The environmentalist and theologian Thomas Berry, in his essay "World of Wonder," quotes Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin: "One could say that the whole of life lies in seeing. That is probably why the history of the living world can be reduced to the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes ... See or perish. This is the situation imposed on every element of the universe by the mysterious gift of existence."
He then goes on, in this essay, to describe in detail the great natural wonders of the North American continent: the great rivers and plains, the extraordinary mountains, the vast and open deserts, the forests of the northeast and the northwest. All these wonders, he observes, have been severely degraded, in most cases irreversibly so, by Western civilization, essentially from the moment of its arrival on Columbus's ships. The loss, and the heedless avarice which has accompanied and driven it, is almost too much to bear. It is, finally, a fact that the mind cannot encompass. Consider, for example, that of the tallgrass prairie that once covered much of the midwest, only about 0.3% remains. The rest has been plowed under, often to grow feed crop for cattle, or corn that ADM will process into corn syrup. Spend a moment and try to feel the enormity of this mindless exploitation of this bountiful planet, endlessly complex and intricate variety tilled and hacked and plowed into dust, and replaced with unnatural expanses of monoculture. What was there is gone, and will never come again.
Why did this happen? Berry suggests that our culture has a fundamental lack of ability to see things as they are. The supposedly rational mind of the Western man views nature as a resource, a repository of wealth waiting to be extracted, and made of use to man. The immediate use value of tallgrass prairie is not apparent to the rational eye, but the soil beneath has obvious value. So, the one is removed to extract the value of the other. Anywhere you have a mining operation, you see this principle in horrifying action. Mountains in West Virginia have no obvious value, but the coal seams within them do. The mountain, then, must go. The boreal forest atop the Alberta tar sands? Valuable insofar as the wood can be sold. The life of the Gulf of Mexico? Of no use compared the the oil beneath the sea bed.
A recent letter to the editor about a proposed taconite mine in Wisconsin illustrates this point with frightening clarity. The mine should go forward, says the writer, because the taconite, in the ground, "isn't doing anyone any good." Apart from its value as a resource for industrial age humans, the taconite is worthless. This, I think, is a fatal blind spot in the Western view of the world. We are, finally, incapable of seeing the world as it is.
The Western religious tradition is also an abject failure in this respect. Berry notes that with its focus on personal salvation through a singular Savior, and its view of nature as corrupt, rather than as a manifestation of divinity, inherently sacred and inspirational, mainstream Christianity has little to say about the culture's inexorable destruction of the planet. The kingdom of God is elsewhere, not here, and because the world is devoid of divinity, Western religion can't be bothered to stir itself to its defense. In fact, anyone who finds divinity in God's actual creation is regarded as a heathen. To be truly Godly is to find not a speck of divinity in creation, the better to make money off its despoiling.
"Consider the lilies ... they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these," says Jesus, who was not afraid of invoking the miracle of the world around him. Unfortunately, modern Judeo-Christian religion has little use for the lilies, so busy is it with convincing its adherents that this world is the fallen one, and therefore of little concern. Like the Western scientific and technological tradition, Judeo-Christian tradition suffers terribly, fatally, from a lack of sight. Nature is fallen, and that is the end of it.
But, as Berry and de Chardin observe, sight is vital. We are blind to so much of this world. The great prairies were plowed under because settlers did not see them as whole or sacred or a manifestation of the divine or as a magnificent example of God's creation, possessed of the right to exist. In short, they didn't pause and experience them as of value in and of themselves. They were experienced and seen only in terms of their own needs, which is to say that they weren't seen at all.
Of course, it turns out that we need those prairies, and every other aspect of nature, far more than we need the black soil beneath. The prairie nourished the soil, just as the soil nourished the prairie. Mow one down, and you may possess the other in a sense, for a while, but soon it will tire of giving of its richness to people who not only do not give back, but who seem to feel that to take endlessly is their right. This is, to my mind, another fatal flaw in the Judeo-Christian approach to nature. God, in Genesis, says "fill the earth and subdue it ... have dominion ... over every living thing that moves on the earth." God may command it, but eventually the earth will balk at this relationship, and the earth has the last word.
The nature of our relationship to the natural world demanded by God is not one in which the natural world is truly seen. The nature of the relationship to the natural world demanded by science is not one in which the world is truly seen. God asks us to subdue the world, and in the world we see something to be subdued. Science asks us to pick apart the world, and in the world we see machinery to be broken down and brought under control. Industry asks us to draw every last resource from the world, and in the world we see fossil fuels, and biofuel, and minerals to be mined. What we see is not the world in its incomprehensible splendor, but merely our expectations of the world. We mistake our expectations for the world, and ultimately we suffer terribly for it, as does the planet. Paul Valery says "to see is to forget the nature of the thing one sees." Before we can see the world, truly, we must let go of the malignant ideas we have about it.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Angry
Today is October 25th, 2012. In the Caribbean, Hurricane Sandy is inundating the Bahamas. The storm will, over the next several days, move up the east coast of the United States, where, according to current forecasts, it will make landfall somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, bringing unprecedented rain, wind, and coastal flooding to a huge swath of the eastern seaboard. Last year, another hurricane, Irene, made landfall in New England, and Vermont, my home for a little over a year some time back, suffered severe flooding. It may - may - be spared the worst of it this year, but still, for the second year running, a part of the country that simply does not see hurricanes more than once every century is bracing for one.
