Almost unbelievably, giant petrochemical corporations prowling our planet for new places to drill are honing in on everybody’s favourite party island. Locals who love the island year round for myriad reasons beyond the techno scene have launched a petition and need our support to block this dangerous scheme.

Ibiza may be infamous for its summer season when legions of tourists flock into mega-clubs to thwap one out to often dubious electronica and spend weeks of their wages on small bottles of water costing ten euros a pop, but there are whole other dimensions to this unique and sacred “Pine Island”.

Early ravers

Ibiza is an exquisite jewel in the Mediterranean with precious ecosystems and a rich cultural past resulting in large portions of the island being registered as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Phoenician settlers founded a port here in 654 BC and named it Ibossim (from the Phoenician “iboshim” dedicated to the god of music and dance Bes).

Something magical about this extraordinary countryside and coastline lends itself to bacchanalia and has been drawing revellers ever since. Some say it is the unusually intense magnetic field focused on a magnificent rock of the southern coast called Es Vedrà.

Es Vedrà

Of course, at a time when our planet’s climate is dangerously changing and renewable alternatives abound, drilling for oil anywhere is unacceptable. However, by setting their sites on our beloved “White Island” the oil hoodlums have finally gone too far.

Perhaps the money men have bought the myth – that this island is just a den of iniquity. They have failed to appreciate that the international, elite of House Heads are actually a major creative force driving much of the positivity keeping our culture float in these dismal times of corporate hegemony.

Paradise @ DC10

The dance floor of DC10 contains so much wasted talent the average IQ is significantly higher than at most of the world’s leading universities. Not only is this a fight Big Oil can never win, by rounding on the latent passions of the Techno Troubadours they may find they have picked an enemy that will prove their downfall. Underground club culture is grass roots and touches every major metropolis in the world. Roused into action it could prove an unstoppable force for change in the world.

In the island’s legendary cave after-parties the talent is so wasted it is actually pretty much wall to wall Mensa members. These people haven’t been partying non-stop for the last fifteen years because they can’t get a job – they’ve been doing it because it makes a hell of a lot more sense then working 9-5 in an office for a company participating in an economy that decimates the natural world whilst enabling six billionaires to sit in mega yachts the size of small cities off Formentera.

Yoga on Formentera

How to solve the “energy crisis”

This latent genius could solve the world energy crisis in 30 seconds if someone got in there and told them there was a problem. We don’t need to disturb them though as we have figured the solution out already. All we need to do is connect giant, concentrated solar arrays in all the world’s major deserts to a global renewable energy grid. If the fossil fuel corporations were simply acting in the interests of their shareholders, as they claim, they would have done this already. The truth is, these companies are run by evil, greedy men who have been so intoxicated with their poisonous business model they plan to destroy our planet just because they can.

Logical arguments can only take us so far. What we need is for the good people of the world to unite into an unstoppable force of positivity and demonstrate that other ways of living are available and much more fun. We don’t need to work five days a week, banks are not too big too fail and the last wild spaces on earth are definitely not for sale. A key tool in our arsenal is house music. Over to you Romanthony:

Please sign the petition here

Bruce Parry, member of the EcoHustler Advisory Posse say no:

Please sign the petition here

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Fifty veiled figures dressed in black carried out a performance art installation entitled ‘Parts Per Million’ throughout a series of rooms in the ‘BP Walk Through British Art’ at Tate Britain during the art gallery’s official re-opening (Saturday 23 November 2013). The piece critiqued the role that Tate is playing in exacerbating climate change by bolstering the public perception of BP through its long-standing sponsorship relationship.

The art at Tate Britain was reordered chronologically this year. The Liberate Tate performance began in the ’1840′ room, when the industrial revolution started to significantly impact emission levels, to the present day room with contemporary art created as carbon dioxide levels reached an all-time high of 400 parts per million (ppm). Leading climate scientists consider 350 ppm to be what must be returned to in this century for earth to be safe for human life for generations to come. In each room the Liberate Tate performers arranged themselves in a different configuration and counted aloud en masse the increase in atmospheric carbon ppm during that time period.

‘Parts Per Million’ is the tenth performance at Tate by Liberate Tate: a group that has become internationally renowned for artworks aimed at ending the relationship of Tate and other cultural institutions with oil companies. One of the performers, Fiona Edwards said:

“Any celebration of British art that prominently bears the BP logo is also endorsing that company’s business model which explicitly involves the destruction of a safe, liveable climate. Tate Britain celebrates with a ‘House Warming Party’, but the presence of BP, one of the companies data shows is most responsible for climate change due to its carbon emissions, makes it more of a ‘Global Warming Party’.”

The national collection of British art housed at Tate Britain – art owned by the public – was rebranded the ‘BP Walk through British Art’ in May: in the very week it was announced carbon dioxide levels had reached 400 ppm. A report published earlier this week estimated that BP was responsible for 2.5% of global historic emissions.

Terri Fletcher of Liberate Tate said: “Tate’s vision statement says that it will ‘demonstrate leadership in response to climate change’. Yet oil companies like BP are actively looking for ways to expand their markets and find new reserves at a time when the world needs to be dramatically reducing the amount of fossil fuels that are being burnt. By actively promoting BP, Tate is positioning itself on the side of the fossil fuel companies that are actually creating dangerous climate change.”

There is growing alarm from artists, Tate members and visitors that Tate is providing support to a corporation creating climate chaos and forcing climate-conscious gallery visitors into an uncomfortable position if they want to enjoy art at Tate (the mission of the art museum is to promote public enjoyment of art). Last year Tate said in a reply to a freedom of information request that it had received more representations raising concerns about BP’s sponsorship than any other issue since the oil company became linked to the gallery in 1990.

