Do We Need a Militant Movement to Save the Planet (and Ourselves)?
By Tara Lohan, AlterNet
Tara Lohan: The book focuses on achieving a culture of resistance — what do you mean by that?
Lierre Keith: Right now on the left what we have is an alternative culture and I would say that is kind of a subculture where you can withdraw from the mainstream and hang out with people who think pretty much like you do, and have a whole lot of alternative institutions but none of your actions and none of your institutions pose a threat to the power structure. You can have a nice life that way, and certainly keep your sanity by hanging out with people who agree with you. I think this is a place where a lot of political movements go to die. There are obvious reasons people do this — it is scary to fight back, it feels overwhelming, and i think most people just want comfort. But in the end, we are going to have to dismantle the power structure that is destroying the planet.
So what we have right now is the alternative culture, but what we need is a culture of resistance — we need a culture that is self-consciously oppositional to things like corporate power, capitalism, industrialization and ultimately civilization, because that is the arrangement of power on this planet right now.
Derek Jensen: In addition, so much of the so-called opposition to the destruction is what I would really term a loyal opposition instead of a real resistance. A couple of ways to look at it — one of them is that what do all the so-called solutions to global warming have in common that are presented in the mainstream in the United States? What they all have in common, is they all take industrial capitalism as a given.
A really great example of this is back in 1997 I interviewed members of MRTA, a rebel group who had taken over the Japanese ambassador’s house in Peru. I was excited to write an article about it. I sent an email [to] a leading progressive magazine saying that I was talking to this guy and I got a call from the editor within a half hour saying “Hey, this is great, we’re really excited about it, what’s the article going to be like?” I said it will be about what their demands are for Peru, what they wanted was very simple — to grow and distribute their own food. They already knew how to do that, they just wanted to be allowed to do it. I was talking about that and she was very excited and I said, “Also the core of this is that to really stop empire you can’t just have people in the margins fighting empire, but we have to fight empire at home — we have to breakdown capitalism at its core.” Hello? Hello? The response went from enthusiasm to “I need to talk to my editorial board.” So I got an email a half hour later saying “thanks, but no thanks.” There is all this really great talk about how it’s important to resist some place else but when one actually talks about resistance here in the United States, then stone-cold silence.
We don’t just have to get people thinking longterm, the first thing I think we have to do is to find a way that they already hate the system and use that as an entree to begin talking…”
The future that we want isn’t going to come about automatically or accidentally. People have to think about where this culture is leading us and what we have to do to get a livable future. If we continue on with business as usual, which is the drawdown of freshwater supplies, the destruction of soil, the burning of every fossil fuel source that can be dug or ground out of the planet then the endpoint is something that looks something like what is happening in the Horn of Africa right now. I mean, that’s what happens when colonialism reaches its endpoint and the soil and water are destroyed. That is the kinds of future that is going to happen if we don’t take action and effective resistance.
Global warming is not the sort of thing where you can delay action and say, “OK, when it gets bad we’ll stop burning fossil fuels,” because the planet’s climate just doesn’t work that way. If we pass certain tipping points that we’re already passing then global warming will become irreversible even if we stop burning fossil fuels. Tipping points like methane being melted and released from the floor of the Arctic ocean, which is already happening now. Or the Amazon rainforest which produces its own climate, drying out and turning into a desert. There have been prolonged droughts already there. We are really on the edge of when we can take action and still be effective. Of course that is the business as usual scenario but there are other scenarios where people take action and disrupt the system that is exploiting the poor globally and destroying the planet. And then we have a chance to build the kind of communities that not only will be sustainable but will meet the basic human needs that so many people aren’t having met right now.
TL: I hear a lot of talk about sustainable agriculture — in your view, is there any kind of agriculture that is sustainable?
TL: So then we would be going back to a hunting/gathering system for food?
TL: The foresight that people seem to have today is about the length of an election cycle — how can we get folks to take a longer view?
I ask people all the time, does the U.S. government better serve individual human beings or corporations, nobody ever says individual people, nobody. When I go talk to a local computer store owner I don’t talk about salmon because he doesn’t care, what I talk about is Walmart — because he now has to get a second job in addition to his computer store, and this is true, he now has to get a second job as a guard at prison because Walmart can sell computers cheaper than he can buy them, so Walmart has driven him out of business essentially. We can find those wedges. We don’t just have to get people thinking longterm, the first thing I think we have to do is to find a way that they already hate the system and use that as an entree to begin talking.
Death of the Liberal Class documenting the ways in which radical thought had been purged from the Left over the last almost 100 years.
It is about using force and not about using persuasion.
I was reading about the anti-apartheid university sit-ins in the 1980s and in one case a group was having a lot of trouble getting people to come out to meetings and sign petitions. People were getting tired and so they decided to do this sit-in at the university administration to risk getting arrested. But they worried since no one is even showing up to our petition nights, how is this going to work? They decided to do it anyway. What they found was that they had a huge turnout, the original group got there and then hundreds and hundreds of more people came because they thought this was a tactic that might actually work. I think that most people who are sympathetic to environmental concerns or to concerns of social oppression are not taking action because they know that the typical things that we’re suppose to do on the Left, sign a petition or write to your member of parliament or Congressperson, they know that that is not going to work and we’re not going to have a movement that is going to take off until people are using tactics that have a chance of success.
[And the corporate media, engaged in continual disinfotainment does not allow such discussions and information to enter the mass debate. Trivia and political lies, yes. Vital knowledge, no.—Eds]
TL : So what is you strategy for ending industrial civilization?
DJ: I know that every prediction about global warming is that they underestimate it on the previous one and I know that those in power are looking with what can only be described as lust, at the melting of the Arctic ice caps. They are not looking with horror, they are not looking with shame, they are not looking with sorrow, they are not looking to change things, they are looking with lust at the access to resources. If anyone thinks that they are going to stop before every living being on this planet that they can kill has been killed, s/he is not paying any attention.
Every cell in my body wants there to be a voluntary transition to a sustainable way of living but I’m not more going to base the future of the planet on that any more than I am going to base it on unicorns jumping over the moon and farting pixie dust. It is just not going to happen.
Tara Lohan is a senior editor at AlterNet and editor of the new book Water Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save Our Most Critical Resource. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraLohan.
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