What ever label humans give their system - Capitalism, Socialism, any-ism - the name of the game is consume the planet as fast as we can.
That's what deep green author and activist Derrick Jensen tells me in this first Ecoshock interview with the radical philosopher. The problem? Call it civilization.
The occasion for our call is an impending visit to Vancouver and Victoria, for speeches about his new book. Hear Derrick October 19th at the Ukrainian Hall in Vancouver (8 pm), October 20th at the David Lam auditorium (6 pm) Actually, the book is a duet, with photographs, about zoos, called "Thought to Exist in the Wild".
But, as often happens, Derrick and I wander off to look at the big, dark picture of the day: the human situation, and what to do. I ask him why people resist his message.
Sorry, no time to wrap it all up in print, and maybe it should stay in audio anyway, beyond the great search engines in the sky. Give this interview a listen. It comes from the Radio Ecoshock Show for October 12th, 2007.
Making radio seems to have soaked up most of my time lately. We've been broadcasting way more than I can get into this podcast. Check out our weekly listing of downloadable shows.
The Ecoshock program is picking up steam, with over a dozen college and community stations syndicated now. If you local non-profit station doesn't have it, ask for it. Anyone writing from their station call letter email box gets the address of a new web page just for radio stations.
That includes a handy podcast and show notes.
Also in that October 12th show is a conference call recorded by RAN, the Rainforest Action Network people. Rebecca Tarbotton explains how America's two largest banks, Citi and Bank of America, are set to finance a whole new wave of dirty coal plant construction. Damn global warming (87 degrees in New York in October, records set all over Canada...) - let's make money building new coal plants!
Stop these madmen from wrecking the climate. Tune in to RAN's "Coal Call" for journalists - with author Bill McKibben, Judy Bonds from Appalachia, and a church and corporate responsibility representative. It was intended as a phone call, but makes for moving radio.
Judy Bonds says America is under attack, being bombed every day. Gazillions of tons of explosions are blowing up American mountains - to get coal. They blow the tops right off the mountains, poisoning land, water, and air. The "hill-billy's" are losing their hills, in the poorest part of the country.
RAN sets out to embarass these huge banks into acting responsibly. But hey, who cares, we all love this fabulous hot weather! Thank you, banks, for making more coal plants!
As though the Arctic sea ice isn't melting away.
Meanwhile, climate curmudgeon Alexander Cockburn is comparing Al Gore to Hitler's PR man Goebbels. Cockburn has lost his mind. He really has.
Check this out, from Cockburn's latest rant at Counterpunch:
"The specific reason why this man of blood shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the IPCC is for their joint agitprop on the supposed threat of anthropogenic global warming. Bogus science topped off with toxic alarmism. It's as ridiculous as as if Goebbels got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1938, sharing it with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for his work in publicizing the threat to race purity posed by Jews, Slavs and gypsies."
Worse: Cockburn threatens, he is going to publish a book on all this garbage. So sad.
What will he say ten years from now, as the Big Heat and storms make parts of America difficult to inhabit? All his good work on the Left, now goes down the tubes. History will only remember him as the crank who was so very wrong.
Alex.
Radio Ecoshock
www.ecoshock.org
2 comments:
Jensen has more insight about Western civilization than any other writer I've read... and I read a lot. People resist his message because he is stating the obvious. It's a simple fact that if the world continues as it is then it won't end nicely for humanity.
Jensen might turn out to be wrong about civilization. I could imagine that it's possible a new type of civilization could form. The problem is that such a possibility is pure speculation.
What we know is that species are going extinct and ecologies are being destroyed that will never be brought back. Nature, in one form or another, will continue just as it continued after the mass extinctions of the past, but this is the largest mass extinction ever to occur on planet earth. No one knows what that means.
Humans are optimistic. It's inborn because it has helped our species to survive. Optimism wasn't a problem for most of our species existence.
In some ways, I'm even more pessimistic than Jensen. My view is somewhere between Jensen and the horror writer Thomas Ligotti. Ligotti wrote a non-fiction work in Collapse journal where he relied heavily on the work of Peter Wessel Zapffe.
Zapffe was a very pessimistic environmentalist who believed humanity was utterly deluded, but what is interesting is that Zapffe was the mentor of Arne Næss who was the founder of Deep Ecology. Næss had a more optimistic vision, but I like that at the root of our modern environmentalist optimism is a profound sense of pessimism.
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