Chris Hedges: Confronting the Culture of Death

With Chris Hedges, Portland, Oregon

It feels too small to say that this is an excellent piece by Chris Hedges. It is larger than that. I have long followed Chris Hedges, read several of his books, and have seen him speak many times here in Portland. I am deeply drawn to Chris and his work and wisdom and integrity and, perhaps especially, to his courage. Chris is a father. I am a mother and grandmother. What inspires me so much about Chris Hedges is his fierce pursuit of truth and relentlessness in offering us the truth of a much, much larger picture than most of us can begin to grasp. And yet Chris goes there. And he goes there despite being a father AND because he is a father. And because his profound caring for children and for life itself expands to the vastness way beyond what is personal. Chris Hedges models for us looking at the depths of the truth of where we’re at now in our human and planetary existence AND not turning away. He also models not giving up the struggle to create a loving and just world, and even though the truth is that everything appears to be stacked against us. We are indeed in the midst of a 6th major mass extinction. How will it all turn out? It doesn’t look good. And we must not give up hope and doing our part, whatever that is, in working to transform the overwhelming darkness in our midst into something radically different — a culture and world and our own human hearts which cherishes life rather than destroys it. These are perilous times. May courage and truth and fierce compassionate action be contagious. May we be brave enough to embrace our individual and collective awakening in every way possible. No act of healing, justice, compassion, courage, truth, kindness, and love is too small. — Molly

Chris Hedges, an ordained Presbyterian minister, gave this sermon Jan. 20 at Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria, British Columbia, in Canada.

By Chris Hedges

The issue before us is death. Not only our individual death, which is more imminent for some of us this morning than others, but our collective death. We have begun the sixth great mass extinction, driven by our 150-year binge on fossil fuel. The litany of grim statistics is not unfamiliar to many of you. We are pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at 10 times the rate of the mass extinction known as the Great Dying, which occurred 252 million years ago. The glaciers in Alaska alone are losing an estimated 75 billion tons of ice every year. The oceans, which absorb over 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, are warming and acidifying, melting the polar ice caps and resulting in rising sea levels and oxygen-starved ocean dead zones. We await a 50-gigaton burp, or “pulse,” of methanefrom thawing Arctic permafrost on the east Siberian arctic shelf which will release about two-thirds of the total carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Era. Some 150 to 200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal are going extinct every 24 hours, one thousand times the “natural” or “background” rate. This pace of extinction is greater than anything the world has experienced since the disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Ultimately, feedback mechanisms will accelerate the devastation and there will be nothing we can do to halt obliteration. Past mass extinctions on earth were characterized by abrupt warming of 6 to 7 degrees Celsius. We are barreling toward those numbers. The mathematical models for this global temperature rise predict an initial 70 percent die-off of the human species, culminating with total death.

The corporate forces that have commodified the natural world for profit have also commodified human beings. We are as expendable to global corporations as the Barrier Reef or the great sequoias. These corporations and ruling elites, which have orchestrated the largest transference of wealth upward in human history, with globe’s richest 1 percent owning half the world’s wealth, kneel, and force us to kneel, before the dictates of the global marketplace. They have seized control of our governments, extinguishing democracy, corrupting law and building alliances with neofascists and authoritarians as the ruling ideology of neoliberalism is exposed as a con. They have constructed pervasive and sophisticated systems of internal security, wholesale surveillance and militarized police, along with criminalizing poverty, to crush dissent.

These corporate capitalists are the modern versions of the Canaanite priests who served the biblical idol Moloch, which demanded child sacrifice. And, as in this ancient Canaanite religion it is our children who are being sacrificed to these “mute idols,” as 1 Corinthians puts it. Their future is being taken from them. These corporate forces are, in biblical terms, forces of death. They will, unchecked, create more human misery and death than the evils of Nazism and Stalinism combined.

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