The Great Mother Wails by Antonia Darder

The Earth extends her arms to us;

Revealing through her nature the changing condition of our existence.
She bends and twists, deflecting the swords of our foolishness;
our arrogance;
our gluttony; our deceit.
Unbridled by red alerts or amber warnings,
Her ire gives rise to monsoon winds, jarring us from the stupor of our academic impunity;
our disjointed convolutions, our empty promises; our black and white dreams.
Filled with unruly discontent, we yearn to dominate her mysteries;
reducing her to microscopic dust,we spit upon her sacredness, tempting the fury of her seas.
We spill our unholy warsupon her bellys tender flesh, blazing dislocated corpses, Ignite her agony and
grief.
Still, in love with her creations, she warns of our complacency
to cataclysmic devastation,
rooted in the alienation of our disconnection
our rejection, our oppression, our scorn.
And still, we spin ungodly tantrums of injustice against her love,
against ourselves, against one another.
When will we remove blindfolds from our eyes?
When will we stretch our armsto her?
When will the cruelty of ourhatred cease; teaching us to abandon the impositions of patriarchy and
greed?
Oh! that we might together renewour communion with the earth.
She, the cradle of humanity.
She, the nourishment of our seeds.
She, the beauty of our singing.
She, the wailing that precedes.

Modern US ocean development is characterized by an ethics of consumerism- this is

the foundation of the throw-away economy that values profits and dumps plastic
Angus 14 [ Ian Angus, editor of the online journal Climate & Capitalism. He is coauthor of Too Many
People? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis (Haymarket, 2011), and editor of The
Global Fight for Climate Justice (Fernwood, 2010), Plastic Plague,
http://monthlyreview.org/2014/03/01/plastic-plague/, AR]
Four decades ago, when most greens were blaming pollution on population growth and personal
consumption, socialist-environmentalist Barry Commoner showed that neither could account for the
radical increase in pollutants since the end of the Second World War. In The Closing Circle, he argued
that the chief reason for the environmental crisisis the sweeping transformation of productive
technology since World War II.1 In particular, he pointed to dramatic increases in the production and
use of materials not found in nature, such as synthetics that do not degrade and therefore become
permanent blights on the earth. Commoner described natural processes as essentially circular: In the
ecosphere every effect is also a cause: an animals waste becomes food for soil bacteria; what bacteria
excrete nourishes plants; animals eat the plants.2 But modern industrial systems are characterized by
linear processes: machine A always yields product B, and product B, once used, is cast away, having no
further meaning for the machine, the product, or the user. As a result, We have broken out of the
circle of life, converting its endless cycles into man-made, linear events.*M+an-made breaks in the
ecospheres cycles spew out toxic chemicals, sewage, heaps of rubbishtestimony to our power to tear
the ecological fabric that has, for millions of years, sustained the planets life.3 The petrochemical
industry in particular has generated a huge range of materials that nature cannot recycle and reuse. In
the first decade after the Second World War, plastics were promoted for and used primarily to make
durable products: furniture, tires, automobile and airplane components, and the like. But while plastics
are still widely used for long-lasting products, the industry has found its biggest success with
throwaways, products specifically designed to be used once and discarded. Commoner described the
trend toward disposables in 1971, but he could not have known then how bad it would get when the
plastic industry really got going. When The Closing Circle was published, there were no plastic soft-drink
bottles, and no one imagined that giant corporations would one day brand and bottle tap water. Today,
72 billion plastic bottles are produced every year. Similarly, Commoner wrote before the introduction of
plastic grocery bags, which were not adopted by major supermarket chains until the early 1980s. Today
over 500 billion bags are made every year. Bottles and bagstogether with blister packs, polystyrene
tubs, foam peanuts, bubble wrap, styrofoam trays, candy wrappers, and a multitude of other forms of
packagingnow account for a third of the plastic produced each year worldwide. It is a bizarre and
extremely irrational process: producing products that are designed to be thrown away but are made
from materials that never die. The second of Barry Commoners famous Four Laws of Ecology is:
everything must go somewhere. As he wrote, that is a critically important issue for materials that
degrade extremely slowly, if at all. Some plastic has been burned, some has been recycled, but most
billions and billions of tons of itremains on earth, and will do so indefinitely. In his remarkable book
Plastic Ocean, Charles Moore (with Cassandra Phillips) reports on the part of the unstoppable
avalanche of nonessentials (39) that ends up in the oceans, where it chokes and poisons fish, mammals,
and birds, and endangers human life. By turns a memoir, environmental expos, and call to action,
Plastic Ocean is a dramatic account of what Moore has learned in fifteen years of collecting plastic
debris in the Pacific Ocean, studying its effects on marine wildlife, tracing its origins, and campaigning to

