Our way of life — industrial civilization — is destroying the planet.
From coral reefs to the great forests, the last strongholds of the wild are falling. The climate is destabilizing. And we are entering the 6th mass extinction of life on Earth. Ecological collapse is here.
This unprecedented crisis demands extraordinary solutions. And yet, governments and mainstream environmental groups are failing to chart a path towards a livable future. What is to be done?
This November 19th, join the philosopher poet of the deep ecology movement Derrick Jensen, radical eco-feminist author and strategist Lierre Kieth, and special guests Saba Malik, Robert Jensen and Dahr Jamail for a special 3-hour live streaming event, Collapse: Ecology, Climate, and Civilization starting at 3pm Pacific Time and hosted by Deep Green Resistance.
This event will explore issues of collapse (ecological, climatic, and civilizational) with a focus on organized, political resistance to slow and mitigate the worst aspects of collapse and accelerate the positive impacts. There will be opportunities to ask questions and participate in dialogue.
This event is also a fundraiser, because the mainstream environmental movement is funded mainly by foundations which don’t want foundational or revolutionary change. Radical organizations like Deep Green Resistance rely on individual donors to support our work.
We are raising $25,000 to fund a national speaking tour, a community-led hydropower dam resistance campaign in the Philippines, land-defense campaigns addressing mining and biodiversity, training programs for activists around the world, and other organizational work.
Whether or not you are in a financial position to donate, we hope you will join us this November 19th for this special event!
Will Falk is a writer, lawyer, and environmental activist. The natural world speaks and Will’s work is how he listens. He believes the ongoing destruction of the natural world is the most pressing issue confronting us today. For Will, writing is a tool to be used in resistance.
Editor’s note: As the climate catastrophe worsens, chaos and contradiction reigns. Grassroots people’s resistance to the fossil fuel industry is growing, but so is government repression, and investment in coal, oil, and gas continues to grow (last year, more than 83% of global energy was supplied by fossil fuels). Meanwhile, governments are censoring the true depths of the crisis and a rush of big-businesses are seeking to capitalize on global warming, seeing a massive “shock doctrine” opportunity for profiting off the crisis.
This excerpt uses Naomi Klein’s concept of the “Shock Doctrine” to analyze how big business has co-opted the environmental movement into a de-facto lobbying arm for the so-called “green” technology industry, and in the process has turned away from the fundamental values of the environmentalism.
It shouldn’t surprise us that the values of the environmental movement have degraded so much in the last 30 years.
Now more than ever, people are immersed in technology instead of the real world. As one report states, “The average young American now spends practically every minute—except for time in school—using a smart- phone, computer, television or electronic device.” A recent poll in Britain found that the average 18-to-25-year-old rated an internet connection as more important than daylight.
We’ve come a long way from the naturalists we were born to be; from inhabiting a living world flush with kin to serving a society in thrall to machines.
It’s no wonder, then, that so many people believe in nonsensical technological solutions. Technology does it for them and the real world doesn’t.
And so, the absurd becomes normal. We hear that green technology will stop global warming. We hear that cutting down forests and burning them is good for the planet. We hear that damming rivers is good for the planet. We hear that destroying the desert to put in solar panels is good for the planet. We hear that industrial recycling will save the world. We hear that commodifying nature is somehow significantly different than business as usual. We hear that we can invest our way to sustainable capitalism. We hear that capitalism can be sustainable.
A global growth rate of 3 percent, which is considered the mini- mum for capitalism to function, means the world economy doubles every 24 years. This is, of course, madness. If we can’t even name capitalism as a problem, how are we to have any chance of saving the planet?
There’s no doubt that global warming is apocalyptic. I (Max) have stood on thawing permafrost above the Arctic Circle and seen entire forests collapsing as soils lose integrity under their roots. This culture is changing the composition of the planet’s climate. But this is not the only crisis the world is facing, and to pretend otherwise ignores the true roots of the problem.
The Sierra Club has a campaign called “Ready for 100.” The campaign’s goal is to “convince 50 college campuses, a dozen key cities and half a dozen key states to go 100 percent renewable.’” The executive director of the Sierra Club, Michael Brune, explains,
“There are a few reasons why Ready for 100 is working—why it’s such a powerful idea. People have agency, for one. People who are outraged, alarmed, depressed, filled with despair about climate change—they want to make a difference in ways they can see, so they’re turning to their backyards. Turning to their city, their state, their university. And, it’s exciting—it’s a way to address this not just through dread, but with something that sparks your imagination.”
