OMNI
ANTHROPOCENE NEWSLETTER #2
COMPILED BY DICK BENNETT FOR A
CULTURE OF PEACE, JUSTICE, AND ECOLOGY
OMNI ANTHROPOCENE
NEWSLETTER #1, January 23, 2016.
Part I: The dominant
economic system is leading our civilization to great disasters, and conditions
will certainly lead to planetary catastrophe if radical correctives are not enacted
soon. Part II: We must change the economic system
thoroughly, and we can, not by partial, stopgap reforms, but by changing to a
system providing protection of the earth for future generations and substantive
equality for all.
Contents,
OMNI Anthropocene Newsletter #2
THE
CATASTROPHE
Gerald Sloan,
“Outer Space as a Gated Community”
Part
One: How Could We Have Known?
Dick’s Timeline
of Climate Research and Publication
Gerald
Sloan, “Termite Dreams”
Dick’s
Review of Kolbert’s The 6th
Extinction
THE
RESISTANCE
Part
Two: Resistance and Reconstitution
Dawson’s Extinction vs.
Kolbert’s The 6th Extinction
Angus, Facing the
Anthropocene
Chapters: 10:
“Accelerating into the Anthropocene,” 1945-73; 11: US Class Society:
Mitigation vs. Adaptation; 12: System Change for Human Needs; 13: Change Power
and Privilege, Cochabamba People’s Agreement, the Movement We Need
Mitigation vs. Adaptation; 12: System Change for Human Needs; 13: Change Power
and Privilege, Cochabamba People’s Agreement, the Movement We Need
Illth, the Anthropocene and US Capitalism,
Militarism, and Empire
Williams, Chris. Ecology and Socialism
Burkett and Foster, Marx and the Earth
Dick,
Twelve Mechanisms for Breaking the Chains of US Capitalism
OUTER
SPACE AS A GATED COMMUNITY
by Gerald
Sloan
Forsythia and japonica are
in full bloom
but a fifty-degree plunge
in temperature
is in the forecast,
"unseasonal" a criminal
euphemism for what we've
done to nature,
our species terminally
unaware of vegetable
intelligence or what to
make of a "100-year
drought"
or flood which happen annually.
Time to reinvent the
lexicon for a planet
whose fossil fuel will
render us expendable
while the ruling class is
raptured in a bubble.
PART ONE: WHY ANTHROPOCENE?
What’s at Stake: How
Could We Have Known?
Our children ask us,
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
Our grandchildren ask,
what did you do when the earth was unraveled?
Our great-grandchildren ask,
what did you do
when the seasons started failing?
when the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?
(from Dellinger, hieroglyphic stairway)
Was it like a burning building full of
people,
the roof already ablaze,
their clothing and hair scorched?
Yet the people asked questions,
and seemed in no hurry to put out the fire.
(from Brecht, “The Buddha’s Parable of
the Burning House”)
A few saw the fire, studied it, and
reported it.
But ears were stopped and hands were tied.
Some understood the cause, and sought
a new building.
But they were hospitalized as mad, or jailed as un-American.
Still, our children ask us,
what did you do when you knew?
And we replied: how could we have
known?
HOW COULD WE HAVE KNOWN?
A CHRONOLOGICAL SAMPLE OF BOOKS AND ARTICLES REVEALING
THE TIME OUR LEADERS AND THE PUBLIC HAVE HAD TO LEARN ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING AND THE
PRESENT URGENCY OF GLOBAL WARMING AS CLIMATE CATASTROPHE. Compiled by Dick Bennett. The
following chronology of knowledge about increasing CO2 and temperature, and
advancing climate change is taken from OMNI’s ANTHROPOCENE, CLIMATE
CATASTROPHE, MITIGATION, ADAPTATION
NEWSLETTER #2, August 31, 2016 (rev.
Nov. 29, 2016, and additions recently).
Dick Bennett
1926 (the
Russians were early)
Vladimir Vernadsky, The
Biosphere, early Soviet use of key concept of integrated living organisms
and nonliving environment (not trans. into English until 1998). In the same time period Aleksei Pavlov
referred to the Anthropocene and anthropogenic era as the new mainly human
driven geological period.
1945-50 a major spike of warming “marking a Great Acceleration in
human impacts on the environment,” particularly in “fallout radionuclides from
nuclear weapons testing.”
1962
Rachel Carson, Silent
Spring. If undermined, the living
processes of Earth will “return in time” to haunt us.
1963
Rachel Carson, “Our Polluted Environment” introduced the concept of ecosystem—an
integrated ecological perspective--to the US public, and “the need to take it
into account in all of our actions” (Foster, “The Anthropocene Crisis,”
11).
1973
First English appearance of word Anthropocene
in an article by Shantser in the Great
Soviet Encyclopedia.
1980
E. P. Thompson. “Notes on
Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization.”
New Left Review (May-June).
1982
Barry Commoner. The Closing
Circle. Aware of the rift in the
metabolism of the biosphere, warns of “the vast changes in the human relation
to the planet, beginning with the atomic age and the rise of modern… synthetic
chemistry
William Catton. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. There must be
limits to our tremendous appetite for population growth, energy, natural
resources, and consumer goods.
1988
United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change Established. IPCC is a
scientific body under the auspices of the United Nations (UN). It reviews and
assesses the most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic information
produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of climate change. It
was first established in 1988 by two United Nations organizations, the World
Meteorological Organization (WMO)
and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and later endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly through Resolution 43/53.
1990
The IPCC published its first
assessment report in 1990, a
supplementary report in 1992, 2nd assessment report in1995, third assessment report (TAR) in 2001, fourth assessment report (AR4) in 2007, and fifth assessment report (AR5) in 2014.
The IPCC inspired an outpouring of research and publications.
Colin Hocking, et al.
Global Warming and the Greenhouse
Effect. A textbook for grades 7 to 10. The earliest textbook for youths on climate
change of which I am aware.
1991
Edburg and Yablokov, Tomorrow
Will Be Too Late.
1992
Al Gore. Earth
in the Balance. (One of
the earliest books inspired by the IPCC reports.) Before
the expression “Green Apollo program” gained
usage, Gore “and numerous others” had urged such a program (Hertsgaard
272). “Gore had urged the U.S.
government to initiate a green Marshall Plan.”
1995
1998
Mark Hertsgaard in Earth Odyssey foretold massive dangers
ahead and “proposed
a Global Green Deal, modeled on the New
Deal” of FDR (from his Hot).
Thomas Casten. Turning
Off the Heat: Why
America Must Double Energy Efficiency to Save Money and Reduce Global
Warming. Notable
for having been published so early, and in fact he had started his warnings
about C02 in 1975.
2001
2002
Paul Crutzen’s essay “Geology of Mankind” in Nature suggests assigning term
“Anthropocene” to the present based upon the alteration of the atmosphere by
fossil fuel combustion and deforestation. The idea was formally studied and
accepted by the stratigraphy committee of the Geological Society of London, which
passed the idea up to the International Commission on Stratigraphy. Their decision was expected in 2016. (Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction, 108-110).
2004
Ross Gelbspan. Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal,
Journalists, and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis—and What We Can Do to
Avert Disaster. Note
the date—Gelbspan’s book the earliest strong book-length warning of the climate
cover-up that I know of.
2005
Jared Diamond. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Diamond says that a
society can either see environmental
problems or not. If they recognize the problem they
can act to solve it or they can ignore it or they can take
ineffective action (from Malcolm Cleveland)
Mark Lynas. High
Tide: News from a Warming World. From a review by Nicholas
Lezard
in The
Guardian, 25
March 2005. “It really ought to be
read by everyone. . . .a passionate argument, with much evidence, for us to do
something about the catastrophe facing the planet as a result of our dependency
on fossil fuels.” "If there's one
message above all that I want people to take from these pages," Lynas
writes, "it's this: that all the impacts described here are just the first
whispers of the hurricane of future climate change which is now bearing down on
us."
