It's Imperialism, stupid

I hear a lot of talk about the environmental movement, about green jobs, opposing fracking, recycling, sustainable energy, renewable energy, clean coal, peak oil.

Some Greenpeace activists may spend seven years in a Russian prison for opposing Russia's oil thirst.

Amy Goodman spent a whole week in Poland at a global environmental conference which seemed to end like all the others: in despair.

But the only ones despairing were the ones who went thinking "this time, this time ..." Structurally, I suspect these conferences are designed to fail, designed to wear away at our hopes and to feed a skepticism. And actually, Russia's iron hand is a sign of things to come - East and West - as more activism tries to surround this unquenchable thirst for oil, gas, and other resources.

It's passed time to change the conversation. The environmental movement needs to stop being the acceptable alternative to what is really plaguing the planet.

The other day, a Facebook ally posed this question: what do you think about the term "social justice"? It was an interesting question, because I can almost remember when this facile term came to be used too widely for its own good: I think in the mid 90's.

I don't like the term now and didn't like it then because it was used to put some distance between its aims and that of socialism. Good cop/Bad cop. Martin vs Malcolm.

The environmental movement needs to get the point. It's imperialism, stupid.

The heart of the issue is development. How is development to be accomplished, whom it will benefit, and who controls its direction.

Imperialism, which no one wants to talk about, did not want to develop the colonies at all, only rape and pillage them. Its aims are no different today. It cannot develop the global South while it continues to support a "global" system which needs to rob, steal, or take for cheap, those things which the global South possesses.

Imperialism is a rapacious, ravenous organism. If it has to foul the waters of some poor country, it will invent a morality to rationalize this pollution; it will also make the people of that poor country seem needy of civilization and at the same time the cause of the misery the West imposes on it.

Or, as Fidel Castro once put it, "They hang us by our necks then criticize us for not breathing."

If it has to foul the water of a poor region within its own territory - a slum, an Indian reservation, an "industrial" area, or a whole state, imperialism will not hesitate to do the exact same crime.

This is the heart of the matter of environmental degradation that continues to plague us right to the present.

Why are they still counting bodies after the hurricane in the Philippines? The environmentalists speak about global warming. The earth is warming. Human civilization may or may not have an effect. But global warming did not make the Philippines a poor country with a wide class stratification and no early warning or evacuation plan.

For about 400 years imperialism promoted itself upon the Philippines - the Spanish crown then the US plutocracy: they were going to raise them up, civilize them, develop them. Some of us have known for a long time this is a lie. The havoc of this hurricane is just another piece of evidence of this lie.

Four hundred years, and nothing to show from it.

The US is still an imperial power. The United Kingdom is still an imperial power. France is still an imperial power. The West is still dependent on extracting the wealth and treasure of the global South for it to be what it is, the monster that it is, cultivating the atrocities it does and making human values out of it.

It is fascinating to hear the current pope speak truths to the lies of these so-called human values.

Nature may or may not be under our influence. But how the wealth and resources are distributed is a task for anti-imperialists. It is a task for people who will call things by their proper names.