Julian Langer: How many bright greens does it take to change a light bulb?  How many dark greens does it take to smash one?

By Julian Langer / Deep Green Resistance UK

“Man [sic] is a part of nature and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”

—Rachel Carson

“Are you helping to solve climate change?” asks the propaganda of the “solar revolution” bright green greenwashing.  Yeah you!  Reading this now.  What are you personally doing in your life at this very moment?  As you read this on your desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, magic bright screen device with internet connectivity, are you helping to solve climate change?  Never mind that the production of solar panels creates toxic nightmarish concoctions and destroys habitat.  Are you, personally, individually, on your own, in your life, solving climate change?

What are you thinking to yourself at this point?  How are you feeling?  A little judged perhaps?  A little guilty?  A little bit like blame has been misapportioned?  Sure, we (especially those of us with enough time on our hands and access to read an internet article) could definitely consume less and take on a personal responsibility towards this.  But are our lifestyle choices the problem, honestly, really?

Oil giants suppress climate change discussion, bankroll corrupt politicians, and mislead their investors and the public, and you’re concerned about whether or not I use solar panels?  I’m sorry, but at what point does this cease to be environmental discussion and instead becomes liberal masturbatory narcissism, taking selfies to post with the hashtag #boughtasolarpanelcheckmeout?

How much faith in this bright green future do we really have?  We’re planning a future in which entitled white people who live off of Happy Meals and Coke Cola are expected to eat insects for a sustainable future.  These people won’t even change their diets to avoid diabetes and heart disease; do we really expect them to chow down on a bowl of bugs?

I don’t mean to sound cynical or mean, but this is a real situation which needs a real discussion.  The current conversation is banal to the extreme, ignoring even personal welfare (you need a living planet too), let alone substantially considering social ethics.  As this culture fails to talk and act effectively, the planet is dying.

Regardless of the extinctions across the planet and the loss of life, unparalleled in any human disaster (film opportunity perhaps?), this culture could continue functioning with a biosphere even more depleted than the one we currently live in.  The vast majority of the biomass is already incorporated into our culture, in that the 200,000 or so other species, who are most at risk, now make up about five percent of the aggregate living cellular tissue of all vertebrates.  We’ve monopolized this planet to the extreme and we’re talking about solar panels?

We’re only halfway to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to meet current (dangerously insufficient) targets.  You feel that air passing in and out through your lungs?  That air which brings oxygen to your blood stream and keeps you alive?  It’s poisoned with toxins and fumes from the burning of fossil fuels; fuel emissions that we know are causing global warming and leading to an ocean devoid of fish life.

Great, the UN is giving funding to environmental projects, but when we’re talking $183 million dollars across 8 bright green solution projects and we’re up against multinational imperialist oil corporations with profits in the tens of billions; what is really happening?

India’s home secretary has canceled Greenpeace registration in the country.  The British government is not defending laws in place to protect wildlife and habitat.  Greece has already shown the world what the modern political sphere is set to look like, in the TTIP era of globalist corporate economics.  This is what the politics of the day is doing, what it values and how little it cares about the worsening disaster.

But what are YOU doing to combat, solve, fix climate change (the extinction, the apocalypse)?  Yeah you!  Have you ordered your solar panels yet?

Though we are in a desperate situation, we should remember that indigenous peoples in India are protecting the waters, forests and commons on which they live.  Despite beatings and jailings by the corrupt liberal government, these people are fighting to defend the land and environment they love and call home, in grassroots resistance groups.  Gunfire and force haven’t stopped them.  Can we muster at least a small fraction of their courage and stand up for our own land?  In the abandoned towns of Chernobyl now free of humans, wildlife is returning and flourishing.  The original inhabitants are taking back the land stolen for buildings and roads and a great big radioactive disaster.

We must learn and draw inspiration from these examples.  We must build our own locally appropriate resistance and restoration strategies with these successes in mind.  They’re not bright-green, happy-go-lucky, business-as-usual liberal responses, but they include a necessary dose of reality.

Unfortunately, the “solutions” on the table in mainstream discourse are not working, and can never work to address the full scale of our crises.  True solutions depend on a culture of resistance, with participating individuals organizing in communities to create change.  So I ask, will you help combat the forces creating climate change?

Nature needs fighters on its side.

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