Greenwashing

The following is from Bud Nye, A Deep Green Resistance supporter in Washington State: \\\___________ After reading Pandora’s Seed, Why the Hunter-Gatherer Holds the Key to Our Survival (2007), by Spencer Wells, here are some of my thoughts: Early in the book I sensed a technotopian slant. Sure enough, as I read more it became clear that, like so many technological utopian people today, Wells seems seriously to believe that we can steal energy from Earth’s ecosystems at the scale of our fossil fuel use without massively damaging those living systems with their billions of living beings. ...

Alternative technologies cannot replace easily transportable, liquid fossil fuels, nor are they sustainable; they require mining, smelting, refining. Most of the rare earth minerals required for wind, solar, and battery technologies are mined in Mongolia and western China by near-slaves. Lakes of toxic waste mark the production sites. These technologies do nothing to address global power imbalances. The US military is spending a great deal of time and money researching alternative energy technologies for the armed forces; tactically, it’s a smart move. But as always, the technology ends up benefiting the powerful while further abusing the natural world and the poor. ...

This article now located on the Deep Green Resistance News Service: What would a real transition to a sustainable society look like?

“They aren’t going to stop destroying the planet until we make it too costly for them to continue. THE SOONER WE DO, THE BETTER.” If we really believed what scientists are telling us about global warming, the fire engines of every fire department would sound their sirens and race to the nearest factory to extinguish its furnaces. Every high school student would run to the thermostat of every classroom, turn it off, and tear it out of the wall, then hit the parking lot to slash tires. Every responsible suburban parent would don safety gloves and walk around the block pulling the electrical meters out of the utility boxes behind houses and condominiums. Every gas station attendant would press the emergency button to shut off the pumps, cut the hoses, and glue the locks on the doors; every coal and petroleum corporation would immediately set about burying their unused product where it came from- using only the muscles of their own arms, of course… ...

If every American took every single action suggested by Al Gore it would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 21 percent. This is a stark truth: even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average American’s annual one ton of garbage production, your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That’s thirty-seven times as much waste as you were able to save by eliminating a full one hundred percent of your personal waste. Industrialism itself is what has to stop. There is no kinder, greener version that will do the trick of leaving us a living planet. In blunt terms, industrialization is a process of taking entire communities of living beings and turning them into commodities and dead zones. ...