DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

About 35 years ago, my friends and I came to Tennessee from all around America. We landed in a little place called Lewis County, where nothing much had ever happened—Hohenwald, the county seat, hadn’t even been founded ’till after the Civil War. The lay of the land was steep, narrow ridges and steep, narrow hollows with clear running creeks in them, and oak trees covered everything.

We felt as if we had done the next best thing to leaving the country—we were isolated enough, physically and politically, to be left alone to work out our lives as we saw fit. We delivered, raised, and educated our own children, grew most of our own food (and sometimes didn’t eat all that well). Hohenwald was happy to leave us alone—they didn’t want the burden of extra children in school and an extra culture to deal with. No social workers came knocking on our doors, concerned about what we were doing, and for the most part no law enforcement officers came to investigate the funny smelling smoke that sometimes hung around us and brought a twinkle to our reddened eyes. We were as far back in the woods as a person could get in Tennessee, and we felt mighty, mighty happy about it. Over in Hohenwald, life went on as it always had. Small town merchants, small town banks, a community of people who knew each other and knew each others’ daddies and mommas and children.

Much of the land in Lewis County was owned by these old-time, long-time families. Old people lived on the land and with the land and had the skills they needed to live in a world where you couldn’t just run to the store for everything. We learned a lot from them.

All this started to change in the 1980’s. The old folks died off and their children sold their land to timber companies, who started in clearcutting. The big farmers in the county went under, and their flat, open land was sold for subdivisions and industrial parks. Our 1700 acres was no longer a drop in a sea of green. It became an island in a sea of stumps. Walmart moved into Hohenwald, and sucked the downtown dry. Our friendly banker, who had always been so relaxed about whether we made our monthly payments, was arrested just before boarding a flight to Brazil, and I believe he is in prison still. The bank was taken over by the FDIC, and suddenly our relaxed way of life evaporated and we had to hustle to make payments to keep our land, had to find ways to work with the system we had once aspired to replace.

Now Hohenwald is an outlying suburb of Nashville. There is no food to speak of grown in Lewis County anymore, no local sawmills cutting local trees for local housing. Since NAFTA, the industrial park has emptied out, and there are no jobs outside of the deadend Walmart type. It could be argued that there never were that many jobs to begin with, but there was a community and a culture and a way of life, and all that has been swept aside by pursuit of the almighty dollar. And they call this progress.

If we ever get serious about corporate crime, some corporate persons are going to be put away for the murder of rural America. Lewis County is only one example of a string of serial killings. I would like to break through people’s established patterns of thinking, that cause them to persist in this downward corporate spiral, and give them the Green tools they need to create a truly better future for everyone on this small and limited planet. Sustainability, responsibility, and community can only be created one relationship, one day, at a time. Compared to the rate at which the world is degenerating, it can seem like an agonizingly slow process. But it’s the only thing that will work.

music: Joan Baez, “Children of Darkness”

Comments

Hey sweetie, net time is really expensive here in McLeod Ganj so I haven’t read your entry properly. But India is hell bent on going the same way as the US, in half the time, with about 100 times the population. They are embracing slash and burn consumerism so fast, and complain that we’re hypocrites for criticizing them. However, there’s 1 BILLION of them so even half that many people consuming on a US level will be devastating. Already the # of individually owned vehicles is skyrocketing thanks to the new prosperity, with very few emissions laws to protect the lungs of ordinary people riding bicycles through the smoggy streets. Just went to Delhi and the smog was unbearable. Thirty years ago a lot of these folks didn’t know what money was. I guess I am a condescending neocolonial for thinking that in some ways they were better off. love, CM
Posted by sirensongs on 12/24/2005 08:10:59 AM

one way or another, the human population of the planet WILL decline….
Posted by brothermartin on 12/24/2005 10:24:38 PM

Last month I was talking about Delphi Corporation, the GM spinoff that’s spinning out, and I said “GM’s not quite ready to throw in the towel just yet”–and lo! and behold, next thing you know, GM’s in trouble. Sometimes I think it’s me. I tell my friends what a great relationship I think they’ve got and they tell me they’re splitting up, or they haven’t gotten it on in months. I buy a product regularly, but the store decides to discontinue it. It’s probably a good thing I don’t have any money to put in the stock market, or I’d lose it. But, I digress…

There are two obvious reasons why GM (and Ford, as well) are in trouble. Neither one has made much effort to develop and market hybrid vehicles, which, for the short term at least, are the wave of the future. Both have instead invested heavily in the SUV market, and SUV sales are plummeting. Must have something to do with the price of gas—and yes, I know, it’s back down around two bucks a gallon, but don’t think it won’t be heading for the sky again soon.

