In Search of an Honest Climate Campaigner
Pulp mills in Longview, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
As some of you are well aware, the Man was never really a paid professional activist. I did manage to hold down a few gigs with some large organizations for a short period of time. Mostly, it was because they were paying me to do something I was already doing, and when it more or less got done, I left. I find the corporate culture of the large environmental groups to be suffocating. Environmental activism is not a career; it is a calling. Like Pope Francis, I believe this is a moral issue. I have said before that it is Jihad. This is one of many reasons I no longer get invited to climate meetings even though I miss the free drinks and especially the fresh salmon with honey mustard sauce.
The first casualty of any big climate campaign is the truth. Like Jerry Falwell, we predict the world’s end by such and such a date, and when we find ourselves still alive and breathing, we amend the date. We’ve been doing this since 1985, and we somehow always manage to find a rationalization to kick the can down the road. We are now kicking it down a blind alley. At least we look busy.
A climate campaigner is generally a college-educated upper-middle-class kid who wants a career. As soon as they get the job they want, they marry, procreate, buy a house and a car, send the kids to private school, and try to keep their jobs to pay for all of this. Not the sort of person to tell their boss that the great idea he just had stunk up the high heavens. It was not always this way.
Today, no high-level climate campaigner will tell you the truth. If you don’t chant the mantra “We still have time” and then say to the world, “Check the air pressure in your tires and don’t drive over the speed limit” or some other such trivial non-threatening action. If you express any concerns about this, you are labeled a radical and are marginalized, isolated and met with a stone wall of silence. You want the truth! You can’t handle the truth! And the foundations you are courting will not fund the truth. So the Climate Leaders become Pharisees. We will talk down to the flock from their pedestals and spoon-feed you feel-good data graphics of the coming Solartopia and beg for donations.
But an honest campaigner might say this in a dark dive bar late at night after another fruitless conference. “Mike, you are right; we have already lost most of Florida and a few other states. You can’t stop or slow the ocean acidification. You cannot prevent forest fires. You cannot prevent the Great Extinction. You cannot hold back the rising sea. But our paid consultant has a study that says this makes people freeze like a deer in the headlights.”
King Canute could not stop the rising tide. Few scientists are devout Canutists, yet many climate leaders seem to be, judging by their public statements. This is what they should be saying: We are entering a war like no other. What we romantically thought of as Mother Earth is, in reality, a great sleeping beast, and she has risen from her Holocene slumber to bring on the Anthropocene in all of its mighty wrath. She is not our enemy, but she is a threat to humanity unless we do something extraordinary and immediately. We will have to make sacrifices as we have always had to do in times of war (with the exception of the Vietnam War, which brought on one of the biggest parties in US history). Only our troops and the antiwar movement made any sacrifices.
Who are we at war with if we can’t hope to fight the Earth Beast? The Oligarchy that rules the world? Or our appetite for comfort and security? A violent war with the Oligarchy will only bring down the curtain of doom even quicker. Wars can and are being fought non-violently, and sometimes, you will need to break a few things. But what are we fighting for? Well, it certainly cannot be the preservation and expansion of the middle class. We will need to become warriors and be willing to eat cold beans out of a can in a damp foxhole. We will need to nationalize all of the assets of the fossil fuel industry and begin rationing everything. We should put the biggest perpetrators who criminally distorted the truth to increase their profits on trial. We need to move into de-growth.
Perhaps most importantly, we must help those who are suffering the most from our excess consumption and our lousy attempt at governing the planet. We may not save our Earth as we know it, but we may salvage a bit of our dignity. In short, we need a new counterculture that rejects materialism and embraces community. In the not-very-distant future, the human population will eventually go through what biologists call a bottleneck. Our numbers will not increase forever. We can either do this together or die in a very horrible war with the Beast and amongst each other as we cling to the comforting messages of those happy-go-lucky tap-dancing fools who insist that the parrot is not dead; it is only sleeping.
The post In Search of an Honest Climate Campaigner appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
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