by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 16, 2015 | Human Supremacy, Strategy & Analysis
By Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen
Once, the environmental movement was about protecting the natural world from the insatiable demands of this extractive culture. Some of the movement still is: around the world grassroots activists and their organizations are fighting desperately to save this or that creature they love, this or that plant or fungi, this or that wild place.
Contrast this to what some activists are calling the conservation-industrial complex–big green organizations, huge “environmental” foundations, neo-environmentalists, some academics–which has co-opted too much of the movement into “sustainability,” with that word being devalued to mean “keeping this culture going as long as possible.” Instead of fighting to protect our one and only home, they are trying to “sustain” the very culture that is killing the planet. And they are often quite explicit about their priorities.
For example, the recent “An Open Letter to Environmentalists on Nuclear Energy,” signed by a number of academics, some conservation biologists, and other members of the conservation-industrial complex, labels nuclear energy as “sustainable” and argues that because of global warming, nuclear energy plays a “key role” in “global biodiversity conservation.” Their entire argument is based on the presumption that industrial energy usage is, like Dick Cheney said, not negotiable–it is taken as a given. And for what will this energy be used? To continue extraction and drawdown–to convert the last living creatures and their communities into the final dead commodities.
Their letter said we should let “objective evidence” be our guide. One sign of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns: let’s lay out a pattern and see if we can recognize it in less than 10,000 years. When you think of Iraq, do you think of cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touches the ground? That’s how it was prior to the beginnings of this culture. The Near East was a forest. North Africa was a forest. Greece was a forest. All pulled down to support this culture. Forests precede us, while deserts dog our heels. There were so many whales in the Atlantic they were a hazard to ships. There were so many bison on the Great Plains you could watch for four days as a herd thundered by. There were so many salmon in the Pacific Northwest you could hear them coming for hours before they arrived. The evidence is not just “objective,” it’s overwhelming: this culture exsanguinates the world of water, of soil, of species, and of the process of life itself, until all that is left is dust.
Fossil fuels have accelerated this destruction, but they didn’t cause it, and switching from fossil fuels to nuclear energy (or windmills) won’t stop it. Maybe three generations of humans will experience this level of consumption, but a culture based on drawdown has no future. Of all people, conservation biologists should understand that drawdown cannot last, and should not be taken as a given when designing public policy–let alone a way of life.
It is long past time for those of us whose loyalties lie with wild plants and animals and places to take back our movement from those who use its rhetoric to foster accelerating ecocide. It is long past time we all faced the fact that an extractive way of life has never had a future, and can only end in biotic collapse. Every day this extractive culture continues, two hundred species slip into that longest night of extinction. We have very little time left to stop the destruction and to start the repair. And the repair might yet be done: grasslands, for example, are so good at sequestering carbon that restoring 75 percent of the planet’s prairies could bring atmospheric CO2 to under 330 ppm in fifteen years or less. This would also restore habitat for a near infinite number of creatures. We can make similar arguments about reforestation. Or consider that out of the more than 450 dead zones in the oceans, precisely one has repaired itself. How? The collapse of the Soviet Empire made agriculture unfeasible in the region near the Black Sea: with the destructive activity taken away, the dead zone disappeared, and life returned. It really is that simple.
You’d think that those who claim to care about biodiversity would cherish “objective evidence” like this. But instead the conservation-industrial complex promotes nuclear energy (or windmills). Why? Because restoring prairies and forests and ending empires doesn’t fit with the extractive agenda of the global overlords.
This and other attempts to rationalize increasingly desperate means to fuel this destructive culture are frankly insane. The fundamental problem we face as environmentalists and as human beings isn’t to try to find a way to power the destruction just a little bit longer: it’s to stop the destruction. The scale of this emergency defies meaning. Mountains are falling. The oceans are dying. The climate itself is bleeding out and it’s our children who will find out if it’s beyond hope. The only certainty is that our one and only home, once lush with life and the promise of more, will soon be a bare rock if we do nothing.