Since 1990, when BP first attached itself to Tate and its collection, much has changed: the scientific evidence of climate change due to burning hydrocarbons and the negative social and environmental impacts of oil companies, BP in particular, is now clear and far more widely known amongst the public, including art lovers.

Tate has placed BP sponsorship “under review”. BP has dominated the Tate Members Annual General Meeting (AGM) for years. In 2012 Tate Director Sir Nicholas Serota promised Tate members ethical alternatives would be explored so that Tate trustees had a choice not to continue BP sponsorship. A progress report is due at the 2013 AGM on 6 December.

Liberate Tate

Liberate Tate, Parts Per Million, Tate Britain 2013 Credit: Kristian Buus

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“Oil. Gas. Oil. Gas. I love Russia.” DJ Smash’s new music video parodies Russia’s oil reliance.

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Given the perennial problem of increasing population growth compounded by increasing consumption I don’t need to be convinced, I wanted to more rapidly get into exploring the post-growth world.

Heinberg has to be thorough because he remains a marginalized voice drowned out against the braying of politicians and media who perennially obsess over increasing growth even as the impossibility is writ large in the world around us.

Heinberg laments that governments want to return us to “a life of carefree motoring through anonymous suburbs” even whilst every day that passes and every gallon of fuel burnt is wasted if it is not preparing us for Peak Everything; the steady decline in supply of the nutrients of the conventional economy.

From now on, to maintain and improve our quality of life, we need to be able to take care of ourselves and our loved ones without depending on mega-corps shifting the fundamentals of life (energy, food, water) around in the giant mechanical web of fossil burning machines which has, for this brief moment in history, become ubiquitous.

Heinberg demonstrates that investing now in renewable energy, low carbon food production, and local resilience could avoid catastrophe but acknowledges that governments and business, trapped in short-term planning cycles, may drive ‘business-as-usual’ over the precipice of collapse. This is why he wrote the book “to prepare individuals and communities for what is coming”.

The job of the informed minority is to have the tools, knowledge and seed ready to enable survival once our centralized, fossil fuel infrastructure splutters to a halt, and yet grass-roots, pre-emptive action should surely spread.

“The end of economic growth does not necessarily mean we’ve reached the end of qualitative improvements in human life.” Indeed, according to Heinberg the single most important thing any of us can do to prepare is to go and meet our neighbors “the people you may need to depend on”. This is also one of the easiest and most successful actions we can take to improve our well being. The number of neighbours we know is closely correlated to our happiness levels.

Heinberg cautions early on that his message may be bleak and yet I relished the realism and found hope in the later sections. At a time of ubiquitous debt, surging unemployment, slashed social welfare, and when nature’s agonies are muffled only by dismal and desperate, endless and empty calls for more; problems whose solutions require restraint, community building and a recalibration of quantity over quality my turn out not to be problems at all. Our planet is beautiful but limited couldn’t our economy be the same?

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Putin sits atop a vast, centralized, fossil-fuel infrastructure that delivers energy and concentrates wealth. Soviet machinery that was supposed to provide for the masses has been hijacked by the few. Their gargantuan yachts, legions of prostitutes and decadent lifestyles are testimony to both the effectiveness of the machinery and its inherent immorality; centralization corrupts.

The hegemonic oligarchs trampling the earth just past the peak of the Industrial Era are scared. They have much to lose and their VIP world of shiny chrome, red velvet and designer-everything cannot insulate against the simmering dissatisfaction that ripples through their impoverished peers.

Putin has long been known to be a gangster but time has revealed him to be worse, a dictator. His power is violent, masculine, humorless and awful. He has silenced dissent, oppressed minorities and used the apparatus of the state to strengthen his own hand and control the people. Naturally, the best response to his brand of oppression is playful, funny and feminist.

Pussy Riot dared to mock the macho monolith and specifically shine a light on the disturbing way the Russian Orthodox Church has become an extension of his power granting his policies holy credence. Putin’s response is as predictable as it is miserable; he wants to crush Pussy Riot like he crushes all that oppose his total control.

Pussy Riot’s colorful, collaborative creativity is not just the best antidote to Putin but the best antidote to the whole dangerous industrial machine as it grasps to gobble and destroy the last remnants of nature. The radical flip to an ecological society requires free and empowered citizens to manifest their power locally.

In the closing statement of their show trial Alyokhina told the court:

“I am not scared of you, I’m not scared of lies and fiction, or the badly formed deception that is the verdict of this so-called court. Because my words will live, thanks to openness.

“When thousands of people will read and watch this, this freedom will grow with every caring person who listens to us in this country.”

Putin’s insecurity is deep and unquenchable, his motives base and obvious. Should he succeed in locking up Pussy Riot, even for a matter of months, it is more industrial, male power closing down artistic expression, local freedom and human rights. It is not just Russia that suffers, Putin sits at the table with other world leaders and they look to each other’s grey, sagging faces to see what they can get away with.

Putin’s vanity and need to project a positive image of himself and Russia may be Pussy Riot’s keys to freedom. Support on the streets and via social media, which the Kremlin no doubt tracks, might actually do some good to the extent that leniency would cast a favorable light on these villains. We should build on Pussy Riot’s important success and do whatever we can to keep them out of the cage.

freepussyriot.org

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The final beastfile, the company trading on life’s essentials…

Glencore provides a text book example of how deregulated, laissez-faire capitalism gives rise to out-of-control corporate monoliths that sidestep national laws to maximize their concentration of wealth whilst reducing the well being of millions of people and decimating the planet’s ecology. Small is beautiful.

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