(14) Dancing without guarantees

RJ: Let's finish with one issue in which there eventually won't be some people on top and some on the bottom, but we'll all lose -- the ecological crisis. On that one, as the saying goes, nature bats last. We've talked mostly about politics, but increasingly I think more about -- and am scared about -- the ecological crisis. Do you?

AO: All the time. The planet is being destroyed, and the indications are that we're moving toward making the planet uninhabitable. I think the damage probably is so great at this point that there's no real path back. The damage to the atmosphere, to nature in general, may be too much. As a species we're not here forever, but we seem to be shortening what time we might have. Sometimes I have the overarching feeling that the damage we've done is not totally reversible.

RJ: So, you're not a scientist, you're not an ecologist. You're talking about a feeling.

AO: Not a scientist, but I know facts and figures, and they're frightening. But they don't seem to frighten a lot of people.

RJ: You ever said that in public? Or do you censor yourself?

AO: No, I haven't talked about that much in public because I can't say that without committing myself to militant activity of an environmental character. I don't know about the reason I don't feel like doing that. I truly don't understand why.

RJ: Maybe because you look for projects where there is an achievable goal, and maybe that one isn't achievable. So, why do it?

AO: Well, you know something, I don't think it's achievable. Not only because of the industrial nations and their ambitions, which are fucking up things. It's not just imperialism destroying the world. Human beings are destroying the world -- some out of necessity, others out of greed. But it's going on. We're poisoning the oceans. We're poisoning the air. There's no question about it.

RJ: Let me tell you a story, because it goes to political organizing again. I was talking to an activist who also is an environmental scientist by training. I said, "Well, you know, I'm not trained in the science of this, but I think a lot about whether the processes we've set in motion can be reversed." She said, "Well, I am a scientist, and the data and all the facts are much worse than you probably understand. It's worse than you can imagine." She meant that if you look across the board, at global warming and groundwater pollution and resource depletion and on and on, as you say, the damage is incredible and possibly irreversible. And so I said, "Well, how do you deal with that?" She said, "I just don't think about it."

AO: I don't agree with that at all.

RJ: Okay, but her point was it was too overwhelming. If she thought about it too much, it would undermine her ability to do activist work. You're talking about a difference between really facing the facts ...

AO: ... probable facts. Nobody can know for sure.

RJ: That's fine. But when I talk about this with people on the left they often say, "Don't even bring that stuff up. It just paralyzes people." But that's kind of an arrogant, saying people can't handle the truth. Do you think there are there certain truths that most people can't handle? From an organizing point of view, that's an important question. Are there times you shouldn't tell people what you really know and really think?

AO: I think it's probably true that the damage is irreversible and that, after a couple of decades, recognizing that will be unavoidable. But I can't stop with that statement. Look, I'll probably die in the next few years, which I know. My response to that is, I want to do everything I can to make the quality of my life, what remains of it, as good as I can make. And there are sons of bitches in my way, on the personal and political levels, who I will take on. Suppose I had definitive proof that this world we live in, for practical human purposes, would end in the next 40, 50 years. What would I tell my children, or my people I'm talking to intimately, the ones I'm trying to convince to live a certain way? Same thing, that there are things we should want to accomplish, to make the world we have left a little better for everyone. And I would say, this music is not going to go on for too long, so let's dance and love it. Let's dance. Let's do the things that matter, even without guarantees. And if anybody gets in the way, let's kick their fucking ass.

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