For the last few years I have been struggling to articulate the outline of a book called Climate War: Sustainment, Apocalypse and Liberation.
In a couple of emails, and a number of threaded discussions off those emails, this concept developed. The initial seed came while studying (and failing my coursework through inattention) the Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Sustainability Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Having read a lot of Noam Chomsky and then the essay Corporate Climate Coup by David F Noble, parts of the book Al Gore a Users Manual and watching the Carbon Finance created carbon trading options marginalise alternatives and debate the climate justice movement, I became increasingly convinced that a faction of the elites where coopting - again - the climate change agenda, and at first financialising it with carbon Finance, and in the background, increasingly militarising it.
With the change of US administrations, and the economic depression developing, I feel I have enough evidence to elaborate this project.
Climate War: just as the Cold War subsumed and defined the peace after World War 2, the Climate War subsumes and defines the period after the Cold War. The Cold War ideology on the US side was anti-communism. The Climate War ideology (shared by most central governments) is anti-environmentalism, with communists being replaced with terrorists and increasingly eco-terrorists. Green is the new red, the FBI’s most wanted is an eco-terrorist. Insurgencies have always been embedded in a place, and so, in reality, all terrorists are fighting for rights to control an environment. The Climate War is the Cold War within the context of climate change, peak oil, peak debt, indeed peak everything. The US framework for managing the world, within the context of Climate War, is Sustainment.
Sustainment: sustainment is an extension of the military term describing the supply and operations of maintenance to military operations. Sustainment is military-industrial supplied sustainability. In the latest US Counter-Insurgency military doctrine, Sustainment leads all counter-insurgency operations. Within the Human Terrain System, hearts and minds are won by the the supply of infrastructure and utilities. Sustainment leads operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the “civilian surge” is sustainment. With the increasing instability of the climate system, the global economic and geo-political system, sustainment will be supplied with the strongest aspect of US national power; the military industrial complex. Within the neo-liberal environment, the military-industrial compex is increasingly privatised and fragmented. As Noam Klein describes in Shock Doctrine, disaster capitalism profits greatly from crisis, real or imagined, and as the Climate War becomes the dominant organising principle for the planet, through real and imagined crisis, sustainment supplied by corporate-state military industrial system. This military industrial system will seek to profit and expand from both the crisis of conflict, of destruction of war and the maintenance of peace, and the rebuilding of damaged systems.
Apocalypse: the Bush administration actively promoted an Apocalyptic - as in catastrophic - self-fulfilling prophecy for the future of the planet. This end-times world-view sees the natural and correct direction of history taking humanity towards a historic conflict in the Middle East - centered on Jerusalem - involving the three major religions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. The true meaning of Apocalypse, the revelation at the end of the world, offers a hope that all people will recognise that only a global and radical transition of planetary management can take the world of peak everything and crisis.
Apocalypse is also eco-catostophie or eco-cide being committed on most of the worlds peoples and ecosystems. Except on tiny pockets of economic, ecological and social sustainability, won through resistance and resilience, and often conquest and empire building. The green zones at the core of the world system, as described in the Shock Doctrine, are often subsidized by exploitation and despoilation at the perpiphery.
Liberation: Every system on the planet needs revolution. Key to these revolutions are democratisation of decision making and finances, within the constraints of equity, justice, the limits to growth, peak oil and climate change. All institutions captured by the narrow interests of elites, need to be liberated and transitioned to democratic and sustainable management.
The Sustainment future is an extension of the Cold War paradigm dominated by multinational corporations, financial capital and militarisation. The Green Revolution (which was the extension of war technology to agriculture) used industrial processes, mechanization, petro-chemical based fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and a concentration of control through financial capital, contracts and legal requirements that could only be matched and master by the largest corporations. Although organic farming has changed some aspects of soil and plant management it has operated with the context of corporate industrial capitalism.
The next Green Revolution is hailed by popular magazines such as Wired, The Economist, Scientific American and Popular Mechanics and relies on further developments in Genetic Engineering, and industrial processes. Sustainment wil also involved financialisation of climate change through complex financial products based on carbon emissions trading.
As this RAND corporation report notes, corporate industrial capitalism may adapt to perennial polyculture and organic techniques in the narrowist sense.
Economic and environmental sustainability might be possible through the Sustainment scenario, however, full social sustainability cannot ever be supplied or created, sustained, by tyrannical systems such as the modern corporation, financial capitalism, centralised government.
Sustainment, as practiced now, is leading to eco-cide, eco-catastrophie and a violent mega-death, which may be the result of abrupt climate disruptions through rapid climate change and/or triggered by a world war.
Notes
Maslows hierachy of needs
different aspects
human systems: food, air, money, water, social, education, health,
cycles i.e carbon cycle, democratising the carbon cycle
12 leverage points on systems
permaculture ethics: 3 ethics, 12 principles
gaia
gaiapermaculture synthesis
climate systems
transition movement - transitions from sustainment - through apocalypse - heaven or hell - to liberation
liberation ecology, theology
end times - interfaith compare
carbon finance, oil,war, energy politics
water