by DGR News Service | Mar 8, 2025 | ANALYSIS, The Problem: Civilization
Editor’s note: “I think hope is really harmful for several reasons. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and they blind us to real possibilities. Does anybody really think that Weyerhaeuser is going to stop deforesting because we ask nicely? Does anybody really think that if a democrat would have gotten into the White House that things would be ok? Does anybody think that vivisectors will stop torturing animals just because we stand outside with a sign?
That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t stand out there with that sign. What it means is, do we really believe that they will stop because we do that? And if you don’t believe that, what does that mean? The book I have just recently completed is really centered around this question. Do you believe that the culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to obtain a sustainable way of living? If you don’t, what does that mean for our strategy and for our tactics? We don’t know. The reason we don’t know is that we don’t ask that question. The reason we don’t ask that question is that we’re so busy pretending that we have hope.” – Derrick Jensen December 1st, 2004
Why is it that so many people are always busy claiming that we need hope? One recent article I saw discusses “active hope” as if that is any different from regular “hope.”
Hope is hopium, be it active hope, regular hope, passive hope, or resigned hope. Put almost any word you want (except “false”) in front of the word
hope, and you will cause me to assume that you are selling something. Something that smells like bullshit.
Before I go into detail regarding hope along with more analysis that I am frequently doing, I came across
this article courtesy of Jan Andrew Bloxham and Steve Pyke, which more or less succinctly wraps up exactly what I’ve been saying for the last decade. Short quotes really don’t do it justice as one
really needs to read the entire article, but I’ll provide a snippet here:
“Biosphere Collapse: We Are in a Terminal Phase
The Sixth Mass Extinction is not a future risk—it is happening now, and human activity is the sole cause.
Extinction Rates: Current rates are 100–1,000 times higher than the “background” rate of the Cenozoic era. While the oft-cited “250–300 species per day” figure is debated (due to undercounting invertebrates and microbes), conservative estimates still suggest ~150 species lost daily. For context, the Permian-Triassic extinction (“The Great Dying”) wiped out 90% of species over 60,000 years. We’re matching that pace in decades.
Habitat Destruction: 75% of Earth’s land surface is degraded by human activity. Forests (critical carbon sinks) are vanishing at 10 million hectares/year. Oceanic dead zones (hypoxic regions) have quadrupled since 1950.
Food Web Collapse: Phytoplankton (the base of marine food chains) have declined 40% since 1950. Insect biomass is dropping 2.5% annually, threatening pollination and soil health.
Conclusion: The biosphere is unravelling faster than evolution can adapt. Humans are not exempt—we are apex predators in a collapsing food web.”
Derrick Jensen told us about hope almost two decades ago and explained that the reason people think we need hope is through cultural conditioning, and this is how he describes hope, quote:
“Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because of the lovely Buddhist saying “Hope and fear chase each other’s tails,” not only because hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this because of what hope is.
More or less all of us yammer on more or less endlessly about hope. You wouldn’t believe — or maybe you would — how many magazine editors have asked me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to leave readers with a sense of hope. But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.”
Going back to
my first article here, the first thing one should determine is whether the situation being looked at is a problem or a predicament. A problem, by definition, has an answer or a solution. A predicament is often called different names such as dilemma, but Wikipedia calls it a “
wicked problem.” Under the word
dilemma is a less complex definition, where we once again see the word predicament under the “See Also” section.
Here is the entry for dilemma on Wikipedia.
Something that is a problem one has agency over, meaning that there is a solution which is both attainable and feasible. Therefore, hope actually prevents one from attaining that goal, quote:
“When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear.“
So, in reality, for almost any problem, what we need is not hope, but COURAGE!
Of course, much has changed over the last 19 years since that article was written in terms of how the predicaments we face have become far worse. Still, nothing has really changed about society making any real efforts to abandon technology use and civilization. When I say things like that, I often get criticized for what is assumed that I want “to live like a cave man” or that I am “Malthusian” or that I just want to “give up.” I wrote
The Cycle of Life specifically for those folks.
Now, for the bad news: predicaments don’t have solutions, they only have outcomes. Yes, my regular readers are most likely very tired of reading that same message over and over and over again. But here’s the catch – courage is great for predicaments too!
An article by Frank Moone gives us details on what to do. In it, he says that:
“Hiding out, giving up, or doing nothing is not an acceptable response.“
Of course, unfortunately, there are people who will do
just that. Simply telling people what an acceptable response is won’t necessarily get them to comply. There are literally hundreds of books out there that describe the exact same things, but again, only people who
want to do that will actually follow through. It really is absolutely not one bit different to people who read my articles versus people who couldn’t be less interested. No interest = no compliance, not that any readers will comply either (of course, I haven’t actually ever asked anybody to do anything – I’ve only made general recommendations). There are literally millions of people who simply
do not care. Is it because of ignorance? Doubtful – as they’ve been told; they choose not to believe. Of course, belief is irrelevant to how the system works. It will continue to work the same way whether one believes in it or not, which is the great thing about facts. Not believing in them doesn’t change them.
The most important part about Frank’s article about “active acceptance” is what it doesn’t tell you. Sadly, the article is based partly on fear. Notice how it talks about survival? Here’s the part I disagree with, quote: “Leave a legacy of wisdom and care for future generations.“
Articles on “how to survive” are literally everywhere. Prepping handbooks, food preparation and storage, books about weapons, bunker building books,
Earthships, Transition Towns,
The Venus Project, and every other type of preparation manual, book, concept, and living arrangement are available at your nearest library or bookstore or online. I’ve written about countless ideas all based on the same premise.
Fear of death. But what if survival is highly over-rated?