I am angry about the cruelty of this, angry that the people of Vermont and of New England may have to rebuild much of what they just put back together, angry at the lives that will probably be lost, angry for the trees that will be ripped down, at the soil that will be washed away, angry that the northeastern United States must apparently now pay much closer attention to hurricane season despite the fact that hurricanes are not supposed to make landfall in New Hampshire, or New York, or New Jersey, or Vermont.
I'm angry because this is our doing, and because it simply doesn't have to be this way. Climate change is extending the hurricane season, and the warming of the ocean waters means that hurricanes have much more energy upon which to feed. The terrible change in the planet's climate which we have wrought - well, there's little we can do to change that now. But we can stop making it worse, and eventually, within a few hundred years, return the climate to the sort of stability we have seen over the past 10,000 years.
I am angry, because the causes are obvious, and the solutions so achingly simple. Stop burning fossil fuels. Stop cutting down the forests. Stop laying down pavement. Stop changing the chemistry of the atmosphere. This is all we must do. Modern humans have existed on this planet for at least 200,000 years, and we have only been burning oil and coal for the last 200. If we stopped, life would be very different, but ultimately, we would be fine. And we could all awaken each day knowing that, even though we must live for a while with a climate likely to throw drought, freak rainfall, and the like our way, that this is temporary, that over time this would happen less and less often, that over time the amount of carbon in the atmosphere would fall, and that the world would renew itself, and be bountiful and beautiful again. It is so simple, so simple. It strikes me full force whenever I consider it, the madness, and the deep sickness that forbids us from even thinking about this, forbids us from realizing that the so-called comforts of a world driven by the combustion of fossil fuels are worthless if we destroy that world in the process. It is so simple. What does it say about us that the obvious and certain solution is not even entertained? I cannot even express how angry it makes me.
So, when Hurricane Sandy makes landfall on the mid-Atlantic coast, and does as much damage as it is likely to do, what will we say? This is the price of doing business? The price of global, oil-fueled economy? As the freak storms become more common, and simply become "the weather," what will we say? What will we do?
I cannot tell you how badly I yearn for a world in which hundred year floods, freak weather, and perfect storms remain so rare that they are spoken of like mythical events, like Noah's flood, or the plague of frogs, so rare that they pass easily into memory, then into folklore, then into mythology, referenced as one references the fairy tales of childhood, or the gods and goddesses of the most ancient myths, real and powerful, but manifesting themselves with a rarity that simultaneously belies and affirms their power. Such stories ought to be told reverently around the harvest table, as cautionary tales about the rare fury of nature, what utter havoc she is capable of wreaking if her limits are crossed with abandon. The simple fact is that those stories can be told in that way again. We can make this simple, simple, life-affirming, earth-affirming choice. We can, if only we know the simplicity of it, and the consequences of choosing otherwise. My God, it is so simple.
I hope Vermont does not suffer again this year, the way it did last year. But it seems apparent that hurricane season is now something that the northeastern United States will have to attend to. But it doesn't have to be that way forever. It doesn't have to be that way.
I am angry about the cruelty of this, angry that the people of Vermont and of New England may have to rebuild much of what they just put back together, angry at the lives that will probably be lost, angry for the trees that will be ripped down, at the soil that will be washed away, angry that the northeastern United States must apparently now pay much closer attention to hurricane season despite the fact that hurricanes are not supposed to make landfall in New Hampshire, or New York, or New Jersey, or Vermont.
I'm angry because this is our doing, and because it simply doesn't have to be this way. Climate change is extending the hurricane season, and the warming of the ocean waters means that hurricanes have much more energy upon which to feed. The terrible change in the planet's climate which we have wrought - well, there's little we can do to change that now. But we can stop making it worse, and eventually, within a few hundred years, return the climate to the sort of stability we have seen over the past 10,000 years.
I am angry, because the causes are obvious, and the solutions so achingly simple. Stop burning fossil fuels. Stop cutting down the forests. Stop laying down pavement. Stop changing the chemistry of the atmosphere. This is all we must do. Modern humans have existed on this planet for at least 200,000 years, and we have only been burning oil and coal for the last 200. If we stopped, life would be very different, but ultimately, we would be fine. And we could all awaken each day knowing that, even though we must live for a while with a climate likely to throw drought, freak rainfall, and the like our way, that this is temporary, that over time this would happen less and less often, that over time the amount of carbon in the atmosphere would fall, and that the world would renew itself, and be bountiful and beautiful again. It is so simple, so simple. It strikes me full force whenever I consider it, the madness, and the deep sickness that forbids us from even thinking about this, forbids us from realizing that the so-called comforts of a world driven by the combustion of fossil fuels are worthless if we destroy that world in the process. It is so simple. What does it say about us that the obvious and certain solution is not even entertained? I cannot even express how angry it makes me.
So, when Hurricane Sandy makes landfall on the mid-Atlantic coast, and does as much damage as it is likely to do, what will we say? This is the price of doing business? The price of global, oil-fueled economy? As the freak storms become more common, and simply become "the weather," what will we say? What will we do?