James Bovard. Attention
Deficit Democracy. Why the public ignores political and
corporate frauds and swallows pervasive lies, why they are indifferent to facts
and increasingly incapable of judging when their rights and liberties are being
destroyed.
2007
George Monbiot. Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. Climate change “is the greatest danger the world now faces” (212). Monbiot favorably cites an article by Colin Forrest that makes the case that if CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere remain what they were in 2005, the average temperature would reach 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels. “Beyond this point, in other words, climate change is out of our hands” (xi). The “only means” to stop this rise “is for the rich nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent by 2030” (xii). Monbiot tells why he thinks this is feasible.
Collectif Argos. Climate
Refugees. (Orig. Fr. Ed. 2007). Predicts that by 2050, there will be 150
million climate refugees resulting
from permafrost melt, island nations submerged, desertification, floods,
glacial melt, hurricanes.
Howard Odum. Environment, Power, and Society. Discusses
the biosphere, the earth as a system, the metabolism of the earth’s thin outer
shell threatened by the overgrowth by capitalism.
2008
Mark Lynas. Six Degrees:
Our Future on a Hotter Planet. Lynas
cites the Katrina hurricane flooding of New Orleans as “what the 21st
century may have in store for many more of us, in a thousand locations across
the world, as climate change accelerates” (14).
“With up to 6 degrees Celsius, or 10.6 degrees Fahrenheit, of global
warming in the cards over the next hundred years,” according to the IPCC, “will
we all…be reduced to eking out a living from shattered remains of
civilization…?” (15). Lynas is
optimistic humans can muster the scientific/technical knowledge and the
political will, but “we need to cut emissions [to 400 ppm to “keep us within
the two degrees safety target”] and do so within a decade” (300) (i.e. 2017).
James Gustave Speth. The
Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from
Crisis to Sustainability. “There is a bridge at the edge of the
world. But. . .there is not much time”
(13).
2009
James Hansen. Storms
of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our
Last Chance to Save Humanity. “…we are running out of time” (xi). “It’s
crucial that we immediately recognize the need to reduce atmospheric carbon
dioxide to at most 350 ppm….” (xi). “…a
change of direction is urgent. This is
our last chance” (xii). “Our planet…is
in imminent danger of crashing” (277) yet our politicians hesitate to act. “…the
biggest obstacle to solving global warming is the role of money in politics,
the undue sway of special interests.” (x).
German Advisory Council on
Global Change (WBGU), led by Hans Schellnhuber, chief climate adviser to
the government of Germany, argued that 2 degrees centigrade temperature rise
must be the limit, which would “require bringing down atmospheric
concentrations [of CO2] fast.” “Greenhouse gas emissions had to fall at
incredible speed.” Hertsgaard, Hot, 249. Schellnhuber “put a new name on a set of
ideas and policies that Al Gore and numerous others had already proposed”
(272).
Al Gore. Our
Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.
Gore stresses urgency in every chapter. For example, Chap. 14: “In communicating the
urgency of the climate crisis….” (315). Referring to the market economy, “change is
urgently needed….” (Chap. 15, 320). Chap. 16, “We urgently need solutions to
remove the political obstacles that block us from confronting the mortal threat
of the climate crisis to the future of civilization.” [This is a magnificent textbook, illuminating
and stimulating in both text and graphics.
–D]
Larry Schweiger. Last Chance.
“Decades of complacency and inattention…eight years of …Bush
administration coupled with procrastination and partisan politics of a divided
Congress have set the stage for enormous and permanent climatic
consequences....we must do much more much faster than we previously believed…to
divert a worldwide catastrophe” (8-9).
“We cannot take baby steps when much bolder action is required”
(6). Schweiger writes elsewhere of his
hope in the new President Obama, which was not realized. [Schweiger was president and CEO of the
National Wildlife Federation.]
2010
Robert Jensen. “In the Face of This Truth” YES MAGAZINE. It’s time to talk honestly about collapse–no matter how others may respond.
Bill McKibben.
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough
New Planet. After
listing some of the massive changes to the earth in recent decades: “These
should come as body blows, as mortar barrages, as sickening thuds. The Holocene is staggered, the only world
that humans have known is suddenly reeling.
I am not describing what will happen if we don’t take action, or warning
of some future threat. This is the current inventory” (5). ”We need now to understand the world we’ve
created, and consider—urgently—how to live in it. . . .But hope has to be
real. It can’t be a hope that the
scientists will turn out to be wrong ,
or that President Barack Obama [or some other magic] can somehow fix
everything….Maturity is not the opposite of hope; it’s what makes hope
possible” (xiv).
Peter Ward. The
Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps.
Introduction, “Miami Beached”: “What might make [the increase in sea
level] unique is the rate at which it is happening. There is every reason to believe that we are
on the cusp of the most rapid rate of sea level rise in Earth history….”(10).
Chap. 3, “The Flood of Humans”:
The correlation between increasing population and rising seas. “The rise in our numbers, more than any
other reason, will ensure the rise of the sea—which not only will happen but
also might be vastly underestimated unless we take immediate action” (90).
Chap. 5, “Greenland, Antarctica, and Sea Level.” Describes from polar melting to rising seas.
Gwynne Dyer. Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as
the World Overheats. Warming will increase militarism and
wars. Without drastic reduction in C02
the planet will heat 4 degrees by 2060.
2011
Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt:
How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to
Global Warming.
2011. Film based on book appeared in 2015.
Merchants of Doubt was one of the most talked-about climate change books of recent years, for reasons easy to understand: It tells story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades.
Merchants of Doubt was one of the most talked-about climate change books of recent years, for reasons easy to understand: It tells story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades.
Lester Brown. World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic
Collapse. Brown’s long-developed “Plan B” urges “massive mobilization—at
wartime speed.” We did it during WWII.
Mark Hertsgaard, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on
Earth. The
“first era of global warming (“the battle to prevent dangerous climate change”)
began on June 23, 1988—the day James Hansen told the U.S. Senate that man-made
global warming had begun.” By the turn
of the century “the second era,” “the race to survive it had begun.” “On the one hand, we must reverse global
warming [lower the global temperature], and quickly—before the climate system
passes tipping points,” and we must “prepare our societies for the serious
climate impacts that are already in the pipeline” (24-25). Hertsgaard in Hot urged “a crash program,” a “Green
Apollo” (272) “for the rapid deployment of green technologies and
practices” (273).
2012
Three World Bank’s reports begin, published as Turn Down the Heat (2014), based on IPCC and Hansen’s methods regarding average and extreme temperatures. Business as usual will push average to 4 degrees or over.
Three World Bank’s reports begin, published as Turn Down the Heat (2014), based on IPCC and Hansen’s methods regarding average and extreme temperatures. Business as usual will push average to 4 degrees or over.
Fred
Guterl. The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause
Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It . “A fine scientific
explanation of our abuse of the natural world that, despite the subtitle, does
not explain how to stop it.
“ KIRKUS REVIEW
2013
Tomgram: Dahr Jamail, The Climate Change Scorecard, December 17, 2013. “What, in other words, is the worst that we could possibly face in the decades to come? The answer: a nightmare scenario. So buckle your seat belt. There’s a tumultuous ride ahead.” Tom
Are We Falling Off the Climate Precipice?
Scientists Consider Extinction by Dahr Jamail.
“I grew up planning for my future, wondering which college I would attend, what to study, and later on, where to work, which articles to write, what my next book might be, how to pay a mortgage, and which mountaineering trip I might like to take next.
Now, I wonder about the future of our planet. During a recent visit with my eight-year-old niece and 10- and 12-year-old nephews, I stopped myself from asking them what they wanted to do when they grew up, or any of the future-oriented questions I used to ask myself. I did so because the reality of their generation may be that questions like where they will work could be replaced by: Where will they get their fresh water? What food will be available? And what parts of their country and the rest of the world will still be habitable?” Click here to read more of this dispatch.
Tomgram: Dahr Jamail, The Climate Change Scorecard, December 17, 2013. “What, in other words, is the worst that we could possibly face in the decades to come? The answer: a nightmare scenario. So buckle your seat belt. There’s a tumultuous ride ahead.” Tom
Are We Falling Off the Climate Precipice?