What if there ARE NO future generations? What if the generation being born today is the last one? Needless to say, not everyone is going to be interested in accomplishing something they see no need for because they see it as a waste of time when they could be doing something they are actually
passionate about. Focusing on surviving isn’t
Living Now. Focusing on surviving is more or less similar to focusing on Dying Now. One must choose how he or she wants to live –
do you want to run towards life or away from death?Frank’s article is good – don’t get me wrong. But it repeats the same message that so many articles promoting survival do – let’s deny reality and promote false hope. One can fear death and choose to focus on attempting to evade it, but this is really the definition of insanity because humans have a natural instinct for survival to begin with (so one doesn’t have to really spend all their time remembering to survive) AND you still won’t escape it. Now, if one really wants to spend their time doing that, then no harm, no foul. If, on the other hand, one isn’t afraid of death and has no interest in such endeavors, then they shouldn’t be shamed for something they see no motivation for or satisfaction in.
Just because I’m passionate about reducing the amount of energy and resources I use doesn’t mean that I think it is OK to try to shame others into doing this as well in a misguided effort to reduce the planetary ecological footprint. It’s just not going to happen. The billionaires certainly couldn’t give two craps about what I’m doing one way or the other and they certainly aren’t going to change their lifestyles to accommodate what I think is important. My message is for people to accept our predicaments for what they are, discover what they are truly passionate about, and work towards that end, at the same time enjoying life and nature and being grateful for what still exists today.
To understand this just a bit deeper, one must understand personal values versus personal traits and the psychology behind them.
Nate Hagens goes into detail on both the dark triad and the dark tetrad personality traits. One can claim specific values but have personality traits which oppose those values, which instantly points to the person being a liar (and potentially a pathological liar, which narcissists tend to be). Either way, traits will outcompete values in almost all circumstances. Most people’s traits and values are much closer in alignment to each other, but we all know people who fit into the dark triad and tetrad patterns.
I understand what many people in the overshoot community would like to see with regards to developing a
sustainable community. I would very much like that myself. I actually seriously considered embarking on building one myself (following in the footsteps of many other individuals who have done this). But then I read countless stories of struggles from others, and enterprises that turned into something far less grand than had been anticipated. Many of these projects failed and even the ones which have succeeded haven’t truly met up with the original expectations. The
MPP works just as prevalently in this regard as it does in mainstream society. I also knew about places in my own state which had originally been developed as utopian societies, such as the Kristeen Community,
New Harmony, and
Padanaram Settlement, which all failed as they were originally set up. The Padanaram Settlement is still in operation, but not like it was for many years. Like most places whose originator/founder has passed away, changes within the community have made it more like a regular town now.
I have attempted to point out many times that attachment to outcome is often associated with goal-setting and is generally ill-advised in the future that we will experience because of the fact that many if not most goals/outcomes will become impossible to meet. Some goals will be far more attainable than others, especially shorter-term ones versus long-term goals. Part of my advice comes from my own experiences. I have always been a rather goal-oriented person. Understanding overshoot means coming to terms with the reality that quite literally everything around us is changing and goals which once may have been attainable now no longer are, simply due to energy and resource decline and climate change, among many other symptom predicaments. This has been difficult to accept.
This is most certainly
NOT to say to give up on any goals that one is passionate about, but to recommend being flexible about goals. Be aware of the strong possibility that your life may come apart at the seams when you least expect it. Why you ask? Because of the
Technate of North America. Everything you thought you knew is about to change if it hasn’t already under the surface (or even
on the surface). I don’t agree with everything in the article (it does appear to be overshoot blind), but the systems surrounding us here in the U.S. are being taken apart, one by one. It is true that collapse doesn’t generally happen in a controlled fashion because it isn’t under the control of any single person or entity. I agree wholeheartedly with that assessment.
Meanwhile,
a new study shows that
peak carbon sequestration was in 2008, and since then the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by plants has declined by an average of 0.25% a year.
Another paper demonstrates that in 2023, the CO2 growth rate was 3.37 ± 0.11 ppm at Mauna Loa, which was 86% above that of the previous year and hit a record high since observations began in 1958, while global fossil fuel CO2 emissions only increased by 0.6% ± 0.5%. This implies an unprecedented weakening of land and ocean sinks, and raises the question of where and why this reduction happened. The rate at which climate change is proceeding is increasing dramatically. This was accurately predicted many years ago but is now happening. See also
Carbon Sinks Are Becoming Carbon Sources.“A lot of discussion is, how should agriculture prepare for this,” he said. But a collapse of the heat-transporting circulation is a going-out-of-business scenario for European agriculture, he added. “You cannot adapt to this. There’s some studies of what happens to agriculture in Great Britain, and it becomes like trying to grow potatoes in Northern Norway.”
THAT is the overwhelming theme I have been attempting to explain for the last four years here.
You cannot adapt to this. We’re not talking just about Great Britain, Europe, or anywhere specific.
Leon Simons says this regarding the rate of warming globally:
“As far as we can determine, this is the fastest rate of warming in the history of our planet!“
The rate of change will overtake the rate of evolution whereby evolution cannot keep up with the changes. Rather than fall into denial of reality, utilize
optimism bias, and attempt to
bargain to maintain civilization, one must comprehend that there is no escaping this and that
we lack agency (who exactly is
“we”?), despite unsubstantiated claims to the contrary by those who are busy trying to sell you a
fantasy that is not to be. Don’t fall into the hope trap – seek courage instead.
A new study on birds points out yet another symptom predicament I have repeatedly mentioned, especially recently – pollution loading. Here’s the poignant part of the article, quote:
“Ideally, you do not want these substances in your body, but in practice, it is virtually impossible for humans and many other living organisms to avoid them.
Recent research and a new method for detecting PFAS bring both bad and good news. The bad news is that we are finding PFAS in places we have not previously found them. The good news is that this means we have become better at detecting these substances.
