It’s natural, whether as a website or an individual, to get caught up in issues that are immediate and urgent. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have been the focus of so many TomDispatch columns are happening right now. People are dying now. The economy is melting down now. The foreclosed and homeless are waking up now in ever-growing numbers. Unemployment lines are getting longer as you read this. Children are hungry this very minute, and the anxiety of a middle-class in freefall is palpable right now almost anywhere you go.
But now and then, it’s also useful to take a step back and ask some longer term questions. Even if we could stop the wars, put people back to work (and back into their homes), even if we could get consumers spending again, there’s always the “what-for” question. What have we accomplished if all we’ve done is reset the clock on the next war, the next bubble, the next bust… and if, all the while, the ice is melting and the globe warming?
Chip Ward, a TomDispatch contributor since 2003, spent 16 years confronting corporations that pollute and run, leaving sickness and suffering in their wake. He was focused on urgent and immediate tasks that made a difference right away (and, while he was at it, running a library system in Salt Lake City that was slowly filling up with homeless people). Recently, he took a break and retreated to the remote canyons of southern Utah where he’s been reflecting on that bigger picture and, as it happens, on the nature of bigness itself at a moment when “too big to fail” is the phrase du jour. Tom
Too Big to Fail
Ecological Ignorance and Economic Collapse
By Chip Ward
“Too big to fail.” It’s been the mantra of our economic meltdown. Although meant to emphasize the overwhelming importance of this bank or that corporation, the phrase also unwittingly expresses a shared delusion that may be at the root of our current crises — both economic and ecological.
In nature, nothing is too big to fail. In fact, big is bound to fail. To understand why that’s so means stepping away from a prevailing set of beliefs that holds us in its sway, especially the deep conviction that we operate apart from nature’s limits and rules.
Here’s the heart of the matter: We are ecologically illiterate — not just unfamiliar with the necessary scientific vocabulary and concepts, but spectacularly, catastrophically, tragically dumb. Oh yes, some of us now understand that draining those wetlands, clear-cutting the rainforests, and pumping all that CO2 into the atmosphere are self-destructively idiotic behaviors. But when it comes down to how nature itself behaves, we remain remarkably clueless.
