OH NO!

You know what makes America great? Our cars. The prosperity of our nation is founded on our love of dependency on foreign petroleum and our unrivaled adeptness at causing massive oil spills. Sadly, the sun is setting on the Greatest Nation In The World:

YOUNG AMERICANS DON'T SEE CARS AS A STATUS OR SEX SYMBOL! THIS WILL SURELY MEAN THE END OF AMERICA.

Bush's Idiocy Takes (More) Shape

Andy Warhol's Endangered Species series was commissioned in 1983 by political and environmental activists Ronald and Frayda Feldman. 25 years later, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, passed by Richard Nixon, is threatened by President Bush, cementing his place as even more destructive and idiotic than even our most embarrassing modern president.


The Bush administration continues its reign of terror into the non-human world by choosing to benefit oil companies over endangered species. In order to keep big business out of harm's way from those pesky environmental groups that threaten to impose limits on emissions, Bush is eradicating the tenets of the Endangered Species Act, the biggest blow to the contemporary environmental movement since the last club Bush took to a baby seal's head.

From the Associated Press, 8/11/08:

"The Bush administration wants federal agencies to decide for themselves whether highways, dams, mines and other construction projects might harm endangered animals and plants....If approved, the changes would represent the biggest overhaul of endangered species regulations since 1986. They would accomplish through rules what conservative Republicans have been unable to achieve in Congress: ending some environmental reviews that developers and other federal agencies blame for delays and cost increases on many projects.

The chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, which oversees the Interior Department, said he was "deeply troubled" by the changes.

"This proposed rule ... gives federal agencies an unacceptable degree of discretion to decide whether or not to comply with the Endangered Species Act," said Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va. "Eleventh-hour rulemakings rarely if ever lead to good government." *

The new regulations follow a pattern by the Bush administration not to seek input from its scientists. The regulations were drafted by attorneys at both the Interior and Commerce Departments. Scientists with both agencies were first briefed on the proposal last week during a conference call, according to an official who asked not to be identified... "This is the fox guarding the hen house. The interests of agencies will outweigh species protection interests," said Eric Glitzenstein, the attorney representing environmental groups in the lawsuit over the wildfire prevention regulations. "What they are talking about doing is eviscerating the Endangered Species Act."

*Possessing the rational level of a high school debate team star renders this man too smart for politics.

We'll be old in 2050

"On Tuesday, leaders of the Group of 8 pledged to 'move toward a carbon-free society' by cutting emissions of heat-trapping gases in half by 2050. But Group of 5 poorer countries refused to sign onto that goal. They are holding out until rich nations like the United States take more aggressive steps to cut pollution over the next decade."
- NYT, July 10, 2008

Hey Kids! Let's Talk about the Unsustainable Path of America!

Robots in 2110 will be the same as in 1972.

Pixar has built an empire on slick animated films that are ingeniously able to please both kids and their parents. They've made billions of dollars, afforded them the ability to throw a little bit (or a lot) of a political message at the young minds they arguably have the largest role in shaping.

Pixar's latest, Wall*E, is the tale of a lovable little robot, his search for love, the anthropogenic destruction of our planet and really fat Americans. Wall*E is the lone robot left on earth after human excess has driven all other forms of life away. The robot watches old movies, learns about love, and falls for a sleek visiting robot who's technologically light years ahead of him. The film takes the shape of an old-fashioned romantic film; it begins as your standard clunky-boy-chases-hot-girl narrative. But for all its provincial posturing, Wall*E offers some welcome reprieve from the text Disney's been regurgitating for about a century. Eva, the hypercapable Angelina Jolie of the robot world, ends up saving Wall*E's clunky ass (straight out of 1972's Silent Running) in ways that Sleeping Beauty, Ariel, or Belle could never even imagine.

