Yes, we’re matricidal

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Murdering Mother Earth one forest, one species and one atom at a time

By Jason Miller

I am the earth.  You are the earth.  The Earth is dying.  You and I are murderers. 

–Ymber Delecto

tree.jpgWhat a sorry lot we humans are, particularly those of us immersed in the “American Way of Life.” Killing is indeed our business. And business has never been better.

According to the World Resources Institute, 4 species go extinct every hour “due to tropical deforestation alone.”

More than half the tropical rainforests are gone and at the rate we’re going, we will have reduced chopped, hacked, sawed, dozed, and burned our way to the virtual eradication of the “lungs of the planet” by the year 2030.

Kids, get ready to start suffocating because we’re NOT giving up our meat habit! Patrick Henry was prepared to die for liberty, but we have a nobler agenda: Give us more grazing land or give us death!

Reflecting the spiritually perverse beings we are here in America (don’t be fooled by our carefully polished veneer of civility and humanity—we’re the most savage murderers of all) is the fact that we are considering replacing our “commander-in-chief,” (the most heinous war criminal since Hitler) with a senile war-mongering septuagenarian and his recently anointed reactionary sidekick who never met a non-human animal she wouldn’t slaughter or an ecosystem she wouldn’t decimate in the name of “hunting,” “free enterprise,” or “resource acquisition.”

Or we may occupy the impending vacancy in the White House with a pseudo-progressive who has sworn his allegiance to the genocidal “state” of Israel and to corporate America whilst surrounding himself with a depraved and ruthless entourage, most of whom sold their souls to Wall Street and the military industrial complex years ago.

McCain at the helm? Obama on the throne? Who cares? Either way we party on here in America, oblivious to the devastation and suffering our obscene existence is causing. Our factory farms will continue torturing and slaughtering billions of animals each year to satiate our meat addiction, McDonald’s will keep our arteries clogged and our ascent to obesity intact, Big Pharma will inundate us with soothing and sedating “happy pills” to ensure our guilt-free participation in the murder of the planet, Big Oil will gleefully continue meeting our gluttonous demand for its “black gold,” and the corporate media will keep our wretched and vile hologram intact by constantly re-enforcing rabid nationalism, ahistorical thinking, consumerism, narcissism, alienation, rugged individualism, “free” markets, the virtues of wealth, and the “superiority” of the American Way.

While numerous complex entities and dynamics enable the power elite to maintain their strangle-hold on wealth and power, military might remains their principal means of dominating, extorting, exploiting, stealing, and annihilating with impunity. While we outspend the rest of the world (that’s all other countries combined, mind you) maintaining and expanding the war machine we revere with religious fervor, it is not money alone that gives our lords and masters the capacity to keep the world safe for capitalism and corporate plunder.

Our dirty little secret here in the US is that we built and buttressed our crumbling empire by unleashing a force so potent and so capable of rendering life on Earth extinct that it makes capitalism’s “slow motion” ecocide look like candy-striping. In 1945 we became the first and only country to harness the power of nuclear fission and utilize it as a weapon of mass destruction. Our cold-blooded murder of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians cemented our position as global hegemon.

When the uber-capitalist ruling elite of the US saw a socioeconomic system that was a potential threat to their supremacy, they successfully convinced most of their wage slaves that they were well off under a system of the rich, by the rich and for the rich and that the “communist threat” in Russia must be extinguished. What was their solution? They forced the Russians (who were moving with amazing rapidity to industrialize an agrarian economy which was dwarfed by that of the US) into a pissing contest over who could manufacture the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Their strategy was of course successful. The Soviet Union eventually collapsed. Country-clubbing white men with snow on the roof-top and fog on the brain maintained their “right” to clench their billion dollar net worth statements in one decrepit claw and the deeds and titles of their myriad precious possessions in the other. And the rest of us could breathe easy knowing that the “American Way of Life” was no longer in jeopardy. But at what cost to the Earth and the rest of its inhabitants?

Nuclear non-proliferation is a joke. Treaties, vows, resolutions, good intentions, and promises involving crossing hearts, hoping to die and sticking needles into eyes have resulted in even more nukes brandished by more nations. Meanwhile, we US Americans continue dictating who gets “nuclear privileges” AND we still possess more WMD’s than any other nation. When is another country going to invade us, depose the evil junta in DC, and hold a public lynching like our puppets did in Iraq?

