For this episode of The Green Flame, we speak with Sergio Alexander Kochergin, a filmmaker, organizer, former U.S. Marine, and native of Ukraine. He did two deployments to Iraq in 2003, 2004, and 2005, and testified before members of Congress in 2008 as part of the new Winter Soldier hearings organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War. Sergio lives in Michigan City, Indiana where he is the co-founder of Politics Art Roots Culture, or the PARC center, which is an event and community space.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
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JUNEAU, ALASKA (Tlingit: A’aakw Kwáan lands) — The Trump administration announced plans today for yet another massive timber sale that would destroy more than 5,100 acres of critical old-growth habitat in the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska.
“Shame on the Trump administration’s Forest Service for having the gall to continue to burden and overwhelm Southeast Alaskans with yet another needless and money-losing timber sale when we are in the midst of a pandemic and a controversial Alaska Roadless Rulemaking process,” said Dan Cannon, Tongass Forest Program Manager for Southeast Alaska Conservation Council. “As Alaskans await Secretary Perdue’s decision on the Roadless Rule, they will yet again have to advocate for the protection of critical old-growth habitat in their backyards. We don’t know how many times we need to say it: Timber only contributes 1% to Southeast Alaska’s economy, while the fishing and tourism industries contribute 26%. Stop making Southeast Alaskans’ lives more difficult by threatening our true economic drivers.”
The U.S. Forest Service’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the South Revilla Integrated Resource Project timber sale proposes chainsawing 5,115 acres of old-growth forest near Ketchikan. It also would allow bulldozing or rebuilding more than 80 miles of damaging logging roads costing U.S. taxpayers more than $11 million. The public will have until Oct. 19 to provide comments.
“This assault on America’s largest rainforest will destroy important habitat for salmon, bears and wolves, and worsen the climate crisis,” said Randi Spivak, Public Lands Director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Clearcutting the Tongass and wiping out enormous carbon stores is like cutting off part of the planet’s oxygen supply. It’s mind-boggling that the Trump administration wants to decimate this spectacular old-growth forest and erase one of the solutions to averting catastrophic climate change.”
This project and the proposed elimination of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule on the Tongass are part of the Trump administration’s relentless efforts to clearcut large swaths of remaining old-growth across the national forest, consistent with its policy of increasing logging nationwide.
“As forests across the America’s burn, the last thing we need to do is destroy old-growth forests in the Tongass Rainforest — one of the United States’ best defenses against furthering the climate crisis,” said Osprey Oreille Lake, Executive Director for the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN). “Existing within the territories of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsmishian peoples, the Tongass is a vital ecosystem necessary to the traditional life-ways of local Indigenous communities. Destroying critical old-growth in the Tongass, not only devastates wildlife habitat and harms the climate, but disregards the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples and further perpetuates modern genocidal policies. We must stand together for our forests, communities and the climate.”
The roughly 17 million-acre Tongass is the largest national forest in the United States. Since time immemorial it has been the traditional homelands of the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian peoples. Alaska Native people rely on the area for culture, traditional hunting, fishing and livelihoods. People from around the world visit the Tongass for world-class recreation, sport and commercial fishing.
“It was just over two months ago that a federal judge threw out the largest logging project we’ve seen in decades because the Forest Service failed to provide communities with basic information like where it intended to log,” said Olivia Glasscock, an attorney at Earthjustice. “Nevertheless the agency is back again with another massive timber sale targeting irreplaceable old-growth trees in the same cherished national forest. Urgent action is needed to address the climate crisis, and that includes efforts to preserve the magnificent trees that absorb carbon. Unfortunately, this destructive logging plan will only make the problem worse.”
The Tongass is the largest intact temperate rainforest left on Earth and provides vital habitat for eagles, bears, wolves, salmon and countless other species. It is a globally recognized carbon sink and helps to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, storing approximately 8% of the total carbon stored in all U.S. national forests.
“Alaska Rainforest Defenders asked, plain and simple in our September 2018 scoping comments on the South Revilla project, that the Forest Service drop the timber part of the project,” said spokesman Larry Edwards. “As with our recently successful lawsuit against the timber component of the POWLLA project, environmentalists have no complaints over the non-timber components of this project.” Edwards added, “In the DEIS, all of the alternatives for the project are estimated to have a timber sale value appraised at a loss to taxpayers, which means that legally a timber sale could not be offered. Continuing to a final EIS would be gambling with millions of dollars of Forest Service planning effort at taxpayer expense.”
Logging the Tongass has been tremendously costly for taxpayers. A new report estimates that timber sales from the forest have cost taxpayers $1.7 billion over four decades.
