For the past 9 years, I have been part of a revolutionary social and ecological organization. In that time, I have made some of my best friends in the world. I have met some of the most incredible people I can imagine: true-hearted warriors with courage, conviction, and character.
These comrades are doing incredible work, around the world, every day. They are fighting coal mines and oil pipelines. They are sponsoring refugees and campaigning for women’s rights. They are advocating for revolutionary environmentalism. They are restoring land and fighting “development,” better known as destruction of the land. They are collaborating and allying with indigenous nations in decolonization and resistance.
They are also doing the everyday work of human beings. They are raising intelligent, articulate, capable children. They are rewriting the rules of equal relationships. They are being good friends. They are creating local, sustainable food systems. They are building community over shared meals and shared ideals, then working to make their ideals a reality.
It has become a tradition in this community for us to support members and close allies who are going through difficult times. We send them notes of support, packages of food, herbal medicines, art. We care for one another.
It is not easy to be a revolutionary. Some of us have lost our jobs for our political views. Others have faced physical violence, ostracization, blacklisting. Taunts, jeers, death and rape threats: these are a regular occurrence for many of us. Many of us live under authoritarian governments and police states of one degree or another. Disappearance, trumped-up jail time, and solitary confinement in maximum-security is a constant threat.
Radical communities can be volatile. Personalities clash, ideals are tested, and the oppression of the dominant culture is never fully stamped out. As we grapple with the biggest problems ever faced by our species—mass extinction, global warming, toxification, militarism, patriarchy, racism—we struggle to form solidarity with each other.
We have had our share of problems. We make mistakes. We hurt each other. We make poor decisions. We have much to learn.
But we are serious, and we are committed. We know ecological revolution is perhaps the only remaining path to a livable future. We are facing the end of life on the planet; any risks are small in comparison to that nightmare. As we struggle externally, against the dominant culture, against the machine, we struggle internally as well. To be better people. To live up to our ideals. To be relentless in our love, our passion, our commitment. To personify the spirit of the revolution.
In this world in crisis, we know where we stand. We stand together, united, in defense of the living planet, and in defense of justice.
—
Max Wilbert is a third-generation organizer who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement, and works with Deep Green Resistance. He is the author of two books.
Editors note: “Green technology” has become the policy centerpiece of the mainstream climate movement. But the idea that technology will solve global warming is a dangerous lie. And as Kim Hill explains in this piece, it is also highly profitable. This is no accident. We offer this article to those who suspect XR is engaging in ineffective resistance, and who are looking for a better way. Analysis is the first step toward effective action.
By Kim Hill
The Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement has taken off around the world, with millions of people taking to the streets to demand that governments take action on climate change and the broader ecological crisis. The scale of the movement means it has the potential to have an enormous impact on the course of history, by bringing about massive changes to the structure of our societies and economic systems.
The exact nature of the demanded action is not made clear, and warrants a close examination. There is a long history of powerful government and corporate interests throwing their support behind social movements, only to redirect the course of action to suit their own ends, and Extinction Rebellion is no exception.
With the entirety of life on this planet at stake, any course of action needs to be considered extremely carefully. Actions have consequences, and at this late stage, one mis-step can be catastrophic. The feeling that these issues have been discussed long enough and it is now time for immediate action is understandable. However, without clear goals and a plan on how to achieve them, the actions taken are likely to do more harm than good.
Extinction and climate change are among the many disastrous effects of an industrial society. While the desire to take action to stop the extinction of the natural world is admirable, rebelling against the effects without directly confronting the economic and political systems that are the root cause is like treating the symptoms of an illness without investigating or diagnosing it first. It won’t work. Addressing only one aspect of the global system, without taking into account the interconnected industries and governance structures, will only lead to worse problems.
Demand 2: net-zero emissions
The rebellion’s goals are expressed in three demands, under the headings Tell the Truth, Act Now and Beyond Politics. I’m starting with the second demand because net-zero is the core goal of the rebellion, and the one that will have enormous political, economic and social impact.
What does net-zero emissions mean? In the words of Catherine Abreau, executive director of the Climate Action Network: “In short, it means the amount of emissions being put into the atmosphere is equal to the amount being captured.” The term carbon-neutral is interchangeable with net-zero.
Net-zero emissions is Not a Thing. There is no way to un-burn fossil fuels. This demand is not for the extraction and burning to stop, but for the oil and gas industry to continue, while powering some non-existent technology that makes it all okay. XR doesn’t specify how they plan to reach the goal.
Proponents of net-zero emissions advocate for the trading of carbon offsets, so industries can pay to have their emissions captured elsewhere, without reducing any on their part. This approach creates a whole new industry of selling carbon credits. Wind turbines, hydro-electric dams, biofuels, solar panels, energy efficiency projects, and carbon capture are commonly traded carbon offsets. None of these actually reduce carbon emissions in practice, and are themselves contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, so make the problem worse. Using this approach, a supposedly carbon-neutral economy leads to increased extraction and burning, and generates massive profits for corporations in the process. Head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital, Louis Redshaw, predicted in 2007 “carbon will be the world’s biggest commodity market, and it could become the world’s biggest market overall.”
