East Chicago: A Ninetieth Century Battlefield
April 27th, 2010
Sometimes it takes a disaster like the Earth Day Disaster to realize our hometowns and our future have been colonized.
East Chicago Portrait Series, Economics, Energy, Environment, Infrastructure, Politics
occupied territories
Your right. It’s not really a battlefield. These are occupied territories - Colonies - Surrendered territories.
One of the reasons that our ‘dear leaders’ do NOT fear a closing of Hormuz by Iran, and probably want exactly this, is that a higher price for oil would eliminate the last grumbles from the environmental movement about tar sands and offshore drilling. As the ongoing oil rig disaster shows, those environmental concerns are actually very meaningful, as are socio-political concerns, but the dialectical logic of disaster can usually be relied upon to trump such ‘quaint’ considerations…
There is a great need for a well articulated set of envio/economic principles. We just need to assure that the environment and the future are clearly held with the highest value - priceless. We can not accept a framework which is expedient, addressing only the concerns of the immediate now owned by a corporate interest. We need a long now perspective with precautionary principals with teeth.
I doubt if corporate interests only have to do with the immediate now. I think that what looks like chaos to us often looks like a plan to them. What I think there is a great need for is a vision for political/cultural/social/economic analysis and change that is both broad and detailed. We have to be able to fit the smaller picture into the larger picture and vice versa, and to see the way issues and concerns interconnect. And we must, above all, counter the top-down approach to decisionmaking, the approach that tends to define even (most crucially, really) what even make it to ‘the table’ as issues…