Friday, March 09, 2012
Must Read
My friend Charlie sent me this article. If anyone cares about our natural landscapes, wildlife, watersheds and wild lands they should definitely read this. I have come to the conclusion that the republican candidates for U.S. President in 2012 will someday be collectively named the 8th Wonder of the World.
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That's a very good article, an excellent, impassioned argument for our open spaces, national parks, for preserving nature basically, and the author Timothy Egan is not shy about putting the blame for their endangerment directly on Republicans, not so much Republicans as that party's wing that caters slavishly and uncritically to the 1 percent, which is gripped at the moment in unbridled greed and fixed on a course to privatize every square inch of the world, in the face of overwhelming opposition to that course.
But it is succeeding, I might add. The notions of shared public interests, like public schools, like the idea that we should form unions, that we have the right to work to further our interests like they do theirs, and so on, are being constantly chipped away at. The shared wilderness is part of that equation.
So I don't know if he gets to the heart of it. Can you have public space, can you successfully achieve shared common interests for the majority, under Capitalism? We've been here before, where the rich ruled, the 1920s. We then got to a point in the 70s where a Republican president signed off on the EPA. We almost immediately started going backwards again.
Democrats and Republicans are just different parts of the same child, Capitalism. One half thinks there should be no regulation, the other thinks it can control itself through regulation.
At best you will get a compromise, like the EPA, which business has consistently fought back against and often just ignored, which administrations have ignored and made impotent or even functioning for the other side, and which as we have seen a couple times even Obama has overruled in the interests of Capitalism.
In other words, you first have to understand Capitalism, as a relentless force that will always cause people who engage in it to want to turn nature into a commodity. You have to bring that into this discussion. If you think you can save nature and the environment by regulating Capitalism, good luck.
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