The Nine Lies of the Fake Green Fairytale

The Nine Lies of the Fake Green Fairytale

by | Oct 5, 2024 | ANALYSIS, The Problem: Civilization

By Prof Jem Bendell / thoughts on collapse readiness and recovery

Self-deception is rife within the environmental profession and movement. Some denial or disavowal is not surprising, due to how upsetting it is to focus on an unfolding tragedy. But our vulnerability to self-deception has been hijacked by the self interests of the rich and powerful, to spin a ‘fake green fairytale’. Their story distracts us from the truth of the damage done, that to come, and what our options might be. Indeed, their fairytale prevents us from rebelling to try to make this a fairer disaster, or a more gentle and just collapse of the societies we live in. Averting wider rebellion might be why the fairytale receives loads of funding for books, awards, feature articles and documentaries, as well as videos for popular YouTube channels. That’s why, like me, you might not have realised for years that it is a fairytale. In this essay I will explain the nine lies that comprise this ‘fake green fairytale’ before explaining how much damage is being done to both people and planet from the dominance of this story within contemporary environmentalism.

The ‘fake green fairytale’ claims humanity can maintain current levels of consumption (a lie) by being powered by renewables (a lie) which are already displacing fossil fuels (a lie) and therefore reach net zero (a lie) to bring temperatures down to safe levels within just a few years (a lie) to secure a sustainable future for all (a lie) and that the enemies of this outcome are the critics of the energy transition (a lie) who are all funded or influenced by the fossil fuel industry (a lie) so the proponents of green globalist aims are ethical in doing whatever it takes to achieve their aims (a lie).

Due to widely available evidence to the contrary, these are not just misunderstandings. To demonstrate that, I’ll explain them briefly in more detail.

First, the claim that humanity can maintain current levels of consumption is not true. Already, humanity is overshooting the carrying capacity of Planet Earth. This year the day that marked the beginning of the overshoot was August 1. We are degrading the capacity of seas, forests and soil to produce what we need, as well as using up key minerals. That’s even with around 800 million people malnourished last year (about 1 in 10 of us worldwide). Meanwhile, our monetary system requires our economy to expand consumption of resources, and the theory of decoupling that consumption from resource use has been debunked by hundreds of peer reviewed studies (see Chapter 1 of Breaking Together).

Second, the claim that modern societies can be powered by renewables while maintaining our current levels of energy use is not true. Over 80% of current primary energy generation is from fossil fuels. Even if we tried to switch everything to electric and generate the power from nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, tidal and wave, then we wouldn’t have enough metals for either the wire or the batteries. For instance we would need 250 years of annual production of copper for the wire and 4000 times the annual production of lithium. Mining is an ecologically damaging activity. And we would need to trash huge tracts of forest to produce the needed quantities of metal. There will be resistance, and rightly so (see Chapter 3 of Breaking Together).

Third, the claim that renewables are already displacing fossil fuels is not true. Instead, globally, renewables are providing additional energy, with fossil fuel usage also increasing. There is no sign of global energy demand declining or any policies aimed at that. We all know that having a side salad with our pie and chips doesn’t make the belly disappear. Therefore, renewables are not yet an answer to the problem of carbon emissions from fossil fuels forcing further climate change. Only policies targeting a reduction of use of fossil fuels, globally, would begin to tackle that – and we see it hardly anywhere.

Fourth, the claim that the world can reach net zero carbon emissions is a lie. Not only is that due to the previous two lies about energy production and demand. Not only is that due to the limitations of any carbon removal technologies and approaches, for getting CO2 out of the atmosphere. It is also because of the fundamental role of fossilised or natural gas in current industrial agriculture. We are a grain-based civilization with estimates of between 50 to 80% of our calories coming from 5 key grains, either directly or via the animals that some of us eat. About 60% of these are produced with chemical fertiliser, which is currently dependent on fossil fuels. A tonne of such fertiliser releases twice its weight as CO2. That is before considering the machines and transportation involved (see Chapter 6 of Breaking Together). With Bekandze Farm, my own work and philanthropy is promoting farming without chemicals, but I recognize we are utterly dependent on them for our current food supply.

Fifth, the claim that achieving net zero emissions would bring temperatures down to safe levels within just a few years is not true. The claim derives from over-claiming, or misrepresenting, what the simulations run on some climate models have found. Those models ignored methane. In addition, recent data on removing aerosols suggests it is a larger driver of heating than was previously understood. Even with those limitations, the research was inconclusive, with some models showing ongoing warming, some showing none, in the impossible scenario of the world having stopped all CO2 emissions. That scenario, by the way, would be even more severe curtailment than net zero (which still allows for some emissions).

Sixth, the claim that such changes will secure a sustainable future for all is not true. That is because both ecological overshoot and climate change have already progressed too far, while ongoing destruction and pollution are too much of a feature of industrial consumer societies (see Chapters 1 and 4 of Breaking Together). The idea that billions more people can improve their lives by being incorporated into such industrial consumer ways of life is nonsense. Rather, the way we privileged people live is a time-bound and geographically-bound niche: if we care about people in poverty then we need to look at different ways of helping, as well as consuming and polluting less ourselves.

Seventh, the claim that any critics of the renewable energy transition are enemies of a sustainable future is not true. The enemies of humanity living happily-ever-after in industrial consumer societies are basic physics, chemistry and biology. Evangelising about it and condemning non-believers does not make that future any more feasible. Instead, we could be working for a more gentle and just collapse, and a lesser dystopia, with less suffering and more joy than otherwise would be the case. The enemies of that are people who distract us from how to fairly reduce and redistribute resource use.