“The biggest increase is in the livers of wading birds. We found up to 180 times more PFAS than previously,” said Zhang.“
Perhaps pollution loading is the reason HPAI H5N1 bird flu has been so deadly to birds and now mammals, which signals potential reasons why humans are becoming so much more disease-ridden as these chemicals, compounds, and toxins add up in our bodies. This is of huge concern because of the implications it has regarding those who think regenerative agriculture or permaculture will build resilience and rebuild the soil. Rebuilding the soil is a lovely idea, and it seems relatively easy to add nutrients to it through mulching and other soil amendments. But how does one rid the soil of microplastics, PFAS, PFOS, dioxins, salts, and a thousand other chemicals/chemical compounds? All of these pollutants are steadily increasing and doing so rather rapidly now due to increased wildfires, winds, extreme weather events, and extreme rain/flooding events.
To end this article, I present
yet another excellent article from Dave Pollard summarizing the backdrop and leadup to the fiascoes unfolding currently in the U.S. but also many other nations as well. The bottom line is that reality is a cruel master, and many of the illusions we chose to believe in didn’t actually exist in the first place. Still, just like the monkeys fighting in the power station in Sri Lanka causing a nation-wide blackout, the same scenario is unfolding in the U.S., quote:
“And for all of that, these massive, staggeringly complex, bureaucratic systems are so easy to break! All it takes is a few monkeys!
Maybe, as we watch our exhausted, fraudulent, incompetently-‘led’ civilization falling apart all around us, we can finally open our eyes and see that it never has been what we believed it was, with all our smarmy talk of “freedom” and “democracy”. It’s been a sham from the start, but we believed the nonsense we’ve been told about it because we wanted to believe it. Take away everything we have, but you’ll never take away our belief in our human superiority, our manifest destiny, the myth of perpetual progress as we spread across the universe, and, most of all, our certainty that we will be saved.
So we have DOGE, perhaps the most blatantly, overtly incompetent gang of monkeys the world has ever seen, let loose in the ‘power factory’ by the Child King, the most incompetent business person in the history of civilization, wreaking havoc on every essential public service in the US.
And we have the incompetent, miseducated, sci-fi dreamer technophiles, with their wild untested ideas for Marvel Comics-style rescues of our ecosystems, let loose to play at geoengineering, sucking up billions from the dregs of the world’s fast-failing treasuries to play at making fusion energy, and carbon capture, and AI everything, and quantum everything, and starships to anywhere-but-this-fucked-planet, and carbon (and now water) cap-and-trade offset exchanges (for those that flunked science). Gotta be some salvation in there somewhere! It’s ordained!”
Watching this unfold is quite sickening, only buffered by the fact that most of us in the overshoot community knew that collapse would come sooner or later. I just think that most of us had wished that we might eke out a few more years first.
Thank goodness for some beautiful pictures at
Manistee, Michigan to distract one away from all of this for a bit!
by DGR News Service | Feb 23, 2025 | ANALYSIS, Education
Editor’s note: “Energy is, of course, fundamental to both human existence and the functioning of capitalism. It is central to production, as well as the heating and lighting systems that most people take for granted, and the energy sector is by far the single largest producer of greenhouse emissions.” A transition to 100% electrical energy will never happen. The percentage of electrical energy is 20%, of which 3% are “renewable”. Those figures have never been higher in well over 50 years. Also everywhere in the world, the development of “renewables” has and remains propped up by government support.
From a distance, the Ivanpah solar plant looks like a shimmering lake in the Mojave Desert(a death trap for migratory). Up close, it’s a vast alien-like installation of hundreds of thousand of mirrors pointed at three towers, each taller than the Statue of Liberty. When this plant opened near the California-Nevada border in early 2014, it was pitched as the future of solar power. Just over a decade later, it’s closing. Ivanpah now stands as a huge, shiny monument to wasted tax dollars and environmental damage — campaign groups long criticized the plant for its impact on desert wildlife.
“It was a monstrosity combining huge costs, huge subsidies, huge environmental damage, and justifications hugely spurious. It never achieved its advertised electricity production goals even remotely, even as the excuses flowed like wine, as did the taxpayer bailouts.
And now, despite all the subventions, it is shutting down about 15 years early as a monument to green fantasies financed with Other People’s Money, inflicted upon electricity ratepayers in California denied options to escape the madness engendered by climate fundamentalism.”
Instead of forcing coal and oil into obsolescence, we’re merely adding more energy to the system — filling the gap with “renewables” while still burning record amounts of fossil fuels. This is the real danger of the “energy abundance” mindset: it assumes that a limitless supply of “clean” energy will eventually render fossil fuels obsolete. In reality, “renewable” energies are not replacing fossil fuels, but supplementing them, contributing to a continued pattern of broad energy consumption.
Historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: ‘Forget the energy transition: there never was one and there never will be one’
At first glance, no one is waiting for a historian to play down the idea of an energy transition. Certainly not at a time of environmental headwinds. But above all, Fressoz wants to correct historical falsehoods and reveal uncomfortable truths. ‘Despite all the technological innovation of the 20th century, the use of all raw materials has increased. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before.’
In his latest book, More and more and more, the historian of science, technology and environment explains why there has never been an energy transition, and instead describes the modern world in all its voracious reality. The term “transition” that has come into circulation has little to do with the rapid, radical upheaval of the fossil economy needed to meet climate targets.
In France, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz has been provoking the energy and climate debate for some time. He denounces the obsession with technological solutions to climate change and advocates a reduction in the use of materials and energy.
The cover of the French edition of your book says ‘the energy transition is not going to happen’. Why do you so strongly oppose this narrative?
We are reducing the carbon intensity of the economy, but that is not a transition. You hear very often that we just need to organise ‘a new industrial revolution’, most recently by US climate envoy John Kerry. You cannot take this kind of historical analogy seriously, this is really stupid.
