Oh, go ahead. Clear the room and save the planet.

I’m talking about bringing up overpopulation every time there is a discussion about global warming, alternative energy, carbon emissions, extinction of species, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the ozone layer, acid rain, or the melting polar ice caps.

That’s right… “overpopulation.” Too many people.

And, trust me, it will clear the room. There is a reason why activists and politicians never bring it up, even though it’s the biggest “duh” on the planet.

The subject was a popular, or at least controversial one about fifty years ago. Paul Ehrlich wrote a bestseller called The Population Bomb and introduced the concept of “zero population growth.” There was a huge national conversation. The type of conversation that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had kicked off just seven years earlier. Folks were doing the math, considering the consequences, and talking about policy changes and possible solutions.

And then, the conversation was dropped. For fifty years.

What happened? Well… For starts, not all of Ehrlich’s predictions came true. Death rates did not rise. India did not starve.

On the other hand, some of his predictions did come true. When the book was written, there were between three and four billion people in the world. In 2012, that figure reached seven billion, having nearly doubled.

Several voices criticized Ehrlich’s book. Biologist and politician Barry Commoner was one of them. He had a theory that social and technological development would lead to a natural decrease in both population growth and environmental damage. Needless to say he was wrong.

But the silence prevails, even as the elephant outgrows the living room, filling it with poop and gaseous emissions.  Why?

Because to talk about overpopulation is to talk about population control. And population control is an explosive subject. Where it has been mandated, there has been an astronomical rise in the aborting of female fetuses. The whole subject touches a deep nerve among ethnic and racial minorities and colonized people who have had to endure the horrors of involuntary sterilization, genocide, “ethnic cleansing,” and cultural genocide. It raises the specter of eugenics and social engineering. And then, of course, there are the religious arguments against birth control, abortion, and women’s autonomy.

Talk of population control also threatens the ruling elite… right down to their toes. To quote the words of Venezuelan  sociologist Edgardo Lander:

"Capitalism is an unlimited growth system. There can be no such thing as a steady-state capitalism, or capitalism with negative growth.”

Endless breeding and doubling populations spell more consumers, or, as the economists would put it, “expanding markets.” And that means greater Gross National Product, more jobs, more investment capital, more prosperity.  Who wants to put the kibosh on that?

But let me state the obvious: While human populations have doubled, planetary resources have not. While human waste products have doubled, places to store them have not. And, quoting Lander again, “Unlimited growth is not possible in a limited planet.” Capitalism, like any pyramid scheme, will run its course.

The reality is that burgeoning population growth is the cause of the environmental crisis. (Can’t wait to the read the comments on this blog.) Yes, poor distribution, mismanagement of resources, racism, colonialism, endless war, etc. etc. have not helped, but there are limits to what the planet can sustain. Some are saying we have already passed those limits.

So let’s get back to my original suggestion: Why not interject the issue of overpopulation into every discussion of the environmental crisis? 

Um, because most folks don’t care to be branded racist, facist, childhating, misogynist, ignorant, colonialist, and anti-spiritual.

Fair enough, but let’s look at why we should take that risk anyway…

Because nature bats last. Because reality always wins. Because nothing gets to the root of the problem except getting to the root of the problem. And because the plants and the animals dying for our sins do not have a voice. And if they did, they would say, “It’s the overpopulation of one exceptionally short-sighted, avaricious  and filthy species, stupid!”

The conversation will not be easy and the solutions are offensive. But let’s do it anyway. We can take it, but the planet can't.

It’s time for a new political party.  “The Party of the Future.” It doesn’t even have to be huge in order to be effective. It just has to be noisy.

I’m talking about a political party whose SOLE PLATFORM is to examine and publicize the long-term impact of any and all policies and legislation.

No focus on political expediency, compromise with corporate lobbyists, deal-making, etc. Because this party is only and ever about one thing: The Future.

