Calling All Future-Eaters
By Chris Hedges
19 July, 2010
TruthDig.com
The
human species during its brief time on Earth has exhibited a remarkable
capacity to kill itself off. The Cro-Magnons dispatched the gentler
Neanderthals. The conquistadors, with the help of smallpox, decimated
the native populations in the Americas. Modern industrial warfare in
the 20th century took at least 100 million lives, most of them
civilians. And now we sit passive and dumb as corporations and the
leaders of industrialized nations ensure that climate change will
accelerate to levels that could mean the extinction of our species.
Homo sapiens, as the biologist Tim Flannery points out, are the
"future-eaters."
In the past when
civilizations went belly up through greed, mismanagement and the
exhaustion of natural resources, human beings migrated somewhere else
to pillage anew. But this time the game is over. There is nowhere else
to go. The industrialized nations spent the last century seizing half
the planet and dominating most of the other half. We giddily exhausted
our natural capital, especially fossil fuel, to engage in an orgy of
consumption and waste that poisoned the Earth and attacked the
ecosystem on which human life depends. It was quite a party if you were
a member of the industrialized elite. But it was pretty stupid.
Collapse
this time around will be global. We will disintegrate together. And
there is no way out. The 10,000-year experiment of settled life is
about to come to a crashing halt. And humankind, which thought it was
given dominion over the Earth and all living things, will be taught a
painful lesson in the necessity of balance, restraint and humility.
There is no human monument or city ruin that is more than 5,000 years
old. Civilization, Ronald Wright notes in "A Short History of
Progress," "occupies a mere 0.2 percent of the two and a half million
years since our first ancestor sharpened a stone." Bye-bye, Paris.
Bye-bye, New York. Bye-bye, Tokyo. Welcome to the new experience of
human existence, in which rooting around for grubs on islands in
northern latitudes is the prerequisite for survival.
We
view ourselves as rational creatures. But is it rational to wait like
sheep in a pen as oil and natural gas companies, coal companies,
chemical industries, plastics manufacturers, the automotive industry,
arms manufacturers and the leaders of the industrial world, as they did
in Copenhagen, take us to mass extinction? It is too late to prevent
profound climate change. But why add fuel to the fire? Why allow our
ruling elite, driven by the lust for profits, to accelerate the death
spiral? Why continue to obey the laws and dictates of our executioners?
The
news is grim. The accelerating disintegration of Arctic Sea ice means
that summer ice will probably disappear within the next decade. The
open water will absorb more solar radiation, significantly increasing
the rate of global warming. The Siberian permafrost will disappear,
sending up plumes of methane gas from underground. The Greenland ice
sheet and the Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers will melt. Jay Zwally, a NASA
climate scientist, declared in December 2007: "The Arctic is often
cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming. Now, as a
sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start
getting out of the coal mines."
But reality is
rarely an impediment to human folly. The world's greenhouse gases have
continued to grow since Zwally's statement. Global emissions of carbon
dioxide (CO22) from burning fossil fuels since 2000 have increased by 3
per cent a year. At that rate annual emissions will double every 25
years. James Hansen, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space
Studies and one of the world's foremost climate experts, has warned
that if we keep warming the planet it will be "a recipe for global
disaster." The safe level of CO22 in the atmosphere, Hansen estimates,
is no more than 350 parts per million (ppm). The current level of CO22
is 385 ppm and climbing. This already guarantees terrible consequences
even if we act immediately to cut carbon emissions.
The
natural carbon cycle for 3 million years has ensured that the
atmosphere contained less than 300 ppm of CO22, which sustained the
wide variety of life on the planet. The idea now championed by our
corporate elite, at least those in contact with the reality of global
warming, is that we will intentionally overshoot 350 ppm and then
return to a safer climate through rapid and dramatic emission cuts.
This, of course, is a theory designed to absolve the elite from doing
anything now. But as Clive Hamilton in his book "Requiem for a Species:
Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change" writes, even "if carbon
dioxide concentrations reach 550 ppm, after which emissions fell to
zero, the global temperatures would continue to rise for at least
another century."
