We Are Our Environment, Environment Is We

An oppressive system often seems stable because it limits people’s lives and imaginations so much that they can’t see beyond the limitations. This is especially true when a social system has existed for so long that its past extends beyond collective memory of anything different. As a result, it lays down terms of social life - including various forms of privilege - that can easily be mistaken for some kind of normal and inevitable human condition.

But this situation masks a fundamental long-term instability caused by the dynamics of oppression itself. Any system organized around one group’s efforts to control and exploit another is ultimately a losing proposition, because it contradicts the essentially uncontrollable nature of reality and does violence to basic human needs and values.

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Our treatment of the ocean is getting increasingly surreal. There are plastic gyres at the center of every ocean on the planet, slowly whirling above the corpses of animals forced to inhale plastic particles; driftnets and bottom-trawlers are emptying the sea of fish with no thought as to what our children will have to trawl for; the outrageous amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by the slowly trudging, heavily stomping beast of industrial progress is turning our oceans to acid; and now the second largest animal on the planet is being hunted and killed to feed upper-class dogs in sweaters. - Rabb!t

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