This arrived in my inbox the other day from a Social Justice activist in my church. I almost deleted it because of the length and the time it would take to digest it, but didn't. I read it today and even got some good belly laughs out of it. I encourage any who might stumble on this space to do the same.
This is not my writing. It's good.
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The Age of Mammals Looking Back on the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century
By Rebecca Solnit
[For Solomon Solnit (b. Oct. 18, 2006)]
The View from the Grass
I've been writing the year-end other-news summary for Tomdispatch since 2004; somewhere around 2017, however, the formula of digging up overlooked stories and grounds for hope grew weary. So for this year, we've decided instead to look back on the last 25 years of the twenty-first century -- but it was creatures from sixty million years ago who reminded me how to do it.
The other day, I borrowed some kids to go gawk with me at the one thing that we can always count on in an ever-more unstable world: age-of-dinosaur dioramas in science museums. This one had the usual dramatic clash between a tyrannosaurus and a triceratops; pterodactyls soaring through the air, one with a small reptile in its toothy maw; and some oblivious grazing by what, when I was young in another millennium, we would have called a brontosaurus. Easy to overlook in all that drama was the shrew-like mammal perched on a reed or thick blade of grass, too small to serve even as an enticing pterodactyl snack. The next thing coming down the line always looks like that mammal at the beginning -- that's what I told the kids -- inconsequential, beside the point; the official point usually being the clash of the titans.
That's exactly why mainstream journalists spent the first decade
of this century debating the meaning of the obvious binaries --
the Democrats versus the Republicans, McWorld versus Global Jihad
-- much as political debate of the early 1770s might have focused
on whether the French or English monarch would have supremacy in
North America, not long before the former was be beheaded and the
latter evicted. The monarchs in all their splashy scale were the
dinosaurs of their day, and the eighteenth-century mammal no one
noticed at first was named "revolution"; the early twenty-first
century version might have been called "localism" or maybe
"anarchism," or even "civil society regnant." In some strange
way, it turned out that windmill-builders were more important
than the U.S. Senate. They were certainly better at preparing for
the future anyway.
That mammal clinging to the stalk had crawled up from the
grassroots where the choices were so much more basic and
significant than, for instance, the one between fundamentalism
and consumerism that was on everyone's lips in the years of the
Younger George Bush. If the twentieth century was the age of
dinosaurs -- of General Motors and the Soviet Union, of
McDonald's, globalized entertainment networks, and information
superhighways -- the twenty-first has increasingly turned out to
be the age of the small.
You can see it in the countless local-economy projects --
wind-power stations, farmer's markets, local enviro
organizations, food coops -- that were already proliferating,
hardly noticed, by the time the Saudi Oil Wars swept the whole
Middle East, damaging major oil fields, and bringing on the Great
Gasoline Crisis of 2009. That was the one that didn't just send
prices skyrocketing, but actually becalmed the globe-roaming
container ships with their great steel-box-loads of bottled
water, sweatshop garments, and other gratuitous commodities.
The resulting food crisis of the early years of the second decade
of the century, which laid big-petroleum-style farming low,
suddenly elevated the status of peasant immigrants from what was
then called "the undeveloped world," particularly Mexico and
Southeast Asia. They taught the less agriculturally skilled, in
suddenly greening North American cities, to cultivate the victory
gardens that mitigated the widespread famines then beginning to
sweep the planet. (It also turned out that the unwieldy and
decadent SUVs of the millennium made great ecological sense, but
only if you parked them facing south, put in sunroofs and used
the high-windowed structures as seed-starter greenhouses.) The
crisis spelled an end to the epidemic of American obesity, both
by cutting calories and obliging so many Americans to actually
move around on foot and bike and work with their hands.
Bush, the Accidental Empire Slayer
For a brief period, in the early years of that second decade of
this chaotic century, a whole school of conspiracy theorists
gained popularity by suggesting that Bush the Younger was
actually the puppet of a left-wing plot to dismantle the global
"hyperpower" of that moment. They pointed to the Trotskyite
origins of the "neoconservatives," whose mad dreams had so
clearly sunk the American empire in Iraq and Afghanistan, as part
of their proof. They claimed that Bush's advisors consciously
plotted to devastate the most powerful military on the planet,
near collapse even before it was torn apart by the unexpected
Officer Defection Movement, which burst into existence in 2009,
followed by the next year's anti-draft riots in New York and
elsewhere.