Scientists Consider Extinction by Dahr Jamail.
“I grew up planning for my future, wondering which college I would attend, what to study, and later on, where to work, which articles to write, what my next book might be, how to pay a mortgage, and which mountaineering trip I might like to take next.
Now, I wonder about the future of our planet. During a recent visit with my eight-year-old niece and 10- and 12-year-old nephews, I stopped myself from asking them what they wanted to do when they grew up, or any of the future-oriented questions I used to ask myself. I did so because the reality of their generation may be that questions like where they will work could be replaced by: Where will they get their fresh water? What food will be available? And what parts of their country and the rest of the world will still be habitable?” Click here to read more of this dispatch.
2014
The
National Climate Assessment 2014
Landmark
Report Warns Time is Running Out to Save US from Climate Catastrophe
|
|
 Joe Romm, News
Investigation, NationofChange, May 7, 2014: The National Climate
Assessment is the definitive statement of current and future impacts of
carbon pollution on the |
Naomi Klein. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the
Climate. “Faced with a crisis that
threatens our survival as a species, our entire culture is continuing to do the
very thing that caused the crisis, only with an extra dose of elbow grease
behind it. . . .from conventional sources of fossil fuels to even dirtier and
more dangerous versions….” (2). We must
“change the systems that are making the crisis inevitable” (4). It will require a “Marshall Plan for the Earth,” which will cost
“billions if not trillions of dollars,” but we can do it if we have the will
(5), if we the people quit “looking away” and declare “a crisis worthy of
Marshall Plan levels” (6). “…revolutionary
levels of transformation to the market system” are “now our best hope of
avoiding climate chaos” (56, 449). She
places her faith in “Blockadia”— in which global “climate and environmental-justice
activists, indigenous peoples, workers, socialists, and other groups throw up
barriers to resist the system” (Foster, “Trump and CC”).
George Marshall, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore
Climate Change. In his
conclusion, “Four Degrees: Why this Book Is Important” (pp. 239-42) Marshall
recounts how for a “many years” scientists focused on the catastrophic dangers
of allowing global average temperature to rise 2 degrees Centigrade above the beginning
of the Industrial Revolution. Here
Marshall discusses the increasing conclusion “that four degrees is the actual
future we face” (239). These scientists
refer not to change, a misleading euphemism, but to catastrophe, Praised by Naomi Klein for having “the courage to look
unblinkingly at this existential crisis.”
2015
Nicholas Stern, Why Are We Waiting? “delay
is dangerous. . . .I hope we can help bring about the acceleration in action
that is vital to the management of climate change.” Stern’s book is for “understanding why we
have been moving too slowly….” (xviii).
[A high-level, sophisticated study that weighs seemingly all important
factors of the economics of climate change.
Lord Stern is the Patel Professor of Economics and Government at the
London School of Economics, President of the British Academy, and other
distinguished positions.. –Dick]
Peter Seidel. There
Is Still Time to Look
at the Big Picture…and Act. In his
Preface he writes about his earlier (1998) book, Invisible Walls: Why We
Ignore the Damage We Inflict on Our Planet…and Ourselves. “Since
then, environmental damage has only grown worse . . .It is clear that if we
continue on our current course our future will be grim indeed.” But “facing the dismal facts might get us to
think and change.” In his Recap p. 171,
first of all “We need to: recognize that we are now on a path leading to
catastrophe.”
2016
Ian Angus.
Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil
Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System.
The “central theme of Ian Angus’s marvelous
new book” is the “dialectical interrelation between the acceleration into the
Anthropocene and the acceleration of a radical environmentalist imperative in
response.” The “main achievement” of
the book is the bringing together” of “two aspects of the Anthropocene”:
variously viewed as the geological and the historical, the natural and social,
the climate and capitalism—in one single, integrated view” that “the world,
under ‘business as usual,’ is being catapulted into a new ecological phase—one
less conducive to maintaining biological diversity and a stable human
civilization.” (from “Foreword” by J. B.
Foster).
John Bellamy Foster. “The Anthropocene Crisis.” (Monthly
Review, Sept. 2016). From his Foreword to Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism
and the Crisis of the Earth System. Foster provides a short
history of the increasing awareness of the recently accelerated global warming
that has produced (possibly to be named) the Anthropocene epoch, given expanded
treatment in “Angus’s marvelous new book.”
Foster ends his essay by quoting Bertolt Brecht’s poem “The Buddha’s
Parable of the Burning House,” in which Buddha exhorted the inhabitants to
leave at once, but they did not, but instead asked foolish questions.
Dolack, “No Planet for Optimists.” Z
Magazine (May 2016 ), 4-5. A dire conclusion based
upon recent studies:
Hansen, et al., in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics: “swift action is necessary in the face of a ‘global emergency’” because of “a future catastrophic rise in the oceans.”
Science: planet “already committed…to a six-meter rise in sea level,” which is likely to inundate 444,000 square miles of land “where more than 375 million people live today.”
Even if the goals committed to by the Paris Climate summit in December 2015 were achieved (1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels), temperature globally would rise “nearly 3 degrees Celsius by 2100.” “We have a global emergency” and must drastically reduce fossil fuel CO2 emissions quickly.
What to do? Because our economic system requires constant growth, “There is no alternative to a massive change in industrial activity.”
Hansen, et al., in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics: “swift action is necessary in the face of a ‘global emergency’” because of “a future catastrophic rise in the oceans.”
Science: planet “already committed…to a six-meter rise in sea level,” which is likely to inundate 444,000 square miles of land “where more than 375 million people live today.”
Even if the goals committed to by the Paris Climate summit in December 2015 were achieved (1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels), temperature globally would rise “nearly 3 degrees Celsius by 2100.” “We have a global emergency” and must drastically reduce fossil fuel CO2 emissions quickly.
What to do? Because our economic system requires constant growth, “There is no alternative to a massive change in industrial activity.”
Report in Science, 26 August 2016, page 852:
Here is an update on an important topic in Facing the Anthropocene. The 35th
International Geological Congress met in South Africa during August 2016. Their decision was pretty much what the book
predicted: These geologists are suggesting that a new geological “epoch”
should be established, named “Anthropocene,” that it should begin in 1945-1955,
and that it’s geological “marker” should include the “black carbon” deposited
by coal plants and other fossil fuel plants. –Art Hobson
Art Hobson, “Fires of the
Anthropocene: Human Inaction Setting Stage for Dire Consequences.” NADG (May
24, 2016).
2017
John Bellamy Foster, “Trump
and Climate Catastrophe.” Monthly Review (Feb.
2017). “…capitalism’s threat to planetary boundaries
cannot be solved by stopgap reforms, however radical, that leave the system’s
fundamental features intact while simply transcending its relation to fossil
fuels.”
Art Hobson, “On Course to
Crash.” NADG (Feb. 21, 2017).
EXTINCTIONS
TD was sent to OMNI350 Book Forum committee 11-30-16
TERMITE
DREAMS
By Gerry Sloan
A slight deviation in climate
could trigger the Anthropocene,
i. e. the next great mass extinction.
In my dream the termites have come
to reclaim the corpses of hardwoods
from houses, bridges and buildings,
their appetites voracious, fattened
by decades rife with extermination.
Then will come the climate refugees
clamoring their desperate demands.
DICK’S ESSAY ON KOLBERT’S THE SIXTH EXTINCTION AND DAWSON’S EXTINCTION: A Radical History 2-3-17
Entering the Anthropocene Era, The Anthropogenic Conquest and Sixth Great Extinction
At the
conclusion of chapter one about the sudden global kill-off of amphibians, and
the author’s account of a night search in Panama by scientists for some surviving
frogs, most others killed by the “unstoppable” chytrid fungus, Kolbert reflects
about the three frogs they returned with.
