MAD
(Mutually Assured Dependence)
Laray Polk: Kumi Naidoo, the international executive director of Greenpeace, has been criticized for bringing a social agenda, not unlike King’s, to the cause of environmental issues. Naidoo has said in response to his critics: “Ever since I came into this job, I’ve been accused of selling out, but I genuinely, passionately feel that the struggle to end global poverty and the struggle to avoid catastrophic climate change are two sides of the same coin. Traditional Western-led environmentalism has failed to make the right connections between environmental, social and economic justice. I came to the environmental movement because the poor are paying the first and most brutal impacts of climate change.”97
Noam Chomsky: I presume that serious environmentalists would agree that saving whales does not get at the root of the problem, and that occupying oil rigs is at best a tactic undertaken to direct attention to deeper causes. On Naidoo, his approach seems to me fully justified, in other respects too. The poor who are (as usual) the victims suffering the most have also often been in the forefront of addressing the root problems. One striking example is the People’s Summit in Bolivia, with its call for a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, an appeal voiced by indigenous people worldwide and a challenge to the predatory and lemminglike pursuit of short-term gain by the rich.98
Looking at Bolivia’s ecology, it makes sense why they would have the most robust protections for nature: their glaciers are melting, and they’re losing the ability to predict natural cycles of water distribution necessary for maintaining food crops. Those are conditions not unique to Bolivia or Andean glaciers, yet they’re prepared to act.99 What aspects of cultural practice prepare some communities for addressing ecological realities head-on? Conversely, what aspects of cultural practice impair—and perhaps immunize—other communities to ecological realities?
Looking at the ecology of the rich societies—the US for example—it also makes sense to move toward robust protections for nature. These past few months provide many warnings.100
There are many differences between Bolivia—the poorest country in South America—and the US, which by rights should be the richest country in world history, thanks to its unparalleled advantages.
One difference is that the major political force within Bolivia is the indigenous majority. Not only in Bolivia, but worldwide, indigenous communities (“first nations,” “aboriginal,” “tribal,” whatever they call themselves) have been in the forefront of recognizing that if there is to be a hope of decent survival, we must learn to organize our societies and lives so that care for “the commons”—the common possessions of all of us—must become a very high priority, as it has been in traditional societies, quite often. The West too. It’s rarely recognized that Magna Carta not only laid the basis for what became over centuries formal protection for civil and human rights, but also stressed the preservation of the commons from autocratic destruction and privatization—the Charter of the Forests, one of the two components of Magna Carta.101
In contrast, the US is a business-run society, to an extent beyond any other in the developed world. Enormous power lies in the hands of a highly class-conscious business elite, who, in Adam Smith’s words, are the “principal architects” of policy and make sure that their own interests are “most peculiarly attended to” no matter how “grievous” the effects on others, including the people of their own society and their colonies (Smith’s concern) and future generations (which must be our concern). In the contemporary United States there has been an increasing growth in the power of the ideology of short-term gains, whatever the consequences. The US business classes have been admirably forthright in announcing publicly their intention of running huge propaganda campaigns to convince the public to ignore the ongoing destruction of the environment, by now quite hard to miss even for the most blind. And these campaigns have had some effect on public opinion, as polls show.102
As for what “immunize [the culture] to ecological realities,” in the US, it is useful to read the public pronouncements of the Chamber of Commerce (the main business lobby), the American Petroleum Institute, and other core components of the dominant business classes. Of course, that requires the contributions of the information and political systems, largely willing to line up in the same parade with only occasional hesitation.
During the Tar Sands Action in Washington, a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute told the press, “the protesters are really protesting jobs.” What do you make of API’s statement?103
The translation of the API statement to English is easy: “The Tar Sands Action is protesting an initiative that will severely harm local environments and accelerate the global rush to disaster—while putting plenty of bucks in our pockets for us to hoard or spend while we watch the ship sinking.”
From what I know of the Tar Sands Action, it consists of people whose priorities are virtually the opposite of the API’s. They want to maintain an environment in which people can live decent lives, to protect their grandchildren from disaster, and to create far more good jobs by using the ample resources available to develop a sustainable energy future while also rebuilding a decaying society and turning it to different and far more healthy directions.104 But, admittedly, they have inadequate concern for the bulging profits of the super-rich and their desperate need to run the world to the ground.
The lack of serious media attention seems to me to fall into the normal pattern of downplaying the threat of global warming, along with general dislike of popular activism, which might revitalize democracy and threaten elite control. As for the former pattern, it is standard. Open the morning’s paper and it is likely to be illustrated.
