Robert Jensen: Kleins simple plea is that we not only think about all this and commit to act, but feel it as well. Taking climate change seriously is not only about data and analysis but about anguish ... the grief that’s inevitable when we face the truth. Klein points out that the financial crisis created an opening for coordinated planning when the U.S. government bailed out the banks and auto companies. But instead of demands for people- and planet-centered changes, Obama toed the neoliberal line—government shouldn’t tell corporations what to do. The task for the left, Klein argues, is to demonstrate that “the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more stable and equitable economic system, one that strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate greed.” The struggle for ecological sanity is intellectual, political, moral, and deeply emotional. Klein is not naïvely calling for the end of all extraction, but rather “the end of the extractivist mindset—of taking without caretaking, of treating land and people as resources to deplete rather than as complex entities with rights to a dignified existence based on renewal and regeneration.” At both the personal and the planetary level, we renew and regenerate, or we die. Klein argues that hope lies not with a new climate movement but with a coming together of all the living movements to pursue “the unfinished business of liberation,” which will come into view when awareness and political engagement aren’t only for activists but become part of everyday life. Most of the infrastructure of modern life will disappear, given that no combination of renewable-energy technologies can come close to replacing the concentrated energy of fossil fuels, and that the collapse of our dense-energy-dependent infrastructure is proceeding far faster than the building of alternatives. We need to let go of the world as we know it, accept that what is coming will test our basic humanity, and commit to constructing a saving remnant. We have to confront not just conservative climate-change deniers and liberal minimizers, but also our own desire to believe that we can solve problems because we want to solve them. resilience.org/stories/2014-09-28/extracting-ourselves-from-the-extractivist-mindset
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 02:23:10 +0000
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