this changes everything
sept 2014:
this changes everything.. by Naomi Klein..
book trailer:
book site:
http://thischangeseverything.org/
https://solutions.thischangeseverything.org/
book links to amazon
– – – – –
notes:
It was a matter of collective survival, so the money had to be found. In the process, some rather large fictions at the heart of our economic system were exposed (Need more money? Print some!).
on ridiculous ness – and we have all we need – just need to re allocate
Finding new ways to privatize the commons and profit from disaster is what our current system is built to do;
built to prosper from disaster – bad is profit ness
protests have also shown that saying no is not enough. If opposition movements are to do more than burn bright and then burn out, they will need a comprehensive vision for what should emerge in the place of our failing system, as well as serious political strategies for how to achieve those goals
a people experiment ness
Rather than the ultimate expression of the shock doctrine—a frenzy of new resource grabs and repression—climate change can be a People’s Shock, a blow from below. It can disperse power into the hands of the many rather than consolidating it in the hands of the few, and radically expand the commons, rather than auctioning it off in pieces.
Indeed the only thing rising faster than our emissions is the output of words pledging to lower them
So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.
we need to think differently, radically differently,
yes. let’s try a different experiment – perhaps something not yet tried
For any of this to change, a worldview will need to rise to the fore that sees nature, other nations, and our own neighbors not as adversaries, but rather as partners in a grand project of mutual reinvention
It seems to me that our problem has a lot less to do with the mechanics of solar power than the politics of human power—specifically whether there can be a shift in who wields it, a shift away from corporations and toward communities, which in turn depends on whether or not the great many people who are getting a rotten deal under our current system can build a determined and diverse enough social force to change the balance of power.
scale the individual – via networked individualism
When fear like that used to creep through my armor of climate change denial, I would do my utmost to stuff it away, change the channel, click past it. Now I try to feel it. It seems to me that I owe it to my son, just as we all owe it to ourselves and one another
So the real trick, the only hope, really, is to allow the terror of an unlivable future to be balanced and soothed by the prospect of building something much better than many of us have previously dared hope
Eisenstein et al ness
the thing about a crisis this big, this all-encompassing, is that it changes everything. It changes what we can do, what we can hope for, what we can demand from ourselves and our leaders…
..It means there is a whole lot of stuff that we have been told is inevitable that simply cannot stand. And it means that a whole lot of stuff we have been told is impossible has to start happening right away
The bottom line is that we are all inclined to denial when the truth is too costly—whether emotionally, intellectually, or financially. As Upton Sinclair famously observed: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!
what if money were no object ness – away from earning a living.. sinclair perpetuation law
if there is a reason for social movements to exist, it is not to accept dominant values as fixed and unchangeable but to offer other ways to live—
Not only do fossil fuel companies receive $775 billion to $1 trillion in annual global subsidies, but they pay nothing for the privilege of treating our shared atmosphere as a free waste dump—a fact that has been described by the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change as “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen
To allow arcane trade law, which has been negotiated with scant public scrutiny, to have this kind of power over an issue so critical to humanity’s future is a special kind of madness
or – perhaps – to allow the concept of money to have this kind of power – what is money..? if we can simply print more – when “we” deem it proper
there is no way in the world that we can have a sustainable economy and maintain international trade rules as they are.
question assumptions.. ie: any rules
when people wake up to the fact that our governments have locked us into dozens of agreements that make important parts of a robust climate change response illegal…
The habit of willfully erasing the climate crisis from trade agreements continues to this day
while trade has repeatedly been allowed to trump climate, under no circumstances would climate be permitted to trump trade.32
the television in my living room, appear nowhere on Canada’s emissions ledger, but rather are attributed entirely to China’s ledger, because that is where the set was made. And the international emissions from the container ship that carried my TV across the ocean (and then sailed back again) aren’t entered into anyone’s account book
exploited workers and an exploited planet are, it turns out, a package deal.
Anderson argues that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies—all while emissions ballooned—that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the core expansionist logic at the heart of our economic system.47
I realize that this can all sound apocalyptic—as if reducing emissions requires economic crises that result in mass suffering. But that seems so only because we have an economic system that fetishizes GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences
again – what is money… why are we letting it decide everything – let’s experiment w/o money – no?
