The Rag Blog

The fire next time is now: Environmental historian Angus Wright’s call for a planetary patriotism

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / November 8, 2011

Angus Wright has a way of saying things we may not want to hear in a way that’s hard to ignore.

An example: During a meeting of environmentalists about shaping the public conversation on our most pressing ecological crises, folks were wrestling with how to present an honest analysis in accessible language — how to talk about the bad news and the need for radical responses, without turning people off. During the discussion about the effects of climate change, Wright offered a simple suggestion for a slogan: “No more water, the fire next time.”

Those words from a black spiritual, made famous by James Baldwin’s borrowing for his 1963 book “The Fire Next Time,” are usually invoked metaphorically. Wright was suggesting that we might want to consider the phrase literally. After a summer of drought and forest fires in Texas where I live, Wright’s comment reminded me that climate disruption isn’t part of some science-fiction future, but is unfolding around us in ways that are both complex and hard to predict, but devastating simple: We’re in deep trouble, ecologically and culturally, as we try to face up to unprecedented planetary problems in a society in denial.

Wright is one of our most astute observers of these troubles. His willingness to face these issues, and his ability to grasp the interplay of complex systems, is no surprise to readers of his book The Death of Ramon Gonzalez: The Modern Agricultural Dilemma, first published in 1990 and revised for a 2005 edition. Looking at one region in Mexico, Wright explains how political and economic power, combined with the arrogance of experts who believe they have all the answers, have radically changed people, communities, and land — mostly for the worse.

Though Wright speaks bluntly about these grim realities, he hasn’t given up trying to change the trajectory of a society that so often denies or minimizes the threat. A retired professor of environmental studies at California State University, Sacramento, Wright is the chair of the board of The Land Institute, which is committed to the research and organizing necessary for a truly sustainable agriculture. His writing also focuses on those issues — he is co-author of To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement in the Struggle for a New Brazil (with Wendy Wolford) and Nature’s Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation, and Food Sovereignty (with Ivette Perfecto and John Vandermeer).

Because Wright has a knack for presenting complex ideas in plain language, I asked him to respond to some crucial questions about how to understand our predicament and options. Can we face reality honestly without feeling overwhelmed? Wright suggests we can.

Robert Jensen: Your invocation of “the fire next time,” with its Biblical roots, suggests a moral warning and the potential catastrophe if we are not up to the moral task. Before we get to questions of politics and science, what do you think is the right moral framework for understanding the ecological crises?

Angus Wright: There certainly is a moral question, but I think we in the environmental movement have wasted a lot of time dealing with it at the wrong level. I get frustrated with the deep tendency of so many Americans to be more worried about the task of saving their souls rather than solving the problem. I am not as interested in the purity of intention or personal practice as I am concerned about correctly identifying the nature of problems and getting to work in an organized way to solve them.

The emphasis, for example, on whether individuals are hypocritical when their personal consumption is out of sync with their political/ecological views has been a diversion. It undermines effective organization and helps to maintain the myth that it is personal rather than collective action that really matters. When we think we are saving ourselves, we tend to become self-righteous in ways that separate us from the other people we need to work with in order to effect societal change. The important moral question is social, not individual. How do we collectively figure out ways to live that don’t require that we destroy the planet’s capacity to sustain life?

RJ: What are the two or three most important things we need to understand about humans, psychologically and politically, if we are to avoid that destruction?

AW: Humans are capable of immense creativity and sacrifice, which has been demonstrated in crisis situations such as wars, famines, migrations, and in the building and defense of homes and communities. In my work, I have been frequently reminded of the incredible sacrifices Mexican immigrants make to earn a little money to send back to their families over years, sacrifices that have both an individual and a community aspect. Many of us know how hard and how creatively our parents and ancestors worked to provide us with the lives we now take for granted. Of course, such effort can have negative as well as positive aspects — for example, the creation of the majority European culture of the Americas at the expense of Native Americans and Africans. People are also capable of stunning complacency, greed, and divisiveness.