The demand for net-zero emissions has been echoed by a group of more than 100 companies and lobby groups, who say in a letter to the UK government: “We see the threat that climate change poses to our businesses and to our investments, as well as the significant economic opportunities that come with being an early mover in the development of new low-carbon goods and services.” Included in this group are Shell, Nestle and Unilever. This is the same Shell that has caused thousands of oil spills and toxic leaks in Nigeria and around the world, executed protesters, owns 60 per cent of the Athabasca oil sands project in Alberta, and intends to continue extracting oil long into the future; the same Nestle that profits from contaminated water supplies by selling bottled water, while depleting the world’s aquifers; the same Unilever that is responsible for clearing rainforests for palm oil and paper, dumping tonnes of mercury in India, and making billions by marketing plastic-wrapped junk food and unnecessary consumer products to the world’s poorest people. All these companies advocate for free trade and privatization of the commons, and exploit workers and lax environmental laws in the third world. As their letter says, their motivation is to profit from the crisis, not to stop the destruction they are causing.
These are XR’s allies in the call for net-zero emissions.
A few more of the billionaires and associated capitalists promoting (and profiting from) the cause
The coal industry sees net-zero as a great opportunity to expand its business.
The nuclear industry also sees the net-zero target as a cause for celebration, and even fracking is considered compatible with the goal.
Net-zero emissions in practice
Let’s look at some of the proposed approaches to achieve net-zero in more detail.
Renewable energy doesn’t reduce the amount of energy being generated by fossil fuels, and doesn’t do anything to reduce atmospheric carbon. Wind turbines and solar panels are made of metals, which are mined using fossil fuels. Any attempt to transition to 100% renewables would require more of some rare earth metals than exist on the planet, and rare earth mining is mostly done illegally in ecologically sensitive areas in China. There are plans to mine the deep sea to extract the minerals needed for solar panels, wind turbines and electric car batteries. Mining causes massive destruction and pollution of forests and rivers, leading to increased rates of extinction and climate change. And huge profits for mining and energy companies, who can claim government subsidies for powering the new climate economy. The amount of fossil fuels needed to power the mines, manufacturing, infrastructure and maintenance of renewables makes the goal of transitioning to clean energy completely meaningless. Wind and solar ‘farms’ are installed on land taken from actual farms, as well as deserts and forests. And the energy generated is not used to protect endangered species, but to power the industries that are driving us all extinct. Not a solution. Not even close. In the net-zero logic of offset trading, renewables are presented as not an alternative to fossil fuel extraction, but instead a way to buy a pass to burn even more oil. That’s a double shot of epic fail for renewables.
The composition of a single 3MW turbine. There are currently around 350 000 turbines in the world, and to meet current energy consumption with 100% wind power would require close to 4 million turbines. Image: The World Bank — Climate-Smart Mining: Minerals for Climate Action
Improving efficiency of industrial processes leads to an increase in the amount of energy consumed, not a decrease, as more can be produced with the available energy, and more energy is made available for other uses. The industries that are converting the living world into disposable crap need to be stopped, not given money to destroy the planet more efficiently.
Reforestation would be a great way to start repairing the damage done to the world, but instead is being used to expand the timber industry, which uses terms like ‘forest carbon markets’ and ‘net-zero deforestation’ to legitimize destroying old-growth forests, evicting their inhabitants, and replacing them with plantations. Those seeking to profit from reforestation are promoting genetically engineered, pesticide-dependent monocrop plantations, to be planted by drones, and are anticipating an increase in demand for wood products in the new ‘bioeconomy’. Twelve million hectares of tropical rainforest were cleared in 2018, the equivalent of 30 football fields a minute. Land clearing at this rate has been going on for decades, with no sign of stopping. No carbon offsets or emissions trading can have any effect while forest destruction continues. And making an effort to repair past damage does not make it okay to continue causing harm long into the future. A necessary condition of regenerating the land is that all destructive activity needs to stop.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is promoted as a way to extract carbon dioxide from industrial emissions, and bury it deep underground. Large amounts of energy and fresh water are required to do this, and pollutants are released into the atmosphere in the process. The purpose of currently-operational carbon capture installations is not to store the carbon dioxide, but to use it in a process called Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), which involves injecting CO2 into near-depleted oil fields, to extract more fossil fuels than would otherwise be accessible. And with carbon trading, the business of extracting oil becomes more profitable, as it can sell offset credits. Again, the proposed solution leads to more fossil fuel use, not less. Stored carbon dioxide is highly likely to leak out into the atmosphere, causing earthquakes and asphyxiating any nearby living beings. This headline says all you need to know: “Best Carbon Capture Facility In World Emits 25 Times More CO2 Than Sequestered”. Carbon capture for underground storage is neither technically nor commercially viable, as it is risky and there is no financial incentive to store the carbon dioxide, so requires government investment and subsidies. And the subsidies lead to coal and gas becoming more financially viable, thus expanding the industry.
Captured carbon is used to extract oil, in Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). If the emissions site is not near an oil well, the carbon dioxide must be shipped or piped vast distances. Implementing carbon capture at scale will require 23 000 miles of carbon dioxide pipelines in the US alone.
Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is a psychopathic scheme to clear forests, and take over agricultural land to grow genetically modified fuel crops, burn the trees and crops as an energy source, and then bury the carbon dioxide underground (where it’s used to expand oil and gas production). It would require an amount of land almost the size of Australia, or up to 80% of current global cropland, masses of chemical fertilizers (made from fossil fuels), and lead to soil degradation (leading to more emissions), food shortages, water shortages, land theft, massive increase in the rate of extinction, and I can’t keep researching these effects it’s making me feel ill. Proponents of BECCS (i.e. fossil fuel companies) acknowledge that meeting the targets will require “three times the world’s total cereal production, twice the annual world use of water for agriculture, and twenty times the annual use of nutrients.” Of course this will mostly take place on land stolen from the poor, in Africa, South America and Asia. And the energy generated used to make more fighter jets, Hollywood movies, pointless gadgets and urban sprawl. Burning of forests for fuel is already happening in the US and UK, all in the name of clean energy. Attaching carbon capture to bioenergy means that 30% more trees or crops need to be burned to power the CCS facility, to sequester the emissions caused by burning them. And again, it’s an offset, so sold as a justification to keep the fossil fuel industry in business. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (in the three most likely of its four scenarios) recommends implementing BECCS on a large scale to keep warming below 2°C. Anyone who thinks this is a good idea can go burn in hell, where they can be put to good use as an energy source.
