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ecology - Rainbow Reporter

'Vagina Monologue' author nails Palin

September 21st 2008 01:51

Burning the Earth

Sometimes someone else says it better than you ever can. Like now

Eve Ensler, the American playwright, performer, feminist and activist best known for "The Vagina Monologues", wrote the following:

Drill, Drill, Drill

I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamed last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, "It was a task from God."

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the li brary, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and health care or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, "Drill Drill Drill." I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

Eve Ensler
September 5, 2008

(I like to think of this as Eve's answer to Lilith - Doug)

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Posted By: Doug Pollard - Category: US politics, elections, ecology, world politics

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Let Us Prey

July 20th 2008 00:06

By CVRaveOn @ photoshoptalent

We turned ourselves from prey to predator, but at what cost?

I’ve been reading some of the more apocalyptic websites scattered around the net and discovered a whole network of extreme websites arguing that we don’t have to worry about global warming, environmental degradation and so forth because “the Lord can clean the air with the hem of his robe” if and when he so chooses, thus neatly absolving us from any responsibility for our own predicament.

On the other hand there are those who think mankind is responsible for the fix we’re in, and therefore responsible for cleaning up the mess, too. (I’m not going to waste time on those who deny there is any mess at all).

How did we get here? Because we didn’t like being prey, and used human ingenuity to turn ourselves into predators instead.

It’s an arms race. Prey animals that are good at evading predators breed. Prey animals are usually fast and prolific breeders. Prey numbers increase.

Predators tend to be slow breeders with small families. When prey is abundant, predator numbers rise. Predators are also evolving, so they’re gradually getting better at catching prey. Prey numbers fall.

The balance shifts. Now there are not enough prey to feed all the predators. They either starve, move somewhere else, or switch to another prey species if one is available. Fewer of the original prey are taken, so their numbers begin to rise – and the cycle begins again.

Humans are a different order of predator, because we’re not a natural predator. We began as prey. We’re self-taught predators – and we didn’t do a very good job of it.

For a start, we don’t just prey on one or two species, we prey on a huge range of species. We’re not just hunting in a few habitats. Thanks to technology, we can hunt in many habitats. And our cleverness allows us to hunt whole species out of existence.

At first, and for quite a long time, humans remained subject to the usual predator-prey law. In times of feast, we flourished, in times of famine, we died. The natural mechanism controlled our numbers. But we don’t like that, we don’t accept that, and work diligently to overcome anything that kills us.

We have become better and better predators. We extend our reach by using technology. And we have over-ridden the fail-safes that used to keep us in our natural place, principally war, starvation, disease and death.

Let’s start with starvation. Take commercial fishing as an example.

In the past, when fish became few, fishermen would beach their boats and either starve, or find another way to feed themselves. Now, they buy technological devices that allow them to see where the fish are, and carry on fishing. They fish in weather that used to keep them in port. They fish species they couldn’t reach before. They fish from bigger ships that can stay at sea taking prey for longer.

The world over, fish stocks are collapsing, because of modern technology. Unlike any other predator, humans can hunt a prey species to extinction. It is now likely that some prey fish, such as cod, will never recover.

In the past, the natural cycle repaired the damage. But we have distorted the cycle. When we move on, we may not have left enough breeding stock alive. We have staved off hunger by extending the predator-prey cycle, but at the cost of wiping out prey species.

Another fail-safe is disease, most dramatically, plagues and epidemics, which as recently as the beginning of the 20th century, took huge numbers. But medical science, and in particular, antibiotics, has temporarily checked many diseases.

One again we successfully turned ourselves from prey to predator. Having been prey to bacteria for centuries, we went on the attack with antibiotics, and wiped out many. But not completely. More and more bacteria are becoming immune, so that we now have some diseases for which once again we have no cure, such as the resistant staph infections, the flesh-eating bugs and so on, and must rely on our natural defences, our immune systems.

Once again we extended the predator-prey cycle, but did not abolish it. We have never managed to get a handle on some diseases, especially viruses. We can’t cure a cold, only endure it. We can’t cure or find a vaccine for AIDS.

We haven’t abolished death, though by prolonging our lives we have increased our demand on the earths resources.

The final failsafe is combat. Sometimes we prey on one another, in what we call war, for resources such as land (for hunting and agriculture or resources).

Wars kept our numbers down, until we got too good at them. Then, as with hunger and disease, we decided we’d better try and abolish, or at least control it. After the two world wars, we have tried to keep wars small and manageable. We won’t use nukes. We try to prevent genocide. We send in peacekeepers.

There is now only one means left to prevent our extinction.

In the past, we could appeal to God, Nature (or nowadays, the ecosystem), to put things right, to restore the balance. That was all very well when we were just another ape and fitted into the natural order. But we have insisted on taking ourselves out of the natural order. Now it’s all down to us.

We could stop interfering – at considerable cost. We could go ‘back to nature’, let famines run their course, not send food aid, claim it’s God’s will that some (but not us, of course) should starve (that statement is meant to be ironic, btw).

We could unshackle war, refuse to send in peackeepers, turn a blind eye to genocide. Actually, some would say we’re not too bad at this one (irony again).

We could refuse medical assistance and drugs, either directly or indirectly, by pricing them out of reach (we’re not too bad at this either). Though to be ethically correct, we should also refuse to use them ourselves.

Some will say we should do nothing, because this is all God’s will. As I mentioned, one very scary website (no, I’m not going to tell you where it is), says that if God wants clean air, he will provide it, and if he doesn’t, we just have to put up with it. Nothing we can do about it besides pray – and go on preying as usual.

Others say, not to worry, human ingenuity will save us, it’s always managed before. But since it was human ingenuity that created this situation, that doesn’t give me a whole lot of hope.

Having elected ourselves the managing directors of the planet, subverting nature (or God, if you prefer), we are finding that we’re not very good at it yet, and we may not get good enough, fast enough, to save ourselves.

When we’ve eaten all the fish, and the birds, and the mammals, what will human ingenuity come up with? Soylent Green?

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Posted By: Doug Pollard - Category: religion, ecology, population, world politics

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