Thankfully sanity (or perhaps just sheer luck) has prevailed and we have been the only nation brutal and stupid enough to employ nuclear weapons. And we have put our nuclear knowledge to constructive use by harnessing the power of the atom to create electricity. Yet when Prometheus brought us the “fire of the Twentieth Century” and told us we could use it for peaceful purposes, he failed to warn us that if this “fire” gets out of control we’re all cooked.

Nuclear power only produces 20% of the electricity consumed in the US, but accounts for a number of staggering problems we simply keep sweeping under the rug for future generations to solve. Forget logic or consideration for our children or for Mother Earth, though. John McCain, Greanpeace founder Patrick Moore, and a host of other whores to the nuclear power industry hail nuclear energy as a “green” alternative to fossil fuels and clamor for more.

Yes, let’s build more nuclear power plants. After all, given our culture of militarism and death, why not erect as many temples honoring Thanatos as is humanly possible?

Let’s take a closer look at the technology many are ready to embrace as the “remedy for Climate Change:”

Nuclear power is touted as a cheap alternative to coal (and other ways of producing energy). While it is a less expensive means of actually generating electricity once a reactor is online (the operating cost is about half that of a coal-fired plant), there are tremendous fiscal costs associated with building a nuclear facility, removing and storing radioactive waste, and decommissioning a plant once it is retired. (One hasn’t been closed yet but the estimated cost to do so is around $300 million).

And just who’s underwriting these outrageous costs? We the taxpayers! On May 12, 2008, the Wall Street Journal wrote, “For electricity generation, the EIA concludes that solar energy is subsidized to the tune of $24.34 per megawatt hour, wind $23.37 and ‘clean coal’ $29.81. By contrast, normal coal receives 44 cents, natural gas a mere quarter, hydroelectric about 67 cents and nuclear power $1.59.”

More importantly, the threat nuclear energy poses to the environment is so high that calling it “green” is an absurdity one would think had sprung from the mind of Lewis Carroll.

Since nuclear plants rely on large bodies of water to cool reactors (and avoid a melt-down) and discharge about 70% of the heat they generate (as waste), they are vulnerable to droughts and cause significant thermal pollution in the bodies of water that cool them.

Nuclear power production begins to contaminate the environment with radioactivity before the fuel even arrives at the plant. It takes a tonne of uranium ore to produce 3 kilograms of uranium oxide. While the tailings that are left behind emit small levels of radiation, they do release radon gas and radioactive dust at a rate 10,000 times faster than the unmined ore. This nuclear contamination stays in the environment for 100,000 years and over time reaches such high levels that a Los Alamos Laboratory report concluded that we need to, “to zone the land in uranium mining and milling districts to forbid human habitation.”

Nuclear power facilities produce a steady stream of low-level radioactive waste, including gas, solid and liquid. Gaseous and liquid wastes are “cleaned and diluted,” but are eventually released into the environment. Solid wastes are transported to one of three low-level radiation disposal sites in the US where they continue accumulating and emitting radiation into the environment. Sounds Earth-friendly, doesn’t it?

About once a year 33% of a reactor’s fuel rods are replaced, producing anywhere from 12 to 30 tonnes of high level nuclear waste. The frightening part is that we’ve been using this “green” technology for 40 years now and still haven’t figured out a safe and permanent means of disposing of its extremely dangerous and lethal by-products. Temporary pools or dry cask storage (large steel cylinders that require constant monitoring) onsite at nuclear facilities house most of the spent reactor fuel, which will remain a dire threat to the environment for tens of thousands of years. Nuclear power plants are running out of storage capacity and the “permanent storage solution” at Yucca Mountain, projected to be operational in 2017, is little more than a tentative and distant speck on the horizon. Perhaps we could erect dry casks on some of the sprawling estates that McCain has forgotten he owned….

How remote is the possibility of a nuclear melt-down resulting in a disaster? Let’s ask the thousands of heavily irradiated victims of Chernobyl and those living in the vicinity of the “near miss” at Three Mile Island.

