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The Wrong Kind of Green
Johann Hari, the Nation
Why did America’s leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests–and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as “unworkable” and “unrealistic,” as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?
At first glance, these questions will seem bizarre. Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted “brands” in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world’s worst polluters–and burying science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed.
I have spent the past few years reporting on how global warming is remaking the map of the world. I have stood in half-dead villages on the coast of Bangladesh while families point to a distant place in the rising ocean and say, “Do you see that chimney sticking up? That’s where my house was… I had to [abandon it] six months ago.” I have stood on the edges of the Arctic and watched glaciers that have existed for millenniums crash into the sea. I have stood on the borders of dried-out Darfur and heard refugees explain, “The water dried up, and so we started to kill each other for what was left.”
…Environmental groups used to be funded largely by their members and wealthy individual supporters. They had only one goal: to prevent environmental destruction. Their funds were small, but they played a crucial role in saving vast tracts of wilderness and in pushing into law strict rules forbidding air and water pollution. But Jay Hair–president of the National Wildlife Federation from 1981 to 1995–was dissatisfied. He identified a huge new source of revenue: the worst polluters.
Hair found that the big oil and gas companies were happy to give money to conservation groups. Yes, they were destroying many of the world’s pristine places. Yes, by the late 1980s it had become clear that they were dramatically destabilizing the climate–the very basis of life itself. But for Hair, that didn’t make them the enemy; he said they sincerely wanted to right their wrongs and pay to preserve the environment. He began to suck millions from them, and in return his organization and others, like The Nature Conservancy (TNC), gave them awards for “environmental stewardship.”
Companies like Shell and British Petroleum (BP) were delighted. They saw it as valuable “reputation insurance”: every time they were criticized for their massive emissions of warming gases, or for being involved in the killing of dissidents who wanted oil funds to go to the local population, or an oil spill that had caused irreparable damage, they wheeled out their shiny green awards, purchased with “charitable” donations, to ward off the prospect of government regulation. At first, this behavior scandalized the environmental community. Hair was vehemently condemned as a sellout and a charlatan. But slowly, the other groups saw themselves shrink while the corporate-fattened groups swelled–so they, too, started to take the checks…
(4 Mar 2010)
Return of the natives
Slavoj Zizek, The New Statesman
James Cameron’s Avatar tells the story of a disabled ex-marine, sent from earth to infiltrate a race of blue-skinned aboriginal people on a distant planet and persuade them to let his employer mine their homeland for natural resources. Through a complex biological manipulation, the hero’s mind gains control of his “avatar”, in the body of a young aborigine.
These aborigines are deeply spiritual and live in harmony with nature (they can plug a cable that sticks out of their body into horses and trees to communicate with them). Predictably, the marine falls in love with a beautiful aboriginal princess and joins the aborigines in battle, helping them to throw out the human invaders and saving their planet. At the film’s end, the hero transposes his soul from his damaged human body to his aboriginal avatar, thus becoming one of them.
Given the 3-D hyperreality of the film, with its combination of real actors and animated digital corrections, Avatar should be compared to films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) or The Matrix (1999). In each, the hero is caught between our ordinary reality and an imagined universe – of cartoons in Roger Rabbit, of digital reality in The Matrix, or of the digitally enhanced everyday reality of the planet in Avatar. What one should thus bear in mind is that, although Avatar’s narrative is supposed to take place in one and the same “real” reality, we are dealing – at the level of the underlying symbolic economy – with two realities: the ordinary world of imperialist colonialism on the one hand, and a fantasy world, populated by aborigines who live in an incestuous link with nature, on the other. (The latter should not be confused with the miserable reality of actual exploited peoples.) The end of the film should be read as the hero fully migrating from reality into the fantasy world – as if, in The Matrix, Neo were to decide to immerse himself again fully in the matrix.
…Avatar’s fidelity to the old formula of creating a couple, its full trust in fantasy, and its story of a white man marrying the aboriginal princess and becoming king, make it ideologically a rather conservative, old-fashioned film. Its technical brilliance serves to cover up this basic conservatism. It is easy to discover, beneath the politically correct themes (an honest white guy siding with ecologically sound aborigines against the “military-industrial complex” of the imperialist invaders), an array of brutal racist motifs: a paraplegic outcast from earth is good enough to get the hand of abeautiful local princess, and to help the natives win the decisive battle. The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them. In other words, they can choose either to be the victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white man’s fantasy.
At the same time as Avatar is making money all around the world (it generated $1bn after less than three weeks of release), something that strangely resembles its plot is taking place. The southern hills of the Indian state of Orissa, inhabited by the Dongria Kondh people, were sold to mining companies that plan to exploit their immense reserves of bauxite (the deposits are considered to be worth at least $4trn). In reaction to this project, a Maoist (Naxalite) armed rebellion exploded…
(4 Mar 2010)
A Lesson from the Great Depression
Tere Barbella, hotchalk
I was listening to a radio program which featured a discussion on what will happen after the “Great Recession”. The conversation specifically focused on California’s Silicon Valley. Several of the commentators spoke about how pivotal Silicon Valley is, not only to California’s recovery, but to the entire country’s. “Silicon Valley will once again lead the nation in technology and innovation!” Silicon Valley will pave the way for a technological Renaissance in America!” “Venture capital will return to the Silicon Valley because that is where the future of America’s recovery lies!” Only one person commented, in a rather sobering way, that we need to proceed with care. We are on the brink of creating a new world, a global community. To think that the recession is going to end and our country, or any other, will be back to business as usual is nonsense. He reminded all who were listening that we have the unique opportunity to fashion not only a new financial operating system for ourselves, but a cultural rebirth as well. A much needed cultural rebirth that balances the importance of the humanities and arts with the creation of technology and industry.
