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We're a Nation of Lemmings
Listening to the endless stream of cars passing my house every day, and knowing, from watching them from my mailbox, that they are almost all carrying just one person, either commuting to work or running some kind of errand, I know we are headed for disaster.
Two days ago, there was a report by Agence France Presse about the ongoing destruction of the world's remaining wetlands (60 percent have already been destroyed by man over the past century), and how they contain within them an amount of stored carbon equal to all the carbon currently in the atmosphere. Global warming and property development are drying out those remaining wetlands, causing the release of that carbon, which will more than negate even the most radical efforts at reducing carbon emissions from power plants, factories and automobiles.
There are also credible, well-researched reports that even a few more degrees of temperature rise in the arctic regions of Siberia and northern North America will melt the permafrost and release as much 400 gigatons of methane gas trapped in frozen clathrates for millennia -- the release of which would cause global temperatures to soar to levels not seen in 250 million years (methane is 20 times as potent a global warming gas as CO2). Vast regions of Siberia are already bubbling with releasing methane as the permafrost line moves north.
Now I grant that our corporate media, ever focused laser-like on important stories like Britney Spears' return to the stage and on the latest gaffe of one or the other presidential candidate, have not been very interested in alerting the masses to these disasters now in progress that could end humanity's run on the planet (along with exterminating most of the rest of the life on the planet too). But that said, at this point everyone has surely heard enough, and witnessed enough in person of the dramatic changes taking place in the earth's climate, to know that something scary is going on.
And yet, people are not just going about their business as usual -- they are actually, for the most part, complaining not about the lack of highly energy-efficient transportation, the lack of alternative and less energy-wasting public transit, and the lack of government funding for a crash program into researching carbon-free energy solutions, but rather about the high price for carbon fuels. People are clamoring for solutions to make gasoline cheaper!
Years ago, back in the 1970s during an Arab-led oil embargo, when gas prices soared, there were mass campaigns to organize car pools. No such campaigns are being organized today, and if any are they don't get any media attention. Instead we read that geologists are saying that massive quantities of untapped oil reserves exist in the far north.
Now the last thing we should be wanting to do is take that nicely sequestered carbon out of the ground and burn it into CO2! But that's what many Americans want done. Screw the climate! We want our cheap gas!
There are so many things we could be doing right now to reduce carbon emissions -- as individuals and as a nation. Turning off air-conditioners would be one. Why should entire houses be cooled by central air? Cool one room and use it for the hottest part of the day if need be. Live downstairs during the hottest months and close off the upstairs when it gets too hot. Ditto in the winter. There's no need to occupy and heat an entire house when it gets really cold. Most Americans' homes are way too large anyhow, but if you need that much room, use it when it doesn't require all that extra energy to heat and cool. (When I lived in Cambridge, England as a kid, we used to sleep in unheated bedrooms under cozy comforters, and then in the morning, I'd go down and light a fire in the living room where we'd be during the day. It would be cold as hell until the fire started, but not for long.) Share rides. Plan errands so that many things get taken care of on one outing, instead of in multiple run-outs. Use bicycles. I have yet to see, on my own bike rides in down or when driving anywhere, someone who is actually riding a bike on some errand-carrying a load in a basket or in a backpack. The only bikers I see are people dressed like Tour de France racers out for some exercise. What's the matter with using bikes for a purpose, instead of the family car?
I'm not trying to criticize, or to say I'm more ecologically virtuous. I'm looking at this as an unprecedented disaster that is dooming my kids, or their future children, to a life of strife, misery and maybe even catastrophe. If I don't take serious action -- and I don't just mean individual life changes, but political action -- to try and save their world, I am guilty of a serious crime. And so are we all.
What the hell happened to any sense of shared responsibility, not just for society, but for our own offspring?
Most decent parents are ready to sacrifice in their lifestyles in order to send their kids to college, or to help them out financially when they are starting out as young adults. But for some strange reason nobody seems ready to sacrifice at all when it comes to rescuing their collective future. This makes no sense.
And yet, this is what our mass culture has done to us. As a nation, as a people, we cannot think beyond our own noses. We cannot even think about the need to act in our own and our children's interest.
