Live Earth and the Ecological Crisis

In honor of Live Earth I felt it was my duty to write an article dealing with the ecological crisis brought on by “carboniferous capitalism” and its desire for endless accumulation. Live Earth was a very decent left/liberal attempt at raising environmental consciousness through both explication of the existing climate crisis and the concrete actions, both local, national and global that are necessary to reduce our ecological footprint - focusing on the small: switching to CFL light bulbs [which are more efficient and therefore produce less carbon contain mercury and thus must be recycled in a special manner - is the tradeoff worth it?], turning off and unplugging lights and electronics when not in the room or in use. And focusing on the large: using renewable energy such as hydro, wind, solar, taking mass transit or the bike instead of the automobile to decongest downtown.

Yet, I want to raise some 'outside the box' questions that were not addressed in the portions of Live Earth that I watched. For Live Earth failed to adequately, in my view, link the ecological crisis to the basic premises of industrial society and more so capitalism, but also the dialectic of the enlightenment. Live Earth, through its all day coverage by Sundance and partial coverage by Bravo and other assorted new channels provided an excellent opportunity to articulate a viable critical ecological message, even an anti-capital ecological orientation. Live Earth had the attention of millions of individuals around the globe. It was a perfect time to articulate a well-constructed message emphasizing the extent of the ecological crisis and linking it to the cultural foundation of bourgeois society – that of capitalism, the enlightenment, and liberal democracy. While I saw one speech discussing how “corporations put profit before people”, this is a generalization and such an abstract reference that it hardly grasps the major foundations of capitalism. Principally since the production for profit is not a unique incentive to capitalism, particularly to the current form of late capitalism.

What is unique to late capital is the mode of production and organization of labor [wage-labor] that is used to accumulate capital. Additionally, capital is premised on the continual accumulation of capital founded upon the production of surplus-value extracted through unpaid labor. Additionally, industrial society [which is capitalist] is fueled by a protestant work ethic and the enlightenment exaltation of science as the mechanism to free humanity from the limits of nature. These cultural foundations have lead to the domination of humanity by a philosophy of continual economic growth and expansion, but more importantly the obsession with work in general and that work is inherently a morally good and worthwhile activity. Moreover, industrial society is constructed upon the belief that humanity is not a part of nature, but is in fact destined to be in control over nature and should use it to further the greatness of humanity. This is the main argument of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno. That the enlightenment via science was to take over humanity’s desire to free itself from nature and its fear that nature controlled humanity. Before the enlightenment there was myth, which tried to control nature through mimesis – imitation. Through imitating nature humanity sought to control nature’s power and subsequently humanity’s fear by reversing the historical relationship, placing humanity in power over nature. However, myth failed in its quest and so the enlightenment prophesized science as the mechanism to continue this project and fulfill its aspirations.

Skipping forward over two hundred years, the culmination of endless work and capital accumulation is the pursuit of perpetual economic growth while science has created industries whose primary byproduct is the severing of ecological constraints, evidenced via the mass pollution of the air, water, land and the creatures that inhabit the ecosystem of earth. Thus, capitalism’s continual expansion of an economic system that is anti-ecological has fueled a mode of life that is inherently anti-life, as it breaks down the life processes and eco-structure necessary to support complex life - i.e. human life. The failure of Live Earth to address this exemplifies the failure of the left/liberals to adequately conceptualize the deep-rooted nature of the ecological crisis and the need to fundamentally restructure not only the economic and political institutions of today but the culture which reproduces these institutions.

Furthermore, when I accessed the Live Earth website I became even more disappointed. The website fails to radically inspire the big questions in how we live and work, how society, particularly the urban-suburban relationship is structured. Is a nonsustainable economy really worth saving or being dominated by? Should we be subordinate to a mode of production that is fundamentally negligent of the most basic and precious of systems - that of the ecological system, whose healthy functioning is a precondition for complex life - i.e. human life.

We need to understand and recognize that the utopian quest for freedom, its realization via an emancipatory politics must not address only capital and its destruction of material welfare – in terms of extended working hours for full-time workers, its preference for part-time contingent low paid labor, technological unemployment, and the destruction of the welfare state, etc., but must tie the ecological crisis and oncoming ecological scarcity to the failure of capital, industrial society and liberal democracy to provide the solutions to this self-made crisis. Moreover, the fundamental principles of capitalist industrial society and liberal democracy are at odds with an ecological and symbiotic relationship between humanity and nature. In fact, it is only through the creation of a post-capitalist post-liberal democracy post-industrial society that the emancipatory project of freedom can be realized. Realized through the creation of a decentralized, deindustrialized society premised on communalism and direct democracy using local/regional social economies and ecotechnology, as well as automation and computerization to reduce working hours and therefore increase both the quality and quantity of freetime, while deemphasizing material relations and obsessive commodity ownership over social relations and creativity and ultimately the replacement of the welfare state and top-down authoritarian welfare with universal basic income and bottom-up local/communal welfare.

Emancipation and liberation cannot occur under carboniferous capitalism and liberal democracy: we must rethink human-nature relations, how we live, and how our political and economic institutions are structured and their basic principles.