Eighth, the claim that critics are all funded or influenced by the fossil fuel industry is not true. Rather, many of us are the more radical and anti-corporate voices in environmentalism. We are aligned with the history of environmental critique, which recognizes climate change as one symptom of a destructive economic system and its associated politics and culture. We want to reduce emissions but refuse to align with a new faction of capital that wants to profit from this disaster by selling inadequate solutions and false hope.

Ninth, the claim that proponents of pseudo-green capitalist policies are ethical in doing ‘whatever it takes’ to achieve their aims is not true. For it is not ethical to override support for the rights of indigenous peoples living in the lands where large corporations want to mine, so that more people can drive a Tesla. It is not ethical to infiltrate climate activist groups to steer them away from radical politics. It is not right to get big tech platforms like Facebook to restrict the reach of analysis which challenges their ‘fake green fairytale’.

I know these self-deceptions are powerful and have consequences, as they shaped my work for decades. In general, they pull us back from revolutionary despair – the kind of transformation that has occurred for so many people when they don’t believe in the false God of technosalvation.

Going forward, I wonder how much ecological destruction, in the form of new mining and old nuclear, will be unresisted, permitted and financed due to belief in the fake green fairytale? We have already seen that in a variety of cases. UK Government support for new nuclear power stations was enabled by climate concern that rose due the campaigns of Extinction Rebellion. Unfortunately, those new stations will not use the new technologies without meltdown risk or hazardous waste. Permits for mining in primary forests have been issued because of the climate crisis. For instance, the Brazilian government has explained that critical minerals for the net zero economy are a reason to issue permits for mining in the Amazon, including in areas inhabited by indigenous peoples. Such mining is a major cause of deforestation. However, the narrowness of the fake green fairytale overlooks this. It ignores the science on the role of forests in cooling our climate through cloud seeding. It’s not just regional, with pollen and bacteria rising from the Amazon forest then seeding clouds and snow over Tibet (Chapter 5 of Breaking Together). Because he is so fixated on the fairytale, billionaire non-scientist Bill Gates tells us trees don’t matter that much for climate. Laughing off tree protection or planting for climate concerns, he asked his audience last year: “Are we the science people or are we the idiots?”

And so we return to the matter of self-deception. There will be money to be earned in maintaining it. I wonder how much censorship, surveillance, and authoritarianism will arise from those who need to maintain the fake green fairytale while resisting a growing backlash? Definitely some. Maybe a lot. Myself and others critiquing the mainstream climate narratives of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have already had our content suppressed or removed from social media platforms. In a world where over 80% of social media sharing globally is enabled by just three American multinational corporations, there is a huge risk to public awareness.

I describe the nine lies of self-deception that comprise the fake green fairytale as being pathological because they prevent humanity from creatively exploring what our options are in this age of consequences. That is why I disagree with those people who say “we” environmentalists should not argue amongst ourselves. They are mistaken about who “we” are. I’m not in the same environmental profession or movement as people who will campaign for policies that will help to trash the Amazon Rainforest for the false promise of a more electric lifestyle. I’m not in the same profession or movement with people who want us to defer to the systems that have caused or administered this destruction. I’m in a very different movement, which believes in freeing people and communities from the pressure to destroy our environment in order to service global capital. That is the ecolibertarian ethos, which I explain in my book Breaking Together.

Photo by Lukas Eggers on Unsplash

DGR Annual Conference: Live Stream and Zoom

DGR Annual Conference: Live Stream and Zoom

by | Aug 21, 2024 | ACTION

Hello! Brandi from Deep Green Resistance here.

 

We here at DGR would love to invite you to our upcoming online conference opportunities. They’re all about our annual conference which is fast approaching. The dates of the conference are Friday, August 23rd (afternoon) until Monday, August 26th (morning).

 

We’ll be doing three livestreams. They are all taking place on Saturday, August 24th and all times listed are in the Pacific Daylight Time zone. Our first live stream starts at 9 am on the 24th and will be presented by Lierre Keith. Those of you who have seen Lierre in action know what a powerful speaker she is. Her talk is entitled From Living Planet to Necrosphere: In the Time of Patriarchy’s Endgame and you definitely don’t want to miss it!

 

Our second livestream will be taking place at 2:30 pm and it will be a Q & A hosted by award-winning author Derrick Jensen. Here is the event page link for both of these first two livestreams and this is also where you can submit questions for Derrick to take on during his event. https://www.facebook.com/events/1201872644161114

 

The third livestream, our Grand Finale, is also a much-needed Fundraiser and begins promptly at 6 pm. We could really use your help, now more than ever, and we’ll be deeply appreciative of every single dime our fundraiser brings in. Here’s the event description for you: It’s Open Mic night at the annual DGR conference. Join us live for magic, music, poetry, and prose, and lots and lots of jokes. We’re running this as a fundraiser and appreciate anything you can give.

 

And here is the event page link to the Open Mic fundraiser for you as well: https://www.facebook.com/events/3910359789251916/

 

An additional item for your attention is that we will be offering all of our Conference Workshops over Zoom, a video meeting platform. Some of you have already asked to be on the Zoom list so next I’ll be gathering the names and getting everything ready for this, including publishing the schedule. There will be a limited number of spots for Zoom participants; if you haven’t already asked to be on the list but want to be, now is the time to request this. You’ll need links to be able to Join and we’ll need to have you ‘all set’ in plenty of time. To request your spot on the Zoom list, please send me an email at brandiwork24@gmail.com letting me know. I will respond to let you know either that your spot is confirmed or that we are full. 

