Eight

 

Earth Index

Monsanto Company’s annual budget lobbying the US government (2015): $4.3 million

Year the FDA approved Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone (rBGH)—banned in thirty-one countries—for use in American cattle: 1993

Profits made in the decade from 2001 to 2010 by the top five oil companies: $901.6 billion

Profits ExxonMobil averaged each quarter in 2012:
$11.225 billion

Percent of combined $100 billion 2008 profits the big five devoted to “renewable and alternative energy ventures”: 4

Percent rise in water utility rates for average Detroit resident in 2015–2016: 9.3

Estimated number of Detroit residents affected by water disconnections (as of July 2014): 100,000

Value of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD): $6.4 billion

Percent of the DWSD budget that goes to Wall Street banks as debt service (FY 2016): 45

Amount contracted to Homrich, a private contractor hired to disconnect water from Detroiters whose overdue bills exceed $150: up to $5.6 million

Two young steelheads are happily swimming downstream when they pass an old crab sitting on a rock in the cool mud beside the river. “How’s the water?” asks the crab. The young fish look at one another blankly. “What’s water?” they ask.

That’s an old and universal story, and its meaning is evident: the fish are the last to notice or to be able to describe the water, whose dimensions—texture and temperature, chemical code, resonance and resistance—nonetheless constitute their whole world. Because they live within the water, it’s entirely taken for granted; because they can’t quite imagine a nonwatery world, they have a limited and distorted view of their own home.

The taken for granted, as always, exercises a powerful pull: It’s difficult for some city-dwellers in the West, for example, to comprehend drought—even severe drought—as long as water pours from the tap (as it always has in their experience) whenever the faucet is opened. They will have to step outside their increasingly nonwatery world if they will ever develop a truer and more accurate picture of their own closing habitat.

Our own human steelheads today, however, are driven by more than innocence or naiveté—evidence of cataclysmic climate change and environmental collapse are all around us, easy to see and to understand wherever you look: the raging fires and the freakish storms, the droughts and the floods, the climbing rates of extinction, the stressed-out birds or the fading bees, the frazzled fish or the misshapen frogs, the temperature, the air, the water. It takes some bizarre combination of self-interest, privilege, cynicism, ideology, corruption, dogma, or chutzpah to keep one’s head buried in the sand, denying the facts in favor of cloud-cuckoo-land fantasies. But denial is not just a river in Egypt, no—magical thinking is the name of the game for the cataclysmic climate change deniers, our own steelheads.

This magical thinking takes many forms. Climate change is a theory—that’s the first line of defense for the steelheads—and the science is disputed. Climate is always changing, and has for millennia—second line of defense—and anyway, it’s in God’s capable if mysterious hands. Egads! Okay, it’s getting warmer, but the causes are complex and unknowable—third line, moving backward—and you can’t prove that it’s caused by human beings. In any case, ingenuity, the free market, and technological advances will work out the kinks as we become ever bigger and better and more prosperous forever. Finally, misdirection and an appeal to anti-intellectualism: Don’t trust the “liberals” and their pesky friends, the “scientists.”

All of this is nonsense and demonstrably bogus. Since the industrial revolution began, the Earth has warmed 0.85 degrees Celsius, and 2013 was the thirty-seventh consecutive year of above-average global temperatures. In May 2014, the hottest May ever recorded worldwide, the average temperature was 0.74 degrees Celsius above the twentieth-century baseline. And 2015 was the hottest year since temperatures have been recorded. At this rate we will experience a six-degree Celsius increase by 2100. Anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD)—human-produced climate change—is a fact of life. But facts haven’t a chance in the face of orthodoxy, and the steelheads peddle a toxic brand, fact free and faith based.

The three-term governor of Texas, a state on fire, has campaigned repeatedly and noisily against any environmental restrictions that would impact Big Oil or Big Energy. He’s a poster boy for steelheads. So is Senator Ted Cruz, who organized prayer circles during a crippling drought. You can imagine the governor looking distantly out the window of his mansion with those vacant steely eyes and observing that the earth is plainly flat as far as he can see, or, as he might put it, “Hey, why am I not upside-down?” Oh, you are governor, you are.