The secret we seek is what inspires humans to act positively and creatively in the face of huge challenges. As humanity faces the environmental crisis, this is its greatest challenge: How do we elicit the kind of collective and individual action and creativity that will be needed? I think previous experience implies that it cannot be fear alone, nor opportunity alone, nor persuasion alone, nor organization alone, but a blend of these elements, with much else. We have been able to lump these things together successfully in the past in something called patriotism — a powerful force for good and ill — and now we need something like a planetary patriotism. But no planetary patriotism can be built without acknowledging and dealing with the major things that divide us as well as the challenge that must unite us. Putting on a happy face won’t cut it.

RJ: If we have a considerable body of knowledge concerning the seriousness of the ecological crises and we have the capacity to respond to threats, what are the key impediments to change? Is the problem in the political leadership of recent decades? The economic system? Something we can’t yet identify?

AW: One problem is an economic system that impels each company within it to pursue growth — each company must seek new investment funds by demonstrating greater growth potential than its competitors. Another problem is a political system that is so heavily corrupted by corporate cash, exacerbated by the absurd legal fiction that a corporation is a person with constitutional rights to free speech. Without those problems, we could have the kind of largely publicly funded campaigns adopted by other countries. I also think that for all its virtues, the constitutional checks and balances built into our system have brought us to gridlock — we really might want to consider the advantages of a parliamentary system in which the executive branch is headed by the leader of the majority party, as in England and many other parliamentary democracies.

We have to be enlightened enough to take aggressive and expensive actions primarily for the benefit of our children and grandchildren. While individuals and families have been able to do this throughout history, it has proven very difficult for whole societies to do so. All these barriers are so daunting that we become overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of it all. Here we face fundamental philosophical and psychological problems at both the individual and collective levels.

RJ: You said the solutions aren’t going to be individual. But how do you evaluate the efforts of people who focus on their everyday lives? That can range from being diligent about recycling, to buying “green,” to biking to work, to planting a vegetable garden. If we don’t naively believe those things can solve all our problems, are they worth doing?

AW: Our most important problems can only be solved by collective action — new policies and laws taken by government. That requires that we act, above all, as citizens. I have watched over the past 40 years as nearly every important institution in our society has gradually shifted to encouraging us to see ourselves as individuals and consumers as opposed to group participants and citizens. We are all aware of this in advertising, but it has also become a powerful trend in education and in government itself. We are encouraged to believe that we can bring the changes we need by exercising our “consumer vote” in the marketplace more effectively than by exercising our citizenship — not just in voting, but also in public debate, in participating in political parties, in the exercise of our professional judgment, in educating our children, in participation in labor unions and professional associations, in speaking out in our communities. Our “vote” through marketplace purchases can only bring about very limited change, and by thinking of ourselves more as consumers than as citizens we diminish our very dignity as human beings. We become a mouth that eats rather than a voice that speaks.

That said, I am all for making the changes at the individual level that can help to create a culture of frugality, help us realize that we don’t really need the great quantity of junk our civilization produces, help us understand that we can make major social changes while actually improving our lives. Most of us want sociability and conviviality more than we want consumer goods. We can set a good example for others by showing that we can live more happily by consuming less. All of this can also help us live within a discipline of conscious choice rather than of allowing advertising to manipulate us.

RJ: In my experience, academics tend to focus on narrow questions they think they can answer. You seem to gravitate toward big questions that defy definitive conclusions. I wonder if that’s because of your training and teaching — you’re a historian who taught environmental studies. We might say that the object of your inquiry has been everything that happened before today, and the interconnectedness of everything happening today. What lessons have you learned about intellectual life from your career?

AW: When Wes Jackson (president of The Land Institute) recruited me to help him create an environmental studies program at Cal State-Sacramento, I was the all-purpose humanities and social science person in a small core faculty. I learned all I could from Wes about biology and genetics, and from other colleagues about oil and mineral depletion, nuclear power, city and regional planning, environmental law. It was a wonderful kind of second graduate school experience that lasted through an entire career.