The other obvious problem for GM is health care costs. About $1500 from the proceeds of every car they sell goes to cover health care. That’s a lot of money, and it isn’t because GM workers are getting sick a lot. It’s because the health care monopoly is raising its rates. Good old fashioned capitalism—get ‘em where ya want ‘em, and soak ‘em for everything they got. Adam Smith’s invisible hand raises its highly visible middle finger.

Everybody knows those two reasons why American automakers are in trouble. But there’s a third reason, and it goes back to the birth of the labor unions that are in such trouble now. The American Federation of Labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the UAW were all built on the same premise: that they would accept capitalism—they are not now and never have been “Socialist” labor unions—labor unions that demanded a voice in the management of the corporations they worked with. That was what made them acceptable to management, but now they are paying the price for poor managerial decisions that they had no part in. The managers who screwed things up depart with golden parachutes; the workers pay for management’s mistakes with the loss of their job security, health care, and pensions. This isn’t fair, but it’s capitalism.

Am I scaring you? Are you worried that the Green Party may actually be a Red party? Fear not. There’s capitalism, and then there’s capitalism. At an individual, or generally small, scale, there’s nothing wrong with using money to make money, or with private ownership of means of production. They encourage responsibility and innovation. But when this gets writ large, when corporations are recognized as “persons” who, due to their size, complexity, and longevity are far more powerful than any individual human being, and when those corporate persons are, by the nature of their charters, primarily committed to infinite self-aggrandizement, then we have unleashed a flood of demons on the land who will rape it and rob us until there is nothing left to plunder. BUT they’re our demons. We can destroy them if we only remember that and take action—and it’s high time we do that.

Corporations must be held responsible for more than just the short-term bottom line. They must be accountable to their employees and their customers, and they must be accountable for their effect on the general welfare. Neither GM nor Ford has scored well on any of these. We need a reform school for corporate persons, and they need to go there.

The only capital punishment I’m in favor of is for corporate persons—and I don’t mean hanging the individual executive dufusses that commit white collar crimes. I mean that corporations that take human life (think Dow and Bhopal) or that repeatedly plunder the public (think Haliburton) should be dissolved, and their assets redistributed to right the injustices they have committed. Sound good to you?

music:  Exene Cervenka, “Just Another Perfect Day”

The first thing that got my attention was a story about how FEMA was stalling the Louisiana Secretary of State’s efforts to contact the dispersed population of New Orleans so that the (predominantly black, predominantly Democratic) city’s upcoming election would be truly representative—it seems that New Orleans is currently a much whiter, more Republican town than it was before Hurricane Katrina—which, by the way, was three times larger than Hurricane Camille, in 1969, the last (actually, the first) category 5 Hurricane to hit New Orleans.

And, speaking of hurricanes, I discovered that our Republican congress has declined to spend the 14 billion dollars the Army Corps of Engineers estimates it would take to restore Louisiana’s wetlands and really make New Orleans safe—they’d rather pour it down the Iraq hole, which sucks up about that much money every six weeks. Omigawd, think about that—TEN BILLION DOLLARS A MONTH FOR THE WAR IN IRAQ. Anyway, the government is not going to do what it takes to make New Orleans safe, just to make sure that all those nigras and Democrats don’t all get in a pile together again. No, sir.

FEMA cited concerns for the evacuees’ privacy as the reason they wouldn’t give Louisiana Secretary of State Al Ater the current addresses of the evacuees. On the other hand, FEMA has been very helpful in letting law-enforcement agencies find out if any sex offenders from the Big Easy have landed in their towns. Don’t want none of our young children despoiled by them degenerates, nossuh. But I digress.

I started noticing that what they were doing to largely black, largely non-Republican voters in New Orleans was part of a pattern. News surfaced that the career Civil Rights lawyers in the Justice Department had not approved of either the Georgia plan to require voters to purchase an expensive photo ID, or Tom DeLay’s Texas redistricting plan (which gerrymandered the state to make six more Republican districts), but that Alberto Gonzalez Franco had gone ahead and OK’d these Republican power grabs. First he claimed the Civil Rights Division had concurred, but then he said, “The fact that there may be disagreement somewhere within the ranks doesn’t mean that the ultimate decision is the wrong decision.” Newspeak, anyone? Doublespeak?

Another Justice Department official, Mark Corallo, a Bush appointee, claimed that Gonzalez’ decisions in Texas and Georgia were “just reversing decades of liberal bias” in the Civil Rights Division. More doublespeak, eh? Thanks to NPR, by the way, for publicizing this story and providing these quotes.

