Greed , Patriarchy, and the Inevitability of Environmental Disasters
There is a strong tendency to live our lives with our heads buried in the sand. We just don’t want to know things that are disturbing or make us anxious. There are many benefits that we enjoy living in a country that is essentially controlled by powerful corporations. We can shop in stores that have all kinds of wonderful consumer products, and abundant food. If we adhere to the corporate culture that is reinforced in movies and on television, that tell us how to look, what to wear, and how to think, we can most likely get a job that will provides the income we need to get along in our society.
No person can be self sufficient anymore. Living in our society requires an income. In order to obtain an income one must conform to what society dictates. We are a society of laws and those who break those laws are severely punished. But society really requires you to do more than just obey the law, society requires you to adhere to the beliefs that are built into the system. We are said to have the right to our own beliefs and our own religion, but our economic system has its own belief system. Unless you conform to that economic belief system you will not get far in our economy.
The central belief in our economic system of capitalism is that profit is the ruling value. This belief in the positive value of greed, which is the unending thirst and drive for profit, has resulted in the concentration of wealth by corporations. Corporations exist to maximize profit. A corporation that does not maximize profit can be sued by their share holders for failing to make enough money.
As human beings there is much more to us than making money. Human culture speaks of love, inter-personal relationships, and a connection to something that is bigger and grander than the individual life in order to give meaning to life. Meaning is ambiguous, mysterious, always changing and evolving but it is essential to being a human being. Corporations and their culture of greed are not human.
Despite not being human, corporations have achieved status under the law as if they were human. This is part of the system of patriarchy. Men dominate government and business and androcentric values and activities infiltrate both to the point that male dominated ideas are the unconsciousness mind of government and business. Patriarchy essentially states that might makes right. During times of war between states or countries, force is used to settle disputes with vast amounts of bloodshed. People die in war, not corporations. War is very expensive and tremendous profits are always made by corporations in the waging of war.
During times of peace, the law is used to settle disputes. Government at both the federal and state levels use force to implement the decisions of the courts on both people and corporations. Corporations that are found to be conducting business outside the law run the risk of going out of existence. The legal system responds primarily to those who have the most money and who can therefore survive expensive and prolonged legal fights.
Lawyers and judges benefit immensely from this system. Many judges rule in favor of corporate rights over human rights. As corporations provide the vast bulk of legal income, it is in the personal best interest of lawyers and judges to favor corporations. Since corporations have the most money, they are able to employ the most skilled and expensive lawyers and are therefore most successful at modifying the law. This is why corporations who are not human have succeeded in gaining rights as if they were human.
There are other ways of living and other values that humans have embraced in the past that are not patriarchal. It is often assumed erroneously that patriarchy and greed are determined by human nature. Knowledge of human evolution that goes back past recorded human history shows that this is not true. Human beings appear as human animals, called modern anatomic humans or homo sapiens sapiens, about 190,000 years ago. It is not until about 50,000 years ago that human culture appears and the hunter gatherer way of life began. The very first human sculptures are female forms or goddesses. It is the simultaneous appearance of technology, art, and religion that identifies human culture. Hunter gatherer cultures which modern patriarchal cultures deride as primitive, lived in nature as part of nature, not in opposition to nature. Nature was viewed as feminine and as the source of life. Women were identified with nature and venerated.
Under patriarchal culture the disdain for women, who have been viewed as property to be passed from father to husband, has been extended to mother nature. The rape of nature parallels the rape of women. Violence against women goes hand in hand with violence against nature.
The planet earth is not viewed as a living soulful being under patriarchy but as a lifeless lump of resources to be exploited for profit. Scientific evidence especially when combined with historical evidence clearly demonstrates that the beliefs of patriarchy are false and even suicidal.
Many historians have commented on the history of Europeans traveling around the world to North and South America, Asia, and Africa and using force to take political control. Taking advantage of a military technology that Jared Diamond describes as guns, germs, and steel, Europeans secured control of natural resources around the globe that continues in the corporate descendents of imperialistic European nations.
