Embracing Ecological Realism

January 11th, 2021

By Robert C Koehler

Via Common Dreams

Our post-election hope couldn’t be more fragile.

Does Joe Biden see his mission as merely reclaiming situation normal from Donald Trump? How aware is he of the big, beyond-our-lifetimes future and the crucial need to address climate change? Is he able to acknowledge that human “interests” go well beyond national borders? And if so, how much political traction would he have to have before he could begin turning vision into policy?

Waging war, preparing for war, worshipping at the altar of military-industrialism are precisely the opposite of what we must be doing.

A recent bit of news: The House just voted overwhelmingly in favor of the 2021 Pentagon budget: $740.5 billion. The vote was 335-78. More Democrats than Republicans gave it their blessing — in utter defiance of any sane recognition of true security, national or otherwise. This is situation normal in action, requiring nothing from a politician except limited thinking.

Waging war, preparing for war, worshipping at the altar of military-industrialism are precisely the opposite of what we must be doing. This is running away from — and intensifying — the real threat we face. Yet our political leaders do so with a shrug, and the corporate media follows suit with a shrug of its own.

The takeaway here is that the real election isn’t over. As Margaret Klein Salamon, cofounder of The Climate Mobilization, put it in an interview with Truthout: “We need the most powerful social movement in history to put unbearable pressure on Biden and Congress to launch a full-scale climate mobilization.”

“We need . . .”

That alone won’t make it happen. What we also need is a shift in consciousness: socially, culturally, politically. It’s not as if we need to move our attention — and our spending — from one war to another: from fighting terrorism and “evil” to fighting climate change. The one thing we do not need is another war, certainly not against Planet Earth.

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