Anderson and Bows-Larkin argue, the time has come to tell the truth, to “liberate the science from the economics, finance and astrology, stand by the conclusions however uncomfortable . . . we need to have the audacity to think differently and conceive of alternative futures.”53
yes. that. exactly.
In other words, changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism
we’re so messed up.
the rest of us are going to have to quickly figure out how to turn “managed degrowth” into something that looks a lot less like the Great Depression and a lot more like what some innovative economic thinkers have taken to calling “The Great Transition.”56
a people experiment – a qr film – too much
Policies based on encouraging people to consume less are far more difficult for our current political class to embrace than policies that are about encouraging people to consume green. Consuming green just means substituting one power source for another, or one model of consumer goods for a more efficient one
Indeed, a number of researchers have analyzed the very concrete climate benefits of working less. John Stutz, a senior fellow at the Boston-based Tellus Institute, envisions that “hours of paid work and income could converge worldwide at substantially lower levels than is seen in the developed countries today.” If countries aimed for somewhere around three to four days a week, introduced gradually over a period of decades, he argues, it could offset much of the emissions growth projected through 2030 while improving quality of life.64
Forget et al – if we want drastic – unbelievable change – set people free – to luxury ness
In short, it means changing everything about how we think about the economy so that our pollution doesn’t change everything about our physical world.
“We have no option but to reinvent mobility . . . much of India still takes the bus, walks or cycles—in many cities as much as 20 percent of the population bikes. We do this because we are poor. Now the challenge is to reinvent city planning so that we can do this as we become rich.” —Sunita Narain, director general, Centre for Science and Environment, 20131
Steve Fenberg of New Era explains, “We have one of the most carbon-intensive energy supplies in the country, and [Boulder] is an environmentally minded community, and we wanted to change that. We realized that we had no control over that unless we controlled the energy supply.”10
boulder – 30 min away (and even closer) to people doing
What stands out about Boulder’s experience is that, unlike some of the German campaigns, it did not begin with opposition to privatization. Boulder’s local power movement began with the desire to switch to clean energy, regardless of who was providing it
It’s entirely possible to have a booming market in renewables, with a whole new generation of solar and wind entrepreneurs growing very wealthy—and for our countries to still fall far short of lowering emissions in line with science in the brief time we have left. To be sure of hitting those tough targets, we need systems that are more reliable than boom-and-bust private markets
Sorting out what mechanisms have the best chance of pulling off a dramatic and enormously high-stakes energy transition has become particularly pressing of late. That’s because it is now clear that—at least from a technical perspective—it is entirely possible to rapidly switch our energy systems to 100 percent renewables
watching the insurance companies continue to put money before human health in the midst of the worst storm in New York’s history cast this preexisting injustice in a new, more urgent light. “We need universal health care,” Mohit declared. “There is no other way around it. There is absolutely no other way around it.” Anyone who disagreed should come to the disaster zone, she said, because this “is a perfect situation for people to really examine how nonsensical, inhumane, and barbaric this system is.”31
Taibbi ness
we are what is standing in the way. with out policy and/or with our blindness to it.
The disaster revealed how dangerous it is to be dependent on centralized forms of energy that can be knocked out in one blow. It revealed the life-and-death cost of social isolation, since it was the people who did not know their neighbors, or who were frightened of them, who were most at risk
Over the course of the 1970s, there were 660 reported disasters around the world, including droughts, floods, extreme temperature events, wildfires, and storms. In the 2000s, there were 3,322—a fivefold boost. That is a staggering increase in just over thirty years, and clearly global warming cannot be said to have “caused” all of it. But the climate signal is also clear
The cost of Superstorm Sandy is estimated at $65 billion. And that was just one year after Hurricane Irene caused around $10 billion in damage, just one episode in a year that saw fourteen billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. alone. Globally, 2011 holds the title as the costliest year ever for disasters, with total damages reaching at least $380 billion. And with policymakers still locked in the vise grip of austerity logic, these rising emergency expenditures are being offset with cuts to everyday public spending, which will make societies even more vulnerable during the next disaster—a classic vicious cycle.37
A 2011 survey by the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs looked at how much it would cost for humanity to “overcome poverty, increase food production to eradicate hunger without degrading land and water resources, and avert the climate change catastrophe.” The price tag was $1.9 trillion a year for the next forty years—and “at least one half of the required investments would have to be realized in developing countries.”40
ridiculous ness of money – why are we even talking this language? – what does this even mean to us. who’s deciding we pay things – who decides price matters.. what does paper mean. oh my.