We the undersigned are not part of the conservation-industrial complex. Many of us are long-term environmental activists. Some of us are Indigenous people whose cultures have been living truly sustainably and respectfully with all our relations from long before the dominant culture began exploiting the planet. But all of us are human beings who recognize we are animals who like all others need livable habitat on a living earth. And we love salmon and prairie dogs and black terns and wild nature more than we love this way of life.
Environmentalism is not about insulating this culture from the effects of its world-destroying activities. Nor is it about trying to perpetuate these world-destroying activities. We are reclaiming environmentalism to mean protecting the natural world from this culture.
And more importantly, we are reclaiming this earth that is our only home, reclaiming it from this extractive culture. We love this earth, and we will defend our beloved.
You can sign on to this letter at: Open Letter to Reclaim Environmentalism
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 7, 2015 | Climate Change, Strategy & Analysis
By Kim Hill / Deep Green Resistance Australia
Naomi Klein’s latest book, This Changes Everything, is based on the premise that capitalism is the cause of the climate crisis, and to avert catastrophe, capitalism must go. The proposed solution is a mass movement that will win with arguments that undermine the capitalist system by making it morally unacceptable.
This premise has many flaws. It fails to acknowledge the roots of capitalism and climate change, seeing them as independent issues that can be transformed without taking action to address the underlying causes. Climate change cannot be avoided by building more infrastructure and reforming the economy, as is suggested in the book. The climate crisis is merely a symptom of a deeper crisis, and superficial solutions that act on the symptoms will only make the situation worse. Human-induced climate change started thousands of years ago with the advent of land clearing and agriculture, long before capitalism came into being. The root cause—a culture that values domination of people and land, and the social and physical structures created by this culture—needs to be addressed for any action on capitalism or climate to be effective.
I’ve long been baffled by the climate movement. When 200 species a day are being made extinct, oceans and rivers being drained of fish and all life, unpolluted drinking water being largely a thing of the past, and nutritious food being almost inaccessible, is climate really where we should focus our attention? It seems a distraction, a ‘look, what’s that in the sky?’ from those that seek to profit from taking away everything that sustains life on the only planet we have. By directing our thoughts, discussions and actions towards gases in the upper atmosphere and hotly debated theories, rather than immediate needs for basic survival of all living beings, those in power are leading us astray from forming a resistance movement that could ensure the continuation of life on Earth.
This book is a tangle of contradictions. An attempt to unravel the contradictions and understand the thinking behind these arguments is what drew me in to reading it, but in the end I was left confused, with a jumble of mismatched ideas, vague goals, and proposals to continue with the same disjointed tactics that have never worked in the past.
This Changes Everything advocates for socialism, then explores why socialism won’t stop fossil fuel extraction. It is against capitalism, yet insists ‘there is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy’. Renewable energy is promoted as an alternative, yet the objections of people whose land and livelihoods are destroyed by these developments is acknowledged and respected. The book promotes the rights of indigenous people to live on their land in traditional ways, and at the same time claims they need jobs and development. It sees the extraction and burning of fossil fuels as the main cause of the climate crisis, yet recommends solutions that require more of the same. It supports economic development while opposing economic growth. It says that ‘compromised, palatable-to-conservative solutions don’t work’ yet is selling exactly that.
One chapter is devoted to promoting divestment from fossil fuel companies, even though this is openly acknowledged to have no economic effect. Apparently it will ‘bankrupt their reputation’ rather than actually bankrupt them. This strategy is unlikely to work, as corporations spend millions on PR campaigns, and control the media, so anyone outside this system will struggle to have any real effect on their reputations. And corporations are powered by money, not morals, so moral campaigns on their own can’t shut down a company. And if they did, this targeting of specific companies, rather than the entire economic system, will only create space for others to take their place.
