David Edwards

Interview Conducted
By Telephone
1.11.00

After climbing the business career ladder for most of his twenties, David Edwards left his management-level marketing job to become a writer. He had no idea how he was going to make a living, but the standard version of success had increasingly felt to him like a terrible, deadening failure. "Three things had become obvious to me," the English author says. "The misery of conventional 'success'; the vast and perhaps terminal havoc this 'success' was wreaking on the world; and the fact that no one was talking about either."

Leaving his apartment, his town, his girlfriend, and most of his friends, Edwards wrote until he ran out of money. Then he moved to a small seaside town and supported himself by teaching English as a second language. "Nine months earlier," he says, "I had been head of a marketing department, and now I was teaching the names of fruits to fourteen- and fifteen-year-old Thai kids: I was the happiest man alive!"

The problem in modern Western society, according to Edwards, remains the age-old one of struggling for freedom — but freedom from a very different set of chains. In his first book, Burning All Illusions(South End Press), Edwards writes, "we have been prisoners of tyrants and dictators, and consequently have needed to win our freedom in very concrete, physical terms. We now need to free ourselves not from a slave ship, a prison, or a concentration camp, but from many of the illusions fostered in our democratic society."

Edwards grew up in a little English village called Bearsted in the county of Kent, where he was known as "Eggy Edwards" and was infamous for playing practical jokes. His mother was from Sweden, and he spent summers in the country there, an experience he credits with having introduced him to a natural, uncomplicated alternative to modern living.

The boredom and sense of futility and emptiness we feel when working solely for our own benefit, Edwards says, is the first piece in the great puzzle of how best to live our lives. The second piece is the realization that, to es-cape this sense of futility and find happiness, we have to work to relieve the suffering and increase the happiness of others — not just the poor, or women, or animals, but all living beings. Most people are good, reasonable human beings, Edwards says, but they are prevented from doing good by the delusion that it involves a miserable sacrifice. In fact, he contends, the best way of looking after ourselves is to work for the benefit of everyone else.

Edwards lives in a one-room apartment on a quiet road with lots of trees, birds, and squirrels, just a twenty-minute walk from the English seaside. He works part time for the International Society for Ecology and Culture, writing and doing research on the impact of globalization and the need for localization. He also writes on environmental, political, and human-rights issues for the Big Issue (a British magazine sold by homeless people), The Ecologist, and Z Magazine.

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DJ: You have written that there are five things everyone ought to know.

DE: The first thing I believe everyone should know is that the planet is dy-ing. To name one of endless examples, last year marine biologists found that between 70 and 90 percent of the coral reefs they surveyed in the Indian Ocean had just died as a result of global warming. This year, much of what remains is likely to follow. Even though reefs cover only 0.3 percent of the area of the oceans, they're home to one-fourth of all fish species. Not only is this loss tragic and inexcusable in itself, but millions of people depend on reefs and the fish which live there for their lives and livelihoods.

Coral reef ecosystems are probably the first major victims of global warming, with others lining up to follow. Scientists now predict that the polar bear will be extinct in the wild within twenty years. Once-great populations of other sea mammals and seabirds could die out as well.

My second point is that huge numbers of intelligent, motivated people are working all out to obstruct action to save the planet. Take the much-ballyhooed Rio Earth Summit in 1992, for example, and then the Kyoto Convention in 1997. How is it that no matter how clear the evidence nor how stern the scientific warnings, time and again effective action is stifled? What prevents it, and why? In the case of the Kyoto Convention, we have a clear answer. John Grasser, Vice-President of the National Mining Association, and a member of the Global Climate Coalition, an organization set up by over a hundred major corporations for the express purpose of combating efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions, said, "We think we have raised enough questions among the American public to prevent any numbers, targets or timetables to achieve reductions in gas emissions being agreed here ... What we are doing, and we think successfully, is buying time for our industries by holding up these talks."

And of course Grasser isn't alone. What we're seeing in the so-called debate over global warming is that the biggest enterprise in human history, which is the worldwide coal and oil industry, is at war with the ability of the planet to sustain life. And part of the battlefield over which the industry is fighting includes our hearts and minds.

The corporate press and politicians keep talking about global warming as if there's significant doubt about it, yet the debate is between perhaps half-a-dozen high-profile skeptics bankrolled by this trillion dollar industry against the consensus of fully 2,500 of the world's most qualified climate scientists working as part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. How is it that these six — whose arguments are often shot full of illogic and absurdity — count the same as all other evidence?

That leads directly to my third point, which is that the death of the planet is symptomatic of a deeper, institutionalized subordination of all life — including human life — to profit. The world is chock-full of environmental and human rights catastrophes that are very real, but the world is just as full of people "buying time for our industries". The lack of discourse about the crucial question of valuing profits over life brings us to the fourth point, which is that the same economic and political forces that profit from these atrocities also profit from the suppression of truth. The defining political and economic truths about the world we live in are not very complicated or difficult to understand. We don't have to dig very deep before things become painfully obvious, but it's the role of the corporate mass media and politicians to prevent us from digging at all, to make sure that instead we spend all of our time thrashing around in the shallows.

DJ: Like by watching Judge Judy or Entertainment Tonight?

DE: If we can just stay distracted enough we'll leave the deep delusional supports of state and corporate power alone. And so we drown in superficiality.

Not only that, but we participate in our...