Today (August 17, 2012), for example, the press reports increasing reliance on Saudi oil, welcoming their increased production in response to US demands, but warning of a problem: dependence on foreign sources. Fortunately, the report continues, the problem is only temporary because we will soon have massive supplies from Canadian tar sands and expansion of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico—while also accelerating the race toward environmental catastrophe, a topic too insignificant to mention.105
On the “big twin threats of nuclear weapons and climate change” and the fallacy of a “limited nuclear war,” activist and physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote: “Recent studies have concluded that even a limited nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India, for example—involving perhaps 100 warheads—would significantly disrupt the global climate for at least a decade and would kick at least 5 million tons of smoke into the stratosphere. Estimates suggest this would potentially lead to the death of up to a billion people because of the effect of this smoke on global agriculture.”106
Any concluding comments on the threat of nuclear war in a world already challenged by ecological collapse?
Sixty years ago President Eisenhower warned that “a major war would destroy the Northern Hemisphere.”107 Notwithstanding his warning, a few years later President Kennedy was willing to face his subjective probability of one-third to one-half of nuclear war to establish the principle that we have the right to ring the USSR with missiles and military bases, but they do not have the right to place their first missiles beyond its borders, in Cuba, then being subjected to a brutal terrorist attack that was scheduled to lead to invasion in the month when the missiles were secretly dispatched.108 That was the essence of the issue. We escaped that time, but it was not the last. A decade later, in 1973, Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert to warn the Russians to keep their hands off when he was informing Israeli leaders that they could violate with impunity a cease-fire established under US-Russian auspices—so we have just learned from declassified documents.109 Ten years later, Reaganite adventurism, probing Russian defenses at their borders, led a serious war scare as Russia feared an imminent nuclear attack.110 There have been all too many cases of programmed missile attacks aborted by human intervention minutes before launch, and while we don’t have Russian records, it’s likely that their performance is worse. Right now President Obama is planning to establish an antimissile system—recognized on all sides to be a potential first-strike weapon—close to the Russian border, leading them to enhance their offensive weapons capacity.111 According to the German press, Israel right now is loading nuclear-tipped missiles on the advanced new submarines that Germany has transferred to Israel, in the full knowledge that they are likely to be deployed in the Persian Gulf as part of the threat of escalated war against Iran.112 And there is much more.
All of these crises can be mitigated or overcome. Many of the major barriers to doing so are right at home—a fortunate situation, because these are the factors that we can best hope to influence—hardly easy, but not impossible.
Those who choose to know, do know. The current issue of the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is devoted to the exciting prospects for science in the twenty-first century. The distinguished scientist who introduces the collection reviews these possibilities, adding, rather plaintively, “If we can manage to avoid total human disaster resulting from societal and environmental challenges (matters that in fact demand our most serious and immediate attention).”113
Bolivian campesinos understand.114
Footnotes:
97 John M. Broder, “Greenpeace Leader Visits Boardroom, without Forsaking Social Activism,” New York Times, December 7, 2011.
98 A decade prior to the 2010 “People’s World Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth,” Bolivian activists had successfully resisted an attempt by Aguas del Tunari (a subsidiary of US-based Bechtel) to privatize the water supply. For a detailed account, see Oscar Olivera, ¡Cochabamba! Water War in Bolivia (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004).
99 Tropical glaciers in the Andean region are at risk, and scientists forecast none will exist in thirty years. Jessica Camille Aguirre, “As Glaciers Melt, Bolivia Fights for the Good Life,” Yes!, March 18, 2010. See also “Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis,” National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC.org).
100 In August 2012 the US Drought Monitor reported 62.9 percent of the contiguous US as experiencing moderate to exceptional drought, with the percent of the worst categories (extreme to exceptional drought) doubling. As a result of drought conditions, widespread crop failure was reported nationwide, with FAO forecasts of shortages and rising prices worldwide. See also James Hansen et al., “Global Temperature Change,” PNAS 103, no. 39 (2006): 14288–93, doi:10.1073/pnas.0606291103.
101 See Noam Chomsky, “How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta, Part 1 and 2,” Guardian (London), July 24–25, 2012; “Carte Blanche,” TomDispatch.com (audio), July 21, 2012.
102 According to a recent survey by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, majorities among six identified groups say climate change and clean energy should be among top national priorities. Yet, according to project director Anthony Leiserowitz, the group with the most influence, climate-change skeptics, account for “only 10 percent [of the population]” but “appear much larger because they tend to dominate . . . much of the public square.” Talk of the Nation, “Gauging Public Opinion on Climate Change Policy,” NPR, May 4, 2012. On the influence of Koch-funded groups on the election process, see note 3, chap. 6.
103 Shelby Lin Erdman, “Battle over Controversial International Oil Pipeline Growing,” CNN, September 5, 2011. The API spokesperson quoted in the article was contacted to verify accuracy; she responded, “If they [Tar Sands Action participants] are protesting the pipeline they are protesting a shovel-ready job that will put thousands of Americans to work. This industry is focused on creating jobs, producing energy responsibly and strengthening America’s energy security.” Sabrina Fang, API Media Relations, e-mail correspondence, November 16, 2011. On how Saudi interests infuse money into US elections through trade associations, namely, API, see Lee Fang, “How Big Business Is Buying the Election,” The Nation, September 17, 2012.
