Saturday Links of the Week: May 5, 2007

What It All Means This Week:

Monbiot’s Global Warming Solution is Already Out of Reach: George Monbiot’s Heat prescribed a radical but feasible way to prevent the more catastrophic effects of global warming, based on years of dedicated research. When I reviewed the book I praised Monbiot for his imaginative plan, but doubted it would ever be implemented. Now Monbiot has acknowledged that it won’t, in an editorial full of desperation and despair.

‘Psychopathic’ Chinese Corporatists Tell It Like It Is: Unlike the deceitful corporatists of affluent nations, Chinese corporations own up to their psychopathy: They put toxic ‘protein’ in pet food because they can get away with it, and because it’s profitable. They know it kills, and has zero nutritional value. They likewise poison cosmetics, household products and human foods, including baby foods. That’s their job: make it cheap, maximize profit for shareholders. No conscience necessary or permitted. In affluent nations, corporatists clamour for deregulation, and bribe and bully corrupt governments and regulatory agencies not to enforce existing laws, and to grant them immunity from prosecution by the public, so that they can do the same. They’re just doing their job. What will it take before the free-market lovers realize the madness of the modern corporate model?

Why We Don’t Act Until It Is Too Late: Today’s NYT has two editorials that merit some reading between the lines. The first, on the US health care system (available only to premium readers) argues that as dysfunctional as the US health care system is, it is human nature not to fix it until it is utterly broken. The second argues that we can and should take some relatively simple technological steps that will go a long way to addressing global warming, easily and painlessly (the report referred to is here). Of course, not only is it our human nature to do nothing about global warming until we see its horrific effects (just as we did nothing to prevent New Orleans from the inevitable Katrina until it was too late) — it is our human nature to do the easy painless stuff and then convince ourselves (although the report says the opposite) that that is enough. Such a strange species we are, doing things that are opposed to our own long-term self-interest (and not doing things that are essential to it).

Canada’s Version of ‘Rendition’: The Canadian government justifiably complained when Canadian citizens like Maher Arar were kidnapped by US Homeland Security and transported to foreign torture centres. But we’re learning that Canadian authorities’ hands are far from clean when it comes to ‘rendition’ activities. We’ve learned that the Canadian RCMP was complicit in the Arar affair, though the cover-up continues despite a government apology and payment to Arar (no charges of negligence, incompetence or malicious prosecution have been laid against the RCMP perps who set up Arar). And now we learn that Canada’s ‘peacekeepers’ in Afghanistan have been turning their captives over to Afghan torture squads, with the full knowledge of the Canadian Minister of Defence Gordon O’Connor and the Canadian chief of defence staff Rick Hillier. This is a blatant violation of the Geneva Convention, and puts Canadian troops in enormous danger (not to mention blackening the reputation of Canadian citizens).

The 100 Mile Diet: Don’t Tell Me, Show Me: Novelist Barbara Kingsolver has often used her stories to convey an activist message, and we know how much more powerful a story can be than an editorial. Now, she’s written a non-fiction book on eating locally, but in her own style, she presents it as a personal story of her family (and others’) struggle to live on locally-raised food alone, and avoids the tendency to prescribe action for readers. As in her novels, her way of making her point is by showing what’s possible, rather than telling what’s necessary.

Environmentally Friendly Tissues: Kleerkut lists the brands of toilet paper (anyone learned the Sheryl Crow ‘one square’ trick yet?) and tissues that don’t come from ravaging old-growth forests. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link.

Thought for the Week: There are some strange synchronicities occurring in my life these days, that I’ll speak more about as they emerge in the next few weeks. But Andrew Campbell has just sent me a passage that he ascribes to Jung that speaks of synchronicity, so it is naturally the thought for the week:

When people ask me “How can you possibly believe that our civilization is in its last century?” I try to tell them. I point them to my Save the World Reading List to explain what research and study I have done on the subject (my intellectual knowledge). I point them to all my writings, in sequence, on the environment and the state of the world that let me think out loud to formulate what I believe (my emotional knowledge). I take them out for a walk in the forest next door and let them see and feel and smell and taste and hear what all-life-on-Earth is telling us (my sensory knowledge). And I confess that instinctively, too, I know this to be true (though that knowledge cannot be imparted because to do so would require others to trusts my instincts). It is the synchronicity of these four types of terrible knowledge, all converging on the same ghastly truth about our future, that has led meto this conclusion.

And then I shrug and say that I can’t explain it any better than that. I just know. I have been ‘led in so far I cannot explain any more’.