Which bogeyman is going to get us first? We have several major contenders which include: Global Warming; a Bushian nuclear attack on Iran (resulting in a worldwide retaliatory spasm of suicide bombings or a world economic meltdown due to oil price spike); a Sunni-Shiite total war in the Middle East supposedly as a result of a “premature” US withdrawal from Iraq; a meltdown of the global economy led by a collapse of the US dollar (anyone for a Wiemar Republic level hyper-inflation?) the Big One, a 7+ on Richter scale earthquake, that destroys Los Angeles or SF Bay Area (including my house.) Other horrific bogeyman possibilities include: a worldwide avian flu pandemic; a dirty bomb terrorist attack on some major city; an accidental nuclear war with the Russians who still have lots of rusty old Cold War era nuclear subs and and now Bear class bombers prowling around; and, oh yeah, what about a large meteor collision with the earth?
With all these horrific catastrophes in direct competition, the one bogeyman that is real, Global Warming, is the one that is in relation to its importance and our short time frame to react is still getting short shrift. This crisis of all times, this on-going and now throughly documented unfolding event, the irreversible damaging of the atmosphere of our planet by CO2 and methane must compete for the attention with all matter of trivia and day-to-day local and geopolitical emergencies. A jaded public is easily distracted accustomed as it is to hyperbolic overreaction by a corporate advertising-driven mass media. A daily diet of disaster and scandal, if-it-bleeds-it-leads yellow journalism results in a sort of collective state of world weary fatigue and fatalistic resignation. It all seems so hopeless. Global Warming is just more bad news, another 'Horseman of the Apocalypse' that threatening to ride down upon us. To further hamper things, the proposed solutions to Global Warming all seem to lead in the direction or austerity. To a population conditioned to base their 'pursuit of happiness' on material acquisition and the enjoyment of the 'good life', some media-driven idealized upper-middle class level of affluence, these measures are anathema especially to those in the US. where denial of the problem has been especially strong.
I wish I could be more optimistic about the fate of the human race. Any serious discussion among most thinking people on the general state of things soon leads to a consensus of pessimism and resigned cynicism. The entrenched corrupt political institutions usually get a thorough drubbing in any such discussion. This is, of course, unless one or more of the those in the discussion is of a religious bent. 'Believers' as they like to call themselves are much less likely to be that down about things. Religious faith allows people to get above it all and take the 'long view'. The impending downward spiral of mankind into barbarism or worse doesn't really bother these people all that much. In fact some of the more hidebound and fundamentalist even deny man's role in climate change and actually support wars. It turns out they are hoping the unending turmoil in the Middle East (much of it the direct result of US and Israel policy) will hasten Armageddon, the End Days and the Rapture and so forth. Others, ironically the two most implacable foes fundamentalist Islamics and Zionists, pine for the reestablishment of long lost theocratic empires in all their mythical glory – Greater Zion or a new global Caliphate. With these people geopolitical machinations and our industrial-driven environmental endgame are really of only minimal concern. In fact they are hard at work making the situation worse. For them it is the afterlife that matters – eternity with a capital “E.” Irrespective of which brand of religion, it always amounts to a convenient projection into the afterlife or the irrelevance of material reality even as it beats them down. It is easy to write off these people as fools with a low gullibility threshold, but their irrationalities are important and dangerous, and directly feed energy and life into the overall Spectacle (see Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle.)
Human institutions evolve self-perpetuating and self-regulating mechanisms and can survive for thousands of years. A good example is the Roman Catholic Church. These formations become embedded in and in fact define a culture – sometimes to the direct determent of the very civilization that the culture is interwoven into. In other words there can be an inherent incapacity of institutions, especially those that constitute the very underpinning of a civilization, to change even as they are actively (and obviously) bringing down the entire edifice.
