After the student/youth strike, then what? Do you wait for stories about your courageous stand to change the heart and mind of decision makers who can impose on others and influencers whom many follow? Hopeful but naive! Do you go ahead and act on your own? Plant all the trees you can. Recycle every bit of stuffs you can. This is growing and will make a difference but maybe a little bit too late for what we need much earlier. Do you go prepare yourself to be an ethical and fair entrepreneur and start your own green business and contribute in greening production and consumption…can be efficient but will require a lifetime for most average experience except if you are truly exceptional. Do you go and green rate your candidates in the next elections and pin your hopes on political candidates who mouth greens? Maybe, but both businessmen/women and politicians of the past and current generations are the ones who made or did not make crucial decisions and actions that lead us to these shit where we are in in the first place?
Violence and coercion is out of the picture. Only the foolish and the most arrogant resort to this and believe it will work. The biggest polluters, habitat destroyers, immiters are also heavily invested in the business of war and violence. Try provoking them in their turf and they will want nothing more than this. Irresponsible business and malgovernance is a hefty wealth accumulator for them, war and strife even more. They are as evil as earthly evil they can be.
Non violent, direct actions, I am all for this BUT maybe it takes a little bit more than a bit of individually-driven of small group driven sabotage here and there, hunger strike here and there, picket lines here and there to attack a whole system so entrenched in every area and stage of our lives. We need direct actions aimed at controlling and mobilizing collective assets and resources of the state, the most readily available resource big enough to make a difference.
No doubt, big business and mid size businesses collectively put together has indeed bigger capacity than the state but unless some of you strikers now moving to this kind of direct actions I am taking about anticipates as part of his/her inheritance your mother and father’s seats in the board and stocks in these companies and you are willing to be different that your parents and defy the very core of what they represent, then for the rest of us, it is only state resources and capacity that we can truly target with some level of practicality.
I frown earlier on having to pin hopes on current politicians. But perhaps you and I, with this sense of eco emergency, rebelling against extinction, fighting for the very right to survive as a speciis made of entirely different stuff and can be the drivers of the state to mobilize its massive resources for direct actions in GREEN GOVERNANCE.
This article is written by ROY CABONEGRO, former President of the Green Party of the Philippines.
After the strike, organize tree planting, garbage/plastic clean-up, lobby congress for rising sea level legislation. The environmental struggle goes on!