George Monbiot’s Guardian piece about the futility of Rio is worth a solemn read.
“Descent,” Josh Keyes, 2011
George, in a piece entitled “After Rio, we know. Governments have given up on the planet“, pretty much nails it.
The Rio+20 Earth Summit is basically a massive disappointment, with noted no shows, and such weak language in the documents that it’s hard not to feel sadness and anger at the proceedings. This seems to be the general pattern: repeat after repeat of weak and failed attempts by the international community to work together on the issue of climate change. Sounds like George feels like it might be time to move on and not rely on these wasted and extravagant gestures.
I especially appreciate this bit of writing.
The efforts of governments are concentrated not on defending the living Earth from destruction, but on defending the machine that is destroying it. Whenever consumer capitalism becomes snarled up by its own contradictions, governments scramble to mend the machine, to ensure – though it consumes the conditions that sustain our lives – that it runs faster than ever before.
The thought that it might be the wrong machine, pursuing the wrong task, cannot even be voiced in mainstream politics. The machine greatly enriches the economic elite, while insulating the political elite from the mass movements it might otherwise confront. We have our bread; now we are wandering, in spellbound reverie, among the circuses.
We have used our unprecedented freedoms – secured at such cost by our forebears – not to agitate for justice, for redistribution, for the defence of our common interests, but to pursue the dopamine hits triggered by the purchase of products we do not need. The world’s most inventive minds are deployed not to improve the lot of humankind but to devise ever more effective means of stimulation, to counteract the diminishing satisfactions of consumption. The mutual dependencies of consumer capitalism ensure that we all unwittingly conspire in the trashing of what may be the only living planet. The failure at Rio de Janeiro belongs to us all.
Do read the whole article here.
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