I cannot tell you how badly I yearn for a world in which hundred year floods, freak weather, and perfect storms remain so rare that they are spoken of like mythical events, like Noah's flood, or the plague of frogs, so rare that they pass easily into memory, then into folklore, then into mythology, referenced as one references the fairy tales of childhood, or the gods and goddesses of the most ancient myths, real and powerful, but manifesting themselves with a rarity that simultaneously belies and affirms their power. Such stories ought to be told reverently around the harvest table, as cautionary tales about the rare fury of nature, what utter havoc she is capable of wreaking if her limits are crossed with abandon. The simple fact is that those stories can be told in that way again. We can make this simple, simple, life-affirming, earth-affirming choice. We can, if only we know the simplicity of it, and the consequences of choosing otherwise. My God, it is so simple.
I hope Vermont does not suffer again this year, the way it did last year. But it seems apparent that hurricane season is now something that the northeastern United States will have to attend to. But it doesn't have to be that way forever. It doesn't have to be that way.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
If you see this movie, may Dr Seuss haunt your dreams like Freddy Krueger
It's not news that the film adaptations of Dr Seuss's books have been the sorts of things I imagine you are forced to watch in Hell. His stories are so pithy and whimsical, and so to-the-point even with all the inventiveness and cleverness of the language, that stretching them out to 80 or 90 minutes necessarily distorts and undermines everything about them. You read some books - even some children's books - and you may find yourself thinking about what a film adaptation would look like, and who should play what role, and who should direct it, and so forth. Dr Seuss's books are not among those. One does not read How the Grinch Stole Christmas and think about costume design for Cindy Lou Who, or wonder about how exactly the Grinch came to have a heart full of unwashed socks, as the song goes. This is so obvious that you know that the people who are making these movies are interested in them not as stories but for their marketing value.
This is mainly why creating a feature-length film version of The Lorax is so uniquely, awfully horrid. You'd be hard pressed to find another book with a central theme so resistant to the whole idea of marketing, unless you made a movie out of Abbie Hoffman's Steal this Book. The marketers (and presumably the scriptwriters) are trying to get around this by pushing the environmentalist aspects of the story. USA Today had an article recently about how the film is being used by a variety of corporations and government bodies to promote "eco-friendly" products and activities. The EPA is using it to sell products branded with the Energy-Star label, and DoubleTree Hotel is using it to persuade people to get on a plane to fly a few thousand miles to Costa Rica, so you can see what remains of the equatorial rainforest. Universal Pictures, the article explains, is being selective about who they partner with in promoting this film, which I guess means that BP will not be featuring any Lorax-themed tie-ins at their gas stations. So that's a relief.
But, as important as it is to the story, the environmentalism of The Lorax emerges from a deeper theme. If you had to express that theme in one word, you would probably choose greed, or avarice. But I'm not sure that entirely captures it.
+++++++
The Lorax begins with an unnamed boy wandering through a wasteland, where he comes upon the Street of the Lifted Lorax. In a derelict factory nearby (the "Lerkim") lives the Once-ler, who tells the boy the story of the Lorax. Long ago, he says, this land was lush - "the grass was still green and the pond was still wet and the clouds were still clean." There were brown barbaloots, and swomee-swans, and humming fish, all of whom lived and played in the shadows of truffula trees. It's the truffula trees the Once-ler is interested in. "All my life," he says, "I'd been searching for trees such as these." Their tufts are very fine, and as soon as he sees them, he says, "I knew just what I'd do." He builds a small shop, chops down a truffula tree, and from the tuft he knits a thneed, which is, of course, "A Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need."
Then, the Lorax emerges from the tree stump. The first thing he says is that he speaks for the trees. But then he demands to know what on earth the Once-ler has made out of the truffula tuft. The Once-ler tells him, in language indistinguishable from boilerplate ad copy, the many, many uses to which one might put a thneed. The Lorax says:
Sir! You are crazy with greed.
There is no one on Earth
Who would buy that fool thneed!
Of course, a customer comes along and proves the Lorax wrong. The Once-ler laughs at the Lorax and dismisses him with a line that you will not hear in the movie, I guarantee:
You poor stupid guy. You never can tell what some people will buy.
Though it's not in the book, I imagine that it was at this moment the Lorax realized the magnitude of what he was up against.
The Once-ler, in entrepreneurial spirit, enlists the help of his family, expands his operations, and razes the ground of truffula trees. The Lorax returns after a while to tell the Once-ler of all the creatures suffering because of the damage being done by his thneed-making business. The brown barbaloots must leave because fewer truffula trees means less truffula fruit. They "are all getting the crummies, because they have gas, and no food, in their tummies!" The Once-ler sort of feels bad about this, but,
Business is business!
And business must grow
Regardless of crummies in tummies, you know.
He's a job creator, what can you say?
The swomee swans are choking on the air, the humming fish find their gills gummed up by the sludge from the Once-ler's factory, and they are both forced from their homes. The Once-ler tires of the Lorax's hectoring, and indignantly tells him that he intends to continue chopping down truffula trees and turning them into thneeds. This speech is punctuated by the fall of the last truffula tree.