The idea of an energy transition is actually a very bizarre form of future thinking, as if we would transform from one energy system to another over a 30-year period and stop emitting CO2. If it were to come across as credible, it is because we do not understand the history of energy.
But don’t we have historic precedents? Didn’t we transform from a rural economy that ran on wood to an industrial society with coal as the big driver?
This is an example of the many misconceptions of the history of energy. In the 19th century, Britain used more wood annually just to shore up the shafts of coal mines than the British economy consumed as fuel during the 18th century.
Of course it is true that coal was very important for the new industrial economy in 1900, but you cannot imagine that as if one energy source replaced the other. Without wood, there would be no coal, and therefore no steel and no railways either. So different energy sources, materials and technologies are highly interdependent and everything expands together.
So I guess you won’t agree either with the claim that oil replaced coal in the last century?
Again, oil became very important, but this is not a transition. Because what do you use oil for? To drive a car. Look at Ford’s first car of the 1930s. While it ran on fuel, it was made of steel, requiring 7 tonnes of coal. That’s more than the car would consume in oil over its lifetime! Today it is no different: if you buy a car from China, it still requires about three tonnes of coal.
You should also take into account the infrastructure of highways and bridges, the world’s biggest consumers of steel and cement, and that is just as dependent on coal. Oil drilling rigs and pipelines also use large amounts of steel. So behind the technology of a car is both oil and a lot of coal.
You suggest looking at energy and the climate problem without the idea of ‘transition’. How?
Focus on material flows. Then you see that despite all the technological innovation of the 20th century, the use of all raw materials has increased (excluding wool and asbestos). So modernisation is not about ‘the new’ replacing ‘the old’, or competition between energy sources, but about continuous growth and interconnection. I call it ‘symbiotic expansion’.
How do you apply this idea of symbiotic expansion of all materials to the current debate about the energy transition?
The energy transition is a slogan but no scientific concept. It derives its legitimacy from a false representation of history. Industrial revolutions are certainly not energy transitions, they are a massive expansion of all kinds of raw materials and energy sources.
Moreover, the word energy transition has its main origins in political debates in the 1970s following the oil crisis. But in these, it was not about the environment or climate, but only about energy autonomy or independence from other countries.
Scientifically, it is a scandal to then apply this concept to the much more complex climate problem. So when we seek solutions to the climate crisis and want to reduce CO2 emissions, it is better not to talk about a transition. It is better to look at the development of raw materials in absolute terms and to understand their intertwinedness. This will also restrain us from overestimating the importance of technology and innovation .
Didn’t technological innovation bring about major changes?
Numerous new technologies did appear and sometimes they rendered the previous ones obsolete, but that is not linked to the evolution of raw materials. Take lighting, for example. Petroleum lamps were in mass use around 1900, before being replaced by electric light bulbs. Yet today we use far more oil for artificial lighting than we did then: to light the headlights of the many millions of cars.
So despite impressive technological advances, the central issue for ecological problems remains: raw materials, which never became obsolete. We speak frivolously about technological solutions to climate problems, and you can see this in the reports of the IPCC’s Working Group 3.
Don’t you trust the IPCC as the highest scientific authority on climate?
Let me be clear, I certainly trust the climate scientists of groups 1 and 2 of the IPCC, but I am highly critical of the third working group that assesses options for the mitigation of the climate crisis. They are obsessed with technology. There are also good elements in their work, but in their latest report they constantly refer to new technologies that do not yet exist or are overvalued, such as hydrogen, CCS and bioenergy (BECCS).
The influence of the fossil industry is also striking. All this is problematic and goes back to the history of this institution. The US has been pushing to ‘play the technology card’ from the beginning in 1992. Essentially, this is a delaying tactic that keeps attention away from issues like decreasing energy use, which is not in the interest of big emitters like the US.
What mitigation scenarios do exist that do not rely excessively on technology?
As late as 2022, the IPCC’s Working Group 3 report wrote about ‘sufficiency’, the simple concept of reducing emissions by consuming less. I’m astonished that there is so little research on this. Yet it is one of the central questions we should be asking, rather than hoping for some distant technology that will solve everything in the future.
Economists tell what is acceptable to power because it is the only way to be heard and to be influential, it is as simple as that. That is why the debate in the mainstream media is limited to: ‘the energy transition is happening, but it must be speeded up’.
The transition narrative is the ideology of 21st century capitalism. It suits big companies and investors very well. It makes them part of the solution and even a beacon of hope, even though they are in part responsible for the climate crisis. Yet it is remarkable that experts and scientists go along with this greenwashing.
Do you take hope from the lawsuits against fossil giants like Shell and Exxon?
Of course Exxon has a huge responsibility and they have been clearly dishonest, but I think it is too simplistic to look at them as the only bad guys. Those companies simultaneously satisfy a demand from a lot of other industries that are dependent on oil, like the meat industry or aviation. More or less the whole economy depends on fossil fuels, but we don’t talk as much about them.
That’s why it is inevitable to become serious about an absolute reduction in material and energy use, and that is only possible with degrowth and a circular economy. That is a logical conclusion of my story, without being an expert on this topic.
Degrowth is not an easy political message. How can it become more accepted?
I do not offer ‘solutions’ in my book since I don’t believe in green utopias. It is clear that many areas of the economy won’t be fully decarbonized before 2050, such as cement, steel, plastics and also agriculture. We have to recognise this and it means that we simply won’t meet the climate targets.
Once you realise this, the main issue becomes: what to do with the CO2 that we are still going to emit? Which emissions are really necessary and what is their social utility? As soon as economists do a lot more research into this, we can have this debate and make political choices. Yet another skyscraper in New York or a water supply network in a city in the Global South?