Seventeen years ago, I had occasion while living in Shanghai, China, to visit a rural area in Anhui Province that the year before had been devastated by a flood so huge that the entire region had been not just flooded, but put deep underwater. As I neared a county seat town that was my intended destination, the bus I was on passed a dike-building project. Thousands of peasants were laboring by hand, with shovels and wheelbarrows, to erect a 50-foot wall of earth to keep the river in its banks in the event of another such flood. I got off the bus and, with my travel companion, started walking towards the project. When we were spotted, thousands of those workers dropped their shovels and ran towards us. It was a terrifying moment to have so many people heading towards and surrounding us, but they were very friendly -- just curious because none of them had ever met a westerner. We began talking with them, and learned that they were all peasants who had left their fields to build this colossal new Great Wall of dirt. They brought us to the worksite and showed us how they would bring their wheelbarrows to the base of the dike, and then attach a cable, which was connected to a winch operated by those ubiquitous one-cylinder, two-stroke kerosene tractors used across rural China. The winch would whip the barrow up the steep hillside, with a peasant running up behind keeping it upright. At the last minute, the peasant would flip the barrow, dumping the dirt and releasing the hook. Then he'd be off down the hill to collect more dirt.
What struck me, besides their ingenuity, was how all these thousands of people had left their own fields to labor for the collective good that year.
I tried at the time to contemplate my fellow Americans doing the same thing, and couldn't for the life of me imagine it.
Now we're in that moment. We know the flood is coming, but no one is willing to join the brigade to take preventive action.
No. Buying a Prius is not taking action. Neither is upgrading the insulation on your house or buying carbon offsets when you fly. We need, as a nation, to commit to seriously ending our addiction to fossil fuels, to rapacious development and the concomitant destruction of forests and wetlands. We need to end our nation's imperialist policies and to instead devote the trillion dollars a year spent on war to saving the planet from ourselves.
A good start would be seeing that people "get it." That would mean communities starting to organize around improving mass transit, arranging for carpooling, and demanding climate-saving action from our political leaders.
I'm not optimistic.
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
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58 Comments so far
Show All"The financial and political crises in Amaerica are coming together in a perfect storm. It will not be pretty, but in crisis there is always opportunity for change. That change will come from an awakening of the masses and not from a lot of fatalistic moaning."
Agreed, Dreamjoehill.
The perfect storm is beginning to hit us, yet I find no value in hand-wringing and moaning about how doomed we are. If that is the case, then that is the case. I choose to go down fighting with a modicum of grace.
Notice that I said "go down fighting." This is the good fight. THE good fight. We are starting to see and feel the tipping point and we have a choice of pissing and moaning about it or trying, however quixotically that may be (and I'm not convinced it is), to steer us in a different direction.
This is why I find the political threads and posts so inane. They all point to changes coming from someone else. It won't. It never has and never will. It must come from us. It must come from individuals like you and me. That is the only way change has ever come. The only way. Waiting for someone else to fix our problems harkens back to the halcyon days of childhood. Well, we are children no longer. It sounds trite, but it is true: We are the ones we have been waiting for. What we do matters as much as what we don't do.
What I hope is that those who consider themselves conscious and at all enlightened will wake up to the fact that they MUST change. WE all must change. It starts with each of us as individuals. Ah, but that is the rub, isn't it? Personal change is very difficult. It requires us to honestly challenge our assumptions and beliefs and change what is false. Are we up to it, fellow "progressives"? Are you?
OK, I'm up to it. I live in a manufactured home with two older dogs and a cat. Tomorrow I'll leave the air conditioning off all day and by evening we'll all be dead of heat stroke. So you won't be hearing from me again on CD or anywhere else.
anbaric_lite, you are right. And the ones who won't lie down will be the ones who are happily consuming now. Because they have a sense of entitlement. You just know that the ones who have the hummers and the SUVs and the swimming pools and the enormous air-conditioned houses now are the ones who, when things start going bad, will metaphorically - and maybe literally – start shooting those they blame, screaming that they don't deserve to be treated like this and saying that their children should be protected above all others.
And you know what the sad thing is. They'll probably win. Because they're selfish. And stupid. And nasty. And all that is good and right and unselfish about the human race, all that has beauty and worth and dignity, will be lost for generations because these people will be more dominant than they have been for a long, long time.
Of course, we could avoid all that. Blowing up hummers and SUVs would be a good start. With their owners in them. Bit of grief, and some of us going to jail, now could save a lot of grief in the future.