Eva comes to planet earth looking for signs of organic life. We later find out she was sent by humanity, which by the year 2775 has morphed into obese soda-slurping slugs who live in a large mall in outer space, rendered actually unable to walk. They'd like to return to earth (in "Operation Recolonize", the perfect unwitting semantic gaffe for the 21st century), which this generation has never seen and can only return to when they receive signs of organic material. Wall*E gives Eva the only plant on the planet to woo her, and suddenly her heart beats green as she prepares to return to the mothership. Evil robots try to steal the plant, thwarting the plans the fat and happy president (think John Goodman) and his minions. Wall*E and Eva run (float, slide) from the evil robots, and the world is saved, thanks to the droid couple. Humans then return to earth, learn how to farm and live in harmony with all life forms on the planet.

For all of it's skepticism of technological development, Pixar fetishizes the robots and other sleek machinery presented in the film. Not only are they superhuman, but they even surpass human emotional capacities. A human couple is inspired to gaze into each other's eyes after watching Wall*E and Eva gallivanting in the night sky outside the spaceship. In 2775, humans are robots, and robots are humans. If children learn how to become humans through the ubiquity of the media, one can't help but wonder what a generation of people who learn from this robotic attempt at humanity will look like in ten or fifteen years.

The film will surely be criticized for its heavy handedness, (hello, Day After Tomorrow) but as a culture, we've all but forfeited the means for understanding subtlety. Pixar has recognized this and opts to hit us over the head with what some will deem their "(evil) liberal agenda." Buy n' Large, a superstore that's even on the moon, right next to the American flag, is traced to causing the end of life on the Earth. At points, the film reads as unhinged disgust with the Bush administration. A bumbling politician (or "Global CEO"-- whoa! Fuck you, contemporary Western political/economic system!) who ends up being wrong about everything preaches to his subjects the importance of "staying the course." Basically, Pixar has grabbed their audience of millions by the throat and told them what a lot of us have known for a while now. Has any major film, especially one aimed at kids, used the word "unsustainable"? And they smeared it all in a sweet little love story to make it go down easier. This isn't the first time and won't be the last that someone's used their wide, captive audience to get their own political message across. But if we now can't grasp the subtlety of suggestion, Wall*E appears at the perfect time. And by perfect, I mean probably about thirty years late.
Pixar films are ubiquitous in any house with kids, and they most likely assume the role of babysitter or even parent to a lot of kids. If kids have to be brainwashed by the media, there aren't many options that offer a more progressive perspective. Science fiction may prove more healthy and productive for both the planet and each kids than romantic fiction.

Happy Earth Day!

In celebration of Earth Day, I've launched a new website!

An introduction to radical environmental ethics is now online at www.radicallygreen.org

Enjoy!

Reason for the end of the world

"...Americans are turning into annoyingly self-absorbed hypochondriacs. Why? Because they can. Go ahead and cry, says the prevailing psychological wisdom. Any trifling discomfort you might feel has been legitimized. Your pain is valid. If you think you're sick, you are."

Kalle Lasn, (Adbusters) argues in Culture Jam (Quill Books, 2000) that the world is falling apart because

1) Americans are rich, bored and empty, consuming everything in their path and treating the natural world like a minor disturbance at best and a potential mall parking lot

and

2) because everyone wants to be like Americans.

Is it too late for humans with influence to acknowledge this and collectively act to change it? Some people claim that humans are above all a self-preserving species, and we'll figure out a solution to the most massive crisis the planet has probably ever faced (worked for the Cold War, sort of. Fifty years ago, a lot of people thought we'd all be blown to bits by now). But, it doesn't help when such a small number of people control the way the entire world works.

If you're not angry/scared/outraged , you're just taking up space. In the immortal words of the Clash, "anger can be power if you know how you can use it."

Good One, "EPA"

It's been obvious for a while that the EPA might as well stand for Environmental Profiting Agency since the agency has nothing more than corporate dollars in mind (thanks to Bush's stellar appointees) and hasn't done too much to prevent destruction of the environment since Nixon was in office (his one good deed).
Welp, it looks like their malign neglect on global climate change is not going uncontested by seventeen states. Finally, some action. Way to go, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia, plus the city of New York, and the mayor and city council of Baltimore!

Sex! Consumerism! Emptiness!