“Despite a commitment to move away from unsustainable old-growth timber sales, the U.S. Forest Service continues to offer these sales in the Tongass National Forest. More clearcutting will damage the real drivers of southeast Alaska’s economy: fish, wildlife and tourism. Defenders won’t stand by and watch as the Forest Service despoils irreplaceable wildlife habitat and threatens sustainable jobs and livelihoods in Southeast Alaska,” said Nicole Whittington-Evans, Alaska Program Director for Defenders of Wildlife.
The Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International www.wecaninternational.org – @WECAN_INTL
The Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International is a 501(c)3 and solutions-based organization established to engage women worldwide in policy advocacy, on-the-ground projects, direct action, trainings, and movement building for global climate justice.
A new space race has begun. Private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin have begun the process of privatizing the night sky. What comes next? Will humans colonize the solar system and beyond? In this third in a series of articles [Part 1, Part 2] Max Wilbert asks why this culture worships “progress.”
It began with wood and blood; trees and muscle power; the fire and the slave. This built the first megacities on Earth. The first civilizations grew: in Mesopotamia; along the Yangtze River and the Ganges; in the Andes; in Egypt; and elsewhere.
As they grew, they displaced other societies, tribes and nations who had existed for eons. By war or trade or marriage, assimilation or extermination, they grew, and as they grew, forests shrunk.
The limits of muscle and fire soon became apparent. By cutting down the forests, by plowing the earth and turning soil carbon into human carbon, they eroded the soil, they salinized the land, and what was a Fertile Crescent became dust. But these societies had created an ideology based on “more.” The result was war and a feverish search for new sources of energy and power.
The next frontier was to dig deeper, to find carbon that was buried deep under the soil in the crust of the planet itself. The burning of coal and oil was a revolution in energy. Suddenly mines could be pumped dry and shafts sunk deeper than ever before. Goods could be moved more quickly. Factories and war machines belched great clouds of smoke into the air, and the logging became industrial. The conversion of a living planet into a necropolis accelerated.
Coal and oil, when combined with the engineering necessary to create the engine, enabled expansion on a scale never before dreamed of. Soon nations had the power to move mountains, and they did. Coal and oil enabled the construction of the first large hydroelectric dams, and now the circulatory system of the planet was bound to civilization’s endeavors as well. And before long, the next boundary was breached: that of the atom itself.
This is the story of civilizations breaking the covenant humans had lived with for 200,000 years; the story of human beings constructing ideologies and megamachines that demand limitless power, and then pursuing that power to—quite literally—the end of the Earth.
Progress as Sort of God
There is a fundamental premise underlying not just capitalism, but all civilized societies: the premise is that “progress” in technological development is an inherent good; that any harm is overshadowed by this good; and that the pursuit of technological development and the power that results should be one of the primary goals of human society. Expansion is good. Growth is good.
This premise underlies not just capitalism, but civilization itself, and much of modern science.
This article is third in a series of essays responding to a scientific study published in the journal Scientific Reports back in May. The study models the future of global civilization, tracking population growth and deforestation, and finds that there is a 90 percent chance of civilization collapsing within the next 20-40 years. I discussed their collapse prediction in the first essay in this series.
The authors of the study theorize, as Salonika pointed out in the second essay, that the only way to avoid collapse is via expansion, especially expansion in energy generation, which they suppose would allow industrial civilization to surpass ecological limits and expand throughout the solar system. They write, “if the trajectory [of civilization’s technological development] has reached the Dyson limit we count it as a success [in our model], otherwise as failure.”
They are referring to a “Dyson Sphere” or “Dyson swarm,” a theoretical megamachine which would encompass a star and capture a large portion of its power output, which could then be used by a civilization.
The idea of a Dyson sphere has been around since the 1930’s, and has a rich life in science fiction. But it is not something to dismiss. Scientists have been working on the theoretical and technical foundation for space-based solar energy harvesting devices for many decades. More deeply, it is an idea that is deeply reflective of the ideology of civilization, which demands power in unlimited quantities. It is the same idea which has underlain civilization since the first slaves were shackled in rows and lashed and set to work building monumental architecture for the emperor. It is the same idea that drove the deforestation of the planet. It is the same idea that built the Grand Coulee Dam, and the Hoover Dam, and the Three Gorges Dam, and the Belo Monte Dam, and that will build the Batoka Gorge Dam unless we stop them. It is the same idea that has infected politicians and rulers and technocrats and theocrats and entire societies for thousands of years.
It is the idea that expansion is the highest good.
The Kardashev scale ranks civilizations as Type I (a planetary civilization, which can use all the energy available on its planet of origin), Type II (which can use all the energy within a given star system), or Type III (galactic civilizations). In this scale, a Dyson sphere corresponds to a Type II civilization. Global civilization today, using Carl Sagan’s extrapolations, is approximately at Type 0.73.
