Almost a century ago, John Steinbeck’s classic Grapes of Wrath describes the pitiful plight of American environmental refugees displaced from Oklahoma by the 1930s’ Dust Bowl to California, where if lucky they might get jobs paying a couple of dollars a day as migrant farm workers. As economic refugees the crux is exploitation by big industrialized agriculture: “In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” To insure profitable prices for agricultural products per supply and demand market manipulation, vast amounts of food produced was plowed under or left to rot in mountains of surplus…and not provided to feed the starving poor during the Great Depression.
In the wake of the most devastating economic collapse since the Great Depression, the current Occupy Wall Street movement is a grassroots response to runaway greed and corruption of business-as-usual profiteering. Bought and sold, American politics has never been more overtly steeped in the Golden Rule: those with the gold make the rules. And the rules staunchly protect the rich status quo oligarchy: the financial “Masters’ of the Universe” power and control by Wall Street and Madison Avenue of the White House and Capitol Hill. Who pays for maintaining the business-as-usual political economic model? We do, the people, the taxpayers and consumers of more, more, more. This growth-is-always-good model, ordained by the rich, is based on unsustainable natural resource extraction, cheap labor exploitation (often overseas at the expense of American jobs at home), and accumulated toxic waste generation that pollute and degrade land, water, and air as by-products of big industry, big agriculture, and big military.
America is rapidly becoming a banana republic (“a politically unstable country that economically depends upon the exports of a limited resource, e.g., fruits, minerals, and usually features a society composed of stratified social classes, such as a great, impoverished working class and a ruling plutocracy, composed of the élites of business, politics, and the military”). Today, the United States is the most economically stratified society in the western world. As The Wall Street Journal reported, a 2008 study found that the top .01% or 14,000 American families hold 22.2% of total wealth–the bottom 90%, or over 133 million families, held just 4% of the nation’s wealth (accessed on September 10, 2012 at http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06132008/profile2.html). A 2012 Congressional Research Service study found that the top 1% of American households accounted for 34.5% of total net worth in 2010, and that the top 10% held 74.5% of total wealth in the USA (accessed September 10, 2012 at http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33433.pdf).
The American middle and poor classes don’t have enough bananas. And the rich can’t eat or drink gold. The emerging Slow Food and Local Food movements, as well The Natural Step, Transition Towns, Permaculture, and Occupy Wall Street are 21st century responses to Steinbeck’s clarion call, and that of filmmaker James Cameron. In his 2009 film Avatar, greedy, militant intergalactic industrialists (future Masters of the Universe from planet Earth) are set on mining a precious mineral called “unobtanium” on the moon Pandora to get rich quick. Of course, this devastating extractive enterprise threatens the very existence of the Na’vi indigenous people and co-habiting life forms collectively providing and enabling ecological life support there. As the film portends, the Idea that Western society’s economic growth religion spawns and results in natural resource hyper-extraction, overexploitation and collapse, environmental degradation, and eventual necessity to evacuate our home planet, leaves only non-Western indigenous peoples on Mother Earth to repair her. Science fiction or plausibly frightening factual reality in the making?
Apparently a rapidly increasing number of the world’s global change scientists, engineers, policy planners, investors, and other decision makers assert that the current business-as-usual trajectory towards ruination is factual reality that demands our collective, urgent attention. In March 2012, over 3000 such leaders met at the Planet Under Pressure: New Knowledge Towards Solutions Conference in London, where with one unified voice they made a State of the Planet Declaration (accessed on July 5, 2012 at http://www.planetunderpressure2012.net/pdf/state_of_planet_declaration.pdf; the Declaration’s first four points are highlighted below).
|
Planet Under Pressure: New Knowledge Towards Solutions Conference London, March 26-29, 2012 State of the Planet Declaration 1. Research now demonstrates that the continued functioning of the Earth system as it has supported the well-being of human civilization in recent centuries is at risk. Without urgent action, we could face threats to water, food, biodiversity and other critical resources: these threats risk intensifying economic, ecological and social crises, creating the potential for a humanitarian emergency on a global scale. 2. In one lifetime our increasingly interconnected and interdependent economic, social, cultural and political systems have come to place pressures on the environment that may cause fundamental changes in the Earth system and move us beyond safe natural boundaries. But the same interconnectedness provides the potential for solutions: new ideas can form and spread quickly, creating the momentum for the major transformation required for a truly sustainable planet. 3. The defining challenge of our age is to safeguard Earth’s natural processes to ensure the well-being of civilization while eradicating poverty, reducing conflict over resources, and supporting human and ecosystem health. 4. As consumption accelerates everywhere and world population rises, it is no longer sufficient to work towards a distant ideal of sustainable development. Global sustainability must become a foundation of society. It can and must be part of the bedrock of nation states and the fabric of societies. |
The London event was convened to frame discussion on action solutions to emerge at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20): The Future We Want summit in Brazil, June 20-22, 2012 (accessed July 5, 2012 at http://www.uncsd2012.org/). With more than 40,000 participants representing a broad spectrum of leaders from government, business, and civil society, as well as UN officials, academics, journalists, and the general public, Rio+20 was the largest UN conference ever held. To advance sustainable development in the areas of energy, transport, green economy, disaster reduction, desertification, water, forests and agriculture, over 700 voluntary commitments totaling more than $500 billion were registered by governments, business, civil society groups, universities and others. Fact, not fiction. And 283 outcomes for The Future We Want here on our planet under pressure are summarized online: http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N12/381/64/PDF/N1238164.pdf?OpenElement).
Joining with others, let’s envision the future we want and take active steps today to bring that future to reality. Let’s “Occupy Earth” softly in reverence, respect and care of all life, land, water, and air taking a red path towards an evergreen society, and reject the business-as-usual path requiring escape (by rich Masters of the Universe who can afford extraterrestrial passage) from a despoiled home planet left for the rest of us. To sustainably Occupy Earth, how about a new evergreen political party, which might whimsically be called the “B’earthday Party?” Happy B’earthday!
Earth occupant,
GEM Education Center Blog 