But there’s much more. “I’m no scientist,” he concedes as he pockets another payment from the filthy extractors and the profit-hungry polluters. He vehemently opposes regulations that would cut carbon emissions or policies that would constrain expanding oil and gas exploration because these are essential to “economic opportunity” and “energy independence” adding that “CO2 is not a pollutant!” This gets closer to the deeper point and the most critical line of defense: The scientific truth of climate change is a side issue for the most dedicated steelheads, including the senator and the governor; it’s the actual implications of what has to be done to halt the unfolding catastrophe that sends them rallying fervently around the flag, each of the fifty state stars now morphed into a colorful corporate logo.

***

What is to be done? Struggling with that question illuminates the strongest argument the steelheads have, even as it exposes their point of greatest vulnerability: seriously engaging the environmental catastrophe, and taking the necessary steps to solve it, will mean—I’ll just spit it out here—overthrowing capitalism. This is the real choice in front of us: the end of capitalism or the end of the habitable Earth, saving the system of corporate finance capital or saving the system that gives us life. Which will it be?

One of the “secret joys,” as Rebecca Solnit puts it, of fighting to save Earth hand in hand with indigenous peoples around the world and the massively expanding environmental movement, is knowing that doing the right thing ecologically has huge rewards socially as well.1 Spreading the practice of decentralized power generation through rooftop solar, for example, points away from corporate-driven policies and toward participatory and power-dispersed solutions in every area: food production, transportation, health matters, and more. In other words, if we collectively enact grassroots, participatory, and transparent solutions to the crisis in a single area, we expand our consciousness, our radical dreams and aspirations, and our community capacity in other areas. We open to a wider world of participatory democracy.

The steelheads can deny the reality of catastrophic climate change all they like, but the hardheaded realists in the corporate board rooms, the Pentagon, and the State Department have done the studies and drawn the maps. They have strategies and tactics already laid out: permanent war, more mobile rapid attack forces, higher and higher walls around fortress USA, technological solutions to decidedly nontechnical problems, an amped-up nationalistic patriotism with its attendant chauvinism and white supremacy, a frenzied appeal to individualism, and the demonization of anyone who rises in opposition.

The usually reliable but increasingly fragile playbook to save capitalism includes massive propaganda campaigns designed to dupe and deceive, to narrow and frame the debate so that it appears that there is no alternative to the logic and practice of avarice and predation. Violence and aggression will be framed as inevitable—invasions and conquest, long-term occupations to secure diminishing resources, wars for oil and raw materials and, coming soon, water wars—and any resistance here or abroad will be cast as the wicked work of terrorists or fanatics. The victims of the catastrophe created by late capitalism—there are millions of climate refugees already on the move—will be labeled “illegal aliens” or “lawbreakers” and put in concentration camps beneficently renamed “temporary holding centers for the undocumented.”

Capitalism demands expansion; its predatory heart is the rage to accumulate. It thrives on growth unleashed and unrestrained, but Earth says otherwise. It reminds us of our shared responsibility and stewardship, of our public obligation to supervise and check and intrude when the private pursuit of profit threatens us all. It’s admonishing us: The ecological burden of unchecked economic growth is simply too much; learn to proceed with caution and constraint—slow down or die. No one can predict with any certainty what is to come; no one can name the mode of life or the institutions we will build in order to assure survival; no one can plot out a clear path forward. But the window is closing, and an entirely new condition is upon us. We will awaken soon enough to the society that must emerge if we are to survive, or we will witness complete collapse. There may still be time left: we can lie down in defeat, or we might rally ourselves to storm the heavens.

The steelheads are counting on people being too shortsighted or self-interested or mystified or mesmerized or frightened or intimidated to choose life. The people—this is the X factor and the wild card, their Achilles’s heel and our potential lifesaver—with our marvelous unpredictability and our unscripted potential, our infinite capacity to step into history at any moment as subjects with hearts and minds of our own. The steelheads’ greatest fear is our best hope—collective consciousness, common struggle.

***

In The Shock Doctrine, the dazzling thinker and writer Naomi Klein produced a germinal account of how corporate power, the 1 percent and their flacks in the media and political establishment, systematically use crises, both real (like floods or fires) and invented (like Detroit going bankrupt), to enact cruel ideological agendas designed to enrich themselves at the expense of those who were hurt by the problems in the first place. Disaster capitalism seizes every tragedy, misfortune, or calamity and turns it into just another profit-making opportunity. The real causes of crises are never examined by the powerful, authentic or alternative solutions never seriously pursued, as the elites double down on the very policies and politics that created the messes in the first place.

