Heeding the Law of the Land

[This is the opening speech of the 16th annual Bioneers Conference, taking place this weekend in San Rafael, Calif. and 16 remote locations across the continent.]

A friend of mine in Texas had a hobby of doing grave rubbings. She favored old, out-of-the-way cemeteries, the final resting places of the notably not rich and famous. She would place a large piece of thin paper over the tombstone and rub it with charcoal to take an impression. My favorite was one that was roughly chiseled, obviously home made. The epitaph said simply, "I told you I was sick."

That's what the Earth is telling us.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita may have finally sounded alarms loud enough for the country to hear. The message is crystal clear. When we fight nature, we lose. The disconnect between the state of nature and the nature of the state is producing a state of emergency. The first homeland security comes from environmental security. The law of the land must become the law of our land.

Katrina also unmasked the corrosive injustice that poisons us as surely as the pollution unleashed by the storm. It's an open secret that poor people and people of color are consigned to live amid the worst environmental hazards of industrial civilization. As E.L. Doctorow said, "We have two types of citizenship in the United States: common and preferred."

While an inept, cynical government staged damage-control press conferences, a new Underground Railroad provided real damage control. A fiercely compassionate person-to-person daisy chain surged with the loving determination of friends and relations, and the kindness of strangers. It's largely the American people and local heroes who salvaged the disastrous government response from utter disaster.

This extraordinary public response signified a larger trend. Even as our institutions are failing, people of good will everywhere are rising in waves of caring, conscience and kindness. Our true social security is woven in community.

But the choice we face is stark: an Age of Extinctions or an Age of Restoration. Which do we choose?

The mission is daunting. Katrina and Rita are just coming attractions for the new world disorder. The violence of these storms should come as no surprise. Over the past twenty years, the force and duration of hurricanes have doubled as a result of global warming. There is a certain poetic justice that these ill winds souped up on fossil fuels struck right at the matrix of the petrochemical industry.

Meanwhile, half a world away, American troops fight for more oil in a hopeless war that only deepens our dependency and binds our ties to anti-democratic regimes. No wonder they call oil the "devil's tears."

For once, we got some real reality TV. We saw the poorest people, dazed and traumatized, trapped on the roofs of their flooded lives. These images are familiar to us from impoverished nations: refugee camps, broken safety nets, and indifferent, incompetent governments.

When we see these images from what we politely call lesser-developed countries, we know what it means. It means people live with the daily hardship of collapsed infrastructures. They live with environmental degradation. They are resigned to inequality as a way of life. The people struggle under corrupt ruling elites of big corporations, crony politicians and the military. Citizens face government secrecy, contempt for the rule of law, the loss of civil and human rights, and rigged elections. Families live with the austerity and instability endemic to an insolvent government indentured to global finance capital.

In the words of the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas: "As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such a twilight that we must be aware of the change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."