We pass economic policy that binds future generations to hopeless debt. We continue to enable an economic system based on unlimited growth of markets...  This has led to colonization, the horrors of NAFTA, and now a philosophy of perpetual warfare (we destroy massive infrastructures and then hire ourselves to rebuild them again). We engage in manufacturing and innovation that is solely profit-driven with inadequate  analysis to how these technologies may impact human society. We generate incredibly toxic waste that we flush into the ocean or waft into the atmosphere or shove into landfills. We have never yet come up with a plan for disposal of nuclear waste. 

The Party of the Future would generate ongoing pressure on the other parties to make concessions to these concerns. Because the Party of the Future would not be owned, and because it would have only one focus, and because it would have moral force behind it, it would have the ability to harass and prod the traditionally  lumbering and pandering political parties. 

I actually believe that the rising generation of voters considers The Future important. Probably because they are facing the distinct possibility of not having one. 

And that is thanks to my generation.

I belong to the Generation of Irrevocable Destruction. It’s a shameful legacy. My generation of “Boomers” has seen… oh, goddess, what haven’t we seen: 

• Extinction of species
• Acid rain
  
• Global warming
  
• Nuclear accidents
  
• Air pollution
  
• Water pollution
  
• Policy of “perpetual warfare” to support corporate capitalism’s demand for ever-expanding markets
  
• Depletion of water supplies
  
• Genetically modified food
  
• Destruction of the rainforests
  
• Pollution of the ocean
• Massive oil spills

… and all kinds of things we probably haven’t even noticed yet.

What would it take to form The Party of the Future?  Not that much. A handful of committed folks with some social networking skills and a great webmaster. And a team of dedicated research folks.  Actually, scratch that. How about a team of folks with some common sense and decency who are able to communicate their concerns with clarity and accountability?

I’ll sign on. It’s the least I can do.

In her  book, The Symbiotic Planet: Evolution by Merger, geo-scientist Lynn Margulis has put forth what she calls the “Gaia Concept.”  What this is, is a serial endosymbiosis theory of evolution.

And you thought this was going to be about food . . .

Bear with me, because the food chain we all learned about in grade school is on the brink of becoming the food potluck—a paradigm shift so major that it’s going to make the discovery of fire look like an evolutionary weenie roast. What we are witnessing is the closing down of our homo sapiens executive dining room in favor of a more democratic, more inclusive, inter-species, employee lunchroom. And it’s all about the “Gaia Concept.”

So just what is this “serial endosymbiosis” that Margulis is talking about? In a nutshell, it’s a theory about relationships not just between plants and animals, but also between them and atmospheric gases, surface rocks, and water, which she maintains are regulated by the growth, death, integration and other activities of living organisms. In other words, it’s about the entire ecosystem of the Earth’s surface as a series of interacting ecosystems, which is definitely not your grandmother’s theory of evolution.

In 1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species, the book that made a monkey out of creation theory. Darwin’s theory of evolution was about survival of the fittest: Random genetic mutations would lead to “natural selection,” whereby the more rugged or adaptive species would multiply and be fruitful, while the less rugged, less adaptive species would die out. In other words, according to Darwin, competition was good for us. This notion led to something called “Social Darwinism,” a convenient rationale for the rampant and predatory capitalism that characterized the Industrial Revolution and which continues, under various guises, to manifest itself today.

But, Margulis has looked at the numbers, and they just don’t add up.  She makes the point that genetic mutations, although common and easy to induce, rarely lead to changes that are beneficial to the organism. In other words, one’s chances for becoming the lucky host of an advantageous change in DNA structure are considerably worse than those for winning the lottery—and the chances are even slimmer of becoming the founder of a new species, based on such a rare mutation.

Margulis argues that evolutionary advances are achieved, not by good genes and natural selection, but by a species’ success in achieving symbiotic mergers with other species. And just as Darwinism coincided with the economic movements of its day, Margulis’ theory appears to be right on time for a planet that has been ravaged by the proponents of Social Darwinism and headed toward a global economy.

In explaining to the lay person how symbiosis works, Margulis uses the example of lichen. Lichen is a combination of two organisms living in a mutually beneficial arrangement. Most of the lichen is composed of fungal filaments, but among these filaments are green algal cells.  If the lichen is submerged in water, the fungus will die out and the algae will proliferate. On the other hand, if there is an inadequate amount of sunlight to sustain the algae’s photosynthesis, then it will die out, leaving the fungus to its own devices. The algae gains a structure that enables it to live on land, and the fungus benefits from the food-making capacity of the algae.