Copenhagen was perhaps the
last chance to save ourselves. Barack Obama and the other leaders of
the industrialized nations blew it. Radical climate change is certain.
It is only a question now of how bad it will become. The engines of
climate change will, climate scientists have warned, soon create a
domino effect that could thrust the Earth into a chaotic state for
thousands of years before it regains equilibrium. "Whether human beings
would still be a force on the planet, or even survive, is a moot
point," Hamilton writes. "One thing is certain: there will be far fewer
of us."
We have fallen prey to the illusion
that we can modify and control our environment, that human ingenuity
ensures the inevitability of human progress and that our secular god of
science will save us. The "intoxicating belief that we can conquer all
has come up against a greater force, the Earth itself," Hamilton
writes. "The prospect of runaway climate change challenges our
technological hubris, our Enlightenment faith in reason and the whole
modernist project. The Earth may soon demonstrate that, ultimately, it
cannot be tamed and that the human urge to master nature has only
roused a slumbering beast."
We face a
terrible political truth. Those who hold power will not act with the
urgency required to protect human life and the ecosystem. Decisions
about the fate of the planet and human civilization are in the hands of
moral and intellectual trolls such as BP's Tony Hayward. These
political and corporate masters are driven by a craven desire to
accumulate wealth at the expense of human life. They do this in the
Gulf of Mexico. They do this in the southern Chinese province of
Guangdong, where the export-oriented industry is booming. China's
transformation into totalitarian capitalism, done so world markets can
be flooded with cheap consumer goods, is contributing to a dramatic
rise in carbon dioxide emissions, which in China are expected to more
than double by 2030, from a little over 5 billion metric tons to just
under 12 billion.
This degradation of the
planet by corporations is accompanied by a degradation of human beings.
In the factories in Guangdong we see the face of our adversaries. The
sociologist Ching Kwan Lee found "satanic mills" in China's industrial
southeast that run "at such a nerve-racking pace that worker's physical
limits and bodily strength are put to the test on a daily basis." Some
employees put in workdays of 14 to 16 hours with no rest day during the
month until payday. In these factories it is normal for an employee to
work 400 hours or more a month, especially those in garment industry.
Most workers, Lee found, endure unpaid wages, illegal deductions and
substandard wage rates. They are often physically abused at work and do
not receive compensation if they are injured on the job. Every year a
dozen or more workers die from overwork in the city of Shenzhen alone.
In Lee's words the working conditions "go beyond the Marxist notions of
exploitation and alienation." A survey published in 2003 by the
official China News Agency, cited in Lee's book "Against the Law: Labor
Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt," found that three in four
migrant workers had trouble collecting their pay. Each year scores of
workers threaten to commit suicide, Lee writes, by jumping off
high-rises or setting themselves on fire over unpaid wages. "If getting
paid for one's labor is a fundamental feature of capitalist employment
relations, strictly speaking many Chinese workers are not yet
laborers," Lee writes.
The leaders of these
corporations now determine our fate. They are not endowed with human
decency or compassion. Yet their lobbyists make the laws. Their public
relations firms craft the propaganda and trivia pumped out through
systems of mass communication. Their money determines elections. Their
greed turns workers into global serfs and our planet into a wasteland.
As
climate change advances we will face a choice between obeying the rules
put in place by corporations or rebellion. Those who work human beings
to death in overcrowded factories in China and turn the Gulf of Mexico
into a dead zone are the enemy. They serve systems of death. They
cannot be reformed or trusted.
The climate
crisis is a political crisis. We will either defy the corporate elite,
which will mean civil disobedience, a rejection of traditional politics
for a new radicalism and the systematic breaking of laws, or see
ourselves consumed. Time is not on our side. The longer we wait, the
more assured our destruction becomes. The future, if we remain passive,
will be wrested from us by events. Our moral obligation is not to
structures of power, but life.
© 2010 TruthDig.com
http://www.countercurrents.org/hedges190710.htm
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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