IMPERILED LIFE: Revolution against Climate Catastrophe

All Imperiled Life artwork credit to Santiago Armengod

I. LIFE IS IMPERILED

(Justseeds)

“Planet Earth is in imminent peril”; it is “in immediate danger of crashing.”– James Hansen

Hannah Arendt

“We must think what we are doing.” – The Human Condition

Theodor W. Adorno

“Thinking is not the spiritual reproduction of that which exists.”

– “Resignation”

CRITICAL SCRUTINY

Capital as the accumulation of catastrophe

India (Manish Swarup/AP)

Sukkur, Pakistan (The Guardian)

Niger (Sia Kambou/AFP)

Haiti (Gideon Mendel)Bihar, India (Gideon Mendel)

Blue Marble, 1970 and 2012

1970 2012

Maplecroft's Climate Vulnerability Index 2009-2010

Climate catastrophe as imperialism

from J. Samson et al., “Geographic disparities and moral hazards in the predicted impacts of climate change on human populations” (2011)

Statistical analysis of increased average global temperatures

Global Mean Temperature (1880-2009, Source: James Hansen), in Minqi Li, “Climate change and the imperative for social revolution”

M. Li, “China, peak oil, climate change”

Climate catastrophe is capital-induced

The Guardian

M. Li, “China, peak oil, climate change”

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, “Terra quasi-incognita”

Some of climate catastrophe's projected effects

Schellnhuber, “Terra quasi-incognita”

from Philip Thornton, “Four degrees and beyond: what might this mean for agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa?”

from Schellnhuber, “Terra quasi-incognita”

H.J. Schellnhuber, “Terra quasi-incognita”

Hansen et al.: current warming rates 10-100x those observed at PETM

II. REVOLUTION“Against all fetishism of the productive forces, against the continued enslavement of individuals by the objective conditions (which remain those of domination), art represents the ultimate goal of all revolutions: the freedom and happiness of the individual.”– Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension (1979)

BIO-REVOLUTION

“The battle cries of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution are valid now more than ever.”

– Max Horkheimer, “Materialism and Morality”

Francisco de Goya, “The Second of May 1808”

The people reject Mubarak, January 2011

الش���عب ير�يد� إس��قاط الن�ظ�ام�!

“Saigon Insurrection (1945)” (Ngo Van)Leila Khaled

“Agrarian Leader Zapata” (Diego de Rivera)

Zapatista mural, Guadalupe Tepeyac

Lucio Cabañas

Minqi Li, “China, peak oil, climate change”

Climate rationality?

from Schellnhuber, op. cit.

Schellnhuber's fair world climate policy

For egalitarianism

Socialism or barbarism... barbarism or freedom?

“The life span of man [sic] running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new […]. The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality [...]. It is in, in other words, the birth of new [humans] and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope.”– Hannah Arendt, “Unpredictability and the Power of Promise,” from The Human Condition

NATALITY AND REVOLUTION

“La humanidad se libera,” Jorge González Camarera