Moving to mammals for her examples of symbiosis, Margulis describes the cow, not as an entity, but as a fifty-gallon fermentation vat. The cow does not digest the grass it eats. The grass is digested by the organisms that are growing—yes, symbiotically—inside its gut.

Having led us gently by the hand from lichen to cow, she now asks us to make the leap from cow to human. And here Margulis is not so gentle. She informs us that we are all hosting eyelash mites. All of us. It doesn’t matter that we take a shower every morning; we still have them. And she invites us to look at our body fluids through the lens of a microscope in order to see the plethora of exotic critters living out their lives, as it were, under our very noses. Having brought us along this far, she then asks us to consider the colon. And here, even the most rabid Darwinist must pause before the void.

The colon is host to the bacteria that constitute the largest percentage of the dry weight of the human body. And whether we like it or not, these bacteria constitute a de facto Lower GI Tract Tenants’ Association. When we are not eating with proper symbiotic respect for the needs of the bacteria in our gut, they die out or the more harmful ones proliferate, and we find, like most landlords, that unhappy tenants have a way of making their problems into problems for the landlords. Unhappy colon bacteria can form pockets of resistance, trash the place, or stage a sit-down strike.

The early 21st century has seen an unprecedented breakdown in communication between the bacterial tenants’ association and the landlord homo sapiens. Perhaps in a simpler time and place, when the human scavenger’s choices were narrowed to a unripe yam, a ripe yam, or a rotten yam, the bacteria had less to fear from the appetites of the landlord.  But in the year 2002, the human forager faces a staggering array of substances for ingesting. Notice, I say “substances,” not “food.” There was actually a time when the food industry granted an award for the “invention” of foods from substances not usually considered edible. Cool Whip forever distinguished itself by being the first, and subsequently most difficult to top, recipient. Even when the substances ingested are the more traditional fruits and vegetables of the human habitat, the consumer discovers that these have been “enhanced” with dyes, their shelf lives have been extended by the use of preservatives, the crop yield has been multiplied by dousing with pesticides, and, most recently, unnatural selection via genetic engineering has been imposed in the name of some surreal, corporate survival of the fittest—which the Supreme Court now informs us have the legals rights of persons.

Our intestinal bacteria, which are the product of hundreds of thousands of years of non-corporate evolution, are at a loss to come up with the one-in-a-bazillion kind of genetic mutations that might, over eons, enable them to adapt to what we are eating today.

Unable to cope with the increasing volume of toxins, the gut has taken to passing some of the garbage on to the bloodstream. The infamous “leaky gut syndrome” is the culprit behind strange new constellations of such seemingly unrelated symptoms as neuro-fibromyalgia, sleep disturbances, panic attacks, migraine headaches, mysterious skin lesions, and debilitating fatigue. What happens in “leaky gut syndrome” is that nutrients meant to be absorbed into the body are suddenly being taken out with the trash through the colon, while substances meant to stay in the intestine are entering the bloodstream where they trigger immune-system responses as foreign invaders. Absorbing more toxins while excreting valuable nutrients, the beleaguered body becomes more and more overwhelmed with work orders, even as it’s experiencing a cut-back in payroll.  Meanwhile, the CEO’s vote themselves another raise in appetite. Not a good situation, as any union mediator can tell you. In the final stages of this deteriorating economy, the Mafiosi of the gut, Candida albicans--also known as yeast, begins to get a parasitic toehold, and there goes the neighborhood.

Auto-immune diseases and allergies, especially food allergies, are on the rise, and we have arrived at the endgame of the food chain. Having arrogantly constructed a theory of consumption that places us at the top of the heap, we have made the potentially fatal error of overlooking our dependence on micro-organisms. The food chain theory goes like this: We eat the big animals who eat the little animals who eat the big plants who eat the little plants, and so on back to the pond scum. (Did somebody say “spirulina?”) We have deluded ourselves into believing that, as long as we humans continued to pay out thousands of dollars to have our bodies incinerated after death or pickled in toxic preservatives, we could lay claim to a dubious, but unique status in the animal world as the only species that eats, but is never eaten.

