climate change

The U.S. Government Cares More for its Proxy Wars than for its Own Citizens.

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I experienced Hurricane Ida directly and assisted in cleanup which has left me with some health problems to this day due to heavy lifting and mold from flooded basements. I don’t regret it.

What I do regret is that my government will prioritize the burdensome Israel and unnecessary Ukraine over its own citizens in need now from Helene.

The stenographers of our corrupt empire, the journoids, follow suit and give more sympathetic coverage to Israel than they do their own backyard. Fearing how critical coverage of the government would look in an election season, many of them seem bent on absolving themselves from anything that could compromise the message of competence.

There are policy ‘wonks’ and journalists alike who, as a class, desperately need to be subjected to a ‘Down to the Countryside’ type policy. Disaster cleanup is a great place to start.

The pace of environmental disasters is accelerating. The empire is over-extended and has become more of a danger than a benefit to its own host country. At some point we are going to have to choose: readiness for disaster at home with a sustainable force posture abroad, or perpetual war and a hollowed out homeland? We cannot afford both.

The government cannot be trusted on these issues. They have deployed elements of the national guard from the effected states to the Middle East during Hurricane season. Communities must harden themselves. They cannot expect timely and effective assistance from a state which no longer sees itself as a society rooted in place but rather as a global edifice of abstract ideas and market fundamentalism.

In this way there is another overlap between lackluster disaster response at home and fueling disasters abroad: both are profitable. Disaster capitalism thrives in war and postwar construction. It also thrives domestically when communities are uprooted. Both are connected to a world vision that sees corporate profit and its lobbyists as the central goal of the state.

I cannot be surprised anymore, but there is no bottom to my disappointment. For the time being more people should look into pursuing policies that learn from the Defend the Guard act.

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, a review

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Roy Scranton wrote this large pamphlet/small book to address what he saw as the act of a civilization not yet coping with its own ending. Not to say human extinction, but that it now seems most likely that, barring a technological miracle, the delicate economic and geopolitical forces underpinning the present lifestyle and assumptions of the developed world-as well as the environmental factors of the entire world at large-are coming to an end. And most people are in denial about it.

To quote from early on:

‘Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our collective fantasies of perpetual growth, constant innovation, and endless energy, just as the reality of individual mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.

The greatest challenge of the anthropocene isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, whether we should put up sea walls to protect Manhattan, or when we should abandon Miami. It won’t be addressed by buying a Prius, turning off the air conditioning, or signing a treaty. The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront our situation and realize that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the difficult task of adapting, with mortal humanity, to our new reality.’

Since I am of the materialism or GTFO school I disagree on prioritizing the philosophical question over that of the sea walls and the potential for conflict. That being said, this is a very valid question to grapple with.

Personally, though I feel like a downgrade of living standards and a rise of conflict are now inevitable due to environmental factors already under way, it would be unwise to underestimate technological innovation for future energy. Though one must be aware that vested financial interests in various old school companies will do everything they can to sabotage such a move through lobbying, and so don’t bet on public funding in any country that allows such political activity.

I found the prose and call to contemplate in this book extremely evocative and probably worth most people’s time. Though if you are already pretty versed in this and/or the growing new (finally, a good new school of philosophy!) of Speculative Realism-also called Speculative Materialism or Object Oriented Philosophy- you will hardly learn anything new. But this issue, of us as a species learning to deal with the consequences of forces we have unleashed-forces now as intrinsically a part of nature as non-man made plants and animals, is one which is desperately needed in an idealistic age overrun by anthropocentric and often non-material ideologies such as liberalism, constructivism, religious fundamentalism, and postmodernism.

The fault I find in this interesting text is its call for a new humanism. Personally, I find humanism itself to bear much of the brunt of our recent delusions and faith in ourselves and ability to consciously dominate nature. But I feel that my thoughts on the much vaunted factor of consciousness are long enough and touching upon issues out of scope with the topic of this post to talk about here. Needless to say, a future post on the topic could very well be in the making. What matters now is humanity dealing with a faceless enemy of its own making which is not human. The ultimate Frankenstein fear story where instead of a cobbled together re-animated corpse we must now recon, like with the early Godzilla movies, with something truly massive and awakened by us.

I will close with another quote I quite liked from near the end. ‘…Global Warming offers no apprehensible foe. That hasn’t stopped people from trying to find one. The Flood Wall Street protesters say the enemy is American corporations. Tanzania’s Jakaya Kikwete and Nauru’s Baron Waqa say the problem is the United States and Great Britain. Shell Oil and the Environmental Defense Fund seem to think it’s intractable UN bureaucracy that is holding us up. Barack Obama has implied its China. Tea Party Republicans would blame Obama, I’m sure, if they actually admitted that global warming is happening and caused by human activity. Meanwhile, NPR listening liberals want to believe that Tea Party republicans are responsible, so they can frame the problem as one amenable to solution by moral education and enlightened consumerism, as if it were all a matter of convincing people to eat more kale and drive electric cars…The enemy isn’t out there somewhere-the enemy is ourselves. Not as individuals, but as a collective. A system. A hive.’