hell is around the corner
From the Department of We're Through The Looking Glass Here People: If there is anything good concerning environmental protections and regulation that might come out of Four More Years, it's that the green movement is now facing a conundrum similar to that of the Democratic Party - adapt or die.
Now, people who get paid many more dollars than I'll ever see and never get cavities - like Nicholas Kristof and the staff of the New Republic - are clamoring for the Dems to go harder and harder right: the latter says stake out "a clearly defined position on terrorism" (um, it's bad?) and out-neocon the neocons, the former wants the Democratic Party to start acknowledging the legitimacy of the no-choice stand on abortion and start memorizing passages from the Bible*. Picking a new DNC chair is a great place to start, but I think Democrats - no, I know Democrats - need to make the same sort of bold claim MoveOn.org did, that if you want our money, you need to start representing our politics. It didn't take what Alexander Cockburn has been referring to the ABB crowd to admit, kind of half-assedly, that the Kerry campaign sucked. It blew, in a big way, yessiree, and that what we all really need are really real Democrats, Obama in 2008.
But, whatever. That's quite literally a fight that's going to have to take place in the streets. If anybody learned anything at the end of this election, ACORN and ACT and MoveOn and the unions will have to take a page out of Hated Ralph's book abandon the national Democratic party as it currently stands, once and for all. It is a cancer, and the only good thing about it is that it's not a vicious and stupid mob, like the Republican "Party."
Lacking the polish and space for bullshit posing, the enviros' fight is a little bit more zero sum, literally, adapt or die. The planet has more or less taken things into it's own hands and is steadily moving past the "projection" phases of enviro degradation to "here and now" phases. It's hard to put your arms around the idea of enviro degradation, one of the reasons the movement often lacks a stronger foothold in American political consciousness than it should have, but try this for some perspective:
Blood tests have revealed that environment ministers from 13 European Union countries are contaminated with chemical pollutants from sofas, pizza boxes and pesticides, the environmental group WWF says.
Offering a rare insight into ministerial lifestyles as well as the risk of chemical pollution in everyday life, WWF said 55 different traces found in their blood samples came from flame retardants used on furniture, non-stick pans, greaseproof pizza packaging, plastics, fragrances and banned pesticides.
All the ministers bore traces of 22 poly-chlorinated biphenyls (PCB), a category of toxic chemicals banned in Europe during the 1970s and among the "dirty dozen" being phased out internationally, it added in a statement.
And that's in Europe, where, at least over the last ten to fifteen years, environmental regulation and protection has been a higher priority than in the States.
A long essay by two green industry consultants critical of the current top-down focus of environmentalism in America made an editorial in The Nation, but according to the piece, the people on high aren't hearing it. Which, if you think about it, may not be so bad. Take the Sierra Club, for instance.
The Sierra Club's leadership time and again has undermined grassroots efforts by flexing their negotiating muscle and compromising positions at crunch time. Such concessions gave birth to Earth First! in 1979, when a few radical environmentalists including Dave Foreman and Mike Roselle (now with the Ruckus Society), out of irritation and loathing, decided to form an unyielding organization to counter such enviro stooges.
Regrettably, the Sierra Club never reverted back to its radical John Muir roots, and instead became even more skilled at cutting deals under the guise of stewardship.
In 1989 David Brower, founder of the Earth Island Institute, Friends of the Earth, and the first executive director of the Sierra Club wrote Doug Scott, then acting conservation director of the Club about the role of dreadful "compromise" within the organization: "My thesis is that compromise is often necessary but that it ought not originate with the Sierra Club. We are to hold fast to what we believe is right, fight for it, and find allies and adduce all possible arguments for our cause. If we cannot find enough vigor in us or them to win, then let someone else propose the compromise. We thereupon work hard to coax it our way. We become a nucleus around which the strongest force can build and function."
Brower went on, "The Sierra Club compromised enough to lose its best antinuclear group. The club has compromised enough to be of little force or effect in slowing the arms race. The club was asked to act four years ago about environmental concerns in Nicaragua, but has remained silent. The club backed away from saving the California condor in the wild. The club did not join in the fight to block the new San Onofre reactors (a failure of which, quite possible, could make Southern California uninhabitable). The club so misjudges the arms race that it discourages the San Diego Chapter from protesting in Nevada, as if such a global problem must be left exclusively to the Toiyabe Chapter. The national club, and Sierra Club California, seem to think that the inexcusable charring of giant sequoias in Sequoia National Park and the terminal isolation of giant sequoias of Sequoia National Forest, and the monocultural new plantations being planted around them, is the province of the Kern-Kaweah chapter and severe damage continues. The club thinks that stopping the charring of sequoias in Yosemite is the business of the Tehipite Chapter, and the damage continues ... The Club is so eager to appear reasonable that it goes soft, undercuts the strong grassroots efforts of chapters, groups, and other organizations."
Thankfully, planet Earth doesn't have to appear before a Senate committee or donate to the League of Conservation Voters in order to be heard. The European Union has estimated that by 2080 - that's 75 years in a week, kids - "cold winters [on the continent] could disappear almost entirely and hot summers, droughts and incidents of heavy rain or hail could become much more frequent."
The challenge to enviros is to steal, heavily, from the environmental justice movement, something along the lines of "there aren't any backyards left to hide this in anymore." Otherwise, dreams of white Christmases will be just that, and streaming videos of Karl Rove and Barney the Dog frolicking on snowy White House lawns will become historical in more ways than one.
*The Dems, at least during the 1990s, have been loathe to commit to safeguarding choice, or even expanding the choice "argument," considering the rapid expansion of fertilization technologies and the availibility of birth control medicines that encroach on any sort of claim to, well, anything the Culture Right can make. Cloning and RU486, which tap into the processes that precede conception, throw a big fat huge wrench into the whole "life=conception" equation, and bringing the conversation closer to the heart of what the Culture Right's real point to opposing abortion is - a reformulation of the Scopes Trial, taking science away from defining or framing how people think about life and where it comes from and how.
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