This image was made in 2015, and since then millions of tonnes of wood pellets have been imported into the UK from clearfelled US forests, and burned in the Drax Power Station in Yorkshire, to power people’s homes. Energy companies receive around £1billion per year in UK subsidies for generating electricity from biomass. There are plans to build several more biomass power stations. Image: www.biofuelwatch.org.uk.
This is what a decarbonised economy looks like in practice. An enormous increase in fossil fuel extraction, land clearing, mining (up to nine times as much as current levels), pollution, resource wars, exploitation, and extinction. All the money XR is demanding that governments invest in decarbonisation is going straight to the oil, gas, coal and mining companies, to expand their industries and add to their profits. The Centre for International Environmental Law, in the report Fuel to the Fire, states “Overall, the US government has been funding CCS research since 1997, with over $5billion being appropriated since 2010.” Fossil fuel companies have been advocating net-zero for some years, as it is seen as a way to save a failing coal industry, and increase demand for oil and gas, because solar, wind, biofuels and carbon capture technologies are all dependent on fossil fuels for their operation.
Anyone claiming that a carbon-neutral economy is possible is not telling the truth. All of these strategies emit more greenhouse gases than they capture. The second demand directly contradicts the first.
These approaches are used to hide the problem, and dump the consequences on someone else: the poor, nonhuman life, the third world, and future generations, all in the service of profits in the present. The goal here is not to maintain a stable climate, or to protect endangered species, but to make money out of pretending to care.
Green growth, net-zero emissions and the Green New Deal (which explicitly states in its report that the purpose is to stimulate the economy, which includes plans to extract “remaining fossil fuel with carbon capture”) are fantasy stories sold to us by energy companies, a shiny advertisement sucking us in with their claims to make life better. In reality the product is useless, and draws us collectively into a debt that we’re already paying for by being killed off at a rate of 200 species a day. With exponential economic growth (a.k.a. exponential climate action) the rate of extinction will also grow exponentially. And the money to pay for it all comes directly from working people, in the form of pension funds, carbon taxes, and climate emergency levies.
The US branch of Extinction Rebellion lists growth as its primary goal. Image: extinctionrebellion.us
The transition to net-zero
There are plans for thousands of carbon capture facilities to be built in the coming years, all requiring roads, pipelines, powerlines, shipping, land clearing, water extraction, pollution, noise, and the undermining of local economies for corporate profits, all for the purpose of extracting more oil. And all with the full support of the rebellion.
Shell’s plan to reach net-zero is to make more than a billion cars, cover millions of acres of land with solar panels, build a new large-scale carbon capture facility every day for 40 years (that’s more than 14 000), and for one third of current oil consumption to be met by bioenergy. This would leave a large proportion of the world’s human population without food, and most of the world’s wildlife without homes. This plan amounts to both genocide and ecocide. And Extinction Rebellion wants all this to happen by 2025.
To get a sense of the scale of this economic transformation, a billion seconds is almost 32 years. If you were to line up a billion cars and run over them (or run them over) at a rate of one car per second, you’d be running for 32 years non-stop. That’s enough cars to stretch 100 times around the equator. You’d probably need to turn entire continents into a mine site to extract all the minerals required to make them. And even that wouldn’t be enough, as some of the rare earth metals required for batteries don’t exist in sufficient quantities. If all these cars are powered by renewables, you do the math on how much mining would be needed to make all the wind turbines and solar panels. Maybe several more continents. And then a few more covered in panels, turbines, powerlines, substations. And a few more to extract all the oil needed to power the mining and road building. Which all leaves no space for any life. And all for what? So we can spend our lives stuck in traffic? It’s ridiculous and apocalyptic, yet this is what the net-zero lobbyists, with the US and UK governments, and the European Union, have already begun implementing.
Shell leads the energy transition, with gas, biofuels, carbon capture, renewables, patented technologies, selling offsets, “Scenarios thought leadership” meaning setting the global agenda, and advising governments on how best to serve their business. All while continuing with their core activity of extracting oil.
Shell’s thought leadership and government advisory schemes appear to be going great, with the US senate passing a number of bills in recent months to increase subsidies for oil companies using carbon capture, and a few more, to subsidise wind, solar, nuclear, coal, gas, research and development, and even more carbon capture, are scheduled to pass in the coming months.
This from July 17, lists just a few of the many bills proposing to increase funding for the energy industry. No objections from the rebels.
The UK government, with guidance from the creepy-sounding nonprofit Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, is implementing a transition to net-zero, involving carbon capture, nuclear, bioenergy, hydrogen, ammonia, wind, solar, oil, gas, electric cars, smart grids, offset trading, manufacturing and the obligatory economic growth. And offering ‘climate finance’ to third world countries, to impose this industrial horror on the entire planet. All led by their advisors from the fossil fuel and finance industries, with input from the CCS, oil, gas, bioenergy, renewables, chemical, manufacturing, hydrogen, nuclear, airline, automotive, mining, and agriculture industries.