stop it. Moore is a rare creature, an activist researcher with the means and determination to work
independently of academic and corporate restrictions. Using a family inheritanceironically, his
grandfather was president of Hancock Oilhe founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in
1994, hoping to shorten the distance between research and restoration of the marine environment.
He writes, The spill, study, and stall crowdadvocating the hundred-year-old petroleum industrys
strategydemands a science of valueless facts to provide a complete mechanistic understanding of a
problem before embarking on any solution. Endless, purposeful delay pending perfect sound science
enforces a form of intellectual sadomasochism driven by the need to preserve profits, not benefit
society (329). In 1997, while sailing his research boat between Hawaii and California, Moore was
initially bemused and then shocked by the amount of plastic litter that floated by, a thousand miles from
the nearest land. He later learned that the material he saw was concentrated in the North Pacific Gyre,
an area where intersecting currents, prevailing winds, and the earths rotation combine to produce a
slow moving whirlpool more than twice the size of Texas. There are huge gyres in each of the worlds
oceans. Any plastic light enough to float that enters the seaeither directly by spills and dumping, or
carried from land by wind or riversis likely to be swept into a gyre, where it will circulate indefinitely,
broken by waves and wind into ever-smaller particles. Moore explains: Anthropogenic debrismanmade trash, 8090 percent of it plastichas broken the reverie of pristine perfection that is the oceans
essence. Its become her most common surface feature. Trash has superseded the natural ocean
sights, stamping a permanent plastic footprint on the oceans surface (70). Bear in mind that although
people have been dumping garbage in oceans for millennia, we have only been throwing plastic away
for fifty years. The accumulation of millions of tons of plastic in ocean gyres is powerful confirmation
that the nature of garbage changed qualitatively in the last half of the twentieth century. On the
Internet, it is easy to find articles that describe the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as a floating island of
plastic debris, sixty to ninety feet thick. Moore dissociates himself from such fantasies. He describes it as
a thin plastic soupuntold millions of plastic particles, interspersed with disposable lighters, pieces of
fish net, broken buoys, and other objects that have not broken up yet. If anything, that makes it much
more dangerous to the birds, mammals, and fish to whom small colored particles suspended in water
look like food. Concern about the plastic ocean is not simply about aestheticsthe ocean equivalent of
roadside trash. It is not just unsightly; it has made the ocean deadly for its inhabitants. Cases of large
animals killed by plastic have been widely publicizedthousands of birds, turtles, seals, and even whales
die every year, their throats and guts clogged with indigestible debris. Plastic affects the entire animal
food chain. As Moores research has proven, even tiny lanternfish ingest plastic particlesand since
they are the main food of tuna, cod, salmon, and shark, many of those particles become part of human
diets. In addition to causing direct physical damage to digestive systems, plastic particles are now known
to be an efficient delivery system for toxic chemicals, some from their manufacturing processes, others
absorbed as they float by polluted shorelines. Many of these chemicals are endocrine disrupters, which
interfere with biological processes, including fetal development. In addition to causing premature death
for countless animals, these chemicals ultimately concentrate in the fish that humans eat, contributing
to a host of diseases. These consequences are all well-known to science, but there has been little action
to stop plastic pollution. The industry has successfully diverted attention away from the production of
throwaway plastics to individual consumer behaviorthe solutions they promote involve cleaning up
or recycling products that never should have been made in the first place. Moore discovered this
personally in 2000, when a conference on marine debris rejected his request for discussion of the
plastics industry. For the organizers, he realized, plastics pose a handling problemthat is, a people