Another chapter explains why ‘green billionaires’ won’t save us, which seems unnecessary in a book arguing for dismantling capitalism—of course more capitalism won’t help. Strangely, Klein is disappointed that Virgin CEO Richard Branson, despite investing many millions of dollars to invent or discover a ‘miracle fuel’ to power his ever-expanding airline, did not achieve this impossible goal. What difference would it make if he had been successful? Whatever this fuel might be, it would still need to be extracted from somewhere, and burned. Unless money really can buy a genuine religious miracle, and even then, the airline industry requires massive amounts of land, mining and manufacturing, and a globalised economy. If fuel costs were not a limitation, these industrial processes would expand more quickly, destroying everyone and everything in their path. A miracle fuel still leaves us with a culture of travelling the world at jet speed, rather than a localised culture of dialogue and relationship with nature. This is the disconnected thinking that comes from engaging with climate as an isolated issue.
The book concludes with a call for a nonviolent mass movement, and ‘trillions [of dollars] to pay for zero-carbon, disaster-ready societal transformations.’ The requested transformations are a transition to renewable energy, and building more infrastructure. These won’t stop capitalism or climate change, and would make the situation worse. A mass movement would require a mass of people who both share these goals and believe that a mass movement is the way to reach them. Given the compromised and conflicted goals, and the corporate influence on the climate movement recently, this is unlikely to happen.
Mass movements using only moral arguments have never changed systems of power in the past. The global Occupy movement is a recent example. While a great deal was achieved, the capitalist system is still with us, and it will take more than peaceful demonstrations to take it down. The infrastructure of capitalism needs to be physically dismantled, using a diversity of tactics, and the culture of domination that legitimises extraction and exploitation must be confronted, and replaced with land-based cultures that value relationship with all living beings.
Image modified from original art by Mark Gould: http://theartofannihilation.com/this-changes-nothing-why-the-peoples-climate-march-guarantees-climate-catastrophe-2/
by DGR News Service | Jun 17, 2014 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Indigenous Autonomy
Deep Green Resistance stands in sympathy and solidarity with Don Celestino Bartolo and the farmers and residents of the municipality of Juchitan de Zaragoza as well as all those who live on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, as they suffer and resist Gas Natural Fenosa’s Biío Hioxo Wind Energy project. Like most large infrastructure projects, the Biío Hioxo Energy project ignores how indigenous communities use the land for food, sacred places, and community integrity. This project harms the land by destroying soils, forests, and natural spaces, as well as with noise and visual pollution.
Projects like this threaten the way of life of the residents of Juchitan de Zaragoza and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and destroy the land. It is typical of the destructiveness of civilization and the unbridled greed of capitalism. Biío Hioxo Energy also serves as an object lesson in the folly of green technology, and deserves our condemnation and resistance.
Indigenous peoples have always been at the forefront of the struggle against the dominant culture’s ecocidal violence. We are heartened by the strength of the people of Tehuantepec, who are resisting with strength and desperation. DGR offers its support and encouragement to those on the front lines of the fight to save the planet, and despite our lack of experience and membership in the region we will support the struggle in whatever way we can.
For more information on the Biío Hioxo project, see http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/12042
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 21, 2014 | Indigenous Autonomy, Indirect Action, Mining & Drilling
By Claire Stewart-Kanigan / The Dominion
“Eco-consciousness” and “green living” are centrepieces of product branding for the Toyota Prius. But that feel-good packaging has rapidly worn thin for members of the Algonquin Nation and residents of Kipawa, Quebec, who are now fighting to protect traditional Algonquin territory from devastation in the name of hybrid car battery production.
In 2011, after nearly two years of negotiations, Matamec Explorations, a Quebec-based junior mining exploration company, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Toyotsu Rare Earth Canada (TRECan), a Canadian subsidiary of Japan-based Toyota Tsusho Corporation. The memorandum confirmed Matamec’s intention to become “one of the first heavy rare earths producers outside of China.” In pursuit of this role, the company plans to build an open-pit Heavy Rare Earth Elements (HREE) mine directly next to Kipawa Lake, the geographical, ecological, and cultural centre of Kipawa.