From the report Net Zero: The UK’s contribution to stopping global warming, p140. This makes clear that as well as ‘low-regret’ options, there is the full intention to institute some ‘speculative options’, meaning technologies that are certain to cause environmental and social devastation. And high levels of regret. Among these are Direct Air Capture, increasing demand for timber, reducing meat and dairy consumption by 50% and replacing with synthetic meat, converting farmland to biofuel crops, short-rotation forestry (meaning cutting down a lot more trees), enhanced weathering, biochar, synthetic fuels, higher CCS capture rates, and wider hydrogen roll-out. On this scale, carbon capture and BECCS are only considered low-to-mid-range regrettable. The report makes clear that “CCS is a necessity not an option.”
More from the UK’s plan for transition to net-zero. Biofuel-powered planes, ammonia-powered shipping, electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles, and “clean growth and industrial opportunities.” All completely dependent on fossil fuels.
September 3: The oil and gas industry has already begun expanding its operations in response to the UK’s announcement of the net-zero goal. “The new Centre will work with government and industry to address the UK offshore oil and gas industry’s footprint while also developing technologies that will contribute to the growing demand for hydrogen production and carbon sequestration… UK Energy and Clean Growth Minister Kwasi Kwarteng, said: ‘The UK’s oil and gas sector has a pivotal role to play in the UK’s journey towards becoming a net zero economy by 2050. Support from companies within the industry is vital to us making this energy transition to a greener future.’”
The European Union, advised by the corporate-funded European Climate Foundation, are implementing a similar plan, aiming to remain competitive with the rest of the industrialised world. The EU intends to commit 25% of its budget to implementing so-called climate mitigation strategies. Other industrialised countries also have plans to transition to a decarbonised economy.
Net-zero emissions is also the goal of the councils that have declared a climate emergency, which now number close to 1000, covering more than 200 million citizens.
This is the plan the rebellion is uniting behind to demand from the world’s governments.
Australia’s decarbonisation plan, with all the usual suspects: efficiency, renewables, nuclear, CCS, gas, carbon forestry, bioenergy and economic growth. ClimateWorks is funded by fossil fuel industry investors.
+ + + + + +
Part II will cover the rebellion’s other two demands, for truth from government and a Citizens’ Assembly; the tactics being used by the rebellion; and their proposed solutions to climate and ecological collapse.
Editor’s note: people with various diets are involved in Deep Green Resistance. Critical analysis of agriculture is central to our understanding.
By Lierre Keith
Start with a sixteen-year-old girl. She has a conscience, a brain, and two eyes. Her planet is being drawn and quartered, species by species. She knows it even while the adults around her play shell games with carbon trade schemes and ethanol. She’s also found information that leaves her sickened in her soul, the torment of animals that merges sadism with economic rationality to become the US food supply. Their suffering is both detailed and institution- ally distant, and both of those descriptors hold their own horrors.
A friend of mine talks about “the thing that breaks and is never repaired.” Anyone who has faced the truth about willful or socially- sanctioned cruelty knows that experience: in slavery, historic and con- temporary; in the endless sexual sadism of rape, battering, pornography; in the Holocaust and other genocides. You’re never the same after some knowledge gets through with you. But our sixteen-year-old has courage and commitment, and now she wants to do what’s right.
The vegetarians have a complete plan for her. It’s simple. You can create justice for animals, for impoverished humans, and for the earth if you eat grains and beans. That simplicity is part of its appeal, partly because humans have a tendency to like easy rules. But it also speaks to our desire for beauty, that with one act so much that’s wrong can be set right: our health, our compassion, our planet.
The problem is they’re wrong, not in their attempts to save the world, but in their solution. The moral valuing of justice over power, care over cruelty and biophilia over anthropocentrism is a shift in values that must occur if we are to save this planet. I didn’t call this book The Vegetarian Lie. I called it The Vegetarian Myth for a reason. It’s not a lie that animals are sentient beings currently being tortured for our food. It’s not a lie that the rich nations are siphoning off the life of the planet for literally oceans full of endless, empty plastic junk. It’s not a lie that most people refuse to face the systems of domination— their brute scale—that are destroying us and the earth.
But the vegetarians’ solution is a myth based on ignorance, an ignorance as encompassing as any of those dominating systems. Civilization, the life of cities, has broken our identification with the living land and broken the land itself. “The plow is the … the world’s most feared wrecking ball,” writes Steven Stoll. For ten thousand years, the six centers of civilization have waged war against our only home, waged it mostly with axes and plows. Those are weapons, not tools. Never mind reparations or repair: no peace is possible until we lay them down.
Those six centers were each driven by a tight cohort of creatures, at the center of which stand an annual plant or two. And humans have been so useful to corn and rice and potatoes, clever enough to conquer perennial polycultures as vast as forests, as tough as prairies, but not smart enough to see we’ve been destroying the world. The cohort has often included infectious diseases, diseases like smallpox and measles that jumped the species barrier from domesticated animals to humans. Humans who stood in the way of civilization’s hunger have been eradicated by the millions through civilization’s microbes, the first clear-cut preparing the way for the plow.
This is the ignorance where the vegetarian myth dead ends. Life must kill and we are all made possible by the dead body of another. It’s not killing that’s domination: it’s agriculture. The foods the vegetarians say will save us are the foods that destroy the world. The vegetarian attempt to remove humans from a paradigmatical pinnacle is commendable. And it’s crucial. We will never take our true place, one sibling amongst millions, sharing a common journey from carbon to consciousness, sacred and hungry, then back to carbon, without firmly and forever rejecting human dominion.
