Some Uncomfortable Truths

Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Chris Hedges released a column on the Truthdig blog this morning that is not for the faint-of-heart. I will now quote Mr. Hedges - remember, you've been warned.

[W]e sit passive and dumb as corporations and the leaders of industrialized nations ensure that climate change will accelerate to levels that could mean the extinction of our species.

In the past when civilizations went belly up through greed, mismanagement and the exhaustion of natural resources, human beings migrated somewhere else to pillage anew. But this time the game is over. There is nowhere else to go.

Okay, if you can take more gloom-and-doom you may want to read the column.


Hedges goes on to summarize the scientific underpinnings of his dire predictions:

The accelerating disintegration of Arctic Sea ice means that summer ice will probably disappear within the next decade. The open water will absorb more solar radiation, significantly increasing the rate of global warming. The Siberian permafrost will disappear, sending up plumes of methane gas from underground. The Greenland ice sheet and the Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers will melt.....

The safe level of CO2 in the atmosphere, [NASA scientist James] Hansen estimates, is no more than 350 parts per million (ppm). The current level of CO2 is 385 ppm and climbing. This already guarantees terrible consequences even if we act immediately to cut carbon emissions.

Believe it or not, Chris Hedges' column today was about more than global warming. It was also about the poor slaves in China who are making our clothes and other products. Hedges backs up the allegation of slavery with a link to Ching Kwan Lee's research.


What do slave labor conditions in China have in common with the threat of global warming? Hedges says that unfortunately, in our current global economy, it is the leaders of global corporations like BP that are now controlling our fates. This explains a lot both in terms of our environmental problems and in terms of worldwide labor abuses. But do the powerful CEOs and other corporate leaders care?

They are not endowed with human decency or compassion. Yet their lobbyists make the laws. Their public relations firms craft the propaganda and trivia pumped out through systems of mass communication. Their money determines elections. Their greed turns workers into global serfs and our planet into a wasteland.

Is Chris Hedges onto something? What do you think?

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I laid awake in the middle of the night thinking about this stuff and realized that I had to add something. It doesn't end with immoral CEOs. It ends with us. We are the ones buying and using the products that have made the corporations so powerful. Some of us are even investing in these corporations. Chris Hedges' message is that it is time for us to rise up in rebellion against the powers that are abusing workers and gradually destroying the earth.

To put it another way, the point is this: If you care, don't be passive. Reading this post is not enough. Plan to do something and follow through with it.