There are a lot of problems with that statement. First, is Ready for 100 really “working,” like Brune says? That depends on the unspoken part of that statement: working to achieve what? He may mean that the campaign is working to mobilize a larger main- stream climate movement. He may mean that Ready for 100 is working in the sense that more “renewable” infrastructure is being built, in great measure because more subsidies are being given to the industry.
If he means Ready for 100 is working to reduce the burning of coal, oil, and gas—which is, in fact, what he means—he’s dead wrong, as “fossil fuels continue to absolutely dominate global energy consumption.”
There’s more about Brune’s quote that’s bothersome. He’s explicitly turning people’s “outrage, alarm, depression, and despair” into means that serve the ends of capital; through causing people to use these very real feelings to lobby for specific sectors of the industrial economy.
If a plan won’t work, it doesn’t matter if people have “agency.” The ongoing destruction of the planet, and the continued dominance of coal, oil, and gas, seems to be less important than diverting people’s rage—which, if left unchecked, might actually explode into something that would stop capitalism and industrialism from murdering the planet—into corporate-friendly ends.
Led by 350.org, the Fossil Free campaign aims to remove financial support for the coal, oil, and gas industries by pressuring institutions such as churches, cities, and universities to divest. It’s modeled on the three-pronged boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) resistance to South African apartheid (a model used today against Israel). The Fossil Free campaign has thus far pressured 800 institutions and 58,000 individuals to divest $6 trillion. Some of these are partial divestments, such as withdrawing from tar sands but continuing to fund fracking.
Still, sounds great, right? Anyone fighting to stop coal, oil, and gas is doing a very good thing.
But given how little time we have, and how badly we’re losing the fight for the planet, we have to ask if divestment is an effective strategy.
The answer, unfortunately, is not really. Jay Taber of Intercontinental Cry points out that “All this divestment does is make once publicly held shares available on Wall Street, which allows trading houses like Goldman Sachs to further consolidate their control of the industry. BDS, when applied against apartheid states by other states and international institutions, includes cut- ting off access to finance, as well as penalties for crimes against humanity.” He states quite bluntly that divestment acts to “redirect activism away from effective work.”
Bill Gates—not usually someone we’d listen to—seems to agree. “If you think divestment alone is a solution,” Gates writes, “I worry you’re taking whatever desire people have to solve this problem and kind of using up their idealism and energy on something that won’t emit less carbon—because only a few people in society are the owners of the equity of coal or oil companies.”
If it occurs on a wide enough scale, divestment makes previously held stocks, bonds, and other investment products available for purchase. This glut drops prices, making it easier for less ethical investors to buy. This not only consolidates the industry, but it also makes fossil fuel stocks more profitable for those who snatch them up. As journalist Christian Parenti writes, “So how will dumping Exxon stock hurt its income, that is, its bottom line? It might, in fact, improve the company’s price to earnings ratio thus making the stock more attractive to immoral buyers. Or it could allow the firm to more easily buy back stock (which it has been doing at a massive scale for the last five years) and thus retain more of its earnings for use to develop more oil fields.”
It’s unlikely any divestment campaigner believes divestment alone will stop global warming. The Fossil Free website recognizes this, writing: “The campaign began in an effort to stigmatize the Fossil Fuel industry—the financial impact was secondary to the socio-political impact.” But as the amount of money being divested continues to grow, reinvestment is becoming a more central part of the fossil fuel divestment campaign. The website continues: “We have a responsibility and an opportunity to ask ourselves how moving the money itself … can help us usher forth our vision.”
Great! So, they’re suggesting these organizations take their money out of oil industry stocks, and use that money to set aside land as wilderness, for wild nature, right?
Well, no. They want the money to be used to fund “renewable energy.” And they’ve slipped a premise past us: the idea that divestment and reinvestment can work to create a better world. It’s an extraordinary claim, and not supported by evidence. As Anne Petermann of the Global Justice Ecology Project writes, “Can the very markets that have led us to the brink of the abyss now provide our parachute? … Under this system, those with the money have all the power. Then why are we trying to reform this system? Why are we not transforming it?”