Rare earths are a group of 17 elements found in the earth’s crust. They are used to produce electronics for cell phones, wind turbines, and car batteries. Rare earths are notorious for their environmentally costly extraction process, with over 90 per cent of the mined raw materials classified as waste.
Toyota has guaranteed purchase of 100 per cent of rare earths extracted from the proposed Kipawa mine, for use in their hybrid car batteries, replacing a portion of Toyota’s supply currently sourced out of China.
Over the last seven years, China has reduced the scale of its rare earths exports via a series of annual tonnage export caps and taxes, allegedly out of concern for high cancer rates, contaminated water supply, and significant environmental degradation. Despite China’s stated intention to encourage manufacturers to reduce their rare earths consumption, the US, the EU and Japan have challenged China’s export caps through the World Trade Organization (WTO) and are seeking new deposits elsewhere for exploitation. Toyota and Matamec are seeking to make Kipawa part of this shift.
Kipawa is a municipality located on traditional Algonquin territory approximately 80 kilometres northeast of North Bay, Ontario, in what is now known as western Quebec. The primarily Indigenous municipality is home to approximately 500 people, including members of Eagle Village First Nation and Wolf Lake First Nation, of the Anishinaabeg Algonquin Nation. The town of Kipawa lies within the large Ottawa River Watershed, a wide-branching network of lakes, rivers and wetlands. Lake Kipawa is at the heart of the Kipawa region.
Lifelong Kipawa resident and Eagle Village First Nation member Jamie Lee McKenzie told The Dominion that the lake is of “huge” importance to the people of Kipawa. “We drink it, for one….Everyone has camps on the lake [and] we use it on basically a daily basis.” This water network nourishes the richly forested surroundings that make up the traditional hunting and trapping grounds of the local Algonquin peoples.
“Where the proposed mine site is, it’s my husband’s [ancestral] trapping grounds,” said Eagle Village organizer Mary McKenzie, in a phone interview with The Dominion. “This is where we hunt, we fish, I pick berries….We just want to keep our water.” Jamie Lee and Mary McKenzie also emphasized the role of lake-based tourism in Kipawa’s economy.
The Kipawa HREE project would blast out an open-pit mine 1.5 kilometres wide and 110 meters deep, from the summit of a large lakeside hill. It would also establish a nearby waste dump with a 13.3 megatonne capacity. Rock containing the heavy rare earth elements dysprosium and terbium would be extracted from the pit via drilling and explosives, processed at an on-site grinding and magnetic separation plant, and then transported by truck to a hydrometallurgical facility 50 kilometers away for refining.
Matamec confirmed in its Preliminary Economic Assessment Study that some effluence caused by evaporation and precipitation is inevitable, especially during the snowmelt period. A community-led presentation argued that this could create acid mine drainage, acidifying the lake and poisoning the fish.
“There’s going to be five [truckloads of sulfuric acid transported from pit to refinery] a day….[I]n a 15-year span, that’s 27,300 truckloads of sulfuric acid,” said Mary McKenzie. “We’re worried about spills and the environment….They’re talking about neutralizing [the acid], when a spill does occur, with lime. I have [sources that say] lime is also a danger to the environment.”
In a 2013 presentation in Kipawa, Matamec stated that while “some radioactivity [due to the presence of uranium and thorium in waste rock] will be present in the rare earth processing chain,” its effects will be negligible. Yet these reassurances ring hollow for some, who point to cancer spikes observed in communities near rare earths projects in China. In the project’s economic assessment, Matamec itself indicated that waste rock is too dangerous for use in concrete and dikes.
“Whatever goes up in the air [from blasting and evaporation] comes down….A lot of those particles are radioactive,” said Mary McKenzie. “Our animals eat this [plant matter potentially affected by the mine]….We depend on our moose, we depend on our fish, so that’s a scary situation.” The refining process also uses strong acids and bases.