The Once-ler family, presumably much richer now, closes up shop. The Lorax, after surveying the broken and lifeless landscape around him, gives the Once-ler a backwards glance and lifts himself up by the seat of his pants, disappearing through a hole in the smog. He leaves behind a ring of stones with the word "UNLESS" carved into it. The Once-ler interprets this for the unnamed boy as meaning that,
UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It's not.
He gives the boy a truffula seed, and tells him to go plant it and protect it, in the hopes that the Lorax and his friends will come back.
+++++++
All the Once-ler sees is money. When he first comes to the land upon which he will build his factory, nothing exists for him except for that thing which will make him rich: the truffula tree. He doesn't see or appreciate the tree itself, doesn't recognize its intrinsic value, the way it sustains and is sustained by the other beings around it. No, for him it has no value except as raw material for his product, the thneed, the quintessential consumer item, which is advertised as fulfilling every need one could possibly have.
The Lorax sees the absurdity of this. For him, the trees are not the first point in a chain of production. They are whole in and of themselves, and are not there to provide raw material for the Once-lers of the world. The whole idea that they need to be transformed or refined in order to be "useful" is insane, as is the idea that the end product could possibly be something that everyone needs. After all, "everyone" was doing just fine before.
His only hope is that others see things as he does. Unfortunately, he's not just up against the Once-ler, but against an entire system, an entire way of thinking and being, in which growth and consumption and constantly unfulfilled needs and desires are the values and lodestars. It's not so much that the trees have no tongues, but rather that the Once-ler and his family long ago stopped regarding trees - and, frankly, everything else that could make them a buck - as anything but objects whose value depends entirely upon how much money can be made off of them. The trees are speaking, and not just through the Lorax, but the Once-ler doesn't understand, and probably wouldn't bother to listen even if he did.
The consumers are just as much a part of this as are the Once-lers. Born and acculturated into a world in which they are constantly told that fulfillment and serenity lie just over the horizon, in the next generation iPhone, another beer, a new car, a new deodorant, why shouldn't they think that happiness lies in the purchase of a thneed? More to the point, why shouldn't the purchase of an Energy Star appliance, or of an eco-tour to Costa Rica, just to pick two completely random and unrelated examples out of the air, not make you feel better about yourself?
So the Lorax faces a system in which the natural world, in all its complexity and mystery, and of which we are a part despite all of our efforts to prove otherwise, is regarded as little more than raw material, and in which the products that emerge from that raw material are regarded as a means to happiness by a population deliberately kept in a state of constant unhappiness. Play such a scenario out to its inevitable end, and what you find is an almost lifeless wasteland, full of gricklegrass and old crows and little else.
The people peddling and licensing the products branded with the "Lorax" label are, at bottom, Once-lers. The Lorax is essentially a story about how - to put it bluntly - the process of manufacturing and buying stupid shit is destroying the planet. But it's more than that. It's also a story about the mindset behind that process. The objectification of the natural world. The irrational, nihilistic obsession with growth. The belief that fulfillment is about buying the right product. And Universal Pictures and the EPA and DoubleTree and every other Lorax licensee see this and decide that what they need to do is find a way to sell it, to slap a label with the Lorax's face on their products. Like the Once-ler, all they see is money. The book The Lorax is their truffula tree.
And why shouldn't they do this? After all, there's no telling what some people will buy.
+++++++
Here's the only animated version of this story you should watch:
Part one:
Part two:
Monday, August 29, 2011
Solidarity
Today I, along with 140 other people, was arrested in front of the White House. We were there to protest the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which, if constructed, would carry unrefined oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. You need only look at pictures of the tar sands to see evidence of a culture gone absolutely mad with avarice, with no sense of limits or decency or respect for the planet and the life it supports. We know that the oil will run out. We know that its extraction and refinement and consumption dump countless tons of carbon into the atmosphere, irrevocably altering the planet's climate. We know that the time to find sources of energy other than coal and oil has long since come. And yet our efforts to extract every last drop of oil from the planet persist, irrespective of the cost to indigenous communities, to the plant and animal life that has the misfortune of living on the ground under which the oil lies, and even to ourselves. Look at these pictures and see the face of a culture insane with desperation, in the midst of what amounts to a death spiral, and making no effort to right itself but rather steepening its own descent.
I want to write more about this soon, but I also want to share something that was very noticeable about the nature of this protest, from the training session last night to the actual arrest today. Last night, one of the organizers identified herself as part of the indigenous community of Canada. The area most impacted by the tar sands excavation is home to some indigenous communities, and it is, unsurprisingly, causing no small amount of devastation. The pollution is so awful and complete that in some areas it is possible to light the water on fire. Communities have been uprooted, their ties to the land severed. Adding to the sheer criminality of the excavation is the fact that it isn't even clear that the Canadian government has the right to grant access and ownership of the land to the oil companies involved. Treaties grant a great deal of control over the land to the indigenous communities. Given the history of treaties between the governments of the North American continent and indigenous peoples, their wholesale violation is unsurprising, but it should not fail to outrage.
