Now comes Naomi Klein, with excerpts from an excellent recent essay that explores the relationships among climate change, fossil fuels and violence by way of revisiting certain ideas expressed in the past by Edward Said, regarding the limitations of environmentalism. The images are from the richly recycled oil cans exhibited within the online gallery of Cal Lane.
For those who – perversely enough – continue to beat the [oil] drum of America’s “greatness”, let us keep firmly in mind that such ephemeral greatness has been achieved largely through cultural genocide; desecration of the landscape; the destruction of worker lungs and bodies; and the global export of our most precious “service”: violence.
What would it mean if we were to choose instead to become, as Klein suggests, great ancestors?