While Matamec stated in the Assessment that “most” of the water used in processing will be recycled, a portion of the post-processing solution will be directed into the lake or tailings ponds. The mine is intended to be operational for 13 years, but tailings ponds would require maintenance for generations, and leaching is always possible. Adding to this risk, Matamec has “assumed that [certain] tailings will not be acid generating or leachable” and will therefore only use watertight geomembrane for a portion of the tailings ponds.
With the approval process being accelerated by both public and private factors, production could begin as early as 2015. Quebec’s regulations call for provincial environmental impact assessments only when projects have a daily metal ore production capacity that is considerably higher than the national standard—7,000 metric tons per day versus 3,000 in the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. What’s more, by categorizing HREE in the same regulatory group as other metals, these tonnage minimums fail to reflect the higher toxicity and environmental costs of heavy rare earths extraction.
Because of this, the Kipawa project does not trigger a provincial-level assessment. It only requires clearance from the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency and a certificate of authorization granted by the provincial Minister of Sustainable Development, Environment and Parks.
On the private side, the assessment process has been fast-tracked by a series of multimillion-dollar payments from TRECan to Matamec ($16M as of April 2013). According to Matamec president André Gauthier in a July 2012 press release, this makes Matamec “the only rare earth exploration company to have received funds to accelerate and complete a feasibility study and an environmental and social impact assessment study of a HREE deposit.”
The chiefs of Eagle Village and Wolf Lake First Nations have been demanding a consent-based consultation and review process since the project was quietly made public in 2011—one that exceeds “stakeholder” consultation standards and acknowledges the traditional relationship of the Algonquin people to the land. Residents only became widely aware of Matamec’s plans following the company’s community consultation session in April 2013.
Jamie Lee McKenzie has not been impressed by Matamec’s consultations. “They come in and they have a meeting…and they tell us all the good things about the mine,” McKenzie told The Dominion. “[They say,] ‘It will give you jobs. We need this to make batteries for green living,’ but that’s it.”
Local organizers told The Dominion that a Matamec-chaired community focus group had been cancelled during the early summer after one local participant asked that her critical questions be included in the group’s minutes. Following what many residents see as the failure of Matamec and provincial assessment agencies to meaningfully engage with Kipawa residents, the community has taken matters into their own hands.
In the summer of 2013, Kipawa residents began to organize, with the leadership of Eagle Village and Wolf Lake members. Petitions containing over 2,500 signatures were sent to provincial ministers, demanding a provincial environmental assessment as well as “public hearings to review the Mining Act…to strengthen rare earth environmental monitoring.” As of late November, there had been no official responses to the petitions, and no positive response to letter-writing campaigns directed at the office of the federal Minister of Environment. (Quebec adopted a new Mining Act in early December, as this article went to print.)
But demands have grown beyond calls for review. “We’re not okay with the BAPE [provincial assessment]; we’re not okay with the mine,” said Mary McKenzie. “We’re against the [project] 100 per cent.” In September, McKenzie helped organize a 100-person anti-mine protest on the shores of Kipawa Lake. In November, the resistance network formalized their association as the Lake Kipawa Protection Society, committed to stopping the mine through regional education, local solidarity, and creative resistance strategies like a “Tarnish Toyota” day of action.
The Kipawa HREE project, if approved, would open doors for the numerous other companies exploring the watershed—such as Globex, Fieldex, Aurizon, and Hinterland Metals—as well as for heavy rare earths mining in the rest of Canada.
“We have mining companies all over in our area here,” said Mary McKenzie. “Matamec is the most advanced, but it’s not just Matamec: we want all the mining out of our region.”
The mine is not the only project on the fast-track: Algonquin and local resistance efforts are picking up momentum, and backing down on protecting the water and land is not on the agenda.
“This is ancestral ground,” McKenzie stressed. “We can fight this.”
Claire Stewart-Kanigan is a student, Settler, and visitor on Haudenosaunee territory.