Native hunter gathering people around the world lost their land and their resources. Patriarchal legal systems have done nothing to correct the historical results of might makes right. The history of greed in the United States of America and the history of genocide against Native Americans have a strong correlation. In 1829 the first American gold rush began in the Chattahoochee River area of Georgia. This was the impetus to disenfranchise the Cherokee people of their land and send them on the "trail of tears" march to a reservation in Oklahoma. Later when oil was discovered on "Indian land" in Oklahoma, Native Americans were again displaced.
The gold rush in California in 1849, completed the displacement of Native Americans that had its roots in the genocidal policies of the Catholic Church’s mission system. The gold rush in the Black Hills in 1875-1878 destroyed the political independence of the Lakota people, and was made famous by the exploits of Custer.
The bringing of Christianity and civilization were viewed as a justification for the destruction of Native American culture which valued and personified Nature. Perhaps no greater evidence is needed of Patriarchy’s contempt for Nature than the deliberate hunting to near extinction of the wild Buffalo herds on the American plains by the U.S. government in the aftermath of the Civil War in order to destroy the basis of the Native American way of life.
Patriarchal greed for Native American land, was fueled in the nineteenth century by gold fever. In the twentieth century greed for oil became more important and continues into the twenty first century.
The patriarchal legal system encourages corporations to maximize profit and minimize risk. Minimizing risk means avoiding responsibility. Oil production around the world has resulted in the degradation of water supplies and a decrease in the standard of living of native peoples. The money that is produced through oil production has been controlled by the oil corporations and a cadre of corrupt rulers around the globe who then take their money with them when they are overthrown. This has been particularly true in Africa.
Even the United States has suffered environmental degradation. The offshore oil spill in the Santa Barbara channel, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska should have been sufficient warning of the inherent dangers involved in offshore oil production and transportation. Safety concerns and the risks of disaster are downplayed in the name of profit. The damage to the Alaskan environment has never been put right, and oil company’s legal teams were successful in delaying and minimizing their financial penalty.
When oil company executives George W. Bush and Dick Cheney occupied the White House, the regulation of the environment’s safety was turned over to ex-employees and future employees of the oil companies themselves. The current disaster in the Gulf of Mexico with the greatest oil spill in human history was inevitable. British Petroleum, Trans Ocean, and Halliburton all point fingers at each other’s role to minimize their own responsibility for the disaster.
No one took responsibility for safety. When problems with drilling occurred it was concern over profit that took priority over safety. Stopping the drilling to determine the problem that was happening on an oil rig drilling in one mile of ocean and then two miles under the crust of the earth could have prevented the disaster. Ignoring the impending signs of disaster over concern for being twenty one million dollars behind schedule resulted in the deaths of eleven men and the ongoing release of an unknown number of millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The size of the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is unprecedented in scope and no one can know what the full extent of damage will be. It is by no means clear that damage will be limited to the Gulf of Mexico. I am reminded of the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty. The environmental disaster may never be made right.
It is time for humanity and the American people to wake up. There are more important things in the world than profit. Human beings are only one animal that evolved on this planet. We must live in accordance with natural law and not a predatory economic system that has only contempt for human lives and the living planet earth. Only the restoration of the Divine Feminine to human consciousness and the understanding that humanity’s rightful place is to be the steward of the earth will restore balance to humanity, the animal kingdom, and the planet.
Restoring the Divine Feminine is as simple as giving every woman control over her own body, her own sexuality and reproduction. When men do not control how many babies women have, overpopulation will disappear. Political power and control needs to be removed from old impotent angry men and given back to the crones, the old wise women who created human culture, agriculture and animal husbandry which created all human wealth. Women created agriculture and animal husbandry by extending the love they gave to their families to plants and to animals. When patriarchy took power seven thousand years ago men took over the means of production. When love is restored to the means of production our conflict with nature will disappear.
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