Klein’s latest book, This Changes Everything, with an accompanying documentary film by her partner and comrade Avi Lewis, is an urgent cry to wake up—get woke!—and pay attention to the dangers facing us and the pressing need for thoughtful and genuine alternatives. Together they rally us to put the scientific reality of catastrophic climate change into all of our movement-making efforts, and to build a coherent and unifying narrative about the real solutions to the climate crisis—an enlightened economic system capable of restraining corporate power and capitalist avarice, strengthening participatory democracy, sharing Earth’s limited resources, and discovering ways to unleash our energies to do the real and necessary work of the world uncoupled from the jobs system and racism and wage slavery.

Klein and Lewis insist that climate change is not an issue like every other; in fact, it’s not an issue at all. Climate change is a message—and that message literally changes everything. Climate change is instructing us on the limits and the interconnectedness of nature. It is challenging our arrogance; it is revealing that the inherent and intrinsic value of nature cannot be monetized or marketed without irreparable harm; it’s telling us to reimagine how we live, what we value, how we see and treat one another, and how we organize our labor; it is asking us to invent and discover sustainable alternatives; it’s urging us to pay attention, be astonished, and act!

Painting capitalism green won’t help. The capitalists merely invent markets to trade carbon and other pollutants, or keep our eyes fixed on individual behavior rather than systems, as the crisis continues gathering steam. State capitalism or command-and-control socialism won’t help either—those systems run hungrily and recklessly on retrograde notions of progress, carelessly damming rivers, hastily extracting all the coal and gas they can grab, heedlessly burning filthy fuels, expanding, growing, accumulating whatever they can as far as they can reach.

With cataclysmic climate change in focus, Klein and Lewis offer a more hopeful agenda: we must all work to reimagine and vitalize the public square, spaces where people can face one another without masks and participate fully in planning the urgent work of creating human-sized solutions to the crisis. We must turn back the frenzied drive to privatize; we must regulate and tax banks and corporations heavily, and get popular public control where we can; we must resist overconsumption and rely more heavily on local production; we must disarm and drastically reduce the size and scope of the military as we face our debt and our responsibility for the problems of poor and developing nations. We might look to the recent gatherings on climate change in Paris, Cochabamba, and Cancún, where many of these ideas were center stage, and welcome the seizing of global environmental leadership by the marginalized and the many from the powerful elites.

This is a broad agenda to be sure, but it’s also entirely within reach. We see stirrings in patches everywhere: Occupy, of course, with its brilliant metaphorical victory—We Are the 99 Percent!— and its broad and inclusive appeal; the activists of Black Lives Matter connecting criminal justice reform with educational and environmental justice; “take back the land” actions, from Miami to Chicago; squatters in Seattle and Boston; alternative systems for health and medicine, food production and distribution, transportation, public safety and housing in Detroit and Oakland and Milwaukee and Chicago; protests, encampments, resistance, strikes, blockades, sit-ins and walkouts and occupations everywhere. These are the seeds of a new world: instead of me-first-ism, recognition of interdependence and a faith in community; instead of monologue, dialogue; instead of worshipping power, an ethic of care and generosity and compassion; instead of easy answers, hard questions; and instead of domination, cooperation and reciprocity. It’s not a big stretch to imagine a seemingly isolated protest in a sweatshop in China, or a blockade by miners of a copper pit in Chile, or a farmworker land seizure on a plantation in Guatemala, or an encampment in the Central Valley of California triggering a worldwide upheaval to reclaim Earth. If you open your senses a bit, you can feel the rumblings coming closer.

Klein and Lewis are clear that while “there is no joy in being right about something so terrifying,” it does point to a deeper duty for all of us. The responsibility now is to become clearer and more focused about challenging the profit-driven system at its root as the “best hope of overcoming these overlapping crises.”

***

In Don DeLillo’s grimly funny and super-smart novel White Noise, the narrator is Jack Gladney, a professor of “Hitler Studies” at a small Midwestern college. Jack sleepwalks through his life to the dull background sounds of TV and endless radio, the Muzak of consumerism and electronics, unrestrained advertising and constant technological innovation, appliances and microwaves. Jack is a steelhead with intellectual baggage. When a train derails outside of town creating what is at first described officially as a “feathery plume” but later becomes a “black billowing cloud” and finally an “airborne toxic event,” everything becomes a bit unhinged. Jack’s response to an official evacuation order is disbelief: “I’m not just a college professor,” he complains. “I’m the head of a department. I don’t see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That’s for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are.”

Well, not anymore. Our own feathery cloud has turned toxic at breathtaking speed, and those folks in the mobile homes might be our best natural allies after all.