I had always been attracted academically to what might be called the “pan-disciplines” such as geography, anthropology, and history, disciplines that can reasonably take on almost any topic in human affairs. Salina, our small Kansas city, was known nationally for having one of the best public libraries of its size, and I spent a lot of time camped out in its stacks. My parents — intensely intellectual people who were too poor to go to college — assumed that any reasonable and moral person would be interested in nearly everything, and they hadn’t been beaten into submission by professors to think differently. They were good models who were eager for knowledge of all kinds. They were looking for clear words and straightforward thinking, and they assumed that good thinking led to social responsibility and political action, to which they were dedicated.

RJ: Thinking about that need for clarity, one last question. As an environmentalist, you can’t ignore the stark reality of the data about our ecological crises. As a historian, you can’t ignore the record of human successes and failures. When you weigh all that up, what advice do you have for how we should face the future? Many people find it hard to face the changes that are likely coming, which I once heard you describe as “dramatic and potentially highly unpleasant.” Are we facing “the fire next time”? Is there a way out of the trap we’ve set for ourselves?

AW: I don’t know if there is a way out, but we have to try. My own expectations are pessimistic because I don’t see enough people having sufficient awareness, understanding, and determination to bring about the major changes we need.

And of course, contradicting what I just said, we don’t really have to try. We only really have to try if we want to maintain our self-respect. If we want to stumble forward drunk while whistling in the dark, we could choose that. I maintain a certain faith that many people are going to make the right choices, and we can hope that is enough. I think Gramsci had it right when he said that he lived with “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” And you have to take that seriously from a guy who wrote while in prison for his political beliefs.

[Robert JensenAll My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

‘Substantive and meaningful’:
Congressional Republicans and the
urgent business of promoting religion

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / November 7, 2011

Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia recently declared that he would work to prevent votes on any new legislation that is not “substantive and meaningful.” To show how serious the Republicans are about addressing only serious public business, on November 1, 2011, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives approved a resolution offered by a Republican congressman, J. Randy Forbes, that reaffirmed “In God We Trust” as the official motto of the United States.

The resolution also supported and encouraged “the public display of the national motto in all public buildings, public schools, and other government institutions.”

No one involved has explained why this reaffirmation of the motto adopted in 1956 and reiterated by a Republican-controlled Congress in 2006, has become a “substantive and meaningful” exercise of the legislative authority of the House.

I thought the U.S. was in the midst of the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. I thought we were still fighting wars in the Middle East. I thought we were having currency issues with China that neede remedying. I thought we were engaging in internet espionage with Israel to interrupt the internet capability in Iran. I thought thousands of Americans were protesting in the streets against the rigged economic system.

I thought we had 9% unemployment officially, and real unemployment in excess of 15%. I thought we had a prolonged drought in Texas that has created great hardship and challenges to the well-being of our people. I thought we were expecting a new round of housing foreclosures against millions of American families.

These and many other problems are, to most of us, “substantive and meaningful,” but the Republicans seem to believe that making this nation’s government side with religion, and one religion in particular, is much more substantive and meaningful than all the economic, social, and environmental problems that are actually in the news and affecting the lives of most Americans daily.

Of course, this posture is in keeping with the theocratic positions of several Republican candidates for the presidency, so it is important for Americans to understand what this issue is about.

In 1782, upon the recommendation of a committee that included Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, Congress adopted an official seal of the U.S., which included the motto “E Pluribus Unum.” That phrase is usually translated as “from many, one,” or “out of many, one,” indicating that out of many states (or colonies) one nation was created. Some prefer to interpret it to mean that from many people of all backgrounds, ethnicities, races, religions, etc., one nation came into being.

“E Pluribus Unum” became the de facto motto of the U.S. until 1956, around the time when rabid anti-communism enveloped the country. It was the period when “In God We Trust” was placed on more American currency and coins than had been done previously, and it was a period when America’s leaders (and most of her people) seemed to be without irony.