But Darwinism is failing us. We have made valiant efforts to colonize our native bodies, imposing our artificially-manipulated, corporately-driven, commercial consumerism on the inhabitants of our various viscera. We have even come up with systems of psychology, spirituality, and philosophy to rationalize this new territorial imperative: We believe that our illnesses are the result of repressed psychological needs, of abuse at the hands of our dysfunctional families, of previous karma from past lives, of negative thinking. We bring in ever more drastic implements of surgical intervention, ever more bewildering and toxic medications—anaesthetizing or poisoning our grumbling constituencies into silence and provoking new conflagrations among previously peaceful inhabitants.

We are having as much difficulty controlling our colonies as Great Britain was having controlling theirs at the turn of the previous century, and our evolution will force us to the same conclusion:  We cannot afford our colonies. Humans have no new colons to conquer. Much as it offends our theories of species superiority, we must yield to the demands of the native, single-cell organisms to whom we owe our health, whom we have systematically oppressed, and who have consistently demonstrated not only more intelligence in their operations (“wisdom” is not too strong a word), but who have also held the high ground morally, in sustaining an ethic of cooperation, shared benefits, and input from all levels of production—even with all the forces of late-twentieth-century agribusiness and biotechnology arrayed against them.

We have lost our free lunch, but what we will be gaining at the interspecies potluck is an incredible pooling of diverse resources. We will find ourselves allies, where formerly we could only dream of domination.  Listening to other species as if our lives depend on it—which they do—we stand on the threshold of undreamed of modes of communication. And the devastating isolation of predatory individualism that has bred so much paranoia, insecurity, and desperation will break up when we begin to understand that we have never been alone, that we have always lived—even in our most delusional, destructive grandiosity—in symbiotic relation to all of the other forms of life on this planet, and in symbiotic relationship with the very earth, air, and water itself.

Surrendering our crowns as kings and queens of the species, we will apply ourselves diligently to winning the true crown of the creation pageant—that which is awarded for most congeniality. As the models for property ownership yield to an understanding of the responsibilities of stewardship, our orientation toward food will undergo a natural evolution. And eating what best supports symbiosis, we may just acquire a taste for life.

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend of mine who works in hospice. She educates people about the process of dying and calls herself an “end-of-life tour guide.” She used a phrase that gave me pause: “the acceptance of denial.”

What does that mean? From her perspective, it means accepting that denial can be a natural and helpful part of living. Denial can enable us to keep up with the functions of daily life in the face of fear or grief that might otherwise overwhelm us. No doubt, our capacity for deploying denial is some kind of neurophysiological adaptation designed to aid in our survival and the preservation of the gene pool. It may have been the case that the primates the most adept at denial lived the longest and propagated the most. Acceptance of denial may be acceptance of Darwinian truths hardwired into our DNA.

But when I heard the expression, I was not thinking about hospice. I was thinking about Fukushima. I was thinking about the disaster in Japan which still has no end in sight, which is still fraught with possibilities of ongoing, uncontrolled nuclear explosions. I was thinking about the tremendous amount of water which will need to be pumped into the damaged reactors to prevent these explosions, and the as-yet unanswered questions about the disposal of those thousands of tons of highly radioactive water. I was thinking about the radiation which has now gone around the globe and which continues to spew into the atmosphere and seep into the ocean every day as a result of this ongoing catastrophe.

I was thinking about Fukushima… but I was also thinking about not thinking about Fukushima—something which is becoming easier and easier to do as the media moves on to new headlines and the lack of answers has become the official answer. Not thinking about Fukushima is facilitated by the reassurances that appear in tandem with each new revelation: "The radiation being registered around the world is negligible, insignificant." "The amount of radioactive water intentionally dumped into the ocean is infinitesimal when compared with the entire volume of water in the sea." "Passengers flying across the country are exposed to more radiation than the amount turning up most places." "It’s safe to drink the water, eat the cheese, buy the fish."

Denial. And now the acceptance of denial.