"Assuming that the behavior of many males in patriarchal society is largely shaped by death denial, I often wonder whether women in patriarchy confront their mortality any more successfully and with fewer damaging ecological consequences. The obsession that many American women exhibit regarding the condition of their bodies, specifically with regard to their weight and appearance, suggests that such women have their own fears and resentments about age and death. The Western world's extraordinary 'consumerist' mentality is supported in part by women who are fixated not only on improving their wardrobes and cosmetics, but also on somehow filling up the internal 'void' experienced by so many people in materialistic societies. To be sure, female preoccupation with physical appearance is greatly influenced by the male gaze, but the situation is probably more complex than this. Men are themselves influenced by and seek the approval of the female gaze, particularly of those females whom men consider attractive. Arguably, so many Western men have been obsessed with acquiring wealth and power because these often prove effective in gaining the interest of women whom those men consider desirable. Perhaps by attempting, with markedly little success, to fulfill sexual-romantic fantasies, men and women alike are concealing more disturbing issues about personal identity, life purpose, and mortality."
-Michael Zimmerman, Contesting Earth's Future
(emphasis mine)

It should be no surprise that we're addicting to buying stuff. Zimmerman isn't the first one to suggest that this may be due to a lack of any sort of cultural grounding outside of the capitalist mentality, but his posturing of the argument as a psycho-sexual/ identity dilemma is compelling.
So what's the answer, if we're doomed to unsuccessfully buy our way into a fantasy we don't even really want fulfilled? Well, we could all go out and buy a some Tom Ford products (the ad above is one of the more tame in a series that was released for a Fall 2007 campaign). A more constructive move, and a more existentially and ecologically responsible one, might be to recognize our own obsessions with wealth and power, question their origins and endless futility (i.e. the fact that they're a cultural construct) and tackle head-on Zimmerman's "disturbing issues about personal identity, life purpose and mortality." Admittedly easier said than done, but we've been living the alternative for a while now and we know what that looks like.

Creation/ Destruction/ Transcendence

"To grossly use more than you need, to destroy, is biologically unsound. Much of the production and consumption of modern societies is not necessary or conducive to spiritual and cultural growth, let alone survival, and is behind much greed and envy, age-old causes of social and international discord."
-Gary Snyder

"A well-ordered harmony does not begin with the self, but rather places the world before life, life before man, the respect for other beings before the love of self."
- Claude Levi-Strauss

But, transcendence is still possible.

Money For Nothing

Resist evil advertisements! with help from Slate.com

And propaganda from oil companies.

The Truth from The Independent (UK):

The Biggest Environmental Crime in History By Cahal Milmo, 10 December, 2007

BP, the British oil giant that pledged to move "Beyond Petroleum" by finding cleaner ways to produce fossil fuels, is being accused of abandoning its "green sheen" by investing nearly £1.5bn to extract oil from the Canadian wilderness using methods which environmentalists say are part of the "biggest global warming crime" in history.

The multinational oil and gas producer, which last year made a profit of £11bn, is facing a head-on confrontation with the green lobby in the pristine forests of North America after Greenpeace pledged a direct action campaign against BP following its decision to reverse a long-standing policy and invest heavily in extracting so-called "oil sands" that lie beneath the Canadian province of Alberta and form the world's second-largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

Producing crude oil from the tar sands – a heavy mixture of bitumen, water, sand and clay – found beneath more than 54,000 square miles of prime forest in northern Alberta – an area the size of England and Wales combined – generates up to four times more carbon dioxide, the principal global warming gas, than conventional drilling. The booming oil sands industry will produce 100 million tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to a fifth of the UK's entire annual emissions) a year by 2012, ensuring that Canada will miss its emission targets under the Kyoto treaty, according to environmentalist activists. (continued)

Since it's Christmas and we're all spending loads of money buying love for people, consider dropping a small monthly check Greenpeace's way. It's a hell of a lot more useful than the fat bills we fork over for coffee every month, and you can think of it as a way to purchase a clear(er) conscience. Those people on city streets with clipboards who try to guilt you into giving them money are pretty annoying (I used to be one) but they are doing something worthwhile, i.e. not ringing up your $300 pants assembled by Hungarian pre-schoolers.