Activist Keith Brunner writes, “Yes, the fossil fuel corporations are the big bad wolf, but just as problematic is the system of investment and returns which necessitates a growth economy (it’s called capitalism).” His conclusion: “We aren’t going to invest our way to a livable planet.”
Is it better to fight for “achievable, realistic” goals through reform, or address the fundamental issues at their root? Usually, we’re in favor of both. If we wait for the great and glorious revolution and don’t do any reform work (which we could also call defensive work), by the time the revolution comes, the world will have been consumed by this culture. And if we only do defensive work and don’t address the causes of the problems, this culture will consume the world until there’s nothing left.
But it’s pretty clear that the real goal of the bright greens isn’t defending the planet: Everyone from Lester Brown to Kumi Naidoo has been explicit about this. The real goal is to get money into so-called green technology. A recent article notes, “Climate solutions need cold, hard cash … about a trillion a year.”
One of Naomi Klein’s biggest contributions to discourse is her articulation of the “shock doctrine,” which she defines as “how America’s ‘free market’ policies have come to dominate the world—through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.” In her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein explains—brilliantly—how the same principles used to disorient and extract concessions from victims of torture can be leveraged to extract political concessions from entire nations in the wake of major disasters. She gives many examples, including the wave of austerity and privatization in Chile following the Pinochet coup in 1973, the massive expansion of industrialism and silencing of dissidents following the Tienanmen Square massacre in China in 1989, and the dismantling of low-income housing and replacement of public education with for-profit schools in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The shock doctrine also perfectly describes the entire bright green movement: Because of a terrible and very real disaster (in this case, climate change), you need to hand over huge subsidies to a sector of the industrial economy, and you need to let us destroy far more of the natural world, from Baotou to the Mojave Desert to the bottom of the ocean. If you don’t give us lots of money and let us destroy far more of the natural world, you will lose the luxuries that are evidently more important to you than life on the planet.
Once you start looking for this trend, it’s really clear. There’s a 2016 article in Renewable Energy World magazine about the Desert Renewable Energy and Conservation Plan. The plan allows major solar energy harvesting facilities to be built in some areas of the California desert, but not other areas. Shannon Eddy, head of the Large-Scale Solar Association, considers protecting parts of the desert “a blow.” She says, “The world is on fire—CO2 levels just breached the 400-ppm threshold. We need to do everything we can right now to reduce emissions by getting renewable projects online.”
Everything including destroying the desert. This is reminiscent of a phrase from the Vietnam War era, which originated in 1968 with AP correspondent Peter Arnett: “‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,’ a United States major said today.”
We also invite readers to get involved in people’s movements against greenwashing and for degrowth, resistance to industrial civilization, humane population reduction, and for the land. You can learn more about an active struggle over these issues at Protect Thacker Pass.
Biocentrism (from Greek βίος bios, “life” and κέντρον kentron, “center”) is an ethical point of view that extends inherent value to all living things. It is an understanding of how the earth works, particularly as it relates to its biosphere or biodiversity, that stands in contrast to anthropocentrism, which centers on the value of humans.
The term biocentrism encompasses all environmental ethics that “extend the status of moral object from human beings to all living things in nature”. Biocentric ethics calls for a rethinking of the relationship between humans and nature. It states that nature does not exist simply to be used or consumed by humans, but that humans are simply one species amongst many, and that because we are part of an ecosystem, any actions which negatively affect the living systems of which we are a part adversely affect us as well, whether or not we maintain a biocentric worldview.
Biocentrists observe that all species have inherent value, and that humans are not “superior” to other species in a moral or ethical sense.
The four main pillars of a biocentric outlook are:
Humans and all other species are members of Earth’s community.
All species are part of a system of interdependence.
All living organisms pursue their own “good” in their own ways.
Human beings are not inherently superior to other living things.<
Three Perspectives on Biocentrism
Excerpted from the book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It. This segment was written by Lierre Keith.
Moment to moment, the world is kept alive only by the bacteria doing the basic work of life, which no one else can do, and by maintaining relationships more complex than any we could ever understand. We are all here only because of other beings. Biologist Robert Rosen argues that the mechanistic paradigm of Western science cannot explain living communities, which are always built from relationship “between the part and the whole.” The word he uses to define living communities: nonfractionability.
