[matilda] The Age of Mammals, by Rebecca Solnit

[Patrick Gillett]

A future history!


>
>This originally posted on the excellent www.tomdispatch.com on December 23, 
>2006.
>enjoy & happy holidays
>david
>
>http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=149598
>
>The Age of Mammals
>Looking Back on the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century
>By Rebecca Solnit
>
>[For Solomon Solnit (b. Oct. 18, 2006)]
>
>The View from the Grass
>
>I've been writing the year-end other-news summary for Tomdispatch since 
>2004; somewhere around 2017, however, the formula of digging up overlooked 
>stories and grounds for hope grew weary. So for this year, we've decided 
>instead to look back on the last 25 years of the twenty-first century -- 
>but it was creatures from sixty million years ago who reminded me how to do 
>it.
>
>The other day, I borrowed some kids to go gawk with me at the one thing 
>that we can always count on in an ever-more unstable world: age-of-dinosaur 
>dioramas in science museums. This one had the usual dramatic clash between 
>a tyrannosaurus and a triceratops; pterodactyls soaring through the air, 
>one with a small reptile in its toothy maw; and some oblivious grazing by 
>what, when I was young in another millennium, we would have called a 
>brontosaurus. Easy to overlook in all that drama was the shrew-like mammal 
>perched on a reed or thick blade of grass, too small to serve even as an 
>enticing pterodactyl snack. The next thing coming down the line always 
>looks like that mammal at the beginning -- that's what I told the kids -- 
>inconsequential, beside the point; the official point usually being the 
>clash of the titans.
>
>That's exactly why mainstream journalists spent the first decade of this 
>century debating the meaning of the obvious binaries -- the Democrats 
>versus the Republicans, McWorld versus Global Jihad -- much as political 
>debate of the early 1770s might have focused on whether the French or 
>English monarch would have supremacy in North America, not long before the 
>former was beheaded and the latter evicted. The monarchs in all their 
>splashy scale were the dinosaurs of their day, and the eighteenth-century 
>mammal no one noticed at first was named "revolution"; the early 
>twenty-first century version might have been called "localism" or maybe 
>"anarchism," or even "civil society regnant." In some strange way, it 
>turned out that windmill-builders were more important than the U.S. Senate. 
>They were certainly better at preparing for the future anyway.
>
>That mammal clinging to the stalk had crawled up from the grassroots where 
>the choices were so much more basic and significant than, for instance, the 
>one between fundamentalism and consumerism that was on everyone's lips in 
>the years of the Younger George Bush. If the twentieth century was the age 
>of dinosaurs -- of General Motors and the Soviet Union, of McDonald's, 
>globalized entertainment networks, and information superhighways -- the 
>twenty-first has increasingly turned out to be the age of the small.
>
>You can see it in the countless local-economy projects -- wind-power 
>stations, farmer's markets, local enviro organizations, food co-ops -- that 
>were already proliferating, hardly noticed, by the time the Saudi Oil Wars 
>swept the whole Middle East, damaging major oil fields, and bringing on the 
>Great Gasoline Crisis of 2009. That was the one that didn't just send 
>prices skyrocketing, but actually becalmed the globe-roaming container 
>ships with their great steel-box-loads of bottled water, sweatshop 
>garments, and other gratuitous commodities.
>
>The resulting food crisis of the early years of the second decade of the 
>century, which laid big-petroleum-style farming low, suddenly elevated the 
>status of peasant immigrants from what was then called "the undeveloped 
>world," particularly Mexico and Southeast Asia. They taught the less 
>agriculturally skilled, in suddenly greening North American cities, to 
>cultivate the victory gardens that mitigated the widespread famines then 
>beginning to sweep the planet. (It also turned out that the unwieldy and 
>decadent SUVs of the millennium made great ecological sense, but only if 
>you parked them facing south, put in sunroofs and used the high-windowed 
>structures as seed-starter greenhouses.) The crisis spelled an end to the 
>epidemic of American obesity, both by cutting calories and obliging so many 
>Americans to actually move around on foot and bike and work with their 
>hands.
>
>Bush, the Accidental Empire Slayer
>
>For a brief period, in the early years of that second decade of this 
>chaotic century, a whole school of conspiracy theorists gained popularity 
>by suggesting that Bush the Younger was actually the puppet of a left-wing 
>plot to dismantle the global "hyperpower" of that moment. They pointed to 
>the Trotskyite origins of the "neoconservatives," whose mad dreams had so 
>clearly sunk the American empire in Iraq and Afghanistan, as part of their 
>proof. They claimed that Bush's advisors consciously plotted to devastate 
>the most powerful military on the planet, near collapse even before it was 
>torn apart by the unexpected Officer Defection Movement, which burst into 
>existence in 2009, followed by the next year's anti-draft riots in New York 
>and elsewhere.