 

As Always, Stay Fierce and Stay Wild.

Thank You Very Much! 

 

—

Sincerely,

Brandi Hayworth

Deep Green Resistance

Executive Director

Building Leadership Capacity: The Ladder of Engagement

Building Leadership Capacity: The Ladder of Engagement

by | Jul 12, 2024 | ACTION, Culture of Resistance

Editor’s note: When we engage in any form of activism, building leadership capacity helps people become more confident and proactive. It means the leader of the group doesn’t have to be responsible for every task and can delegate other important tasks to members. In this case, the author talks about climate change, we at DGR think that climate change is one of many problems and stems from our destructive industrial culture. But you can exchange the word for any other that would describe a dire situation today – the strategy of leadership capacity still applies. DGR disagrees with 350.org’s belief that electrifying everything will “solve” climate change. It is, in fact, impossible, and attempts to do so will only make matters worse.

By ,

Learn how organisers recruit and build the leadership capacity of others with the Ladder of Engagement.

This article has been sourced from Daniel Hunter’s book published by 350.org called The Climate Resistance Handbook. Daniel explains the Ladder of Engagement with a story from South Africa about an environmental justice group. Read below or see Chapter 3 on Growth and pages 40 – 46. The images have been added by the Commons Library.

The Ladder of Leadership

Growing groups face a challenge. Organisers are often the ones doing much of the work of the group — and they get tired of doing everything…One option for the organisers getting tired is they keep sacrificing more and more. They give up sleep. They sacrifice school and work. They stop social activities — it always becomes about the activism.

For most people, that’s just not sustainable. So what’s the alternative?

Getting new people to step into leadership!

A story from Ferrial Adam in South Africa provides us an example. She was part of an environmental justice organisation working with folks at the grassroots. Led largely by women, they were challenging a government policy called “Free Basic Electricity.” That policy guarantees the government will pay for a certain amount of electricity to poorer households (currently 50 kWh, about 5% of what the average US home uses).

This is a major issue, as the lack of access to energy often dooms whole districts to poverty. For example, those lacking electricity often rely on carbon-intensive paraffin, candles, or cutting down trees. This leads to a host of negative environmental and health effects.

Building relationships is key

This policy was widely credited as a successful social justice policy. But those who were most impacted by this policy weren’t part of the debate. So Ferrial began a research study to learn more about the actual impacts this had for households, which meant going to the poor districts in the city of Johannesburg.

She started where the people were. Her first step was finding a group of women who were keen and already working on energy struggles. It was important to start by explaining the intention and need for the work. She started by getting people to monitor their use of electricity. She spent time building relationships with mostly women, who ran the households. It took many months of weekly workshops to teach people to calculate the energy consumption of different household items.

Increased confidence

Her report was done. And she could have been the person presenting the report in front of national bodies. But when public hearings were planned to increase costs, the people Ferrial had been working with wanted more. She asked the women if they would testify on their own behalf. They jumped at the chance. Ferrial says, “It was so amazing and powerful watching people go to a hearing and speak as a collective on why the government should not raise the price of electricity.”

“They became part of the organisation and took their own leadership. Ferrial wasn’t calculating people’s consumption for them and writing the report and talking before the national bodies. She was organising. She wasn’t doing things that people could do for themselves.”

The women were supported through steps of engagement over the months. This way, they gained expertise about their own electricity usage and education on national policy and the impacts of climate change. Each step gave them increased confidence to not only testify but be strong community activists.

This concept is called the “ladder of engagement.”

The women wouldn’t have been ready to testify as their first step. Instead, they needed to learn more about their own situation. Then they needed to connect to others’ stories and see they weren’t alone. The ladder helps us think about what to do when people say, “What you’re doing is great, how can I help?”

“In our minds, we have our to-do list and things we need done. But that’s not where to start. We have to think from the perspective of that person.”

That probably means our first response is, “Let’s talk about what you’re up for doing.” And we find out what kinds of tasks they might be willing to help us with — ones that match their interest and involvement (not our long to-do list).

“This isn’t a science, and each person is different. Some people have absolute terror making phone calls but would happily risk civil disobedience. So chatting with people about their interests is important.”

Thinking about newer activists in our group with the ladder of engagement in mind helps us think about the next step for them.
And as Ferrial did, we can offer steps to keep increasing their level of commitment and involvement. This cultivates relationships and helps people move up the ladder of engagement, which is how you, too, will increase your group’s involvement.

Recruit People Outside your Circle

“Of course, to get more people into leadership, you have to have lots of conversations with them — about the goals of the campaign and the work you’re doing. You have to build trust. And you have to find them!”

Sometimes it’s hard to recruit new people, because we get used to talking the same way about an issue. You may have some ways you talk about climate change that you’re used to.

But someone you want to recruit may not talk about it that way. They may not care about climate change, but they may care about cats. You can tell them that climate change is increasing the habitat for fleas, ticks and mosquitoes. That’s bad news for pets. It exposes them to new diseases, like West Nile, Lyme disease and heartworm. Or maybe they care about football. Climate change isn’t going to end football soon, but it will change the game. With more erratic climactic events, you will see more games like the snowy 2013 World Cup qualifying match between USA and Costa Rica. It was a disaster. Or, since the spread of Zika (and other diseases) increase with the rise of temperatures, Brazil’s warmer temperatures threatened to derail the Rio 2016 Olympics.

