In the wake of September’s U.N. Summit on Sustainable Development (an oxymoron), and as a lead in to the U.N. Climate Change Conference in early December, let us read this post, sign Derrick Jensen’s petition, and prepare to act in defense of our Mother Earth.
Remember, as Simon Parkes put it recently in his October newsletter, it is in the interests of the Global Industrial Complex to transition to renewable energy solutions, IF they are large, centralized, and subject to the usual corporate controls:
“The reality is that even though there are large stocks of crude oil, the depth and situation means it is no longer a realistic source for stocks and bond holders who will see their dividends continually falling. These same corporations will if unchecked simply move to electricity. This is how it would work; an electric car can travel at over 100 mph but currently can only travel for a distance of between 100-250 miles on one charge. Envisage the scene, you drive up to the ‘filling’ station, drive on to a ramp, your car is lifted up, the battery pack is removed from underneath your vehicle, a new battery is fitted and off you go! The system has maintained its control, only the substance of fueling has changed and thus the elite maintain their monopoly.”
An Open Letter to Reclaim Environmentalism
by Derrick Jensen
Excerpt:
It is long past time for those of us whose loyalties lie with wild plants and animals and places to take back our movement from those who use its rhetoric to foster accelerating ecocide. It is long past time we all faced the fact that an extractive way of life has never had a future, and can only end in biotic collapse. Every day this extractive culture continues, two hundred species slip into that longest night of extinction. We have very little time left to stop the destruction and to start the repair. And the repair might yet be done: grasslands, for example, are so good at sequestering carbon that restoring 75 percent of the planet’s prairies could bring atmospheric CO2 to under 330 ppm in fifteen years or less. This would also restore habitat for a near infinite number of creatures. We can make similar arguments about reforestation. Or consider that out of the more than 450 dead zones in the oceans, precisely one has repaired itself. How? The collapse of the Soviet Empire made agriculture unfeasible in the region near the Black Sea: with the destructive activity taken away, the dead zone disappeared, and life returned. It really is that simple.
You’d think that those who claim to care about biodiversity would cherish “objective evidence” like this. But instead the conservation-industrial complex promotes nuclear energy (or windmills). Why? Because restoring prairies and forests and ending empires doesn’t fit with the extractive agenda of the global overlords.
And yet, it’s tricky: calling hands-off to humans for much of the world’s open spaces CAN play right into the hands of, and mimic the calls for, wild nature — as outlined in the centrally controlled U.N. Agenda 21 plan that would corral everyone in cities, and exert even more control on how our food is produced.
The point is that everywhere, each of us must feel into the ground upon which we walk, listen to what She needs — pay attention! Localize, simplify, “grow your own in concert with friends and neighbors,” and, above all, continue to opt-out of top-down corporate power while integrating with bottom-up human mycellium networks.
Let us take seriously the idea that we must, each of us, where we live and right now, begin to “degrade” our “lifestyle,” — let us agree to slip into our “discomfort zone,” use less energy, live less “large,” live more closely with others, limit travel (especially flying), stop worshiping the latest devices, start fixing, repurposing, and sharing things rather than buying new ones — etc. I.e., let us agree to back off our insistent call for more, more, more, so that we may lessen our extractive footprints and take utterly seriously the critical, crying needs of our dear home planet.