problem, not a material problem. Its all our fault, in other words (162). At a similar conference in
2011, government and industry representatives worked with the organizers to draft what was to be a
plan to lead the way to a debris-free oceanbut the draft did not even mention plastic until Moore
and other activist-scientists loudly objected. As Moore told a reporter at the time, trying to clean up the
oceans while doing nothing to stop production of disposable plastic is like trying to bail out a bathtub
with the tap still running (165). Ultimately, Moore concludes, the problem is a system that puts
corporate interests ahead of the environment, even ahead of human survival. Because change is hard
and powerful people and organizations benefit from the status quo. Plastics are a high-stakes game, and
those who run it can ill afford to lose control of the playing field. But ridding the oceans of plastic means
stopping all plastic inputsnow (292). That will only happen if governments confront industry and put
responsibility where it belongson plastics producersnot volunteer cleanup crews, taxpayersupported government agencies, and NGOs (164).

Nothing is sacred to our civilization of ocean waste dumping our obsession with
consumption is all encompassing and makes all bodies dispensable
Zygmunt Bauman, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Universities of Leeds and Warsaw, 2004
[Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts, p. 96-7]
If the premodern life was a daily rehearsal of the infinite duration of everything except mortal life, the
liquid modern life is a daily rehearsal of universal transience. Nothing in the world is bound to last, let
alone last forever. Todays useful and indispensable objects, with but few exceptions, are tomorrows
waste. Nothing is truly necessary nothing is irreplaceable. Everything is born with a branding of
imminent death; everything leaves the production line with a use-by date label attached; constructions
do not start unless permissions to demolish (if required) have been issued, and contracts are not signed
unless their duration is fixed or their termination allowed depending on the hazards of the future. No
step and no choice is once and for all, none is irrevocable. No commitment lasts long enough to reach
the point of no return. All things, born or made, human or not, are until-further- notice and dispensable.
A spectre hovers over the denizens of the liquid modern world and all their labours and creations: the
spectre of redundancy. Liquid modernity is a civilization of excess, redundancy, waste and waste
disposal.

In response to consumerism, vote affirmative to endorse a politics of the cultural

commons and resist status quo US ocean development practices
PNJ 11 [Pacific Northwest Journal, community-based environmental literacy journal, Educating for a
Revitalization of the Cultural Commons, http://clearingmagazine.org/archives/3023, April 25, 2011,
AR]
The cultural commons are not an abstraction, but rather exist in every community: rural, suburban,
urban, tribal, wealthy, impoverished, religious, secular, north, and south. Within different communities
the cultural commons include activities, knowledge, skills, and patterns of mutual support that do not
rely on a monetized economy. In non-Western cultures, where the monetized economy may consist of

