Latin America Moves Left and Forward

[Peace Patriot]

5. All environmental advances in the U.S. came on the heels of the "New Deal" which...

...expanded the financial well-being of millions of Americans, creating a vast middle class and upwardly mobile poor, and sparked all of the vast improvements in civil rights and public participation that culminated in the 1960s and 1970s. The environmental movement was born of that era and essentially came to a halt with Reagan, whose Secretary of the Interior was the one who said, "You've seen one redwood, you've seen them all."* Ever since Reagan, we have been galloping back to the Dark Ages on the environment. The EPA today is a joke. Corporations rule. Environmental regulation is an empty husk.

My point is that the social, economic and political conditions for the kind of environmentalism needed now--to quite literally prevent the DEATH of the planet--exist, or are in the process of being created, in Latin America and almost nowhere else, certainly not here. And in addition to leftist policies of pouring resources into education, medical care, upward mobility for the poor, good wages and decent benefits, high employment, high levels of public participation and other requirements of creating a large middle class--the basic necessary condition for creating good environmental policy, Latin America has a large and politically active Indigenous population whose religions are based on reverence for Mother Earth and a large campesino (small farmer) population which is also politically active and opposed to corporate agribusiness and its poisonous activities.

Latin America doesn't have the solutions; nobody does--not yet anyway--but they are facing the crisis of development vs the environment in a far different world than the one in which the environmental movement (as a widespread phenomenon) was first born. NOBODY KNEW, in the '60s, '70s or '80s, that the redwood forest and other forests are needed as "carbon sinks" and that the size of the trees is directly related to the effectiveness of the forest cover in absorbing carbon emissions. (Thus, ancient redwood trees--which grow to 20 and more feet in circumference and 200 to 300 feet tall, over the course of 500 to 2000 years--are much more valuable organisms for preventing global warming than forests with measly ten or twenty year old trees or clearcut forests where there are no trees, or merely shrubbery, or plantations of baby trees.

There were many other reasons to protect forests, back then--preserving biodiversity (birds, animals, insects, fish) and protecting clean water sources, but the stakes are much higher now--as to what we now KNOW about the Earth's ecosystem. Forests are basically the "lungs of the planet" and we have destroyed about 80% of the planet's "lungs" over the last hundred years!

And that, of course, is only ONE aspect of the picture of Earth's destruction. The others include vast toxic pollution from industrial processes and substances, vast loss of biodiversity in every kind of ecosystem, pollution of the oceans, areas where the ocean is now dead, loss of fresh water sources, catastrophic melting of the polar ice caps, vast losses of wild land, nuclear power disasters of various kinds (and more to come) and so on.

Such impacts--impacts that are literally destroying the world we live in at an alarming pace--require bold, vibrant politics, bold, vibrant thinking and discussion and bold, vibrant, politically active populations to solve. Latin America, inspired by goals of social justice and sovereignty, are having the kinds of bold, vibrant discussions that we are not having, because OUR democracy is nearly mordant. And that mordancy started with Reagan.

Latin America, thus far, has NOT been a major contributor to this global catastrophe. The most developed and most highly industrialized societies are far and away the major culprits. BUT, Latin America is most definitely headed in the direction of massive development, at the same time that they are making leaps forward in social justice and democracy. The difference between us and them is that THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT IT. As humans, that is how we begin to solve problems. And if there is sufficient democracy and openness and responsive government, problems do get addressed as the result of open discussion. Our government is positively barricaded AGAINST such discussion. Their purpose is to fend off "environmentalists" on behalf of corporate interests-and conscienceless profiteers. We have only to look at the Alaska pipeline, the BP oil spill, "fracking" and Fukushima, to know this. "We the People"--who have always been 70% to 80% in favor of strong environmental regulation--have no influence whatsoever on government policy.

What I see in Latin America is the potential for discussion to lead to solutions and action. The conditions are there. Democracy is alive in Latin America. Government leaders actually listen to people. Some leaders are acutely attuned to the world's environmental crisis--Evo Morales, for instance. Others are more labor organizer types like Lula da Silva--their emphasis on job creation and spreading the wealth. They ALL have the problems of development vs the environment before them, and, unlike the "New Deal" leaders here, who spread the wealth here through the '70s, they KNOW what's at stake as to our planet's ecosystem. They are well-informed.

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*(And that was no idle remark or stupid misspeak. It was POLICY--and not the least consequence of that rightwing/corporate policy, fronted by the fake stupid Neanderthals of Reaganism, was the utter decimation of the ancient redwood forest in California, of which less than 5% remains today. The redwood forest region is now severely depressed because THE TREES ARE GONE. No more timber--no more timber jobs. And that wealth is all gone--sucked right out of the region by rapacious timber corporations. It is an excruciating dilemma for leaders with a conscience--for progressive leaders like those in LatAm who know what is going down, and are torn between the desire for well-paying jobs--however short term they may be--and the desire to use their country's resources to benefit their people, on the one hand, and local and world environmental crisis, on the other. But at least they ARE torn--and out of that pain, solutions can be born. Our leaders don't have that conflict. And, lately, they don't seem to give a crap about jobs either. Outsourcing should have been banned long ago--if we had any kind of democracy left. It is absolutely traitorous.)