The mechanistic mind is also wrong across geologic time. Scientists and lay people alike have tried to draw a line between life and inanimate matter. Chemists, for instance, divide their field into the organic and inorganic. Organic matter is that which is produced by the “vital chemistry” of living creatures. Inorganic refers to “forms of matter which exist independently of the operation of living beings.”11 Rocks, metals, minerals, and water, for instance, are considered inorganic. But given a few billion years, rock will become living creatures who will eventually get pressed back into rock. And with a few plate shifts, the sediment of the ocean floor, built from the bodies of sea creatures, will become dry land. That land—comprised of those compressed dead bodies—is once more taken up by living creatures. Hence Russian scientist V. I. Vernadsky called life on earth “a disperse of rock.” Writes evolutionary biologist and futurist Elizabet Sahtouris, “This view of living matter as continuous with, and as a chemical transformation of, nonliving planetary matter is very different from the view of life developing on the surface of a nonliving planet and adapting to it.” In Sahtouris’s words, it’s the difference between “a living planet” and a “planet with life on it.”
This is not just clever semantics. In one view the planet is inanimate habitat for humans and maybe a few other creatures. According to another, everything on earth is part of a process called life. As Sahtouris writes, “Planetary life is not something that happens here and there on a planet—it happens to the planet as a whole.” Life is not a kind of matter, but a process.
Derrick Jensen: “Pretend You Are a River”
Excerpted from the book Endgame: The Problem of Civilization.
Pretend you are a river. Pretend you are the mist who falls so fine—so gentle—that nothing separates water and air. You are the rain who falls in sheets, explodes onto the ground to leave pocks and puddles. You are the ground who receives this water, soaking it up, taking it in, carrying it deep inside. You are the cracks and fissures where the waters accumulate, flow, fall to join more water, and more, in pools and rivers who move slowly through cavities, crevices, pores. You are the sounds and silence of water seeping or staying still. You are the meeting of wet and dry, the union of liquid and solid, where solids dissolve and liquids solidify. You are the pressure who pushes water through seams. You are the rushing water who bubbles from the earth.
You are a tiny pool between rocks. You overflow, find your way to join others who like you are moving, moving. You are the air at the surface of the water, the joining of substantial and insubstantial, the union of under and over, weight and not-weight. You are the riffle, the rapid, the tiny waterfall who turns water to air and air to water. You are the mist who settles on the soil. You are the plants who drink the mist, and you are the sun who warms and feeds them.
You are the fish who feed on insects who feed on plants who feed on soils who feed on fish. You are the fish who become soils who become plants who become insects who become fish who flow down the river.
You are the river who joins other rivers to become a new river who is all of the rivers and something else.
You are the river. You do not stop at the banks, where liquid turns to solid. You reach into the sky and into the soil. Water moves through rocks, comes up to form pools far from the fast flow where the rivers move together, seeps down to join still waters deep below the surface, waters who sleep and wake and sleep and mingle with the stones who are the river, too.
You are the river, who is married to the mountains you have known since they were young, who have given themselves to you as you have given yourself to them. You are the canyons you nestle into, each year deeper than the year before. You are the forests who give you their fallen trees, and the meadows you flood and feed and who feed you back their fruits and fine insects who fly to your surface to be taken in by the fish who with their own bodies again feed the meadows.
You are the river who feeds the ocean, who feels the tides pushing and pulling against your mouth, the waves mixing fresh and salt. You are that intermingling. That is who you are. That is who you have always been.
You are the river. You have lived with volcanoes and glaciers. You have been dammed by lava and ice. You have carried log jams so large and so old they grow their own forests, with you running beneath. You have lived through droughts and floods.
You are the river. You miss the salmon. You miss the sturgeon. You miss the ocean. You miss the meadows. You miss the forests. You miss the beavers and otters and grizzly bears. You miss the human beings.
You are the river. You want them back. You want to feel the tickling of the sturgeon, the thrusting of the salmon. You want to carry food and soil to the ocean. You want to cover the meadows as you used to, and you want to give yourself to them and you want them to give themselves to you, as you have done forever, and as they have too.