But in order to save the world we must know it, and the veg- etarians don’t, not any more than the rest of the civilized, especially the industrially so. Hens driven insane in battery cages are visible to vegetarians; both morally and politically that insistent sight is needed. What are invisible are all the other animals that agriculture has driven extinct. Entire continents have been skinned alive, yet that act goes unnoticed to vegetarians, despite the scale. How do they not see it? The answer is they don’t know to look for it. We are all so used to a devastated landscape, covered in asphalt and the same small handful of suburban plants, a biotic coup of its own. The whole east coast should be one slow sigh of wetland, interspersed with marsh meadows and old growth forest. It’s all gone, replaced by a McMonocrop of houses, shackles of asphalt, the brutal weight of cities.
Where the water goes shy, the trees should thin to savanna and prairie, although even there the wetlands should cradle the rivers. But there’s nothing left. The deltas and swamps, bison and black terns, have been turned into soy and wheat and corn. The capitalists say we should turn those into animal units; the vegetarians say we should dump them near the starving; I say we should stop growing them and let the world come back to life. Then we can take our place again, that place that the vegetarians claim to want, our place as participants.
We can dominate or we can participate but there is no way out. That’s what no one is telling that sixteen-year-old. The earth is liter- ally dying for wetlands and forests, rivers and prairies. And if humans would simply step aside, the world would do the work of repairing itself. But that repair involves death. It means letting the beavers eat the trees, letting the wolves eat the beavers, letting the soil eat us all. It means taking down every last dam and letting the salmon come home to lay their eggs and be eaten, and in the eating become the forest. This is the world as it should be, resiliently nourishing itself, the gift both given and received. No one is going to tell that sixteen- year-old girl the truth, because there’s no one left in her world who knows it.
Letting the beavers come back will mean that wetlands may well cover one-third of the land in places. Those wetlands can’t coexist with our roads and suburbs and agriculture. So where does your loyalty lie? Ask yourself that question as if you really mean it. Those wetlands would also feed us forever. To bring the wolves back would require a similar and massive contracture of human activity: they need land, wild land, sturdy with functioning forests and grasslands, not broken by cars, gouged into subdivisions, and coerced into mono- crops. You can’t have it both ways, vegetarians. If you want to save this world, including its animals, you can’t keep destroying it. And your food destroys it.
If you want rules about what to eat, I can give you some principles. They’re slightly more complicated than “Meat Is Murder,” but then the living world is complex, and beholding it should leave us all aching with awe. So start with topsoil, the beginning place. Remember, one million creatures per tablespoon. It’s alive, and it will protect itself if we stop assaulting it. It protects itself with perennial poly- cultures, with lots and lots of plants intertwining their roots, adding carbonaceous leaves, and working together with mycelium, bacteria, protozoa, making a new organism between them, the mycorrhiza that talks and nourishes and directs.
Defend the soil with your life, reader: there is no other organism that can touch the intelligence of what goes on beneath your feet.
So here are the questions you should ask, a new form of grace to say over your food. Does this food build or destroy topsoil? Does it use only ambient sun and rainfall, or does it require fossil soil, fossil fuel, fossil water, and drained wetlands, damaged rivers? Could you walk to where it grows, or does it come to you on a path slick with petroleum?
Everything falls into place with those three questions. Those annual monocrops lose on all three counts, unless you live in Nebraska, where it “only” fails the first two. Animal rights philosopher Peter Singer argues that you should only eat animal products if you can see their origin with your own eyes. While I agree with the impulse—to end the denial and ignorance that protect factory farming—this demand has to be much bigger: you should know where every bite of your food comes from. We need to end the denial and ignorance that protect agriculture. The worldview that gives any and all plant foods an automatic pass is profoundly blind to how those very foods devour living communities. Go look at Nebraska, where the native prairie is 98 percent gone. Even if you’ve never seen an Audubon bighorn or a swift fox, you must surely miss them.
We’ve all built this living world of gift and need, birth and return. To repair this planet, we must take our sustenance as part of those relationships instead of destroying them. We can pull the forest down or we can eat the deer that live there. We can rip up the grass or we can eat the bison that should stretch across the plains. We can dam the rivers or we can eat the fish that could feed us forever. We can turn biologic processes into commodities until the soil is salt and dust, or we can take our place as another hungering member of an ancient tribe, the tribe of carbon. All flesh is grass, wrote someone named Isaiah in a book I don’t usually quote. In Hebrew, the word translated as “flesh” is basar, meaning meat, something one eats. Isaiah understood what is no longer physically visible to us, living at the end of the world: we are all a part of one another, made from grass, become meat.
“But food requires destruction,” a vegan argued with me, in an e-mail exchange that went exactly nowhere. That is the final myth you must face, vegetarians. Because the food I am proposing, the food of our ancestors, whose paleolithic hearts and souls we still inhabit, does not require destruction. At this moment it would in fact require repair and restitution: the forests and grasslands mended, conquered territory ceded back to the earth for her wetlands. Steven Stoll sums up agriculture: “Humans became parasites of the soil.” It’s your food that has brought us to the end of the world.
My food builds topsoil. I’ve watched it happen. The mixture of grasses and trees, cousins in their own right, provides for the animals, who in their turn maintain and nourish by their simple biological functions of eating and excreting. On Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm— the mecca of sustainable food production—organic matter has increased from 1.5 percent in 1961 to 8 percent today. The average right now in the US is 2-3 percent. In case you don’t understand, let me explain. A 6.5 percent increase in organic matter isn’t a fact for ink and paper: it’s a song for the angels to sing. Remember that pine forest that built one-sixteenth of an inch of soil in fifty years? Cue those angels again: Salatin’s rotating mixture of animals on pasture is building one inch of soil annually.
