By Chip Ward, cross-posted from TomDispatch
What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of
inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support
systems -- its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere -- goes hand in hand
with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and
greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the
assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment
are one and the same?
Money Rules: It’s not hard for me to understand how
environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the
hip. In all my years as a grassroots organizer
dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public
health, it was always the same: someone got rich and someone got sick.
In the struggles that I was involved in to curb polluters and
safeguard public health, those who wanted curbs, accountability, and
precautions were always outspent several times over by those who wanted
no restrictions on their effluents. We dug into our own pockets for
postage money, they had expense accounts. We made flyers to slip under
the windshield wipers of parked cars, they bought ads on television.
We took time off from jobs to visit legislators, only to discover that
they had gone to lunch with fulltime lobbyists.
Naturally, the barons of the chemical and nuclear industries don’t
live next to the radioactive or toxic-waste dumps that their
corporations create; on the other hand, impoverished black and brown
people often do live near such ecological sacrifice zones because they
can’t afford better. Similarly, the gated communities of the
hyper-wealthy are not built next to cesspool rivers or skylines filled
with fuming smokestacks, but the slums of the planet
are. Don’t think, though, that it’s just a matter of property values or
scenery. It’s about health, about whether your kids have lead or
dioxins running through their veins. It’s a simple formula, in fact: wealth disparities become health disparities.
And here’s another formula: when there’s money to be made, both
workers and the environment are expendable. Just as jobs migrate if
labor can be had cheaper overseas, I know workers who were tossed aside
when they became ill from the foul air or poisonous chemicals they
encountered on the job.
The fact is: we won’t free ourselves from a dysfunctional and unfair
economic order until we begin to see ourselves as communities, not
commodities. That is one clear message from Zuccotti Park.
Polluters routinely walk away from the ground they poison and expect taxpayers to clean up after them. By “externalizing”
such costs, profits are increased. Examples of land abuse and
abandonment are too legion to list, but most of us can refer to a
familiar “superfund site” in our own backyard. Clearly, Mother Nature is among the disenfranchised, exploited, and struggling.
Democracy 101: The 99% pay for wealth disparity with
lost jobs, foreclosed homes, weakening pensions, and slashed services,
but Nature pays, too. In the world the one-percenters have created, the
needs of whole ecosystems are as easy to disregard as, say, the need
the young have for debt-free educations and meaningful jobs.
Extreme disparity and deep inequality generate a double standard with
profound consequences. If you are a CEO who skims millions of dollars
off other people’s labor, it’s called a “bonus.” If you are a flood
victim who breaks into a sporting goods store to grab a lifejacket, it’s
called looting. If you lose your job and fall behind on your mortgage,
you get evicted. If you are a banker-broker who designed flawed mortgages that caused a million people to lose their homes, you get a second-home vacation-mansion near a golf course.
If you drag heavy fishnets
across the ocean floor and pulverize an entire ecosystem, ending
thousands of years of dynamic evolution and depriving future generations
of a healthy ocean, it’s called free enterprise. But if, like Tim
DeChristopher, you disrupt an auction of public land to oil and gas companies, it’s called a crime and you get two years in jail.
In campaigns to make polluting corporations accountable, my Utah
neighbors and I learned this simple truth: decisions about what to allow
into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are
soon enough translated into flesh and blood, bone and nerve, and daily
experience. So it’s crucial that those decisions, involving
environmental quality and public health, are made openly, inclusively,
and accountably. That’s Democracy 101.
The corporations that shred habitat and contaminate your air and
water are anything but democratic. Stand in line to get your 30 seconds
in front of a microphone at a public hearing about the siting of a
nuclear power plant, the effluent from a factory farm, or the removal of
a mountaintop and you’ll get the picture quickly enough: the
corporations that profit from such ecological destruction are distant,
arrogant, secretive, and unresponsive. The 1% are willing to spend
billions impeding democratic initiatives, which is why every so-called
environmental issue is also about building a democratic culture.
First Kill the EPA, Then Social Security: Beyond all
the rhetoric about freedom from the new stars of the Republican Party,
the strategy is simple enough: obstruct and misinform, then blame the
resulting dysfunction on “government.” It’s a great scam. Tell the
voters that government doesn’t work and then, when elected, prove it.
And first on the list of government outfits they want to sideline or kill
is the Environmental Protection Agency, so they can do away with the
already flimsy wall of regulation that stands between their toxins and
your bloodstream.
