This phrase from Chris Hedges piece, I blogged about it yesterday, keeps haunting me. I thought of it immediately when I read about those people in Tennessee whose house burned down because they didn’t pay the fee.
If the hegemony of the corporate state is not soon broken,
we will descend into a technologically enhanced age of barbarism.
I really have Real Fear for our kids. But I have hope as well. Not a lot, but… some.
UnderAge Records presents One Eyed Rhyno!
Great young band from Sacramento, CA, addressing the devastating and deadly conditions that impact wildlife after an oil spill.
The hat tip goes to Subhankar Banerjee from Youth Across North America Are Fighting for Their Future Climate.
One Eyed Rhyno is donating 100 percent of their proceeds for gulf restoration projects to The Student Conservation Association (SCA), which “builds new generations of conservation leaders and inspires lifelong stewardship by engaging young people in hands-on service to the land.” I talked to the band members over the phone recently and asked them why they decided to donate the funds. They responded, “We’re young. We don’t have much time, we have to do everything we can right now.” They told me they have events planned with SCA through Earth Day 2011.
Cool. That’s nice. Cool tune.
I could sit here all day following along a google goose link hunt and find gobs GOBS more sites with similiar “youth conservation, environmental team leadership and community service education” type projects and even free money from Lexus with Scholastic. Yes, really.
And that’s good to see, glad to hear it.
But…
“We’re young. We don’t have much time, we have to do everything we can right now.”
Everything we can.
Look at the past winners of that Lexus Challenge. Some of them are pretty outstanding. A few of them…. meh. Pet waste and recycled water bottles. Really?
Really.
GRAND PRIZE (1 of 2, the other one, Operation Haiti, is awesome):
The Green Team, Florida (Team: James, Corey, Jose, Nick, Nadia)
Teacher advisor Debbie V. and her team took on pet waste and the related contaminants that can affect water quality and threaten aquatic life. In addition to a “Lake Clean-Up Day,” the Green Team educated the community about the environmental dangers of pet waste with guest speakers and informational literature. They also installed a “pet station” at the nearby Lake Wire to encourage pet owners to clean up after their furry friends. The team donated disposable pet waste bags, and conducted water quality tests to ensure that oxygen levels remain safe for freshwater fish, underwater grasses, and other wildlife in the lake. Well done!
and another Prize went to
RSVP, Utah (Team: Ethan, Matthew, Alex, Christian, Logan, Tommy)
Led by teacher advisor JoAnne B., RSVP took aim at plastic bottle recycling. The team collected almost 1,400 bottles and more than 300 cans at local sporting events, while heavily promoting their cause with posters, Jumbotron appearances, and petitions!
Okay they did do petitions. sigh.
I feel a rant coming on.
It’s like…. there’s a tsunami coming and the benevolent & generous corporations are passing out umbrellas.
Do you think the kids really get it?
Is anyone telling them…. the whole Truth?
Or… do they go with the wikipedia? (or worse).
The wide use of fossil fuels has been one of the most important stimuli of economic growth and prosperity since the industrial revolution, allowing humans to participate in takedown, or the consumption of energy at a greater rate than it is being replaced. Some believe that when oil production decreases, human culture, and modern technological society will be forced to change drastically. The impact of peak oil will depend heavily on the rate of decline and the development and adoption of effective alternatives. If alternatives are not forthcoming, the products produced with oil (including fertilizers, detergents, solvents, adhesives, and most plastics) would become scarce and expensive. [bolds mine]
Hell, I don’t even get it, how can they be expected to?
So who’s teaching them … how … to prevent or alter the coming disasters? (Hint: it’s not me! see cartoon!) Ya know… WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT?!?!?
Hmmmph. That’s what I thought.
Guess we all need to talk about it some more.
Or something.
I think we’re gonna need a bigger boat.
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maybe I need to get me (and my kid!) some of these gum boots.
for the days ahead…
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I still like it.
in the 17th 18th and 19th centuries, models we still follow today built these economic ideas and theories based on the realities of their worlds?
These economics exclude the idea of value for things that people won’t pay for based on a purely demand and supply model of what you could take and use from the environment which is for all intents and purposes considered owned and otherwise “free”. If not made to do it, people will not pay, for example, for environmental cleanup. They will not pay for species management, they will not pay much more for sustainable energy.
We do not have a model of economics that takes into account that that which you take from the environment is not free, that it has to be paid for, or replaced, somehow.
We also have economic models based on continuous, exponential and unsustainable growth. And it is by that standard we gauge our “productivity” and our relative economic “prosperity”.
So we need New Economics. And unlike the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, we have computers, now. So, what we have to do is start valuing goods and services not only on labor, energy and what it costs intrinsically to make a thing, but also what it costs the environment and balance that out with sustainability, what a particular endeavor puts back into the environment.
Part of what this does is, it finances people who aid the environment in some way. Either by doing things or not doing things, for example, those who choose not to reproduce and add to population overburden are, in effect, doing society and the earth a favor.
Our political leaders will not consider any kind of New Economics until the world burns.
So, how do we solve this conundrum? I am fully convinced that the only way is not through political leadership, but by beginning to structure communities of people in such a way that this sort of New Economy is gradually built from the ground up.
It beats putting one’s head in the sand or fancying that our old economics bankster based political leaders will somehow do it for us, absent the world burning.
…….and how Dem Liberals are not capable of seeing that reality.
Whether you agree with him or not, he writes with a passion that is needed.
http://dandelionsalad.wordpres…
…. has to do with making teachers low wage, untenured nomads* who teach for a few years and then move on to other careers, and makes them easier to get rid of if they aren’t teaching the kind of “Profit Trumps Conservation of Your Planet, Always” sort of nonsense that comes from the anti climate science folk, who are in turn the real estate developer’s sprawldivision maker’s best friends.
Institutional memory.
Imagine how bad the science teachers could get, and shudder.
* was reading a story by a parent in the DC area who had a kid in school and did this devastatingly good smackdown of Arne Duncan and Michele Rhee, the former chancellor of the DC school district who broke their teacher’s union. She called them tourist teachers, they come in for a year or two, for the culture, and then leave.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com…
fail to carry out the corporate/curricular agenda.
I’ve actually seen a school district where a representative of one of the publishers was stationed at the school to hold teachers to the scope and sequence of the prescribed materials.
Aligned curriculum and accountability were terms that began to take life during the first term of Reagan. Way back then I said, “Oh Boy, here we go”. Reagan hated teachers big time. As time went by, the politicans, bureaucrats and [super stealthily] publishers began to look for scapegoats for complex educational issues. Recently, they’ve added the media (whom Obama is using quite well).
And just a few weeks ago, after teacher unions begged the L.A. Times NOT to print lists of effective AND ineffective teachers, they did it anyhow, and a fantastic, dedicated teacher in L.A. county, who all recognized as a gem in the community and a life saver for many troubled kids, committed suicide because his results fell into the ineffective column.
It’s all about CONTROL. Ain’t never gonna get free thought when it’s all about control and big time money, but that’s another issue for another time. For the Democrats to kick their oldest and strongest supporters under the bus is a
plain and simple tragedy. What it does is make the corporatepoliticobureaucraticmedia interests coalesce to the exclusion of the people who really matter, the teachers of course.
I detest the educational system as about as much as I detest the legal system.
went to Underage Records and gotta tell ya, not impressed.
Lose the eco-wimps, get some generalizing punks:
For example, this goes out to BP.