"When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained." Twain / "I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of these contradictions out for myself." Montaigne / "I write because I have found no other means of getting rid of my thoughts." Nietzsche / "Writing is an integral part of the process of understanding." Arendt / "Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers." Asimov.
This morning I listened to a Naomi Klein interview from this week about her very different type of book, while reading a prescient Geroge Monbiot article that he reposted from last March. There's a striking amount of overlap.
Both are about the new right-wing alliances being formed, and the furthest right political parties we've seen in some time creeping up worldwide.
George Monbiot:
Monbiot blames the influencers who are feeding the young conspiratorial messages, including Russell Brand (hence the recent repost).
"He appears to have switched from challenging injustice to conjuring phantoms. If, as I suspect it might, politics takes a very dark turn in the next few years, it will be partly as a result of people like Brand. . . . He wastes his talent on tired and discredited tales. . . . Such claims are not just wrong. They are wearyingly, boringly wrong. But, to judge by the figures (he has more than 6 million subscribers on YouTube), the audience loves them. . . .
We've grown to develop an anti-expertise view in society. I imagine it might have something to do with a do-it-yourself mentality born of individualism and capitalism. I can work harder to figure out how to do it myself and then I don't need anyone else's help. I get that.
About eight years ago, I built a reading/writing/painting studio in my backyard all by myself despite not really knowing what I was doing (h/t YouTube videos), and I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. But, I hired an electrician to wire it and a window guy to install that huge front window. I know my limitations. From the other side of things, though, as a teacher, it's pretty annoying when non-teachers are confident they could do the job better and offer helpful hints around time management because surely you can finish the day's work by the end of the school day. "Prep your lessons on PD days," I was told recently. I can't even begin to explain everything wrong with that suggestion. Teachers have a skill set that many well-meaning parents don't have, and it would be amazing if people could believe that and trust us just a little.
When I posted a little summary of what I understand so far of the Klondike Papers, many asked me for access to the 6,400 pages of documents that were discussed - the corroboration of many of the claims. As far as I know, those pages were only provided for select journalists chosen by David Wallace. Someone claimed they're all open source, but I haven't seen signs of this elusive file online. But this is where I think we need to understand our limits and when to find an expert. I summarized what I know of this story from watching six hours of interviews and reading a handful of Reddit posts and another handful of news sources. Once I started down that rabbit hole, I spent a day watching and reading and the next day sorting and writing. Sifting through 6,400 pages would be like reading War and Peace FIVE TIMES, and with the chapters and paragraphs all out of order so it's an enormous effort to make sense of it all. I'm not sure how many people asking for a copy are really up for that kind of journey.
Linda McQuaig's newest book, The Sport and Prey of Capitalists: How the Rich are Stealing Canada's Public Wealth, is a fast read full of local history and written as history should be written, as colourful stories about fascinating people! But, in order to try to remember any of it, I've whittled it down to the bare bones here. She comes down hard on Trudeau, both of them, and for good reason, but takes a generally non-partisan role in exploring the good and bad players in our history.
Her concern throughout: "We've failed to appreciate our heritage as a nation that has embraced public enterprise to great effect" (6). Then she traces our gradual acceptance, at a huge cost to our country, of the neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatization, and union busting through the history of specific industries affecting Canada today: the banking system, tar sands, railways, 407, hydro, and medicines.
The book cover says the book "provides the hope and clarity required to change the world." Well, he certainly tries. He's got a plan of action that's possible, but I didn't get the requisite hope necessary to be spurred to action. It's a bit of an overview of many ideas from different places, many of which are already in action somewhere in the world, and it left me with a solid book list to peruse, but it also left me with a sinking feeling that this will never work. We're never going to get our shit together enough to do any of this. But I've been wrong before.
The first part is a mix of Charles Taylor's notion of social imaginaries, Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, Robert Reich's Inequality for All, and Noam Chomsky's talks on solidarity. Then he gets into specifics about our ideas around our communities, environment, economics, and democracy.
This is Chomsky's last long-form documentary. It came out in January, but I hadn't heard about it until recently. I paraphrased/transcribed the 72 minute video liberally with links to further readings below.