Peter Bane did some calculations. He estimates that there are a hundred million agricultural acres in the US similar enough to the Salatins’ to count: “about 2/3 of the area east of the Dakotas, roughly from Omaha and Topeka east to the Atlantic and south to the Gulf of Mexico.” Right now, that land is mostly planted to corn and soy. But returned to permanent cover, it would sequester 2.2 billion tons of carbon every year. Bane writes:
That’s equal to present gross US atmospheric releases, not counting the net reduction from the carbon sinks of existing forests and soils … Without expanding farm acreage or removing any existing forests, and even before undertaking changes in consumer lifestyle, reduction in traffic, and increases in industrial and transport fuel efficiencies, which are absolutely imperative, the US could become a net carbon sink by changing cultivating practices and marketing on a million farms. In fact, we could create 5 million new jobs in farming if the land were used as efficiently as the Salatins use theirs.
Understand: agriculture was the beginning of global warming. Ten thousand years of destroying the carbon sinks of perennial polycultures has added almost as much carbon to the atmosphere as industrialization (see Figure 5, opposite), an indictment that you, vegetarians, need to answer. No one has told you this before, but that is what your food—those oh so eco-peaceful grains and beans—has done. Remember the ghost acres and the ghost slaves? What you’re eating in those grains and beans is ghost meat, down to the bare bones of whole species. There is no reconciling civilization and its foods with the needs of our living planet.
To save the world, we must first stop destroying it. Cast your eyes down when you pray, not in fear of some god above, but in recognition: our only hope is in the soil, and in the trees, grasses, and wetlands that are its children and its protectors both.
“And why are we not doing this now?” is the clarion call Bane ends with. For a lot of reasons, most of them having to do with power. But a new populism could spring from this need, a serious political movement combining environmentalists, farm activists, animal rights groups, feminists, indigenous people, anti-globalization and relocalization efforts—all of us who are desperate for a new, and living, world.
That’s the real reason I’ve written this book. The earth, our only home, needs that movement, and she needs it now. The only just economy is a local economy; the only sustainable economy is a local economy. Come at it from whichever angle matches your passion, the answers nest around the same central theme: humans have to draw their sustenance from where they live, without destroying that place.
That means that first we must know that place. I can’t give you a list of what to eat because I don’t know what can live where you do. I can only give you the principles I’ve already laid out. Then you’ll have to ask questions. How much rain falls where you are? What’s the terrain, the temperature, the soil? Dairy cattle, for instance, do great things where I live in cold, wet New England. I wouldn’t suggest them in dry New Mexico.
Understand my point. Farming—the growing of annual mono- crops—will never be sustainable. Our only chance is a judicious and humble human participation in perennial polycultures. We can do that poorly, as demonstrated in the overgrazing due to population pressures that is currently turning grasslands to desert the world over. Or we can do it well, like the Fulani of Africa, with a largely unbroken line reaching back to a pre-human time four million years ago.
How much can we change the landscape before participation becomes destruction? Especially when our impact may not be visible for a thousand years? Should we, for instance, use fire? Fire will drive out some species, both plant and animal, and encourage others. Where I live, sugar maples are iconic. Yet five hundred years ago, they wouldn’t have been here, or not many of them. The burning practices of Native Americans kept the forest here shifted toward fire-resistant and mast-bearing trees. That information was a shock
to my system: don’t mess with my maple trees. But Brian Donahue makes the point that as long as there has been a forest in New Eng- land, there have been humans living in it. We belong here, too, if we would just behave like it. The pristine forest free of human influence has never existed here, so is it the ideal we should be aiming for?
If so, that ideal must presuppose a devastated landscape some- where else and an interstate highway system to transport the foods produced out of it. None of this can last: not the devastation, the fossil fuel, the distance. We need to eat where we live and our food must be part of the repair of our home.
Let’s look at an example. Do dairy cows belong in New Eng- land? In the here and now, as I make my personal and political decisions about breakfast, are cows on the side of good or do they need to be hauled up Mount Doom?
Dairy cattle were brought over from Europe four hundred years ago. Does that rule them out automatically? But if you dig deeper into the past, there were once thirty-three more genera of large mammals on this continent, relatives of horses, cows, elephants, giraffes— and not that long ago, a mere 12,000 years. Their absence has left evolutionary widows, trees like honey locust and osage orange that are in decline because they need large herbivores to help them.9 In that sense, horses and cows were perhaps reintroduced with the spread of Europeans. So dig deeper still. Are these new animals similar enough to the ones that are gone, or do their divergences make them destructive assailants on the land base? There were, for instance, once equids here, but they had cloven hooves and no upper teeth. The result of the solid hooves and incisors is “ecological havoc.”10 The feral horses from Europe destroy desert seeps and springs, smother spawning gravel with silt, and strip grasslands to bare dirt. The most in-depth analysis of nineteen study sites found severe damage to “soils, rodents, reptiles, ants, and plants.” That damage puts species from desert tortoises to the endangered Lahontan cutthroats at risk.
There are clearly brittle landscapes too fragile for cows—especially for dairy cows—as well. Most of the west is more suited to the animals that were already there—buffalo, pronghorns, elk—and that’s what the people there should be eating. So that’s a directive: restore the prairie, long grass and short, and the drylands, and return their animal cohorts. Then think long and hard about other megafauna and their place on this continent. Do the grasslands and savannas want them back, or their relatives that still survive? What about the honey locust and osage orange, who need their large seeds to be di- gested and carried by large herbivores? Is their dying simply evolution at work? If we humans reintroduce some creature that might fulfill that function and restore the range of those trees, is that also evolu- tion? Or is that interference?