Rachel Carson: “In Every Grain of Sand is The Story of the Earth”
Excerpted from the book Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson.
Along mile after mile of coastline, the land presents a changing face to the sea. Now it is a sheer rock cliff; now a smooth beach’ now the frayed edge of a mangrove swamp, dark and full of mystery. Each is the seacoast, yet each is itself, like no other in time or place. In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.
This coastline plays endless variations on the basic theme of sea and land. On the coastal rocks of northern New England the sea is an immediate presence, compelling, impossible to ignore. Its tides rise and fall on their appointed schedule, draining coves and refilling them, lifting boats or dropping away to leave them stranded. On the broad beaches of the South the feeling is different. As you stand at the edge of the dunes, when the tide is out, the ocean seems far away. Under the push of a rising tide it advances a little, reducing the width of the buffer strip of sand. Storms bring it still farther in. But compared with its overwhelming presence on Northern shores it seems remote, a shining immensity related to far horizons. The sound of the waves on such a day, when the heated air shimmers above the sand and the sky is without clouds, is a muted whisper. In this quiet there is a tentativeness that suggests that something is about to happen. And indeed we may be sure the present stand of the sea here is only temporary, for many times in the past million years or so it has risen and flowed across all of the coastal plain, paused for perhaps a few thousand years, and returned again to its basin.
For the shore is always changing, and today’s sand beach may become the sheer coast of a distant tomorrow. This is precisely what happened in northern New England, where, only a few thousands of years ago, the earth’s crust sank and the sea came in, covering the beaches and the plain, running up the river valleys and rising about the hills. So, on the young Maine coast today, evergreen forests meet the granite threshold of the sea.
Everywhere the wind and the sea have shaped the coast, sculpturing it into forms that are often beautiful, sometime bizarre. Along the Oregon coast the rocky cliffs and headlands speak of the age-long battle with the sea. Here and there a lonely tower of rock rises offshore, one of the formations known as stacks or needles. Each began as a narrow headland jutting out from the main body of coastal rock. Then a weak spot in its connection with the mainland was battered through.
Here and there the assaults of surf have blasted out caves in the sea cliffs. Anemone Cave in Acadia National Park is one. In the famous Sea Lion Caves on the central Oregon coast several hundred sea lions gather each autumn, living in the tumultuous surge of the surf, mingling their roars with the sound of the sea, still working to break through the roof of the cave.
Back from the surf line, the winds have piled up majestic dunes here and there. At Kitty Hawk in North Carolina perhaps the highest dunes of the American coast rise abruptly from the sea. I have stood on the summit of one of those dunes on a windy day when all the crest appears to be smoking, and the winds seemed bent on destroying the very dunes they had created. Clouds and streamers of sand grains were seized by the strong flow of air and carried away. Far below, in the surf line, I could see the source of the dune sand, where waves are forever cutting and grinding and polishing the fragments of rock and shell that compose the coastal sands.
What this adds up to should be clear enough, yet many people who should know better choose not to see it. This is business-as- usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed, ambition-addled destruction of the wild, the unpolluted, and the nonhuman. It is the mass destruction of the world’s remaining wild places in order to feed the human economy. And without any sense of irony, people are calling this “environmentalism.”1 —PAUL KINGSNORTH
Once upon a time, environmentalism was about saving wild beings and wild places from destruction. “The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind,” Rachel Carson wrote to a friend as she finished the manuscript that would become Silent Spring. “That, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done.”2 She wrote with unapologetic reverence of “the oak and maple and birch” in autumn, the foxes in the morning mist, the cool streams and the shady ponds, and, of course, the birds: “In the mornings, which had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, and wrens, and scores of other bird voices, there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marshes.”3 Her editor noted that Silent Spring required a “sense of almost religious dedication” as well as “extraordinary courage.”4 Carson knew the chemical industry would come after her, and come it did, in attacks as “bitter and unscrupulous as anything of the sort since the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species a century before.”5 Seriously ill with the cancer that would kill her, Carson fought back in defense of the living world, testifying with calm fortitude before President John F. Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee and the U.S. Senate. She did these things because she had to. “There would be no peace for me,” she wrote to a friend, “if I kept silent.”6
Carson’s work inspired the grassroots environmental movement; the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); and the passage of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. Silent Spring was more than a critique of pesticides—it was a clarion call against “the basic irresponsibility of an industrialized, technological society toward the natural world.”7 Today’s environmental movement stands upon the shoulders of giants, but something has gone terribly wrong with it. Carson didn’t save the birds from DDT so that her legatees could blithely offer them up to wind turbines. We are writing this book because we want our environmental movement back.