The Bush administration's mismanagement of the U.S. economy,
while debt piled up, so obviously spelled the end of the era of
American prosperity and power that some explanation, no matter
how absurd, was called for -- and for a while embraced. The long
view from our own moment makes it clearer that Bush was simply
one of the last dinosaurs of that imperial era, doing a
remarkably efficient job of dragging down what was already
doomed. If you're like most historians of our quarter-century
moment, then you're less interested in the obvious -- why it all
fell -- than in discovering the earliest hints of the mammalian
alternatives springing up so vigorously with so little attention
in those years.
Without benefit of conspiracy, what Bush the Younger really
prompted (however blindly) was the beginning of a
decentralization policy in the North American states. During the
eight years of his tenure, dissident locales started to develop
what later would become full-fledged independent policies on
everything from queer rights and the environment to foreign
relations and the notorious USA-Patriot Act. For example, as
early as 2004-2007, several states, led by California, began
setting their own automobile emissions standards in an attempt to
address the already evident effects of climate change so
studiously ignored in Washington.
In June of 2005, mayors from cities across the nation unanimously
agreed to join the Kyoto Protocol limiting climate-changing
emissions -- a direct rejection of national policy -- at a
national meeting in Seattle. Librarians across the country
publicly refused to comply with the USA-Patriot Act, and small
towns nationwide condemned the measure in the years before many
of those towns also condemned what historians now call the
U.S.-Iraq Quagmire.
It was the bullying of the Bush administration that pushed these
small entities to fight back, to form local administrations and
set local regulations -- to leave the Republic behind as they
joined the journey to a viable future. And when their withdrawal
was finished, so was the Republic.
Now, the thousands of tons of high-level radioactive waste that
pro-nuclear-reactor Washington policies had brought into being
are buried in the granitic bedrock underlying the former capital
-- known as the Nuclear Arlington in contrast with the Human
Arlington to the south, which will receive the remains of a few
more nostalgic officers from the Gulf Wars, then close for good.
The whole history of armament, radioactive contamination,
disarmament, and alternative energy research is on display in the
museum housed in the former Supreme Court Building, though many
avoid the area for fear of radiation contamination.
In hindsight, we all see that the left-right divide so harped
upon in that era was but another dinosaur binary. After all,
small government had long been (at least theoretically) a
conservative mantra as was (at least theoretically) left-wing
support for the most localized forms of "people power" -- and yet
neither group ever pictured government or people power truly
getting small enough to exist as it does today, at its most
gigantic in bioregional groups about the size of the former
states of Oregon or Georgia -- but, of course, deeply enmeshed in
complex global webs of alliances. All this was unimagined in, for
instance, the dismal year of 2006.
By the time the Republican Party itself split in 2012 into two
adversarial wings dubbed the Fundament party and the
Conservatives, the American Empire was dismantling itself. Of
course, the United States still nominally exists -- we'll pay a
bow to it this year at the Decolonization Day fireworks on July 4
-- but it is a largely symbolic entity, like the British Royal
Family was for a century before its dissolution in 2020.
A similar death-of-the-dinosaurs moment was at work in the
mainstream media -- the big newspapers and television networks of
that era. During the early years of the century, as Bush the
Younger dragged the country deeper into the mire of unwinnable
wars and countless lies, most of the big newspapers and
television news programs lost their nerve, their edge, or even
their eyesight, and failed dismally to report the stories that
mattered. Some fell to scandal -- the New York Times was never
the same after the Judith Miller crisis of 2005. Some were
sabotaged from without, like the Los Angeles Times, undercut by
its parent corporation's "cost-cutting" programs. Some withered
away as younger readers fled paper pages for the Internet. But
behind them, below them, in their shadow, regarded as puny and
insignificant back then -- even though their scoops kept
upstaging and prodding the print media -- were bloggers,
alternative media such as small magazines and websites! , the
glorious Indymedia movement, progressive radio, even the
text-messaging that had helped organize the first great Latino
march of the immigrant rights movement at its beginnings in April
2006.