How to organize?

Or maybe they just don’t like being angry! A study on climate and conflict showed that warmer temperatures increase people’s personal conflicts (by 2% amongst friends, and by 11% outside their social circle). So hot temperatures can cause more anger.

But even when we get more flexible in talking about climate change, many groups often mistakenly believe they’ve tapped all the people who are passionate about their issue. “Nobody in my school cares about climate change.” The problem is often not that we have exhausted the possibilities in our city or small town — it’s how we are organising.

Building leadership capacity

When it comes to recruitment, many of us think of people just as individuals. We imagine there is a scattering of people out there from whom to recruit.

The reality is different. Most people are not attracted to groups simply as individuals. Ask around, and you’ll find that very few people get involved in a cause because they receive a flyer, get sent an e-mail, see a poster, or see a Facebook post.

Most people join a group or get involved because someone they know personally invited them.

That’s because society is better understood as clusters of “social circles”. Social circles may be organised as formal or informal groups — religious communities, gangs, tight-knit neighborhoods, etc. Social media can show you the number of people who are friends of friends many times over.

The quickest way to build a group is to ask people in your net works of friends or family. Those people are the most likely to say yes to you. But a group stops growing when it reaches its maximum potential of people from its members’ initial social circle. Continuing to reach out within that circle may not bring in many more people.

The trick is to jump out of your social circle and find people connected with other social circles.

Ways to recruit in social circles

Show up at the events and meetings of people outside your circle. This is a great chance to meet others, see how they work, and find out where their values overlap with your campaign.

  • Stop doing the tactics you’ve always been doing, and try new ones that might appeal to different audiences. If your tactics are marches, strikes, and massive, disruptive direct actions, and it’s not working, then it’s time to adapt. Ritualising our actions makes us predictable and boring. People want to join fresh and interesting groups.
  • Notice when other groups make overtures toward your movement, and follow up with them. For example, if we are seeing reluctant corporate and government allies taking steps towards us, maybe with some of them there are relationships we can build to keep them moving faster.
  • Do lots of one-on-one meet-ups with leaders from other movements and groups. Meet with different people — not to recruit them, but to learn from them.
    • What are their values?
    • What interests them?
    • What strategies recruit people like them?
  • Do direct service. Gandhi was a big fan of what he called the “constructive program,” which means not only campaigning against what we don’t want, but also building the alternative that we do want. Climate disasters provide large-scale and small-scale chances for us to be part of that. Direct service to disaster survivors and other community-based projects put us shoulder to shoulder with others who want to make things better. Who better to hear a pitch about joining your campaign?

Growing outside of your social circle takes time, but when it comes to building successful groups, it’s worth the effort.

This article is from the Climate Resistance Handbook which brings together a wealth of learnings from the climate justice movement. It starts with breaking social myths about how social movements win. Then dives into campaign tools and frameworks you can use. It closes with how to grow your group and use creative, impactful actions and tactics. This book is full of stories of climate warriors from around the globe and historical movements. It’s filled with practical wisdom and inspiration to make you more effective, more active, and ready for what’s next.

Derivative of graphic by parasoley/Getty Images Signature via Canva.com

Forest Bird Trade Flies Quietly Under Social Media Radar

Forest Bird Trade Flies Quietly Under Social Media Radar

by | Jun 24, 2024 | NEWS, The Problem: Civilization

by on Mongabay 11 June 2024

  • During the COVID-19 pandemic, a young documentary filmmaker began quietly joining a growing number of Facebook community groups run by traders of rare Indonesian birds.
  • Over the following two years, a reporting team from several news organizations uncovered a wide network of actors offering species for sale for as little as 250,000 rupiah ($15). These individuals included a serving naval officer.
  • One shop owner selling birds in Morowali, the epicenter of Indonesia’s nickel mining and smelting boom, said they began trading in birds in 2018, after ships began docking in the local port bringing oil and cement.

KENDARI, Indonesia — In 2021, as the world grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic, Irwan watched online as a flurry of new social media groups dedicated to parrots sprang up across Indonesia.

When Irwan, whose name Mongabay has changed to protect his identity, first began participating in these online marketplaces, he saw a rainbow of parrot species offered for as little as $15 a bird, but with little further information about the species.

Two years later, after careful research, Irwan helped uncover a diffuse network of operators quietly transporting rare birds from eastern Indonesia for sale. He set out to establish whether the birds were bred in captivity or plucked from protected forests around the industrial boomtown of Kendari, his home in Southeast Sulawesi province.

“This was never detailed,” Irwan told Mongabay Indonesia. “That’s what interested me about it.”

Illegal trade in wildlife around the world is worth up to $23 billion each year, with one out of four global bird and mammal species falling victim to the business, according to BirdLife International.

As in other criminal enterprises, researchers emphasize that the true extent of the illegal trade dwarfs the number of seizures by authorities.

Much of the trade is conducted on social media. In 2016, Facebook partnered with WWF and other environmental groups to form the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online, aiming to reduce wildlife trade on the platform by 80% within four years.

In 2019, Facebook banned all live animal trade on its platform, allowing only verified sellers with legitimate business reasons. By 2020, the partnership introduced an alert system that notified users about the illegality of trading wildlife products whenever relevant search terms were used.

