15 Things You Can Do to Help Fight Global Warming

Heads too large, and eyes too wide,
they crowd the fringes of a smiling sun.
Grandma helps Grandpa plant a tree,
and a smiling mother hangs clothes on the line
while a man of some kind of color
enthusiastically
checks his tire pressure;
and everywhere, people are replacing light bulbs…

Sixteen: Try to think of as many novel ways to sequester carbon as possible. For example, old cereal boxes filled with wood chips can make an attractive and colorful display on an unused shelf. What if instead of taking your leaves and grass clippings to the curb, you just put them in your basement? Does the shredded tissue paper in the bottom of your pocket or purse really need to be cleaned out? Don’t be afraid to be creative!

Seventeen: Invite your friends to a climate-party. See who can catch the most methane molecules between their fingers. Collect the methane in carefully sealed bags, then mail it to the moon.

If I bought the poster
and I hung it in my kitchen,
would that be number eighteen?

Listen:

In 2007,
Barack Obama said We can’t
solve global warming
because I fucking changed
the light bulbs in my house
It’s because of
something collective.

Now this was not
widely reported,
because the news media,
understandably
did not want
to offend their audience
by repeating the word
“collective”,

but say what you will
about the man

who golfed
while forty-thousand
in Florida
people marched
with a couple
around the White House
of oil and gas
demanding action
executives,

he was right about this:

In these Benighted States of America
we’re not doing no fifteen things.
As long as half of the people
and half of the Congress
believe the lie
that it’s all a hoax
that it doesn’t matter
we’re not going anywhere but faster
down this highway to hell.

So let me offer you
not fifteen things,
but one:

We can stop.

We can walk that path
down along the river
into the old woods,
to where the big basswood
blew over in that storm.
Collect the inner bark
like the Senecas did
and twist it into strands
like fine dark Asian hair;
plait the strands into braids,
then the braids to a rope,
strong and soft and supple,
then go find a man
named murdoch or koch
and use it to string him up
by his balls

Except, maybe, in certain parts of Pennsylvania:

Photo Credit: Timothy A. Clary

“The revolutionists in Nio, they come from that same tradition. They weren’t just striking for better wages or protesting the draft. They are not only socialists, they are anarchists; they were striking against power. You see, the size of the demonstration, the intensity of popular feeling, and the government’s panic reaction, all seemed very hard to understand. Why the commotion? The government here is not despotic. The rich are very rich indeed, but the poor are not so very poor. They are neither enslaved nor starving. Why aren’t they satisfied with bread and speeches? Why are they supersensitive? … Now I begin to see why.“

—Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed

Certainly not all of the protesters in Liberty Plaza would identify as anarchists.  But the binding thread, the living heart, of the non-hierarchical, decentralized, self-organizing movement to Occupy Wall Street  lies here.   They are striking against inequity and they are striking against power–the power of banks, of corporations, of the corporate media, of the government, of wealth and privilege.  And the non-structure of the movement itself reflects these essential anarchistic ideals.  The medium is the message.

To much of the rest of the world, all of this is obvious.  But in these Benighted States, where the word “anarchy” is most associated most closely with chaos and destruction, it’s a point that needs to be made.

(About The Dispossessed:  by all means, read this beautiful and important book if you have not yet done so (a good place to buy a copy online is at  Women & Children First.)    Along these same lines, also check out Marina Sitrin’s work on horizontalism (horizontalidad) in Argentina.)