The Latin American Renaissance
The Latino-ization of the United States had brought some long
missing civic engagement and pleasure back into public life and
tied the country (and Canada) to the splendid insurgencies of the
southern hemisphere. The era of post-communist revolution that
would explode from Tierra del Fuego to Tijuana in the second
decade of the century is usually traced back to the entrance of
Mexico's indigenous Zapatistas onto the world stage on January 1,
1994.
One bold reflection of a changing continent in those years was
the election of progressive leaders -- including leftist Rafael
Correa in Ecuador, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Michele Bachelet in
Chile, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil, and Evo Morales of
Bolivia, all by 2006 -- even eventually Alicia Ponce de Leon in
Columbia in 2014, three years after U.S. war funding dried up
(along with the America that paid for it). Chavez (president
1998-2013) termed this the Bolivarian Revolution.
As a group, they were not bad as national leaders then went, but
one great blow against nationalism proved to be the British
seizure of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998
for crimes against humanity and his in-absentia trial in Spain, a
saga that dragged on until the blood-drenched dictator's heart
failed at the end of 2006. The new world is both more
transnational and more local than the one it eclipsed, and nobody
will ever be so beyond the reach of justice again. (Africans,
for example, recovered from Swiss and offshore bank accounts the
hundreds of billions of dollars stolen by their former dictators,
which gave a huge boost to the fight against AIDS and
desertification.)
Whatever the names of their leaders, the real force in Latin
America -- and increasingly elsewhere -- would be in the
grassroots activism that the Zapatistas heralded, which, in the
view from 2026, clearly signaled the fading relevancy of
nation-states. Latin indigenous movements, labor movements,
neighborhood groups, worker-takeovers in Argentina's factories
from 2001 onward, and the Argentinean ideology of horizontalidad
(or horizontalism) that went with it, were just early signs of
this development.
Like the regionalist policymaking entities of the United States,
these movements undermined even progressive presidents to set
more radical policies and grew to include many indigenous
autonomous zones across the hemisphere. For example, in late
2006, the 8,000-member Achuar tribe (whose region spans what was
once the Peru-Ecuador border) took hostage and defeated Peru's
main oil and gas-extraction corporation in a mode of victorious
resistance that would become increasingly common. In Mexico, the
stolen presidential election of 2006 that resulted in the
inauguration of PAN Party candidate Felix Calderon was the straw
that broke the camel's back, so to speak. In the years to follow,
the Second Mexican Revolution spread from Chiapas, Oaxaca, and
Mexico City, slowly dissolving that nation into a network of
populist regional strongholds. Seventeen of them reinstated a
local indigenous language as their official tongue.
Global Justice and the Drowned Lands
The Latin American Renaissance also created a network of
communities strong enough to take in some of the climate-change
refugees from Central America and Southern Mexico, who fled both
north and south, along with Sunbelt -- and what came to be called
Swampbelt -- �migr�s from the southern United States. The
great population transitions thus went more smoothly in the
western hemisphere than across the Atlantic, where Europeans
engaged in escalating anti-Muslim confrontations before realizing
that only immigration could prop up the economies of nations
whose native-born, white-Christian populations were rapidly aging
and, thanks to ultra-low birthrates, declining.
The end of those bloody squabbles is generally considered to have
been marked by the election in 2020 of Chancellor Amira Goldblatt
Al-Hamid by what was then only a loosely federated association of
German-speaking bioregional principalities. Similar crises --
and, in some cases, bloody cross-community, cross-religion
bloodlettings --took place elsewhere, especially as populations
moved away from increasingly desertifying, ever hotter hot zones
in Africa and Southern Asia. Some historians have regarded the
devastating global bird-flu pandemic of 2013 as fortunate in
relieving climate-change population-shift pressures; others --
including the noted historian Martha Moctezuma from the
University of San Diego-Tijuana's Davis Center on Public Luxury
-- discard that perspective as callous.
Every schoolchild now knows the Old Map/New Map system and can
recite the lands that vanished: half the Netherlands, much of
Bangladesh, the Amazon Delta, the New Orleans and Shanghai
lowlands. And who today can't still sing the popular ditties
about those famed "fundamentalists without their fundamentals" --
the senators who lost the state of Florida as it rapidly became a
swampy archipelago. Most schoolchildren can also cite the World
Court decision of 2016 that gave all shares in the major oil
companies to Pacific Islanders, mainly resettled in New Zealand
and Australia, whose homes had been lost to rising oceans (a
short-lived triumph as the fossil-fuel economy ebbed away).
