Here is my April column for The Noise. Enjoy.
(side note: I will be redesigning my site during the next week or so. If you come here and it looks strange, don’t be alarmed)

The first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, was launched from the momentum of the anti-war movement and accomplished a portion of the objectives it set out to do. As Earth Day has become absorbed by the dominant culture and co-opted by less-than-environmentally-sound-ventures, many people claim that Earth Day is now a celebration of the earth, when people unite under largely empty aesthetic gestures, such as planting trees and picking up garbage.

Yet, in a way, do you not celebrate the earth when you notice a particularly beautiful sunset or let your eyes wander up the stream of a river? Further, the idea of hammering the earth year round while setting aside a day to celebrate it is eerily similar to the context of an abusive relationship. It is also reminiscent of colonialism inherent in the way sports teams claim they’re “honoring” Native people by parading harmful stereotypes.

Twenty million people took to the streets on the first Earth Day. They even shut down congress. It is said that the success of the first Earth Day resulted in “groundbreaking federal legislation.” The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was established later that year, followed by the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Endangered Species Act of 1973. The objective of the first Earth Day was, according to its founder, Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, “to shake up the political establishment and force this issue onto the national agenda.”

That objective was met, in part, as environmental concerns were forced onto the national agenda. The problem is, these concerns were never properly prioritized. Since 1970, many organizations, writers, activists, and agencies have been working tirelessly on behalf of the planet, even while much of the legislation they worked so hard for were slowly rolled back in favor of corporate interests and an economy that must grow or quickly collapse.

I’ve heard our environmental problems compared to the collision course of the Titanic. The explanation goes like this: we see the danger ahead of us. We can only assume that maintaining this course will result in catastrophe. Yet some people don’t fully understand the problem and frantically begin to rearrange the deck chairs. When people ask what good it will do, they respond, “at least I’m doing something.” Those who understand the problem lobby the captain to turn the ship before it’s too late.

Beyond the fact that the Titanic story undermines the power of a committed group of individuals in favor of the whims of an incompetent leader, there is a fundamental problem that is over-looked. If everyone works together and successfully persuades the captain to turn, that danger will be avoided. This quick-fix might feel victorious at first, but doesn’t change the fact that everyone is sailing on an inherently and fundamentally flawed ship, narcissistically described as “unsinkable.”

April 22, 2008 will mark our country’s 38th Earth Day and we’re closer now to global ecological collapse than ever before. There are people in the world—calm, intelligent, reasoning people—who argue that this ecological collapse is already under way and quickly gaining momentum. It is clear that the traditional tactics and strategies utilized thus far have not been effective. This is not to undermine or devalue the committed and tireless efforts of individuals who have dedicated their lives to these issues. But instead of trying to persuade the captain to steer this death trap away from the danger, a more radical idea would be to abandon ship. We need to abandon out-of-date strategies and plot new courses that reflect new challenges.

We might drift awhile before we find a strategy that works, but that’s okay. Nineteenth century French writer Andre Gide wrote, “One doesn’t discover new lands without first consenting to lose site of the shore for a very long time.”

Earth Day has been peddling the idea of environmental sanity for far too long. If we cannot meaningfully honor the earth as we simultaneously destroy it and if Earth Day no longer results in environmental legislation in line with the needs of the natural world, it is clear that Earth Day needs to be transformed—by defining our goals and refocusing our efforts.

Our environmental problems are often just as layered and diverse as there are possible tactics to confront them. Under the ever-expanding umbrella of “environmental problems,” lies issues relating to water, air, deforestation, industrial agriculture, factory farming, soil erosion, greenwashing, the vacuuming of the oceans, toxic chemicals, mass extinction, and much more. All of these issues are further tied to and made more complex when race, class, and gender are taken into consideration. We need to embrace radical new ideas that address root problems rather than quick fixes.

In his short but powerful book, How Nonviolence Protects the State, writer and activist Peter Gelderloos writes that any issue approached from a “radical” perspective translates as an attempt to uncover “the roots of a particular problem rather than focusing on the superficial solutions placed on the table by the prejudices and powers of the day.”

The most effective protest movements have always been layered responses to complex circumstances. Yet the legacies of these movements are always portrayed in a manner that props up any tactic that is not a threat to the State. When Malcolm X said, “By any means necessary,” he didn’t define what kind of protest was acceptable. He left that up to those confronted with the circumstance.

The nonviolent protests of Martin Luther King Jr. would not have been successful without the intimidation brought on by more militant factions. Similar critiques have been made about Gandhi and those members of the anti-war movement who believe naively that it was their efforts alone that ended the war in Vietnam.

When faced with the choice, the dominant power structure chooses to engage and later to embrace the nonviolent leaders of protest movements, therefore minimizing the contribution of a wide spectrum of resistance. In this way, radical activists legitimize the demands of mainstream organizations, but don’t expect them to be invited to the White House for tea.