Jared Diamond's Collapse is an classic study of this unfortunate tendency. Diamond follows the downfall, seemingly quite predicable and not at all opaque to any thinking person living there at that time, of several such collapses – Easter Island, Nordic Greenland, the Anasazi Indians and others. In each case the warning signs were ignored or feebly reacted to for many years until the point of no return quietly and fatally slid past. The (ex-Polynesian) Easter Islanders could not turn away from their deforestation based religion requiring logs (many logs) to roll huge, massively heavy carved images (graven images?) from the quarry to various sites all around the island. Eventually they created a barren environment with a bad new-micro climate that could not support them. The Nordic Greenlanders couldn't lower themselves to switch from Northern European climate style agriculture and animal husbandry to hunting and fishing practiced by the indigenous population seen by them as lowly savages and heathens. The Anasazi built their cities in a semi-dry climate oblivious to long term weather patterns (Southern California are you listening?) All of the societal collapses that Diamond chronicles (obviously for allegorical reasons) systems that were both simpler and more isolated than ours. Simplicity and isolation were both advantageous and increased vulnerability. Identification and addressing the problem early on could have reversed things especially with Easter Islanders. But they had no external means of help being over 1200 miles (by sail) from their nearest neighbor, Pitcairn Island. Unlike the Easter Islanders we live very close to each other due to the wonders of our tightly knit transportation and communications technology. We live in a time of intricate incredibly complex inter-relationships effecting every nook and cranny of the entire planet. We have become evermore monolithic in terms of our world-wide economy – welcomed by those who own most of it (more markets, more profits.) The economy is our religio-institution that we cannot let go of or change adequately even as it kills us! We are much like the Easter Islander as we decimate our natural environment for short term, hegemonically defined goals.
The process of global warming was recognized by all of those with any degree of environmental consciousness and has been thoroughly documented in peer-reviewed literature by thousands of scientists worldwide. Yet with visible evidence now appearing in every direction, immediate day-to-day concerns continue to divert our attention. We are like the Easter Islanders. Immediate problems and day to day issues keep us from any real collective and unified concern. Just look at any headlines and lead stories in any daily paper or worse turn on CNN, Fox or CNBC. The scale and seriousness of the impending world-historical catastrophe of human-induced climate change cannot compete with everyday pedestrian bullshit. The overall situation, usually bad, at any given moment requires us to direct most of our psychic energy into the immediate crisis a hand - like the war in Iraq. These short term emergencies, short term in relation the crisis of ecocide, are in direct competition for our attention. And this is going to be our undoing. We will continue to piss away critical time let this last closing window of opportunity slam shut. Once its throughly too late the horse is long gone from the barn and things are really drastic, not the usual droughts, floods, hurricanes and heat waves, but huge population relocations and die-offs, then we will 'get crack'in', when it's too fucking late! All sorts of draconian state-of-emergency decrees will be ushered forth by the political class as panic sets in.
Before the Al Gore documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, and all the recent graphic video footage of huge glaciers sliding to the sea but with no less of a deluge of scientific data it was even worse. No one cared. We were all off buying gas guzzling SUV's and huge pickups, building ever larger metropolises in the desert and voting for Green-baiting Republicans. Any media account of the problem had to be counterbalanced by psuedo-science speculation and contrarian doubt planting by the whore's with PHDs on the payroll of Exxon and energy industry public relations outfits. Now even as the concern level rises it has started to become almost like another background noise – another possible bogyman that could get us. It becomes a sort of unconscious source of anxiety that is always with us – kind of like the ever present possibility of a 'nuclear war with the Soviets' during the Cold War years
What I fear about the Global Warming Crisis now that it is officially acknowledged by the US (who is the biggest contributer per capita by far to global warming gases) is that it will get absorbed into the whole overall spectacle itself. It will become (or probably already has) become a mere representation of itself. It certainly happened to the so-called Environmental Movement. The present day Environmental Movement came of age in the early 1970's descending from a convergence of 19th Century conservationism and the post-Rachel Carson rise of the field of ecology. By the early 1970s damage to the environment was becoming more inescapable, and growing consciousness was emerging. To co-opt it, it became practical even among the industrial corporate sector, who have always made it a standard practice of externalizing production costs by off loading as much waste as possible into 'the commons', to start to get on board – or appear to. Environmentalism was an apple pie issue from the start, good for elementary school field trips and nationally sponsored Earth Days and Coastal Cleanup days. All designed to make us feel good. But by the early 1970s even Republican Party favored the idea with brand new federal agency set up during the first Nixon Administration to enforce a growing set of regulations and laws pertaining to the environment– the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA.) This was all well and fine until the corporations realized they could not pass all the costs of being regulated and force to clean up back to the end consumers – in short it was starting to cost real money. Just Republicans inherently and uniformly oppose labor unions because they cut in to profits and operational prerogatives so did they soon uniformly opposed further environmental regulation. Bu the 80's they had a standard bearer anti-environmental in a cowboy hat with ranch – Ronald Reagan. Soon the Westerners and the corporate sector were in alliance making environmentalism a Democratic “liberal” issue. And it has been ever since.
