[matilda] The Age of Mammals, by Rebecca Solnit

Fri Jan 5 19:36:20 GMT 2007

Anyone going to/aware of the bus protest tomorrow? 11 am at city hall. first buses 'day saver' ticket will be 4 pound as of monday!michelle
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. - Martin Luther King
> From: paddygillet at hotmail.com> To: 6193 at yahoogroups.com; matilda at lists.aktivix.org; ssf at lists.aktivix.org> Date: Fri, 5 Jan 2007 14:45:28 +0000> Subject: [matilda] The Age of Mammals, by Rebecca Solnit> > 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> > _________________________________________________________________> Be the first to hear what's new at MSN - sign up to our free newsletters!  > http://www.msn.co.uk/newsletters
_________________________________________________________________
Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail.
http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.aktivix.org/pipermail/matilda/attachments/20070105/1f989fc3/attachment-0001.htm