Poll after poll shows that citizens understand the need for environmental rules and safeguards. Mercury is never put into the bloodstreams of nursing mothers by consensus, nor are watersheds fracked until they are flammable
by popular demand. But the free market ideologues of the Republican
Party are united in opposition to any rule or standard that impedes the
“magic” of the marketplace and unchecked capital.
The same bottom-line quarterly-report fixation on profitability that accepts oil spills as inevitable also accepts unemployment as inevitable.
Tearing apart wildlife habitat to make a profit and doing the same at a
workplace are just considered the price of doing business. Clearcutting
a forest and clearcutting a labor force are two sides of the same
coin.
Beware of Growth: Getting the economy growing has
been the refrain of the Obama administration and the justification for
every bad deal, budget cut, and unbalanced compromise it’s made. The
desperate effort to grow the economy to solve our economic woes is what
keeps Timothy Geithner at the helm of the Treasury and is what stalls
the regulation of greenhouse gasses. It’s why we are told we must sacrifice environmental quality for pipelines
and why young men and women are sacrificed to protect access to oil,
the lubricant for an acquisitive economic engine. The financial empire
of the one percenters and the political order it has shaped are
predicated on easy and relentless growth. How, we are asked, will there
be enough for everyone if we don’t keep growing?
The fundamental contradiction of our time is this: we have built an
all-encompassing economic engine that requires unending growth. A
contraction of even a percent or two is a crisis, and yet we are
embedded in ecosystems that are reaching or have reached their limits.
This isn’t complicated: There’s only so much fertile soil or fresh water
available, only so many fish in the ocean, only so much CO2 the planet can absorb and remain habitable.
Yes, you can get around this contradiction for a while by exploiting
your neighbor’s habitat, using technological advances to extend your
natural resources, and stealing from the future -- that is, using up
soil, minerals, and water your grandchildren (someday to be part of that
same 99%) will need. But the limits to those familiar and, in the
past, largely successful strategies are becoming more evident all the
time.
At some point, we’ll discover that you can’t exist for long beyond
the boundaries of the natural world, that (as with every other species)
if you overload the carrying capacity of your habitat, you crash. Warming temperatures, chaotic weather patterns, extreme storms, monster wildfires, epic droughts, Biblical floods, an avalanche
of species extinction… that collapse is upon us now. In the human
realm, it translates into hunger and violence, mass migrations and civil
strife, failed states and resource wars.
Like so much else these days, the crash, as it happens, will not be
suffered in equal measure by all of us. The one percenters will be atop
the hill, while the 99% will be in the flood lands below swimming for
their lives, clinging to debris, or drowning. The Great Recession has
previewed just how that will work.
An unsustainable economy is inherently unfair, and worse is to come.
After all, the car is heading for the cliff’s edge, the grandkids are
in the backseat, and all we’re arguing about is who can best put the
pedal to the metal.
Occupy Earth: Give credit where it’s due: it’s been
the genius of the protesters in Zuccotti Park to shift public discourse
to whether the distribution of economic burdens and rewards is just and
whether the economic system makes us whole or reduces and divides us.
It’s hard to imagine how we’ll address our converging ecological crises
without first addressing the way accumulating wealth and power has
captured the political system. As long as Washington is dominated and
intimidated by giant oil companies, Wall Street speculators, and
corporations that can buy influence and even write the rules that make
buying influence possible, there’s no meaningful way to deal with our
economy’s addiction to fossil fuels and its dire consequences.
Nature’s 99% is an amazingly diverse community of species. They feed
and share and recycle within a web of relationships so dynamic and
complex that we have yet to fathom how it all fits together. What we
have excelled at so far is breaking things down into their parts and
then reassembling them; that, after all, is how a barrel of crude oil
becomes rocket fuel or a lawn chair.
When it comes to the more chaotic, less linear features of life like
climate, ecosystems, immune systems, or fetal development, we are only
beginning to understand thresholds and feedback loops, the way the whole
becomes greater
than the sum of its parts. But we at least know that the parts matter
deeply and that, before we even fully understand them, we’re losing them
at an accelerating rate. Forests are dying, fisheries are going, extinction is on steroids.
Degrading the planet’s operating systems to bolster the bottom line
is foolish and reckless. It hurts us all. No less important, it’s
unfair. The 1% profit, while the rest of us cough and cope.
After Occupy Wall Street, isn’t it time for Occupy Earth?
Chip Ward co-founded and led Families Against Incinerator Risk and HEAL Utah. A TomDispatch regular, he wrote about campaigns to make polluters accountable in Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and about visionary conservationists in Hope’s Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land.
Friday, October 28, 2011
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