“It occurred to me that the frogs and their progeny, if they had any,
and their progeny’s progeny, if they had any, would never again touch the floor
of the rainforest but would live out their days in disinfected glass
tanks.” And then that night she
experienced “vivid, troubled dreams, the only scene from which I could later
recall was of a bright yellow frog smoking a cigarette through a holder” (22). The entire chapter is a masterpiece of
science reporting, weaving anecdote with multiple contexts ranging in millions
of years, until this final metaphor condenses the latest extinction in a flash.
The
amphibians, who are “among the planet’s great survivors,” “crawling out of the
water some 400 million years ago,” have been decimated throughout the planet in
only a decade by a new fungus in the chytrid family. How was the comic nightmare smoking frog
brought down by a “cigarette” fungus so quickly? By way
of speed of human commerce and globalization (18-19), she argues, the planes
and ships that race from country to country and hemisphere to hemisphere. So why the “cigarette”? A few pages earlier Kolbert had quoted a frog
researcher: “one species has unwittingly
achieved the ability to directly affect its own fate and that of most of the
other species on this planet” (8)
PART II What Can Be Done?
The chytrid fungus can be killed with
bleach, but, well, that’s as preposterous than trying to clean oil from every
dying bird and fish in the Gulf of Mexico after the pipeline spill. So will all other species go the way of the
Neanderthals, who “lived in Europe for more than a hundred thousand years” and
would be living there still, along with the mammoths, the aurochs, and the
wooly rhinos had not homo sapiens appeared?
Here she becomes stuck in her entirely true
understanding of “human nature.” On p. 2
she states for the first of many times her vision of the human Godzilla that
spread throughout the world, until it “reproduce[d] at an unprecedented
rate. In a single century the population
doubles; then it doubles again, and then again.
Vast forests are razed. Humans do
this deliberately, in order to feed themselves.
Less deliberately, they shift organisms from one continent to another,
reassembling the biosphere.” During this
time humans, having discovered coal,
“begin to change the composition of the atmosphere. This in turn alters the climate and the chemistry
of the oceans.” Some plants and animals
adapt, but millions [she’s referring to species here] “find themselves
marooned. Extinction rates soar….”
Scientific research in the hands of an
exceptional writer has produced this dazzling book on massive anthropogenic
extinctions. Science has given us the
understanding. Now what can science do
to prevent further disastrous consequences?
Her final chapter begins with the frozen zoos
at San Diego, Cincinnati, and other zoos.
A reassuring experience? Kolbert
writes: “I try to calculate how many
little plastic vials and vats of liquid nitrogen would be required to store all
the frogs threatened by chitrid and the corals threatened by acidification and
the pachyderms threatened by poaching, and the multitudinous species threatened
by warming and invasives and fragmentation, and soon I give up; there are too
many numbers to keep in my head” (261).
I suggest we all read this aloud loudly, more than once, experimenting
with various voices to convey such hopelessness.
But then she breaks the text to signify a deep
breath or shift in perspective and to ask the question: “Does it have to end this way?” Science, scientists have taught us how we are
“imperiling other species.” In addition
to being destructive, however, humans, scientists “can also be forward
–thinking and altruistic”—think of John Muir, Rachel Carson, and countless
others. In 1974 Congress passed the
Endangered Species Act, and soon afterward the California Condor was brought back
from the brink, and a tremendous effort is under way to save the whooping
crane. So, “wouldn’t it better, practically
and ethically, to focus on what can be done and is being done to save species, rather than to speculate gloomily
about a future in which the biosphere is reduced to little plastic vials? ‘People have to have hope.’” (263).
I doubt anybody will disagree.
But what will be the foundation of that
hope stronger than a handful of successful restorations and a roomful of wishful
thinking? That the altruistic people
will eventually win out over the selfish?
A few pages from the end she recognizes
her “real subject has been the pattern” underlying the individual species
extinctions, “call it the Holocene extinction, or the Anthropocene extinction,
or, if you prefer the sound of it, the Sixth Extinction” (265). Mainly the surface of the earth experienced
gradual or uniformitarian changes, but occasionally—5 times—sudden,
catastrophic changes occurred, caused by glaciation, warming, asteroid impact,
volcanic eruption, and now by human beings (266). What is the pattern by knowledge of which we
can resist? The pattern not merely of change but “the rate of change”—“when the world changes faster than species can
adapt.” How can we slow that rate of
change?
Apparently, she argues, it’s not “whether
people care or don’t care…people change the world.” But can she be more specific, if we are to
grapple with global catastrophe?
It is older than “modernity” (goodbye
Neanderthals), but “modernity is its fullest expression.” But what is modernity? Well, it’s “the qualities that made us human
to begin with: our restlessness, our
creativity, or ability to cooperate to solve problems.” It’s our “use of signs and symbols to represent
the natural world”; this is or was our hope.
Yet they “pushed [us] beyond the limits of that world.” That is, the so-called homo sapiens species is inherently “dangerous to other
species.” To slow the rate of change, we
must change human nature.
Here Kolbert makes her final textual
break, but this time not in a new direction, but to affirm again the human
causation of the 6th Extinction by the exhibit in the floor of the American
Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Biodiversity, and to ask the question,
“what happens to us?” Will we too be
undone by our species’ nature? (I am
about a page from the end of the book.)
And her answer is, very likely.
By disrupting “the earth’s
biological and geochemical systems—cutting down tropical rainforests,
altering the composition of the atmosphere, acidifying the oceans—we’re putting
our own survival in danger.”
But won’t human intelligence and its
science discover some miracle technological remedies? Some people say, “Don’t worry,” our ingenuity
for construction will counter our ingenuity for destruction. But Kolbert dismisses all technological fixes
in one paragraph (268).
What is most important, she concludes in
her final paragraph, is to be aware of this “amazing moment” of our decision to
open or close our “evolutionary pathways.”
I urge you to read her final paragraph on giant rats. See Part III below under Resistance.
Art Hobson, “On the Course
to Crash. Study Firms Up Serious
Concerns for Planet Earth.” NADG (February 21, 2017). “If
we lack the will to really change our habits, this disaster (“sea levels…80
feet higher”) will soon become irrevocable.”
RESISTANCE: we’re
not burning or drowning YET
Part III: From Kolbert to Dawson, Blame Not Human
Nature but the Economic System: Change the System Not the Climate
Kolbert’s
is a geologist’s or archaeologist’s perspective. Like all other life-forms ours will disappear
too, and all we have created. Her final
chapter demonstrates how conflicted she is with such knowledge, how ambivalent,
how upset.
But
she has skipped over a huge reality that might offer stronger hope than she recognizes. If human nature is dangerous to other
species and to itself, human nature embracing the US form of capitalism is extremely
dangerous, for it nourishes the worst in our nature. Here’s why we must seek to displace that
capitalism: the sudden anthropogenic rise
to dominance of the economic system of capitalism can be reversed. Some countries have significantly altered it to
make it less dangerous to life. But
Kolbert does not explore this alternative.
Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything is similar.
She recognizes the origins of climate change in the economic system of
neo-liberal capitalism, but she does not perceive a way to change the system and
institutions. “…the real reason we are failing to rise to
the climate moment is because the actions required directly challenge our
reigning economic paradigm” (neo-liberal, deregulated capitalism). “Only when we identify these chains do we
have a chance of breaking free” (63).
Combined, Kolbert and Klein offer a compendium of the harms of capitalism. And Klein sets forth many remedies,
especially resistance by blockades. But neither exposes the structure or
workings of that economic system that would enable us to abolish it brick by
brick.
What of capitalism
itself? What are its mechanisms
susceptible to analysis, exposure, and change?
What are its chains which we might remove link by link?
Many books offer such analysis. After all, Marx was writing over 100 years
ago. Recently several books that
examine climate change and or extinctions have been published. The best of which I am familiar is by Ian
Angus, Facing the Anthropocene, which
analyzes warming and extinctions. But I’ll discuss for a moment the latest
on extinctions, a primer of only some 100 pages by Ashley Dawson, Extinctions: A Radical History.