More creative responses to climate change included the
tree-traveler and polar-bear collectives. These eco-anarchist
clans -- now popular contemporary heroes -- first nursed plant
populations on their unnatural journeys north by means of
extensive rainy-season nursery cultivation and summer planting
programs that have since become huge outdoor festivals. Today,
many city parks and town squares have statues of Cleo Dorothy
Chan, who organized the first small tree-traveler collective in
southern Oregon and is now hailed globally as the twenty-first
century's Johnny Appleseed. ("You can't choose between grief and
exhilaration; they are the left and right foot on which we hike
onward," said the t-shirts of the tree-travelers.) As for the
polar-bear folks, they were initially a group of zoologists and
circus trainers who, inspired by the tree-travelers, mobilized
themselves to teach young polar bears to adapt to changed
habitat. They are often credited with saving that one ch!
arismatic species in the wild, even as thousands of less
emblematic ones vanished.
The Principles of Change
A mature oak tree always looks significant; and, when we look at
it, we're willing to respect acorns -- but the rest of the time
the seeds of the next big thing are just trodden upon and
overlooked. The ideas that made our era and pulled us back from
the brink, the stakes that went through the hearts of the
dinosaurs and the more incremental forces that rendered them
extinct were all at work in the 1990s. They just didn't look very
impressive yet, and people were intimidated by the heft of those
dinosaurs and swayed by their arguments.
The World Court and related human rights, environmental rights,
and criminal courts became more powerful presences as the sun set
on the era of nation-state. Multiple changes often combined into
scenarios impossible to foresee: for example, the belated U.S.
recognition in 2011 that the International Criminal Court did
indeed have war-crimes jurisdiction over Americans coincided with
the worldwide anti-incarceration movement. This explains why,
for example, former President Bush the Younger, extradited from
Paraguay and found guilty in 2013, was never imprisoned, but
sentenced to spend the rest of his life working in a Fallujah
diaper laundry. (People who are still bitter about his reign are
bitter too that the webcam there suggests, even at his advanced
age, he still enjoys this work that accords so well with his
skill-set.) His assets -- along with those of his Vice
President, and of Halliburton, Bechtel, Exxon, and other war
profiteers -- were famously awarded to the Vie! tnamese Buddhist
Commission for the Iraqi Transition. After almost a decade of the
bitterest bloodshed, Iraq, too, had broken into five nations, but
by this time so many nation-states were being reorganized into
more coherent units that the Iraqi transition, led by the Women's
Alliance of Islamic Feminists (nicknamed the Islamofeminists),
was surprisingly peaceful when it finally came.
"As I've said many times, the future is already here. It's just
not very evenly distributed," said the sci-fi novelist William
Gibson in 1999. In retrospect, the arrival of the Age of Mammals
should have been easy to foresee. On every front -- family
structure and marriage, transportation, energy and food
economies, localized power structures -- everyday life was being
reinvented in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries. From India to Indiana an interlocking set of new ideas
began to emerge and coalesce, becoming in the end the new common
sense that new generations of thinkers and activists were guided
by. Who now thinks it's radical to advocate that decentralization
is better than consolidated power, that capitalism's worldview is
vicious and dishonest, that the public matters as much or more
than the private, that enforced homogeneity is not a virtue
either on a farm or in a society?
The basic tools were already in place long before our era; here
and there, a few at a time, people picked them up and started
building a better future. Some new inventions mattered, such as
the super-efficient German and Japanese solar collectors and
methane generators that revolutionized energy production, but
much of the march toward a more environmentally sane future
didn't require fancy scientific breakthroughs and technologies,
just modesty. We scaled back on consumption and production. For
example, the collapse of the U.S. military put an end to the
world's single most polluting entity, while the near-end of
recreational air travel also made a significant contribution to
rolling back greenhouse-gas production.
The law of unintended consequences continued to prevail: When
touristic air travel withered, so did Hawaii's tourist economy --
making the retaking of the islands by indigenous Hawaiians via
the King Kamehameha Council a piece of cake. Of course sailing
ships still travel the triangular trade-winds route between Latin
America, Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest.