On March 11 and 12, I had been panicked. Three decades earlier, I was part of a global, anti-nuclear movement. I had been arrested for occupying a nuclear power plant—if you can call leaping into the arms of the police an occupation. With my fellow activists, I had made a study of the industry. We understood the tactics, could spot the rhetoric, sniff out the lies. On March 11, I understood much about what was happening—with multiple, core-reactor meltdowns; with the power behind the cooling systems not only knocked out, but knocked out for days and possibly weeks; with cracked containment pits; with multiple bomb-like explosions. I understood that this was the worst disaster and the most serious threat to life that has ever occurred on this planet... and with no end in sight.

And I was terrified. For two days. But terror is difficult to sustain when there are viable and attractive alternatives. I had a life. I was actually out on tour with extensive obligations. I was traveling. Besides, there was nothing I could do about it anyway. This was not the terror of being pursued by a predator, where the extra surges of adrenalin translate into bursts of energy and sustained stamina for self-defense or escape. The terror induced by Fukushima was a kind of frozen horror, where the adrenalin played itself out in obsessive speculation and nervous, non-productive activity.

In the world of the jungle, terror is incentivized. Experiencing terror saves one’s life. In a world with scenarios of nuclear holocaust, terror is not incentivized. Denial is. It becomes an attractive option in the face of helplessness and overwhelming doom, of unthinkable consequences for millions of people, for thousands of years. Denial conditions us to believe reassurances without questioning source or motive. Denial enables us to function as if nothing has changed.

I am in this denial now, and it is a great relief compared with the terror of March 11 and 12. The world has not ended. Yet. And that word “yet” appeals to my biology… the “acceptance of denial.” The patient is dying. There is nothing we can do. There is no point in dwelling on it. The best thing to do is go on with our living. For now.

Is this really what it comes down to? “Not with a bang, but a whimper…” Or, not even the whimper?

I have found a locus of resistance, one that works for me. And it has to do with what is visible and what is invisible.

We have become an increasingly visual culture. I know this, because I am a playwright by trade, and playwriting is an aural art form. People used to say they were going to “hear a play.” Fewer than one fifth of Shakespeare’s audiences could actually see the stage. There is a limited arena for action on the stage, and without special effects, the physical drama is usually embarrassingly bogus. In theatre, the drama is in the language—in the impassioned speeches, in the verbally violent confrontations, in the seduction of argument. As a playwright, I am acutely aware of how theatre has been left behind, like some kind of cultural oxbow lake, as the river of pop culture has moved over, carving out new channels in visual media: film, TV, DVD, Nintendo, 3-D movies, Youtube, Wii, etc.

And the more visual the culture, the greater our disconnect. Why? Because when it’s visual, it’s about appearances. The symbols begin to usurp the substance they are supposed to represent. Thinking, and especially deep, radical, and independent thinking becomes short-circuited as the gaze is directed by the ever-editorializing lens of the camera.

The evolution of our technology has vastly outstripped the evolution of our brain. We have not had the time in a few generations to evolve brains that can instinctively distinguish between dancing dots on a screen and dancing dots on the back of the retina. The boundaries between reality and fantasy, documentary and drama, video games and war games are blurring. Children under the age of four are acquiring Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from watching on-screen violence. Celebrities are becoming government leaders. As humans become more and more attuned to a visual world, we become more and more easily manipulated by the images that we see. We have come to believe in what we see, whether or not it is real. And we are teaching ourselves to ignore or discount what we cannot see.

This is the problem with radiation. It is not visible. It can’t be felt or tasted. It has no odor, no texture, no temperature. It’s not as if Fukushima is being covered with ashes or buried in lava. It’s not as if there is a sulfurous, unbreathable gas hanging over the town. The sun still shines, the birds sing, and the flowers bloom. People have to be prevented from entering the zone around the reactors. People have to rely on readings and reporting from experts and agencies to tell them when they can drink the water.

And, as I said, denial has become accepted and acceptable. Because denial is natural in a situation like this, and especially in a culture so heavily oriented to the visual.