In 2011, the Department of Defense released, at minimum, 56.6 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent into the atmosphere, more than the U.S.-based operations of ExxonMobil and Shell combined.46
then she asks – where will the money come from – and adds – assuming that the govt won’t just print more – like they’ve done for banks. and to that i’d ask – why not – and/or – why do we even need money..
According to Stephen Pacala, director of the Princeton Environmental Institute and codirector of Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative, the roughly 500 million richest of us on the planet are responsible for about half of all global emissions
then she gives a short (and she says incomplete) list of some ways we could get money, including.. low rate financial transaction tax, closing tax havens, a 1% billionaire’s tax, slashing military budgets, $50 tax per metric ton of co2, phasing out fossil fuel subsidies…. then she adds:
If these various measures were taken together, they would raise more than $2 trillion annually.55
so – even if we played within the ridiculous rules we keep assuming can’t be changed/wiped-out, we could do it
it is not that “we” are broke or that we lack options. It is that our political class is utterly unwilling to go where the money is (unless it’s for a campaign contribution), and the corporate class is dead set against paying its fair share.
end ch3 – talks about need for populace to create political leaders who would: do long term public planning and say no to corporate moneys
That has decentralized not just electrical power, but also political power and wealth: roughly half of Germany’s renewable energy facilities are in the hands of farmers, citizen groups, and almost nine hundred energy cooperatives.
Iwan Baan ness – oh to trust self-organizing
Though often derided as the impractical fantasy of small-is-beautiful dreamers, decentralization delivers, and not on a small scale but on the largest scale of any model attempted thus far, and in highly developed postindustrial nations
These examples make clear that when governments are willing to introduce bold programs and put goals other than profit making at the forefront of their policymaking, change can happen with astonishing speed.
leap frog ness
The key, she says, is to offer people something the current system doesn’t: the tools and the power to build a better life for themselves.
something else to do ness
Communities should be given new tools and powers to design the methods that work best for them—much as worker-run co-ops have the capacity to play a huge role in an industrial transformation. And what is true for energy and manufacturing can be true for many other sectors: transit systems accountable to their riders, water systems overseen by their users, neighborhoods planned democratically by their residents, and so on.
exactly. short. ness. let’s try that.
“agroecology,” a less understood practice in which small-scale farmers use sustainable methods based on a combination of modern science and local knowledge.
“Agroecology is the solution to solve the climate crisis.” Or “small farmers cool the planet.”25
as De Schutter notes, “Today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production where the hungry live—especially in unfavorable environments.”
All this amounts to a compelling case against the claim, frequently voiced by powerful philanthropists like Bill Gates, that the developing world, particularly Africa, needs a “New Green Revolution”—a reference to philanthropic and government efforts in the mid-twentieth century to introduce industrial agriculture in Asia and Latin America.
Hunger isn’t about the amount of food around—it’s about being able to afford and control that food. After all, the U.S. has more food than it knows what to do with, and still 50 million people are food insecure.”28
“The tragedy here is that there are thousands of successful experiments, worldwide, showing how climate-smart agriculture can work. They’re characterized not by expensive fertilizer from Yara and proprietary seeds from Monsanto, but knowledge developed and shared by peasants freely and equitably.”
mincome as well..
while his administration ordered more environmental reviews, then reviews of those reviews, then reviews of those too.
inspectors of inspectors – too much
The energy sector is changing dramatically all the time—but the vast majority of those changes are taking us in precisely the wrong direction, toward energy sources with even higher planet-warming emissions than their conventional versions.
