Since the modern environmental movement was founded decades ago following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the ability of the earth to support life has declined precipitously to the point that most life is now at risk. We are on the verge of pushing the ‘reset’ button on Planet Earth, of reverting the earth to a state where only primordial slime will be viable.
Environmentalists are not the cause of this degradation, but clearly they are also not the solution. There are several reasons for this:
- Environmental movements have become corporatized, in the sense that many have well-paid Executive Directors and are fearful of jeopardising their grants and donations by being too ‘radical.’
- Many environmentalists put Ego before Earth, insisting things be done their way and refusing to make common cause with other groups.
- Environmentalists have utterly failed to recognize the nature of the opposition.
The first two points are common knowledge among anyone who has worked much with environmental groups. Suffice it to say this: Global warming will destroy civilisation and much life on earth, rendering efforts to save the whales, or any other species, moot. Environmental groups should have been working together, but rarely do. In addition, environmentalists could have and should have been reaching out to social justice organizations, as global warming will solve numerous human issues, like starvation, AIDS, resource wars, and so on by eliminating humans.
But it is the final point that I wish to delve into. There are people among us who operate with an entirely different morality; I call it the Predator Morality and describe it more thoroughly in the link provided. The Predator Morality is dominant today; the evidence is all around us, from CEOs wrecking companies while collecting fat bonuses to the invasion of Iraq.
In brief, predators do not share the same morality as you and I. A predator’s only concern is himself, and he will do whatever he can away with to get more money, power, and prestige for himself. This point is critical, and environmentalists and social justice crusaders have completely missed it. Most people think everyone else is like them, and this is a fatal error when dealing with a predator. Imagine a deer thinking a wolf is, at heart, just like a deer; the deer would be dead very quickly.
This is how people like Rex Tillerson can fund global warming denial, or the president of Nike can sleep at night when his products are made in sweatshops. Predators are not like you and me. They cannot be reasoned with, bargained with, or trusted. They have a fundamentally different morality, an alien morality.
The wolf feels no guilt or shame when it kills, and neither does any other predator, including human predators. This is why protests fail. We have allowed the predators to dominate the top levels of power, from global corporations to politics, and they don’t care what the sheep think.
They only care about what the sheep will let them get away with, and so far that’s just about everything. When former U.S. President Ford pardoned Nixon, all the political predators got the message: If we stick together, the American people will let us get away with whatever we want.
Fast-forward to today, and nobody should be surprised when Nancy Pelosi takes “impeachment...off the table” for George Bush II, or when President Obama continues on the course set by Bush. The predators know the sheep will do nothing.
A good friend was complaining that there were massive, worldwide protests prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq – but they invaded anyway. Of course they did. The deer organized a protest against the wolves, and the wolves went ahead and ate the deer anyway. They knew the deer would never fight back, and that is the only thing that predators fear.
The wolves let us protest and vote and complain, and they keep eating us. The only way to stop the predators is to stop them. It is going to be exceptionally difficult now, as they occupy the highest positions of power and have great wealth. Our final nonviolent chance is to start jailing some of them to make an example; if we don’t do that, violence will surely ensue.
In one of the few useful applications of online petitions, I have called upon those of us in the rich countries to urge the Maldives to charge Rex Tillerson with crimes against humanity. I urge you to sign the petition, which will be delivered to the President of the Maldives, who has said his people “will not die quietly.”
Most environmentalists in rich countries find that action extreme, because they labour under the delusion that Tillerson will somehow see the light if only they engage in enough consciousness-raising and marches. I find that people in countries on the front lines of climate change are considerably more receptive to the idea.
The rich countries led the way with increasing human freedom in the past, but we have lost our courage. In an ironic twist, we have traded our freedom for trinkets from China. It is now up to the developing countries to do or die. Start making an example of the predators who will destroy us all, before it is too late.
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You can recognize those evil predators using the following characteristic: their eyes are on either side of their nose. They are also known to eat carrots, because the carrots are powerless to resist.
Written in December 2009