Mad Max World | Meandering home

We have been taught to accept whatever choices people make, as long as they are lawful. Within an essentially unquestioned framework called “The Law”, we believe, people (I mean citizens) can live out their valuable freedom, and choose anything they want and cannot do in-justice.

Of course, “The Law” is a power structure only cosmetically separated from the state, which is only cosmetically separated from the Corporatist Elite. And these corporate entities (with more “personhood” under the law than most primates have) make the choices that matter to our planet. They choose to “develop the resources”, that is to rape and kill mountains, forests, rivers, oceans.

We have choices too. I’m not talking about the allegedly all-important consumer choices (will come to that in another post), but about the choice to fight back. To do something about “it”. If we can for once indoctrinate ourselves, and find other sources to base our emotions on than our flat-screen TV sets, we might have a chance. We might be able to associate the feeling of wealth with healthy forests and rivers teeming with life. And to associate the feeling of poverty with encroaching concrete, industrial production and consumption.

Cover of January, 1915 National
Geographic Magazine
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But it’s a choice so it’s your call. Green propagandists like myself, environmental scientists, and others can only advise. Go ahead. Choose an ocean where 90% of the fish are gone (you probably don’t know what codfish tastes like), choose the destruction of primary rain forest, never mind about biodiversity, never mind about cancer treatment, never mind the indigenous, or the fact that these forests are the carbon sinks. Choose a world where the important industrial nations don’t even show up at a conference (Rio+20) because they’re too busy shoveling money up bankers’ asses. Choose a world where the positive feedback mechanisms of climate change (and to you, corporate media dick, if you abuse the word “positive” to pretend it’s not that bad, I’ll kill you) are structurally ignored: what do you (and anyone) really know about methane trapped in permafrost, the Greenland icecaps, and the plankton depletion, all of which could trigger runaway climate change?

Choose a world that will look more like the background of the Mad Max films than what we still see on National Geographic. Choose a world where the smog is unbearable and you need a mask to survive (a real one, not a figurative mask like we think we already need today). Choose a world without wild animals. Choose a world full of poison. Choose a world that looks like a moon, with big air conditioned apartment buildings housing the wealthy 1%, while the rest is enslaved in the production process to satisfy their insatiable perverse hunger for more. Go ahead, choose for yourself.

But don’t you dare to choose for your – and our – children and grandchildren. Don’t you dare.