We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, April 23, 2012

The consequences of failure

Click here to access article by David Spratt from Climate Code Red (Australia). 
If you avoid including an honest assessment of climate science and impacts in your narrative, its pretty difficult to give people a grasp about where the climate system is heading and what needs to be done to create the conditions for living in climate safety, rather than increasing and eventually catastrophic harm. But that’s how the big climate advocacy organisations have generally chosen to operate, and it represents a strategic failure to communicate. 
There main problem is the failure of most environmentalists to identify the real problem: climate scientists and their media organs are not addressing the basic source of the problem--the capitalist system with its growth imperative. The problem is this system, but they refuse to name it simply because the political operatives of the One Percent have been very successful through their ubiquitous organs of indoctrination to instill the belief in nearly everyone that "there is no alternative", and through their direct control of most organizations which inhibits most aware people from mentioning any link of climate emergency to the capitalist system. Those who fail to conform to the "party line" often sacrifice their careers.
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