Censored 2014 (55 page)

^18.
Pete Spotts, “Mass Extinction? Man May Still Have Time to Catalog Earth's Species,”
Christian Science Monitor,
January 25, 2013.

^19.
Jim Dwyer, “Warning of A World That's Hotter Wetter,”
New York Times,
May 23, 2012, 16,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/nyregion/african-fossils-may-show-the-future-of-cli-mate-change.html?_r=o
.

^20.
20 Carl Zimmer, “Multitude of Species Face Threat of Warming,”
New York Times,
April 5, 2011, Di.

^21.
Naomi Lindt, “The Call of the Wilds in Cambodia,”
New York Times,
March 6, 2011, TR8.

^22.
Gaia Vince, “A Looming Mass Extinction Caused by Humans,” British Broadcasting Company, November 1, 2012,
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/201211101-a-looming-mass-extinction/i
.

^23.
Ewen Callaway, “Cloning: Can it Resurrect Extinct Species?” BBC Future, February 29, 2012,
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120229-can-we-resurrect-extinct-species
.

^24.
Michelle Lalonde, “Biodiversity's Concrete Solution; Urban Accommodation of Wildlife and Green Spaces Needs to Be Championed More Actively by Politicians,”
Montreal Gazette,
November 1, 2010,
http://blogs.montrealgazette.com/2010/11/oi/green-life-column-biodiver-sitys-concrete-solution
.

^25.
Annalee Newitz, “Can Humans Survive?: Five Mass Extinctions Have Nearly Wiped Out Life on Earth. The Sixth Is Coming,”
Newsweek,
May 6, 2013,
http://www.thedailybeast.com/news-week/2013/05/06/the-sixth-mass-extinction-is-upon-us-can-humans-survive.html
.

^26.
Herbert I. Schiller,
The Mind Managers
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1973).

^27.
Faye Flam, “In Haiti, a Trek to Save Rare Animals: As Its Forests Disappear, Other Life Does, Too.”
Philadelphia Inquirer,
September 13, 2011, A1.

^28.
For definitions and examples, see Peter Singer,
Animal Liberation
(New York: Avon Books, 1975); David Nibert,
Animal Rights/Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002); and Joan Dunayer,
Speciesism
(Der-wood: Ryce Publishing, 2004).

^29.
Species Alliance,
Call of Life;
UNEP, “Global Biodiversity Outlook 3”; Center for Biological Diversity, “Owning Up to Overpopulation,”
Endangered Earth
(Fall 2009): 1,7; and Paul and Anne Ehrlich,
One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future
(Washington DC: Island Press, 2004). One classic statement on this problem is William R. Catton,
Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change
(Champaign: University of Illinois, 1980).

^30.
For notable exceptions in the sociological literature, see John C. Alessio,
Social Problems and Inequality: Social Responsibility Through Progressive Sociology
(London: Ashgate Publishers, 2011); and Riley E. Dunlap et al., eds.,
Sociological Theory and the Environment: Classical Foundations, Contemporary Insights
(Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

^31.
UNEP, “Global Biodiversity Outlook 3” 12–13. For one accessible account of efforts to model the economic value of undisturbed ecosystems, see Gretchen C. Daily and Katherine Ellison,
The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable
(Washington DC: Island Press, 2002).

^32.
United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),
The Precautionary Principle: World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology,
March 2005,
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001395/1139578e.pdf
. While there are numerous definitions of the precautionary principle, a strong definition, when applied, requires all social actors who engage in economic/technological/social activities that could somehow affect the delicate balance within an ecosystem or otherwise bring harm to life—to first demonstrate that, indeed, no such harm will occur. Until then, no action should be taken. While weak versions of this principle are applied in some parts of Europe and non-European countries like New Zealand, there is little notable application of this principle in the United States, where the focus tends to be more on risk management related to cost-benefit analyses than on protecting life and the ecosystem.

^33.
Annie Leonard,
The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health
(New York: Free Press, 2010).

^34.
General Electric is one of many giant corporations that uses its nearly endless economic resources to defend its illegal activities—all the while doing cost-benefit assessments of being caught and prosecuted. For examples, see “GE Misdeeds,”
http://www.cleanupge.org/gemis-deeds.html
; and Charlie Cray, “General Electric,” CorpWatch,
http://www.corpwatch.org/section.php?id=16
. Corporations are also effective at using their resources to influence the political system and government “regulatory” agencies. Consider, for example, the relationship between Monsanto and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), as covered in
Censored
story #24, “Widespread GMO Contamination: Did Monsanto Plant GMOs before USDA Approval?,” in this volume.

