Dear Greta and youthful allies,
Am an activist fan many times your age and a veteran of the ‘93 Kyoto Protocol and 2010 COP10 Biodiversity debacles. Like COP25, both efforts were castrated by the Big-coin-operated hands of corporate captured govs. Am writing to offer a birthday welcome to this fraught decade and a biomimetic path to redemption.
“Let us lift our minds high enough to dominate the problem.”
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
COP25’s lack of urgency or spine only surprised those unfamiliar with COP history or the 2014 Princeton report documenting that citizens’ desires and needs have a “near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy." That was a US study, but as Madrid showed, the same contempt for public interest is currently as flagrant in Australia, Japan, Canada, Brazil, Saudi Arabia et corp-suborned alii. And all but the US will be in Glasgow this year with the same marching orders to fuck up outcomes there. Ditto at Davos, Riyadh G20, Dubai WGS and other global confabs.
In the post-COP25 pause it helps to remember when broad movements falter they tend to fractionate back to local trenches and conflicts, cf. Occupation, Indignados, Arab Springs, recent anti-war coalitions, etc. But rather than lowering sights and getting “realistic”, would ask young climate defenders to defy gravity, depression & centrifugal force and take the battle upstream instead.
Specifically would urge impatient climateers to side-step public sector puppets and go directly after their megacorporate masters – not as individual bad actors, but as a malignant form of life.
Your and my grandkids’ generation face a cruel diversity of scourges. None may be greater than the climate crisis, but the dangers don’t really stop there. Besides the raging climate fevers we’re still imperiled by nuclear hazards, pillaged seas, resource wars, hijacked democracies, escalating inequality, migrant torment, etc. And activist efforts have become perilously divided and frequently conquered by focusing on different symptoms. Since this fragmented approach isn’t working too well, shouldn’t we ask what we’d require for a truly broad spectrum cure?
Consider the major entities currently causing, worsening or fattening from 90% of our eco-social ills: Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big Data, Big Chem, Big “Defense” and the whole growth-obsessed Fortune 2000 fraternity. Given the common denominator, couldn’t a concerted global effort to radically downsize, decentralize & democratize these cancerous bodies unite and empower activism all around the world?
Megacorporate bodies really are cancers, by the way, cancers of the biosphere and every body politic they occupy. And that’s a defensible fact, not a flippant metaphor. They are aggressive living systems that have abandoned positive eco-social purposes for endless self-enriching growth. Climate justice and sanity are two of their latest victims, but left to their own rapacious devices they will continue to devastate democratic governance, generations of hard-won reforms and thousands more species & ecosystems until they destroy their hosts and collapse.
What if youth were to demand not just emission reductions, but radical size reductions in all malignant corporate life? Awakening to and uniting against a common lethal enemy would open fresh avenues of collaboration and synergy among countless single issue groups.
Don’t know if you’ve followed the field of biomimicry or its impressive success solving all sorts of technical & design challenges. Nobody’s applied it yet to earth devouring cancers, but logically it suggests we mimic the best arts & craft of our own immune systems. Tumors can be shrunk to remission by a diversity of immune cells if their shared intel is accurate re the nature, strengths and weaknesses of the threat. Immune cells are autonomous and decentralized, but strategically collaborate for common goals. Re tumors, their joint objective is ridding the host of the mutant bodies or at least shrinking them back to innocuous scale.
Activists could replicate that strategic wisdom, but most of our intel today sucks. It’s way too focused on individual symptoms, “bad apple” players or regulatory iniquities that distract us from their central upstream cause. Our climate, survival and evolutionary promise can only be saved by swiftly recognizing and reversing megacorps’ current de facto hegemony over our countries, cultures and policies.
Nobody ever asked the “sovereign people” in any land to approve these bodies’ deadly scale or ecocidal impunity, let alone their global control of our governance. Yet their kind and growth über alles agendas now indisputably dominate our era and an ever increasing number of societies.
In professed democracies, we the people do have some options. Public restraint of corporate form, scale & activities was quite common in 19th century America. State legislatures determined each corporate body’s purpose, size, behaviors and lifespan via their charter’s DNA; and such controls still remain within our reach.
Our elected reps could remedially revise megacorp charters to limit their size, ban their political rights and downgrade their status from “persons” to hazardous instruments. Reps could also demand diverse stakeholder board representation equal to shareholders’ to enforce triple bottom line accounting and localize regulatory oversight.
Outside on the street we can also spark diverse civil, legal, economic and artistic uprisings to quicken megacorp dissolution. Raising local heat to fever pitch is how our bodies’ working-class cells energize our immune defenses; and since most of us already fear and loathe Big domination, it wouldn’t be an impossible ask.
Working to dismantle megacorp dominion is not backing away from any other crisis, it’s just effectively targeting the metastatic mother of them all. Small is beautiful we know, but the cancerous bane of bigness is what needs publicity now.
Engaged youth can turn on that spotlight. Declare a megacorp emergency, catalog their varied harms, and invite activists of every stripe to help democratize and dismember them back to human scale. Pursued with wit and passion a megacorp miniaturization campaign could take a lot less time than fighting them retail, crime by crime, and trying to regulate their conduct with feckless laws they themselves designed.
Until this mega threat to humanity and eco-wellbeing is clearly, boldly, quickly addressed we’re doomed to more decades of futility that we really can’t afford.
The field of battle is rigged of course, booby-trapped with corp-controlled media, govs and courts; but a unified view of these malignant assaults can birth insightful biomimicked tactics for which the unnaturally Big still have few defenses. We just need to remain decentralized, diagnostically united, Earth-focused and committed to ending this plague. The “another world” that’s always been possible is simply a localized post-megacorp realm where life-revering values have been resurrected and empowered.
In closing, we know all this bio-political talk must sound strange at first but please try to think it through. We’re all immersed in living systems and subject to their ills. When some turn growth-obsessed and destructive, there are things that we can do. Since your voice is so very loud right now and so much is at stake, your exploring Big pathology could make a huge difference and inspire redemptive remedies. “When they go low, we go high” is a cute genteel brag, but hope you come to see it could also be a killer strategy
.
With enduring respect and anticipation,
for the wild,
david k-
for the wild,
david k-
************
PS: Could recommend a raft of supportive sources, but Korten’s When Corporations Rule the World, Achbar/Abbott’s doc The Corporation, Sales’ Human Scale Revisited and our Big Body Theory are fruitful places to start.
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W. David Kubiak is an Asia-based Project Censored Award-winning activist-journalist, an avid exponent of Big Body Theory, #bigbanerecognition & Immunocytizenship and winner of the 2000 NH Dem VP Primary on an anti-megacorp platform.
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