Basic Call to Consciousness

Our Strategy for Survival

Continued from last week.

The specter of regional famine, or even worldwide famines, cannot be interpreted as the simple product of a world of scarce resources overwhelmed by the needs of expanding human populations. The situation is not that simple. In the United States, for example, a simple program of energy conservation – insulation of dwellings, office and industrial buildings would cut back energy consumption by more than 25% in 10 years, and even given growth predictions in terms of populations and economy, the U.S, could conceivably enjoy the current standard of living in the year 2000 while consuming less energy than was consumed in 1980.

The fact is that it is highly unlikely that the United States will adopt a program of energy conservation along lines which would drastically cut back consumption. The present U.S. political system is controlled by energy interests which are concerned with profit and growth, and energy lobbyists are not interested in conservation. In fact, there is no sector of the U.S. economy which will move toward energy conservation as a national energy policy, even though such a policy might conceivably conserve wasted energy which could have gone toward production of food. The problems which we are facing today, as a species which inhabits a planet of limited resources, arise not simply out of physical limitations but from political realities. It is a hard fact of life that the misery which exists in the world will be manipulated in the interests of profit. Politics and economics are intricately linked in the West, and social considerations command inferior priorities in the world’s capitals. Energy conservation is not likely to become a policy in the Western countries generally, and the acceptable alternative in the eyes of the multinational energy corporations is the plan to create much more energy through the production of nuclear power plants, especially fast breeder reactors. The predictable misery caused by increases in energy prices which push up food prices (and thus drive the poor from the food marketplace) will also provide the grist for the promotion drives of the multinationals. Nuclear reactors will be made to sound more necessary.

Technologies have political cousins. The same people who own the oil interests have enough clout in many governments to discourage serious and broad-based efforts at energy conservation. They have the ability to command governments to support energy development schemes which will leave them in control of the world’s usable energy sources and also in control of the world’s marketplace. The same people constitute a class of interest in the Western world which seeks to control every aspect of the economic life of all peoples. Practically every people in the West will be dependent of their technologies for energy and food production, and all who enter the marketplace which they control will be colonized.

The roots of a future world which promises misery, poverty, starvation and chaos lie in the processes which control and destroy the locally specific cultures of the peoples of the world. To the extent that peoples and areas of the world are dependent on the giant multinational corporations which control production, distribution, and consumption patterns and to that extent only is the future a dark and ominous one. For this reason, the definition of colonialism needs to be expanded in the consciousness of the peoples of the planet earth. Colonialism is a process by which indigenous cultures are subverted and ultimately destroyed in the interests of worldwide market economy, quite contrary to all of the teachings of the colonists, are exactly the interests which promise to create a crisis for humanity in the decades to come.

Continued next week.