World without end ...

In November, 1979, Dr. Helen Caldicott spoke at a Toronto (Canada) forum on Nuclear Energy as an issue in preventative medicine. Judith Quinlan, writ:;ing for the Canadian publication, Broadside, (Vol. 1, No. 4) has placed in a feminist context the grisly facts presented by Dr. Caldicott. She urges women, as women, urgently to take up the battle against the grave threat of nuclear power. "There is only one answer to the question of the future of the human race ... it is contained in the surviving strands of a female principle." We reprint excerpts from the Broadside article.

It is certainly true that the nuclear industry has put all life on the verge of extinction. But nuclear madness is not the only product of patriarchal technology run amuck. It is
equally true that the chemical industry has done the same thing, by seeding the earth's protective ozone layer with oxygen- hungry gasses, so that we are being exposed to more and mo re of the sun's natural radioactivity. It is also true that the burning of carbon fuels has raised atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to a point that threatens to bake us all in a cosmic green-house. It is also true that the products of industries of all kinds are killing the surface of the oceans, where algal oxygen-production provides 80% of the air we breathe, and are raising the levels of acidity on the earth where land plants produce the remaining 20% of our oxygen. Those of us under thirty are members of a generation that will soon know only one kind of 'natural' death - cancer-caused by the food we eat, the radioactivity we absorb, and the filth that lodges in our lungs. All this is true.

Scientists are already glibly calculating the chances of survival Not your survival, or my survival. Not even the survival of the human race. But survival of life - any life - on earth. Many have already projected a world, by the year 2000, without any human life. The scenario is not one of those science-fiction horror stories of a post-holocaust world, full of wildly-mutated people fighting of packs of wildly -mutated dogs. The scenario we are facing now is much more chilling.

Imagine a quiet  world with a surface temperature close to boiling point, with an air pressure about five times normal , and both climbing. The rain, in fact, would be diluted sulphuric acid under these conditions, even without lnco's help. There are no trees, no land animals, no birds. There might be a few insects left, but even these marvels of adaptation will eventually die out. There may be a few crustaceans, like the ones in the Galapagos rift that don't require light, but these are by definition dead-end strands in the evolutionary web. The only life form that presents any hope for survival in this scenario are single-celled algae. If there are enough of them left, they might be able to photosynthesize enough oxygen before succumbing to ultra-violet radiation, and this might replenish the ozone layer, and it might counteract the CO₂ heating effect, and in a few million years the earth might be able to start supporting more complex life forms. But by that time the sun would be getting very old and the earth itself would soon be consumed in its dying expansion into a red giant.

If the algae don't survive there is very little hope that the sort of chemical evolution that produced life on earth could ever be repeated. The earth's core is cooling and we will never again see the violent upheavels and volcanic activity that fueled and energized the chemical soup from which life emerged.

When the scientists look at these facts, they ask themselves if perhaps global self-destruction is inevitable - a consequent stage in the sort of technological civilization we have produced. This is not a new hypothesis. Since the birth of the patriarchy, Armaggedon has been prophesied, and global suicide has been taken for granted .

Can this be so? that the price of 'civilization' is life itself? I think not.

The problem isn't the stupidity of the nuclear industry, although the nuclear industry is certainly stupid. It isn't even the power greed of the armaments industry, although as Doris Lessing puts it so elegantly in Shikasta, the armaments industry is the driving force behind the Hundred Year War known as the Twentieth Century. It isn't the incredible gulf between the haves and the have-nots of this world, which is nevertheless a despicable symptom of the 'Degenerative Disease'.

The threat behind the madness we are facing runs deeper than all these things. Mary Daly has called it the religion of necrophilia. Early feminists recognized it as anti-life and anti-female. Witches called it black magic (we now eat it with chocolate coating!). All women know it and feel it deep inside ourselves. Sometimes we call it anger, or depression, or madness. Sometimes we see it as anger. All of us know, some of the time, that there is something basically wrong about this man's world. Something so deep-to-the-root, so pervasive, that it penetrates our entire lives, our minds, our souls, our earth.

Nuclear Madness

What the nuclear madness has woken us up to is the fact that time is running out. It isn't enough, any more, to make a few 'connections', without digging for a deeper interconnectedness between our lives, our world, and our struggle. It isn't enough anymore to claim responsibility for our own lives, our bodies, and our immediate environment. As feminist, we know that it won't be enough to save the world from nuclear madness of greater and lesser degree. there are no choices left.

Women everywhere are claiming responsibility for the earth we live on, for the quality of life on it, for the future of human civilization. But meanwhile, the madness that is patriarchy is reaching crisis proportions, and people are turning to the old solutions in new garb; surrendering the future to t he intervention of a mythical god, searching for a father/government/ protector who will save them from being hit in a constant endless war. No god (or goddess) made this mess, and no god will get us out of it. No women made this mess either. Remember that.

Groups like Women Against Nuclear Technology are beginning to say it. That the problem started thousands of years ago. That it is everywhere. That it is the problem of a world that places control and profit and fear above humanity and love. A world that pits one human being against another, and refines that act with technology. A world that has built on the back of such a system an entire culture, a long history , a set of religions, an economy, and a science. Lies have been built upon lies, so that we finally have come to believe that what is killing us is 'human nature'.

The first split was male and female. The first victims were women. The entire world we live in now is based on a point of view that has been developed by only half the human race We are living in a social mutation.

It is too late now to mince words, to ease gently into a future vision that our mothers and grandmothers nurtured and tried to save for us. There is only one answer to the question of the future of the human race. The answer is contained in the surviving strands of a female principle. The answer is first of all to end the patriarchal period of our human history. End it, once and for all. Finished. Or we will all be finished.

The answer is, second of all. to replace it with a future vision that we are only now beginning to distill. A world where technology is used to ease and eventually eradicate human hardship. A world where science serves the needs of survival, not death.

I am suggesting that it is possible, right now, to turn patriarchal technology around, and claim the technology that our fore-mothers were developing before it was stolen and distorted by the patriarchs. I am suggesting that within five years it would be possible to completely eradicate the waste of human lives in daily labour. And with the end of labour, the end of the economic system that feeds on it. I am suggesting that every person could be comfortably housed and fed right now, with the resources already available to us. I am suggesting that it is possible to eradicate much, if not all, of the disease that we suffer. I am suggesting that we could live in a truly global society, with instant free communication between all the people; with fast efficient transportation systems that bring the earth's bounty to all of us, and provide a true mobility between people. I am suggesting that we could make available all the facts and information that would free all people from the scourge of ignorance, and elevate learning, and art and creative thinking to levels in line with our human potential for greatness. I am suggesting that it is possible to remove the barriers to love and understanding that make our lives so impoverished.

I am suggesting that a high-technology utopia is possible right now. A world that has no longer any interest in telling anyone what to do, what to think, how to live. A world without struggle, but with constant activity, with unbridled creativity, with limitless possibilities. I believe that women will continue to fight for this world , long after our brothers have already given up, because we are, after all, mothers.I believe that we have been fighting for just such a world for thousands of years. I believe that, in the end, the men will join us because it is the only world where they, too, will be free. I believe very strongly that the time to start seriously on this task is now.

I don't know if we'll do it, in the time they have left to us. But I do know that the alternative is nothing less than annihilation.

Available from: Broadside, P.O. Box 494, Station P., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 2TI.