We know the enemy

Back when Earth Day was young and the word “ecology” (from the Greek root for home) was on some lips, Walt Kelly’s Pogo captured the moment. Kelly’s diffident possum is pictured amongst the litter of the swamp, swamped in pollution. “We have met the enemy and he is us,” he says.

Of course, some things have changed in four decades.

But many other things have not.

We still depend on Carboniferous carbon, oil and coal — fuels of astounding filthiness, fuels that cost human lives to bring to the gas pump and the wall outlet — to power our orgy of consumption. And the corporate mendacity of BP is nothing new. Corrupt, criminal, and flooded with billions, international energy corporations have an open record of horror: Texaco’s chumminess with Hitler, Shell’s complicity with murder in Nigeria, Chevron’s toxic despoiling of Dubai — these are just a few of the sordid depths of the monstrous history of energy.

But our roads are still filled with fleets of those grotesque trucks I call “suburban utility vehicles.” Multiple vehicles per family and leaf-blowers and hair dryers and 90-inch flatscreens and freezing AC; hell, we demand the dirty shit, that oil, that coal (most of our electricity comes from burning coal), no questions asked. It’s no different from the slaughter and boiling of whales for their fat, which is how we used to burn the candles at both ends. In so many ways, then, the outrage and disgust over BP’s Gulf oil disaster is misplaced. The disaster is an inevitable result of our hunger for more and more. We’re the ones who have empowered the corporate criminals, we’re the ones who let them capture the state that is supposed to watch over them in our name, we’re the crackheads desperate for their filthy crude, their black-lung devil dust.

I don’t know how people, so fattened and stupefied on the goo of melted fossils, go “backwards” and power down. I can’t think of a historical instance of anything like that, so it’s probably not possible without massive shock. But I do think the first step, like with all junkies, is recognition of our own responsibility. Yes, prosecute the BP criminals and liquidate the company if necessary to pay for the disaster, and fuck their investors, who are complicit in their criminality, but above all admit that we are the enemy.