In New Hampshire, former GOP national committee member James Tobin is on trial for allegedly being part of a conspiracy to jam not only Democratic Party get-out-the-vote phone banks, but a non-partisan “get-a-ride-to-the-polls” hotline. Two other people have already been convicted in this conspiracy. Do you see that pattern I’m talking about?

And then there’s Ohio. Oh, boy. The state has mostly gone over to paperless electronic voting, which Bush’s so-called “Helping America Vote Act” (which should be called “the Helping America Vote Republican Act”) is designed to push, and funny things have happened. There were some ballot reform measures which, according to polls by the conservative Columbus Dispatch, enjoyed widespread popular support—like, 2-1 in favor. They mysteriously went down to 2-1 defeats, instead, while the paper’s poll on a ballot measure supported by the state’s Republicans was accurately reflected in the vote.

Strangely, the polls were most inaccurate in districts with paperless voting, just like when John Kerry had the election stolen from him. This would seem to call for a recount, right? Guess what! Ohio’s Republican legislature is working on passing a law quintupling the cost of doing a recount , and outright forbidding anyone to challenge the results of a federal election in Ohio, period. Will this stand in court? Considering who’s appointing the judges these days, the answer is, it probably will. The bill goes even further, requiring the same kind of stringent ID standards that were labelled “Jim Crow” in Georgia, and making it easy for (frequently Republican) DA’s to prosecute people for conducting voter registration drives. Ah, the eye of the beholder….

Similar laws are being introduced in other Republican-majority states. Free elections means we’re free to elect them, right?

And where are the Democrats on this? Asleep at the switch. There needs to be hell raised about this kind of chicanery, this mockery of democracy, but the Democrats are not speaking out, not walking out, not sitting in, they’re just acting like it’s business as usual. MoveOn is not working on this. The DLC certainly isn’t. Even Dennis Kucinich doesn’t have anything to say on the subject.

We in the Green Party have a lot of great ideas about how to reinvigorate the American electoral process—opening the ballot to minority parties, instant runoff voting (in which voters get to vote for both their first and second choices), maybe even proportional representation, all tried and tested procedures that would make for a much more nuanced and lively democracy in this country. BUT the foundation of democracy is honest elections, and it looks like that’s not in the forecast.

What the Republifascists don’t understand is that, although they can steal elections, they can’t b.s. the natural world, and the natural world is catching up with them—and all the rest of us, too. More on that after this….

music:  ”Soldier of Plenty,” by Jackson Browne

Comments

The county commission here in Pleasants County,WV has chosen to go with electronic voting machines in the upcoming elections thanks to these new HAVA laws requiring modern voting techniques across the country. It hasn’t made big news locally, but I just wonder what our citizens, mainly senior citizens, are going to think next November when they have to cast their votes on Ms. Pac Man machines. We’ve always used paper ballots and I don’t know why we can’t continue to do so. http://appalachiangreens.blogspot.com
Posted by chad edwards on 12/22/2005 12:28:26 AM

There’s a movement down here that’s at least making some noise about this switch–though it seems to me the officials have their minds made up already. There will be some kind of “paper trail” on them, though, so at least that much of a dent has been made in the move to electronic voting.
Posted by brothermartin on 12/24/2005 01:12:00 AM

Last month I talked to you about China’s impossible dream—to have a living standard on a par with the U.S. There just ain’t enough oil , wood or grain in the world for it to happen, in a nutshell. Since then, an accident at an oil refinery has sent a hundred tons of benzene into the main water supply for Harbin, one of China’s largest cities. All that benzene has passed through Harbin; by now it has crossed the border into Russia, and eventually it will reach the Pacific Ocean, where it will enter a food chain that may end up on the plates of fish eaters here in America. Oh, joy.

You know, in a way we’re lucky it was benzene. Sure, benzene is a carcinogenic neurotoxin, but it’s not, y’know, acutely poisonous—it’s not like it was arsenic or cyanide or chlordane, not a Bhopal-type incident that’s going to kill thousands of people outright. It’s just going to create a leukemia spike, which, when you consider all the other toxins that are getting turned loose in China, will hardly be noticed. Really.

If the Chinese government has its way, that leukemia spike won’t be noticed at all, because they’ll hide or manipulate the statistics to keep it from showing up. The latest news reports from China indicate that the officials responsible for the spill are paying for it with their jobs, but the ones responsible for hiding it from the public are not.

This spill is just the most noticeable event of its kind, so far. A recent visitor to rural China wrote of villages where the only available household water was purple from industrial pollution, and noted how widespread industrial pollution is throughout the countryside. I suppose this is one way to deal with the problem of overpopulation.