>
>The Bush administration's mismanagement of the U.S. economy, while debt 
>piled up, so obviously spelled the end of the era of American prosperity 
>and power that some explanation, no matter how absurd, was called for -- 
>and for a while embraced. The long view from our own moment makes it 
>clearer that Bush was simply one of the last dinosaurs of that imperial 
>era, doing a remarkably efficient job of dragging down what was already 
>doomed. If you're like most historians of our quarter-century moment, then 
>you're less interested in the obvious -- why it all fell -- than in 
>discovering the earliest hints of the mammalian alternatives springing up 
>so vigorously with so little attention in those years.
>
>Without benefit of conspiracy, what Bush the Younger really prompted 
>(however blindly) was the beginning of a decentralization policy in the 
>North American states. During the eight years of his tenure, dissident 
>locales started to develop what later would become full-fledged independent 
>policies on everything from queer rights and the environment to foreign 
>relations and the notorious USA-Patriot Act. For example, as early as 
>2004-2007, several states, led by California, began setting their own 
>automobile emissions standards in an attempt to address the already evident 
>effects of climate change so studiously ignored in Washington.
>
>In June of 2005, mayors from cities across the nation unanimously agreed to 
>join the Kyoto Protocol limiting climate-changing emissions -- a direct 
>rejection of national policy -- at a national meeting in Seattle. 
>Librarians across the country publicly refused to comply with the 
>USA-Patriot Act, and small towns nationwide condemned the measure in the 
>years before many of those towns also condemned what historians now call 
>the U.S.-Iraq Quagmire.
>
>It was the bullying of the Bush administration that pushed these small 
>entities to fight back, to form local administrations and set local 
>regulations -- to leave the Republic behind as they joined the journey to a 
>viable future. And when their withdrawal was finished, so was the Republic.
>
>Now, the thousands of tons of high-level radioactive waste that 
>pro-nuclear-reactor Washington policies had brought into being are buried 
>in the granitic bedrock underlying the former capital -- known as the 
>Nuclear Arlington in contrast with the Human Arlington to the south, which 
>will receive the remains of a few more nostalgic officers from the Gulf 
>Wars, then close for good. The whole history of armament, radioactive 
>contamination, disarmament, and alternative energy research is on display 
>in the museum housed in the former Supreme Court Building, though many 
>avoid the area for fear of radiation contamination.
>
>In hindsight, we all see that the left-right divide so harped upon in that 
>era was but another dinosaur binary. After all, small government had long 
>been (at least theoretically) a conservative mantra as was (at least 
>theoretically) left-wing support for the most localized forms of "people 
>power" -- and yet neither group ever pictured government or people power 
>truly getting small enough to exist as it does today, at its most gigantic 
>in bioregional groups about the size of the former states of Oregon or 
>Georgia -- but, of course, deeply enmeshed in complex global webs of 
>alliances. All this was unimagined in, for instance, the dismal year of 
>2006.
>
>By the time the Republican Party itself split in 2012 into two adversarial 
>wings dubbed the Fundament party and the Conservatives, the American Empire 
>was dismantling itself. Of course, the United States still nominally exists 
>-- we'll pay a bow to it this year at the Decolonization Day fireworks on 
>July 4 -- but it is a largely symbolic entity, like the British Royal 
>Family was for a century before its dissolution in 2020.
>
>A similar death-of-the-dinosaurs moment was at work in the mainstream media 
>-- the big newspapers and television networks of that era. During the early 
>years of the century, as Bush the Younger dragged the country deeper into 
>the mire of unwinnable wars and countless lies, most of the big newspapers 
>and television news programs lost their nerve, their edge, or even their 
>eyesight, and failed dismally to report the stories that mattered. Some 
>fell to scandal -- the New York Times was never the same after the Judith 
>Miller crisis of 2005. Some were sabotaged from without, like the Los 
>Angeles Times, undercut by its parent corporation's "cost-cutting" 
>programs. Some withered away as younger readers fled paper pages for the 
>Internet. But behind them, below them, in their shadow, regarded as puny 
>and insignificant back then -- even though their scoops kept upstaging and 
>prodding the print media -- were bloggers, alternative media such as small 
>magazines and websites, the glorious Indymedia movement, progressive radio, 
>even the text-messaging that had helped organize the first great Latino 
>march of the immigrant rights movement at its beginnings in April 2006.