Dawson praises Kolbert’s “terrifying
tour” of the planet. But he also deals out severe criticism. Not
human nature, which is a hopeless and despairing argument, but human-created capitalism is the “engine of
the extinction crisis,” and “it is
easier to imagine the end of capitalism than it is to articulate any other
genuine solution” to the crisis (98). Kolbert
attributes ecocide to humanity as a whole.
But it was capitalism that “unleashed waves of enclosure, imperialism,
warfare, and ecocide over the last five hundred years that have benefitted a
very small segment of humanity while displacing, immiserating, enslaving, and
destroying countless number of people, animals, and plants. Everyone is not equally responsible for the
destruction of nature, as Kolbert [266] suggests. Such a sweeping indictment of an
undifferentiated humanity is both historically inaccurate and politically
disempowering. Such a perspective offers
us not understanding of the structural forces that generate exploitation and
ecocide, no sense of how such forces may push the vulnerable to behave in ways
that are antithetical to their long-term interest, and no conception of how
people in the relatively affluent global North might act in solidarity with
those whom Frantz Fanon called ‘the wretched of the earth.’ Such a perspective is truly hopeless” (98-99).
In contrast, Dawson’s Extinction from beginning to end engages in resistance, beginning
where Kolbert ends. Particularly, he
seeks the structural causes of the crisis. Christian Parenti’s concepts of “tropics of
chaos” and “catastrophic convergence” are useful (11-12), and the “global
attack on the commons,” the “world’s common wealth,” the “destruction of global
diversity” by privatization (Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth) are crucial (13).
(OMNI350 has at least touched upon both.) A core energy of capitalism—growth—is
explained as “stripping the world of its diversity and fecundity”: expansion for profit produces increasing
commodification, which becomes “this insatiable maw…consuming entire ecosystems.”
And as Kolbert saw humans being undone
by their own expansion disadvantageous to other species and to themselves,
Dawson sees the human structure of capital accumulation as destroying “its own
conditions of reproduction” as illustrated by the 6th Extinction
(13-14).
Dawson’s “primer on extinction” prepares
us for “this planetary crisis” by integrating study of science,
environmentalism, and radical politics. “Indeed, extinction cannot be understood in
isolation from a critique of capitalism and imperialism” (15). So he begins with “the notion of the
Anthropocene,” the “present catastrophe” (chap. 2), followed by analysis of
extinctions as “products of capitalism” (chap. 3), ending with this statement: “Capitalism, it is clear, cannot solve the
environmental crises it is causing” (62).
Chapter 4,”Anti-Extinction,” critically surveys such efforts as
“rewilding” and “deextinction,” ending with the commodification even of
“disaster biocapitalism.” Chapter 5, “Radical
Conservation,” pp. 83-94, describes an anti-capitalism conservation movement. I think this chapter can stand alone as a
manifesto, you can read it in 15 minutes, and the 6th chapter, the
Conclusion, does not add much.
References For Kolbert and Dawson
DAWSON, Ashley. EXTINCTIONS:
A Radical History. 2016.
KOLBERT, Elizabeth. THE
SIXTH EXTINCTION. Henry Holt, 2014.
Both books provide end notes
and bibliography that combined provide an excellent library of books and
articles on extinction in the Anthropocene Era.
Related Readings
Angus, Ian.
Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth
System. Monthly Review P, 2016. The best book I know that combines both
the science and the politics of the climate catastrophe. Part One gives an excellent summary in 6
chapters of the science of cc. Part Two
in five chapters is about “Fossil Capitalism.”
Part Three, “The Alternative,” two chapters: chapter 12: “Ecosocialism and Human Solidarity,” chapter
13: “The Movement We Need.”
Angus, Ian. A
Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism. Monthly Review P, 2017.
Baran, Paul A. The
Political Economy of Growth. Monthly
Review P, 1957. The creation and use of
economic surplus.
Baran, Paul A. and Paul
Sweezy. Monopoly Capital: An Essay on
the American Economic and Social Order. Monthly
Review P, 1966. Giant corporations.
Burkett and Foster. Marx
and the Earth. 2017.
Klein, Naomi. This
Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate. 2014. Strong
emphasis upon indigenous peoples’ resistance and their blockades.
Lowy, Michael.
Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe. 2015.
Chapter One: What Is
Ecosocialism. Chapter Two: Ecosocialism
and Democratic Planning. Chapter Three:
Ecology and Advertising. Chapters Four
and Five on Indigenous Peoples. Four
important, inspiring Appendices.
Magdoff, Fred and Chris
Williams. Creating an Ecological Society: toward a Revolutionary
Transformation. Monthly Review P,
2017.
O’Connor, James. Natural
Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism.
Guilford P, 1997.
Saito, Kohei. Karl
Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished “Critique of Political
Economy.” Monthly Review P, 2017.
“Ashley
Dawson’s slim and forceful book … makes a case for being the most accessible
and politically engaged examination of the current mass extinction … a welcome
contribution to the growing literature on this slow-motion calamity.” —Matthew
Schneider-Mayerson, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, Yale
University, in the Los Angeles Review of Books
“Dawson's
searing report on species loss will sober up anyone who has drunk the Kool-Aid
of green capitalism. For a bonus, readers will learn a lot from his far-sighted,
prehistoric survey of extinction.” —Andrew Ross, author of Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal
“Dawson
has summed up the threat to our fellow species on Earth with clarity, urgency
and the finest reasoning available within the environmental justice literature.
He explains how capital's appropriation of nature cannot be 'offset,' nor
solutions found in financialization. Fusing social and ecological challenges to
power is the only way forward, and here is a long-awaited, elegant and comprehensive
expression of why the time is right to make these links.”
—Patrick Bond, Professor of Political Economy, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg,
and author of Politics of Climate Justice: Paralysis Above, Movement Below
—Patrick Bond, Professor of Political Economy, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg,
and author of Politics of Climate Justice: Paralysis Above, Movement Below
“A succinct and moving account of the co-evolution of capitalism, imperialism, and climate change. Dawson demonstrates not only how capitalism created climate change but also why the former must be challenged in order to halt the latter. Offering not only critique but also solutions, this rousing book is a great tool for anti-capitalists, climate change activists, and those still making sense of the intrinsic connections between the two.”
—Jasbir Puar, Associate Professor, Graduate Program Director Women's and
Gender Studies, Rutgers University, author of Terrorist Assemblages
“Historically
grounded, densely researched, fluidly written, Ashley Dawson’s book on
extinction is a powerful and painful exploration of human civilization's
environmental irrationalities. Yet Dawson does not see annihilation as
inevitable and he even points towards an alternate path.”
—Christian Parenti, author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change
and the New Geography of Violence
—Christian Parenti, author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change
and the New Geography of Violence
Some thousands of years ago, the
world was home to an immense variety of large mammals. From wooly mammoths and
saber-toothed tigers to giant ground sloths and armadillos the size of
automobiles, these spectacular creatures roamed freely. Then human beings
arrived. Devouring their way down the food chain as they spread across the
planet, they began a process of voracious extinction that has continued to the
present.
Headlines today are made by the
existential threat confronting remaining large animals such as rhinos and
pandas. But the devastation summoned by humans extends to humbler realms of
creatures including beetles, bats and butterflies. Researchers generally agree
that the current extinction rate is nothing short of catastrophic. Currently
the earth is losing about a hundred species every day.
This relentless extinction, Ashley Dawson contends in a primer that
combines vast scope with elegant precision, is the product of a global attack on the commons, the great
trove of air, water, plants and creatures, as well as collectively created
cultural forms such as language, that have been regarded traditionally as the
inheritance of humanity as a whole.
This attack has
its genesis in the need for capital to expand relentlessly into all spheres of
life. Extinction, Dawson argues, cannot be understood in isolation
from a critique of our economic system. To achieve this we need to transgress
the boundaries between science, environmentalism and radical politics. Extinction: A Radical History performs this task
with both brio and brilliance.