Sometimes it seems to me the Chinese just don’t get it, even when they try to be ecological. A story recently came out of China, via the Associated Press, about the largest government slaughter of Chinese civilians since Tienamen Square. Troops shot ten people dead out of a demonstration of thousands who were protesting that they were being insufficiently compensated for seizure of their land. Why was the government confiscating their land? Why, to build a wind farm, a tidal generating plant—and a coal-fired power plant. For this they were displacing thousands of relatively self-sufficient, if financially impoverished, peasants. How ecological! Then I read something that really made my jaw drop—the government of China admits that 70,000 similar protests occurred just last year. Seventy thousand protests in ONE YEAR.

The thing is, the Chinese are not doing this for themselves or by themselves. They are doing it for us, with our money. The widespread pollution of China is a direct effect of a massive transfer of wealth from the United States and Western Europe to China. We, with our royal lifestyles, are responsible for those 100 tons of benzene washing down the Amur River, for the fact that five of the world’s ten most polluted cities are in China. They are dying for our sins of gluttony and overconsumption.

When the first Westerners approached China about commercial trade, they were rebuffed, because the Chinese felt they had everything they needed already, and it was true. There is a remarkable book, “Farmers of Forty Centuries,“written nearly a hundred years ago, that details how the Chinese farmed the same land for four thousand years–sustainably, intensively, and organically feeding the longest-lasting, most sophisticated urban civilization that has ever existed on this planet. Sure, our civilization is a lot more sophisticated, but we have a few thousand years to go to match the Chinese record for sustainability. What they did was not easy, and for most of the people on the bottom it was not terribly gracious, but it by God worked for four thousand years.

But all that is being swept away. The Chinese have sold their inheritance for a pot of Walmart contracts and a dream of upward mobility for everyone. When I was a kid I read in Ripley’s Believe it or Not that if everyone in China stood on a chair and they all jumped off their chairs at the same time (a feat of synchronization that might not be past them), they would change the orbit and rotation of the earth, and that was several hundred million Chinese ago. What the Chinese are doing now is every bit as upsetting to global stability as jumping off of chairs en masse. and it really is happening.

As a “developing nation,” China is not bound by the Kyoto Agreement, although they have agreed to work on cutting their greenhouse gas emissions—if the European nations will subsidize that process. That’s not fair to the Europeans—China’s pollution problems have mushroomed much more at the behest of American demand than demand from Europe. And most climate scientists agree that the Kyoto Protocols are a drop in the bucket compared to what really needs to happen to keep from going into out-of control global warming—if we can still stop it at all. What profit is it to gain a world of money and lose the soul of soil and air?

musical segue: “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place,” as played by Richard Thompson from the live 1988 album, “More Guitar”

More disquieting news on the global warming story came from Greenland this month, as a study revealed that the subcontinent’s glaciers are thinning and melting into the sea at an increasing rate. This is desalinizing the Arctic Ocean, and has had the net result of slowing the Gulf Stream down significantly. The Gulf Stream’s flow brings warmer water and warmer temperatures to northern Europe, but its flow has decreased by almost a third in the last twelve years, which has cooled northern Europe by about one degree centigrade. While this has slowed down the warming of northern Europe (which is still losing its glaciers at an alarming rate), the effect of being a cool spot on a warming globe will merely set up the likelihood of more unstable weather.

For example, a late November blizzard came on so suddenly in southern England that thousands of people were stranded on roads, in schools, and just wherever they happened to be when the storm hit. Kinda like the movie, “The Day After Tomorrow.”

As the Gulf Stream sucks less heat out of the tropics, more heat builds up in the southern oceans, helping fuel larger hurricanes. When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, I said, “watch out—category six storms are gonna be happening.” Lo and behold, not long after Katrina came Wilma, whose winds topped out at 175 miles an hour—just one mile per hour short of what would be a category six storm, extrapolating out from the Saffir-Simpson scale, in which hurricane categories change with about every twenty miles an hour of increase in wind speed.

Oh, there’s some good news in the Greenland story. The average temperature there is up by 5 degrees C, and for the first time since the Vikings originally colonized it a thousand years ago (during a natural global warming spell) it’s warm enough to grow potatoes in Greenland.

Meanwhile, in Asia, the glaciers that feed all that continent’s major river systems—the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Irriwaddy, the Yangtze, and the Yellow River—are in retreat, cutting the flow of water into those rivers and threatening to dry out some of the most densely populated places on earth.

We in the Green movement have been sounding an alarm about the course of civilization for over thirty years now, and have always been brushed off with catch phrases like uneconomical, impractical, anti-progress, anti-technology, unAmerican, and the like. It is becoming increasingly obvious where the road we have taken instead is leading us—it’s a hot place, a dry place, and there ain’t much mercy there. How ’bout it, Christians, does it sound familiar?