^35.
See, for example, Winona LaDuke, “A Society Based on Conquest Cannot Be Sustained,” in
Oppression and Social Justice: Critical Frameworks,
ed. Julie Andrzejewski (Needham Heights: Simon & Schuster Custom Publishers, 1996), 199–206.

^36.
Alterieri et al., “Trophic Cascade” and Species Alliance,
Call of Life.

^37.
Leonard,
Story of Stuff.

^38.
See, for example,
Censored
story #7, “The Merchants of Death and Nuclear Weapons,” and story #12, “The US Has Left Iraq with an Epidemic of Cancers and Birth Defects,” in this volume.

^39.
See, for instance,
Censored
story #15, “Food Riots, the New Normal?” in this volume.

^40.
See
Censored
story #3, “Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Worse Than Expected,” in
Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution,
Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth with Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 91–93; and story #8, “The Fairy Tale of Clean and Safe
Nuclear Power,” in
Censored 2012: Sourcebook for the Media Revolution,
Mickey Huff and Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011), 101–107.

^41.
In this volume, for example, see
Censored
story #21, “Monsanto and India's ‘Suicide Economy'” and story #24, “Widespread GMO Contamination: Did Monsanto Plant GMO's before USDA Approval?”

^42.
For example, see “Baby's Tub Still Toxic?”
Censored 2013,
96–97.

^43.
See
Censored
story #18, “Fracking Our Food Supply.”

^44.
For example,
Censored
story #18, “The True Cost of Chevron,” in
Censored 2011: The Top Censored Stories of 2009–10,
eds. Mickey Huff, Peter Phillips, and Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2010), 94–99.

^45.
See
Censored
story #14, “Wireless Technology a Looming Health Crisis,” in this volume, and also story #15, “Dangers of Everyday Technology,” in
Censored 2013,
93–96.

^46.
For instance,
Censored
story #17, “Nanotech Particles Pose Serious DNA Risks to Humans and the Environment,” in
Censored 2011,
88–93; and story #22, “Nanotechnology Offers Exciting Possibilities But Health Effects Need Research,” in
Censored 2006: The Top 25 Censored Stories,
eds. Peter Phillips and Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 110–111.

^47.
See, for example,
Censored
story #12, “Pacific Garbage Dump: Did You Really Think Your Plastic Bag Was Being Recycled?” in
Censored 2012,
107–108.

^48.
For instance,
Censored
story #10, “Mountaintop Removal Threatens Ecosystem and Economy,”
Censored 2006,
75–78. On Navy testing, see “U.S. Military's War on Earth,”
Censored 2004: The Top 25 Censored Stories,
eds. Peter Phillips and Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 79–82.

^49.
See
Censored
story #2, “Oceans in Peril,”
Censored 2013,
87–89.

^50.
International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, “Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production,” UNEP, June 2, 2010,
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub releases/2010-06/udot-ffu053O110.php
.

^51.
Project Censored reported this as the
Censored
story #2, “US Department of Defense is the Worst Polluter on the Planet,”
Censored 2011,
15–24.

Michael Nagler

1. A CRISIS OF MEANING

Every social movement needs two resources to succeed:
unity,
or a sense of
shared purpose;
and a long-term
strategy.
That is acutely true of the movements swirling around the globe today in response to crisis after crisis unleashed by the failing institutions of the prevailing order. Environmentalist and author Paul Hawken has convincingly shown that, while there are literally a million or more worthy projects being carried out in “the largest social movement in history,” they are working in isolation, thus forfeiting their potential effectiveness.
²
And nonviolence scholars (yes, there are some) have realized for some time that spontaneous popular uprisings, hopeful and dramatic as they may be, soon lose momentum for want of long-term strategy, thus unintentionally giving rise to elements as destructive as the regimes they dislodged, when those elements rush into the vacuum created by those popular uprisings.

Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's iconic campaign for India's freedom, which was conspicuously endowed with both unity and strategy,
we at the Metta Center for Nonviolence have created a platform called Roadmap that provides a framework for both shared purpose and long-term strategy.

