Nothing else in the world… not all the armies…  is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

                                                           — Victor Hugo

Last night I got to see Bill McKibben deliver a typically rousing and depressing speech in his hometown and the home of the American Revolution, Lexington, Massachusetts. McKibben is one of very few leading lights building a global climate movement up to the task of preventing an all-out climate catastrophe. I credit McKibben more than any other single person with pushing those concerned about climate change to take meaningful collective action. So I was a little nervous when I got to ask him a question from the audience about something I find troubling about his approach.

Early in his talk, McKibben pointed out that the number 350 — equal to the maximum safe level of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere — was entirely non-ideological. He went on to suggest that we can build a movement that can shame and pressure our elected officials to act to price carbon high enough that we begin to phase out our devastating use of fossil fuels. Missing from this approach, however, is McKibben’s own analysis that the paradigm of economic growth is an underlying cause of the climate crisis. While McKibben was clearly embracing the task at hand as a political one, he seemed excruciatingly timid about the fact that the political task at hand is an ideological one.

{ Excerpt from a piece I wrote for Swans Commentary, June 2007 }

But before the fires from the “shock and awe” military onslaught were even extinguished, Bremer unleashed his shock therapy, pushing through more wrenching changes in one sweltering summer than the International Monetary Fund has managed to enact over three decades in Latin America.

-Naomi Klein, Baghdad Year Zero

In a searing article in Harper’s Magazine in September 2004, Naomi Klein laid out a theory of the Iraq War that shreds even today’s conventional wisdom about the motivations for our invasion. Her theory was that the neocons saw Iraq as a potential test tube for their ideological utopia, and pursued a strategy of shock therapy, where the devastation of war would force Iraqis to rebuild their nation from scratch. Out of desperation (not to mention shock and awe), they would be receptive to U.S. economic policy unimaginable in any other country. The common refrain that Bush did not have a postwar plan is inaccurate. According to Klein, the neocons’ plan started to backfire once the companies they were counting on to privatize the country hesitated to jump on board, and not for the reason you think. Yes, the security situation wasn’t perfect. But more importantly, companies decided to wait for the creation of an Iraqi government because international law prohibited the United States as an occupying force from running the show.

Of course, there were other parts to the ideological impetus for this war, including but not limited to Iraq’s tremendous oil reserves, the extension of US hegemony through the establishment of military bases, and the ever-present profit motives of the military-industrial complex. While Naomi Klein exposes the neoconservative drumbeat for war that we all love to hate, these other reasons hone in on a rift in the antiwar movement that must be overcome. That rift, my friends, is between those of us who hold out hope that the Democratic Party can be moved to spurn these deeper-rooted motivations for war, and those of us who know they cannot and will not.

{ Installment 3 of Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series }

Speed-stunned imagination

Past a certain threshold of energy consumption, the transportation industry dictates the configuration of social space. Motorways expand, driving wedges between neighbors and removing fields beyond the distance a farmer can walk. Ambulances take clinics beyond the few miles a sick child can be carried. The doctor will no longer come to the house, because vehicles have made the hospital into the right place to be sick. Once heavy trucks reach a village high in the Andes, part of the local market disappears. Later, when the high school arrives at the plaza along with the paved highway, more and more of the young people move to the city, until not one family is left which does not long for a reunion with someone hundreds of miles away, down on the coast.

Equal speeds have equally distorting effects on the perception of space, time, and personal potency in rich and in poor countries, however different the surface appearances might be. Everywhere, the transportation industry shapes a new kind of man to fit the new geography and the new schedules of its making. The major difference between Guatemala and Kansas is that in Central America some provinces are still exempt from all contact with vehicles and are, therefore, still not degraded by their dependence on them.