And I still need to decide about breakfast.
Cattle on pasture in my climate can easily be sustainable. Joel Salatin is certainly proving that. The model is sound and the climate and rainfall are suitable. But pasture isn’t the natural landscape of New England. Forests, wetlands, and marsh meadows are. The Europeans’ cows first grazed in those meadows and forests. As the beaver were eradicated, the wetlands and marsh meadows disappeared. Meanwhile, in Europe, experimentation with plant admixtures improved the sustainability of pastures dramatically. How does turning some forest land into pasture compare with the habitat shift of burning? Both of these are activities that, done well, will build topsoil and provide for human sustenance essentially forever. So how much impact are we allowed to have? The entire rainforest is a human project. Small patches are burned by the indigenous like the Lacandon Mayan, and then planted in a secession of eighty different crops, including the vines, shrubs, and trees that will take over when the plot has been abandoned—though “abandoned” is not really an accurate description, as the plot will be revisited in a twenty-year rotation, and will meanwhile produce food, fiber, and building materials, as well as a home for the wild animals that serve as protein.
Which brings me to my point. It wasn’t pasture that brought down the northeast forest. It was coal. As long as the human economy was based on wood in this cold climate, people more or less took care of the forest, because they needed it. Coal was what reduced the forest to simply one more commodity, and the land that forests grew on was more profitably used for wool breeds of sheep. What will happen as the price of oil first climbs past what the average household can pay, then past the effort worth retrieving it from the ground? Will New England be cleared from the Atlantic Ocean to the Housatonic River as people freeze to death? Or will the rural areas and private woodlot owners be able to hang onto their parts of this young forest, knowing that without it they, too, will soon freeze? Will we be facing a war not over Middle Eastern oilfields, but over trees in the Berkshires?
And I still need to decide about breakfast.
I can raise these issues, but maybe I can’t answer the questions.
I know that whatever we’re eating has to build soil, and if it doesn’t, it has to be struck forever from the human menu. It has to be part of a self-replicating community, where life and death are inseparable in the process of nourishment. Everyone has to give back, through the labor of their life functions, and then through the nutrients stored in their bodies. Our food can’t be based on fossil fuel, for nitrogen or energy. Nor can it use fossil water, or indeed any water that empties a river.
Dairy cows, where I live, meet those criteria and more. But is the change in species composition wrought by human-set fire on the acceptable side of the line while the change required for pasture placed in the unacceptable column? Then what we will eat instead will be deer and moose. Both of those, along with bison, migrated here from Eurasia not too long ago, maybe 12,000 years. They filled in niches left empty by the megafaunal extinctions. They’re Eurasian trans- plants, too. Do you see how complicated this gets?
And I still need my breakfast.
In the end, I do have my own answers to offer, of course, but they involve a bit more than drinking soy milk. Agriculture has to stop. It’s been a ten thousand year disaster, as life on earth will tell us if we listen. Writes William Catton:
The breakthrough we called industrialization was fundamentally unlike earlier ones. It did not just take over for human use another portion of the web that had previously supported other forms of life. Instead, it went underground to extract carrying capacity supplements from a finite and depletable fund …
As discussed earlier, I think the beginning of the fossil fuel age does mark a new level of human destructiveness, but he’s wrong in his characterization of agriculture as simply taking over more ecological niches. Agriculture is extractive: soil is depletable and “peak soil” was ten thousand years ago, on the day before agriculture began. We’ve been on the down curve ever since.
So agriculture has to stop. It’s about to run out anyway—of soil, of water, of ecosystems—but it would go easier on us all if we faced that collectively, and then developed cultural constraints that would stop us from ever doing it again.
Where I live, the wetlands need to return to cover the land in a soft, slow blanket of water. They will be a home for a lush multitude of species, many of which—waterfowl, moose, fish—could feed us. The rivers need to be undammed. And the suburbs and the roads need to be abandoned. I have no great solutions for how to make that economically feasible: I sincerely doubt it’s possible. I only know it has to happen, no matter how much we resist.
We are thrilled & honored to announce that Prairie Protection Colorado and Deep Green Resistance are bringing Derrick Jensen & Lierre Keith to Denver, Colorado on Sunday, Oct 6, 12:30 pm Mountain Time, 18:30 UTC.
Video will be available after the event on our YouTube page as well.
Derrick Jensen
Derrick Jensen is a leading voice of cultural dissent. He explores the nature of injustice, how civilizations devastate the natural world, and how human beings retreat into denial at the destruction of the planet.
Derrick has authored 27 books and counting including The Myth of Human Supremacy, Endgame Volume 1 & 2, The Culture of Make Believe and A Language Older than Words. He co-authored the book, Deep Green Resistance, inspiring people from all over the world to resist the systemic insanity of those who are killing the planet.
Lierre Keith is an acclaimed writer, radical feminist, food activist, and environmentalist. Her work centers on civilization’s violence to the earth, male violence against women and the need for serious resistance to both. Her book The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability has been called “the most important ecological book of this generation.” She co-authored the book, Deep Green Resistance, inspiring people from all over the world to resist the systemic insanity of those who are killing the planet.
This is excerpted from Chapter 15, “Our Best Hope,” in the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. It was written by Lierre Keith.
In our story, the first direct hit to industrial infrastructure is likely to be something more pragmatic and less daring, like the electric grid. Our actionists have planned well. Remember the four criteria for target selection: the grid is accessible, vulnerable, and critical, and while it is recuperable, the abundance of the first three criteria could potentially make that recuperability more theoretical than practical.
