it's getting pretty bad out there. even if it isn't bad now, and it really is, how will it be by the end of the century with double the number of people on the planet? got a solution for that? i doubt it. global corporate government is trying to lock down the final loose ends to give it permanent, absolute control. madmen have had these dreams before. in the end, they'll be no match for the forces rebelling against them.
the danger this time, though, is global warming. for the first time ever, with the possible exception of a global nuclear war, human extinction has become a very real possibility. the cure will clearly not be to the liking of our corporate overlords. they will provide a massive disinformation campaign using their control of the mass media. they will distract us with war between nations based on all sorts of false causes. and they will seize control of national governments or blackmail them to cooperate with their profit-focused, pollution-blind agendas.
the counterpunch is well underway. for the most part, it's still well beneath the radar. the revolution will not be televised. but something is surely going on. in the US, what more than 25 years of pro-corporate presidents have done has become very visible even to those not paying attention. Co2 out of control, genetically modified crops, seeds that don't reproduce, oil intensive industries and lifestyles, SUV madness, child labor, and the virtual collapse of an aging infrastructure are all the dirty work of those with no social conscience and only shareholder profits as their guide. but, in the most organic but disconnected way, slowly, far too slowly, the resistance is building.
source:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/09/3087/Grass Roots Rising: Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest“Blessed Unrest” is about a movement that no one has noticed, not even the people involved. “The movement,” as Paul Hawken calls it, is made up of an unknowable number of citizens and mostly ragtag organizations that come and go. But when you do see it, you understand it to include NGOs, nonprofit agencies and a seemingly disparate range of people who might describe themselves as environmental activists, as well as people who might not describe themselves as anything at all but are protesting labor injustices, monitoring estuaries, supporting local farming or defending native people from being robbed of the last forests. <skip>
“If there is a pervasive criticism of global capitalism that is shared by all actors in the movement, it is this observation: goods seem to have become more important, and are treated better, than people. What would a world look like if that emphasis were reversed?” The movement, most importantly, is very lowercase, its sensitivity being its great strength and, naturally, its tactical weakness. Do-gooding will always have a perception problem. Mountaintop-removal mining rarely risks seeming behind the times, even though it is; Amazonian tribesmen’s marching on a World Trade Organization meeting seems futile and quixotic, even though it’s not.
The rationale for the movement is sprinkled through the book like smelling salts. By the middle of the century, Hawken writes, resources per person on the globe will drop by half. Pesticide residues are prevalent in soft drinks in India. The World Bank helps pay for an oil pipeline through the Mindo Nabillo Cloudforest in Ecuador. Species extinction and poverty abound while profits soar. “The world’s top 200 companies have twice the assets of 80 percent of the world’s people, and that asset base is growing 50 times faster than the income of the world’s majority,” Hawken notes. According to Hawken, the movement’s modus operandi is to work at the edges, on lower levels. The movement is an alternative to the old choice of Communism or capitalism, and the current one of freedom versus terror. “Instead of isms it offers processes, concerns and compassion,” he writes. “The movement demonstrates a pliable, resonant and generous side of humanity. It does not aim for the utopian … but is eminently pragmatic.”
When you read about the movement, Hawken says, its members are usually described as anarchists or at least nut jobs - as was evident during the anti-W.T.O. demonstrations in Seattle in 1999, when a bumbling police force turned a protest into a riot, and the TV news crews focused on the relatively few ski-masked window breakers rather than the scores of scientists, conservationists and community service workers who were demonstrating. Hawken sees the roots of the movement in the dawn of abolitionism in 19th-century America and in Gandhi’s Thoreau-inspired civil disobedience — even though the abolitionists and Gandhi would probably say there had been a movement, also with a public relations problem, long before they showed up. The high point of the book is Hawken’s excellent critique of the chemical industry’s attack on Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962, which shows that the corporate P.R. response to ecological criticism has not changed much. Carson (who kept private the cancer that was killing her) was billed as a hysterical “spinster” and a “fanatical defender of the cult of the balance of nature.” One doctor, dismissing Carson’s indictment of DDT and other chemicals, wrote that ” ‘Silent Spring,’ which I read word for word with some trauma, kept reminding me of trying to win an argument with a woman. It can’t be done.” <skip>
“Blessed Unrest” is not a glass-half-full book. But Hawken does imply that the movement — which he estimates at perhaps two million organizations strong — is a sign of life stirring in the beaten-up bowels of the planet, part of the earth’s own immunological response, as executed collectively (maybe even semiconsciously) by “social antibodies.” Hawken, studiously avoiding the language of religion, ends up groping for a faith-free yet faith-based terminology to describe what connects people who put aside their own immediate material needs, if just for a second. “Sustainability, ensuring the future of life on earth, is an infinite game, the endless expression of generosity on behalf of all,” he says. Hawken, it seems, is hoping for a miracle, which by definition is possible only because it’s impossible. At the very least, knowing that other people are thinking along those lines makes such a thing seem a little more likely.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