In this scale, the more energy a society can appropriate for themselves, the more advanced they are.
Those who have slaves can appropriate more energy than those who do not.
Those who cut down the forest and burn it can appropriate more energy than those who do not.
Those who plow the grasslands under can appropriate more energy than those who do not.
Those who break the boundary of the atom will have more energy than those who do not.
And those who are willing to capture sunlight itself—through a Dyson sphere or other forms of technology—will have more energy than those who do not.
It goes without saying that striving for higher levels on the scale is the goal of most people in power. From the beginning, most western science has been underpinned by a philosophy that the more human beings can control nature, the better. From Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance thinkers to Francis Bacon and the Royal Society, scientists have willingly hitched themselves to tyrants and democracies alike to fund their unending curiosity, and in return they have delivered weapons, energy, and economic development.
Control and expand: this is the ideology of conquest.
The Study of Consequences
Legendary science fiction author Frank Herbert wrote in his classic Dune that “ecology is the study of consequences.” The term is appropriate, then, to describe the study of the consequences unleashed by the decisions made by civilizations up to this point.
We’ve already spoken of the forests that are now past tense and the Fertile Crescent that is fertile no more. Agriculture—not gardening, but totalitarian agriculture—is no more than organized appropriation of primary productivity, habitat, and soil fertility from non-human species to benefit a single species (humans).
Primary productivity, or photosynthesis, is the basis of terrestrial ecology—the basis of life on land. On average, in agricultural areas, 83% of primary productivity is extracted by humans, leaving 17% for the non-humans who remain. This is a consequence of civilized agriculture, just as global warming and ocean acidification are consequences of the choice to seek energy from coal, petroleum, and natural gas.
The Fermi Paradox and The Great Filter
We cannot speak of civilization, Dyson spheres, and ecology without discussing the Drake equation and the Fermi Paradox.
Astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake created the Drake equation in 1961 at the first scientific meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. The equation estimates the probability that there are other intelligent life forms in the galaxy with whom we might communicate. The equation is a rough tool, more thought experiment than precise scientific measure, and plugging in different variables can give wildly different results. It’s all conjecture; life has only ever been observed on one planet.
The Drake Equation, however, does suggest that there could be as many as 15 million planets with intelligent life in the Milky Way alone; we just don’t know. This is where the Fermi Paradox comes in. The Fermi Paradox is a mystery posited by Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi: given these huge numbers, why have we found no evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence? A 2015 study concluded that Kardashev Type-III civilizations are either very rare or do not exist in the local Universe.”
Why has SETI failed?
There are many possible explanations, many of them revolving around the idea that the formation of complex life-forms is actually extremely rare, and that life on Earth has passed through some sort of “Great Filter” to arrive at this. An alternative explanation is that societies that develop the ability to transmit radio waves and travel off their own planet tend to destroy their own ecological founds and collapse.
Each of these explanations is horrifying in its own way.
The Colonization of Space
Incidentally, rockets used in spaceflight destroy the ozone layer, release as much carbon dioxide in 2 minutes as a car would produce in two centuries, and are changing the composition of the upper atmosphere, releasing gasses and particles in areas they have never before naturally existed. And this process is accelerating as corporations such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic begin to colonize near-Earth orbit with thousands of satellites and increasing numbers of commercial craft.
It is expected that the number of rocket launches will increase by an order of magnitude within the next few years.
Another Path
Does it have to be like this?
Some would have us believe that science, technology, and progress are the only possibility—the only option that is thinkable. But is this true?
The science of conquest is not the only type of science. There is another; a science that is based on observation, thesis, and evidence, that is based on a peer-review that does not take place in university buildings, but rather in forests, in grasslands, along rivers, in the oceans.
This is the science of the Polynesian sailors, who set out across ten thousand miles of ocean on boats made of sustainably-harvested wood, who navigated the seas and found islands like a pin in the oceanic haystack without compasses, GPS satellites, or steel-hulled boats.
It is the science of the Kalapuya people, who practiced a scientific ecology through prescribed burning of their land, cultivating species beneficial to biodiversity and abundance not just for humans, but for all life, and thus gardened the entire landscape and created one of the most diverse habitats on Earth, and of the Klamath people, who use fire to geoengineer climate on a small scale by setting their hillsides alight when inversions cause the smoke to gather in their river valley, cooling the river and triggering the salmon runs.
It is the science of the Aborigines, who encoded language and culture in songlines and land, and created a continuous culture that has lasted at least 65,000 years. It is the science of those who remain, keeping these traditions alive, who often don’t use the term science, because it is too small a word for what they do.
There are other ways to live, ways that are no less complex or rewarding, no less respectful of human intellect, but which are build on relationship.
