Chris Hedges: A Reality Check from the Brink of Extinction

[marmar]

from Truthdig:



A Reality Check from the Brink of Extinction
Posted on Oct 18, 2009

By Chris Hedges


We can join Bill McKibben on Oct. 24 in nationwide protests over rising carbon emissions. We can cut our consumption of fossil fuels. We can use less water. We can banish plastic bags. We can install compact fluorescent light bulbs. We can compost in our backyard. But unless we dismantle the corporate state, all those actions will be just as ineffective as the Ghost Dance shirts donned by native American warriors to protect themselves from the bullets of white soldiers at Wounded Knee.

“If we all wait for the great, glorious revolution there won’t be anything left,” author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen told me when I interviewed him in a phone call to his home in California. “If all we do is reform work, this culture will grind away. This work is necessary, but not sufficient. We need to use whatever means are necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet. We need to target and take down the industrial infrastructure that is systematically dismembering the planet. Industrial civilization is functionally incompatible with life on the planet, and is murdering the planet. We need to do whatever is necessary to stop this.”

The oil and natural gas industry, the coal industry, arms and weapons manufacturers, industrial farms, deforestation industries, the automotive industry and chemical plants will not willingly accept their own extinction. They are indifferent to the looming human catastrophe. We will not significantly reduce carbon emissions by drying our laundry in the backyard and naively trusting the power elite. The corporations will continue to cannibalize the planet for the sake of money. They must be halted by organized and militant forms of resistance. The crisis of global heating is a social problem. It requires a social response.

The United States, after rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, went on to increase its carbon emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels. The European Union countries during the same period reduced their emissions by 2 percent. But the recent climate negotiations in Bangkok, designed to lead to a deal in Copenhagen in December, have scuttled even the tepid response of Kyoto. Kyoto is dead. The EU, like the United States, will no longer abide by binding targets for emission reductions. Countries will unilaterally decide how much to cut. They will submit their plans to international monitoring. And while Kyoto put the burden of responsibility on the industrialized nations that created the climate crisis, the new plan treats all countries the same. It is a huge step backward. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091019_a_reality_check_from_the_brink_of_extinction/

[mmonk]

1. Recommended.

[HillbillyBob]

2. http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Silent_Spring

Silent Spring is a book written by Rachel Carson and published by Houghton Mifflin in September 1962. The book is widely credited with helping launch the environmental movement.<1>

When Silent Spring was published, Rachel Carson was already a well-known writer on natural history, but had not previously been a social critic. The book was widely read

snip

The book documented detrimental effects of pesticides on the environment, particularly on birds. Carson said that DDT had been found to cause thinner egg shells and result in reproductive problems and death. She also accused the chemical industry of spreading disinformation, and public officials of accepting industry claims uncritically.

snip

History professor Gary Kroll commented, "Rachel Carson's Silent Spring played a large role in articulating ecology as a 'subversive subject'— as a perspective that cut against the grain of materialism, scientism, and the technologically engineered control of nature."<[br />
snip

Carson was violently assailed by threats of lawsuits and derision, including suggestions that this meticulous scientist was a "hysterical woman" unqualified to write such a book. A huge counterattack was organized and led by Monsanto Company, Velsicol, American Cyanamid — indeed, the whole chemical industry — duly supported by the Agriculture Department as well as the more cautious in the media.


Industry and agribusiness advocates continue to criticize Silent Spring. In a 2005 essay, "The Harm That Pressure Groups Can Do", British politician Dick Taverne was damning in his criticism of Carson:

Carson didn't seem to take into account the vital role (DDT) played in controlling the transmission of malaria by killing the mosquitoes that carry the parasite (...) It is the single most effective agent ever developed for saving human life (...) Rachel Carson is a warning to us all of the dangers of neglecting the evidence-based approach and the need to weight potential risk against benefit: it can be argued that the anti-DDT campaign she inspired was responsible for almost as many deaths as some of the worst dictators of the last century. <18>

However, DDT has never been banned for anti-malaria use,<19> and Carson argued in Silent Spring that:

No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored. The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible.

So we are still fighting the fight against corpses that insist it is their 'god given right to profit', no matter the cost to to other inhabitants of this planet..So who issued this god given right? The supine court of course under Justice Marshall in the 1880s, I forget what date, does the day matter so much as the resulting death of our family members from Agent Orange? I have 3 uncles who are disabled with every thing from bone degeneration to organ cancers from using this stuff and I have a cousin and a friend that both committed suicide in desperation with the PTSD from VietNam and the health problems from being sprayed with DDT and Agent Orange.
I have developed allergies to market produce because of the pesticides and shit they spray on them. I am assuming such since I quit eating produce other thank what we grow in our yard or our nearby neighbors grow organically I don't get sick.

Since we moved out to the country and the days the wind does not blow from the coal fired power plants 100 miles away I don't have the serious asthma attacks.

These energy and chemical corpses need to be leashed or we will all surely die, and those of us that do not die outright will eventually die from the lack of fresh air, clean water etc. Why is it their profits are fucking more important than babies born with the normal number of organs and limbs?

Rachel Carson was trying to say use this with caution not the rampant abandon she was seeing them. I remember as a kid when they were spraying ddt every where even over my grandparents farm in WV.
I could run the litany of the devastation we are causing from polluted water to sooty air loaded with everything from fossil fuel smoke to chorines used in manufacture. The real bitch is that the jobs are gone but the pollution is still there , the corpses have moved on to other countries and are now finishin the job of world destruction.
sigh, sickening. I just saw a neighbor cut down to sell several acres of older timber. they are not replanting, just grab the cash and run.