Flight plan

Mongabay Indonesia worked with other news outlets including Garda Animalia, which reports exclusively on the wildlife trade in Indonesia, to track and document the illegal bird trade in Sulawesi, an important transit hub for wildlife in the archipelago.

Reporters saw protected species advertised openly on social media, including the yellow-crested cockatoo (Cacatua sulphurea), black-capped lory (Lorius lory) and Moluccan eclectus (Eclectus roratus).

One account was traced to an individual whom reporters dubbed by their initials, WL: a university student in Puwatu, a subdistrict of Kendari. Reporters found WL in a two-story house fenced in by concrete and iron walls, with a plastic sheet obscuring the view of a terrace. Parrots native to the island of New Guinea perched in an enclosure outside.

WL said he’d obtained the parrots from a contact known by the Facebook pseudonym “M Parrot.” He claimed the man held a breeding permit from the provincial conservation agency in Southeast Sulawesi, the BKSDA.

WL and M Parrot were members of the same Facebook groups, where they interacted. WL said he understood that M Parrot kept around 20 pairs of birds, and that they could be identified by rings on the birds’ talons used to show certification.

“If it turns out that it’s against the law … well, don’t blame me,” WL told our reporting team. “I’m just a buyer.”

The student said the trade in birds from New Guinea likely came from hunters based in the island, whose western half is part of Indonesia.

Meanwhile, parrots in Kendari are often sourced from Obi Island in North Maluku province, and sent to port in Morowali by weekly ship. From there, the cages are switched to an overland transfer to Kendari.

bird

Photo by Pat Whelen on Unsplash

Boomtown birds

Bungku harbor serves the industrial heartland of Morowali, which is undergoing rapid development as part of Indonesia’s nickel mining boom. The port was undergoing renovations and there wasn’t a ship to be seen when reporters visited this year.

A port worker said he usually saw crates of birds endemic to Maluku and Papua unloaded every week as large ships docked in Morowali. From here, the bird trade fans out into this part of Sulawesi, the world’s 11th largest island.

We met a man on the roadside of the main highway north of Morowali selling various types of parrots, without any official documents.

“This is 650,000 rupiah [$40],” he said, offering us a cage. “It’s a Maluku parrot.”

The man said he obtained the birds from crew members of ships anchored in Morowali, and that he would occasionally purchase birds from a trader in South Bungku, a subdistrict of Morowali.

The main road was packed with thousands of motorcycles of workers from the vast Morowali nickel smelting complex, a key node in the global electric vehicle industry. Inside one small shop by the road we found two black-capped lories, the birds’ feet chained to a small perch. Three yellow-streaked lories (Chalcopsitta scintillata) idled in their cages above a thin base of sand.

The black-capped lories were each priced at 1.8 million rupiah ($110), while the asking price for a yellow-streaked lory was 800,000 rupiah ($50). A contact number was displayed in front of the shop.

The owner said he’d been trading in birds since 2018, after ships bringing oil and cement started docking more frequently in Morowali to feed the mining boom in the region.

Later, when asked to identify the source of the birds via a WhatsApp message, the shop owner didn’t respond.

Bird on a wire

In October 2023, our reporting team visited the Southeast Sulawesi office of Indonesia’s conservation agency, the BKSDA, to obtain information on breeding permits for birds in the province.

The agency held only one such permit on file. It had been authorized in March 2023 in the name of Asriaddin.

Erni Timang, forest ecosystem lead for the Southeast Sulawesi BKSDA, said that documentation held by the conservation agency showed the permit holder didn’t have a license to deal in the birds.

“He can only breed, he can’t trade yet,” Erni told Mongabay. “You need to have a distribution permit first.”

Ahmar, the BKSDA’s conservation lead for Kendari, said his office had on several occasions attempted to clarify the trading status of the permit holder. However, Ahmar said that on every occasion, Asriaddin was unavailable at his registered address because he was on duty at the Kendari naval base. A public relations officer at the base confirmed that Asriaddin was a serving naval officer.

Mongabay visited the registered address in late March. At the home we saw cages containing various colorful parrot species, exotic imports as well as eastern Indonesian endemics, including black-capped lories, yellow-crested cockatoos, and a black lory (Chalcopsitta atra).

“In the past there were many, but now there are fewer,” a resident at the address told reporters.

On May 25, reporters reached Asriaddin by phone and asked about his status as a trader of birds.

“That’s not correct, it’s just speculation,” Asriaddin said.

When asked whether he had failed to report any breeding activities to the government conservation agency, Asriaddin claimed to not properly understand the reporting requirements.

Singky Soewadji from the Indonesian Wildlife Lovers Alliance (Apecsi), a civil society organization, criticized the awarding of breeding permits by the BKSDA conservation agency, which is part of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry.

“The director-general of the BKSDA should carry out its control function,” Singky said, “not wait until there is a violation of the law.”

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

Review of the Film Bright Green Lies

Review of the Film Bright Green Lies

by | Jun 3, 2024 | ANALYSIS

Editor’s note: Civilization is in free fall, and most people do not accept that. Humans will have to use a lot less energy. That future is hard for people to grasp. They will need to adjust their expectations of how reality is going to look. This will require going through the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining(excuses), depression, and acceptance. We can still create social relations that can improve the world through policy and interactions. Remember the win is always in the movements struggling together with others toward those victories, the fighting against the fascism of industrial civilization.

