Rationing Isn’t the Enemy

Leave a comment

April 15, 2013 by losingourcool

Here’s a rationing Q&A with Michael Arria for VICE motherboard.

Arria starts by asking, “What has Earth Day become, in your estimation, and what should it be about instead?”

My response:: “There’s the corporate Earth Day—an occasion for greenwashing and conspicuous green consumption. There’s the anticorporate Earth Day, when we blame all of the planet’s ills on greedy companies and the politicians who serve them. And there’s what might be called our personal Earth Day—a day for recycling, bicycling, and celebrating individual practices and lifestyles that are supposed to ‘save the Earth.’ Nothing good comes out of the corporate Earth Day. The other two are fine as far as they go, but they take us on a detour away from the growth-dependent economic system that’s at the root of the global ecological crisis. Nothing of substance is being done about climate disruption, mass extinction, landscape destruction, ecosystem breakdown, or our grossly distorted distribution of material resources. That’s because effective action would mean a wholesale economic transformation, one that would be wholly unacceptable to today’s business leaders, politicians, and economists.”