>
>The Latin American Renaissance
>
>The Latino-ization of the United States had brought some long missing civic 
>engagement and pleasure back into public life and tied the country (and 
>Canada) to the splendid insurgencies of the southern hemisphere. The era of 
>post-communist revolution that would explode from Tierra del Fuego to 
>Tijuana in the second decade of the century is usually traced back to the 
>entrance of Mexico's indigenous Zapatistas onto the world stage on January 
>1, 1994.
>
>One bold reflection of a changing continent in those years was the election 
>of progressive leaders -- including leftist Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Hugo 
>Chavez in Venezuela, Michele Bachelet in Chile, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva 
>in Brazil, and Evo Morales of Bolivia, all by 2006 -- even eventually 
>Alicia Ponce de Leon in Columbia in 2014, three years after U.S. war 
>funding dried up (along with the America that paid for it). Chavez 
>(president 1998-2013) termed this the Bolivarian Revolution.
>
>As a group, they were not bad as national leaders then went, but one great 
>blow against nationalism proved to be the British seizure of the former 
>Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998 for crimes against humanity and 
>his in-absentia trial in Spain, a saga that dragged on until the 
>blood-drenched dictator's heart failed at the end of 2006. The new world is 
>both more transnational and more local than the one it eclipsed, and nobody 
>will ever be so beyond the reach of justice again. (Africans, for example, 
>recovered from Swiss and offshore bank accounts the hundreds of billions of 
>dollars stolen by their former dictators, which gave a huge boost to the 
>fight against AIDS and desertification.)
>
>Whatever the names of their leaders, the real force in Latin America -- and 
>increasingly elsewhere -- would be in the grassroots activism that the 
>Zapatistas heralded, which, in the view from 2026, clearly signaled the 
>fading relevancy of nation-states. Latin indigenous movements, labor 
>movements, neighborhood groups, worker-takeovers in Argentina's factories 
>from 2001 onward, and the Argentinean ideology of horizontalidad (or 
>horizontalism) that went with it, were just early signs of this 
>development.
>
>Like the regionalist policymaking entities of the United States, these 
>movements undermined even progressive presidents to set more radical 
>policies and grew to include many indigenous autonomous zones across the 
>hemisphere. For example, in late 2006, the 8,000-member Achuar tribe (whose 
>region spans what was once the Peru-Ecuador border) took hostage and 
>defeated Peru's main oil and gas-extraction corporation in a mode of 
>victorious resistance that would become increasingly common. In Mexico, the 
>stolen presidential election of 2006 that resulted in the inauguration of 
>PAN Party candidate Felix Calderon was the straw that broke the camel's 
>back, so to speak. In the years to follow, the Second Mexican Revolution 
>spread from Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Mexico City, slowly dissolving that nation 
>into a network of populist regional strongholds. Seventeen of them 
>reinstated a local indigenous language as their official tongue.
>
>Global Justice and the Drowned Lands
>
>The Latin American Renaissance also created a network of communities strong 
>enough to take in some of the climate-change refugees from Central America 
>and Southern Mexico, who fled both north and south, along with Sunbelt -- 
>and what came to be called Swampbelt -- émigrés from the southern United 
>States. The great population transitions thus went more smoothly in the 
>western hemisphere than across the Atlantic, where Europeans engaged in 
>escalating anti-Muslim confrontations before realizing that only 
>immigration could prop up the economies of nations whose native-born, 
>white-Christian populations were rapidly aging and, thanks to ultra-low 
>birthrates, declining.
>
>The end of those bloody squabbles is generally considered to have been 
>marked by the election in 2020 of Chancellor Amira Goldblatt Al-Hamid by 
>what was then only a loosely federated association of German-speaking 
>bioregional principalities. Similar crises -- and, in some cases, bloody 
>cross-community, cross-religion bloodlettings --took place elsewhere, 
>especially as populations moved away from increasingly desertifying, ever 
>hotter hot zones in Africa and Southern Asia. Some historians have regarded 
>the devastating global bird-flu pandemic of 2013 as fortunate in relieving 
>climate-change population-shift pressures; others -- including the noted 
>historian Martha Moctezuma from the University of San Diego-Tijuana's Davis 
>Center on Public Luxury -- discard that perspective as callous.
>
>Every schoolchild now knows the Old Map/New Map system and can recite the 
>lands that vanished: half the Netherlands, much of Bangladesh, the Amazon 
>Delta, the New Orleans and Shanghai lowlands. And who today can't still 
>sing the popular ditties about those famed "fundamentalists without their 
>fundamentals" -- the senators who lost the state of Florida as it rapidly 
>became a swampy archipelago. Most schoolchildren can also cite the World 
>Court decision of 2016 that gave all shares in the major oil companies to 
>Pacific Islanders, mainly resettled in New Zealand and Australia, whose 
>homes had been lost to rising oceans (a short-lived triumph as the 
>fossil-fuel economy ebbed away).