Publication July 2016 • 132 pages
Paperback ISBN 978-1-682190-40-1 • E-book 978-1-682190-41-8
Paperback ISBN 978-1-682190-40-1 • E-book 978-1-682190-41-8
IAN ANGUS. FACING THE ANTHROPOCENE
By Dick Bennett, 11-30-16
The book is very
clearly written, yet cannot be speed read because so many passages invite
underlining or an asterisk or exclamation point or a marginal note or a letter
or phone call.
Consider Chapter
6, “A New (and Deadly) Climate Regime” (of increasingly extreme CO2 and heat-related
events). (Well the
opening pages on “Standard Deviation and Sigma Events” regarding average global
temperatures and extreme weather 90- are not easy.) Angus opens with the opinion of James Hansen, maybe the most important
climatologist today (as this book illustrates), that the Paris Agreement to
limit average global temperature to 2 degrees Centigrade above preindustrial
levels is “a fraud” because the agreement is voluntary. That drew my first of several exclamation
marks! Does that matter? Yes, from 2 to 4 degrees is “a huge jump” (and he explains, as he does
all claims throughout). He concludes
his first section with his equally exclamatory statement: “Unless radical changes are made, the
Anthropocene will be marked not just by [increasing overall] warmth but by a
new climate regime [of increasingly extreme heat events], very different from
the 11,700 years of Holocene stability.
This is not just speculation: the transition is well under way” (90)(as
his book demonstrates, and see his excellent bibliography and my refs. at
end).
Because the
remaining pages of the chapter elaborate this opening clearly, I’ll not
continue to abstract them but will move to suggestions for action, which his
book calls for page after page.
What can we do?
Replace “climate
change” with “climate catastrophe.”
Celebrate James
Hansen (and all genuine climatologists, our climate Cassandras) and his Storms
of My Grandchildren, an essential study in the politics of science.
Gather Angus’s evidence
of anthropogenic climate catastrophe.
Improve his Index (e.g. regarding anthropogenic).
Cite evidence of
influence of climate on weather.
List the probable
consequences of energy “business as usual.”
Publicize the
World Bank’s 2012-1014 reports Turn Down
the Heat.
List ways
Fayetteville, AR, will be affected by heat waves and precipitation extremes
here and around the world. E.g., in a 4
degree World “about 50 percent of the
global population,” particularly in Africa, Central America, and parts of South
America, will frequently experience unusual (Sigma-e) heat waves by 2040—this
will be the new summer norm.” Trump’s
Wall around Washington County, or welcome the stranger?
Tell
Fayetteville’s Mayor, Council, Emergency Management, and other relevant
officials about the book. Demand
leadership from EM. And Springdale,
Rogers, Bentonville, Bella Vista.
Buy a copy of the
book for a friend or student.
Locally: Nightbird, B&N, and
UA’s Bookstore has ordered copies.
Chapter 6 ends
Part One with a quotation from Naomi Klein’s
This Changes Everything p. 88: “there
is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of
capitalism as they are currently constructed.” Enter Part TWO, “FOSSIL CAPITALISM.”
REFERENCES
Bennett, Dick. Anthropocene,
Climate Catastrophe Newsletters. #1: http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2016/08/anthropocene-newsletter-1.html .
Cassandra: Apollo gave her the power of prophecy, but when she refused him, he
inflicted a curse that nobody would ever believe her prophecies.
Angus, Chapter 10, “Accelerating Into the Anthropocene,” 152-174
152, four key drives of the long Anthropocene boom
See the Great Acceleration graphs in chapter 2 (44).
1945 to 1973 the
Golden Age of Capitalism mostly in the northern countries, prosperity for some, but also “the other America” of the poor. Interstate highway system. The petroleum/auto complex a fundamental feature of boom, enormous consumption, accompanied by “deadly cost”: “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world” (157, Kunstler ). Military has become largest gas hog. 1974-5 first recession since 1930s to strike all imperialist countries simultaneously. Worker pay levelling. Enviro. Regulation under corp. attack. Globalization. Outsourcing manufacturing to low-wage countries increasing. Dangerous greenhouse gas emissions from ships increasing. Plastic. Chemical fertilizers. Fossil capitalism, Big Carbon rules, “underlies all the changes that have driven the Earth System into the Anthropocene. Can US capitalism de-fossilize. Yes and No (173).
Golden Age of Capitalism mostly in the northern countries, prosperity for some, but also “the other America” of the poor. Interstate highway system. The petroleum/auto complex a fundamental feature of boom, enormous consumption, accompanied by “deadly cost”: “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world” (157, Kunstler ). Military has become largest gas hog. 1974-5 first recession since 1930s to strike all imperialist countries simultaneously. Worker pay levelling. Enviro. Regulation under corp. attack. Globalization. Outsourcing manufacturing to low-wage countries increasing. Dangerous greenhouse gas emissions from ships increasing. Plastic. Chemical fertilizers. Fossil capitalism, Big Carbon rules, “underlies all the changes that have driven the Earth System into the Anthropocene. Can US capitalism de-fossilize. Yes and No (173).
Chapter 11, “We Are Not All in This Together”
Roy vs. Gore, US a class society of unequal groups.
Review of Elizabeth Jackson. https://politicsandculture.org/2009/10/02/elizabeth-jackson-an-ordinary-person%E2%80%99s-guide-to-empire/
In 21st C. fossil capitalism not just inequality
exists in abundance, a fundamental feather of capitalism, but “gross inequality.” “In 2015, the richest 1 percent of the
world’s population owned as much as the remaining 99 percent combined.”
“The Victims of Climate Change”
Malnutrition, hunger, lack of shelter. “Unmitigated climate change will lock the
world’s poorest countries and …citizens in a downward spiral.”
“Exclusion and Extermination”
Not only does fossil capitalism create cc, but both are
connected to racism. Extreme weather
shocks often involves “savage sorting” of people and “exterminism”:
characteristics of society that result in harm or elimination of population,
not only nuclear arms but “systemic ecological destruction.” Including
“calculated neglect.”
“Environmental Militarism”
Failure of rich nations to assist poor nations, but instead,
especially the US, to fund “militarized adaptation” against new “environmental
security threat.” In many and increasing
instances it becomes a war of the rich in their “armed lifeboats” gainst the
poor, including “armed force against starving people,” labeled “barbarism” by
Barry Commoner.
“Environmental Apartheid” (184).
Business as usual in the Anthropocene, the rich shielding
themselves from the effects of warming, including the poor; e.g. Superstorm Sandy.
Conclusion on capitalist accumulation, surplus population,
increasing global divide of rich and poor.
If “fossil capitalism remains dominant, the Anthropocene will be a new
dark age of barbarous rule by a few and barbaric suffering for most”
(187).
MITIGATION AND
ADAPTATION: CLASS MARKERS? by Dick Bennett
That prevention by mitigation might be the
public’s choice seems reasonable, and adaptation for the elite who can afford
it. The idea from Mike Davis was
mentioned in Ian Angus’s Facing the
Anthropocene (185). Climate change will have “‘dramatically
unequal impacts across regions and social classes.’” For the poor the results will be dire. Mitigation--preventing increasing of CO2,
warming, weather extremes—is a global problem that will require several
Marshall Plans perhaps aided by several Manhattan and Apollo programs. Think of the cost of shifting from the fossil
fuel energy regime to that of sustainable fuel, as one example. Their results will affect all people
relatively equally.
But adaptation, at
least at present in most of the world, is mainly an individual or local
matter. Achievements will depend upon
how much money individuals, a neighborhood, or town has or lacks. Poor people build on flood plains because the
land is cheaper. Think of levees and
walls around wealthier, higher neighborhoods as with Katrina. Manhattan, NYC, our wealthiest city, is
starting a wall around its southern tip.
But every coastal city will need walls—or move! Either way, poor people often don’t have or
have enough expensive flood insurance.
From individual homeowners, to neighborhoods, to states and nations, the
extreme weather of climate change inflicts the greatest damage upon those who
possess the fewest resources for adaptation.
That’s unjust, you
exclaim. We must prepare to protect our
vulnerable citizens. We do have examples of such care. We have FEMA.