 

By Paul Mobbs, The ‘Meta-Blog’, issue no.14, 7th May 2020

 

Being ‘well known’ in eco-circles, you sometimes get strange, often unsolicited stuff arriving in your inbox. This, however, was something I’d been hoping for: A chance to view, and thus review, ‘Bright Green Lies’ – Julia Barnes’ new documentary about the environmental movement and its support for renewable energy.

‘Planet of the Humans’ (PotH) was entertaining. At a general level, it was factual, albeit a polemic expression of those points. But its protracted period of production meant that it lacked coherence, and thus left itself open to easy criticism.
Those criticisms when they came, however, fell directly into the lap of the central argument of the film: That mainstream environmentalists distort facts to promote an erroneous vision of the measures necessary to ‘save the planet’.

It wasn’t just Josh Fox, backed by green entrepreneurs, engaging in a cavalier reshaping of facts and quotations to blacken the name of the film. Our own George Monbiot engaged in his own well-honed distortion of fact and quotation via The Guardian (symbolic of a number of their recent failures) in order to try and prevent people from watching the film on this side of the pond.

‘Bright Green Lies’ is very different: Like PotH, once again it presents the personal viewpoint of the director, Julia Barnes. Unlike PotH, though, it has a very different tone, building upon the immediacy and well-researched content of the eponymous book by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert – all of whom appear in the film.

You get the core of the film’s argument over the first five minutes, as the four main protagonists set out their respective take on the ‘bright green’ position [time index in the film is shown in brackets]:

 Barnes: “People rarely question the solutions they are taught to embrace, but with all the world at stake we must start asking the right questions. There is a push for a 100% renewable world, and after the research I’ve done for this documentary, I want no part of it. I did not become an environmentalist to protect my way of life or the civilization in which I live. I did it because I am in love with life on this planet and because the world I love is under assault. This film is for those whose allegiance is with the living world. Those who would do whatever it takes to defend it.”[02:26]

 

 Jensen: “You will have hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets of Washington, or New York, or Paris; and, if you ask those individuals ‘why are you marching?’, they will say, ‘we wanna save the planet’. And if you ask them for their demands they will say, ‘We want subsidies for the wind and solar industry’. That’s extraordinary. I can’t think of any time in history when any mass movement has been so completely captured and turned into lobbyists for an industry.”[03:49]

 Keith: “The environmental movement used to be a very impassioned group of people who cared very deeply about the places we loved and the creatures we loved. What happened, though, in my lifetime, was that this movement which was so honorable and impassioned, it turned into something completely different. And now it’s about protecting a destructive way of life, while it destroys the creatures and the places we love. It’s all become, ‘how do we continue to fuel this destruction?’ as if the only problem was that we were using oil and gas.”[03:16]

 Wilbert: “The natural world isn’t really part of the conversation anymore. Kumi Naidoo, the former head of Greenpeace, I was watching him being interviewed the other day. He was saying, ‘The planet’s going to survive, the oceans are going to survive, the forests are going to survive, it’s really about can we save ourselves or not’. And I just saw that and I’m thinking, what the hell are you saying? … This is someone who’s considered to be one of the top environmentalists in the world and he’s say- ing we don’t have to worry about the forests or the oceans? I mean, that just betrays a complete lack of empathy and connection to the natural world. I don’t know how you could possibly say that when we’re in the midst of the Sixth Great Mass Extinction, and it’s being caused by industrial culture. It’s being caused by the same institutions, the same economies, the same systems, the same raw materials, the same extractive mindset, that is being used for these renewable energy technologies.”[04:36]

 

Environmentalism is a ‘class’ issue

My introduction to ‘environmentalism’ started before I’d seriously heard the word; growing up in a semi-rural working-class family who grew their own food, kept chickens, and foraged. Likewise, coming into contact with ‘mainstream’ environmentalism in the mid-1980s introduced me to the concept of ‘bright green’ before I’d heard that term either.

If there’s one general criticism I have (in part because the book, too, glosses over it), it is the failure to explore the class bias of environmentalism. It is dominated by the middle class (and in the UK, led by the upper-middle class); and so the economically ‘aspirational’ middle-class values suffuse its agenda. That’s overlooked in the film.

That this movement should innately favor individualist materialist values, over communal or spiritual ones, should therefore be of no surprise. That does not condemn these groups, or render them incapable of change. What it makes them do is reflect a narrow focus on both concerns and solutions. More importantly, in a mass political society, it makes it difficult for them to have empathy with a large majority of the public – and that hampers their ability to make change.

That bias towards affluence informs their ideological values, which in turn have come to dominate contemporary environmentalism. As said in the film:

 

“Bright Green Environmentalism is founded on the notion that technology will solve environmental problems; and that you can, through 100% recycling, through wind and solar power, have an industrial economy that does not harm the planet. Deep ecology is the belief that we need to radically change the way society functions in order to be sustainable.”[05:30]

The spectre of this early ideological differentiation has haunted the movement. Just as Keith outlines, for me it became evident around 1988 to 1990. Figures such as Jonathon Porritt and Sara Parkin sought to divest the movement of its ‘hairshirt’ image and put it on a ‘professional’ footing. As a self-acknowledged ‘fundo’ (the pejorative term used for deep green ‘fundamentalists’ in the Green Party at that time) that didn’t enthuse me one bit.

That ‘professionalised’ approach (for which, read compromise with neoliberal values) would slowly percolate through the movement over the next decade. And with it, the compromise that has stalled more radical responses to ecological issues ever since. That failure has, in part, only escalated these historic internal tensions – tensions that this film, almost certainly, will inflame.

