The above words were spoken by Sid Carr, manager of Kinder-Morgan’s gasoline pipeline in Oregon — similar to the one in Bellingham, Washington which leaked over 270,000 gallons into a creek bed and was accidentally ignited, killing three people, two of them children.
Modern society, when looked at thru the lens of “Reverse Anthropology,” is obviously completely toxic and dysfunctional, and dominated by the all-powerful profit motive at the expense of people, animals and the environment.
The moralistic sloganeering aimed at “green consumers” to make them more conscientious might obscure the real, structural and institutionalized reasons for this high-tech ecocidal business fetish behavior. As long as the ultimate and most highly regarded purpose of human activity is uncritical participation in an unquestioned economic system that’s killing the earth and its creatures, an oppressively mythical motivational force will continue to multiply the chances for future disasters.
History has already shown that “accidents” are an inherent part of the system — in the words of Mr. Carr, we’ve got to “live with the devil” if we’re going to continue to reproduce a mode of living that’s dependent upon non-renewable resource exploitation and the financial coercion that encourages it.
When the corporate-owned media announces certain things “must be” in order to protect consumers from the greater of two evils, the larger context that created these “choices” remains a mystified “fact” of life. Consider the reasons why public space is almost completely ruled by automobiles and business transactions!
When it comes to presenting alternatives to the unworkable and suicidal capitalist techno-industrial system, the mainstream media fails to deliver because it has become dependent upon that system’s continued existence. I encourage people to check out the alternative press, especially papers like Fifth Estate, Green Anarchist/Green Anarchy and the Earth First! Journal, as well as books like “Against Civilization,” ed. by John Zerzan, to expose themselves to perspectives that might make a difference.
While some might think such viewpoints too “extreme,” consider what’s going to happen if we keep going the way we’ve been. Drastic situations (such as global warming, species extinction, more pollutive and stress related diseases than ever before) might require drastic solutions. At the very least they demand more self-analysis and imagination when it comes to realizing how we might want to live in a completely different way.
HOMO LUDENS! 7–99, revised 12–00