Nonviolence is the Roadmap's operative principle. By emphasizing nonviolence, we provide an alternative to the established culture, which sees coercive force as the fundamental basis of both change and order.

But nonviolence is more than a method; it is itself a new story of reality and human significance. The Roadmap reflects this understand
ing by placing the power of the individual at its center, in direct contradiction to the passivity and powerlessness that characterize the old story. The individual is not just the beneficiary of this new model but its source. The energy of change arises from personal empowerment as it did in Gandhi's scenario, and moves outward through “constructive program” to confrontational nonviolent resistance, if necessary.
³

Among the areas that serve as guidelines for essential change and regeneration in the Nonviolent Resistance ring around the Roadmap, we give primary consideration to the creation of a new story. Observing that ballads and stories “socialize us into our roles as men and women and affect our identities,” the pioneer of cultivation theory, George Gerbner, often quoted Scottish patriot Andrew Fletcher (1655–1716), “If I were permitted to write all the ballads, I need not care who makes the laws of the nation.”
⁴
The powerful resonance of a person-centered movement—armed, as it were, with a new story that makes clear
why
the person is the center of global meaning and power—has an incredible potential for change. Why care about other peoples' health care, especially if there might be more to go around if they weren't there? Why look for an alternative to brute force, even if its destructive side effects outweigh any possible gains, if we live in a regime of competing interests and there's no other way? What, after all, do human trafficking, high rates of murder and suicide, weak gun safety laws, election fraud, banksterism, and war have in common? These all rest upon a flawed vision of the human being. In fact, “flawed” is an understatement. The prevailing image of a human being today—an image consistent across the mainstream of our art forms, education, policy-making, the news media, and a majority of scientists (though their number is shrinking somewhat)—is that of a material body separate from other creatures and the environment, doomed to compete for ever scarcer resources in a universe that has come about by chance. “What liberals and progressives don't seem to understand,” wrote Lynn Stuart Parramore recently, “is that you don't counter a myth with a pile of facts and statistics. You have to counter it with a more powerful story.”
⁵
That more powerful story is beginning to take shape.

THE NEW STORY

What we have lost in the modern desacralization of nature and the degradation of the human image—and what we stand to gain by reversing it—can be thrown into relief by this passage from a fourteenth-century text of Christian mysticism,
The Cloud of Unknowing:
“Beneath you and external to you lies the entire created universe. Yes, even the sun, the moon, and the stars. They are fixed above you, splendid in the firmament, yet they cannot compare to your exalted dignity as a human being.”
⁶

Seven centuries later, University of California-Berkeley's quantum physicist Henry P. Stapp wrote:

Present-day visionaries frame this new narrative in terms of three inter-related stories: the
Universe Story
(which is also the title of Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry's excellent book);
⁸
the
Earth Story,
some-times called Sacred Earth or the Gaia Hypothesis; and finally the
Per-son Story.
Although these stories overlap, it is the third story, about the new image of the human being, that is critical for significant social change. Unfortunately, it has been the least studied. But, to appreciate all fully, we must start with the biggest picture.

The Universe Story

For our purposes, the postclassical or quantum-era story of the universe can be summed up in two propositions:

1. All reality is an interconnected whole. It is “nonlocal,” in the language of physics; but in the plain words of Swami Vivekananda, “The whole universe is one.”
⁹
Nothing that we do, say, or even think is without effects, whether measurable or not, that extend everywhere. This interconnected perspective resonates with the observation of Martin Luther King Jr. that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
¹⁰

2. All of evolution has been a steady unfolding of consciousness.

The two points are clearly related because unity, or “nonlocality,” is utterly impossible in the material realm but begins to be imaginable as a feature of consciousness.

But two things must be added to the second point. First, “unfolding” means just that.
¹¹
Consciousness itself, the underlying reality in both quantum physicists and the Vedantic and other traditions, did not evolve: it always was and still is, unchanging and indivisible. “I regard consciousness as fundamental,” physicist Max Planck wrote in 1931. “I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. . . . Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
¹²
Consciousness has been there, Rabbi Michael Lerner has argued, “[n]ot from the emergence of brains but from the very, very beginning of everything. . . . There never was a time when the universe wasn't equally conscious as it was physical.”
¹³
Indeed, pursuing Lerner's line of inquiry, we may consider whether the universe is
more
conscious than physical.