>
>More creative responses to climate change included the tree-traveler and 
>polar-bear collectives. These eco-anarchist clans -- now popular 
>contemporary heroes -- first nursed plant populations on their unnatural 
>journeys north by means of extensive rainy-season nursery cultivation and 
>summer planting programs that have since become huge outdoor festivals. 
>Today, many city parks and town squares have statues of Cleo Dorothy Chan, 
>who organized the first small tree-traveler collective in southern Oregon 
>and is now hailed globally as the twenty-first century's Johnny Appleseed. 
>("You can't choose between grief and exhilaration; they are the left and 
>right foot on which we hike onward," said the t-shirts of the 
>tree-travelers.) As for the polar-bear folks, they were initially a group 
>of zoologists and circus trainers who, inspired by the tree-travelers, 
>mobilized themselves to teach young polar bears to adapt to changed 
>habitat. They are often credited with saving that one charismatic species 
>in the wild, even as thousands of less emblematic ones vanished.
>
>The Principles of Change
>
>A mature oak tree always looks significant; and, when we look at it, we're 
>willing to respect acorns -- but the rest of the time the seeds of the next 
>big thing are just trodden upon and overlooked. The ideas that made our era 
>and pulled us back from the brink, the stakes that went through the hearts 
>of the dinosaurs and the more incremental forces that rendered them extinct 
>were all at work in the 1990s. They just didn't look very impressive yet, 
>and people were intimidated by the heft of those dinosaurs and swayed by 
>their arguments.
>
>The World Court and related human rights, environmental rights, and 
>criminal courts became more powerful presences as the sun set on the era of 
>nation-state. Multiple changes often combined into scenarios impossible to 
>foresee: for example, the belated U.S. recognition in 2011 that the 
>International Criminal Court did indeed have war-crimes jurisdiction over 
>Americans coincided with the worldwide anti-incarceration movement. This 
>explains why, for example, former President Bush the Younger, extradited 
>from Paraguay and found guilty in 2013, was never imprisoned, but sentenced 
>to spend the rest of his life working in a Fallujah diaper laundry. (People 
>who are still bitter about his reign are bitter too that the webcam there 
>suggests, even at his advanced age, he still enjoys this work that accords 
>so well with his skill-set.) His assets -- along with those of his Vice 
>President, and of Halliburton, Bechtel, Exxon, and other war profiteers -- 
>were famously awarded to the Vietnamese Buddhist Commission for the Iraqi 
>Transition. After almost a decade of the bitterest bloodshed, Iraq, too, 
>had broken into five nations, but by this time so many nation-states were 
>being reorganized into more coherent units that the Iraqi transition, led 
>by the Women's Alliance of Islamic Feminists (nicknamed the 
>Islamofeminists), was surprisingly peaceful when it finally came.
>
>"As I've said many times, the future is already here. It's just not very 
>evenly distributed," said the sci-fi novelist William Gibson in 1999. In 
>retrospect, the arrival of the Age of Mammals should have been easy to 
>foresee. On every front -- family structure and marriage, transportation, 
>energy and food economies, localized power structures -- everyday life was 
>being reinvented in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. 
>From India to Indiana an interlocking set of new ideas began to emerge and 
>coalesce, becoming in the end the new common sense that new generations of 
>thinkers and activists were guided by. Who now thinks it's radical to 
>advocate that decentralization is better than consolidated power, that 
>capitalism's worldview is vicious and dishonest, that the public matters as 
>much or more than the private, that enforced homogeneity is not a virtue 
>either on a farm or in a society?
>
>The basic tools were already in place long before our era; here and there, 
>a few at a time, people picked them up and started building a better 
>future. Some new inventions mattered, such as the super-efficient German 
>and Japanese solar collectors and methane generators that revolutionized 
>energy production, but much of the march toward a more environmentally sane 
>future didn't require fancy scientific breakthroughs and technologies, just 
>modesty. We scaled back on consumption and production. For example, the 
>collapse of the U.S. military put an end to the world's single most 
>polluting entity, while the near-end of recreational air travel also made a 
>significant contribution to rolling back greenhouse-gas production.
>
>The law of unintended consequences continued to prevail: When touristic air 
>travel withered, so did Hawaii's tourist economy -- making the retaking of 
>the islands by indigenous Hawaiians via the King Kamehameha Council a piece 
>of cake. Of course sailing ships still travel the triangular trade-winds 
>route between Latin America, Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest.
