it more official-sounding.

Because it’s all well and good to stick to the moral high ground, especially since if sea levels keep rising, the moral high ground may be all that’s above water. But ultimately 8 billion people aren’t going to fit on the mountain peaks, so let’s do our part to keep the moral low ground dry too, eh?

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Big Picture

Tagged ,

Planet Moving for beginners

Posted on September 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

2011 is the year for climate activism (knock wood–so far): the Keystone Pipeline protests at the White House, Climate Reality last week, Moving Planet this weekend, a Keystone Pipeline action in Ottawa on Monday, all in September. Chances are you missed the White House bit and won’t be making it down to NYC for Occupy Wall Street, nor will you be busing it up to Ottawa to camp out on Parliament Hill and tell Stephen Harper what an idiot he is.

(Definition of Idiot: repeatedly states he has no intention of doing anything about preserving the planet we live on because the soils, oceans, atmosphere and climate underlying our civilization are not significant, but as soon as Europe’s economy falters and a recession looms he jumps in with both feet. This, Dear Readers, is like fussing with the arrangement of the photos on your mantelpiece while your house burns down around you.)

I digress. Chances are, you are not traveling for climate activism.

But lucky you, you don’t have to!

For the very laziest among you, log on to the Climate Reality project and watch the highlights videos from the comfort of your den or living room. At the very least, watch Doubt & the concluding New York City highlights. That’ll take all of 15 minutes of your time.

For the less lazy, Moving Planet is this Saturday, aka tomorrow, and climate change events will be held all over the world. I know of several within a one-hour drive of my house including rallies, bike rides, fairs and clean energy exhibitions. It might be–I fear to even whisper it–fun.

I count myself as fairly lazy most of the time (fact: I do not own a hairdryer, mostly because I see no point in burning coal to get my hair to dry faster when it’ll dry on its own anyway, but also, it saves me a heap of time every morning and I’d much rather sleep), but even so, I’m hoping to get out to the Hamilton Moving Planet rally tomorrow afternoon.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Environmental News, Hope

Tagged , , ,

Lappe’s Eco-Mind & Jensen et al’s Deep Green Resistance: the matter & anti-matter of environmentalism

Posted on September 12, 2011 | 7 Comments

It's either a Tilter's produce of Jensen's worst nightmare, or Lappe's dream come true. Or maybe it's just a wind turbine.

Reading Deep Green Resistance followed by Eco-Mind over the course of a few days is a great way to get vertigo.

They’re both written by well-respected, well-known environmentalists and authors.

They rely on many of the same facts: 90% of fish gone, global warming inevitable, hundreds of millions of human deaths to follow, screwy notions of “democracy” in the western world, and so on.

Yet you could not find two more different books resulting from such similar premises.

Deep Green Resistance: Western industrial civilization will never undertake a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of life, so it is up to people who see what is going on to organize, make some explosives, and start blowing things up.

Eco-Mind: Western industrial civilization has not largely undertaken a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of life, but look at Costa Rica! They are doing some interesting things. And Denmark! Let’s all be like Costa Rica and Denmark. There, all fixed.

Deep Green Resistance: Indigenous cultures have a lot to teach us about how to live with and in nature. Most of them will tell you that “listening to nature” is not a metaphor, but something serious, and if you do, nature will tell you what it wants you to do to protect it. When I listen to nature, it tells me to organize, make some explosives, and start blowing things up.

Eco-Mind: Indigenous cultures have a lot to teach us about how to live with and in nature. Indigenous peoples all over the world have loving and respectful relationships with their immediate environments. We should emulate that. There, all fixed.

Deep Green Resistance: Green technologies are promoted by hacks and sell-outs who want western industrial civlization to continue, and therefore, they are all nature-haters who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. Especially wind and solar energy. Ugh. You know, wind turbines and solar panels are produced in industrial processes with pollution and effluents and crap. No, it’s definitely time to organize, make some explosives, and start blowing things up.

Eco-Mind: Green technologies are a fabulous way to maintain our current way of life while reducing our carbon footprint. Look at Denmark! They produce all kinds of green electricity, and they’re not barbarians living in caves in the woods, either. We need lots and lots of wind and solar energy. Turbines and solar panels are produced by angels whose only industrial wastes are a few discordant notes from their heavenly choir. If we all produced as much green electricity as Denmark and Germany do, that might take us a whole quarter of the way towards solving the global climate change crisis. I mean, challenge. What about the other 3/4? Umm, look, angels! There, all fixed.

Deep Green Resistance: Five billion people are going to die at least and the sooner we get started, the fewer people who will die, not to mention all of the other species we’re driving to extinction, and they count too, you know. Nothing good for the environment ever came out of western industrial civilization, so the whole thing has just got to be destroyed. Who’s with me? Let’s organize, make some explosives and start blowing stuff up!

Eco-Mind: OK so people are dying and species are going extinct and deserts are growing and we’re not sure our grandchildren will be able to breathe whatever atmosphere we’re creating for them, but that’s no reason not to think positively! Only our thoughts and perceptions of the environmental crises are holding us back. OK so we’ve created a few little problems here in western industrial civilization but I’m sure it’s nothing we can’t fix with some optimism and determination. Look at Denmark! And there was some guy in India who started growing crops differently, too. Eh? There, all fixed.

Conclusion 1: If two intelligent and well-informed people can take the same set of facts, more or less, and construct such entirely different narratives with recommendations in such different universes, then whatever is going on here has precious little to do with rational argument and full consideration of the facts. (I would however like to point out that neither one of them is saying, “Ocean collapse? What ocean collapse?”)

Conclusion 2: I’d like to take Jensen and Lappe and lock them in a room together, not letting them out until they collaborate on a book. Now that–if they survived it–would be something to read.

Jensen et al don’t account for anything good or any progress whatsoever (ozone layer, reforestation in some parts of the first world–yes, I do realize that’s because we’ve exported our deforestation to poor countries–and so on), yet Lappe never analyzes whether these bits and pieces of progress could ever add up to a liveable world for ourselves and our children. Their blind spots are so complementary it’s frightening.

If you’d like to get the same effect without shelling out for the books, they both have websites:  Deep Green Resistance and Eco-Mind.

Here is what I would like, in my ideal LappeJensen Frankenstein book:

Lappe’s analysis of our destructive and incorrect assumptions about human nature, how they’re harming us, and what to replace them with.

Jensen et al’s analysis of the scope and extent of our environmental crises and exactly how much trouble we’re in.

Lappe’s summary and analysis of the good that people are doing about it, worldwide.

A Jensen analysis of how much those solutions will actually solve, and what problems will remain when they’re done.

Some Lappe ideas about what might bridge the gap.

And some Jensen proposals for how to hurry this thing along using stronger activist approaches than “write to your politicians, sit in the square and be arrested” left-wing thing that’s been doing us so much good so far.

In other words, I’d like the truth, solutions that match the scale of the problem, and enough optimism to keep working at it.

If you read both books, once you’ve recovered from the migraine induced by having two authors use the same facts and ideas to pull your brain in opposite directions like a piece of silly putty, you might have some sense of where that is. Or you might not. You might just have a desperate need for painkillers and a nap.

→ 7 Comments

Posted in Prose & Poetry

Tagged , ,