Once identified has a liberal, do-gooder “Democratic Party issue”, it was easy naturally evolved into another left-center 'special interest' along side of organized labor, consumer rights, civil rights, privacy, universal health care and so on. And it did. A whole industry of beltway connected environmental groups with paid staffs vying for donations and grants sprung up and become essentially just another lobby, another accepted part of the Establishment. And so it has remained for well over 30 years through thick and thin. Mostly thin as Republicans almost as a matter of principal oppose all environmental legislation and when in power precede to minimize or refuse the enforcement of what is on the books – especially under the Bushian Anti-Environmentalist Taliban. The Democrats when in, supported by the same corporations who bankroll the Republicans, only timidly enforce existing environmental statutes and offer only tepid new legislation.
So with this partisan arrangement firmly in place, that is with issue of the throughly environmentalism institutionalized, throughly reified and domesticated that is totally absorbed into the overall Spectacle, along comes the unprecedented problem of global warming. Environmentalists in their scientific, academic, foundation-bound ghetto had been accumulating increasingly alarming empirical evidence of this gathering storm for years. It was originally called the Greenhouse Effect in that the planet would heat up like a hothouse if the buildup of CO2 gases was not arrested and would have increasingly deleterious effects on many sensitive climatic and ecological balances. But the threat of environmental destruction caused by global warming planet was occurring within a unified field of many other environmental threats, many other “inconvenient truths” - deforestation especially tropical rainforests, ozone holes forming every winter over Antarctica, the plundering of the world's oceans leading to plummeting fisheries, massive wetland and mangrove swamp loss, coral reef loss, top soil erosion, dead zones at mouth of rivers, deadly air and water pollution and on and on. It was dizzying and depressing. Each issue had groups that specialized in their issue – Greenpeace (oceans), Rainforest Alliance (tropical deforestation), Coral Reef Alliance and so on. Over the last three decades each group has struggled for support and recognition – and legislation. The public when polled usually pays lip service to environmental concerns and gives some support and money. That is except for those who identify themselves as “conservatives” (strange ironic label for those who did not want to conserve anything), who derisively called the environmentalist “tree huggers” and “greenies.” Anyway, that's all water under the bridge.
So here we stand with a recognized historically unprecedented problem of a global scale, one that could literally “end the world” as we know it and we must watch helplessly as the dithering begins. Our political leadership is fucking joke. Not one single candidate for the US horse race for President in 2008 has placed Global Warming front and center within their campaigns. There are no bold, Apollo Project scale initiatives being unveiled here in ground zero of planter warmers – where we have 1/5 of the world's population but are consuming 75% of its energy – thus we pumping well over our share of climate warming gases mainly CO2 and methane up into the stratosphere where it will stay for thousands of years cooking our fat asses. It not that most politicians are actually crooked and corrupt although many are, it's that there primary focus is on the reality at hand. It has to be or they will be swept aside by others more adaptable to a particular social-political reality. And the social-political reality is defined by pandering, infotainment producing corporate media (owned by anti- environmentalist Republicans) – another classic feedback loop. So they cannot lead but only react. The time and energy they typically devote to a particular cause or issue is in direct opposite proportion to its importance. They will not do jack shit until it is too late and then they will fall over themselves with draconian decrees making us even more miserable as everything collapse around us. It will be way too late. Maybe it already is!