We were asked as a group to think about what it meant to be in solidarity with the people who live near the tar sands excavation, to act to some extent in place and on behalf of them. And I was not quite prepared for this exercise. I came here largely because actively seeking new sources of oil, irrespective of the damage done, seems to me the height of insanity, and deserving of opposition. The planet as a whole simply can't take it. I have to admit I didn't give the communities there much thought. And even the pictures linked to above don't seem to show the direct cost to local communities.
And then today we hear of the effects of hurricane Irene. Some communities and cities in its path were spared catastrophe. But Vermont, where I lived for over a year, is almost literally underwater. When Bill McKibben, longtime environmentalist and one of the organizers of today's protest, spoke this morning, he described a brief telephone call he had with his wife, with whom he lives in Vermont. "It's all but washed away," he said. He was referring to the state. Covered bridges that have stood for over 200 years are gone, destroyed by rivers swollen to many, many times their usual size and strength. Entire towns are underwater, farms upon which and houses in which people have lived for generations are currently uninhabitable or just taken away by floodwaters. Many people are missing.
McKibben spoke of the people of Pakistan, many millions - millions - of whom were made homeless by torrential rains last year. He said that we, the protesters, were fortunate in comparison. We will be able to go home after our arrests.
Even though the rich and powerful will be able to protect themselves, for a while, from the worser effects of climate change, the unique thing about this planet-wide crisis is that there is ultimately no hiding from it. The people displaced in Pakistan, they are no different from you or me. It is only though a trick of fate, an accident of birth, that they live there and you live here. To think otherwise is delusion. And clearly we are not to be spared from the extremes of weather. The people of Vermont, well, probably a few of them chose to live there precisely because it is beyond the reach of tropical storms and hurricanes. That's certainly one of the many things I liked about it. But even that is no longer a guarantee.
And do you think that an oil company will hesitate before scraping your community off the face of the earth if tar sands are discovered there? What makes you so special? Do you think that the displaced and poisoned communities of Alberta, Canada, thought any differently than you? We are all at risk. Martin Luther King said that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Chief Seattle spoke of a great web of life. "All things are connected, like the blood that unites us all," he said. Do not be deceived into thinking that this is abstraction. Solidarity, for me, means recognizing these sayings, and countless others expressing the same idea, as truth.
I want to write more about this soon, but I also want to share something that was very noticeable about the nature of this protest, from the training session last night to the actual arrest today. Last night, one of the organizers identified herself as part of the indigenous community of Canada. The area most impacted by the tar sands excavation is home to some indigenous communities, and it is, unsurprisingly, causing no small amount of devastation. The pollution is so awful and complete that in some areas it is possible to light the water on fire. Communities have been uprooted, their ties to the land severed. Adding to the sheer criminality of the excavation is the fact that it isn't even clear that the Canadian government has the right to grant access and ownership of the land to the oil companies involved. Treaties grant a great deal of control over the land to the indigenous communities. Given the history of treaties between the governments of the North American continent and indigenous peoples, their wholesale violation is unsurprising, but it should not fail to outrage.
We were asked as a group to think about what it meant to be in solidarity with the people who live near the tar sands excavation, to act to some extent in place and on behalf of them. And I was not quite prepared for this exercise. I came here largely because actively seeking new sources of oil, irrespective of the damage done, seems to me the height of insanity, and deserving of opposition. The planet as a whole simply can't take it. I have to admit I didn't give the communities there much thought. And even the pictures linked to above don't seem to show the direct cost to local communities.
And then today we hear of the effects of hurricane Irene. Some communities and cities in its path were spared catastrophe. But Vermont, where I lived for over a year, is almost literally underwater. When Bill McKibben, longtime environmentalist and one of the organizers of today's protest, spoke this morning, he described a brief telephone call he had with his wife, with whom he lives in Vermont. "It's all but washed away," he said. He was referring to the state. Covered bridges that have stood for over 200 years are gone, destroyed by rivers swollen to many, many times their usual size and strength. Entire towns are underwater, farms upon which and houses in which people have lived for generations are currently uninhabitable or just taken away by floodwaters. Many people are missing.
McKibben spoke of the people of Pakistan, many millions - millions - of whom were made homeless by torrential rains last year. He said that we, the protesters, were fortunate in comparison. We will be able to go home after our arrests.
Even though the rich and powerful will be able to protect themselves, for a while, from the worser effects of climate change, the unique thing about this planet-wide crisis is that there is ultimately no hiding from it. The people displaced in Pakistan, they are no different from you or me. It is only though a trick of fate, an accident of birth, that they live there and you live here. To think otherwise is delusion. And clearly we are not to be spared from the extremes of weather. The people of Vermont, well, probably a few of them chose to live there precisely because it is beyond the reach of tropical storms and hurricanes. That's certainly one of the many things I liked about it. But even that is no longer a guarantee.
And do you think that an oil company will hesitate before scraping your community off the face of the earth if tar sands are discovered there? What makes you so special? Do you think that the displaced and poisoned communities of Alberta, Canada, thought any differently than you? We are all at risk. Martin Luther King said that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Chief Seattle spoke of a great web of life. "All things are connected, like the blood that unites us all," he said. Do not be deceived into thinking that this is abstraction. Solidarity, for me, means recognizing these sayings, and countless others expressing the same idea, as truth.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
What's the French word for douchebag?
