BPSDB In the dim mists of time hundreds of us were gathered by a foundation to discuss how we were going to move from our then state of impending environmental crisis to a sustainable society. Demographically we were a sampling of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business people, NGO staffers, and community organizers.
We talked and worked over three days in ever changing combinations that always had representation from each sector. By the last evening we were a much smaller, exhausted group consisting almost exclusively of the NGO staffers, community organizers and scientists, with only a handful of the others still present. The organizers then revealed our last task, which was to answer:
- What needs to happen?
- What will it take?
- Who will pay for it?
There was a long silence, and then finally a voice (an environmental consultant) said in a calm, measured manner “Revolution … Blood in the streets … Eat the rich.”
There was another long silence as we all looked around to see how the others were reacting to this. What we saw was a room full of people calmly nodding. We then spent the last few hours translating that answer into language that the Foundation could actually publish in it’s report.
Make no mistake, this was not a gathering of radical activists. The participants were 
drawn from quite mainstream, moderate organizations and institutions. Nor, I think, would that have been the answer given when we first gathered, even by the subset of us still there at the end.
Although the group had an abundance of experience trying to make change, the day long sessions of quibbling over trivia and dross had brought into stark relief just how inert “the system” was. Apparently imminent catastrophe was simply not sufficient reason to fiddle with the price of gas, or anything else for that matter.
Also apparent was that we were not occupying the same reality. For one group “imminent” clearly meant “only when they are dragging me beaten and bleeding to the gallows”, whereas the rest of us understood it as “the time still left to change the outcome.”
blood and love without the rhetoric
This is the agenda of the system we have created, the society we currently have. All that we love is bleeding. The disenfranchised and powerless suffer and die, living systems collapse, species go extinct.
Meanwhile entrenched interests seek to muzzle any discussion of why it is so and how we can prevent it. As far as possible information is controlled, manipulated, distorted.
This would naturally be completely unacceptable even if it were stable and sustainable, but it’s not even that. The ongoing aggregation of wealth and privilege by the few is driving the rest of society and the living planet to collapse.
love and rhetoric without the blood
Sadly at the end of that conference we did not immediately set about organizing resistance cells for a mass civil disobedience campaign. In retrospect we probably should have. Instead we returned to attempting to bring about meaningful change through education and persuasion.
This has clearly failed. We underestimated how resistant society would prove to any change that might entail some lesser standard of privilege. Further there is no reason to believe that more of the same will bring about a different result.
“Any great change must expect opposition, because it strikes at the very foundation of privilege.”
Lucretia Mott 1853
It was probably also true that we were not that eager to suffer personally if it was not necessary. While most of us practiced some level of personal “sacrifice” (eg not owning a vehicle), these are inconveniences at worst and do not compare to what real struggle requires.
blood and rhetoric without the love
There are always those whose anger, sense of helplessness and despair lead them to call 
for armed resistance. They are more than ready to make someone else sacrifice for the cause. While they do take some risks in what they do, experience has shown that when the police lines move forward the “vanguard of the revolution” are curiously absent.
I find dealing with these self-styled revolutionaries frustrating in exactly the same way that the climate change Deniers are. They use all of the same rhetorical tricks and distortions that the radical right does, presumably for the same reasons (ie they have no rational case to make).
I have looked for and repeatedly asked for some sort of rational argument in support of their position, and all I ever get is the same tired cartoons while being dismissed as a “liburahl. That experience suggests that substituting one dysfunctional system of power inequities with a different one is not actually fundamental change is also dismissed as irrelevant.
The only argument in it’s favour seems to be that of expedience. Effective nonviolent resistance takes training, preparation and knowledge, rioting can be done at the drop of a tear gas canister. Nonviolently risking beatings and injury requires great discipline and commitment, whereas inflicting beatings and injury requires only anger and a sense of self-righteousness.
Continue reading at News Junkie Post
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We give our consent every moment that we do not resist.
Image Credits:
Quebec City protest, 2001 by Matthew Blackett
Summit of America (FTAA) Québec April 2001 by Michaël Pineault
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“NGO staffers”
Where does their bread comes from?
From taxing the producer of wealth.
They just consume, not produce.
There is another word for just consumer.
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Economic distribution/slanted
You cannot expect to get the same product from unequal effort.
You cannot expect to get the same result from the lazy and the hard worker
You cannot expect to get the same result from the guy who skips class and the guy who does not
Don’t look at the outcome, look at the effort.
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The organizations and researchers putting gender and poverty into the equation are mostly NGO’s/UNIFEM/ UNFCC/IPCC.
The WHO tells us that women are more likely to die in natural disasters and they tend to provide the food for their households in developing economies. Their caregiving tasks will be that much harder in vulnerable regions affected by climate change. In other words, women make up the majority of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable.
I have to wonder when Americans climate change deniers will take the next logical step i.e., logical in their own narrow minds, and claim that the world’s poorest women are the ones leading ‘the conspiracy’. :-(
I am more often than not one of few women talking about climate change. This partly reflects the tendency for women (still) to be socialized to be less action oriented and to feel more comfortable being supporters rather than taking initiative. I think it also reflects the ideological dimensions of climate change politics.
The fact that Western women have been very, very slow to put climate change on the agenda in a loud and meaningful way is a huge problem. Women absolutely must try to start challenging instead of choosing to be silent.
So I especially ask women: what needs to happen? What will it take? WE need to speak up and speak out. It doesn’t matter what the ‘speaking’ looks like: as long as it’s honest, it will be helpful. Sometimes personal attacks on you will actually mean you have spoken the truth. Allies will support you.
Martha
I’m all out of optimism about our ability to tackle the problem in the near future. We’re making incremental steps which is better than nothing.
The real battle may start when things start getting unignorably ugly. Climate is in an ugly state now but it’s ignorable.
The challenge will be to funnel the anger that’s coming. The far right will attempt to divert it using massive PR and media campaigns to push false narratives (like they do about DDT for instance) and possibly force. Our challenge will be to make sure they fail. That challenge starts now we need to lay the groundwork. But we’ll have to be patient as we won’t have that moment of reckoning until the system starts breaking down more comprehensively than it is now.
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The basic has been there for over a 100 years now. People started to talk about national parks, human deforestation with the consequence of creating deserts, the organic movement are examples of a basis made. The term of human created climate change i found in a lecturer given in November 1874. Followed by, what some called, the “silly hippies” Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the land-art movement.
We need to build on this and not create an other basis.
Revolution, not so sure, look how many we had in history and we still have a huge cab between the “rich” and the “poor”.
I like a steady but constant change we can not do it overnight.
The climate change will wake up many people one day, as it happens to more and more and the effects can be felt by more and more.
I like how the Germans move on and on against all the big companies who do not want it and than join them.
The latest move from Bolivia could be an example for the west as well.
The idea that the “rich” provide the wealth/bread for others has been proven wrong many centuries ago yet they still would like us to believe their convenient lie.
Many big companies did not bring wealth they took it away, from the many to the few.
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