But those precedents will not be—are not now—sufficient, and the floods
and fires are increasing in number, intensity, and cost. But we can improve them; it is possible. But probable? We can change our tax structure and Wall
Street investment system to benefit the people instead of the few? Given the Congress and President and
libertarian ideology presently in power, is this government likely to plan and
prepare to finance the protection of the people of the US?
As the pressures
increase, are the wealthiest more likely to be generous to the millions of
people threatened by the consequences of climate change, or will they dig in,
build up, and construct walls around—to keep out flood and fire, and
refugees?
We should add a third
extraordinary demand on the resources and finances of our nation and the
nations of the world: rebuilding after
the destruction of the homes, cities, nations by extreme events (from warming
and climate change) neither mitigation nor adaptation were able to prevent.
And let’s not forget
natural disasters. A magnitude-7.8 earthquake
struck the Himalayan nation of Nepal in April 2015, killing an estimated 8,969
people, destroying more than 600,000 houses and leaving some 2.8 million people
in need of humanitarian assistance. If
the Republican Party in power now is reluctant to help its own vulnerable and
many desperate citizens adequately, how can we expect it to be concerned with
enormous disasters around the world caused by nature and by humans.
PART THREE, THE ALTERNATIVE
189-91
“Ultimate insider” Gus Speth’s reversal (chap. 2, p. 38). Features of US capitalism 190. Speth, Hansen, et al., planetary emergency, Anthropocene, 575 billion tons of carbon emitted since1870. Solutions: from illth to wealth. Our children and grandchildren.
“Ultimate insider” Gus Speth’s reversal (chap. 2, p. 38). Features of US capitalism 190. Speth, Hansen, et al., planetary emergency, Anthropocene, 575 billion tons of carbon emitted since1870. Solutions: from illth to wealth. Our children and grandchildren.
CHAPTER 12, “Ecosocialism
and Human Solidarity”
Introduction: Hurricane
Sandy and human altruism.
The Problem of Time. We don’t have much time (194).
Destination: ecological civilization—altruism, equality. What must we do? (198-200).
The Problem of Time. We don’t have much time (194).
Destination: ecological civilization—altruism, equality. What must we do? (198-200).
Destination: Global Human Solidarity. Charter for Human Development [see the AFSC
and FCNL mission statement]. Global
North nations and ecological restoration.
Obstacles (202).
Destination: Ecosocialism.
Economy :to meet social needs.”
Two essentials (202). The Belem
Ecosocialist Declaration of 2008. System
change not climate change (204-5).
Radical transformations (207).
What happened in Stalin’s USSR?
(208-211).
CHAPTER 13, “THE MOVEMENT WE NEED”
Introduction: Naomi Klein.
Holocene over, Anthropocene has begun.
Ecological Counterpower (213).
All of us who want a world without oppression must be engaged: We don’t have time to change ourselves first;
we change by changing the world (Luxemberg).
Being radical (215).
A Majority Movement (215).
A change in power and privilege.
[Who must lose? Dark Money, All the Presidents’ Bankers,
The Influence Machine.] Tactics.
A Tale of Two Cities (216).
Copenhagen vs. Cochabamba, the great divide. The Cochabamba People’s Agreement. The “active participation of all oppressed
people.”
The Movement We Need (217).
Four characteristics of successful resistance in the Anthropocene
(218-222). Marxism a method. We must reverse “capitalism’s ecosuicidal
drive.” Watchwords: Leave the oil in
the soil; leave the coal in the hole; leave the tar sand in the land.” [First two were chanted at 71B/Joyce by the
demonstrators against the Dakota pipeline Dec. 3, 2016.]
ILLTH: THE ANTHROPOCENE
AND US CAPITALISM, MILITARISM, and
EMPIRE 12-1-16 By Dick Bennett
Ian Angus’s Facing the
Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System contains
only a few pages about US militarism and the climate catastrophe rushing toward
us. But what little it says is potent
and dynamic. Here are the pages from
chapters 8, 9,10, and 11 : 130-31, 136-42 (240), 160-163 (241), 181-84 (243),
204.
Here are four key passages:
WWII “wasn’t just a passive divider between Holocene and
Anthropocene”; rather it “created the conditions that have shaped capitalism
ever since, and started the Great Acceleration on its environmentally
destructive course” (137). “Capitalism’s
worst depression and most destructive war set the stage for the economic and
social changes that have pushed the Earth System into a new and dangerous
epoch”(138).
“Military Keynesianism—massive military spending to maintain or
increase economic growth—has been a fundamental feature of the U.S. economy, no
matter which political party was in office, for over half a century” (141).
“Today the U.S. military is the world’s largest user of
petroleum, and the largest polluter,
producing more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical companies
combined, and the largest producer of
greenhouse gases” (160).
“Any serious effort to stop global warming will have to overcome
the resistance of the U.S. military. As
Barry Sanders writes: ‘Today’s brand of warfare, especially, just relies too
heavily on staggering amounts of oil; it produces too much greenhouse gas to
ever willingly constrain itself with any kind of treaty’” (162-3).
Angus gives us his specific sources on chapter 8 in notes 11-15,
on chap. 9 notes 1-16, and chap. 10 notes 24-13, 11 notes 13-21. Related sources elsewhere are numerous. My point is, as a reputable scholar he is
transparent; we can determine the adequacy of his sources.
Here are some of the books and a few of the essays cited for
these chapters; for more info. go to his Bibliography:
Buxton et al., “Security for Whom in a Time of Climate Crisis?”
Custers, Questioning Globalized Militarism
Du Boff, Accumulation and Power
Eckersley, “Environmental Security, Climate Change, and
Gloalizing TerrorismFoster, et al., “The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military
Spending”
Hayes, “Colonizing the Future”
Heartfield, Unpatriotic History of the Second World War
Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes
Hynes, “Pentagon Pollution, Part One”
Jansson, Sixteen-Trillion-Dollar Mistake
Klare, Blood and Oil
Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight
Mitchell, Carbon Democracy
Oakes, “Toward a Permanent War Economy?”
Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography
of Violence; “The Catastrophic Convergence: Militarism, Neoliberalism and
Climate Change.”
Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts
Sanders, The Green Zone: The Environmental Cost of Militarism
Semova et al., “US Department of Defense Is the Worst Polluter
on the Planet.”
Shah, Crude
Suvin, In Leviathan’s Belly
Thorne, “Profiteering in the Second World War.”
Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
Books Angus might also have cited:
-Bertel, Rosalie.
Planet Earth: The Latest Weapon of
War.
Collectif Argos. Climate
Refugees
--Dyer, Gwynne. Climate
Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats.
Most of these book are only partially about the subject, some
very partially, so you can see how small is the scholarship, despite the
enormous harms to the environment the US military has caused and is causing
today. Except for Sanders’ Green Zone, I haven’t found a single
book that concentrates upon the Pentagon and Enviro Destruction (might be a
title) or on Pentagon and Global Warming or Climate Catastrophe. In my own field I can find large, book-length
bibliographies on Shelley or Wordsworth, or Dickens or Thackeray. Why do you think this failure to study the
metabolism of the US military, the US economic system, and appearance of the
Anthropocene epoch is happening?
Here is my first newsletter on US capitalism and climate change.
I am gathering readings for #2. http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2014/11/capitalism-and-climate-change.html I also have published
online newsletters on the military and
cc.
What might we do?
Write
a poem, or song, or essay on ILLTH vs. Wealth
(accumulation that causes harm, Angus 162)
Above all, encourage scholarship. Ask professors you know in any field why
there’s so few books and articles. At
this moment, we all need to become scholars of the subject. Take a subject within your power. For example, study the local National Guard
unit. What is its budget? What
corporations have profited from the unit?
How much pollution/CO2 does it produce? During maneuvers, what if any effort is made
to preserve the soil and species from the tanks and cannons? What happened to the ecosphere during foreign
tours of duty? Anything you do will be
an advance, given the general lack of attention!
Go beyond Angus’s and my additions. Find some articles and books we have missed,
and make them known.
Our planet is suffering the extinguishing of thousands of
species in The Sixth Great Extinction, as the title of one book declares. What is the impact of the C-130s in
Jacksonville on wildlife?