Mainstream environmentalists now overwhelmingly prioritize saving industrial civilization over saving life on the planet. The how and the why of this institutional capture is the subject for another book, but the capture is near total. For example, Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute and Earth Policy Institute—someone who has been labeled as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers” and “the guru of the environmental movement”8—routinely makes comments like, “We talk about saving the planet.… But the planet’s going to be around for a while. The question is, can we save civilization? That’s what’s at stake now, and I don’t think we’ve yet realized it.” Brown wrote this in an article entitled “The Race to Save Civilization.”9
The world is being killed because of civilization, yet what Brown says is at stake, and what he’s racing to save, is precisely the social structure causing the harm: civilization. Not saving salmon. Not monarch butterflies. Not oceans. Not the planet. Saving civilization. Brown is not alone. Peter Kareiva, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, more or less constantly pushes the line that “Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of [human] people…. Conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to [human] people.”10 Bill McKibben, who works tirelessly and selflessly to raise awareness about global warming, and who has been called “probably America’s most important environmentalist,” constantly stresses his work is about saving civilization, with articles like “Civilization’s Last Chance,”11 or with quotes like, “We’re losing the fight, badly and quickly—losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.”12
We’ll bet you that polar bears, walruses, and glaciers would have preferred that sentence ended a different way.
In 2014 the Environmental Laureates’ Declaration on Climate Change was signed by “160 leading environmentalists from 44 countries” who were “calling on the world’s foundations and philanthropies to take a stand against global warming.” Why did they take this stand? Because global warming “threatens to cause the very fabric of civilization to crash.” The declaration con- cludes: “We, 160 winners of the world’s environmental prizes, call on foundations and philanthropists everywhere to deploy their endowments urgently in the effort to save civilization.”13
Coral reefs, emperor penguins, and Joshua trees probably wish that sentence would have ended differently. The entire declaration, signed by “160 winners of the world’s environmental prizes,” never once mentions harm to the natural world. In fact, it never mentions the natural world at all.
Are leatherback turtles, American pikas, and flying foxes “abstract ecological issues,” or are they our kin, each imbued with their own “wild and precious life”?14 Wes Stephenson, yet another climate activist, has this to say: “I’m not an environmentalist. Most of the people in the climate movement that I know are not environmentalists. They are young people who didn’t necessarily come up through the environmental movement, so they don’t think of themselves as environmentalists. They think of themselves as climate activists and as human rights activists. The terms ‘environment’ and ‘environmentalism’ carry baggage historically and culturally. It has been more about protecting the natural world, protecting other species, and conservation of wild places than it has been about the welfare of human beings. I come at from the opposite direction. It’s first and foremost about human beings.”15
Note that Stephenson calls “protecting the natural world, protecting other species, and conservation of wild places” baggage. Naomi Klein states explicitly in the film This Changes Everything: “I’ve been to more climate rallies than I can count, but the polar bears? They still don’t do it for me. I wish them well, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that stopping climate change isn’t really about them, it’s about us.”
And finally, Kumi Naidoo, former head of Greenpeace International, says: “The struggle has never been about saving the planet. The planet does not need saving.”16 When Naidoo said that, in December 2015, it was 50 degrees Fahrenheit at the North Pole, much warmer than normal, far above freezing in the middle of winter.
13 “Environmental Laureates’ Declaration on Climate Change,” European Environment Foundation, September 15, 2014. It shouldn’t surprise us that the person behind this declaration is a solar energy entrepreneur. It probably also shouldn’t surprise us that he’s begging for money.
14 “Wild and precious life” is from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day.” House of Light (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992).