Banner image credit: Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. Author supplied.
by DGR News Service | Feb 15, 2025 | ANALYSIS, Education
By Mankh / Musings from Between the Lines
Once upon a timeless . . . the non-human Light-Beings of the Sun cast their rays like life-giving nets upon the waters and the lands of the Earth . . . and all beings stirred awake to do the day’s work (and play) . . . until the nighttimeless when all beings rested and then the stars would guide their dreams . . .
(“Buddha Resisting The Demons Of Mara”)
In the actual living-experience, there is no “happily ever after” because there is constant work and maintenance to do. While work and maintenance can sometimes be enjoyable, they aren’t end-of-rainbow-pot-of-gold ideal. Yet many people cling to the idea of such gold, of ‘making it big.’ And many cling to infantile delusions of a constant comfort zone.
Zen saying: Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.
In general, i’ve noticed that many people have an aversion to talking about or dealing with extremely difficult situations of which for this essay i’ll call such extremities, The Monster. The difficulty is understandable because The Monster is unpleasant and pokes at one’s trauma buttons.
The Merchants of Veneer refers to those who go to extremes to cover-up The Monster. The Monster is genocide, ecocide, deliberately induced fear and terror, violence and greed, all of which i consider as horrid manifestations of what Steven Newcomb refers to as “the domination system,” and what many know of as colonialism, predatory capitalism, totalitarianism, fascism, ad nauseam.
MONSTER: from Latin monstrum — inauspicious portent or sign, abnormal shape, “a derivative of monere ‘to remind, bring to (one’s) recollection, tell (of); admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach.’”
Teachers and elders “advise, warn, instruct” peers and younger generations with ways to avoid monsters; forewarned is forearmed, and weaponry is not a necessity.
Also, one can figure out stuff on one’s own because typically there are signs or warnings before The Monster does dastardly deeds. I think of those signs and warnings as a pattern of mercy built into the universe.
When not heeded, however, and instead allowed to run amok, monstrums (abnormal shapes and signs) can take on a form — anything from falling down and hurting one’s self, to an addiction, to a river-polluting corporation, a brainwashing media, a flagrantly offensive military force, so-called green/renewables saving the world, AI, genocide, ecocide, and more.
Many of the modern monsters appear as the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing. Whether a fancy-car-driving televangelist, a clown pedophile, or a corporation that holds charity events with one hand while destroying natural habitats and cultures with the other — the concept is the same.
Many signs in the world continue to go unheeded, and so: many monsters need to be dealt with.
The deeper root of “monster” is men- “to think, mind, spirit, memory, sage, seer,” indicating that, as mentioned above, one has the ability to ward off monsters, to think ahead, to care for the mind and spirit of all beings.
But our Mother Earth knows that The Monster is running amok and, as Leonard Cohen sang, “Everybody knows that the boat is leaking / Everybody knows that the captain lied… / And everybody knows that it’s now or never” . . . Yet the big question then is: Why do so many choose to ignore?
Enter the Merchants of Veneer and their willing and ignorant minions. Those Merchants are masters of the slick surface level, from the looks real faux wooden cabinet to the media spectacle previews condoning and cheering on the War on Iraq and the Global War Of Terror, while conversely, not tainting the shine by not showing the genocide in Gaza. The Merchants of Veneer shine the shit-show to delusory perfection, and so slickly that masses of people go along with the bumpy ride by ordering an environmentally friendly seat belt rather than finding ways of smoothing the rode.
The Merchants of Veneer are the Public Relations division for The Monster. The PR includes the corporate media, global banking systems, consumerism, enforced religions, revisionist history and cherry-picked educational systems, and governments in bed with corporations aka fascism.
When telling people some tidbit i know, some of the history of America and Turtle Island, i’ve often heard people say to the effect, ‘It’s terrible what was done to the Natives.’ Yes, but then when i add that it’s still going on and cite a specific issue, they may shake their head in disgust, but don’t seem to find it as terrible NOW. ‘Why?’ I’ve asked the air, ‘Why do they avoid and turn away?’
And the answer i get is the impetus for this essay . . . Not wanting to face The Monster, not wanting to make sacrifices with one’s comfort zone which is actually a comfort zone built on the discomforts of others, those who do the work and maintenance with no chance of a pot of gold rather lucky if they get a next meal.
“Every program of exploitation has an ideology bolted on to legitimate it to the world — but also to those benefitting: very few people want to look in the mirror and see a monster staring back.”
~ Matt Kennard, from his book The Racket: A Rogue Reporter Vs The American Empire.
Wake-up Call
The Buddha’s typical subtly serene smile is not one of “happily ever after. My interpretation from experience is that, in part, that serene smile has to do with maintaining one’s inner state of consciousness whether during good times or when facing The Monster.
Many years ago i had a transformative meditation experience, but the details escape me so i’ll attempt to convey the gist: One time meditating i began to see horrible, scary stuff, like scenes of a war. At first i thought: Is this my mind? What i have done? But then i realized i was simply supposed to watch, to witness, be brave enough to witness without flinching or running away, maintain my composure – subtly serene Buddha smile optional – and to allow space for whatever feelings that arose. This inner experience helped me learn to face The Monster, rather than turn a blind eye.
As the story of Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha tells:
Before becoming a Buddha, he saw Four Sights or Signs: aging, disease, death, and devotion to finding the cause of suffering, devotion to participating in the world rather than escaping from it.
And after he became enlightened he began to do the work of dealing with monstrums: “to remind, bring to (one’s) recollection, tell (of); admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach” in an effort to help others to avoid or deal with The Monster.
(“his hands in the dharmachakra mudra gesture of teaching”)
As the story goes, before Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha, the demon Mara tried to seduce him with beautiful women, then attacked him with monsters, then questioned the validity of his enlightenment.
“Then Siddhartha reached out his right hand to touch the earth, and the earth itself spoke: ‘I bear you witness!’ Mara disappeared. And as the morning star rose in the sky, Siddhartha Gautama realized enlightenment and became a Buddha.”