From The Dominion: http://dominion.mediacoop.ca/story/toyota-prius-not-so-green-after-all/20373
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 5, 2013 | Alienation & Mental Health, Strategy & Analysis
By Vincent Kelley / One Struggle
I recently saw an Aquafina® bottle sitting on a table at my workplace. Its label read: “New! ECO-FINA Bottle™, 50% less plastic (*on average vs. 2002 bottle).” To start, it is ridiculous that PepsiCo, the producer of the Aquafina® brand, would lay any claim to social consciousness by offering a “greener” choice than its competitors. Pepsi drains aquifers in India [1], knowingly includes carcinogenic coloring in its soft drinks [2], and adopts racist hiring practices [3], just to name a few of the corporation’s psychopathic behaviors. This psychopathology, of course, is not unique to Pepsi—it is the modus operandi of the corporation itself as a legal-economic entity. [4]
But there is something else illustrated by the ECO-FINA water bottle that is common not only to corporations in the monopoly stage of capitalism [5], but to industrial civilization as a whole. Namely, the fabrication of meaningless choices while meaningful choices are systematically eliminated. Furthermore, as meaningful choices are eliminated, the hegemonic elites craft a distorted narrative that frames the oppressed as the agents of choice who “chose” such elimination.
Some examples: When Western nations colonized the Americas, India, Africa, or any other exploited region of the globe, the colonized peoples “chose” to abandon their traditional cultures to be players in the arena of industrial capitalism; when a woman is prostituted by a man, she “chose” to be in the industry; when a homeless person is terrorized by police, he “chose” to slack off and be a burden to the rest of society and, therefore, deserves the terrorizing. Indeed, the oppressor is an expert at using his agency to create a false narrative of the agency of the oppressed in an effort to legitimize his oppressing.
This agency narrative, if you will, is inculcated into every civilized human being by means of the patriarchal household, the coercive school system, the hierarchical workplace, and the stupefying television, lest any oppressed class should name the objective disparity in agency between the colonizer and the colonized, the pimp and the prostitute, or the homeless person and the cop, and act accordingly to dismantle the relationship of domination.
In the economic sphere, in order to convince us that we truly do have agency, the ruling class inundates us with a barrage of products to choose from: Baskin-Robbins 31 flavors, at least 31 brands of toothpaste to mitigate the damage done to our teeth and gums by the Baskin-Robbins ice cream, new and increasingly violent pornography for men to watch, and thousands of cosmetic products to distract women from—while often contributing to—their objectification in a pornified culture. And for those who are more “socially conscious” there is the ECO-FINA Bottle™, which allows you to love the ecocidal profits system twice as much as you consume half the amount of plastic!
This deluge of consumptive choices is exceedingly wasteful—US companies spent $131 billon on advertising in 2010 alone. [6] Additionally, when supported by “socially conscious” individuals, the valorization of choice by “progressive” consumers is inherently liberal—i.e. not radical—in its fixation on personal lifestyleism, as opposed to systemic change. And, most importantly, this barrage of choices in an economy that values production for production’s sake is disorienting and, as we will see, paradoxically coercive.
Sociologist of religion Peter Berger argues that, in modernity, individuals are forced to choose their religion or worldview. In the words of fellow sociologist Keith A. Roberts, “Berger did not view this situation as one in which the individual is free to choose. . . Rather, each person must choose; that is, one is coerced into doing so.” [7]
With an overabundance of worldviews in the religio-spiritual marketplace, from the range of conservative institutional religions to the assortment of New Age spiritualities of abstraction, the individual is acculturated into a milieu of unease and confusion vis-à-vis how to live in the world. While a plurality of choices is ostensibly appealing and progressive, it is ultimately coercive in the disorientation it engenders and the meaninglessness it obscures. [8]
Similarly, many other “choices” in our lives appear free and meaningful on the surface but are, in reality, unfree and meaningless.