It's about the American Dream: the idea that you can be born poor but work hard enough for a home and car and good schools - that's all collapsed. We profess to like the values of democracy, so public opinion should have an influence on policy and the government should carry out actions determined by the population, but the privileged sector doesn't like democracy. We have extreme inequality with a super wealthy group in the top 1/10th of the top one percent. It's unjust in itself, but it's got a corrosive effect on democracy.
The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power
Concentration of wealth yields concentration of power, especially as costs of elections skyrocket forcing politicians into the pockets of corporations. This translates into legislation that increases the concentration of wealth through fiscal policy (taxes, deregulation, rules of corporate governance) designed to increase the concentration of wealth and power in a vicious cycle of progress.
I was really looking forward to seeing the latest Josh Fox film on fracking. I loved Gasland (for which Mark Ruffalo was just added to the US Terror Advisory List for promoting), and then Chris Hedges gave this film a nod, which means a lot to me. And then one reviewer wrote that the film will "restore your faith that we, as a people, have the power to save ourselves." Exactly what I need. So I bought it on iTunes and settled in for some enlightenment.
Maybe my expectations were a smidge too high.
It fell into the same problems that made Rob Stewart's films less than stellar. In Sharkwater, Stewart had long dramatic interludes focusing on himself and the problems he experienced being unwittingly thrust into activism. And then in Revolution, he spoke at length about beginning to learn about the environment. At least Stewart, near the end, seemed to recognize the part he himself was playing in exacerbating climate change with all the air travel the film required. Did it really require it, is the question. Stewart starts asking himself some really hard questions, which I respect. Fox doesn't go there.
Like Stewart, Fox is just learning - or, at least, he presents the appearance of just learning about climate change. He's been in this a while, so I can't imagine he doesn't get the big picture yet, and I'm really not a fan of the technique of feigning ignorance to get people on board. It feels like he hadn't done any research before the shoot so we could watch him discover what it is to "eat from the tree of knowledge, and now there's no going back." I want a documentary to tell me something I don't know, and tell me with confidence. I want a climate change doc, especially, to tell the world everything they need to know to get with the program. There were too many shots of Fox walking through forests in awe of nature - look at that spider! and that tree! and that bird! Even worse, most of those shots weren't of the forest, but of Fox looking at the forest. We were to be enthralled by his wonder at nature, not by nature itself. If he were my son, this would be my favourite movie ever. But he's not.
That gets to the bigger problem here: that this film is way too focused on Fox to be compelling to anyone who isn't related to him or doesn't have a crush on him. It starts with a painfully awkward dance to show how happy he is that a river nearby won't be polluted with oil. It was a hard-won victory, and I get the celebratory tone, but there are other ways to show joyfulness without forcing us to watch a guy dance in his living room for the entire opening credits. He finds it helpful to cope with tragedy by playing the banjo. That's really nice for him, but it's doesn't necessarily translate to helping us cope by listening to him play.
Like Stewart, Fox does it all, and sometimes it's better to spread the jobs around a more talented pool. His narration is stilted, with long dramatic pauses mid-sentence throughout. There aren't rises and lulls in the intensity of his tone; it's all drama all the way through: "Just a few months later. New York City. Was about to get. A wake-up call." Couple that with a really quiet voice juxtaposed with sudden bursts of loud extended musical interludes meant my finger hovered on the volume the whole time. He had some great footage from a camera strapped to a drone, and he had the cash to film in twelve different countries, but he didn't spring for a steadicam, so much of the tromping through the forest had a Blair Witch effect.
He collected the usual litany of talking heads: Bill McKibben, Michael Mann, Elizabeth Kolbert... but only for a few minutes each. If I had the chance to chat with Elizabeth Kolbert, I'd have so many more questions to ask. She's got a wealth of knowledge that was largely ignored. And the McKibben interview was in a food court, and they decided to include their argument with mall security about filming in the mall. I struggle to see the purpose of that clip - why they'd choose a food court to film in, and why they'd choose to highlight the conflict. Is it to mirror the pipeline protests? A corporation vs citizen struggle? He was just a security guard doing his job. Weird.