Lest we forget, nuclear reactors are “dual-use” by virtue of the fact that plutonium is one of their by-products and plutonium can be used to produce nuclear weapons. Small wonder our ruling class trembles with fear (hence their belligerence, bullying and macho posturing) at the prospect of Iran (a nation which refuses to genuflect to the American/Israeli Empire) developing nuclear reactors to generate power.

And someone please explain what it is that’s so “green” about a source of electricity that produces waste that people (whom our malevolent and brutal foreign policy has pissed off-there are millions and millions of them) could use to make a “dirty bomb” and then deploy it against us. Granted the potential efficacy of a dirty bomb is subject to debate, but who wants to find out? We already have 104 repositories for bomb-making materials scattered across the United States. Let’s push to add more!

While many anti-nuclear activists focus their efforts on opposing the issuance of licenses to build new nuclear power plants, another approach may prove to be more effective and is in play at this moment. Members of IPSEC, a group of over 70 community groups, have devoted themselves to shutting down the nuclear power plant known as the Indian Point Energy Center. Grassroots and non-profit, the objective of IPSEC groups like Riverkeeper is to replace nukes with a truly safe form of sustainable energy and to preserve the integrity of the environment. If IPSEC is successful in setting a precedent by catalyzing the shuttering of Indian Point, a domino effect could ensue and spell the beginning of the end for the menace of nuclear power.

For a litany of reasons, IPSEC is wholly justified in its appeals to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to deny Entergy Corporation’s bid to renew Indian Point’s license for another 20 years. In fact, if sanity and moral considerations amounted to more than a pair of sickly midgets making desperate and ridiculous attempts to halt the stampeding herd of narcissistic consumers and greedy corporations that are the embodiments of monopoly capitalism, there wouldn’t even be a debate.

Indian Point is situated about 25 miles from New York City, a rather populous area, eh? (93 million people live within a 500 mile radius of this nuclear facility, most of whom would be impacted by a major accident or meltdown at Indian Point).

Indian Point’s two reactors that continue to function were built in 1974 and 1976, which means that they are old, hence prone to cracks, leaks, fissures, wear, deterioration, and the like. It also means that they were built to less stringent safety specifications than newer reactors.

At one time Indian Point had three functional reactors. In an October 2001 article (entitled America’s Terrorist Nuclear Threat to Itself) long-time anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman wrote, “Indeed, Indian Point Unit One was shut because activists warned that its lack of an emergency core cooling system made it an unacceptable risk. The government ultimately agreed.”

In 2006 the NRC fined Entergy Corporation, the owners and operators of Indian Point, $130,000 for problems associated with its system designed to warn nearby residents to evacuate in the event of a nuclear crisis.

Until they finally began moving them to dry casks in January of this year, Indian Point had 1500 tons of spent fuel rods stored in temporary pools. These pools have been leaking tritium and strontium-90 (both highly toxic substances) into the groundwater and the Hudson River since 2005 and are demonstrably vulnerable to sabotage or attack. And as Wasserman elucidates in the previously cited article, these pools (not to mention the reactor cores) are horrific accidents waiting to happen:

“Without continuous monitoring and guaranteed water flow, the thousands of tons of radioactive rods in the cores and the thousands more stored in those fragile pools would rapidly melt into super-hot radioactive balls of lava that would burn into the ground and the water table and, ultimately, the Hudson.”

Indian Point Energy Center manifests nearly all that is inane and insane about humans shattering atomic nuclei and hubristically believing we can play with the fires of hell without getting burned…..

Yet there’s at least a “little” Eichmann in all of us as we faithfully participate in our ecocidal “American Way of Life.” So what do we care about a little radiation here or a few meltdowns there?

Remember, “Killing is [our] business…..and business is good!” Just ask a member of that species that will be extinct in about 15 minutes….

For those of you refusing to bow at the altar of Thanatos, click on the links below to find out what you can do to help IPSEC shut down Indian Point:

http://www.remyc.com/rockthereactors/gameplan.html

http://www.ipsecinfo.org/

http://www.riverkeeper.org/campaign_indianpoint.php

http://greennuclearbutterfly.blogspot.com/

http://www.petitiononline.com/cipn2002/petition.html

http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2001/10/00_wasserman_nuclear-threat.htm



Comments

One Response to “Yes, we’re matricidal”

  1. Michelle on September 6th, 2008 5:47 pm

    Be it splitting the atom, be it raising an entire old growth forest, be it the oppression and harming of women, or whatever, that kind of destruction is focused on/against the life force, the generator.