It says a lot about the state of the world-- people acting on behalf of the environment have to shout you down and stand in your way just to be ignored most of the time if not ostracized (once a guy yelled "I hate the environment!" at me), while we all walk by quickly to where we really want to go, to buy the selves we want to be at H&M or Victoria's Secret. (Karolina Kurkova's rack is the size of a car on the Michigan Ave store's window in Chicago.)

Subversive culture isn't for sale, no matter how "indie" H&M's hoodies are. Be a punk, and don't buy anything. Except maybe some stock in the planet.

Get in the Prius, Kids, the World is Ending

We are all Good People, we're just trying to get buy*, we've Worked Hard for our stuff, we deserve our luxury vacation in an impoverished nation!

Right?

No.
_____________________________________________________

I don't need to sit here and type about how everyone and their Hummer-hawking mother is trying to get on the Green bandwagon. It's obvious. What's apparently isn't so obvious is that said bandwagon is running on non-renewables.
The current mix of American identity-crisis, or need for a label to subscribe to (Red or Blue? Do I believe in God? Well, my priest says that abortion is bad so I hate the gays too, and don't believe in climate change because that guy on TV who likes God too says it's fake) and self-obsessed, misguided "philanthropy" (I send cheap factory-made crap to orphans in Cambodia who make cheap crap in factories! I'm a good person!) has opened the market for "green" consumption, perfect for the smug and misinformed in your life this holiday season.

We like to believe that believe that "change" can begin at the mall, that we can give ourselves a pat on the back for buying organic produce at Wal-Mart. We want the self-satisfaction of knowing that we've done a good thing, without actually having to go through the trouble of changing anything in our lives at all. That way, we can sleep easily on our NEW!! 300-count ORGANIC!! Egyptian cotton sheets from Bloomies!! Forget that the cotton was grown in a desert climate and used massive amounts of fresh water, harvested by poor laborers (who have no fresh water to drink) for next to no money, the cotton was flown thousands of miles to the department store chain in the suburban mall that replaced a forest and paved over a pond for parking, and the old sheets will probably go to a landfill after no one buys them at the Goodwill.

This feature from American Public Media poses the question "Is our consumer society sustainable?" The fact that this question apparently still needs to be asked really only answers the question of why we're on the fast track to a human-designed ecological collapse: we refuse to acknowledge that our addiction to convenience and crap is not only slowly devouring us as individual humans, but extends far outside the realms of ignorance that our suburban enclaves have afforded us. (What? My actions affect other people and things? What are other people and things?)
But ignorance can be fixed; knowledge can be imparted upon the uniformed. The real threat here is the smug, "conscious consumer" whose Prius cupholder is always stocked with a Starbucks double-espresso-nonfat-peppermint-latte-extra hot-extra foam-two splenda in two cardboard cups and a 10% recycled material coffee cup cosies. Six hundred dollar organic Italian free-trade leather boots made from the happy hides of New Zealish cows that have fully realized their existential potential usually factor in somewhere, along with $59 organic face moisturizer, and another family Prius sitting in the garage at home next to the Explorer, which is only used for long family car trips. To the mall.
A new store just opened up in Burlington that bills itself as a store for "natural parenting." Since when did "nature" involve a huge plush giraffe from China? This is more of a vehical for the parents' own sense of self-worth than effective in alleviating any ecological destruction that we've had so much fun in causing.

Don't buy the color-coded hype. "Green" is a brand. Consumption is consumption: always effective in degrading the environment in one way or another. Toyota is a business; they did not create the Prius to save the world. They wanted to make money. Used is usually better than "green." Progress and paradigm shift are not for sale at the mall, and neither is self-fulfillment. Just don't ask me where to find them.


*whoa, subconscious.

American River

American River, Karen Williams Edelmann
courtesy of artbackroom.com

Ipso Facto

Using Latin phrases makes you sound smart, even if you don't really know what they mean.

"A terrorist and an environmentalist cannot live within the same skin."

"Our work is going to end, if it ends, in the construction of this space for new political relationships."

Rock Star as cultural construction? Nooooooooo!

Too Howl too handle, 50 years later.

"Self-obsessed tunnel vision spiraling into nihilism" sound familiar? You might be an American under 30.

The Voice of a Generation is unoriginal, Ivy-leagued and male.
Times sure have changed.