104 The Tar Sands Action is part of an ongoing campaign to protest the proposed 1,661-mile pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. The unconventional product to be conveyed, chemical-laden bitumen derived from the Canadian tar sands, has been described as “the dirtiest oil on the planet.” The largest action to date took place in front of the White House between late August and early September 2011. During the two-week sit-in, more than twelve hundred participants committed acts of civil disobedience, resulting in arrest. The event involved a consortium of groups and individuals: Bold Nebraska, Indigenous Environmental Network, 350.org, activists, ’08 Obama campaigners, farmers, scientists, and writers.
105 Clifford Krauss, “U.S. Reliance on Oil from Saudi Arabia Is Growing Again,” New York Times, August 16, 2012. On Saudi plans to refine Canadian tar sands in Texas, see Lee Fang, note 7, this chapter. On history of OPEC, see note 8, chap. 1.
106 Lawrence M. Krauss, “Judgement Day,” New Humanist, March/April 2010.
107 During the Geneva Conference in July 1955, Pres. Eisenhower spoke candidly to representatives from the USSR, telling Nikolai Bulganin that modern weapons were developed to the point that any country that used them “genuinely risked destroying itself. . . . A major war would destroy the Northern Hemisphere.” He made a similar point with Georgi Zhukov: “Not even scientists could say what would happen if two hundred H-bombs were exploded in a short period of time, but . . . the fall-out might destroy entire nations and possibly the whole northern hemisphere.” Francis X. Winters, The Year of the Hare: America in Vietnam, January 25, 1963–February 15, 1964 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 7–8.
108 Leading up to the 1962 Soviet missile installation, the Kennedy administration carried out two major covert operations in Cuba: the Bay of Pigs invasion and Operation Mongoose. The latter has been described by historian Stephen G. Rabe as a “massive campaign of terrorism and sabotage.” The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 137. According to Graham Allison: “The U.S. air strike and invasion that were scheduled for the third week of the confrontation would likely have triggered a nuclear response against American ships and troops, and perhaps even Miami. The resulting war might have led to the deaths of 100 million Americans and over 100 million Russians.” “The Cuban Missile Crisis at 50: Lessons for U.S. Foreign Policy Today,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2012.
109 National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 281, s.v. “Documents 8A-D: DEFCON 3 during the October War.”
110 The CIA speculates Soviet fears of an imminent attack may have been a response to US actions launched a few months into Reagan’s first term: air and naval probes near Soviet borders that sought vulnerabilities in early warning systems; fleet exercises in proximity to sensitive Soviet military and industrial sites and operations that simulated surprise naval attacks; radar-jamming and transmission of false radar signals; submarine and antisubmarine aircraft conducting maneuvers in areas where the Soviet Navy stationed its nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines; and simulated bombing runs over a Soviet military installation in the Kuril Island chain. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA.gov), CSI Publications, s.v. “Books and Monographs,” s.v. “A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare,” March 19, 2007.
111 In November 2011 Russian Pres. Dmitry Medvedev issued a statement drawing a direct correlation between Pres. Obama’s 2009 revision of a missile system—a two-part installation in Poland and the Czech Republic planned by the previous administration—and the willingness of Russia to negotiate the New START treaty. He also stressed any plans for a European missile defense system that excluded Russia from “building a genuine strategic partnership” with NATO could result in withdrawal from START. Medvedev delineated additional measures, and by January 2012, it was reported Iskander missiles had been deployed to Kaliningrad, an exclave between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea. “Statement in Connection with the Situation concerning the NATO Countries’ Missile Defence System in Europe,” President of Russia (Kremlin.ru), November 23, 2011; “Russia Starts Deploying Iskander Missiles in Kaliningrad Region,” RT (Moscow), January 25, 2012.
112 “Operation Samson: Israel’s Deployment of Nuclear Missiles on Subs from Germany,” Der Spiegel, June 4, 2012.
113 Jerrold Meinwald, “Prelude,” Daedalus 141 (Summer 2012): 7.
114 Chapter 4, Article 8 of Bolivia’s Law No. 071 calls for the promotion of peace and the elimination of all nuclear, chemical, and biological arms and weapons of mass destruction (IV. 8. 6. “Promover la paz y la eliminación de todas las armas nucleares, químicas, biológicas y de destrucción masiva”). For comparison, the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which bans all nuclear explosions, has been signed but will not enter into force until ten remaining states complete ratification; the US is among the holdouts. On Bolivia’s law, see note 1, chap. 1.