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"Environmental politics are largely controlled by the foundations--they control what's discussed and what the major issues are. The foundations are shackled at the hip to the Democratic Party, and the dominant ones are all children of big oil companies. Pew, the Rockefeller Family Fund, W. Alton Jones--their endowments were the fortunes of big oil.
"I was talking to an environmentalist who said that if you want a grant from any of those foundations, you have to have global warming in your agenda.
"Now, let's say you're working on fighting chemical companies in Cancer Alley. How do you work global warming into your agenda? Or if you're fighting factory trawlers, which are creating dead zones off the Pacific coast, how do you work global warming into that? But if you can't, then the money dries up.
"What it creates is a kind of inchoate state of environmental politics, because I don't think you can build a mass political movement around global warming.
"This is one of the ways where Alex Cockburn and I differ. Alex doesn't believe that humans can affect the environment. I know we can screw things up royally--I just don't think we can fix it.
In some ways, to me, global warming ought to be a kind of liberating experience. Yes, this is bad, but you really can't build a movement to fight it or correct it, so let's go fight things that we can defeat--whether it's strip mines, or the mismanagement of the Colorado River, or the Bush administration removing the grizzly bear in Yellowstone from listing under the Endangered Species Act.
"Those are battles that you can fight and win. But if you're cowering under the shadow of global warming, then you're not going to be able to wage those battles successfully.
I think that's one of the many reasons why the environmental movement is as impotent as the antiwar movement. It's shackled to a political party that has no vision, no spine and no guts. And it's economically dependent on a tiny network of foundations that it allows to control its political agenda.
"These foundations frown on any kind of militancy even when the moment demands militancy. If you take their money, and they expect you to dance to their tune.
Found on Counterpunch.org
SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) “Either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; OR, the VICTORY OF SOCIALISM, that is, the conscious struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism.” Rosa Luxemburg
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