Each of us has the ability to touch Earth, not only with hands, but with the feet and heart and mind, and actions.
Each of us has the ability to be touched — how much better a mood i have when my day begins with seeing and hearing geese flying overhead.
Since the word “Buddha” means “awakened, to awaken to the natural law,” the Buddha-nature is not of any one individual rather a way of seeing, of being, of living in accord with Sun and Stars and all sentient beings here with Mother Earth. This Buddha-nature is beyond any box of religion and beyond any specific label of spirituality.
We as a species, as well as all species, are faced with a dual dilemma: stopping The Monster that is already in action, already running amok yet pretending with a slick veneer that everything is under control and things will get better soon. And warding off The Monster that is clamoring to get in on the destructive, sucking the life out of life action.
Instead of overreacting to The Monster and counteracting with violence, fear or greed, the experience of witnessing allows for the possibility of one’s inner nature and/or Earth guiding the next step.
Mankh (Walter E. Harris III) is a writer and small press publisher; he travels a holistic mystic Kaballah-rooted pathway staying in touch with Turtle Island. Mankh meditates, gardens, enjoys music and good humor.
Banner: Antique wooden Oni mask from Japan by Justin Ziadeh on Unsplash
by DGR News Service | Jan 4, 2025 | ANALYSIS, The Problem: Civilization
By GERRY MCGOVERN, SUE BRANFORD / Mongabay
In 2022, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres declared that the “lifeline of renewable energy can steer [the] world out of climate crisis.” In saying so, he echoed a popular and tantalizing idea: that, if we hurry, we can erase the climate emergency with widespread adoption of renewables in the form of solar panels, wind farms, electric vehicles and more.
But things aren’t that simple, and analysts increasingly question the naïve assumption that renewables are a silver bullet.
That’s partly because the rapid transition to a global energy and transport system powered by “clean” energy brings with it a host of new (and old) environmental problems. To begin with, stepping up solar, wind and EV production requires many more minerals and materials in the short term than do their already well-established fossil fuel counterparts, while also creating a major carbon footprint.
Also, the quicker we transition away from fossil fuel tech to renewable tech, the greater the quantity of materials needed up front, and the higher the immediate carbon and numerous other environmental costs. But this shift is now happening extremely rapidly, as companies, governments and consumers try to turn away from oil, coal and natural gas.
“Renewables are moving faster than national governments can set targets,” declared International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol. In its “Renewables 2024” report, the IEA estimates the world will add more than 5,500 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity between 2024 and 2030 — almost three times the increase between 2017 and 2023.
But this triumph hasn’t brought with it a simultaneous slashing in global emissions, as hoped. In fact, 2023 saw humanity’s biggest annual carbon releases ever, totaling 37.4 billion metric tons, which has led experts to ask: What’s going on?
The introduction of coal in 19th century England — an innovative, efficient, cheap new source of energy — made some wealthy, produced an onslaught of consumer products, and was a public health and environmental disaster. Contemplating the coal boom, economist William Stanley Jevons developed the Jevons paradox. Image via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).
Jevons paradox meets limits to growth
Some analysts suggest the source of this baffling contradiction regarding record modern energy consumption can be found in the clamor by businesses and consumers for more, better, cheaper technological innovations, an idea summed up by a 160-year-old economic theory: the Jevons paradox.
Postulated by 19th-century English economist William Stanley Jevons, it states that, “in the long term, an increase in efficiency in resource use [via a new technology] will generate an increase in resource consumption rather than a decrease.” Put simply, the more efficient (and hence cheaper) energy is, the greater society’s overall production and economic growth will be — with that increased production then requiring still more energy consumption.
Writing in 1865, Jevons argued that the energy transition from horses to coal decreased the amount of work for any given task (along with the cost), which led to soaring resource consumption. For proof, he pointed to the coal-powered explosion in technological innovation and use occurring in the 19th century.
Applied to our current predicament, the Jevons paradox challenges and undermines tech prognosticators’ rosy forecasts for sustainable development.
Here’s a look at the paradox in action: The fastest-expanding renewable energy sector today is solar photovoltaics (PVs), expected to account for 80% of renewables growth in the coming years.
In many parts of the world, large solar power plants are being built, while companies and households rapidly add rooftop solar panels. At the head of the pack is China, with its astounding solar installation rate (216.9 GW in 2023).
But paradoxically, as China cranks out cheap solar panels for domestic use and export, it is also building six times more coal power plants every year than the rest of the world combined, though it still expects almost half its electricity generation to come from renewables, mainly solar, by 2028.
This astronomical growth at first seems like proof of the Jevons paradox at work, but there’s an unexpected twist: Why is China (and much of the rest of the world) still voraciously consuming outmoded, less-efficient fossil fuel tech, while also gobbling up renewables?
One reason is that coal and oil are seen as reliable, not subject to the same problems that renewables can face during periods of intense drought or violent weather — problems caused by the very climate change that renewables are intended to mitigate.
Another major reason is that fossil fuels continue being relatively cheap. That’s because they’re supported by vast government subsidies (totaling more than $1 trillion annually). So in a sense, we are experiencing a quadruple Jevons paradox, with oil, coal, natural gas and renewables acting like four cost-efficient horses, all racing to produce more cheap stuff for an exploding world consumer economy. But this growth comes with terrible environmental and social harm.
Exponential growth with a horrific cost
Back to the solar example: China is selling its cheap solar installations all over the globe, and by 2030 could be responsible for half the new capacity of renewables installed planetwide. But the environmental cost of satisfying that escalating demand is rippling out across the world.
It has spurred a huge mining boom. Desperate to satisfy fast-rising demand, companies and nations are mining in ever more inaccessible areas, which costs more in dollars, carbon emissions, biodiversity losses, land-use change, freshwater use, ocean acidification, plus land, water and air pollution. So, just as with fossil fuels, the rush to renewables contributes to the destabilizing of the nine planetary boundaries, of which six are already in the red zone, threatening civilization, humanity and life as we know it.
