Water of Life

MICHAEL K SMITH—Abbey called himself a racist in Confessions of a Barbarian, though he defined the term as an aversion to being dominated by a race to which one did not belong, which definition would render nearly all of humanity “racist”: “Am I a racist? I guess I am. I certainly do not wish to live in a society dominated by blacks, or Mexicans, or Orientals. Look at Africa, at Mexico, at Asia.” Abbey was aware of the contributions of Western colonialism and imperialism to the widespread misery found in those regions, but argued it was but “Western guilt neurosis” to assign primacy to them in accounting for Third World conditions in the late twentieth century.

JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER—In the first part of the chapter, Foster discusses the “qualitative transformation in the level of human destructiveness” that characterized capitalist production after World War II. This transformation included massive increases in the use of synthetics that could not be readily reabsorbed by nature, accompanied by a radical expansion in the use of all forms of energy, particularly fossil fuels.

EVO MORALES—“Our vision of the Communitarian Socialism of Living Well is based on rights and not on the market. It is based on the full realization of human happiness of peoples and populations, through the full complementarity of the rights of peoples, persons, states and Mother Earth”

When George W. Bush’s administration claimed that the Clean Air Act couldn’t be used…