Reality, as we’ve come to know it these last three years, seems to be “not long for this world,” as my mother used to say. Politically, socially, morally, environmentally — it’s on its last legs. It’s decrepitude is caused by a kind of economic senility in which “inevitable” growth trumps everything, including public health and human decency.
This purely economic view of reality is the dehumanizing cause of the dangerous and precarious state of the world all of us are facing now. Putting money first and abandoning all precautions and social goods has literally allowed the flourishing of what I call the Pollution Industrial Complex, whose wastes have created climate change and the diasporas, pandemics, floods, droughts, wild fires, super hurricanes and rising oceans that plague humans and wildlife the world over.
We can’t keep on doing the same thing. It’s literally killing us off.
That’s why many of us, young people in particular, are looking to reactivate — through Black Lives Matter, #Me Too and various other economic, environmental and anti-climate change initiatives such as Occupy and The Green New Deal — the social justice and environmental movements of the recent past. We’re working to extend their agendas and make good on their struggles to create an America in which equality, decent work, and a healthy and habitable environment, not vast accumulations of wealth, are functional goals of society.
When at last it becomes clear to the majority of us that the old ways are incapable of responding to the deteriorating conditions of life on the planet, new economies based on serving humane goals rather than plutocratic ideals will emerge. It simply has to be.
But we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The insights of activist thinkers of the recent past are still viable. Take, for instance, the work of Lester R. Brown in his 2003 book “Plan B: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble.” Brown lays out an “urgent reordering of priorities, a restructuring of the global economy” designed to prevent its total collapse. Young people in the vanguard of the Green New Deal get this urgency for change. And in many ways, they are giving new life to Brown’s pioneering ideas. As he warned, “if we cannot stabilize climate, there is not an ecosystem on earth we can save.”
The basics of Brown’s Plan B have a familiar ring.
We have to “raise water productivity” by adopting “realistic prices,” using new irrigation technology, harvesting rain water, and, I’ll add, ridding ground water of pollution. We have to raise land productivity if we hope to feed the growing world population as we struggle to stabilize atmospheric temperature. This includes raising protein efficiency, saving soil and crop land, and a general rethinking of land productivity.
We have to cut carbon emissions in half, if not more, Brown says, by “raising energy productivity,” “harvesting the wind,” “converting sunlight into electricity,” and “building the hydrogen economy” based on the fuel cell which is “twice as efficient as the internal combustion engine,” emitting only water vapor. Lastly, Brown says, we must respond to “the social challenge” by stabilizing population, by supporting ongoing education and lifelong learning for everyone, by curbing pandemics and aggressively supporting universal health care.
For many of us, the logic of this agenda is as self-evident as equal rights for women, voting and civil rights for everyone, universal literacy, environmental justice, the necessity of humanitarian social safety nets and a living wage for everyone.
What kind of grassroots political activity will have to evolve out of the present chaos if we are to have a chance at a sustainable future? In the broadest strokes, I see a future political alignment among environmentalists, social justice activists and the arts community including architects, planners, landscape designers, writers, film makers, musicians and poets. There could be a powerful political synergy among them, with clear proposals energizing public consciousness.
Creative people in general tend to gravitate toward the agendas of both social and environmental activists, agendas which are intertwining around putting an end to environmental racism. The imaginative energy of the arts could infuse both movements with an intensifying cultural viability that communicates clearly and readily arouses emotional and moral commitment.
Transcending the current degradation of American politics and human rights, along with the deterioration of the global environment could become a politically inspiring project for all of us, young and old, each in our own ways, advocating more vigorously and pointedly for clean energy, and environmental and social justice for everyone.
The current reality that’s on its last legs does not need extraordinary measures to be replaced. These are hard and painful times, indeed. Many of us are suffering and trying to prevail against often impossibly difficult circumstances. But along with those burdens there also seems to be a new spirit arising, a rebirth of conviction and determination, a burgeoning refusal to be victimized any longer.
Many of us in pain are finding new hope in an intuition we share about the future — that it simply has to get better and that we can, as individuals, help in some way to create a world that has, so to speak, dodged the bullet of a terminal condition to create a steady state, a sustainable new world. Everything’s ready for an ongoing, progressive populist uprising. And we are at the very beginning of it right now.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
I hope you’re right. For the first time in my 72 years of life, I feel powerless and hopeless, and it really frightens me. Thanks for bringing some light to what feels like doomsday.
A problem seems to be that the more challenging or desperate economic conditions are for impoverished people, the more degraded the environment becomes from willingness to mine, cut forest, use pesticides, end protection for endangered species, dam rivers and flare off natural gas. I’ve seen this phenomenon especially in central america. Stealing trees from the Biosphere park in Guatemala, setting forest fires to graze cattle, But its not just impoverishment either. The wealthy corporations, wipe out extensive tracts of rainforest for sugar cane and palm oil production. In Albuquerque, huge housing developments get approval with little evidence that there will be water to support the growth. In Carlsbad, the politicians argue that bringing all of the US nuclear reactor waste will provide a few jobs. So now we irradiate ourselves for economic growth. Duh. As if we didn’t have enough from uranium piles, an atom bomb test, WIPP fire and explosion, Los Alamos contamination and plan to release a gigantic amount of Tritium into our air space along with military base contamination of our aquifers with jet fuel and PFAS. And even though Sandia Labs says it has the resources to clean up its Mixed Waste Landfill if the NM Environment Department simply gives the Order to do so, the NMED is mired in its own intransigence. Please plant a tree today.