OR, NOTES ON ECONOMICS
In the latest Harper's (November, 2009), Steven Stoll sends a shot across the bow of climate deniers. But, the import of Stoll's article comes at the end:
Taking responsibility for the consequences of agriculture, capitalism, and industrialism is not the same thing as believing that humans control the tit and wobble of the globe. It requires us to wield what control we have through public policy. The recent decision by the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases as a public-health risk under the Clean Air Act does more than rebuke the deniers. It represents an extraordinary shift in American perception. It heralds the end, or so we can hope, of an approach to our atmosphere--as an infinite sink--that has financed industrial capitalism since soot turned the birds black in Manchester. We can only hope that the people of the most polluting nation will finally ask some meaningful questions. What is a just climate and what [is] [I found a TYPO!] an unjust one? Which climate represents the insatiable demands of corporate growth rather than the health and stability of everyone else? By confirming the human role in climate change, and by declaring a warming world injurious to the public good, the EPA has swung a club against perhaps the grandest capitalist conceit of the twentieth century: that society forms part of the economy, not the other way around.
Ecology becomes policy when our responsibility becomes undeniable. So completely cultivated, walked over, and settled up is our planet that it no longer makes sense to regard any part of it as lying beyond human influence.
I hope that we can read this meaning into the EPA's actions, but, I think that it's more likely that the EPA took this action because for reasons both political (the "Blue Dogs" and the rise of Pentecostal Republicans) and structural (the Senate), the legislative branch is incapable of taking serious actions, and the executive branch then fills that gap.
But wouldn't it be nice if we had indeed "swung a club against perhaps the grandest capitalist conceit of the twentieth century: that society forms part of the economy, not the other way around." Dare to dream, I suppose.
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