First ‘green consumerism’, and then ‘sustainability’, foundered on the reality that the movement’s role as a ‘stakeholder’ in government and industry programs produced little change. Today, the issue at the heart of this internecine contention is renewable energy – and whether it is a realistic response to the Climate Emergency or just another distracting ruse.

I think this film is a good contribution to that contemporary debate. If only to make many people aware that this debate exists, and so cause people to look at the academic research in more detail.

As Barnes succinctly put it: “We are told that we can have our cake and eat it too.”[01:59] And yes, this really is all about cutting the ‘cake’ of affluence. But the film’s criticism of consumerism was couched in a generic “we”, and therein lies its failing.

 

When it comes to consumption it is not an issue of ‘we’. It is about how an extremely narrow social and economic elite exploit the majority by giving them the ‘illusion of affluence’. Albeit one that is today precariously founded upon deepening debt and doubtful economics (a ‘deep’ issue in-and-of itself).

By not making the case that it is a highly privileged minority causing/benefiting from ecological destruction (see graph below), the film and book miss the opportunity to state arguments such as:

 

  • The most affluent 10% of the global population (OK, that’s mostly us!) cause half the pollution;
  • But even within these most affluent states, national inequality means wealthy households emit far more pollution than the poorest;
  • Hence pollution is absolutely associated with economic inequality and consumption; and,
  • That this skew means the most affluent states must reduce consumption by perhaps 90%!
In a situation where – both globally but also in the most polluting states – it is a minority which is causing these problems, that redefines its political ‘reality’ in different terms. To be fair, Barnes strays into this issue at points:

“The ocean is the foundation of life on this planet. The fact that we’re losing it at the rate we are is alarming. I think part of the reason we’re failing is that we ask what is politically possible more often than we ask what is necessary.”[41:37]

Simple logic demands that this minority urgently change their lifestyle, lest the majority, threatened by ecological breakdown, seek to rest it from them. It is how they do this which is another live issue. Frankly, that’s not going too well right now:

 

Currently, Western states are seeking to repress protests against the climate emergency, to forestall calls for more radical change; While at the same time, billionaires create bunkers in remote locations to survive any future backlash from the dispossessed majority. This creates a powerful incentive for the ‘impoverished majority’ to rest control away from the economic elite driving ecological breakdown. The reality is, though, neither Greenpeace, WWF, nor even Extinction Rebellion, are likely to pick up that banner any time soon. Their failure to recognise affluence as a driver for ecological destruction negates their ability to act to stop it. Instead tokenis- tic measures, like renewable energy, supplant calls for meaningful systemic change.

Economics versus ecological limits

About halfway through, Max Wilbert elucidates a truth that doesn’t get nearly enough exposure:

“When people talk about 100% renewable energy transition to save the planet, to save civilization, what they’re actually talking about is sustaining modern high-energy ways of life, at the expense of the natural world.”[26:38]

I’m sure a number will recognise that from many of my previous workshops. In fact, I’ve just had a Facebook post blocked for, ‘violating community standards’. The offense? It linked to a summary of the research making this same point, and it’s not the first time that’s happened. It’s a touchy subject!

In 2005, my own book, ‘Energy Beyond Oil’, visited many of the issues explored in the film/book. In far less detail though, as there was nowhere near the quantity of research evidence available back then. What that also highlights, though, is how over the interim: ‘Bright green’ environmentalism has been unable to comprehend the message from this new research; while at the same time deliberately deflecting people’s attention towards points of view which have a questionable basis for support.

On that point, I think Max Wilbert gives a most eloquent view for how mainstream environmental- ism sold itself on the altar of green consumerism:

“They want us to believe that consumer choices are the only way we can change things. But if we accept that then it means that they’ve won because we’re defining ourselves as consumers…I have to buy things within this culture to survive, and that is not something that defines me or my power as an actor in this world. I would say much more fundamentally I am an animal. I have hands. I have feet. And I can walk places. And I can do things. And I have a voice. And I have the ability to speak with people and build a relationship with people. And I have the ability to organise. And I have the ability to fight if need be. These are all much more important than my ability to buy or not buy something.”[48:28]

 

Since ‘Planet of the Humans’, many on the ‘bright green’ side of the aisle have learned a lesson. Their hysterical condemnation of the film, to the point of calling for it to be banned, only served to feed it greater publicity, ensuring more would see it.

Their lack of response this time is perhaps also due to how well the film exposes the fragility of their arguments. One of the bright points in the film was the way in which ‘deep green’ criticisms were dove-tailed alongside interviews with those they criticised – amplifying the substance of the disagreement be- tween each side.

I think my favorite was the segment on Richard York’s research, showing that growing renewable energy actually displaces a very minimal level of fossil fuels. When York’s point was put to David Suzuki, his reply, which I too have often received, was, ”So what is the conclusion from an analysis like that, we shouldn’t do anything?”[24:08]

The film brilliantly explodes this false dilemma. When pushed, about needing to tackle things systemically rather than just trying to influence behavior, Suzuki’s response was, “Yeah, there’s no question our major impact on the planet now, not just in terms of energy, is consumption. And that was a deliberate program…”[24:26]

When it comes to the ‘liberal’ solutions to the climate crisis generally, I think Lierre Keith gives the most perceptive criticism of the simplistic, ‘bright green’ arguments for change[1:03:23]:

“[Capitalism] takes living communities, it converts those into dead commodities, and then those dead commodities are turned into private wealth. And a lot of people think, well, if we just make that into public wealth, we all could get an equal piece of the pie, that’s the solution. The problem is that’s not go- ing to be a solution because you’ve still got the first two parts of that equation. Why are we taking the living planet and turning it into dead commodities? That’s the problem…It’s the fact that rivers, and grasslands, and forests, and fish, have been turned into those dead commodities, that’s the problem.”

