Minnesotans for Sustainability posted an interview with Richard Heinberg (author of "The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies" and "Powerdown:Options and Actions For A Post-Carbon World"). Here it is: http://www.mnforsustain.org/oil_heinberg_puplava_interview_032203.htm
Heinberg notes, as do many others -- that we Americans each have the fossil-fuel energy equivalent of about 155 slaves working for us. We live as though this situation has always existed, and always will. As Jared Diamond has argued in his most recent book -- and as many scientists argue from many different disciplines -- because we refuse to examine the premises of our own actions, we are bringing the world to environmental, economic, and geopolitical collapse.
The leaf blower issue is surely a sign and a symbol of absurd myopia. In our own peculiar Midwestern way, we raise parochial blindness is to the level of a fetish. Libertarianism is warped to mean that we have a right to ignore even relatively small impacts of our actions on others in our community, but especially our right to ignore the impacts of our actions on the larger environment.
We fit the parable of the drunk at a party. The drunk has consumed most of the alcohol at the party, and continues to drink vast quantities even after guests arrive who have had none. The drunk uses brute force to stop some quests from having a drink, and intimidates many more. The drunk is eventually ejected from the party -- "the party's over." We Minneapolitans are a good example of the belligerent, drunken American, are we not? We piss away the precious time with arguements over leaf-blowers while tens of thousands of people around the world die violent deaths so that we can continue to consume more and more petroleum and vast amounts of water, food and other scarcening resources.
The moment we talk about real issues in American politics -- local, state or national -- people seem to run for the exits. Much better to drug ourselves with a bit of talk radio, eh?
I will be doing a presentation at Barton school for one of my daughter's classes on current affairs. The class is following the stock market and domestic and world events. I will speak as a local eco-entrepreneur about environmental economics. As I contemplate this, I realise that the children in our schools -- public and private -- are indoctrinated to become violent from a very young age. We are teaching our kids that our "right" to use a leaf blower is inalienable and universal, but stewardship of the earth and life in community are at best optional considerations. As with so much of our political and commercial discourse, we are shaping our children to do what every good corporate CEO does: externalise all costs to others, accrue all benefits to self, and never consider the implications of one's actions on others or the environment.
Even our local political discourse is absurd: it is no longer meaningful. Perhaps we could just turn on a leaf blower in one hand, and listen to talk radio blaring from a boombox held in the other? This might be as good a way to distract us from real issues as a political race, or as a media-spectacle crime story, or a celebrity trial, or a story on steroids in professional baseball, or even the latest bit of war-porn purveyed to us as news. Delerium Tremens, anyone?
I will try to maintain some hope. My daughter and her eighth-grade classmates are awash in the numbing contradictions of our culture which seduces our children into war as a Disney adventure. . Many young people in Minneapolis choose to drop out because they have learned very well from us, and can see the handwriting on the wall, which is large and luminous, but which too many Minneapolis adults are too intentionally ignorant to see. We adults mostly run for the exits as soon as the real issues are brought up, you see. Our obscene arguments about leafblowers drown out the possibility that human community exists as anything other than competing producer-consumers whose petty, bitter bickering allows for the continuation of the process whereby our children are given the two great twin gifts we offer: the crushing burden of taxes we choose not to pay and instead defer to them; and the violent, toxic waste dump that we give them as a world to live in.
On the bright side: leaf blowers and talk radio will soon be a thing of the past.
-- pedaling for peace and ecojustice, from Lynnhurst, for now -- Gary Hoover
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