What has evolved is not consciousness itself, then, but life-forms with greater abilities to use this consciousness—climaxing, as far as life on this planet is concerned, with the uniquely human (though not often fully utilized) capacity for self-awareness. This long process has been beautifully brought out by the popular meditation teacher, Sri Eknath Easwaran: “If we take the Gita's view, that God has become the world and mind and matter belong to the same field, we get a much loftier view of evolution: the eons-long rise of consciousness from pure energy until the simplest of life-forms emerges and the struggle for increasing self-awareness begins.”
¹⁴

Second, and even more significant: evolution
will continue to be
an unfolding of consciousness. As physiologists and sages alike say of our cognitive capacities, they have not begun to reach any known limitation. We nonetheless experience at least one serious limitation in our consciousness, which Albert Einstein, in a famous passage, identified and pointed out how to transcend:

Here is the twentieth century's greatest scientific genius describing nothing less than the purpose of life, to “shatter the chains of egotism” that create the feeling of separateness between ourselves and others, as Gandhi put it.
¹⁶
This would seem to be the great leap that humankind has taken beyond other animals.

Scientists have calculated that the likelihood that this universe and its most spectacular achievement—life—came about by chance is about that of a strong wind blowing through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 707. Clearly, as Nobel Prize-winning biologist George Wald said at a recent conference, this universe has been “headed for life from the Big Bang.”
¹⁷
Heading for life and raising consciousness are two ways of looking at the same phenomenon. There is also a third. Since higher consciousness means an enhanced awareness of unity—because as evolutionary biology has discovered, cooperation has played a more potent role in evolution than competition and, as neuroscience has discovered, we higher animals are “wired for empathy”—then the universe exhibits what Buddhists call
mahakaruna
or “vast compassion.” It exhibits what we might call—to paraphrase an expression from the sterile debate between creationism and science— “compassionate design”; and we participate in that design when we carry out projects of social change through nonviolence. This would
explain why solving problems with nonviolence leads to more lasting solutions than doing so in the “traditional” way—with violence, which, from this perspective, is counter-evolutionary.

While animals exhibit many behaviors of appeasement and conflict transformation—far more than were recognized before the birth of “positive science”
¹⁸
—it would seem to be a human prerogative to consciously choose suffering as a way of opening the heart of the opponent for his or her own welfare. In Gandhian or “principled” nonviolence, we are never against the true well-being of the other even when we're compelled to resist their attitude, behavior, or institutions: in Christian terms, “We hate the sin, but not the sinner.” Gandhi stated very simply: “Nonviolence is the law of our species,” a spirit that “lies dormant in the brute.”
¹⁹
Without a framing narrative to rationalize this law, nonviolent activists have nonetheless discovered it in their own experiences.

Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) is one of some twenty nongovernmental organizations that is now actively applying nonviolence across borders in situations of impending or open conflict—a development of Gandhi's
Shanti Sena
or “peace army” idea that has been expanding throughout the world beneath the radar of the mass media. Recently, a CPT field team member was conversing with an activist in Iraqi Kurdistan who announced his intention to use nonviolence in their struggle. The CPT member, perhaps to test his friend's resolve, pointed out that nonviolence can be dangerous (which is true, though not nearly as dangerous as violence), that sometimes nonviolence doesn't yield the hoped-for results right away (which may also be true but again is even more true of violence).
²⁰
The activist replied, “Sometimes you are happy in nonviolence because you are not losing your soul. You might lose hope, or get tired, but you are not losing your soul.” He does well to repeat the phrase; “I lost my soul in Iraq/Afghanistan” is frequently on the lips of veterans who, numbering in hundreds of thousands (actually, 1.7
million
from Vietnam alone), are suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, which drives increasing numbers of veterans to the point of suicide.
²¹
A retired US Army psychiatrist recently said that the response to this tragedy of the Army and the Department of Veterans Affairs is to not talk about it, because to acknowledge the existence of this widespread phenomenon would
be “to pathologize an absolutely necessary experience”
²²
—namely, war. But there is another reason the military doesn't talk about it: it lies beyond the vision of the prevailing paradigm, with its assumption of alienation and separateness.