A few months ago, Aasif Mandvi did a bit on the Daily Show about Asbesto, Canada. The town, it seems, is trying to revitalize its economy by mining and selling its namesake to India, where it is not outlawed and where even minimal environmental and worker protections do not exist. Asbestos, of course, is known to increase the risk of mesothelioma, a very nasty and practically incurable form of lung cancer, many times over for those exposed to it. This is not secret knowledge. All the same, the people of Asbestos, Canada - or at least its civic leaders - seem not the least bit troubled by what they are doing.
At the end, Mandvi, through playing along, shows indignation. He asks of his interviewee, "What's the French word for douchebag?" Watch, it's funny:
I admit that I love that phrase, What's the French word for douchebag? Whenever I see someone pulling some kind of dick move - a politician, a celebrity, a pro athlete - it's usually the first thing that pops into my mind. What's the French word for douchebag? It's at least as deserving of an acronym as Oh My God, or What Would Jesus Do? WTFWFD? Although, just looking at it now, it's probably much more likely to be read as What the Fuck Would [name beginning with F] Do? than what it actually represents.
But it really should be used more specifically than even the way I use it. It applies best when used to refer to people who take actions that they know will lead to grave harm to other people or to other places, hiding serenely behind some kind of defense mechanism or another. Plausible deniability. Self defense. Economic necessity.
The problem is, of course, that even with that relatively exact definition, the sheer number of potential uses quickly becomes overwhelming.
Take the following. Several weeks ago I saw an ad similar to this in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
Canadian Oil: Fuel for the Heartland job engine
The ad advocates for the further development of the Alberta tar sands, and for the construction of a pipeline through Canada and the United States that would carry the oil found there. The group behind the ad is an oil industry group called the American Petroleum Institute. The oil industry, of course, is in general best thought of as a pack of ghouls and vampires whose sole purpose is to profit through theft of the planet's natural wealth. They're not unlike the aliens in Independence Day, although their ugliness is usually lurking just beneath the surface rather in plain sight. In fact, the aliens of Independence Day would've been wildly more successful had they just landed their spacecraft outside the corporate headquarters of BP, Exxon-Mobil, and other similarly-minded paragons of the energy industry, sold them their resource-extracting technology, in exchange for, say, 50% of the resources extracted, and instructed them to package the whole thing as a massive jobs program. It's likely that President Bill Pullman, rather than jumping into a fighter jet to join the final battle, would have been proposing tax breaks for the companies openly colluding with the invading creatures. There would have been no alien for Will Smith to punch, and if he'd gone after the executives of the oil companies in the same way, I imagine he wouldn't have gotten very far if he'd started dragging the unconscious body of, say, the CEO of Exxon-Mobil though the deserts of New Mexico to Area 51.
This is not hyperbole. The Alberta tar sands rest under a very unfortunate and expansive forest, one of the last great boreal forests on the planet. As implied by the name, the oil there is in a more solid state than that found in the oil fields in, say, Texas, and so "extraction," as the process is so blandly called, is much more destructive and energy intensive than in those oil fields (which are themselves hardly a model for environmental stewardship.) In fact, it involves what can best be described as flaying the skin off the earth, to get at the oil mixed with sand and soil underneath.
The process is so sickeningly destructive that it almost defies description, so here's a picture:
That was a forest, once upon a time.
And here is a lecture by Naomi Klein in which she talks about this complete monstrosity:
This has been on my mind for a while, because I think it reflects an unsettling sickness at the heart of this culture and this country. Someone created that ad above, someone decided to call this a jobs issue, and who can argue with jobs? Who can argue with the creation of however many jobs the American Petroleum Institute claims the Keystone pipeline will ultimately create? No doubt someone has done a cost-benefit analysis and decreed that development of the tar sands, and creation of the pipeline, are entirely worth it, just as drilling in an ice-free Arctic will be decreed worth it, just as drilling in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico was thought to be worth it. And still is, by people who make those decisions. Douchebags, in other words.
But this sort of thing is inevitable according to the logic of our economy, our way of life. This is what I'm getting at. We're all douchebags, when you come right down to it. The oil from the Alberta tar sands will power our cars, our planes, our lights, our heat, our air conditioners. It's found in our plastics, in just about every product we consume. It powers our agriculture and is found in our food. As production in already discovered oil fields diminishes, as it must, we will go looking for oil in much less accessible places. like the tar sands, like the Arctic. And even under the most favorable cost benefit analysis, that oil will run out, too, but only after the destruction of ecosystems and the poisoning of the water and the soil. And even if you only consider the inevitable human cost, wholesale destruction of environments releases toxins into the same air and water and soils, and those who live anywhere near the tar sands will ingest in one form or another, in one way or another, those toxins. And we all live downstream. So much human disease is caused by this relentless environmental assault that I think we tend to ignore it instinctively, but the illness and death caused by cancer and respiratory illnesses, just to name a few, are almost beyond reckoning, and it is occurring because of this culture's abuse of the planet. We're all complicit, not just the people of Asbestos, Canada.