Everything was changing then, is changing now, and some years
back the Principles of Change were codified. These simply recited
the history of popular and nonviolent resistance from slave
uprisings (Hochschild
'05) and Gandhian tactics (Schell
'03) to the principles of direct action (D. Solnit '09) and
social change (see Marina Sitrin
on
horizontalism, '06) and drew the obvious conclusions about how
change works, what powers civil society has, how war can be
sabotaged from below, and why violence ultimately fails.
Believers in authoritarian power had prophesied a globalized
world of corporate nation-states (and indeed the 2012 Olympics
featured teams identified by branding rather than nation, such as
the Dasani and Nokia track teams and the Ikea Decathaletes); but
even as the polar bears survived, a different kind of change in
the global climate doomed most of the large corporations. The
outlawing of corporate personhood was launched in Porter
Township, Pennsylvania, in December of 2002 and gradually became
the law of the land.
By 2015, the "human rights" U.S. courts had given to corporations
in the 1880s had been globally stripped away from them again. Of
course, there were revolts against the new world -- just as the
Republican dinosaurs led a long rearguard movement against
women's rights, queer rights, the rights of the environment, and
science education, so there were corporations that resisted the
new order, most spectacularly when Arkansas was taken over
wholesale by Wal-Mart for seventeen months in the early teens.
The heavily armed Arkansans rose up, Wal-Mart's private army
changed sides, and what was once the world's biggest corporation
joined the dung-heap of history along -- most famously -- with
Monsanto, derailed by the Schmeiser verdict, the
precedent-setting World Court decision to award all assets in the
genetic-engineering corporation to small farmers previously
terrorized for not paying royalties on crops contaminated by
Monsanto's genetically altered strains. Failed presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton, who had been appointed ambassador to
the United States from the Republic of Wal-Mart, was sentenced to
three years as a sweeper at an Arkansas farmer's market and
became locally beloved in the role.
In the American Middle East (known as the Midwest until modern
geographers pointed out that the west starts at the Continental
Divide), sectarian feuding, which kept the region in a state of
subdued civil war for almost a decade, still flares up
occasionally. Periodic sorties by the Fundaments against new
programs and lifestyles are considered part of normal life,
though Kansas's John Brown Society provides a degree of
protection against them.
The Republic of Northern Idaho was another outpost of
different-sex-only marriage laws and creationism, but the need to
work with downriver communities on salmon restoration and dam
removal eventually dissolved the breakaway half-state into the
Columbia River Drainage federation. Other historians claim that
the tattooed love freaks of the Seattle region, who found common
ground with the ex-truckers and elk-hunters of Idaho, dissolved
the Idahoan Republic via bicycle races and beer fests. Some also
say the same-sex desires of elk hunters were legendary and led to
negotiations for a direct rail link to San Francisco and Los
Angeles.
In 1996, the Pentagon prepared imaginary scenarios describing
five potential futures by 2025. Most of them were based on the
belief that a better world was one dominated by American military
power -- which is to say, by the threat of state violence. That
they came up with five possible futures demonstrated, at least,
how wide-open the next two decades seemed, even to a
Tyrannosaurus-Rex bureaucracy that thought it was soon to own the
planet.
Some of their technological, corporate, and militaristic futures
could have come to pass. Had people not come to believe strongly
enough in their own power, in a horizontalist society, and in a
planet-wide ability to work with the environmental changes the
Industrial Age had loosed on us, we might be living in a very
different, unimaginably catastrophic world -- one in which the
mammals would never have proliferated. They might even have
breathed their last without ever emerging from under the fern
fronds and out of the grasses.
The future, of course, is not something you predict and wait for.
It is something you invent daily through your actions. As Mas
Kodani, a Buddhist in Los Angeles, said in the early twenty-first
century: "One does not stand still looking for a path. One walks;
and as one walks, a path comes into being." We make it up as we
go, and we make it up by going, or as the Zapatistas more
elegantly put it, "Walking we ask questions." What else can you
do?
Perhaps respect the power of the small and the mystery of the
future to which we all belong.
Rebecca Solnit lives in and loves the peninsular republic of San
Francisco, where she is working on a new book. Her most recent
books are still Hope in the Dark
and A Field Guide to Getting Lost
.
Copyright 2006 Rebecca Solnit
