By Richard Mellor in California
My wife and I decided to drive over to the coast today to get out of the house. We live on the east side of the San Francisco Bay and from our house to where we parked the car at the trail head was exactly 43 miles: the Rock Springs parking lot on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County.
This parking lot is not far from an outdoor theatre where plays are performed during the summer. The pandemic has changed that, of course. Tamalpais is a beautiful mountain with many trails. If you don’t want to hike all the way up it, from Stinson Beach to the top, there are many alternatives, the Pantoll Station is about halfway up and you can start there.
Or, instead of starting there and going up, you can go down to Stinson Beach via the Marr Davis Trail and back up the Steep Ravine or vice versa. Either way, it’s all beautiful. The west side of Tam, as the mountain is affectionately called, faces the Pacific Ocean and is very different to the east side. The trail is on the east side and is part of Marin Water.
California’s natural beauty
My decision to post on the blog what I might normally post to Facebook, to share California’s natural beauty with friends and the public, was a political one, because the natural world and nature in general, of which human beings are a part, is under siege.
This incredible beauty, and the world is filled with incredible beauty like this, is in danger of being destroyed. That we can walk in it and wonder at it from within is not an accident either. If it were left to the rich and powerful, all these wonders would be private, would be gated, and would be off limits to the working public.
It doesn’t take much effort to discover the catastrophic effects the so-called ‘free market’ has had on the environment in the state of California alone. Capitalism has spread like a virus throughout the world, driven, as Marx explained, by the “…need of a constantly expanding market for its products…. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”.
And in this rapacious pursuit of profits, nothing is sacred, not human life or nature itself. Capitalism cannot destroy nature, but it can alter it to the point where it will destroy life as we know it. Everything must bow before the alter of profit, and that includes the natural world; the beauty we see is simply another commodity to be bought and sold. It is the system of social organisation, of production that drives this runaway train.
The air we breathe is global air
With the globalization of capitalism and the resulting climate crisis, no solution to the problem can be found in one country or one region. Pouring radioactive water into the ocean off Japan affects us all. The air we breathe is global air, is it not? The destruction of the rain forests, the Earth’s lungs, will kill us all; don’t doubt that. And the swirling plastic in the Pacific Ocean that is apparently twice the size of France, is not simply killing ocean life, it is slowly killing us all.
I think it does not take a genius to figure out that everything is connected and that all the social struggles for housing, jobs, health care, freedom from police violence, all of them, mean very little if decades, and I mean decades, from now whole swathes of the planet are uninhabitable. That your children or grandchildren will not survive it.
As far as the environment goes, the days of the “friends “of this or that creek or the “Save the Ocean” coalitions or the multitudes of non-profits that populate this and many other areas of protest, having any significant impact on the environmental catastrophe that is decades away are long gone. I am pretty sure that they have achieved very little in terms of halting capitalism’s destruction of the natural world.
The point of no return…but not yet
But that does not mean that I believe we have gone beyond the point of no return; if I did believe it, I would just spend more time at the pub and I wouldn’t be writing this. The failure of these mainstream organisations to apply any significant brake to the train is that they believe capitalism can solve this problem, can hold back the tide like Canute. I am talking about the genuine ones, there are many charlatans in all social movements.
We are in difficult times, and they can be very depressing times. But I have not yet abandoned the view that the working class, the millions of people, and majority of the population that live and exist through the sale of their labour power, by working for wages, will at some point, yes, when their backs are against the wall, will be forced to confront the enemy and change things.
It’s not guaranteed, but the solutions are there. Just consider that this parasitic character, Elon Musk, whose wealth came from the backs of the black South African working class, is spending billions of dollars, not money he earned, on sending rocket ships and other contraptions to Mars. As far as I know, NASA, a US public agency funded by the taxpayer, has handed him a contract for this Mars exploration. And don’t kid yourself, Total Recall was on the mark, exploring Mars is about seeking raw materials and wealth extraction, it is not an egalitarian venture.
Snouts in the public trough
Even if we accept that Musk’s millions are his, which they aren’t, who voted to hand over millions of our dollars to this man? Talk about snouts in the public trough.
I’m going to end this here. I was just going to post of today’s hike on Facebook and here I am. I should add that while I am optimistic and I believe we are not at the point of no return, that doesn’t mean that such a point doesn’t exist.
If you have grandchildren in my opinion you are obligated for their sake to become involved in some way or another in really saving the planet. And feel free to offer constructive criticism to Greta Thunburg; but don’t make fun of her. She deserves our respect, and while she may not have all the answers, she’s right about the emergency and she’s a courageous young person.
From the US socialist website, Facts for Working People. The original can be found here.