He threw in some stats about increasing weather events, rising sea levels, endangered animals, factory farms, ocean acidity, threatened protesters, that the window to slow the expected 2° rise by 2036 closes within a year from now (NASA thinks we may have already hit 2°), and that all our 40-year-old pipelines are going to break. He referred to the Amazon rainforest as the lungs of the world even though the oceans create significantly more oxygen. Standard stuff. But a few of his poignant pieces of information were learned by most of us in grade three: "People. And animals. Exhale carbon dioxide. Trees. Take in. Carbon dioxide."
What I learned? To make a good documentary, you really have to get over yourself and your personal learning experience and make the subject matter the star of the show. Read some Monbiotbefore you start shooting so you don't sound like you've never heard of any of this before, and so you can temper your amazement at what's being shared. A lot of it is old news to anyone remotely familiar with the issues, like that Republicans don't think climate change is caused by human activity. Even better, read the IPCC reports that came out in 2014.
As far as learning basic information about climate change, there are better films to watch to understand all the meetings leading up to Paris. Like this one at only 4 minutes:
And then Grist also explained what happened in Paris, but in much more positive terms than Fox:
So his big question, the big draw to the film, is the focus on what won't be destroyed by climate change. His thesis is that we'll still have courage and creativity and resilience and all sorts of other wonderful human attributes that should be celebrated. But, I think we won't have any of those if we don't have any humans left. This is where some knowledge of Naomi Klein's and Gordon Laxer's plans for change would have helped add some substance to his song and dance. He's struggling with how to cope with all the knowledge, but he hasn't gotten far enough in depth in his own journey to have us walk with him. He seems to want to escape rather than actually cope with the reality of it all - to actually feel that reality.
By comparison, a much better film on the complexity of coping with the environmental destruction in our own backyard is Fractured Land with Caleb Behn. Both Behn and Stewart were willing to question their own motives and involvement in a way that Fox skirts around, refusing to acknowledge, which leaves his film feeling superficial at best. And of the three filmmakers, Behn's film offers the most complex understanding of the situation and leaves you with the most hopeful spirit. We can't have real hope if we distract ourselves with music in the face of significant loss. We have to have a clear path to walk to help make it okay.
John Oliver's show about surveillance is a must see:
Amazing, right!?!
But what sticks with me most, as a teacher and an environmentalist, is this line: "Is this a conversation we [American citizens] have a capacity to have?"
Bingo.
When intelligent people speak passionately about what they think is most important for the world to understand, they often go over people's heads or provide too many details that nobody really cares about, and then their message is lost. Are you paying attention, Naomi Klein??* Maybe Oliver could interview her next!
If we can't find a way to get people to understand the significance of what's happening to our ecosystems right now, we're screwed. Maybe it would help to remind everyone that, if the atmosphere is filled with more greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and supporting factory farms, then they'll be too worried about finding drinking water and a home at a higher elevation to be able to have sex.
Except, that happened with phthalates years ago, and nobody cared. There was a huge Globe & Mail spread on how phthalates and plastics affect male fertility and even penis size, and I thought at the time, "Now things will change." But it didn't. At all. Because it's not happening to people in a way they can see, and it's not happening to them RIGHT FREAKING NOW.
Blarg. How do we get the message across in a way that people will get pissed off and actually change the way they live and the types of politicians and platforms they'll support??
Help me, John Oliver. You're our only hope.
________
*Yes, I know I could use a lesson on this too, but I'm a C list blogger, so I'll just putter away here how I like, thank-you very much.
It's curious that Margaret Wente is so clear about the errors Klein commits in her new book, when it appears from Wente's article today, "The It Girl of climate change doesn't get it," that she's looked at "every interview, excerpt and review," but hasn't actually read the book. It reminds me of a film buff I know who refused to see Atom Egoyan's beautiful film Exotica because it was just about strippers. As if.
I'm only on chapter 4, and I'm convinced Wente's concerns are unfounded. She claims Klein ignores "elementary facts" about China and India's role in GHG emissions, but a cursory look at the index of the book reveals a column of page references under the headings of 'China' and 'India.' Klein clarifies that we've outsourced our emissions when we outsourced our factories. I think she gets it.
Klein's not suggesting we just cut emissions growth in the US and Canada, rather she calls for a change worldwide: "Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us" (22). And that's just in the introduction to the book.
