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By Root 1490 0

enough, for instance, you can end up convinced you’ll be standing over your vegetable patch with your shotgun, warding off the marauding gang that’s after your carrots. . . . The marines aren’t going to be much help there—they’re not geared for Mad Max—but your neighbors might be. Imagining local life in a difficult world means imagining taking more responsibility not only for your food but for your defense. (Consider Switzerland, for example, where every adult male is a soldier.) Militia is an ugly word to many of us, but it’s worth remembering, at least for those of us with tricorne hats in the closet, that a local militia fought the fight on Lexington Green.54

That is an image of America as a failed state. There really must be a better option. Civilization, for all its faults, has much to recommend it, much within it that is worth defending. World civilization, this largely capitalist global economy, for all its exploitation and inequity, has produced phenomenal wealth and technology. Can we really not imagine a way to redeploy and redistribute these assets and capacities?

CHAPTER 16

Implications and Possibilities

In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own,

partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons

with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a

Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering

there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasper-

ated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enor-

mous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.

—HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick

CIVILIZATION IS IN CRISIS , though the effects are not yet fully felt. The metabolism of the world economy is fundamentally out of sync with that of nature. And that is a mortal threat to both. In the preceding pages, I have shown how the social impacts of climate change are already upon us, articulating themselves through the preexisting crises of poverty and violence, which are the legacies of Cold War militarism and neoliberal economics. The combination of these factors, their imbrications and mutual acceleration, is the catastrophic convergence. As part of the catastrophic convergence, we see forms of violent adaptation emerging.

In the Global South these take the form of: ethnic irredentism, religious fanaticism, rebellion, banditry, narcotics trafficking, and the small-scale resource wars like the desperate skirmishing over water and cattle in which the Turkana herder Ekaru Loruman was killed. In the North, the multilayered crisis appears as the politics of the armed lifeboat: the preparations for open-ended counterinsurgency, militarized borders, aggressive anti-immigrant policing, and a mainstream proliferation of rightwing xenophobia.

And keep in mind this key fact: even if all greenhouse gas emissions stopped immediately—that is, if the world economy collapsed today, and not a single light bulb was switched on nor a single gasoline-powered motor started ever again—there is already enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to cause significant warming and disruptive climate change, and with that considerably more poverty, violence, social dislocation, forced migration, and political upheaval. Thus we must find humane and just means of adaptation, or we face barbaric prospects.

I will not offer a program of green development, nor one of grassroots peace building and disarmament, nor a list of NGOs that point the way forward with their good deeds. Such efforts must be generated in their appropriate contexts by the protagonists of specific local dramas. Our crisis is not a matter of the reading public lacking the names and addresses of groups to work with. Likewise, there are almost endless examples of small-scale, grassroots forms of socially just adaptation that use appropriate technology and are embedded in participatory democracy. But these will remain Lilliputian until they become central to state policies and a formal agenda of economic redistribution on an international scale.

Furthermore,