My TV wasn’t showing a lurid disaster movie. This was the real thing. I even had friends downwind of the catastrophe. After the ominous and possibly apocalyptic explosion occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi atomic power plant, and one of its reactors threatened meltdown, the world waited with baited breath for genpatsu-shinsai – an enduring atomic disaster triggered by earthquake. Maybe the worst danger has now passed. As I write and post this it’s still unclear. But it’s all too plain that with a single – albeit massive – seismic flip the planet proved that it is not the passive victim of human exploitation and the philosphies of abstract greed. Is this the Gaia hypothesis in action? I don’t know. That might just be another human conceit to place our selves at the centre of the action, but I am not able dismiss it out of hand. All I know is the current devastation in Japan – and the fear of what might be, and still could be – must serve as a call to reevaluation of the narrow, ignorant, profit-driven aspirations of the corporations and the billionaire barons who currently attempt to govern us and negate and sideline any more realistic or intelligent considerations of how this world might be organized for the benefit of both humanity and its planetary home.
Our good pal John May has a lot to say about nuclear power on The Generalist. Click here.
Click here for live coverage.
The secret word is Grim
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