Preface Preface
If humans choose to work to minimize the existential threats of our time, perhaps the most improbable aspect of remedy is that we will accept modalities based on collaboration and creative adaptation, rather than perpetual combat and domination.  It is a stark fact that present and future economies are predicated on a finite energy resource: carbon-based fuels.2 Consensual science on climate change presents another fact: we may only have a few years to make adjustments in the collective carbon load before we are faced with irreversible consequences. As Christian Parenti in Tropic of Chaos perceptively and correctly points out:
“[E]ven if all greenhouse gas emissions stopped immediately—that is, if the world economy collapsed today, and not a single light bulb was switched on nor a single gasoline-powered motor started ever again—there is already enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to cause significant warming and disruptive climate change, and with that considerably more poverty, violence, social dislocation, forced migration, and political upheaval. Thus we must find humane and just means of adaptation, or we face barbaric prospects.”
 
Seen in this light, to live collaboratively and creatively is less a radical proposal than a pragmatic one, if we, future generations, and the biosphere are to survive nuclear war and environmental catastrophe.
Laray Polk Dallas, Texas September 2012
1.
 
Environmental Catastrophe
Laray Polk: When we began this conversation in 2010, our starting point was a statement you had recently made in the press: “There are two problems for our species’ survival— nuclear war and environmental catastrophe.” What is meant by “environmental catastrophe”?
 
Noam Chomsky: Actually, quite a lot of things. The major one is anthropogenic global warming—human contribution to global warming, greenhouse gases, others—but that’s only a part of it. There are other sources of what’s called pollution—the destruction of the environment—that are quite serious: erosion, the elimination of agricultural land, and turning agricultural land into biofuel, which has had a severe effect on hunger. It’s not just an environmental problem; it’s a human problem. Building dams and cutting down the Amazon forests has ecological consequences—there are thousands of things and the problems are getting a lot worse.
For one reason, because of the role of the United States. I mean, nobody’s got a wonderful role in this, but as long as the United States is dragging down the entire world, which is what it’s doing now, nothing significant is going to happen on these issues. The US has to at least be seriously taking part and should be well in the lead. It’s kind of ironic; if you look at this hemisphere, the country that is well in the lead in trying to do something serious about the environment is the poorest country in South America, Bolivia. They recently passed laws granting rights to nature.1 It comes out of the indigenous traditions, largely—the indigenous majority, they’ve got the government advocating on their behalf. Sophisticated Westerners can laugh at that, but Bolivia is going to have the last laugh.
Anyway, they’re doing something. In the global system, they’re in the lead, along with indigenous communities in Ecuador. Then there’s the richest country—not only in the hemisphere, but in world history—the richest, most powerful country, which is not only doing nothing, but is going backward....