Those numbers also tell us that the very thing we must do to avert catastrophe—stop digging—is the very thing these companies cannot contemplate without initiating their own demise. They tell us that getting serious about climate change, which means cutting our emissions radically, is simply not compatible with the continued existence of one of the most profitable industries in the world.
roughly $27 trillion
ridiculous ness
It also helps that these companies are so profitable that they have money not just to burn, but to bribe—especially when that bribery is legal. In 2013 in the United States alone, the oil and gas industry spent just under $400,000 a day lobbying Congress and government officials, and the industry doled out a record $73 million in federal campaign and political donations during the 2012 election cycle, an 87 percent jump from the 2008 elections.59
What all this money and access means is that every time the climate crisis rightfully triggers our collective self-preservation instinct, the incredible monetary power of the fossil fuel industry—driven by its own, more immediate self-preservation instinct—gets in the way.
Ashton concluded, “In government it is usually easy to rectify a slight misalignment between two policies but near impossible to resolve a complete contradiction. Where there is a contradiction, the forces of incumbency start with a massive advantage.”63
the handy thing about selling natural resources upon which entire economies have been built—and about having so far succeeded in blocking policies that would offer real alternatives—is that most people keep having to buy your products whether they like you or not
since these companies are going to continue being rich for the foreseeable future, the best hope of breaking the political deadlock is to radically restrict their ability to spend their profits buying, and bullying, politicians.
or change that whole system thinking as well… no?
Because these distortions have been in place for so long—and harm so many diverse constituencies—a great many smart people have done a huge amount of thinking about what it would take to clean up the system.
part of noise ness. time for new system. rather than spin wheels on clean up.
We can’t sit this one out, not because we have too much to lose but because we have too much to gain. . .
As many are coming to realize, the fetish for structurelessness, the rebellion against any kind of institutionalization, is not a luxury today’s transformative movements can afford.
or.. it’s exactly what we need to expedite. perhaps we’re just missing the mechanism to unleash.
A bitterly ironic infertility for an island whose main export was agricultural fertilizer.12
“solastalgia,” with its evocations of solace, destruction, and pain, and defined the new word to mean, “the homesickness you have when you are still at home.”
Glenn Allbrecht
although this particular form of unease was once principally familiar to people who lived in sacrifice zones—lands decimated by open-pit mining, for instance, or clear-cut logging—it was fast becoming a universal human experience, with climate change creating a “new abnormal” wherever we happen to live.
Few places on earth embody the suicidal results of building our economies on polluting extraction more graphically than Nauru. Thanks to its mining of phosphate, Nauru has spent the last century disappearing from the inside out; now, thanks to our collective mining of fossil fuels, it is disappearing from the outside in.
And we tell ourselves all kinds of similarly implausible no-consequences stories all the time, about how we can ravage the world and suffer no adverse effects. Indeed we are always surprised when it works out otherwise. We extract and do not replenish and wonder why the fish have disappeared and the soil requires ever more “inputs” (like phosphate) to stay fertile. We occupy countries and arm their militias and then wonder why they hate us.
people who could very well be the climate refugees of tomorrow to play warden to the political and economic refugees of today.20
the warming is no less real for our failure to pay attention.
later on – reading about all the strategies shared at summit. and thinking of a time in gradeschool, where they brought this stuff we put on our teeth – to see where we were missing dirty spots. wondering how could we see better – what we’re doing to the air/earth? exposing what we keep looking past.. or is currently invisible to the naked eye..
It’s not that these substances are evil; it’s just that they belong where they are: in the ground, where they are performing valuable ecological functions. Coal, when left alone, helpfully sequesters not just the carbon long ago pulled out of the air by plants, but all kinds of other toxins.
true about so many things (and people) in life.. no?
Saving a few beautiful mountain ranges wouldn’t be enough to get us out of this fix; the logic of growth itself needed to be confronted.
same with concept of money – no?
“step in line, or else you’re not going to get your share of the money,”
too complex and arcane for nonexperts to understand, seriously undercutting the potential to build a mass movement
so important that movement is simple enough, ie: be you. it can’t require that the 99% who may/may not read or be interested in your thing.. do so.. 99 and 1 ness
while green groups battle over the research and voluntary codes, the gas companies are continuing to drill, leak, and pour billions of dollars into new infrastructure designed to last for many decades
inspectors of inspectors – while we’re suffocating from the day… the death of us ness
The added irony is that many of the people being sacrificed for the carbon market are living some of the most sustainable, low-carbon lifestyles on the planet
learning from those we think we need to manage.. oi – quiet enough ness
does nothing to change the underlying cause
i would even suggest that for climate – perhaps our underlying cause: 2 needs – that would unleash all people – to take care of all else – got to be deep enough – if we want it to sustain itself
instead treats only the most obvious symptom
how we deal with most of life.. no?