My mind cheered with silent applause. The man was dead on. We will not emerge from this recession to resume the same consumptive behavior that resulted in our current financial crisis. Our focus as a society on materialistic, techno toys that are obsolete in three months is not what is going to revitalize the human race. A cultural elevation requires more than an iPhone. It requires the arts. They are called the humanities because they are what makes us human. Now, more than any other time in recent history, they are desperately needed to restore value and substance to our disposable, replaceable and transient world.
During the Depression, along with restoring a collapsed economy, the United States government recognized the need for a “national unity”. The government viewed the economically devastated public as “a people without a unifying central culture”. Back then, it was as important to the government to cultivate a unified American society as it was to return the country to economic stability. Eleanor Roosevelt brilliantly understood the need to develop a national sense of esteem and identity, and pressured her husband to take action. Between 1933 and 1934, the Public Works of Art Project One was initiated by the government to create murals on public buildings. It employed 3700 artists and resulted in over 15,000 works of art. The Federal Art Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration- or WPA- was created in 1935. It employed over 5000 artists and produced 225,000 works of art for the American public. Artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willim de Kooning and Diego Rivera were among those employed as muralists during the depression. Regionalism, art that depicted specific national regions, became popular through artists such as Grant Wood and Edward Hopper. Artists, writers and musicians were paid to create. Visual artists had complete freedom over their subject matter and medium unless they were being commissioned to create a mural. Divisions within the Project One included a teaching project which employed artists to teach classes at neighborhood houses or community centers. Over two million students attended W.P.A. art classes during the eight years of the program.
(4 Mar 2010)
sent in by EB contributor Rick Lakin
Why Us, God?
Patrick J. Deneen, Front Porch Republic
In the wake of two devastating earthquakes, we are again witnessing echoes of longstanding debates over “theodicy,” or the effort to justify the existence of a just and loving God in the face of the existence of suffering and even evil (Theos=God; Dike=Justice). These debates are hardly new – current debates remarkably echo arguments that took place some 350 years ago following the devastating Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.
One reaction against “theodicy” – the effort to “justify God’s ways to man” – in the face of such horrific devastation was (and remains) two-fold. First, there is a rejection of the idea that there is any “meaning” to such an event – and rather, the conclusion that the earth and nature is capricious and undiscriminating in its bestowal of life and death. Second, in the face of belief in this very “meaninglessness” of the world, there are demands and efforts for active human intervention to impose meaning, and particularly, to pursue ever-greater arrangements of justice. The modern scientific project was the result – arising in significant part in response to the Lisbon earthquake – allowing humanity increasingly to control the arbitrariness of nature’s actions upon humanity.
Responses to the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile have hauntingly echoed the reactions of the world’s leading philosophers some 350 years ago following the Lisbon earthquake. While this fact has been noted by some prominent commentators, what has gone largely unrecognized is that there is one important difference today: we live in the wake of several centuries of mixed record of scientific achievement.
…The Lisbon earthquake shattered this view. In the reactions it provoked, one sees especially the origins of many of today’s stances in regards to science, religion, and nature.
For some, the earthquake was evidence of God’s wrath – the theodicy in which we can interpret with certainty the will of God in the events of the world. The reactionary author Joseph DeMaistre (responding to Candide) argued that the earthquake was in fact a great good, because its residents surely deserved to be punished (and, he argued further, the innocent deserved to be delivered from the iniquity of that place). This was the opposite of Leibniz – all is good, because all is bad. We can see echoes to Maistre’s conservative critique in the reaction of Pat Robertson to the Haiti earthquake – the destruction was divine recompense for an evil committed by the Haitians (just as the attacks of 9/11 were deserved because of the iniquity of modern America).
…Then there was the response of Voltaire, long suspicious of clericalism and superstition, who saw in the Lisbon quake evidence of a capricious and even cruel world. In his famous novel Candide (Candide, ou l’Optimisme), Leibniz’s phrase becomes ultimately an idiotic mantra contradicted by the reality that the earth is not the best of all possible worlds. That novel describes the eventual disillusionment of Candide from the philosophic optimism of his teacher, Dr. Pangloss, a disillusionment that is completed by his confrontation with the devastating earthquake of Lisbon. Voltaire’s recommendation (through the words of his character, Candide), was to “cultivate your own garden” – that is, to take care as best one could what was under your own control, recognizing that there was no final justice or meaning in the universe. One heard echoes to this view recently in the analysis of James Wood (who also revisited the reactions to the Lisbon Quake in his essay. Wood concluded his article by condemning the Maistre/Robertson view (as would Voltaire) while ending with a plaintive, existentialist plaint: “For either God is punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or as capricious as nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent (the Obama view). Unfortunately, the Bible, which frequently uses God’s power over earth and seas as the sign of his majesty and intervening power, supports the first view; and the history of humanity’s lonely suffering decisively suggests the second.”
What is striking about the contemporary echoes to these arguments is a changed contemporary context. We are witnessing not only echoes, but widespread embrace, of another reaction to the Lisbon earthquake – that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau – in a letter to Voltaire – argued that the earthquake revealed not the existence of divine retribution nor the need for Enlightenment solutions, but the evils of “progress.” Long suspicious of the arguments of Enlightenment colleagues, he argued that it was the concentration of humanity in to compressed living space – versions of tenements and high-rises – that led to the devastation of what otherwise would have been merely a curiosity and perhaps inconvenience to healthier, more primitive societies. He argued that humans should not live in unnatural ways, in contradiction to nature.
Rousseau’s arguments have made a significant comeback: we live today with the existence of both an embrace of scientific aims of progress and a deeply pervasive adoration of nature, along with a deep suspicion of the advances of science and technology.
There is no better evidence of this latter view than the remarkable popularity of the movie “Avatar.”…
(9 Mar 2010)
