Monday, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, The Climate Group, and other disrupters dont seem interested in disrupting daily life very much at all. Not only is the New York march being held on a Sunday, it is designed to end up on marginal 11th Avenue. Advertisements even playfully encourage marchers to grab brunch before making history. Whether their brunch server is invited to change history with the hipsters and bankers is difficult to discern. Elliott Sperber writes Climate change is a scientific fact. The planet is warming, and this warming is anthropogenic – that is, it is caused by people. It is not, however, caused by all people, or by all cultures, equally. Some ways of life are simply more destructive than others. The evidence for this is overwhelming. And as temperatures and sea levels continue to rise, and as glaciers and ice caps continue to melt, we all bear witness to ever new hurricanes, floods, fires, and other disasters. We even have new terms to describe these exigencies – e.g., extreme weather events. Famine, disease, war, water insecurity, and other insecurities proliferate. Sperber goes on to assert promotions for the People’s Climate March (which entreat people to “save the world,” and to “save everything we love,” along with descriptions of itself as “a movement that can save the world”) may reflect an orientation less concerned with transforming the world in keeping with the interests of actual justice than it is with organizing society in a manner that preserves certain privileged ways of life. Sperber probes further: How else does one explain the fact that, in the film Disruption (which, according to the Peoples Climate March website, gives a behind-the-scenes look at a part of the effort to organize the Peoples Climate March), the organizer Keya Chatterjee herself proclaims (some 40 minutes in) that we have to get off of fossil fuels to protect our way of life? This assertion leads to as much confusion as it reveals. Just which way of life is Chatterjee referring to? Isnt our way of life the problem that were supposed to be combating? Or, did she mean something else? Beyond the fact that the march is supported by the Climate Group, whose members include, among others, BP, Goldman Sachs, and Duke Energy, an examination of the implications of the film’s title is revealing. Sperber presents a clear solution to the problem: As such, instead of the coercive, exploitative, capitalist model that produces food, homes, transportation systems, energy systems, and other human needs for exchange, a critical, emancipatory politics would produce and distribute those conditions necessary for actually egalitarian, democratic social relations for their own sake. tvhobo/share.php?a=1&sheet=2929
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 07:55:40 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015