The French Revolution

 Photo by Norbu Gyachung

The news lately has been full of reports of the revolt in France, of the “Gilets Jaunes” or “Yellow Vests.” Their demonstration was triggered by a new tax on gas which was announced for the next year, but its true motive is the increasing disparity between the rich and poor in the country. Today is the fourth day of confrontations, and the movement is now nationwide.

Having been watching and waiting for years—decades—for a sign that the public was going to revolt against the ongoing squeezing of the middle classes between high taxes and low pay by western governments, it does not surprise me that it is France, the country in which democracy began, that has started it. After all, they were the people who once cut off the heads of their monarchy when a similar situation developed following the building of Versailles in the 1780s, and they still retain enough democracy to demonstrate without being killed.

While the public in the western countries has been led to believe by the mass media that the hard times we have increasingly faced is just a sign of the times, it has actually been caused by the global corporations, which have never enjoyed higher profits. The money is all there—it has just been taken from the pockets of the middle classes and put in the pockets of the rich. If you don’t believe me just do a bit of internet searching about it.

In the summertime, while fires raged through the temperate forests of the northern hemisphere, the French Minister of the Environment, Nicolas Hulot, simply threw up his hands and quit, an unprecedented act, due to the way he and efforts to work towards protecting the environment were ignored by this government. He asked what he could possibly do in a government in which all environmental matters were treated lightly and he had no resources with which to work.

The same is true in other western countries, but in Canada, during the same period, and while the country was burning, the Minister of the Environment announced that its priority was hunting.

The new French revolution may well topple a government which has suppressed the taxes of the rich while raising the taxes of the poor, and has ignored the threat of climate change. It may or may not spread to other countries. In America there are a lot of angry people, but they lack the level of democracy enjoyed by the French—if they took to the streets to demonstrate widely, there would likely be a lot of killing. In Canada it would never happen because the people are too brainwashed by television to see the true picture.

But the true picture is there to see, and it is more than high time to start doing something, to stop working on the old world and begin working on the new one. Because, far from being a “light” topic, our environment happens to be all we have.

Strange as it may seem, in spite of extraordinary advances in cosmology, this planet is the only one we know of on which complex life exists. There is no other planet to escape to, as optimistic right wingers once imagined would be the case when the time came that they had destroyed this one. Yet, beneath the infinitely delicate protective layer of our atmosphere, and led by a system that considers financial gain to be more important than life, our species, which strangely fancies itself the most intelligent of all creatures, (the only one(!) “made in the image of God”), is destroying the biosphere that supports us and treating the problem as unimportant.

Repeatedly during the past century, various thinkers have been writing about the eventual problems of continuous development on a finite planet, and from time to time asking whether science could not possibly turn some of its brilliance to solving the problems that were developing due to the runaway instincts of this rogue ape, including the population explosion, to no avail.

I have been working for sharks all these years because I had put my sunset rendezvous with the local reef sharks first in my life for seven years, and spending time with them for fifteen years, so knew, through repeatedly confirmed personal experience, what they were like as animals and individuals. Since no other voice had taken that perspective, I felt a need to speak out for them, especially after they were finned. However, at some point one needs to go farther than one’s own little specialty and it seems to me that the events in France are as good a cue as any to begin supporting all efforts to demand that the governments of the world begin to look after the planet first and foremost, and to identify and stop supporting the true evils—I cannot find a better word to use—that are destroying the networks of living things using methods varying from direct killing to global warming.

Climate change, now undeniable, is causing cascading ecological changes both on earth and in the oceans, leaving living organisms in environments in which they cannot survive. For example, the sharks on a reef on which the coral has died, the fish in a dead zone, the exhausted polar bear swimming on and on and never finding any ice, the person living in a burning forest.

It is time to say no to business as usual and begin to demand, in whatever form that may take, that governments start looking after our planet or step down from their positions of control, and that they stop rating the value of money above that of life—our lives, and those of our fellow living beings.