> As I whistle through this graveyard in the dark, I do two things: try to
> look for positive solutions (localism, bioregionalsim) and ask myself "what
> about the Left?". Why exactly IS the Left so afraid to address this issue?
> .....the issue with the ultimate and most serious threats to the oppressed.
Like all of us, I'm interested in the so-called New Social Movements, the
Porto Alegre thing. I was on Pat Bond's excellent e-debate list recently (I've
dropped off because of lack of time); this list is based in S Africa where the
meltdown and probable disappearance of human society is already discernible on
the historical horizon. Of course, people do see what is rushing at them, but
they remain complacent. This is historically-conditioned blind optimism. It
takes the programmatic form of organising fights for social justice. However,
this is obviously a blind alley. The only social justice you will get is the
social justice of the graveyard, where everyone is equally dead.
It seems clear from my own reading of the Porto Alegre runes that social
justice remains everywhere the watchword. Only the case-hardened deep-ecos,
the Arne Naess-ites, have fully embraced *in practice* the utter futility og
searching for social justice in the middle of a holocaust, not only of human
life, but of all life. The world which is waiting for us right round the
corner will look quite different from this. It will be drastically
impoverished of life. The oceans will be empty. The air will be empty. The
rainforests will be a memory. The glaciers will be a memory. The biomes will
be thinned. The atmosphere will be back to the Jurassic. Ecosystems which have
evolved over milennia wil suffer the fate of the snail diversity of Hawaii:
they will just fade away and disappear. There will be no large mammals left
anywhere. No large primates, except us, anywhere in the wild.
We will notice because there also will be no green concrete all over the
midwest and the prairie farms of Latin America, and Europe. Rice production
will collapse across large parts of South and East Asia. In the absence of
petrol-powered monoculture, human beings will begin to starve. They will then
notice that because there is no biodiversity left anywhere, there is no chance
of reverting to simple subsistence agriculture. We will not survive from our
backyards and allotments. The topsoil is gone.
The collapse of energy systems will leave people cold, hungry and immobilised.
Look at Russia, where it's already happening and where the dieoff is
accelerating.
It is hard now for anyone to refute any single one of the propositions which
underlie this terminal scenario. Unfortunately, thougjh, most people still do
not believe in it. The masses in the core-countries live inside Orwellian
bubbles of reality-denial. The rest of the world doesn't count unless it has a
gun in its hands. Only when the bubble bursts will people see the world as it
is, but by then it will be too late. Inevitably, therefore, the future of
humankind will be some variant of this: first, the complete collapse of global
civilisation on a scale far more profound than any example from history, eg
the fall of Rome. Second, the complete collapse of knowledge-bases. No-one
needs libraries when the scientific and technological support-systems have
disappeared. So the libraries will burn, as they did before.
Second, demographic collapse. Pimentel argued the planet can support 2 billion
sustainably. But that assumes a managed transition. There will be no managed
transition. So look around you; if you live in a country of two million, or
fifty million, or three hundred million, then you'll be living in a country of
a few thousand scavengers, or a million or less, or ten million or less. The
population of Elizabethan (16th century) England was less than 3 million.
Today it is 57 million. Work it out for yourselves.
It will take centuries, on past experience, for this Dark Age to end, 500
years at least. But I am not sure that civilisation will ever return, because
we have used up the only available energy-base for an industrial civilisation,
and we have not found anything to replace fossil fuels. Wood burning is not
enough.
And we do now know how humans wil survive under climate change processes which
we now know will continue for centuries, millennia and even millions of years.
That's the true (uncountable) cost of what we've done.
Anyone for picketing the Qatar meeting?
Mark
>
> The arguments I have perceived here on Crashlist are generally a) "only by
> destroying capitalism first can we do anything about it." b) "it's not my
> problem, I am too busy trying to support the revolution" c) "there is
> nothing we can do" d) "these enviros are a bunch of idiots."
>
> The Left (for want of a better term) has the skills, organizational
> understandings and the courage to address the issue in ways world-wide that
> no other socio/political/economic entity does. Yet for the most part the
> Left is still focused on hair splitting the differences between NATO and
> other killers, Bush and other puppets, Wall Street and other tulip bubbles.
>
> Why is the Left's indignation over the bombing of one criminal's assets by
> another criminal cartel so acute, when the world is dying from the actions
> of neighbors we could all influence? ... simply by, as Mark comments,
> "addressing the issue" and educating those within our spheres of influence.
>
> To me it seems so much more appropriate a use of our limited time and
> resources.
>
> The news sparking this post awakens us to the fact that we could do the most
> to insure a better life for ... say ... the oppressed of the Balkans, the
> Near East, or the Indian Subcontinent by insuring their water supplies. It
> is not yet an insurmountable task to do so, or to at least mitigate the
> abject misery their children will suffer.
>
> We should at least entertain a discussion on the list as to why "we [fail]
> to make these facts the
> basis and guiding compass of [our] politics."
>
> tom
>
> "A rapidly growing human population, rising "economic" expectations,
> continual decline in natural resources and increasing pollution by
> industrialised countries are leading to a crisis of epic proportions. ...
> The origin of our dilemma is the economic illusion that humans make basic
> commodities. We now know ecosystems make our basic commodities, therefore:
> economics is in fact the natural science that deals with the production,
> distribution and recycling of ecoproducts." -- John Pozzi
>
> (speaking on the issue raised by:
> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/UK/Environment/2001-02/satmap170201.shtml/
> )
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
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