>
>Everything was changing then, is changing now, and some years back the 
>Principles of Change were codified. These simply recited the history of 
>popular and nonviolent resistance from slave uprisings (Hochschild '05) and 
>Gandhian tactics (Schell '03) to the principles of direct action (D. Solnit 
>'09) and social change (see Marina Sitrin on horizontalism, '06) and drew 
>the obvious conclusions about how change works, what powers civil society 
>has, how war can be sabotaged from below, and why violence ultimately 
>fails.
>
>Believers in authoritarian power had prophesied a globalized world of 
>corporate nation-states (and indeed the 2012 Olympics featured teams 
>identified by branding rather than nation, such as the Dasani and Nokia 
>track teams and the Ikea Decathaletes); but even as the polar bears 
>survived, a different kind of change in the global climate doomed most of 
>the large corporations. The outlawing of corporate personhood was launched 
>in Porter Township, Pennsylvania, in December of 2002 and gradually became 
>the law of the land.
>
>By 2015, the "human rights" U.S. courts had given to corporations in the 
>1880s had been globally stripped away from them again. Of course, there 
>were revolts against the new world -- just as the Republican dinosaurs led 
>a long rearguard movement against women's rights, queer rights, the rights 
>of the environment, and science education, so there were corporations that 
>resisted the new order, most spectacularly when Arkansas was taken over 
>wholesale by Wal-Mart for seventeen months in the early teens.
>
>The heavily armed Arkansans rose up, Wal-Mart's private army changed sides, 
>and what was once the world's biggest corporation joined the dung-heap of 
>history along -- most famously -- with Monsanto, derailed by the Schmeiser 
>verdict, the precedent-setting World Court decision to award all assets in 
>the genetic-engineering corporation to small farmers previously terrorized 
>for not paying royalties on crops contaminated by Monsanto's genetically 
>altered strains. Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who had 
>been appointed ambassador to the United States from the Republic of 
>Wal-Mart, was sentenced to three years as a sweeper at an Arkansas farmer's 
>market and became locally beloved in the role.
>
>In the American Middle East (known as the Midwest until modern geographers 
>pointed out that the west starts at the Continental Divide), sectarian 
>feuding, which kept the region in a state of subdued civil war for almost a 
>decade, still flares up occasionally. Periodic sorties by the Fundaments 
>against new programs and lifestyles are considered part of normal life, 
>though Kansas's John Brown Society provides a degree of protection against 
>them.
>
>The Republic of Northern Idaho was another outpost of different-sex-only 
>marriage laws and creationism, but the need to work with downriver 
>communities on salmon restoration and dam removal eventually dissolved the 
>breakaway half-state into the Columbia River Drainage federation. Other 
>historians claim that the tattooed love freaks of the Seattle region, who 
>found common ground with the ex-truckers and elk-hunters of Idaho, 
>dissolved the Idahoan Republic via bicycle races and beer fests. Some also 
>say the same-sex desires of elk hunters were legendary and led to 
>negotiations for a direct rail link to San Francisco and Los Angeles.
>
>In 1996, the Pentagon prepared imaginary scenarios describing five 
>potential futures by 2025. Most of them were based on the belief that a 
>better world was one dominated by American military power -- which is to 
>say, by the threat of state violence. That they came up with five possible 
>futures demonstrated, at least, how wide-open the next two decades seemed, 
>even to a Tyrannosaurus-Rex bureaucracy that thought it was soon to own the 
>planet.
>
>Some of their technological, corporate, and militaristic futures could have 
>come to pass. Had people not come to believe strongly enough in their own 
>power, in a horizontalist society, and in a planet-wide ability to work 
>with the environmental changes the Industrial Age had loosed on us, we 
>might be living in a very different, unimaginably catastrophic world -- one 
>in which the mammals would never have proliferated. They might even have 
>breathed their last without ever emerging from under the fern fronds and 
>out of the grasses.
>
>The future, of course, is not something you predict and wait for. It is 
>something you invent daily through your actions. As Mas Kodani, a Buddhist 
>in Los Angeles, said in the early twenty-first century: "One does not stand 
>still looking for a path. One walks; and as one walks, a path comes into 
>being." We make it up as we go, and we make it up by going, or as the 
>Zapatistas more elegantly put it, "Walking we ask questions." What else can 
>you do?
>
>Perhaps respect the power of the small and the mystery of the future to 
>which we all belong.
>
>Rebecca Solnit lives in and loves the peninsular republic of San Francisco, 
>where she is working on a new book. Her most recent books are still Hope in 
>the Dark and A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
>
>     Copyright 2006 Rebecca Solnit

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