Well those selfish, stupid and nasty people sure are dominant in Cumberland, MD and the surrounding Allegany County, MD and nearby Mineral County, WV.
And practically all of them drive very large SUVs. Photos of their children appear on a regular basis in the newspaper being awarded this or that degree or business scholarship. Their kids never seem to join the military, yet these are the very people who wave the flag with fervor and bad-mouth the small handful of more enlightened folk of this area.
They're raising thousands upon thousands of dollars to build a new high school sports stadium to replace the perfectly good high school sports stadium yet if the local UU Fellowship advertises a meeting to discuss global climate change it has to be canceled due to lack of interest. the local newspaper actually runs letters to the editor (on a regular basis) written by people who claim that global heating doesn't even exist, and that the planet is actually cooling. The local Chamber of Commerce recently applauded efforts by the 1st Maryland Congressional district to block any attempts at curbing greenhouse gas emissions because of the detrimental effect it would have on two local businesses--the coal fired power plant and the paper mill.
The local Republican Congressman, Roscoe Bartlett, refuses to reveal his income taxes, apparently having to do with some questionable real estate deals. And were you to read this Cumberland Times-News carefully, you'd think that all the current problems we now face were recognized a decade ago by the Republicans who
have been working steadily over the years to fix them but have simply been prevented from doing so by the Democrats. Republicans have, for example, ALWAYS opposed fraudulent mortgage lending practices by large banks....
It's a sorry situation around here. No wonder people are writing books about Cumberland, MD. home of the 372nd MP Company of Abu Grahab infamy. This has got to be one of the most corrupt places in the U.S. They even appointed the retired CEO of a major US corporation as their mayor. Every so often yo see his photo in the paper looking like an Israeli life insurance salesman.
Helping my fellow Earthlings smacks of 'socialism' and therein lies the problem. These false notions injected from childhood on.
Mr. Lindorff,
My comment could stand correction, without a doubt. Yet I know your direction. After Katrina there was damn little local "wage-paid" help, as I am certain you are aware. At one time in this country, perhaps.
As to the difference between Communism, a la Mao, and military-fascist, either will pay wages when necessary to prevent the unsettling of the peasants. The U.S. does the same thing. Although I believe we are more military-fascist than democratic republic. And, really, when it comes down to "local help" defines communism conceptually much more eloquently than poor Marx's model having been twisted by every, never mind...Lenin, Stalin, Mao. Those are the billboard models.
Other than that, my daughter is fluent, also.
Believe me, this reposte is not about one-up-manship. I am hoping I have provided more articulation for my view. I realize that there is a reaction to the word "communism,' especially when uttered by a Westerner. Intellectually inclined people assume that all Americans are ignorant, illiterate, beer-swilling "commie-haters." And probably with good reason. But do me a favor and try to jump that stereotype. Because, believe me, the world see us as Corporate Pigs, not as honorable, humanitarian people reaching out to aid the poor, the enslaved etc. ad nauseum.
But most of us make these mistakes because it doesn't promote our cause or we, simply, don't know the person and could care less.
I mean, face it. You thought I was attacking when all I did was examine. That's fine. But I won't get down on my knees metaphorically or literally. Not to you or Bush.
And I still worry about my daughter being caught up in a Chinese "cultural cleansing."
Listen to Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and all the other right-wing bloviators. They absolutely deny global warming and refer to those who do believe in it as various kinds of idiots, morons, retards, loonies, whackos, and Chicken Littles . These people have millions of admiring, fawning, believing listeners, who believe every word they say without question like it's Holy Gospel. If the human race is going to save itself from itself, it can only happen if there is absolute unity of purpose. We are nowhere near to that. Half this country can't even be bothered to vote in a Presidential election, and of those who DO vote, (allegedly)half voted twice to install the biggest, the greediest, most arrogant, money and power-hungry gang of thieves, thugs, crooks, shysters, and whores in history into the halls of power. Turning around that kind of entrenched, bone-deep stupidity would be difficult in the best of circumstances. With the likes of Limbaugh, Coulter, O'Reilly, and Hannity reinforcing it daily, it is impossible.
The human race had a great run. The good news is that we will leave a detailed record of how we blew off life in the the most beautiful place in the universe. I wonder what those who discover our relics, be they evolutionary or extra-terrestrial, will think of a race that was so smart, and in the end, so stupid.