Mining, it must be remembered, is also still heavily dependent on fossil fuels, so it generates large quantities of greenhouse gases as it provides minerals for the renewables revolution. A January 2023 article in the MIT Technology Review predicts that the mining alone needed to support renewables will produce 29 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions between now and 2050.
Carbon is far from the only problem. Renewables also require a wide range of often difficult-to-get-at minerals, including nickel, graphite, copper, rare earths, lithium and cobalt. This means “paradoxically, extracting this large amount of raw materials [for renewables] will require the development of new mines with a larger overall environmental footprint,” says the MIT article.
There are other problems too. Every year 14,000 football fields of forests are cut down in Myanmar to create cheap charcoal for China’s smelting industries to process silicon, a key component of solar panels and of computers.
This rapid development in rural places also comes with harsh human costs: Mongabay has reported extensively on how Indigenous people, traditional communities and fragile but biodiverse ecosystems are paying the price for the world’s mineral demand in the transition to renewable energy.
There is strong evidence that the Uighur minority is being used as slave labor to build solar panels in China. There are also reports that workers are dying in Chinese factories in Indonesia that are producing nickel, a key metal for solar panels and batteries.
The manufacture of smaller and faster electronic devices is leading to ever more e-waste, the fastest growing waste stream in the world and by far the most toxic. Image by Montgomery County Planning Commission via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
The search for solutions
“We really need to come up with solutions that get us the material that we need sustainably, and time is very short,” said Demetrios Papathanasiou, global director for energy and extractives at the World Bank.
One popularly touted solution argues that the impacts imposed by the rapid move to renewable energy can be greatly reduced with enhanced recycling. That argument goes this way: The minerals needed to make solar panels and build windfarms and electric vehicles only need to be sourced once. Unlike fossil fuels, renewables produce energy year after year. And the original materials used to make them can be recycled again and again.
But there are problems with this position.
First, while EV batteries, for example, may be relatively long lasting, they only provide the energy for new electric vehicles that still require steel, plastics, tires and much more to put people in the Global North and increasingly the Global South on the road. Those cars will wear out, with tires, electronics, plastics and batteries costly to recycle.
The solar energy industry says that “solar panels have an expected lifespan between 25-30 years,” and often much longer. But just because a product can last longer, does that mean people won’t clamor for newer, better ones?
In developed nations, for example, the speed at which technology is evolving mitigates against the use of panels for their full lifespan. A 2021 article in the Harvard Business Review found that, after 10 years or even sooner, consumers will likely dispose of their first solar panels, to install newer, more efficient ones. Again, the Jevons paradox rears its anti-utopian head.
Also, as solar proliferates in poorer nations, so too will the devices that solar can drive. As solar expands in the developing world, sales for cheap solar lanterns and small solar home electric systems are also expanding. An article in the journal Nature Energy calculates that in 2019 alone, more than 35 million solar products were sold, a huge rise from the 200,000 such products sold in 2010.
This expansion brings huge social benefits, as it means rural families can use their smartphones to study online at night, watch television, and access the market prices of their crops — all things people in the Global North take for granted.
But, as the article points out, many developing-world solar installations are poor quality and only last a few years: “Many, perhaps even the majority, of solar products sold in the Global South … only have working lives of a couple of years.” The problem is particularly acute in Africa. “Think of those solar panels that charge phones; a lot of them do not work, so people throw them away,” said Natalie Gwatirisa, founder of All For Climate Action, a Zimbabwean youth-led organization that strives to raise awareness on climate change. Gwatirisa calculates that, of the estimated 150 million solar products that have reached Africa since 2010, almost 75% have stopped working.
And as Americans familiar with designed obsolescence know, people will want replacements: That means more solar panels, cellphones, computers, TVs, and much more e-waste.
Another disturbing side to the solar boom is the unbridled growth of e-waste, much of it toxic. Gwatirisa cautions: “Africa should not just open its hand and receive [anything] from China because this is definitely going to lead to another landfill in Africa.”
The developed world also faces an e-waste glut. Solar panels require specialized labor to recycle and there is little financial incentive to do so. While panels contain small amounts of valuable minerals such as silver, they’re mostly made of glass, an extremely low-value material. While it costs $20-$30 to recycle a panel, it only costs $1-$2 to bury it in a landfill. And the PV industry itself admits that ‘the solar industry cannot claim to be a “clean” energy source if it leaves a trail of hazardous waste.’
Renewables are rapidly growing, producing a bigger share of global energy. But electricity demand is also soaring, as unforeseen new energy-guzzling innovations are introduced. For example, an artificial intelligence internet search is orders of magnitude more energy-intensive than a traditional Google search, and requires new power generation sources. Pictured is the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Station, infamous for a 1979 partial meltdown. The facility is soon to reopen to support AI operations. Image courtesy of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Solving the wrong problem
Ultimately, say some analysts, we may be trying to solve the wrong problem. Humanity is not experiencing an energy production problem, they say. Instead, we have an energy consumption problem. Thus, the key to reducing environmental harm is to radically reduce energy demand. But that can likely only be done through stationary — or, better still, decreased — consumption.
However, it’s hard to imagine modern consumers not rushing out to buy the next generation of consumer electronics including even smarter smartphones, which demand more and more energy and materials to operate (think global internet data centers). And it’s also hard to imagine industry not rushing to update its ever more innovative electronic product lines (think AI).
A decline in energy demand is far from happening. The U.S. government says it expects global energy consumption to increase by almost 50% by 2050, as compared with 2020. And much of that energy will be used to make new stuff, all of which increases resource demand and increases our likelihood of further overshooting already overshot planetary boundaries and crashing overstressed Earth systems.