The underground networks can hit a few nodes at once, and the unconnected affinity groups, well versed in DEW and the DGR grand strategy, can follow up on the vulnerable targets to which they have access. The first DGR blackout could last days or even weeks.
An instructive event to consider from recent history is the Northeast Blackout of 2003. On August 14, a huge power surge caused a rolling blackout over a large section of northeastern US and Canada, affecting fifty-five million people. This event brought home how very delicate power grids are. Because electricity can’t really be stored, it has to be consumed within a second of being produced or else dumped. Supply and demand have to be matched very precisely or costly infrastructure can be seriously damaged by either too much or too little power. The grid has built-in protective relays to guard against flashovers, which dis- connect any line that has a sudden surge in power. But with such tight correspondences, it’s amazing that any of us have reliable electricity.
August 14 saw a cascading failure that started with electric arcs between a few overhead lines and some trees in northeast Ohio. By the time the grid had finished responding, power plants all across the Northeast had gone offline and a full-fledged blackout was on. A total of 256 electric power plants shut down, and electricity generation dropped by 80 percent.
But the phrase “cascading failure” applies to a lot more than the grid. Oil refineries couldn’t operate and neither could the nine nuclear power plants in the region. Gas stations couldn’t pump gas. Air, rail, and even car traffic halted. The financial centers of Chicago and Manhattan were immobilized, and Wall Street was completely shut down. The Internet only worked for dial-up users, and then only as long as their batteries lasted. Most industries had to stop, and many weren’t running again until August 22. That last includes the auto industry. The major television and cable networks had disruptions in their broadcasts. In New York City, both restaurants and neighbors cooked up everything on hand and gave it away for free as the perishables were just going to have to be thrown out. Meanwhile, the Indigo Girls concert went on as planned in Central Park. And the New Jersey Turnpike stopped collecting tolls.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not seeing any drawbacks here. The cascade was broad and deep, if short. Fossil fuel use was seriously decreased; nuclear power plants rendered useless; oil went unrefined in northern New Jersey, my child’s eyes’ vision of Mordor in that last whisper of wetlands; the rich were kept from draining the poor; and the flood of lies and vicious media images stopped drowning our hearts, our children, and our culture for a brief night. And there were parties with neighbors and music on top of that.
The DEW activists will be soundly condemned, and not just by the mainstream, but by Big Eco, and by many grassroots activists. This is to be expected. Our actionists need to prepare for it emotionally, socially, organizationally. It can’t be helped. Remember the goal: to disrupt and dismantle industrial civilization. Judged by that goal, our actionists’ first attack on the electric grid has been a raging success. And nothing breeds success like success. More groups form, more cells divide in the network. Maybe a whole arm is dedicated to the grid while others go on to other targets. Like the tar sands. The pipelines carrying tar sands oil from Alberta to the coast are 800 miles long; sab- otage is too easy. Meanwhile, the equipment necessary for the massive scale of the tar sands extraction is almost inconceivable: twenty stories high and counting. Some of it has to be carried on trucks with ninety tires on twenty-four axles, weighing a total of 917,000 pounds, which is so heavy that two auxiliary trucks are needed to help push. These trucks need special permits and are only allowed on the highway during daylight hours.
Our story is accelerating. A victory for the Tar Sands Brigade comes on the night the draglines are torched, and a few of the factories that make them are incinerated. Does Suncor get more? Yes. And those are burned as well, somewhere on their vulnerable route between their arrival point in Bellingham, Washington, and their departure point in Fort McMurray, Alberta.
Again, Big Oil, Big Coal, and Big Eco all condemn the activists. The public overwhelmingly hates them. But in the Athabasca River, the northern pike and the tundra swans love them. More equipment is pur- chased. Our actionists respond by sinking the replacements on the boats before they even touch shore and, for added emphasis, a mid- night demolition of a corporate headquarters or two. Native Athabasca Chipewyan and Mikisew Cree elders and more than a few Clan Mothers are smiling all week. The warriors, meanwhile, ask some questions, starting with: kakipewîcîhwin cî? Will you come and join me? It’s up to them to decide whether to move from protecting their community to offensive action. The young, of course, are all “Yes.” When the next DGR blackout rolls through the middle of the continent, a sudden blast blazes across the night as a key bridge comes down on Provincial Route 63. Try getting that million-pound equipment across the river now.
Only a few hundred people are involved at this point. There are three networks, one in the northeast US, one in the Pacific Northwest, and a smaller one in the upper Midwest. There are also affinity groups in Vancouver, Asheville, Burlington, Austin, Guelph, Montreal, and some of the First Nations’ warrior societies are now involved.
And in this story, there are people who want to join, but can’t. They make the decisions they have to make, and do what they can instead. They translate a scaled-down version of this book—the marrow, the soul—into Hindi and Spanish and Mandarin and Sámi. Deep Green Resistance becomes Résistance Verte Profonde and then Molaskaskwi Aod- wagan, slipping south into Resistencia Verde Radical, crossing oceans into Djúpur Grænn Mótspyrna, Dunkelgrüner Widerstand, Mörktgrönt Motstånd, Paglaban Malalim Berde. The question only changes its sound, never its heart: K’widzawidzi nia? Ti unirai a me? Kayo ay sumali sa akin? The question is asked and asked and asked, whispered like a prayer in that moment the heart shifts from petition to thanksgiving: will you join me? Until “me” becomes “us,” because finally a resistance has quickened.
