Rebel Without a Pause

Image source: robertlpeters.com

There was a nice piece in Planet Green last week on one of my intellectual heroes, the inimitable Professor Noam Chomsky. I first came across him more than 20 years ago when I read The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, a long time before people started talking about the so-called Washington Consensus. I have read a lot of his stuff since, and listened to countless interviews, and he has never wavered from his radical position; one reason, perhaps, for the ‘rebel without a pause’ tag given to him by Bono.

As the Planet Green article notes, the environmental movement needs to take a resolute, Chomskyesque approach if it is to achieve its aims. Chomsky himself puts the case very succinctly in the 1992 Manufacturing Consent documentary:

“Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain. Now it’s long been understood–very well–that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist–with whatever suffering and injustice it entails–as long as it’s possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage can. At this stage of history, either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community issues guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others or–alternatively–there will be no destiny for anyone to control.”

Is It Too Late to Prevent Catastrophic Climate Change?

People in 181 countries are coming together today to take part in arguably the most widespread day of environmental action in history. An estimated 5200 events are scheduled to take place around the world, to call for strong action and decisive leadership on the climate crisis. The main objective is to draw attention to the science of climate change and what constitutes an acceptable level of CO2 in the atmosphere. The figure is 350 parts per million (ppm); hence the formation of 350.org. Right now, it is around 389 ppm. Meanwhile our politicians are saying that 450 is politically realistic. If you agree with Clive Hamilton, then 450 is simply not acceptable at all. This speech, entitled: Is It Too Late to Prevent Catastrophic Climate Change? was delivered in Sydney at a meeting of the Royal Society of the Arts last Wednesday, and the message is very depressing.

Political tipping points or natural tipping points?

ngopost.org

Lester Brown’s book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, asks whether we can cut carbon emissions fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet, whether we can close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save the glaciers in the Himalayas, and whether we can we stabilise population by lowering birth rates before nature takes over and halts population growth by raising death rates. The political imperative looms ever larger as finite resources — long exploited as though they are in infinite supply — become exhausted. Brown makes reference, for example, to Saudi Arabia which, in early 2008, announced that it would no longer be self-sufficient in wheat because the non-replenishable aquifer it has been pumping for irrigation was largely depleted. Production will cease entirely in 2016, meaning a population of 30 million will need to import all its wheat. The problem of over-pumping is far more acute in India where 175 million Indians are being fed with grain produced from wells that are running dry, and in China where 130 million are affected. Meanwhile, with the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melting at an accelerating pace, sea level rises are set to inundate much of the Mekong Delta, which produces half of the rice in Viet Nam, the world’s second-ranking rice exporter.

Brown observes that food shortages led to the demise of earlier civilisations such as the Sumerians and the Mayans, and that dwindling food supplies may be the undoing of twenty-first century civilisation as well. “It is decision time,” says Brown. “We can stay with business as usual and watch our economy decline and our civilisation unravel, or we can adopt Plan B and be the generation that mobilises to save civilisation.”