Geoengineering debate generally takes place within a remarkably small and incestuous world, with the same group of scientists, inventors, and funders promoting each other’s work and making the rounds to virtually every relevant discussion of the topic.
imaginary cosmopolitanism. ness.
This is how the shock doctrine works: in the desperation of a true crisis all kinds of sensible opposition melts away and all manner of high-risk behaviors seem temporarily acceptable.
According to Latour, Shelley’s real lesson is not, as is commonly understood, “don’t mess with mother nature.” Rather it is, don’t run away from your technological mess-ups, as young Dr. Frankenstein did when he abandoned the monster to which he had given life.
a terribly poor metaphor for geoengineering. First, “the monster” we are being asked to love is not some mutant creature of the laboratory but the earth itself. We did not create it; it created—and sustains—us. The earth is not our prisoner, our patient, our machine, or, indeed, our monster. It is our entire world. And the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.
yeah. that. 2 needs.
geoengineering the very antithesis of good medicine, whose goal is to achieve a state of health and equilibrium that requires no further intervention
cure begs to be temporary.. designed to become obsolete
Perhaps this is mere coincidence, but it does seem noteworthy that so many key figures in the geoengineering scene share a strong interest in a planetary exodus.
imagine if we focused all that time/energy/money on earth/us – at least first.
“The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination—an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our future.” —Arundhati Roy, 20101
then the largest protests in the history of the U.S. climate movement (more than 40,000 people outside the White House in February 2013).
– – – – –
and then – live tweets while reading book – sept 2014:
and.. The heirs of oil baron John D. Rockefeller are dumping fossil fuel investments thkpr.gs/3570338 pic.twitter.com/CkznrD5CbF
step one for getting out of a hole: Stop digging.”24
oh. on so many levels. of course i see it so deeply in Ed.
on January 4, 1993, “an estimated 300,000 Ogoni, including women and children, staged a historic non-violent protest, and marched against Shell’s ‘ecological wars.’ ”
To this day, oil production has ceased in Ogoniland—a fact that remains one of the most significant achievements of grassroots environmental activism anywhere in the world.
The Ijaw Youth Council voted unanimously to call their new offensive Operation Climate Change. “The idea was: we are going to change our world,” Isaac Osuoka, one of the movement’s organizers, told me. “There was an understanding of the link that the same crude oil that impoverishes us, also impoverishes the Earth. And that a movement to change the wider world can begin from changing our own world.”
an attempt at another kind of climate change—an effort by a group of people whose lands had been poisoned and whose future was imperiled to change their political climate, their security climate, their economic climate, and even their spiritual climate.34
government declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew. According to Osouka, “In village after village, soldiers deployed by the state opened fire on unarmed citizens.” In the towns of “Kaiama, Mbiama, and Yenagoa people were killed in the streets and women and young girls were raped in their homes as the state unleashed mayhem, ostensibly to defend oil installations.”35
rule of their protests – were no guns, no drinking..
Brutal events like these go a long way toward explaining why many young people in the Niger Delta today have lost their faith in nonviolence.
creating bad starfishness
And yet it is worth looking back to the 1990s when the aims were clear. Because what is evident in the original struggles of the Ogoni and Ijaw is that the fight against violent resource extraction and the fight for greater community control, democracy, and sovereignty are two sides of the same coin.
