During this election year it is important to recognize that corporations pretty much run the world. Despite the outcome of the elections, they will continue to do so — at least until we organize and change the rules that have created the dominant neoliberal system.

We all support corporations. We buy from them, work for them, manage them, invest in them, and help them with our tax dollars. We have to ask ourselves — and answer — the following questions:

Question 1: Do we want to support companies that maximize short-term profits if that means causing the oceans to rise, destroying rainforests and other vital resources — in essence destroying the resources that support our economy?

The obvious answer: No.

But that is exactly what’s happening today. We’ve created a cannibalistic economy that is consuming itself — and us — into extinction. Paul Levy, the author of Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil, calls it the “Wetikonomy”: a reference to wetiko, an Algonquin word for cannibalism that was used specifically to describe the European colonialists and their destructive way of interacting with the world. The consequence of the corporate-led global economy is to destroy life in a perpetual quest to grow GDP.

Question 2: Change what?

What can we learn from the American Revolution? In 1773, most colonists believed the British were invincible. But George Washington recalled the Battle of the Monongahela during the French and Indian war, about 20 years earlier, when he had seen a huge British army badly defeated by a handful of Indians. “No, they are not invincible,” he said. “We just need to hide behind trees.”

We must change the story and the rules.

We are at such a time now.

When Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics, he promoted the current story: “the only responsibility of business is to maximize profits, regardless of the social and environmental costs.” The rules governing business ever since reflect that story. That was in 1976, a time when financial capital was considered in short supply and nature abundant. No one was talking about peak oil or climate change. But that is no longer true. The situation has changed. The story and the rules must also change.

Question 3: What is the new story?

I was taught in pre-1976 business school that corporations should be good citizens, should serve a public interest, in addition to paying a decent rate of return to investors. They should give employees health care insurance, retirement pensions, job security, pay taxes, and support public service institutions, like schools and recreational facilities.

The acceptance of Friedman’s logic, the Reagan/Thatcher (counter)revolution, the hijacking of academia and the economics profession, the absurd concentrations of wealth and power among a tiny elite, and many other events have led to a new dominant moral and economic order called neoliberalism. We must now create a new story, one that states that the responsibility of business is to serve the public, to be good citizens, to contribute to our shared commons, and to create a regenerative economy rather than a cannibalizing one.

It is essential to recognize that the old story and rules have resulted in a dysfunctional system, a global failure on an unimaginable scale. We are in the midst of the 6th great extinction on this planet, and the first to be created by a single species. We need to build an economic system that is regenerative — that is itself a renewable resource — instead of one that is consuming itself into extinction.

We need new rules, regulations and laws that support ideas and processes that clean up pollution, that internalize the so-called ‘externalities’ of doing business, that regenerate destroyed environments, and that develop technologies for new, more efficient energy, communications, transportation and other systems.

Question 4: What can you do?

There are no simple answers to this question because so much depends on your context, your life path, your particular set of privileges and desires.

One place where we all can start is to look for and shine a light on the story behind the story. One of the things I learned through the process that eventually resulted in my book, The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, is that there are almost always stories behind the “official” story.

Recent incidents, such as WikiLeaks and the Snowden/NSA files, and great investigative reporting from Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica and the committee of journalists who published the Panama Papers, have exposed corrupt politicians and tax-evading billionaires.

Democracy depends on spreading information, on transparency and a healthy dose of skepticism. It demands that we question our leaders, government policies, and the ingrained logic of our cultural, political and economic operating systems. In order to create a less destructive world, we have to first be able to see the cannibalistic tendencies rooted in selfish consumption (wetiko) in our culture, in our community, and indeed, in ourselves.

The second aspect of what you can do is to create local, individual, and collective power to demand political change. Most change gets implemented on local levels — and it all starts with an individual or group of individuals. Social media has increased the power of each and every one of us in powerful ways.

Recently, a small group of activists and bloggers in Vermont, a state with less than 0.2 percent of the US population, got a law passed forcing corporations to label GMOs. As a result, some of the biggest food producers in the country — Kellogg’s, General Mills, Campbell’s Soup, Mars, and ConAgra — committed to the national labeling of GMOs.

The power of community organizing ended apartheid, gave women and Black people voting and civil rights, has ensured that corporations clean up polluted rivers, and almost brought an obscure Vermont senator and proclaimed socialist into the White House (and in the process deeply influenced the Democratic Party). The list of successes is endless.

Through joining and supporting social movements, we will inspire government to pass laws that will create a regenerative economy.

We have to demand that corporations serve a public interest. Corporations run the world and they depend on you. CEOs receive monthly summaries about email, Facebook and Twitter messages that come to their offices. They know they have to listen to their customers.

Pick a corporation you want to change. Start a social networking campaign: “I love your products but I won’t buy them any more until you pay your workers a living wage, clean up the pollution you caused, pay your taxes, and create transparency in your operations.” Send it to all your social networking circles and ask them to send it to theirs.

You are living at a watershed moment in history. This presidential campaign has, above all else, shown the power elites that we understand that the system is broken. Now we must change the story and the rules, and do it in time for civilizational and planetary regeneration.