    We’re taught, particularly in native American philosophy, that you can only go so far with that before retaliation sets in, that the life force will not let you, the life force does strike back. Mother Earth supports us and she does have consciousness. So far, she’s been very forgiving and relatively gentle with we, her children. But for how long?

    I find it very interesting that the lowest of her organisms, bacteria and viruses can and are beginning to wipe man out; especially when human immune systems have been so compromised by what we’ve injected into the bio-spheres. We’ve altered weather patterns also. The ferocity of our storms increases, much death across the planet due to that currently.

    Nuclear energy is being touted as our savior against global warming; what insanity, what a violent patriarchal technology! Jason was right when he titled his essay, “Yes, we’re matricidal.” Take as for example in the Garden of Eden myth and that it is up to men to dominate both women and the earth, give us a script for all kinds of violence against women, which, of course, I connect up with violence against the earth in that the earth and women are seen as passive, as submissive, as out of control and thereby need to be controlled, dominated, etc. Until we understand the underlying psychology, the mental infection our society injects us with, we’ll never have leaders of government and industry who embody a kind of collective responsibility….a gynecentric system, in which the emphasis is not on competition, power over, domination, but rather on equality, harmony, balance, tolerance for a wide diversity of life styles, the centrality of powerful women, being absolutely necessary for society to function well. These systems did exist on the planet everywhere, before male divinity and worldly authority.

    The story of the human race begins with the female. Woman carried the original human chromosome as she does to this day; her evolutionary adaptation ensured the survival and success of the species; her work of mothering provided the cerebral spur for human communication and social organization. Yet for generations of historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and biologists, the sole star of the dawn story has been man. Man the hunter, man the tool-maker, man the lord of creation stalks the primeval savannah in solitary splendor through every known version of the origin of our species. In reality, however, woman was quietly getting on with the task of securing a future for humanity—for it was her labor, her skills, her biology that held the key to the destiny of the race.

    For, as scientists acknowledge, “Women are the race itself, the strong primary sex, and man the biological afterthought.” In human cell structure, woman’s is the basic “X” chromosome; a female baby simply collects another “X” at the moment of conception, while the creation of a male requires the branching off of the divergent “Y” chromosome, seen by some as a genetic error, a “deformed and broken “X.” The woman’s egg, several hundred times bigger than the sperm that fertilizes it, carries all the genetic messages the child will ever receive. Women therefore are the original, the first sex, the biological norm from which males are only a deviation. Historian Amaury de Riencourt sums it up:

    “Far from being an incomplete form of maleness, according to a tradition stretching from the biblical Genesis through Aristotle (384-322 BCE) to Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), femaleness is the norm, the fundamental form of life.”

    There was a startling discovery, debated by the American Anthropological Association in 1987, that every single person on the planet is descended from the same primitive hominid, and that this common ancestor was a woman. Using the latest techniques of gene research into DNA, the molecular structure of gene inheritance, scientists working independently at Oxford, Yale, and University of California at Berkeley, and Emory University in Atlanta have succeeded in isolating one DNA “fingerprint” that is common to the whole of the human race. This has remained constant for millennia despite the divergence of races and populations throughout the world—and it is incontrovertibly female. This research points directly to one woman as the original “gene fount” for the whole of the human race. She lived out of Africa and spread across the face of the globe, giving rise to all the people living today.

    This work on the woman who could have been our grandmother Eve is still in its infancy, and controversial in its implications. Not least of the problems it poses for the sons of Adam is its implicit dismissal of the Christian myth—for the “gene fount mother” necessarily had a mother herself, and the identity or numbers of her sexual partners were irrelevant, since hers was the only cell that counted. Indisputable, however, is the central role of women in the evolution of the species. In terms of the DNA message that a new individual needs in order to become a human being, the essential genetic information is only ever contributed by and transmitted through the female. In that sense, each and every one of us is a child of Eve, carrying within our bodies the living fossil evidence of the first women who roamed the African plain side by side with their men.

