“Top priorities may not be any of those five. It may be continuing to stabilize the financial system. We don’t know yet what’s going to happen in January. And none of this can be accomplished if we continue to see a potential meltdown in the banking system or the financial system. So that’s priority number one, making sure that the plumbing works in our capitalist system.”

—President-Elect Barack Obama

Reprinted from THOMAS PAINE'S CORNER

11/8/08

“Top priorities may not be any of those five. It may be continuing to stabilize the financial system. We don’t know yet what’s going to happen in January. And none of this can be accomplished if we continue to see a potential meltdown in the banking system or the financial system. So that’s priority number one, making sure that the plumbing works in our capitalist system.”

—President-Elect Barack Obama

Ironically, it is the plumbing of that capitalist system that we are using as we flush the future of life on Earth down the toilet.

We can “elect” a charismatic, intelligent man from a brutally oppressed minority to be our president to purge our collective guilt, mouth “feel good” platitudes, celebrate the triumph of “democracy,” and delude ourselves into believing we are preparing to warp back to a fictitious golden era when America was a benevolent guardian of humanity and the Earth, but that doesn’t change the fact that industrial capitalism is rendering this planet uninhabitable.

And just two days after the “election,” we learned that our newly minted “savior,” for whom we were desperate after eight years of “anomalous” malevolence under the Bush administration, is making the viability of our violent, irrational, unstable, exploitative, unjust, and unsustainable socioeconomic paradigm “priority number one.”

Obama has sold his soul to capitalism, a way of being premised on greed, selfishness, materialism, alienation, and infinite growth—a recipe for ecocide.

Perhaps the best “change” for which we can “hope” is that more people will awaken and fall into a despair that spurs them to do something about the rapidly deteriorating state of our environment, frighteningly large increases in the number of extinct species, rising scarcity of potable water, ecological overshoot, and a host of other symptoms of the terminal disease Obama blithely calls the “capitalist system.”

Let’s glean some insight from Derrick Jensen, an anarcho-primitivist, author, lecturer, philosopher, and tireless fighter for a beleaguered, dying planet. Here is a back and forth he had with radical activist, Melissa Gragg, and Cyrano’s Journal Online’s associate editor, Jason Miller, on 4/15/08:

Melissa: Okay, let’s start off with you kind of, I’ve seen a couple interviews, and I guess you have to answer some of the same questions over and over.

Derrick: [laughter]

Melissa: But do you want to explain to people who haven’t read your writing why you think civilization needs to be brought down?

Derrick: Well it’s killing the planet. Ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans are gone. There’s six to ten times as much phytoplankton in the oceans as—I’m sorry, six to ten times as much plastic as there is phytoplankton, and that’s the equivalent of, in temperate forests, of there being Styrofoam ninety feet thick through all the forests, and . . .

Jason: Wow, that’s a pretty horrifying metaphor.

Derrick: No, it’s not a metaphor. That’s an analogy I guess it would be, but it’s, I mean it’s, that’s what it is in the, in the real physical ocean.

Jason: Uh-huh.

Derrick: There’s a myth with this culture. I mean they say that one sign of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns, and I’m going to lay out a pattern here, and let’s see if we can see it in less than six thousand years.

Jason: [laughter]

Derrick: But when you think of the plains and hillsides of Iraq, is the first thing that you think of is cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touches the ground. That’s how it was prior to the beginnings of culture. One of the first written myths of this culture is Gilgamesh deforesting the plains and hillsides of Iraq to make cities, and the Arabian peninsula was Oak savannah, and the near east was heavily forested, Greece was heavily forested, Italy was heavily forested, north Africa was heavily forested. Those forests were cut for, to make the Phoenician and Egyptian navies. You know this culture destroys land bases wherever it goes. It destroys, it destroys the natural order. It’s built on, it’s not based on living in one place forever. The Tolowa, on whose land I now live, lived here for at least 12,500 years if you believe the myths of science, and this culture’s lived here for 180 years, and the place is hammered. I mean there was, there was salmon runs so thick that people were afraid to put their boats in the water for fear they would capsize, and the salmon are, are almost gone, and you’re, you’re southeastern Kansas, right?

Jason: Oh.

Melissa: Uh-huh.

Jason: Yes.

Derrick: Yeah, I mean, there were Eskimo Curlews in that area that would come through, and they would be in flocks of, so large they would darken the sky for days at a time, and they were eradicated.

Derrick: So yeah, it’s, it’s, I mean, also it’s really obvious. I mean any way of life that’s based on the use of non-renewable resources won’t last, pretty, pretty clear, and I mean, so this way of life has never been sustainable, and it never will be. Any way of life also, that’s based on the hyper-exploitation of renewable resources won’t last. The only way you can live sustainably is by actually improving your habitat. That’s how all creatures that survive in the long run, survive in the long run, and this was a really stupid blow out, and it’s killing the planet.

Jason: I think the readers would like to know this. What’s your opinion of radical direct action groups like the Earth Liberation Front and the ALF?

Derrick: I think that they are in their infancy and will make a lot of mistakes as they grow up and will, and they will grow up. I think that there’s a lot to commend them for their, many of the people for their courage, and there is, there’s some huge problems, and there’s a huge snitch problem, and I have to question the seriousness of some of the people—not all of them. Some of them are very, very serious, and I need to say this, because it’s just so, the whole federal response to it is just so stupid. The Feds, since they’re—they labeled them as the largest domestic terrorist threat on one level, and it’s, and then at the same time, and they’re saying, you know, we’re catching all these terrorists, eco-terrorists, who are doing this. At the same time you hear George Bush all the time say there hasn’t been a successful terrorist attack since 911.

Jason: [laughter] That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that.

Derrick: Yeah, it’s huh? I guess you kind of, kind of have it both ways.

Jason: Yes.

Derrick: Also the notion of terrorism in this case is really stupid, because it’s, I mean, nobody’s been injured, nobody’s been particularly scared, nobody’s been terrorized, you know. They’ve been startled maybe.

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING THIS INTERVIEW