just a few dollars a day, the cultural commons are what sustain daily life. The cultural commons in
communities across North America include the intergenerational knowledge, skills, and activities that
range from how to prepare and share a meal, to healing practices, creative arts, narratives and
ceremonies, craft knowledge and skills, games and outdoor activities, and political traditions such as civil
liberties and democratic debate. Each of these categories encompasses a depth of embodied knowledge
and relationships that would take many papers to fully describe. Clearly there is not a single description
that fits the diversity of the worlds cultural commons. And while the cultural commons of some
communities include traditions of discrimination and violence toward marginalized groups, many
aspects of the cultural commons of even these communities may have little adverse ecological impact.
We are caught in Western cultures in a series of double binds. For example, success in expanding the
economy is further reducing the viability of natural systems; students who graduate from public schools
and universities are becoming increasing addicted to finding their sense of community in cyberspace
instead of in face-to-face, intergenerationally connected communities where they could learn the skills
and discover talents that lead to non- material forms of wealth and mutual support; and current foreign
policies are directed at Westernizing other cultures, and thus are destroying the diversity of languages
and intergenerational knowledge that have been adapted over hundreds and thousands of years of
living within the limits and possibilities of local bioregions. Public schools and universities continue to
perpetuate these double binds by what they designate as high-status knowledge, and by the silences
and prejudices in the curriculum. A key characteristic of high-status knowledge is learning to use various
systems of representation that foster abstract, context-free thinking, while a key characteristic of low
status knowledge is that it is acquired in face-to-face intergenerational relationships, including
mentoring and learning a cultures patterns of moral reciprocity. The way out of these double binds is
first to learn about the nature and ecological importance of regenerating the local cultural commons,
and secondly, to learn the various ways they are being enclosed by ideologies, market forces, silences,
and misconceptions that have their roots in the industrial system of production and consumption.
Enclosure refers to the process of transforming aspects of a culture (broadly understood) that are freely
shared by members of the community into what is privately ownedinto a commodity or service that
has to be purchased. Since the processes of enclosure vary from culture to culture, what will be
addressed here are the forms of enclosure that, in the name of progress and growing the economy, are
aggressively transforming what remains of the cultural commons into market opportunities. Enclosure
has occurred when individuals lack the intergenerational knowledge of how to prepare a meal and
instead rely upon industrially produced food, or upon commercially produced artistic performances
instead of developing personal talents in a mentoring relationship, or upon the government to
determine whether the traditions of habeas corpus and the right to privacy now threaten national
security. The farmer who plants genetically modified seeds that require the purchasing of new seeds for
the next years planting not only has accepted the enclosure of intergenerational knowledge of how to
identify which seeds should be saved, but also the enclosure of a complex body of knowledge of soil and
weather conditions that in times past were essential to successful farming. Examples of enclosure of
intergenerational knowledge and skills are as numerous as daily life is complex. What needs to be
discussed are the educational reforms that are essential if students are to graduate with a knowledge of
how the local cultural commons represent alternatives to the consumer dependent lifestyle that further
undermines community and degrades the Earths natural systems. These educational reforms should
enable students to recognize the different forms of enclosure, and the consequences they have for the
individual, community, and the environment. The initial challenge, however, is to get students to

recognize the cultural commons they participate in on a daily basis. There are two problems here that
need to be taken into account. First, most of the cultural commons are part of daily experience that is
largely taken for granted. Examples may include learning the language groups pattern of writing from
left to right, how to prepare certain foods, the way in which a guest is greeted, the narratives that are
the source of individual and group identity, the differences between private and public space, the right
of each individual to express her/his ideas, and so forth. The other major difficulty is becoming explicitly
aware that language, which is also part of the cultural commons, serves the same role in connecting
generations of individuals as the DNA does in the realm of human biology. The analogy even holds to the
point where a metaphor, like a mutated gene, can be seen as reproducing over generations the
misconceptions of earlier thinkers. Just as genes influence biological development over many
generations, metaphors constituted in the distant past influence thought and behavior over many
generations. The major difference is that we can make explicit the analogy that is reproduced in the use
of metaphors such as tradition, individualism, intelligence, data, and so forthand then identify
analogies that give the metaphor a more current and ecologically accountable meaning. The shift from
thinking of wilderness as wild and in need of human control to thinking of it as a pristine ecology with its
own cycles of regeneration represents an example of our ability to change the meaning of words in ways
that account for todays realities. The language is like DNA metaphor should not be extended to the
point of making a linguistic determinism argument. The way most of the local cultural commons are
tacitly learned in context, as well as the way learning the language of ones cultural group reproduces
earlier patterns of thinking that are largely taken-for-granted, become critically important in
determining whether the educational process makes these taken-for-granted patterns explicit or leaves
them below the level of conscious awareness. If the educational process does not enable students to
become explicitly aware of the problem of relying upon metaphors whose meanings continue to be
framed by analogies settled upon in the distant past, or of the civil liberties that can be traced back in
English history to 1215, or of the differences between developing ones own creative talents and being a
consumer of the talents of others, then the enclosure of these and other aspects of the cultural
commons may go unnoticed. Indeed, if the analog that equates change with progress is taken for
granted, the various forms of enclosure will likely be seen as the latest expression of progress. The role
of the educator then should be that of a mediator whose responsibility is to help students make explicit
the embodied and conceptual differences between their experiences in different cultural commons and
market/consumer relationships and dependencies. Both students and educator are unlikely to have
given sustained attention to these complex differences, such as the difference between food prepared
and shared in a family setting or among friends, and food prepared by the industrial system; or between
face to face communication and technologically mediated communication; or between participating in
the telling of a narrative and reading about it; or between developing a skill and purchasing something
ready-made; or between assuming the right of free expression and having it monitored by the
governments surveillance technologies, and so on. Given that both the students and educator are
engaging in a process of inquiry and clarification that neither is likely to have explored before, the
responsibility of the educator is not to give pre-conceived answers. By not privileging one set of
experiences over others, the process of helping students become explicitly aware of the benefits and
losses may lead in some instances to recognizing that certain aspects of the
scientific/technological/industrial culture represent genuine advantages over certain traditions of the
cultural commons. Other comparisons between the students embodied experiences may lead to an
awareness that consumerism of certain products and services undermines the traditional patterns of