One essential step toward sustainability is the circular economy, say renewable energy advocates. But, as with so much else, every year we somehow go in the opposite direction. Our current economic system is becoming more and more linear, built on a model of extracting more raw materials from nature, turning them into more innovative products, and then discarding it all as waste.
Currently, only 7.2% of used materials are cycled back into our economies after use. This puts an overwhelming burden on the environment and contributes to the climate, biodiversity and pollution crises.
If a circular economy could be developed by recycling all the materials used in renewables, it would significantly reduce the constant need to mine and source new ones. But, while efficient recycling will undoubtedly help, it also has limitations.
The 2023 planetary boundaries update shows six boundary safe limits transgressed: climate change (CO2 concentration and radiative forcing), biosphere integrity (genetic and functional), land-system change, freshwater change (blue water use and green water), biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus), and novel entities pollution (including thousands of synthetic chemicals, heavy metals, radioactive materials, and more). The ocean acidification boundary is very near transgression. Only the atmospheric aerosol pollution and stratospheric ozone depletion boundaries are still well outside the red danger zone. Image courtesy of Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Richardson et al. 2023 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
The future
Tom Murphy, a professor emeritus of the departments of physics and astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, San Diego, became so concerned about the world’s future, he shifted his career focus to energy.
While initially a big promoter of renewables, having built his own solar panels back in 2008, he has recently turned skeptical. Panels “need constant replacement every two or three decades ad infinitum,” he told Mongabay. “Recycling is not a magic wand. It doesn’t pull you out of the need for mining. This is because recycling is not 100% efficient and never will be. In the laboratory maybe, but not in the real world. You’re going to have this continual bleed of materials out of the system.”
Yet another renewables problem is that sustainable energy is often siloed: It is nearly always talked about only in the context of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Rarely are the total long-term supply chain costs to the environment and society calculated.
Reducing CO2 is clearly a vital goal, but not the only critical one, says Earth system scientist Johan Rockström, joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, and who (with an international team of scientists), developed the planetary boundaries framework.
It is undeniably important to reduce greenhouse emissions by half over the next seven years in order to reach net zero by 2050, he says. But this will be difficult to achieve, for it means “cutting emissions by 7.5% a year, which is an exponential decline.”
And even if we achieve such radical reductions, it will not solve the environmental crisis, warns Rockström. That’s because radical emission reductions only tackle the climate change boundary. A recent scientific paper, to which he contributed, warns that “six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity.”
Rockström in an exclusive interview told Mongabay that, at the same time as we vigorously combat global warming, “We also need to come back into the safe space for pollutants, nitrogen, phosphorus, land, biodiversity,” and more. This means that our efforts to repair the climate must also relieve stresses on these other boundaries, not destabilize them further.
Murphy says he believes this can’t be achieved. He says that modernity — the term he uses to delineate the period of human domination of the biosphere — cannot be made compatible with the protection of the biological world.
To make his point, he emphasizes an obvious flaw in renewables: they are not renewable. “I can’t see how we can [protect the biosphere] and retain a flow of nonrenewable finite resources, which is what our economic system requires.” He continues: “We are many orders of magnitude, 4 or 5 orders of magnitude, away from being at a sustainable scale. I like Rockström’s idea that we have boundaries, but I think his assessment of how far we have exceeded those boundaries is completely wrong.”
Murphy says he believes modernity has unleashed a sixth mass extinction, and it is too late to stop it. Modernity, he says, was unsustainable from the beginning: “Our brains can’t conceive of the degree of interconnectedness in the living world we’re part of. So the activities we started carrying out, even agriculture, don’t have a sustainable foundation. The minerals and materials we use are foreign to the living world and we dig them up and spew them out. They end up all over the place, even in our bodies at this point, [we now have] microplastics. This is hurting not just us, but the whole living world on which we depend.”
Like Murphy, Rockström says he is pessimistic about the level of action now seen globally, but he doesn’t think we should give up. “We have the responsibility to continue even if we have a headwind.” What is extremely frustrating, he says, is that today we have the answers: “We know what we need to do. That’s quite remarkable. Years back I could not have said that. We have solutions to scale down our use of coal, oil and gas. We know how to feed humanity from sustainable food systems, that largely bring us back into the [safe zone for] planetary boundaries, the safe space for nitrogen, phosphorous, freshwater, land and biodiversity.”
One key to making such radical change would be a dramatic, drastic, wholesale shift by governments away from offering trillions of dollars in “perverse subsidies” to environment-destroying fossil fuel and mining technologies, to pumping those subsidies into renewables and the circular economy.
Murphy says he doesn’t believe we should give up either. But he also says he doesn’t believe modernity can be made sustainable. “I suspect that the deteriorating web of life will create cascading failures that end up pulling the power cord to the destructive machine. Only then will some people accept that ecological ignorance — paired with technological capability — has dire consequences.”
But, he adds, this does not mean the human race is doomed.
“The modernity project does not define humanity. Humanity is much older. It’s too late for modernity to succeed but it’s not too late for humanity to succeed.” Here he turns to Indigenous cultures: “For hundreds of thousands of years, they survived and did quite well without causing the sixth mass extinction.”
“There isn’t a single Indigenous package,” he says. “Each is tuned to its [particular local] environment, and they vary a lot. But they have common elements: humility, only taking what you need from the environment, and the belief that we can learn a lot from our ‘our brothers and sisters,’ that is, the other animals and plants who have been around for much longer than us.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Murphy remains cheerful: “Most people are extremely depressed by what I say. I’m not. Not at all. I think it’s exciting to imagine what the future can be. You’re only depressed if you’re in love with modernity. If you’re not, it’s not devastating to imagine it disappearing.”
Banner image: Installation of solar panels. Image by Trinh Trần via Pexels (Public domain).