    As this suggests, nothing could be further from the truth of the role played by early woman than the “hunter’s mate” stereotype of the dim huddled figure beside the fire in the cave. From around 500,000 BCE, when Femina Erecta first stood alongside Homo erectus in some sun-drenched primordial gorge, many changes took place before both together became sapiens. And there is continuous evidence from a number of different sites throughout the Pleistocene age of women’s critical involvement in all aspects of the tribe’s survival and evolution generally thought of, like hunting, as reserved to men.

    The early woman was in fact intensively occupied from dawn to dusk. Hers was not a long life—like their mates, most hominid females, according to scientific analysis of fossil remains, died before they were 20. Only a handful survived to 30, and it was quite exceptional to reach 40. But in this short span, the first women evolved a huge range of activities and skills. On archaeological evidence, as well as that of existing Stone Age cultures, women were busy with and adept in:

    * Food Gathering;
    * Child Care;
    * Leatherwork;
    * Making garments, slings and containers from animal skins;
    * Cooking;
    * Pottery;
    * Weaving grasses, reeds and bark strips for baskets;
    * Construction of shelters, temporary or permanent;
    * Toolmaking for a variety of uses, not simply agricultural—stone scrapers for skins, and sharp stone blades for cutting out animal sinews for garment making; and
    * Medical application of plants and herbs for everything from healing to abortion.

    In earliest times, women’s gathering served not only to keep the tribe alive—it helped propel the race afterward in its faltering passage towards civilization. For successful gathering demanded and developed skills of discrimination, evaluation and memory, and a range of seeds, nutshells and grasses discovered at primitive sites in Africa indicate that careful and knowledgeable selection, rather than random gleaning, dictated the choice. This work also provided the impetus for the first human experiments with technology. Anthropologists’ fixation on man and hunter has designated the first tools as weapons of the hunt. But since hunting was a much later development, earlier still would have been the bones, stones or lengths of wood used as aids to gathering for scratching up roots and tubers, or for pulverizing wood vegetation for ease of chewing. All these were women’s tools, and the discovery of digging sticks with fire-hardened points at primitive sites indicates the problem-solving creativity of these female dawn foragers, who had worked out that putting pointed sticks into a low fire to dry and harden would provide them with far more efficient tools for the work they had to do.

    Unlike the worked flint heads of axes, spears and arrows, however, very few of the earlier tools have survived to tell the tale of women’s ingenuity and resourcefulness. Sticks also lacked the grisly glamour of the the killing-tools in the eyes of archaeologists, and had no part to play in the unfolding drama of Man the Hunter. Archaeology is likewise silent on the subject of another female invention, the early woman gatherer’s “swag bag,” the container she must have devised to carry back to the camp all she had found, foraged, caught or dug up in the course of her day’s hunting.

    Woman’s work of gathering would inevitably take on a wider and more urgent dimension when she had infants to feed as well as herself. The prime centrality of this work of mothering in the story of evolution has yet to be acknowledged. A man plank in the importance of Man the Hunter in the history of the human race has always been the undisputed claim that cooperative hunting among males called for more skill in communication and social organization, and hence provided the evolutionary spur to more complex development, even the origins of human society. The counter argument is briskly set out by Sally Slocum:

    “The need to organize for feeding after weaning, learning to hand the more complex socioemotional bonds that were developing, the new skills and cultural inventions surrounding more extensive gathering—all would demand larger brains. Too much attention has been given to skills required by hunting, and too little to the skills required for gathering and the raising of dependent young.”

    But once up and running through the great open spaces of popular belief, Man the Hunter has proved a hard quarry to bring down, and few seem to have noticed that for millennia he has traveled on through the generations entirely alone. For woman is nowhere in this story. Aside from her burgeoning sexual apparatus, early woman is taken to have missed out completely on the evolutionary bonanza. “The evolving male increased in body size, muscular strength and speed, as well as in intelligence, imagination and knowledge,” pronounced a leading French authority, “in all of which the female hardly shared.” Countless other historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and biologists worldwide all make the same claim in different ways. Man, it seems, single-handedly performed all the evolving for the rest of the human race. Meanwhile early woman, idle and dependent, lounged about the home base, the Primordial Airhead and Fully Evolved Bimbo.

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Anwaar’s articles appear simultaneously here at Truth Spring and at Soul Vibes in The Pakistan Tribune.


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