Forest fires are raging on the East coast, raging in Minnesota, raging on the West coast. Floods are devastating the Mississippi and Missouri river basins. Some 230 tornadoes have wreaked destruction across the country so far this year. One, a mile wide with winds over 200 miles per hour, wiped out an entire town. The state of Texas alone is paying out $43 million for tornado damage and $913 million for hurricane damage per year. You might wonder, "What in the world is going on?" To put it simply, we have hurt Mother Nature and she is fighting back.
The environmental crisis did not just happen. It is interconnected with the growth of industry and society in the post-WWII period. Armed with the billions of dollars from war profiteering, the ruling class tightened their control of the government and set out to make America into a country totally dependent on the corporations. The first step was the expansion of the roads into a super highway system. This made possible the building of suburbia, which along with the destruction of the public transportation systems, made the auto industry the heart of the country's economy. As giant trucks replaced the railroads, the emergence of supermarkets destroyed the corner stores and made the automobile a necessity for the poor as well as the rich.
By the mid-1950s, the internal combustion engine and uncontrolled industrial pollution began to have a visible effect on the environment. Since the end of WWII, scientists have warned of the dangers in the destruction of the environment. It wasn't that nobody listened. They believed they couldn't do anything about it. Processes tend to create an independent life of their own. As the transnational corporation and globalization consolidated, environmental destruction became an integral part of the capitalist mode of production.
Even as the leaders of government and industry began to understand the consequences of their actions, they were not able the reverse the process they had set in motion. World leaders met in Kyoto, Japan and drafted an international agreement to attempt to slow down the destruction of the environment. The President of the U.S. refused to sign it and the political stooges of the American corporations in Congress laughed it off. They said we can't afford to put the environment ahead of profits. That is true — they can't. If they do, the whole capitalist house of cards will come apart. The globalization of the economy along with the maturing of the market economy has made it nearly impossible to force the giant international corporations to protect the environment. The rules of the market economy are that if you take measures to protect the environment at the expense of profit, you will be taken over by corporations who have no such concerns. So the corporate profits shot up until today they are the highest ever recorded by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. This explosion of profit was paced by the destruction of the ecology, by an increase in tornadoes, wildfires and floods.
The conclusion is inescapable. Innumerable species have developed and as conditions changed, disappeared from the face of the earth. There is no guarantee that we as a species will remain if intolerable conditions develop. This is not an ideological question. It is a question of survival. We cannot allow the earth to remain a plaything for profit in the hands of private individuals. The environment has become a strategic front of struggle against corporate power and the private ownership of things indispensable to society. This time it is the earth itself. There is no way to quantify our demands. We have to reclaim the earth and build a humane economic system worthy of the people who inhabit it.
