Is Climate Change Narcissistic?
Randy “Hurricane” Hayes, legendary co-founder of the Rainforest Action Network Weighs In
Randy Hayes is feeling a bit apocalyptic but as he says, that’s how one often feels when you return from the Hopi Nation, that 9000-year-old civilization of seers and prophesiers nestled in the Four Corners region of the US southwest, a place where Hayes has been acquiring wisdom for 50 years.
Randy “Hurricane” Hayes is one of the founders of the modern environmental movement. When he and Earth First co-founder and rabble-rouser Mike Roselle founded the Rainforest Action Network and RAN got rolling, they ended, pretty much, the bad idea of rainforest beef by Burger King, of unsourced mahogany and old growth trees being used for cheap doors and wood at Home Depot, the beginning of—we hope—the end of big banks like Chase financing logging and destruction in Indonesia for palm oil with the killing of countless orangutans and the polluting of nearby seas as collateral damage. And, yes, recycled paper. That was a big idea back in the days of yore, the ‘80’s. Kinkos was the first to get the news from RAN and acquiesce to righteousness.
“When we would get a victory,” Hayes remembers, “we would thank the corporation because I always believed in the Martin Luther King, Jr. style of nonviolent civil disobedience. It's not about defeating the enemy. It's about a tool of last resort to get people to walk forward together.”
Before we get to why the normally cheerful and raucous Hayes—who has long partied with Tommy Tutone, the Grateful Dead and Bob Weir, the Doors, Jello Biafra, Bonnie Raitt, and more, believing those folks could get the word out to the vox populi better than a full-page ad in the Times or Post, though RAN did those too—why the never shy Hayes is so worried that a self-centered, narcissistic climate movement is missing a bigger point—Hot Globe first offers a brief anecdote on how successful organizations really get started.
JIM MORRISON, THE DOORS:
What have they done to the earth, yeah?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn and
Tied her with fences and dragged her down—
Friends of the Earth had just kicked out their own founder, David Brower, and Hayes and Roselle had a desk in the back of FOE’s office. They realized that without the legendary Brower, savior of the Grand Canyon and all that, they were not going to get funded to start a rainforest organization.
“’Well, I'm going out to get a 6-pack of beer then,’ said Roselle,” as Hayes recalls it, “and he came back and he said, what do you think we should do now that we know that they're not going forward?’ I said, well, we start our own group. And he said, ‘What do you want to call it?’ And I said, Rainforest Action Network. Mike, being artistic, pulled out some press-on type, pressed on the top of a piece of blank paper, Rainforest Action Network. I went to the copy room, made 25 copies, came back, slammed it on the desk and said, Mike, we have a letterhead. We're an organization! And he handed me another beer.”
I don’t know why environmental groups go to the Ford Foundation or some such when they should tap Modelo Especial, Bud Light, PBR or Stone Brewing (Arrogant Bastard Ale, my favorite) for their funding.
But enough silly stuff!
“If you go back to 1985 when we started Rainforest Action Network,” says Hayes, “we were hoping for a soft landing to an ecologically sustainable society. Then I would say 20 years later, I thought, well, there won't be any soft landing because the progress hasn't been made. Maybe there'll be a semi-soft landing. And
now when people ask me if I'm hopeful, I can simply tell them with good honesty, I am hopeful that post-collapse we can rebuild with an ecological paradigm. But only if we get started now.
And so people need to understand what that is and what it means. Otherwise, people rebuild from what they know and what human society, Western Industrial society, knows is what got us into this dilemma in the first place. So we still have our work cut out for us in the next decade or two as things around us collapse. . .
What are people trying to save with the phrase climate change, asks Hayes? They are “not saying save the climate, and that is very anthropocentric. It's very human- oriented. People's concerns are around, ‘Well, gee, climate is affecting me and food prices and all of that.’ That just shows the frailty of our species. We humans just don't seem to have a deep ecological relationship with the natural world, which we did for 99% of human history when we were hunter gatherers. We lived in nature. We were nature, on a day-to-day basis. But that has changed. Now for the bulk of the 8 billion of us, going to 9, 10, maybe even 11 billion, that's not going to happen. The great frailty of the industrial paradigm is industrial agriculture. As climate change or climate systems degrade, this creates more floods and more droughts and more heat waves.
If you think your food prices have gone up in the last 2 or 3 years, you ain't seen nothing yet.”
It took me a few days to get what Hayes was getting at here. I’ll sum it up:
Our understandable concern with climate change too often puts our species, that is, us humans, at the center of everything, once again and as always. All religions, or most, preach this dogma although they don’t burn scientists at the stake so much these days for pointing it out. Hayes is saying with all our righteous concern with climate change (and making money from same) that we’ve forgotten the earth, the biosphere--ironically so. In other words
we’re more worried about what will happen to us than what we’ve done to the earth. And how to repair it. A truth seldom stated. #
For a deeper dive into Hayes’ thinking, click the AUDIO PODCAST or ZOOM INTERVIEW below:
or read past the cool self-promoting Hot Globe picture at the end for an amusing Zoom with Hayes before he went kayaking off Cabo San Lucas last week with Jim “"867-5309/Jenny" Keller and Joe (Running the Amazon) Kane, and for us
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David Brower, Hot Globe, and Randy Hayes counting pelicans at Sinbad’s restaurant below the Bay Bridge in San Francisco once upon a time.
(Michael Janelle is Assoc. producer of HOT GLOBE by Steve Chapple)