But has it always been natural to ignore what cannot be seen? Anthropology and archeology tell a different story. They tell us that, historically, indigenous cultures from every part of the globe have put a lot of stock in the unseen. Indigenous people have had many names to describe the ways in which the unseen world of spirit permeates and informs the visible and tangible world. There is Maori  “Dreamtime” or Hawai’ian “mana” or Yoruban “orishas.” The spirits of ancestors, of creators, of animals, of sacred places exist contemporaneously with humans, and rituals and codes have evolved to teach humans how to honor their presence and how to avoid offending them.

The ubiquitous spiritual systems of indigenous peoples point to the fact that ongoing consciousness  of the unseen is native to our evolution and our biology.  Had we not colonized our senses, we would have understood the blasphemy of splitting the atom, of creating a deadly waste material of which we could not dispose. We would have known that we were arrogating to ourselves the powers over life and death that should never belong to one species. We would have known that what we were doing was displeasing to the spirit world, constituting a profound violation of the sacred.

The sacred has been replaced by the profane in contemporary Western culture. We have electricity instead of spiritual forces. We have digital imagery instead of visions. In the words of Gertrude Stein, “Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation [sic].” Radiation is the perverse counterfeit of spiritual substance. It is the by-product of the endgame of divorcing the material world from its spiritual animus. The splitting of the atom is just the final act in a brutal campaign of disconnection. In the words of Robin Morgan:

"If one had to name one quality as the genius of the patriarchy, it would be compartmentalization, the capacity for institutionalizing disconnection. Intellect severed from emotion. Thought separated from action. Science split from art. The earth itself divided; national borders. Human beings categorized by sex, age, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, height, weight, class, religion, physical ability, ad nauseum. The personal isolated from the political. Sex divorced from love. The material ruptured from the spiritual. The past parted from the present and disjoined from the future. Law detached from justice. Vision dissociated from reality."

I derive hope from the fact that it is possible to recover an apparently innate reverence for the unseen. I take comfort in this. I understand how I am incentivized by a corporate culture and by my own biology to deny the full horror of radioactivity. I accept that. I accept my  denial about Fukushima. I accept that this denial may even be natural. But I know that it was once in my ancestral biology to experience rich rewards from sensing the unseen spiritual essence of life and to find joy and peace in honoring that spiritual essence, in being a part of it, in protecting it and cultivating it in myself.

And because I know this, I choose to believe that this sensing of spirit can be recovered—uncovered, dis-covered, and revivified. And this spiritual seeing-of-the-unseen, unlike Fukushima, is powerfully incentivized… by faith, joy, and even ecstasy. It results in tangible enhancement of quality of life, of self-esteem, of sense of belonging. It also results in the reverence that would have prevented the splitting of the atom in the first place, and this reverence holds the potential to prevent the building of new nuclear reactors.

This attention to the cultivation of my spiritual sense is the most focused and effective and political response I can make to what is happening to the ocean and to the land and to the air and to all the forms of life on this planet.

Albert Einstein said, “The splitting of the atom changed everything except man’s mode of thinking.” I am choosing to believe and endeavoring to prove that he was mistaken.

Board games... I remember playing Candy Land... it was probably my first. And then, of course, there was Monopoly. I can remember figuring out early on that, unless one was adept at strategic alliances, the outcome of the game was pretty much determined by the toss of the dice.  It might take a long time to play out, but basically, if one landed early on Boardwalk and Park Place, it would be pretty tough to beat that monopoly. Then there was Risk, a microcosm of Cold War thinking and global domination.

Turns out, board games are ancient, the earliest one named "Senet" being pictured in a fresco in an Egyptian tomb from 3000 BC. "Patolli" was played by the ancient Aztecs, and the Royal Tombs of Ur contained the "Royal Game of Ur."

But let's go back to Monopoly for a second. If board games represent microcosms for cultural mindsets, it behooves us to understand the origin of this game. The game that taught me capitalism was, according to the BBC, a redesign of a board game first published by (wait for it) a woman who was a Quaker and a political activist. Her name was Elizabeth Magie. The original name was "The Landlord's Game" and it was intended to teach people how monopolies end up bankrupting the majority, while enabling a small minority to amass an ill-gotten fortune. On January 5,1904, the game was awarded U.S. Patent 748,626.