Jensen then bookends Keith’s point with another, straightforward invalidation of the basic premise of the bright green approach[1:04:33]:

“What do all the so-called, ‘solutions’, to global warming have in common? They all take industrial capitalism as a given, and so conform to industrial capitalism. They’ve switched the dependent and the independent variables. The world has to be primary, and the health of the world has to be primary because without a world you don’t have any economy whatsoever. And the bright greens are very explicit about this. What they’re trying to save is industrial capitalism, industrial civilization. And that’s my fundamental beef because what I’m trying to save is the real world.”

Climate inequality meets decolonialism

Jensen makes an interesting observation towards the end of the film:

“The thing that blows me away is the lengths that people will go to avoid looking at the problem. That they will create all these extraordinary fantasies in order to do something that’s not going to help the planet so they can avoid looking at the real issue. Which is that industrial civilization itself is what’s killing the planet.”[59:40]

Likewise, Barnes astutely characterises the basic block to progress toward the near end:

“Bright green environmentalism has gained popularity because it tells a lot of people what they want to hear. That you can have industrial civilization and a planet too. It allows people to feel good about maintaining this destructive way of living and to avoid asking hard questions about the depth of what must be changed.”[1:05:04]

For me, though, it was Keith’s discussion about what it is ‘civilization’ is based upon[1:00:02] which brought a long overdue argument into circulation: Criticism of the ‘resource island’ model for the modern city, and its inherent link to the global expropriation and exploitation of land. Driven by the wealthiest ‘city’ state’s need to maintain consumption, the inherent ‘neocolonial’ aspects of international climate negotiations are something the climate lobby too often overlook. Especially in relation to issues such as carbon offsets, the global allocation of carbon budgets, and their inherent global inequality.

At some point environmental groups must call ‘bullshit’ on these whole neocolonial proceedings, and start giving equal value to all humans, irrespective of their present-day privilege. More importantly, we have to give ecological capacity, currently occupied by human societies, back to natural organisms to allow them sufficient space to live too.

Before ‘Bright Green Lies’ turned up, I had just seen Raoul Peck’s excellent, ‘Exterminate All The Brutes’. Coming to the end of ‘Bright Green Lies’, what startled me was how the two films arrived at a very similar place. Both showed similar blocks toward acceptance of the radical change required, around both ecological change and decolonialism.

To understand Peck’s film it helps to have read, ‘Heart of Darkness’. In structuring the film around the characters in that book, and contrasting it to The Holocaust, Peck shows how indifference to European and US colonialism enabled The Holocaust to take place [Episode 4, 46:57 to 54:11]:

“It is not knowledge that is lacking… The educated general public has always largely known what atrocities have been committed and are being committed in the name of progress, civilization, socialism, democracy, and the market…At all times, it has also been profitable to deny or suppress such knowledge… And when what had been done in the heart of darkness was repeated in the heart of Europe, no one recognized it. No one wished to admit what everyone knew.

 

Everywhere in the world, this knowledge is being suppressed. Knowledge that, if it were made known, would shatter our image of the world and force us to question ourselves. Everywhere there, Heart of Darkness is being enacted…Black Elk, holy man of the Oglala Lakota people, said after the Wounded Knee Massacre, ‘I didn’t know then how much was ended… A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. The nation’s circle is broken and scattered. There is no centre any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.’”

There are uncomfortable parallels between Peck’s insights into Holocaust denial, the denial of the crimes of colonialism, and the everyday denial of the damage that affluence and material consumption are causing to the entire planet. From the horrors of resource mining to the devastation of the oceans by plastics, such evidence represents a constant ‘background noise’ in the modern media. A noise people have learned to ignore, in order to keep functioning amidst the cognitive dissonance of their everyday, disconnected lives.

As Peck says, “It is not knowledge that is lacking”. People are aware. The fact that they will not engage with the issue, as outlined in ‘Bright Green Lies’, is that people innately know the extent of their own complicity. To do so, ‘would shatter our image of the world and force us to question ourselves’.

We do not need more ‘evidence’. The block to ecological change is not simply a lack of ‘knowledge’. It is that many all too well understand the reality of what stopping the ecological crisis would entail. Trapped by their subconscious fear of what that would mean personally, they cannot see a solution to the psychological dependency engendered by consumerism and industrial society.

 

Mainstream environmentalism, as the film outlines, is its own worst enemy. In advocating ephemeral, consumer-based solutions to tackling ecological breakdown, it creates its own certain failure. Unfortunately, unless the counter-point to that, the ‘deep green’ argument, is able to give people the confidence to accept and let go of industrial society, it will not make progress either. I think this film almost gets there; but we need to focus far more on the workable, existing examples of people living outside of that system to give people the confidence to make that internal, ‘leap of faith’. For those who want to follow this road, and perhaps provide those examples, this film is a good starting point to build from.

 

Released under the Creative Commons ‘BY-NC-SA’ 4.0 International License

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Deep Green Resistance, the News Service, or its staff.