“Once our authoritarian technics consolidates its powers, with the aid of its new forms of mass control, its panoply of tranquilizers and sedatives and aphrodisiacs, could democracy in any form survive? That question is absurd: Life itself will not survive, except what is funneled through the mechanical collective.”1 LEWIS MUMFORD
There is so little time and even less hope here, in the midst of ruin, at the end of the world. Every biome is in shreds. The green flesh of forests has been stripped to grim sand. The word water has been drained of meaning; the Athabascan River is essentially a planned toxic spill now, oozing from the open wound of the Alberta tar sands. When birds fly over it, they drop dead from the poison. No one believes us when we say that, but it’s true. The Appalachian Mountains are being blown to bits, their dense life of deciduous forests, including their human communities, reduced to a disposal problem called “overburden,” a word that should be considered hate speech: Living creatures—mountain laurels, wood thrush fledglings, somebody’s grandchildren—are not objects to be tossed into gullies. If there is no poetry after Auschwitz, there is no grammar after mountaintop removal. As above, so below. Coral reefs are crumbling under the acid assault of carbon. And the world’s grasslands have been sliced to ribbons, literally, with steel blades fed by fossil fuel. The hunger of those blades would be endless but for the fact that the planet is a bounded sphere: There are no continents left to eat. Every year the average American farm uses the energy equivalent of three to four tons of TNT per acre. And oil burns so easily, once every possibility for self-sustaining cultures has been destroyed. Even the memory of nature is gone, metaphrastic now, something between prehistory and a fairy tale. All that’s left is carbon, accruing into a nightmare from which dawn will not save us. Climate change slipped into climate chaos, which has become a whispered climate holocaust. At least the humans whisper. And the animals? During the 2011 Texas drought, deer abandoned their fawns for lack of milk. That is not a grief that whispers. For living beings like Labrador ducks, Javan rhinos, and Xerces blue butterflies, there is the long silence of extinction.
We have a lot of numbers. They keep us sane, providing a kind of gallows’ comfort against the intransigent sadism of power: We know the world is being murdered, despite the mass denial. The numbers are real. The numbers don’t lie. The species shrink, their extinctions swell, and all their names are other words for kin: bison, wolves, black-footed ferrets. Before me (Lierre) is the text of a talk I’ve given. The original version contains this sentence: “Another 120 species went extinct today.” The 120 is crossed clean through, with 150 written above it. But the 150 is also struck out, with 180 written above. The 180 in its turn has given way to 200. I stare at this progression with a sick sort of awe. How does my small, neat handwriting hold this horror? The numbers keep stacking up, I’m out of space in the margin, and life is running out of time.
Twelve thousand years ago, the war against the earth began. In nine places,2 people started to destroy the world by taking up agriculture. Understand what agriculture is: In blunt terms, you take a piece of land, clear every living thing off it—ultimately, down to the bacteria—and then plant it for human use. Make no mistake: Agriculture is biotic cleansing. That’s not agriculture on a bad day, or agriculture done poorly. That’s what agriculture actually is: the extirpation of living communities for a monocrop for and of humans. There were perhaps five million humans living on earth on the day this started—from this day to the ending of the world, indeed—and there are now well over seven billion. The end is written into the beginning. As earth and space sciences scholar David R. Montgomery points out, agricultural societies “last 800 to 2,000 years … until the soil gives out.”3 Fossil fuel has been a vast accelerant to both the extirpation and the monocrop—the human population has quadrupled under the swell of surplus created by the Green Revolution—but it can only be temporary. Finite quantities have a nasty habit of running out. The name for this diminishment is drawdown, and agriculture is in essence a slow bleed-out of soil, species, biomes, and ultimately the process of life itself. Vertebrate evolution has come to a halt for lack of habitat, with habitat taken by force and kept by force: Iowa alone uses the energy equivalent of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year. Agriculture is the original scorched-earth policy, which is why both author and permaculturist Toby Hemenway and environmental writer Richard Manning have written the same sentence: “Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron.” To quote Manning at length: “No biologist, or anyone else for that matter, could design a system of regulations that would make agriculture sustainable. Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron. It mostly relies on an unnatural system of annual grasses grown in a mono- culture, a system that nature does not sustain or even recognize as a natural system. We sustain it with plows, petrochemicals, fences, and subsidies, because there is no other way to sustain it.”4
Agriculture is what creates the human pattern called civilization. Civilization is not the same as culture—all humans create culture, which can be defined as the customs, beliefs, arts, cuisine, social organization, and ways of knowing and relating to each other, the land, and the divine within a specific group of people. Civilization is a specific way of life: people living in cities, with cities defined as people living in numbers large enough to require the importation of resources. What that means is that they need more than the land can give. Food, water, and energy have to come from somewhere else. From that point forward, it doesn’t matter what lovely, peaceful values people hold in their hearts. The society is dependent on imperialism and genocide because no one willingly gives up their land, their water, their trees. But since the city has used up its own, it has to go out and get those from somewhere else. That’s the last 10,000 years in a few sentences. Over and over and over, the pattern is the same. There’s a bloated power center surrounded by conquered colonies, from which the center extracts what it wants, until eventually it collapses. The conjoined horrors of militarism and slavery begin with agriculture.