In 1933, three years after the start of the Great Depression,  the game was reinvented as "Monopoly," and it has become the most popular board game ever played. More than one billion would-be millionaires have passed Go and collected $200 in the eighty years since it's invention.

But something very strange seems to have occurred along the way from "The Landlord's Game" to "Monopoly." Life has begun to imitate art. We, as a planet, have begun to treat life as a board game, and the earth as the board.

Right now, as I write this, the greatest environmental disaster on the planet is transpiring. An explosion on an oil rig, due to lax oversight, shortcuts on materials and research, and exceptions to regulations, is causing hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil to pour into the ocean.

That's a catastrophe. Now, imagine that the explosion had taken place in a building in Manhattan... and a fire is raging, destroying PROPERTY (keep that word in mind). Fire trucks and ambulances show up. But imagine government officials sending them home. "No, this explosion has occurred in a building owned by Widgets, Inc. and it is their responsibility to deal with it." And then, of course, Widgets, Inc. who is in the business of making and selling widgets, has to scramble to get in the business of firefighting and rescuing people... for which they have little expertise, less budget, and miniscule motivation... because the bottom line of a corporation is producing profits for their shareholders. Actually, there will be a certain tension between this firefighting/lifesaving and the interests of the stockholders. And, meanwhile, the fire rages on, spreads through the city, and destroys lives.

That would seem crazy, wouldn't it? As soon as the explosion occurs, the model changes. There is a full-on mobilization to deal with the disaster.

But that's not happening in the Gulf. Everyone is standing around and waiting for  Widgets, Inc.-- in this case, British Petroleum--to stop the destruction and save the lives. And this mission is definitely in conflict with their bottom line. We can see that. They immediately began to pour millions into public relations and lobbyists, because that's the kind of damage they understand: government regulation. That's the fire they are skilled at putting out. They have mobilized to keep the press away from the coastal areas. They understand company secrecy. They have raced to pour chemicals more toxic than oil into the ocean in order to sink the oil, get it out of sight. They understand the PR value of that, also... never mind that these chemicals will kill sea life. Out of sight, out of mind. And their CEO has complained about wanting his life back. Thousands of folks on the Gulf Coast have permanently lost their livelihood and with it the life they have always known, but the BP CEO has gone off to the yacht races in England, because, in his words, it's one of the biggest races in the world!

And is this their fault? They are, after all, a corporation. They do what corporations do. There is an unforgettable documentary The Corporation, which you can watch for free (and legally) on Hulu. It lists the characteristics of a sociopath, who is, admittedly, a menace to society... and then it goes down this list, showing how corporations exhibit every one of those characteristics... that, in fact, those characteristics are built into the very definition of a corporation.  And how absolutely disastrous to society this is, and especially, now that the Supreme Court has granted them the legal rights of an individual (human).

Corporations view the world as a monopoly board. There are opponents and allies in the game, but no real people. There is property, but no real planet with nature and ecosystems. And the reason why there would be a governmental response to an explosion in Manhattan is that this explosion would be impacting private property. But the explosion in the ocean...?  Well, nobody owns the ocean.  Nobody owns the floor of it. Nobody owns the water rights to the ocean. It's up to BP to fix it.

This seems crazy to me. And there were immediate offers of funding and expertise from other governments. These were turned down. Hands off! This is a corporate problem!  Goddess forbid anyone do anything that infringes on the territory of a corporation. The last thing this administration needs is more hysterical press about socialization, government takeover of business. Which is odd, because we have certainly nationalized a ton of banks and other financial institutions in the wake of the mortgage crisis. Isn't the "failure" of the ocean as an ecosystem something that would warrant a bailout?

But, the ocean is not a property. And the billions of ocean creature lives lost in this disaster do not form a voting constituency. And life is, after all, a board game.

Except it's not. We need to remember this. We are not the lords of the planet, we do not have rights over other forms of life. We act as if we do, but the day of reckoning, when we realize our interdependence, is upon us. Life is not a board game, much as some of us would like to believe that it is. If it was, all of us would be drawing the "Go Directly to Jail" card.