Common Dreams is currently hosting a self-congratulatory little article by Jane Etherington about how bourgeois suburbanites can make a "positive impact" on the environment by drying clothes on clotheslines instead of burning energy in dryers, and in response to my predictably sarcastic comment, someone asked me for a better "solution" than Ms. Etherington's pitiful, white-bread environmentalism.

Unfortunately, I don't have any "solutions," no matter how radical, and neither does anyone else. It's a testament to the nullity of public debate on this issue that anyone can even ask about "solutions," as if we were still living in 1964, when there was still a chance to avoid catastrophic degradation of the environment.

What we can do now is give future generations a little hope for partial recovery, and even this relatively modest aim would require a radical commitment equally repulsive to liberals, conservatives, and virtually everyone else except a few shock-troops from ELF and anti-whaling pirates from GreenPeace.

The first order of business is shutting down as many oil fields as possible, from Texas to Saudi Arabia, and denying any remaining fields access to global markets. Russia would defend its fields with nuclear weapons, but its pipelines to Europe and China are still vulnerable. Shutting down oil production involves significant military action, and significant risk of military retaliation, but there is no risk-free strategy that offers any possibility of diminishing the worst consequences of an already inevitable ecological collapse. If remaining oil reserves find their way into the atmosphere, however slowly, all conceivable counter-measures will be overwhelmed.

The second order of business is preventing further destruction of the rain-forest in Brazil and elsewhere, and none of the relevant countries will act without compulsion. The alternative is allowing lumber barons and peasant scavengers to finish cutting the lungs out of the planet.

The third step is replanting forests on a global scale, and transplanting most of the bourgeoisie from their unsustainable suburbs to mobile work-camps on the frontiers of desertification.

As radical and even absurd as my suggestions may appear to so-called "concerned citizens" of all political persuasions, not even the most radical program offers any prospect of "solutions" for us or our children, and all we can really hope for is a slightly better chance of recovery in the distant future.