This is not to say that everyone should take to the streets and riot. I am saying that there are no tactical choices that are closed to us. Instead of viewing activism through the lens of violence and nonviolence, as dogmatic pacifists seem to do, tactics must be judged based on their effectiveness. If nonviolent civil disobedience is not working, that doesn’t mean one should start throwing Molotov cocktails, but one should reevaluate the strategy in terms of how it can be made effective or whether or not it can ever be effective within that particular context.

In Walden, Thoreau writes, “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” What are the root causes of our current predicament? What does a sustainable and just society look like? What is the quickest most effective way to get there? What are our constraints? What are effective ways of confronting those constraints? Is capitalism compatible with a living planet? Can civilization be made sustainable? If so, how? If not, why and what does that mean for your tactics as an environmentalist? These questions aren’t rhetorical; they’re some of the most important questions we can ask. One of the reasons why we don’t have answers to these questions is not because we are incapable of finding them, it’s because we don’t talk about them.

While I have my opinions, I believe it is more important simply to pose the questions, participate, and encourage these important conversations to take place. First of all, we should not let other people define problems for us, we should certainly not let other people define the solutions, and we should especially not let other people tell us how to protest. One of the problems is, there are so many voices out there telling us that we can’t solve these problems, that humans are not capable of understanding such large-scale global issues. Let me explain and debunk one popular myth with a short anecdote.

Imagine you are alone, late at night, recalling a radio broadcast you heard on the way home from work. A psychopath killer—totally incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong, a real-life Michael Myers, who is known in your city for many grizzly murders—has escaped from the high security wing of a nearby mental institution. Minutes after you lock all the doors, turn off the television, and settle into bed, you hear footsteps in the hall outside your bedroom. It isn’t the footsteps that are terrifying as much as it is the silence between them. Thump…thump… The door opens, yet all you hear is your heart pounding inside your chest. Sitting up, you immediately recognize his face from television. Revealing a dull carving knife, he stands in the doorway and says, “I am going to kill you.” You remember the gun in the drawer beside you. You know exactly what to do.

Over and again, I keep hearing that one of the reasons we are so slow to meaningfully react to any one of our environmental problems is because humans have a hard time realizing a danger if it is not clear and obvious. So if a killer presents a danger, we’re wired to either stay and fight or run and hide. Global threats such as peak oil and climate change, on the other hand, don’t exactly get our blood pumping.

Aligning yourself with the “we-can-only-confront-danger-when-it’s-in-our-face” ethos not only justifies inaction, but it is also a slap in the face to the hundreds of cultures who do have a sense of the future. To name just one example among countless, the “Great Law of Peace” of the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy) mandates that chiefs consider the impact of their decisions on the seventh generation yet to come. We, on the other hand, prefer the “rugged individualist” model: every generation for themselves! We are left to deal with the affects of decisions (or lack thereof) made before we were born. Our children will have to deal with the decisions (or lack thereof) of our generation. Sure, for hundreds of thousands of years of life on this planet, humans have been wired to deal with immediate threats, but that doesn’t make us innately ignorant of long-term affects.

Further many of the destructive and unsustainable aspects of the dominant culture have built-in characteristics. We know capitalism is predicated on constant and persistent expansion or it will quickly collapse and we know such an economic model can only last for so long on a finite planet. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, we’ve known oil is nonrenewable. Yet, the dominant culture, this civilization, has been constructed, molded, and shaped around the idea that there will always be an abundant supply of cheap energy.

Because the dominant culture mediates the space between environmental problems and our perception of those problems—either by exporting that destruction to other communities or keeping them debatable issues—we don’t view these problems as the sort of threats they really are. Unlike the choice posed in the psychopath-killer-scenario, there is nowhere to run and hide from these problems. We have to stay and fight.

Many people, human and nonhuman, have been fighting in many different ways for a long time. In recent years I have stood beside them and witnessed their passion, their endurance. They fight on despite small victories and large defeats. They fight on despite the apathy and hopelessness of the masses. They need your help, your strength, but they are tired of superficial gestures.

Instead of “celebrating” Earth Day this year, use is as an occasion to bring up some of the questions posed here or elsewhere regarding the fundamental, “root causes” of our current and widespread environmental predicament. Talk to your friends, family, and co-workers. It is, after all, a matter of life and death.

Question their solutions by evaluating the cause of the problem, and interrogate the way in which the “solution” addresses that problem. If you find inconsistencies, talk to somebody about it. We are at the forefront of an exciting turn in human history. We need radical thinkers to step into the limelight. There are no leaders of movements, only the perception of leaders. To echo the words of Hopi Elders from Oraibi, AZ (which was recently co-opted and manipulated by Barack Obama), “The day of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Kyle is in the process of organizing an Earth Day forum to discuss new approaches to addressing these issues. More information will be posted on his website, www.undertheconcrete.org, as it becomes available. Any brilliant ideas regarding the direction of this forum should be emailed to kyle@thenoise.us.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 10:37 am and is filed under local events, Column. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.