The Almighty might view the placement of a reverential reference to God on filthy lucre as creating a graven image in violation of the admonition against such conduct found in the Ten Commandments. Yet, this was also the period when the Congress found it necessary to confound school children everywhere by adding the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. I still recall how hard it was to remember to add that phrase when we recited the Pledge each morning at school.

Such religious pronouncements are promoted by people who want to reinforce their claim that the United States is a Christian nation. Early in our history, John Adams and the Congress early disavowed such a notion in the Treaty of Tripoli, which was adopted in 1796:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion — as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen — and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

The words “Mussulmen” and “Mohometan” refer to those who follow Islam or to the Muslim religion. For those who are irony-challenged, I would suggest that the widespread animosity felt by Americans against Muslims, particularly after 9/11, may seem puzzling in light of the Treaty of Tripoli.

The motto “In God We Trust” should present several obvious problems for those of us who live in a nation made up of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Bahais, Taoists, Wiccans, Hindus, and members of other religious traditions, as well as the over 16% of citizens who profess no religious affiliation.

The term “God” usually refers to the Judeo-Christian god and arguably to Allah, though I have never heard a Muslim refer to Allah by the name “God.” Some other religions don’t believe in any god. By using the name “God,” we exclude all of these others, which seems unAmerican. And for all I know, we have citizens in the U.S. who still believe in Zeus, or Zoriaster, or Krishna, or Thor, or Mithra, or any of the thousands of other gods that have been worshipped through the millennia.

If we have to have a religious motto, shouldn’t it be something like “In a diety we trust?” Yet that would leave out those Americans who don’t trust in any diety.

In pushing his legislation, Forbes claimed that there has been “a disturbing trend of inaccuracies and omissions, misunderstandings of church and state, rogue court challenges, and efforts to remove God from the public domain by unelected bureaucrats.”

Exactly how his resolution fixes any of these alleged problems is not apparent. Undoubtedly, the Republicans are trying to curry favor with the fundamentalist evangelicals who promote a false history of the U.S.

Former evangelist and author Frank Schaeffer, the son of the renowned evangelist Francis Schaeffer, wrote last month,

Like most evangelical/Roman Catholic fundamentalist movements in history, from the Bay State colonies to the Spanish Inquisition, the American Religious Right of today advocates the fusion of state power and religion through the reestablishment of the “Christian America” idea of “American Exceptionalism” (i.e., a nation “chosen” by God), the form of government adopted by the Puritans’ successors during the age of early American colonialism.

Forbes and most congressional Republicans will do almost anything to fuse government and fundamentalist religion, even if it means ignoring the substantive problems faced by most Americans, including most members of the religious right.

Forbes and others like him believe it is their business as government officials to compel me and all other Americans “to firmly declare our trust in God, believing that it will sustain us for generations to come.”

Nothing could be farther from the meaning and actual words of the religion clauses of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; . . .” No public official has the right to tell anyone how or when to practice his or her religion.

Such actions of Congress to privilege some religious beliefs turns all Americans who are not Christian or Jewish into political outsiders. They encourage government at every level to indoctrinate our children into a particular religious view regardless of their families’ beliefs. It is government promotion of religion and is forbidden by the Constitution.

A few representatives recognized this and voted against Forbes’s resolution:

Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.)
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.)
Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.)
Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.)
Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.)
Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.)
Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.)
Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.)
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.)

Two others voted “present.” They were Rep Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Rep. Melvin Watt (D-N.C.).

It should never be the purpose of government to sow religious division among Americans, but that’s just what this resolution does. It is time for all Americans, religious and non-religious, to tell their public officials to stop using religion to appeal to some of their constituents to the exclusion of the rest.

It is time to tell public officials to stop creating religious divisions in our country and acknowledge the clear intent of the the Constitution’s language that one of its authors, Thomas Jefferson, believed created a wall of separation between government and religion. Such a wall takes away nothing from the religious among us, all of whom are free to engage in their religion wherever and however they like, with an important exception: they should not expect the government’s approval or disapproval of their religion.

They should not expect the government to promote their religious beliefs, which is exactly what the Forbes House resolution does.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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