This is coming as a rude surprise to a great many historically privileged people who suddenly find themselves feeling something of what so many frontline communities have felt for a very long time: how is it possible that a big distant company can come to my land and put me and my kids at risk—and never even ask my permission? How can it be legal to put chemicals in the air right where they know children are playing? How is it possible that the state, instead of protecting me from this attack, is sending police to beat up people whose only crime is trying to protect their families?
here’s to questioning more assumption – for all of us – commons ness – ie: Sophia Campos ness
“I would like to officially welcome Rex to the ‘Society of Citizens Really Enraged When Encircled by Drilling’ (SCREWED),” wrote Jared Polis, a Democratic Congressman from Colorado, in a sardonic statement. “This select group of everyday citizens has been fighting for years to protect their property values, the health of their local communities, and the environment. We are thrilled to have the CEO of a major international oil and gas corporation join our quickly multiplying ranks.”47
After two centuries of pretending that we could quarantine the collateral damage of this filthy habit, fobbing the risks off on others, the game is up, and we are all in the sacrifice zone now
equity. just wrong end. for now.
What is clear is that fighting a giant extractive industry on your own can seem impossible, especially in a remote, sparsely populated location. But being part of a continent-wide, even global, movement that has the industry surrounded is a very different story.
prior to now ness.
This networking and cross-pollinating is usually invisible—it’s a mood, an energy that spreads from place to place.
a qr ness
In a sane world, this cluster of disasters, layered on top of the larger climate crisis, would have prompted significant political change.
The power of this ferocious love is what the resource companies and their advocates in government inevitably underestimate, precisely because no amount of money can extinguish it.
We know that we are trapped within an economic system that has it backward;
..it behaves as if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions) while insisting that there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that human institutions manufacture, and that, if imagined differently, could build the kind of caring society we need.
yes. tweeted it twice on purpose.
“It’s not a fun time to be in the coal industry these days,” said Nick Carter, president and chief operating officer of the U.S. coal company Natural Resource Partners. “It’s not much fun to get up every day, go to work and spend your time fighting your own government.”26
oh my. just. .. oh my. like – welcome to the real (99%) world.
if there is one thing billion-dollar investors hate, it’s political uncertainty.
They were there to send the message, as one protester put it, that, “This is going to affect our future generations. They still need to live.”
What has changed in China in recent years—and what is of paramount concern to the ruling party—is that the country’s elites, the wealthy winners in China’s embrace of full-throttle capitalism, are increasingly distressed by the costs of industrialization
What has changed in China in recent years—and what is of paramount concern to the ruling party—is that the country’s elites, the wealthy winners in China’s embrace of full-throttle capitalism, are increasingly distressed by the costs of industrialization.
Li Bo, who heads Friends of Nature, the oldest environmental organization in China, describes urban air pollution as “a superman for Chinese environment issues,” laughing at the irony of an environmentalist having “to thank smog.” The reason, he explains, is that the elites had been able to insulate themselves from previous environmental threats, like baby milk and water contamination, because “the rich, the powerful, have special channels of delivery, safer products [delivered] to their doorsteps.” But no matter how rich you are, there is no way to hide from the “blanket” of toxic air. “Nobody can do anything for special [air] delivery,” he says. “And that’s the beauty of it.”30
World Health Organization sets the guideline for the safe presence of fine particles of dangerous air pollutants (known as PM2.5) at 25 micrograms or less per cubic meter; 250 is considered hazardous by the U.S. government. In January 2014, in Beijing, levels of these carcinogens hit 671. The ubiquitous paper masks haven’t been enough to prevent outbreaks of respiratory illness, or to protect children as young as eight from being diagnosed with lung cancer
or not..
consent seems beside the point. Again and again, after failing to persuade communities that these projects are in their genuine best interest, governments are teaming up with corporate players to roll over the opposition, using a combination of physical violence and draconian legal tools reclassifying peaceful activists as terrorists.V51
Scahill and Taibbi and Soling and … ness. so in need of another way.
as George Monbiot, The Guardian’s indispensable environmental columnist, put it on the twenty-year anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit,
“Was it too much to have asked of the world’s governments, which performed such miracles in developing stealth bombers and drone warfare, global markets and trillion-dollar bailouts,
..that they might spend a tenth of the energy and resources they devoted to these projects on defending our living planet? It seems, sadly, that it was.” Indeed, the failure of our political leaders to even attempt to ensure a safe future for us represents a crisis of legitimacy of almost unfathomable proportions.56
Finding ways of expanding public spaces and nurturing civic involvement is not just some woolly-headed liberal project—it’s a survival strategy.”58
_________
__________
be you. 