mutual support and self-sufficiency within the community, and the development of personal talents.
While this mediating role does not require, and in fact, precludes giving ready-made answers, public
school and university-based educators nevertheless should have special background knowledge,
especially if the students are just learning to examine the differences between their experiences of the
cultural commons and of industrial/consumer culture. The mediator should possess a knowledge of the
layered nature of metaphorical thinking, especially how the root metaphors of a culture continue to
frame the process of analogic thinking, as well as how metaphorical language carries forward the moral
values of the culture. The mediator also needs to work at being aware of her/his own taken-for-granted
assumptions, as well as examining when students are reproducing the taken-for-granted patterns of
thinking they acquired in the earlier stages of their primary socialization. The key to mediating then is
the ability to encourage students to become aware of different aspects of their embodied/conceptual
experience as they move between the cultural commons and the market/consumer activities and
relationships. To cite a simple example that can move to deeper levels of complexity with older
students, asking a student to give expression to the differences between face-to-face communication
and technologically mediated communication (e.g., email, cell phone, between avatars), would include
asking about differences in associated relationships and emotions, including empathy, non-verbal
patterns of communication, sense of solidarity, memory, bodily experience, and so on. Questions that
students could address in other cultural commons experiences, such as in relation to being mentored in
one of the creative arts, would include the above, but also those surrounding whether the experience
fosters a sense of mutual support and awareness of moral reciprocity that is different from being a
member of an audience. The mediators responsibility also includes bringing a historical perspective to
discussions of the tensions between the cultural commons and the forces of enclosure. That is,
educators can provide students with an understanding of how past cultural forces led to the
development of important traditions that are now a taken-for-granted part of the cultural commons in
the West, such as habeas corpus (which is now being threatened), as well as how other aspects of the
cultural commons were enclosed, such as local traditions of healing (which varied from culture to
culture) through the rise of scientific medicine, the marginalization of orality through the emphasis on
print-based literacy and now computers, the loss of craft knowledge through the introduction of the
industrial system of production, and so forth. Each of these changes also need to be discussed in terms
of whether they enrich certain groups while impoverishing others, how they impact natural systems, as
well as the different forms of dependency they brought and continue to bring about. Through
recognizing that the local cultural commons represent alternatives to a consumer dependent existence
with its associated degradation of natural systems, the process of mediating can lead to enabling
students to name aspects of their cultural commons experiences that need to be conserved, as well
exploring what might be reformed or eliminated entirely. When students move between their cultural
commons and market/consumer culture at a taken-for-granted level of awareness, they often lack the
communicative competence necessary for resisting or affirming what contributes to a more community
and ecologically sustainable future. Too often they remain mesmerized by the dictates of media and
markets. It is only as students can reflect on the ecological and community consequences of what would
otherwise be part of their taken-for-granted experience, that local democracywhich has traditionally
been part of many cultural commons can be revitalized.