mixing bleach and ammonia, wondering why we feel faint

It's 2008, the year The Green Death got so bad it even made the network news. All over the planet people are having extreme difficulties just finding even small portions of food for themselves and their families; so many more than ever are getting by just one day at a time, living on almost nothing. At the same time, and also all over the planet, people are being systematically pushed off of their food growing lands. Malnutrition and disease follows, emaciation and death. Why?

Even in the U.S., we can see something unusual is happening if we keep an eye on food and gas prices. We are all being affected by powerful forces most of us do not quite understand, forces many of us who are relatively well off haven't yet really tried to understand. Those of us paying attention are aware of the fact that these trends do not exist in isolation from one another. Oil prices are up, food prices are up too. We know we will at some point be just as desperate as the people eating mud cookies in Haiti if we stay on this course; we know something is wrong somewhere.

At the same time we have a great new global concern about climate change, and through the discourse on that topic we in the so-called developed world have come to understand that there is some sort of problem, some inequity, in the way we consume natural resources. We eat up the world's raw materials at an unsustainable rate; we burn some of the stuff and spew it into the air and we should start being responsible and cleaning up some of our mess. We, the developed, are starting to recognize that the way we're doing things is reckless and unfair and risking the future of life on the planet (wow, does this mean we're all "radical" now?). It seems admirable and appropriate that even heads of corporations are beginning to acknowledge this. We all now seem to sense that it is incumbent upon us to change, to address these inequities, perhaps to conserve energy, lower our carbon footprint, not consume quite so much, change our lifestyles in some way. Then things will all be better. So we think.

Here we will look into some of the solutions we have been offered. We'll look at the theory (public relations greenwashes) and practice (genocide-perpetrating) sides of biofuels and carbon markets. We'll monitor insane coercive development and reforestation schemes. We will watch for the ever-entertaining and disheartening signs of the great lengths industrial civilizations and their inhabitants will go to just to avoid admitting that drastic changes in their social orders and lifestyles may be necessary ("no such thing as climate change," "we're not running out of oil," maybe even, "they hate us for our freedoms"). We will take a look back at coercive (but "green") population control programs, among other things. Anything that illuminates our refusal to address the most basic and obvious unfairnesses inherent to our present global social and economic order. Double standards are so much fun to spot.

It is becoming clear to many of us that some of the remedies that have been offered to us as solutions to our greatest problems are far worse than just some harmless placebo snakeoil. Some of the remedies we have bought into are already compounding the problems, and in some cases they are even making things orders of magnitude worse then they would have been with business as usual. Let's think long and hard about it all.

In this blog we will try to learn from the stories of people who have already been badly hurt (or worse) by our overzealous (mostly well-meaning yet often subtly self-interested) attempts at fixing things, and we will look into and follow the cases of some of the largest-scale scam artists on earth, people and organizations who are pillaging our planet and our communities as all the while we congratulate them on what a great job they are doing providing us employment, bringing us cheap goods from far away, keeping The Economy (Our Economy) growing, and developing the backward and undeveloped regions and peoples of the earth "for the good of all." We hear the same rationales for destructive and utterly unfair forms of economic growth and development coming from politicians, oil companies, trade groups, humanitarian organizations (!), industrial interests and conglomerates of all sorts, agribusinesses, development banks, multilateral aid organizations; in short, the civilizers. They still wear a certain notorious mantle with pride (though they use different words for it these days); they carry on no less than the grand civilizing vision of Manifest Destiny. And they will, no matter what the human cost, until the machine stops.

Those of us not directing these schemes have been had. We may have been slow to catch on, but by paying attention we can get better at not letting the grand fallacies slide past our attention when the cheerleaders of an insistently self destructive industrial civilization try to conscript us into their grand projects. Figuring out how to stop their projects altogether is a different story.

So below, to kick things off, is one of the funniest, most absurd schemes yet. When by the sheer force of our instinctual irrepressible derisive laughter we are able to bring these grand destructive projects to their knees, or slap them down before they even get launched, this blog will gladly close up shop and say mission accomplished. Oh the folly:

Chevron and Weyerhaeuser form biofuels joint venture, Catchlight Energy LLC:

http://biopact.com/2008/03/chevron-and-weyerhaeuser-form-biofuels.html

And here's what the world's indigenous people have to say about the effects of biofuels, tree plantations, coercive development projects and the like. They are the canaries in this global coal mine, among the last canaries we are blessed to have, let's not ignore them:

http://www.un.org/apps/pressreleases -- see the comments from indigenous representatives at the forum on 4-22-08:

http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2008/hr4946.doc.htm

Or see Evo Morales' comments on the opening day of the forum to get the gist, 4-21-08:

http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2008/hr4944.doc.htm

This is the first entry for this blog, we'll get things more "refined" soon. Much more to come...