COMMON SENSE -AND STUPIDITY

Photo by Steve Weir | Bothell, WA | 2019

In a recent essay for Consortium News, (a news and commentary on-line site I enthusiastically support and recommend) the historian, Vijay Prashad, writing of our grossly excessive depletion and waste of natural resources globally, makes a critically essential distinction between the resource -consumption of “undifferentiated”humanity (all of us) and the resource-consumption of individual nation-states (India, Yemen, the US )

He writes that as typically described by "undifferentiated natural resource-consumption,” in order to maintain present personal levels of natural resource consumption, humanity is annually drawing off the equivalent natural resources of 1.7 earths.

That means that we are consuming natural resources 75 % times faster than nature can annually regenerate.

Following Prashad's calculations, within the lifetimes of many of us, an environmental catastrophe is inevitable.

Much more to the point, Prashad writes, “if everyone on the planet lived like an “average” American, we would need five earths to regenerate what is consumed” or wasted in a single year.

Or, if everyone on the planet “lived like a person from Yemen, we’d only need 0.3 earths.

Thus, Prashad goes on to explain, the concept of “undifferentiated” humanity, (all consumers) “disguises the great (nation-state) differences across the world and, unfairly suppresses the need of some peoples -such as the people of Yemen- to increase their consumption in order to have a dignified life.”

Additionally, “One million of the estimated eight million species of plants and animals on the planet are now threatened with extinction.”

“The main threat to a majority, Prashad explains , is biodiversity-loss caused by the capitalist agribusiness system of food production… 86% of projected losses…in biodiversity… (resulting from) …. Land conversion, pollution, and soil degradation.

Thereupon, it’s Prashad’s conclusion that environmental degradation has not been caused by “undifferented” human consumption at all, but instead, by our capitalist system of social organization.

So, at this point, while I’m still not yet an unambiguously committed anti-capitalist, I cannot but take Prashad very seriously, and say once again, what is to be done?

And of course, as you’ve no doubt surmised, he does have a few cogent and, provocative, suggestions.

But first, a couple of cautionary observations:

As we all know, we have thriving among us, a species of legal advisor, whose sole purpose is to tell anyone who can afford their services, how to do anything they’re inclined to do, -within or outside the law- without legal inhibition, without, in other words, risking criminal penalties and,

make as much money as possible, while doing it.

Their principal clients, as you might guess, are our political elites, our upper-upper corporate-military-administrators, our financial oligarchs and, those people of stature and privilege and power who control the geo-political business of our country.

Being wealthy enough to buy whatever they’ve ever wanted, they know they can buy themselves out of even such " remotely" worrisome circumstances as when inevitably rising seas begin to submerge New “York and Los Angeles.

Some, on the advice of high-end “Environmental Consultants” have already purchased “safe nest” retreats in post-colonial highland hideaways. Some have constructed multi-story citadels deep inside mountains and even beneath the sea, and some are planning to move to an appropriately renovated moon; but none, as far as I’ve been able to learn, has demonstrated the least interest in correcting things at home.

That’s why it must be up to us.

We’re all we’ve got.

And it’s with that understanding, and with those ends in mind, that Vijay Prashad and his colleagues at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, are now putting together a “series of publications on the ‘capitalist crises of climate and the environment’, that every one of us can, and most assuredly should benefit from reading and, also, however possible, acting upon.

The essential principles, as I’ve outlined below, are developed and explained in much more fulsome detail in Prashad’s article, “Beyond ‘Green Capitalism’ to be found in the Independent on-line News and Commentary site, Consortium News, Volume 30, Number 180 - Monday, June 30, 2025.

Below are the teaser topic lines. Check out the Details (see above) for yourself.

1.) International Climate and environmental discussions must be democratized.

NO QUESTION ABOUT IT: For-profit Corporations must be prohibited from running the show

2.) The world’s governments must strengthen their own agreements and treaty obligations.

Big governments -(the United States of America)- must be held to democratic rules designed to protect weaker governments

3.) There must be a fair energy transition plan that is democratically shaped.

In other words, smaller, weaker nations must be protected from “conumption-deprivation"

4.) The global economy must be reshaped through agrarian reform.

All commercial agriculture everywhere must be scientifically organized and managed

So, everyone. Good Luck to all of us,

We must, each of us, talk to everyone we can

For we must make the opportunity “to create the world anew"

"Silence is Consent"