Individually we can choose to fill up with regular, plus, or premium at the gas station, but we cannot choose to live in a society free from the destruction wrought by fossil fuel extraction and use. Individually we can choose whether to apply for a job at Walmart or one at McDonald’s, but we cannot choose to live in a society free from wage slavery. Individual men can choose not to abuse women, but women will never be able to choose a life without the threat or enactment of male pattern violence in a culture that extols institutionalized misogyny. Individual colonized peoples—more accurately the native elite, not the immiserated masses—can choose to work their way up in the bureaucracies of colonial or colonially-controlled governments, but they can never choose to return to the governing structures of their traditional culture. Individual students can choose whether or not to turn in their homework, but they cannot choose to escape from the coercion of compulsory schooling.
In other words, we have ample, but usually meaningless, choices within the confines of a culture that strives to obliterate the choices that are truly meaningful. As Noam Chomsky insightfully notes, “[t]he smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. . .” [9]
Analogously, we have numerous choices within the spectrum of civilization, but these choices are rendered meaningless in the face of what is excluded from the realm of choice. [10]
To drink clean water, to be free from the threat of violence, to have healthy biotic communities, to have a respite from the incessant war on the health and diversity of our emotional experience—none of these things were ever on the table for us to choose. Instead, we’re stuck with 31 flavors of ice cream and an ECO-FINA™ water bottle.
But there is something meaningful you can choose. You can choose to resist. If you are reading this article, you possess the social and cultural capital to resist industrial civilization in at least some way, be it by material support to radical movements, grassroots organizing, or decisive actions against the central loci of industrial civilization itself. Instead of falling into the trap of the oppressors’ agency narrative, the promise of gratification in a plethora of consumer goods, or the lighter conscience of “environmentally-friendly” personal lifestyle choices, strike at the nodes of power, and strike now. The impoverished colonial subject, the tortured prostituted woman, the terrorized homeless man, the nearly exterminated Cross River gorilla, the toxified oceans, and the ravaged forests—they can’t wait any longer. Now is the time to fight.
[1] India Resource Center and Community Resource Centre, “Deception with Purpose: Pepsico’s Water Claims in India,” India Resource Center (Nov. 30, 2011), at http://www.indiaresource.org/news/2011/pepsipositivewater.html.
[2] April M. Short, “Despite Claims to the Contrary, Pepsi Is Still Using Caramel Coloring Linked to Cancer,” AlterNet (July 4, 2013), at http://www.alternet.org/food/pepsis-caramel-coloring-probably-causes-cancer. , and adopts racist hiring practices3
[3] Sam Hananel, “Pepsi Beverages Pays $3.1M In Racial Bias Case,” The Huffington Post (Jan. 11, 2012).
[4] See, for example, Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (New York: Free Press, 2004), 79, 135.
[5] See, for example, John Bellamy Foster, “The Epochal Crisis,” *Monthly Review *(2013, Volume 65, Issue 05, October)*, *at http://monthlyreview.org/2013/10/01/epochal-crisis
[6] Kim Bhasin, “The 12 Companies That Spend The Most on Advertising,” Business Insider (Jun. 22, 2011), at http://www.businessinsider.com/companies-that-spend-the-most-on-advertising-2011-6?op=1.
[7] Keith A. Roberts, Religion in Sociological Perspective (United States: SAGE Publications, 2011), 307.
[8] I am not arguing that someone born into a household with repressive religious doctrines and practices should, in an ideal world, stick with her original religion. I am simply contending that a religion can be good in itself in the absence of other choices for its adherents to compare it with. Indeed, a member of a sustainable and compassionate indigenous culture does not need a profusion of worldviews to compare to her own in order to know that she is living ethically.
[9] Noam Chomsky, The Common Good, (Odonian Press, 1998), 43.
[10] Those of us who are relatively privileged in the rich, Western capitalist countries, of course, have more meaningful choices than those in poor countries. That said, even our meaningful choices are drastically reduced the longer civilization exists.
"But there is something else illustrated by the ECO-FINA water bottle
that is common not only to corporations in the monopoly stage of
capitalism, but to industrial civilization as a whole."
