Return of the Trout

Well, well, look who's back? I probably lost my one follower ( Ducky are you out there?) but I am used to writing for no one. Sort of a hobby. I have been spending time writing at a couple of other venues, the main one being IOPS, or organization for a participatory society. There is a "project" forum there and some great discussion at Project E.A.R.T.H., a kind of eco-philosophy blog. I have also been writing pieces for my local discussion/activist group the Zoozaps and writing speeches for the anti-coal export work I am involved in and writing a few short stories and still working on the second novel. Not a dull moment! My study of theory has really taken off in some interesting directions (still radical left however) with a big emphasis on identity, ideology and now culture. But enough about me- let's talk climate. One feels the inexorable ticking of a silent, deadly clock behind all the articles and IPPC reports and pieces on NPR or Frontline. Because despite all the talk, NOTHING IS BEING DONE. I suspect most people have experienced a particular nightmare where they realize that they must move rapidly in order to escape something or someone and yet frighteningly, they find that they are somehow frozen, that their legs will not respond or seem stuck in molasses. This terrifying dream-work is a good metaphor for the current reaction of our species to the threat of catastrophic climate change. There is to my mind a collective, pathological inability to overcome stasis or inertia which can at least partially be explained by a fatal flaw in the discourse of resistance: there is no moral or emotional equivalency between the perceived crisis and the imagined responses. Take as one example the campaign for divestment now underway on college and university campuses. Here, an acknowledged existential crisis such as the increasing rate of greenhouse gas emissions is met with procedural, administrative “action” ie to have an endowment relinquish its fossil fuel stocks. This is equivalent to politely asking an arsonist to use less gasoline when burning down your house. It is a moderate, calm, incremental response which convinces the general public that the rhetoric of “crisis” is overblown and irrational. The woman who comes up to you and asks if she can bum a smoke because her child has just been kidnapped is not to be taken seriously. The tenor of her response is too far removed from the severity of her problem. Al Gore goes about the country telling business leaders to shift their investments in order to avoid a dangerous “carbon bubble”. Now there is a rallying cry to awaken a dormant public: Protect Your Profit! Besides, investors know the most profitable strategy is to ride a bubble to the very last second to maximize return. Mainstream economists like William Nordhaus write books like Climate Casino about fifteen years too late and say we need cap and trade. In a similar fashion, those working to stop coal export (Powder River to Asian Markets via West Coast terminals) point to the hazards of increased traffic, coal dust and diesel fumes. They direct these minor, procedural complaints to the same politicians, bureaucrats and regulators to whom you would turn to with a problem of invasive weeds and then can’t understand why the public is not more alarmed! Just as damaging, those who use the language of immanent crisis, ecocide and system change are automatically de-legitimized and made to sound unreasonable or “alarmist”. The “good students” go to Powershift conferences and network and politely ask administrators for incremental change, just as they have been taught by those involved in past movements for “social change” ie apartheid, civil rights, gender equality, etc.. Those risking their own safety, comfort, freedom and bodies are made to look “militant” and “extreme” by comparison. But the uncomfortable truth is that this crisis is fundamentally different, both in terms of its order of magnitude and in its temporal dimension than those historical examples. The clock that is ticking is unlike any clock mankind has ever experienced because this is only a lineal, gradual process till the moment you reach the precipice. The very concepts of “tipping points”, or cliffs or positive feedback loops are so fraught and traumatic that our collective emotional response is by definition pathologized, repressed and not surprisingly, totally inadequate. The true, rational, healthy outrage which the situation calls for, in fact demands, must be reflected in our collective calls for action. There must be an equivalency between the threat and the response in our discourse, in terms of both language and practices. In terms of strategy going forward, I believe there exists another crucial “tipping point”, the point at which absent a serious shift in momentum, not just the “climate movement” but the Social Justice Left more generally, will become totally and tragically defeated and irrelevant. To avoid this calamity, I believe we need a concerted and concentrated push towards a defining win. And there is no better issue, more symbolically potent to rally around than the last leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. A recent piece by someone with Rising Tide argued the opposite, that the movement was putting too many eggs in one basket. I could not disagree more. The moment is now. All the eggs. Stop Keystone with mass civil disobedience, on a scale not seen in any social movement, ever.