Another week in the Anthropocene. Oh, to say the word, to think the thought! Anthropocene. Feel the power. This week in the Anthropocene, in the geological epoch of the Anthropos, of the upright ape with opposable thumbs, this week, some Sapiens stopped some oil. Some more Sapiens reported on their actions as if they were somehow 'radical'. Hundreds of humans got together and glued their bodies to fossil fuel infrastructure, locked their wrists to the top of tankers, stopping ten key oil refineries from functioning altogether. They acted in unison with groups from around the world, and their actions have already led to immense queues for petrol at empty stations. And while they went home, in their Pampers, from their overnight stays in beautifully rigid, admirably human police cells, the government of their country went ahead and announced they'd be selling off their own ocean for oil and gas drilling. It cannot be overstated just how radically Boris Johnson, and the entire UK government, are changing the world. Boo-hoo, environ-mentalists.
How much do your veins ignite at the thought we are in a climate emergency? How much does our human influence over the entire living world fuel the engine of your heart, churning it, exploding it - just to know that there is no crevice, no mole-hill, no patch of pure polar snow, no cockroach or foetal elephant or mythically-gargantuan river we humans haven't pestered, polluted, poisoned, panicked or scorched from existence? We may not be the Creator, but we have empowered ourselves to be the Re-Creators. We lift the black bedrock from deep underground, from our planet's deep past, and we - in defiantly hedonistic splendour - burn it into cancerous clouds. We burn it to go faster, we burn it to go higher, we burn it to be hotter, and we burn it - most spectacularly - just to burn it.
The Establishment believes in brakes. The Intergovernmental Party-Poopers on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report this week that begged world leaders to stop burning fossil fuels, and to cease the process of natural destruction that has characterised our recent behaviour on this planet as a species. They warn of unprecedented floods, wild wildfires, of the general unpredictable maelstromisation of this, Beckett's muckball. They say that, in order to avoid mass extinction of those lower life-forms, in order to avoid starvation of the millions in distant lands (though distance is relative, I'll concede), in order to dodge damnation, we must decommission the fossil-fuel furnaces that grant us our omnipotence.
Where's the fun in that?
Millions are attempting to slam the brakes on to stop our joyride. The wind whips our hair as we lean, howling and yelping from the windows of our 747 passenger jet, accelerating, accelerating, up, up, up, and on towards the atmosphere.
Who are these spoil-sports? Who do these people think they are, crawling forward from the back of our aircraft (economy class, naturally), pleading for us to make an emergency landing? I will not let them. We will reach the vacuum, oh my brothers. Oh, let me die! Let me fly, let me roar until the rocket fuel runs dry, and then let me revel in the screams of my passengers as we plunge toward our final judgement, pummelled into the planet, pulverised on the face of our Mother Nature. Let me die, and let me take you all along for the ride!
Is suicide not the most radical act?
We have been given a planet, abundant with life, lush with diversity; we have been given Paradise. We, it was expected, should be happy, should be content with this our gift. Enough to eat, enough to do, enough causes and injustices to fight that our little soppy souls would be satisfied with humble existence. But we have dared do the illogical; we have boldly ventured into the uncharted wastelands of idiocy; we have rejected the gift of Paradise. We have built on it, drilled on it, burned it. We have killed it, in order to kill ourselves. Given a life we should be happy with, we radical humans have radically thrown it away.
Boris Johnson, with his cheeky, winking announcements of nuclear-powered solutions to the climate crisis, is the driver of our Doomsday chariot. A grinning psychopath set to chuckle us off this mortal coil, Boris has seen Russia's assaults on Ukrainian nuclear sites as an open invitation for further brink-teetering edge-of-your-seat-ering apocalypse-tempting. What this swirling, unstable world needs, ol' Boris knows, is even more potentially world-ending bombs. The scheming genius he is, Big Johnson Johnson pretends these nuclear power stations are for the purpose of providing power, but the science shouts clearly that we need to get off the fossil fuels now if we want a habitable world, and nuclear plants take about ten or twenty years to even get a decent way through construction. By then, if all goes to plan, we'll have countless half-completed nuclear facilities right next to rising coastlines (for that's where they'll go, oh boy!) and we'll get to rub our hands and jump for joy and place bets on where the mushrooms will first erect themselves in the sulfuric sky. These plants aren't to save us - actual plants, with green stuff on them, could perhaps even at this late stage manage that - these nuclear sites are rather the revolver we will soon press to our collective temples.
War is the trigger. And oh, good God are we pulling that thing!
We must now listen to poets like Marinetti and the other Futurists - here are points 4, 7 and 9 from their glorious manifesto:
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
9. We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
As you can see, these pillars of morality understood the viscerally urgent need for speed. It isn't a coincidence that speed is a drug. We're hooked, we all feel the need. The only ones who don't are those tribes who still live bound by the rhythms of nature, and those 'activists' who would pull parachutes from our shooting plane. Nobody who stops oil is an 'activist' - they aim to stop, to slow. They're passive-ists. They're pacifists, and no dirtier word exists in the English language. The only issue I have with the 'Futurists' is their name: their philosophy of maximum speed and aggression is incompatible with a future. Sooner or later, the most aggressive flames burn out, having scorched all there was to scorch. Especially if spoilsport firemen or eco-campaigners are about to douse the torch.
Don't let them kill the fun. Stand with Boris Johnson, with Rishi Sunak, with Priti Patel, with Jair Bolsonaro, with Donald Trump, with Joe Biden, with Barack Obama, with Xi Xinping, with the entire economy of Saudi Arabia, with the International Monetary Fund, with the United Nations, with the World Bank, with HSBC, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Barclay's, JBS, Tesco, Sainsbury's, Nestle, Coca Cola, McDonald's and Unilever, and with all those billionaires and private jetters... Stand up to the little man trying to save the world.
In the words of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres this week, "Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels. Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness."
Be radical. Be mad. Stay in the plane, keep flying until we run out of gas, and plunge with me into the most radical place us humans can ever bring ourselves. Kamikaze this plane(t).
The oceans are rising. Join them...
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