John Perkins is the author of The New York Times bestseller Confessions of an Economic Hitman and, most recently, Hoodwinked: An Economic Hitman Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded and What We Need to Do to Remake Them. Perkins just recently published The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

Originally published on truthout.org

Photo by Jack Zalium

The post Seeing Wetiko: We Must Reject Economic Cannibalism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Singing whales, talking trees, dancing bees, birds who make art, fish who navigate, plants who learn and remember. We are surrounded by intelligences other than our own, by feathered people and people with leaves. But we’ve forgotten. There are many forces arrayed to help us forget—even the language we speak.

I’m a beginning student of my native Anishinaabe language, trying to reclaim what was washed from the mouths of children in the Indian Boarding Schools. Children like my grandfather. So I’m paying a lot of attention to grammar lately. Grammar is how we chart relationships through language, including our relationship with the Earth.

Imagine your grandmother standing at the stove in her apron and someone says, “Look, it is making soup. It has gray hair.” We might snicker at such a mistake; at the same time we recoil. In English, we never refer to a person as “it.” Such a grammatical error would be a profound act of disrespect. “It” robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a thing.

And yet in English, we speak of our beloved Grandmother Earth in exactly that way: as “it.” The language allows no form of respect for the more-than-human beings with whom we share the Earth. In English, a being is either a human or an “it.”

Objectification of the natural world reinforces the notion that our species is somehow more deserving of the gifts of the world than the other 8.7 million species with whom we share the planet. Using “it” absolves us of moral responsibility and opens the door to exploitation. When Sugar Maple is an “it” we give ourselves permission to pick up the saw. “It” means it doesn’t matter.

But in Anishinaabe and many other indigenous languages, it’s impossible to speak of Sugar Maple as “it.” We use the same words to address all living beings as we do our family. Because they are our family.

What would it feel like to be part of a family that includes birches and beavers and butterflies? We’d be less lonely. We’d feel like we belonged. We’d be smarter.

In indigenous ways of knowing, other species are recognized not only as persons, but also as teachers who can inspire how we might live. We can learn a new solar economy from plants, medicines from mycelia, and architecture from the ants. By learning from other species, we might even learn humility.

Colonization, we know, attempts to replace indigenous cultures with the culture of the settler. One of its tools is linguistic imperialism, or the overwriting of language and names. Among the many examples of linguistic imperialism, perhaps none is more pernicious than the replacement of the language of nature as subject with the language of nature as object. We can see the consequences all around us as we enter an age of extinction precipitated by how we think and how we live.

Let me make here a modest proposal for the transformation of the English language, a kind of reverse linguistic imperialism, a shift in worldview through the humble work of the pronoun. Might the path to sustainability be marked by grammar?

Language has always been changeable and adaptive. We lose words we don’t need anymore and invent the ones we need. We don’t need a worldview of Earth beings as objects anymore. That thinking has led us to the precipice of climate chaos and mass extinction. We need a new language that reflects the life-affirming world we want. A new language, with its roots in an ancient way of thinking.

If sharing is to happen, it has to be done right, with mutual respect. So, I talked to my elders. I was pointedly reminded that our language carries no responsibility to heal the society that systematically sought to exterminate it. At the same time, others counsel that “the reason we have held on to our traditional teachings is because one day, the whole world will need them.” I think that both are true.

English is a secular language, to which words are added at will. But Anishinaabe is different. Fluent speaker and spiritual teacher Stewart King reminds us that the language is sacred, a gift to the People to care for one another and for the Creation. It grows and adapts too, but through a careful protocol that respects the sanctity of the language.

He suggested that the proper Anishinaabe word for beings of the living Earth would be Bemaadiziiaaki. I wanted to run through the woods calling it out, so grateful that this word exists. But I also recognized that this beautiful word would not easily find its way to take the place of “it.” We need a simple new English word to carry the meaning offered by the indigenous one. Inspired by the grammar of animacy and with full recognition of its Anishinaabe roots, might we hear the new pronoun at the end of Bemaadiziiaaki, nestled in the part of the word that means land?

“Ki” to signify a being of the living Earth. Not “he” or “she,” but “ki.” So that when we speak of Sugar Maple, we say, “Oh that beautiful tree, ki is giving us sap again this spring.” And we’ll need a plural pronoun, too, for those Earth beings. Let’s make that new pronoun “kin.” So we can now refer to birds and trees not as things, but as our earthly relatives. On a crisp October morning we can look up at the geese and say, “Look, kin are flying south for the winter. Come back soon.”

Language can be a tool for cultural transformation. Make no mistake: “Ki” and “kin” are revolutionary pronouns. Words have power to shape our thoughts and our actions. On behalf of the living world, let us learn the grammar of animacy. We can keep “it” to speak of bulldozers and paperclips, but every time we say “ki,” let our words reaffirm our respect and kinship with the more-than-human world. Let us speak of the beings of Earth as the “kin” they are.

The post Nature Needs a New Pronoun: To Stop the Age of Extinction, Let’s Start by Ditching “It” appeared first on P2P Foundation.