If you're interested in taking some concrete action, visit tarsandsaction.org. I'm planning on going.
At the end, Mandvi, through playing along, shows indignation. He asks of his interviewee, "What's the French word for douchebag?" Watch, it's funny:
I admit that I love that phrase, What's the French word for douchebag? Whenever I see someone pulling some kind of dick move - a politician, a celebrity, a pro athlete - it's usually the first thing that pops into my mind. What's the French word for douchebag? It's at least as deserving of an acronym as Oh My God, or What Would Jesus Do? WTFWFD? Although, just looking at it now, it's probably much more likely to be read as What the Fuck Would [name beginning with F] Do? than what it actually represents.
But it really should be used more specifically than even the way I use it. It applies best when used to refer to people who take actions that they know will lead to grave harm to other people or to other places, hiding serenely behind some kind of defense mechanism or another. Plausible deniability. Self defense. Economic necessity.
The problem is, of course, that even with that relatively exact definition, the sheer number of potential uses quickly becomes overwhelming.
Take the following. Several weeks ago I saw an ad similar to this in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
Canadian Oil: Fuel for the Heartland job engine
The ad advocates for the further development of the Alberta tar sands, and for the construction of a pipeline through Canada and the United States that would carry the oil found there. The group behind the ad is an oil industry group called the American Petroleum Institute. The oil industry, of course, is in general best thought of as a pack of ghouls and vampires whose sole purpose is to profit through theft of the planet's natural wealth. They're not unlike the aliens in Independence Day, although their ugliness is usually lurking just beneath the surface rather in plain sight. In fact, the aliens of Independence Day would've been wildly more successful had they just landed their spacecraft outside the corporate headquarters of BP, Exxon-Mobil, and other similarly-minded paragons of the energy industry, sold them their resource-extracting technology, in exchange for, say, 50% of the resources extracted, and instructed them to package the whole thing as a massive jobs program. It's likely that President Bill Pullman, rather than jumping into a fighter jet to join the final battle, would have been proposing tax breaks for the companies openly colluding with the invading creatures. There would have been no alien for Will Smith to punch, and if he'd gone after the executives of the oil companies in the same way, I imagine he wouldn't have gotten very far if he'd started dragging the unconscious body of, say, the CEO of Exxon-Mobil though the deserts of New Mexico to Area 51.
This is not hyperbole. The Alberta tar sands rest under a very unfortunate and expansive forest, one of the last great boreal forests on the planet. As implied by the name, the oil there is in a more solid state than that found in the oil fields in, say, Texas, and so "extraction," as the process is so blandly called, is much more destructive and energy intensive than in those oil fields (which are themselves hardly a model for environmental stewardship.) In fact, it involves what can best be described as flaying the skin off the earth, to get at the oil mixed with sand and soil underneath.
The process is so sickeningly destructive that it almost defies description, so here's a picture:
And here is a lecture by Naomi Klein in which she talks about this complete monstrosity:
This has been on my mind for a while, because I think it reflects an unsettling sickness at the heart of this culture and this country. Someone created that ad above, someone decided to call this a jobs issue, and who can argue with jobs? Who can argue with the creation of however many jobs the American Petroleum Institute claims the Keystone pipeline will ultimately create? No doubt someone has done a cost-benefit analysis and decreed that development of the tar sands, and creation of the pipeline, are entirely worth it, just as drilling in an ice-free Arctic will be decreed worth it, just as drilling in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico was thought to be worth it. And still is, by people who make those decisions. Douchebags, in other words.
But this sort of thing is inevitable according to the logic of our economy, our way of life. This is what I'm getting at. We're all douchebags, when you come right down to it. The oil from the Alberta tar sands will power our cars, our planes, our lights, our heat, our air conditioners. It's found in our plastics, in just about every product we consume. It powers our agriculture and is found in our food. As production in already discovered oil fields diminishes, as it must, we will go looking for oil in much less accessible places. like the tar sands, like the Arctic. And even under the most favorable cost benefit analysis, that oil will run out, too, but only after the destruction of ecosystems and the poisoning of the water and the soil. And even if you only consider the inevitable human cost, wholesale destruction of environments releases toxins into the same air and water and soils, and those who live anywhere near the tar sands will ingest in one form or another, in one way or another, those toxins. And we all live downstream. So much human disease is caused by this relentless environmental assault that I think we tend to ignore it instinctively, but the illness and death caused by cancer and respiratory illnesses, just to name a few, are almost beyond reckoning, and it is occurring because of this culture's abuse of the planet. We're all complicit, not just the people of Asbestos, Canada.
If you're interested in taking some concrete action, visit tarsandsaction.org. I'm planning on going.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Got an hour? Why not spend it loading your homepage?
Apologies to those to whom I send email relatively frequently. I am presently in Chachapoyas, a lovely little town in the northern highlands of Peru where time passes like a lazy river and the internet loads like another river that is in a slow and lazy competition with the first river and is winning hands down. Loading my email account takes a truly geological length of time, and the connection is frequently sketchy at best. As soon as I have access to a better connection, I should be able to do some catching up, email-wise.