Agricultural societies end up militarized—and they always do—for three reasons. First, agriculture creates a surplus, and if it can be stored, it can be stolen, so, the surplus needs to be protected. The people who do that are called soldiers. Second, the drawdown inherent in this activity means that agriculturalists will always need more land, more soil, and more resources. They need an entire class of people whose job is war, whose job is taking land and resources by force—agriculture makes that possible as well as inevitable. Third, agriculture is backbreaking labor. For anyone to have leisure, they need slaves. By the year 1800, when the fossil fuel age began, three-quarters of the people on this planet were living in conditions of slavery, indenture, or serfdom.5 Force is the only way to get and keep that many people enslaved. We’ve largely forgotten this is because we’ve been using machines—which in turn use fossil fuel—to do that work for us instead of slaves. The symbiosis of technology and culture is what historian, sociologist, and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) called a technic. A social milieu creates specific technologies which in turn shape the culture. Mumford writes, “[A] new configuration of technical invention, scientific observation, and centralized political control … gave rise to the peculiar mode of life we may now identify, without eulogy, as civilization… The new authoritarian technology was not limited by village custom or human sentiment: its herculean feats of mechanical organization rested on ruthless physical coercion, forced labor and slavery, which brought into existence machines that were capable of exerting thousands of horsepower centuries before horses were harnessed or wheels invented. This centralized technics … created complex human machines composed of specialized, standardized, replaceable, interdependent parts—the work army, the military army, the bureaucracy. These work armies and military armies raised the ceiling of human achievement: the first in mass construction, the second in mass destruction, both on a scale hitherto inconceivable.”6
Technology is anything but neutral or passive in its effects: Ploughshares require armies of slaves to operate them and soldiers to protect them. The technic that is civilization has required weapons of conquest from the beginning. “Farming spread by genocide,” Richard Manning writes.7 The destruction of Cro-Magnon Europe—the culture that bequeathed us Lascaux, a collection of cave paintings in southwestern France—took farmer-soldiers from the Near East perhaps 300 years to accomplish. The only thing exchanged between the two cultures was violence. “All these artifacts are weapons,” writes archaeologist T. Douglas Price, with his colleagues, “and there is no reason to believe that they were exchanged in a nonviolent manner.”8
Weapons are tools that civilizations will make because civilization itself is a war. Its most basic material activity is a war against the living world, and as life is destroyed, the war must spread. The spread is not just geographic, though that is both inevitable and catastrophic, turning biotic communities into gutted colonies and sovereign people into slaves. Civilization penetrates the culture as well, because the weapons are not just a technology: no tool ever is. Technologies contain the transmutational force of a technic, creating a seamless suite of social institutions and corresponding ideologies. Those ideologies will either be authoritarian or democratic, hierarchical or egalitarian. Technics are never neutral. Or, as ecopsychology pioneer Chellis Glendinning writes with spare eloquence, “All technologies are political.”9
There exists some debate as to how many places developed agriculture and civilizations. The best current guess seems to be nine: the Fertile Crescent; the Indian sub- continent; the Yangtze and Yellow River basins; the New Guinea Highlands; Central Mexico; Northern South America; sub-Saharan Africa; and eastern North America.
T. Douglas Price, Anne Birgitte Gebauer, and Lawrence H. Keeley, “The Spread of Farming into Europe North of the Alps,” in Douglas T. Price and Anne Brigitte Gebauer, Last Hunters, First Farmers (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1995).
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