The big difference between this movement and the Occupy movement, is that we've been offered a clear and possible solution that can be put in place if people worldwide can convince leaders this is vital to our survival. Yes, that's a big 'if,' but because it's difficult doesn't mean it shouldn't be attempted march after march after march.
I question Wente's insistence that, yet again, this can't possibly make sense or work or help anything. I wonder if it's a matter, as Klein suggests, that "it is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered" (37). But we do have to "grow up," as Wente says, not to see that "climate change is a complex and fiendishly hard problem" as Wente suggests, but instead to see that we have a real choice to make, that we can take this path towards radically decreasing emissions worldwide even though it's going to be hard. It's not the fun choice in the short term, but it's the only choice that gives us a long term.
As Leonardo Dicaprio said at the UN today, we're looking at climate change as a fiction, but we're seeing undeniable evidence of climate change every week that's decades ahead of scientific projections. This disaster has grown beyond individuals and now requires industries taking large-scale action. We must end the free ride that industrial polluters have been given. It's not just achievable, but good economic policy. This is not a partisan debate, but a human one.
So far, I've just dipped into This Changes Everything, but the introduction alone is a compelling read. I made my way through Shock Doctrine several summers ago, and it broadened how I think of the world. This should be an interesting trip where even the Nature Conservancy doesn't escape scrutiny.
A review by Drew Nelles in today's Globe & Mail summarizes some of her ideas, and raises a contradictory message found in the book: "If capitalism itself is the problem, what does Klein mean when she writes that '[t]here is plenty of room to make profit in a zero-carbon economy'...." I think it just shows how deeply we're into the mindset of capitalism, and that we need to be given a bone. It's too hard to alter the entire ideology, so some remnants remain to get us involved. Many people are still hoping to stop the burning of fossil fuels without affecting our lives too dramatically - and I wonder if it's possible to do, as Klein seems to suggest here, or if it's just the only message that people will accept at this point - enough to also accept that "oil companies will have to be forced, through popular pressure and legislative action, to let themselves die - to become as fossilized as the long-dead life forms they suck from the Earth" (Nelles).
Klein can also be seen in a Democracy Now interview last Thursday where she explains some of the ideas in the book. (She's a much better writer than a speaker, though, so I edited out the "yeah, well"s from the the following bit of the transcript.)
She explains the two tactics necessary to our survival, championing Germany as the model for improvement:
I think two things need to happen at once, and this is what the German experience shows us. You need to have bold national policies, like you need to have feed-in tariffs. You need to have clear goals—how much of your grid is going to switch to renewable energy, by what time. You need to have the right incentives in place. I think what Germany shows, too, is [the flaws with thinking] that it’s a big problem, so we need only big solutions, and [arguing] in favor of nuclear power and industrial agriculture. But actually, what Germany shows is that the fastest transition we’re seeing anywhere in the world is happening through a multiplication of small-scale solutions, with well-designed, smart national policies. But that’s not enough. You also need to say no to the fossil fuel companies. So we need to close those carbon frontiers, right? We need to have clear no-go zones—no drilling in the Arctic, no new tar sands, and wind down the tar sands. We need to enshrine these fracking moratoriums into law. We need to turn the moratoriums into bans, and we need to expand them. So, it’s the yes, on the one hand; it’s the no, on the other hand.
...in my country, in Canada, I think there’s a really clear connection with respecting indigenous land rights, because some of the largest...pools of carbon are under the lands of some of the poorest people on the planet, and much of it is under indigenous land. So, there are tremendous fights being waged by indigenous people around the world to keep the drillers out of the Amazon, to slow down the tar sands. But one of the most important things that needs to happen is that the benefits of this new economy ... the people who have been hurt the most, who have been on the front lines of the extractive economy and have got the worst deal in the unequal exchange powered by fossil fuels, need to be first in line to benefit, so that there are real options beyond just extractive economies, because people are being asked to choose between having running water and having an extractive project in their backyard which will potentially poison their water. That’s a nonchoice. People need better choices than that.
We'll see how the march goes tomorrow. I'll be in Toronto in a thunderstorm. It offers some pathetic fallacy for the TV crews - one way or another.