Chachapoyas's main claim to fame is its proximity to Kuelap, a pre-Incan set of ruins dating back to the mid-first millenium of the common era. I'm beginning to think that much of Peru's pre-modern history can be understood as a series of efforts to build the most impressive cities possible on the highest mountains possible. Kuelap is in slightly worse shape than Machu Picchu, but is still amazing in its own right. It is, as I said, atop a fairly tall mountain, with correspondingly incredible views of the valleys below. It's surrounded by a wall of stone, with a narrow entrance on one side through which you walk to find a steep incline up to the main area of the city. A few of the stones on the walls on either side of the entryway have figures carved into them, including a cayman and a rather eerie human face. Most of the buildings had, understandably, crumbled either partly or fully in the many hundreds of years since the site was occupied, but what remained was still quite remarkable. In many of the circular dwellings were narrow corrals where people kept guinea pigs - the food, not the pet - and several had underground chambers with portals in the very center of the dwellings. These were apparently used as the resting places for the remains of family members (after about a year's worth of burial at another more distant site to allow decomposition to run its full course.) One large wall served as a mausoleum - through a small hole you could see the pelvis and femur of one of Kuelap's former inhabitants.
Tonight the tour group is heading out for dinner, and tomorrow I'm off to see some ancient sarcophagi and the third largest waterfall in the world. Seems like a reasonable way to end this trip. Thursday and Friday are essentially travel days.
Hope all is well at home. Looking forward to seeing you all again.
Chachapoyas's main claim to fame is its proximity to Kuelap, a pre-Incan set of ruins dating back to the mid-first millenium of the common era. I'm beginning to think that much of Peru's pre-modern history can be understood as a series of efforts to build the most impressive cities possible on the highest mountains possible. Kuelap is in slightly worse shape than Machu Picchu, but is still amazing in its own right. It is, as I said, atop a fairly tall mountain, with correspondingly incredible views of the valleys below. It's surrounded by a wall of stone, with a narrow entrance on one side through which you walk to find a steep incline up to the main area of the city. A few of the stones on the walls on either side of the entryway have figures carved into them, including a cayman and a rather eerie human face. Most of the buildings had, understandably, crumbled either partly or fully in the many hundreds of years since the site was occupied, but what remained was still quite remarkable. In many of the circular dwellings were narrow corrals where people kept guinea pigs - the food, not the pet - and several had underground chambers with portals in the very center of the dwellings. These were apparently used as the resting places for the remains of family members (after about a year's worth of burial at another more distant site to allow decomposition to run its full course.) One large wall served as a mausoleum - through a small hole you could see the pelvis and femur of one of Kuelap's former inhabitants.
Tonight the tour group is heading out for dinner, and tomorrow I'm off to see some ancient sarcophagi and the third largest waterfall in the world. Seems like a reasonable way to end this trip. Thursday and Friday are essentially travel days.
Hope all is well at home. Looking forward to seeing you all again.
Monday, March 21, 2011
On the bus
Overnight, I took an 11 hour bus ride from Chiclayo to Chachapoyas. Here's what it was like:
Actually, it wasn't like that in the slightest. There was music, but it was coming from the radio of a young man sitting near me, and instead of making me want to dance it made me want to curl up in a ball and cry.
Here's what it was actually like:
The ride and duration were actually similar. However, we lacked a Keanu Reeves figure to maintain order, and the driver wasn't nearly as hot as Sandra Bullock. He was more of a Paul Giamatti type. Try sleeping through this sort of thing, by the way.
After carefully considering the options, I think this reflects my general bus riding experience overnight:
In which I'm Steve Martin or Martin Short. I prefer Martin Short; Steve Martin is funny, don't get me wrong, but I find Martin Short to be a much more accessible comedian, even if he isn't quite as brilliant. But the bus was at least 10 or 15 degrees hotter on the inside than on the outside, on account of the fact that there were over 50 of us crammed together in seats that sort of reclined and without air conditioning or openable windows. Now, I paid about $11 for the bus ride, so I got exactly what I paid for. I did have water, thankfully, and lip balm, but I have since booked a return trip for tomorrow that should be much kinder.
Hope all is well at home.
Actually, it wasn't like that in the slightest. There was music, but it was coming from the radio of a young man sitting near me, and instead of making me want to dance it made me want to curl up in a ball and cry.
Here's what it was actually like:
The ride and duration were actually similar. However, we lacked a Keanu Reeves figure to maintain order, and the driver wasn't nearly as hot as Sandra Bullock. He was more of a Paul Giamatti type. Try sleeping through this sort of thing, by the way.
After carefully considering the options, I think this reflects my general bus riding experience overnight:
In which I'm Steve Martin or Martin Short. I prefer Martin Short; Steve Martin is funny, don't get me wrong, but I find Martin Short to be a much more accessible comedian, even if he isn't quite as brilliant. But the bus was at least 10 or 15 degrees hotter on the inside than on the outside, on account of the fact that there were over 50 of us crammed together in seats that sort of reclined and without air conditioning or openable windows. Now, I paid about $11 for the bus ride, so I got exactly what I paid for. I did have water, thankfully, and lip balm, but I have since booked a return trip for tomorrow that should be much kinder.
Hope all is well at home.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)