How much fuel is used by one C-130? With what effect upon the atmosphere? (US imperial reach depends upon the boxcar
C-130).
The UofA celebrates its military students and vets. Interview a few about the military and
environment
Put the pressure by exposing the planetary assault by our
military.
--Williams, Chris. Ecology
and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis. Haymarket, 2010. (See:
Speth, Magdoff, Foster, Dyer.)
Around the
world, consciousness of the threat to our environment is growing. The majority
of solutions on offer, from using efficient light bulbs to biking to work,
focus on individual lifestyle changes, yet the scale of the crisis requires far
deeper adjustments. Ecology and Socialism argues that time still remains to save
humanity and the planet, but only by building
social movements for environmental justice that can demand qualitative changes
in our economy, workplaces, and infrastructure.
“Williams adds a new and vigorous
voice to the growing awareness that, yes, it is our capitalist system that is
ruining the natural foundation of our civilization and threatening the very
idea of a future. I am particularly impressed by the way he develops a clear
and powerful argument for an ecological socialism directly from the actual
ground of struggle, whether against climate change, systematic poisoning from
pollution, or the choking stream of garbage. Ecology and Socialism is a notable addition to the growing
movement to save our planet from death-dealing capitalism.”
—Joel Kovel, author of The Enemy of Nature
—Joel Kovel, author of The Enemy of Nature
“Finally, a book that bridges the
best of the scholarly and activist literatures in socialist ecology!
Sophisticated and compelling, eschewing academic jargons ‘postmodern’ and
otherwise, Ecology and
Socialism more than
competently champions a Marxist approach to environmental crisis and the kind
of economic democracy needed to achieve an ecologically friendly system of
production and human development.” —Paul Burkett, author of Marxism and Ecological Economics
Marx and the Earth: 
An Anti-Critique
John
Bellamy Foster, University of
Oregon, and Paul Burkett, Indiana
State University, Terre Haute, 2017.
A
decade and a half ago John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett introduced a new,
revolutionary understanding of the ecological foundations of Marx’s thought,
demonstrating that Marx’s concepts of the universal metabolism of nature,
social metabolism, and metabolic rift prefigured much of modern systems
ecology. Ecological relations were shown to be central to Marx’s critique of
capitalism, including his value analysis. Now in Marx and the Earth Foster
and Burkett expand on this analysis in the process of responding to recent
ecosocialist criticisms of Marx. The result is a full-fledged anti-critique—pointing
to the crucial roles that dialectics, open-system thermodynamics, intrinsic
value, and aesthetic understandings played in the original Marxian critique,
holding out the possibility of a new red-green synthesis.
John Bellamy Foster.
“Trump Against the Planet.” Monthly Review (February 2017).
THE TWELVE VALUES, MECHANISMS,
LIABILITIES, AND CORRECTIVES OF US
CAPITALISM. A Topical Guide to Breaking the Chains of Capitalism by Dick
Bennett
Klein, This
Changes Everything. “The “real
reason we are failing to rise to the climate moment is because the actions
required directly challenge our reigning economic paradigm [de-regulated
capitalism]. Only when we identify these
chains do we have a chance of breaking free” (63).
Depreciation of Nature
Leading to Exploitation
Liabilities:
Human Ecocide against commons of water, air, flora, fauna, leading to
self-destruction
Climate:
Drive for profit led to extraction from commons until CO2, warming, weather
extremes, extinctions
Alternative:
Attitude of equality of human, other species, air, soil; rejection of
commodification as source of value,
Commodification
Liabilities: turning all the earth’s resources
into capital even though they are finite; selfishness, gluttony,
competitiveness, shortsightedness, using up
resources as fast as possible for growth and profit
resources as fast as possible for growth and profit
Climate
catastrophe: disastrous pillage of the planet
Alternative: generosity, cooperation, long-range planning,
affirmative government
Growth
Liabilities: exceeding the planetary
boundaries, exhaustion of resources, 6th Great Extinction
Climate catastrophe: all other causes are
exacerbated by endless growth
Alternative: Quality of Life not
GDP as measure of success, Why the GDP Is Not A Good Measure of A Nation's Well Being
...
Consumption
Liabilities: consumption as end itself,
acquire even what you don’t need, individual obesity, diabetes;
Climate catastrophe: exhaustion of
resources, carnivorism major cause of methane
Alternative: Vegetarianism, Veganism
Capital Accumulation, Drive for personal profit,
need for continuous growth
Liabilities: inequality, poverty,
accentuation of class gaps; as illust. by the 6th Extinction,
capital accumulation destroys itself
Relevance to climate catastrophe: unequal
economic adaptation to cc, particular vulnerability of the poor to cc
consequences
Alternative: labor theory of value,
altruism, equality, cooperation, welfare of all
Monopoly, Consolidation,
Purchase of or Merger with Competitors
Liabilities: Ceaseless efforts to eliminate competition,
monopoly goal to
ensure profit. NADG (9-13-16). “Merger to Create Largest Fertilizer Firm.”
“Horizon Will buy Drugmaker for $80M.”
ensure profit. NADG (9-13-16). “Merger to Create Largest Fertilizer Firm.”
“Horizon Will buy Drugmaker for $80M.”
Climate Catastrophe: minimizing, marginalizing public influence in
economic system, prices, quality
Alternative or corrective: strict anti-trust laws and enforcement;
cooperation, co-ops, worker ownership
Massive Criminal
Corporations
Liabilities:
Too big to fail or prosecute and the public to pay; e.g., Exxon denial of climate change
Climate
Catastrophe: destruction of the planet
Alternative,
Corrective: Seize their assets to fund
reduction of carbon emissions
Instability of Market
System
Liabilities:
Boom and Bust, periodic crises of over-accumulation compelling
investors to seek foreign markets
investors to seek foreign markets
Climate
Catastrophe: Periodic implosion of
people’s savings and investments
when money needed for mitigation and adaptation
when money needed for mitigation and adaptation
Alternative,
Corrective: close government watch of
Wall Street
Advertising, Inducing Consumption,
Creating Needs,
Liabilities: culture of deception, society of deceit, persistent subversion
of truth and trust: (Valera promoting its “clean” gasoline)
Liabilities: culture of deception, society of deceit, persistent subversion
of truth and trust: (Valera promoting its “clean” gasoline)
Climate catastrophe: chief mechanism of exhaustion of resources
by consumption
Alternative: strict government oversight of lying about
products, critical
thinking education K-12.
thinking education K-12.
Hostility to Government Oversight
Liabilities: abandonment of affirmative
government,the only power strong enough to control corporate abuses
Climate Catastrophe: dismantling of government regulatory agencies
intended to assist and protect the people (Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed)
Alternative: return to concept of
affirmative government of, by, and for the p eople
Hostility to Taxes
Liabilities: enfeebling even elimination of the
institutions of civilization in health, education, and so on, that require
financial support
Climate Catastrophe: all estimates of what will be needed for
mitigation and adaptation reach trillions of dollars
Alternative: a just tax system that minimizes gaps between
the rich and the poor (definition of just is fair)
GDP as Measurement of
Economic Success
Liabilities: gives false assessment of real
needs of society
Climate catastrophe: GDP measurement encourages growth
Alternative: Quality of Life as measure of
national success
WARS and IMPERIALISM for
RESOURCES, SPACE
Liabilities: ecocide/ecological warfare, extractionism
rampant, enormous waste of nations’ resources and treasuries; incalculable
suffering by death and relocation of all species,
Climate Catastrophe: resource wars
destroy entire nations; e.g. Syria 2016, incalculable cost of restoration
Alternative: conversion of military to
civilian needs, abolition of nuclear weapons, prosecution of all war criminals
or at the least public confession.
Sources:
Ian
Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil
Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System
Ashley Dawson, Extinction:
A Radical History. 2017.
Michael
Lowy, Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative
to Capitalist Catastrophe
END
ANTHROPOCENE NEWSLETTER #2, FEBRUARY 27, 2017
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