Note, May 31, 2020: I have managed to retrieve this bit of my Saybrook work, a personally pivotal essay originally written in March 2013, from Academia.edu. I am hoping I have caught all the blockquotes, some citations undoubtedly require updating, and some citations are to my parts-unknown.org site which is now off line. I have not yet added Chicago style footnotes as promised for my Saybrook work.
“WE HAVE FOUND THE ENEMY, AND HE IS US” – AND OUR SYSTEM OF SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
by David Benfell
Social Transformation 7077
Saybrook University
San Francisco, CA
March 2013
“WE HAVE FOUND THE ENEMY, AND HE IS US” – AND OUR SYSTEM OF SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
Introduction
Any [social] movement needs a target. But this isn’t the Arab Spring. Climate change is not Hosni Mubarak. This isn’t the Occupy moment. Climate change is not simply “Wall Street” or the 1%. It’s not simply the Obama administration, a polarized Congress filled with energy-company-supported climate ignorers and deniers, or the Chinese leadership that’s exploiting coal for all its worth, or the Canadian government that abandoned the Kyoto treaty and supports that tar-sands pipeline, or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has put its money where its mouth is in American electoral politics when it comes to climate change. Yes, the giant energy companies, which are making historic profits off our burning planet, couldn’t be worse news or more culpable. The oil billionaires are a disaster, and so on. Still, targets are almost too plentiful and confusing. There are indeed villains, but so many of them! And what, after all, about the rest of us who lend a hand in burning fossil fuels as if there were no tomorrow? What about our consumer way of life to which all of us are, to one degree or another, addicted, and which has been a model for the rest of the world. Who then is the enemy? What exactly is to be done? In other words, there is an amorphousness to who’s aiding and abetting climate change that can make the targeting on which any movement thrives difficult. (Engelhardt, March 3, 2013)
“We have found the enemy,” proclaims a protagonist from Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strip, gazing upon a litter-strewn landscape in an Earth Day poster, “and he is us” (quoted in BytesMaster, April 25, 2011). I remember that first Earth Day, in the year for which that poster was made, in 1970. With my classmates, I planted flowers in a garden alongside Lincoln Elementary School in Mt. Lebanon, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My more prosaic mother had me pull some weeds, compelling me to confront the arbitrariness of the distinction between weeds and desired plants.