I just participated in a conversation with Van Jones about the Green for All campaign. Van shared with us some news that gave me shivers: like that all of Al Gore's worst case scenarios posed in An Inconvenient Truth are quite possibly our best case scenarios. That the city of Atlanta is 27 days away from being completely out of water. That we might not be talking about eco-apartheid in the near future, we might be talking eco-facism. Because the winners of today might just step up and say, you know what? There just isn't enough to go around, so we're getting rid of all the rest of these people.
He's talking about building a movement that is both left and green, one that works toward social justice while helping our environment. He says lets train all the poor kids to install solar panels; to caulk all the buildings that are leaking too much energy. He says, millions of homes, millions of buildings are going to need these things. That means millions of jobs for people who don't have them right now.
What's not to love about this scenario?
For me, its that it is a stop-gap solution. It doesn't address the inequities in our system - we could just have the same people winning, and the same people losing. It doesn't go far enough with addressing our ecological crisis. It maintains capitalism, consumerism. The system is broken and it needs real solutions.
I know he's thought all this through. And when he talks about building a movement, he's clear that this is only the beginning: that we need to start with things that we can win, that people can relate to. We pull in people from the right, we pull in the folks who are left but don't really think about the environment. And we don't hold back on taking down the Right with a capital R folks who just don't give a shit at all about the environment. And after we're through that, and we've begun to survive this climate crisis, we move on to Round 2... we make real change for the better --- meanwhile our people are employed and we slow climate change.
This is a nationwide movement toward a global solution. Growing food and justice for all is part of it. Food needs to be a part of it ... its not just about what we feed our bodies but how we feed our bodies, and how we relate to ourselves, each other, through the one tangible element that connects us all back to our ecology. Lots of thinking to do... and lots of work ahead.
1 comment:
any solution for a broken system will be akin to any other stop gap measure you can think of. there is no solution. the system needs to be discarded, get rid of, gone... in your scenario, when you thought things through, you came to the conclusion that we may become dispensable to the power elite. what we need to do is get rid of them before they get rid of us. we can accommodate within the system as much as we want, but in the end, in this generation, or the next, or the next, the clash of interests, the struggle for resources will become real. we already see many proxy wars going on. the thing is, this is the most useless cowardly generation in the entire history of man-kind. there's no way the things that need to happen will happen. excuse my pessimism or cynicism, but i got money on it. there will be no uprising in America, not anytime soon.
troddin'
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