What future do we want? The dystopian future of science fiction? A world of control? A world of Dyson spheres and continental solar arrays? A world “red in tooth and claw,” where survival of the fittest means those who will extract more ruthlessly will gain power? Or do we want a world of connection and participation, a world of mutual aid, where we give back as much or more than we take?
I dream of a world where humans practice a different kind of science—not the science of conquest but the science of cooperation.
Max Wilbert is a writer, organizer, and wilderness guide. A third-generation dissident, he came of age in a family of anti-war and undoing racism activists in post-WTO Seattle. He is the editor-in-chief of the Deep Green Resistance News Service. His latest book is the forthcoming Bright Green Lies. His first book, an essay collection called We Choose to Speak, was released in 2018. He lives in Oregon.
The Ohio River carried my ancestors to me. Arriving through traumatic memories recorded in history books and through a vivid nightmare, my ancestors’ presence was painful at first. Then, I asked my ancestors for help creating strength from the pain and they answered through wild geese.
When I was researching how settler colonialism affected the original peoples of the Ohio River basin, I also learned how settler colonialism affected my Irish ancestors. I read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. She characterizes the Protestant colonization of Ireland (along with the Christian Crusades) as “dress rehearsals for the colonization of the Americas.” During the late 1500s and early 1600s, at the same time English colonies in Virginia and Massachusetts were being established, Dunbar-Ortiz describes how
“the English conquered Ireland and declared a half-million acres of land in the north open to settlement. The settlers who served early settler colonialism came mostly from western Scotland. England had previously conquered Wales and Scotland, but it had never before attempted to remove so large an Indigenous population and plant settlers in their place as in Ireland. The ancient Irish social system was systematically attacked, traditional songs and music forbidden, whole clans exterminated, and the remainder brutalized. A ‘wild Irish’ reservation was even attempted.”
I learned that the brutal practice of scalping originated in Ireland. Dunbar-Ortiz explains:
“The English government paid bounties for Irish heads. Later only the scalp or ears were required. A century later in North America, Indian heads and scalps were brought in for bounty in the same manner. Although the Irish were as ‘white’ as the English, transforming them into alien others to be exterminated previewed what came to be perceived as racialist when applied to Indigenous peoples of North America and to Africans.”
I found a connection with the ancestors of the original peoples of the Ohio River basin when I learned that many Englishmen who were involved in the colonization of Ireland were also involved in the colonization of North America. In the late 1500s, the English Governor of the newly conquered Irish province of Ulster, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, invaded the Irish province of Munster (where my ancestors lived), and ordered that
“the heddes of all those (of what sort soever thei were) which were killed in the daie, should be cutte off from their bodies and brought to the place where he [Gilbert] incamped at night, and should there bee laied on the ground by eche side of the waie ledying into his own tente so that none could come into his tente for any cause but commonly he muste passe through a lane of heddes which he used ad terrorem…[It brought] greate terrour to the people when thei sawe the heddes of their dedde fathers, brothers, children, kindsfolke, and friends.”
Dunbar-Ortiz writes, “The same Sir Humphrey Gilbert who had been in charge of the colonization of Ulster planted the first English colonial settlement in North America in Newfoundland in the summer of 1583.”
Reading this breached a dam within me. I was flooded with ancestral memory.
I saw the gruesome lane Gilbert constructed. I tried to keep my eyes on the path ahead of me. Hurry through, I told myself. These heads are too rotten, too disfigured to recognize. But, some of my loved ones had yet to come home. The desire for closure was too strong.
Why does that nose look so familiar?Is it my brother’s?Is that red hair? My sweetheart’s hair is red. But, she was miles from the fighting. She’s safe. Isn’t she? Each step down the lane became more difficult. Each head I passed made the terror stronger. My grief became so overwhelming that I envied the lifeless eyes staring at me as I passed, oblivious to the horrors they manifested.
Despite my ancestors’ prodding, I was sick of confronting the violent history of settler colonialism. I was still reeling from my writing about Macutté Mong and the slaughtered Christian Delawares. I was self-conscious that much of my writing about the Ohio River, so far, had been dark and heavy. I wanted to write about something beautiful, something hopeful, something that didn’t involve massacres.
Then, my ancestors sent me a nightmare.
It was a sunny afternoon. I stood in waist-high, fragrant grass next to a wide, slow river. Despite my waking mind being fixated on the Ohio River, the shape of the land and the dark, almost mahogany color of the water suggested this was not the Ohio River. I was reminded of a river I spent some time with in Ireland in 2018 – the River Blackwater in Munster, not far from my McCarthy ancestors’ home.
The nightmare began with beauty. I ran my hands through the thick grass. My bare feet sunk pleasantly into damp, warm soil. The grass imitated the river’s face as the breeze rippled in similar patterns over both. As the tune to “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” filled my ears, beauty slipped into melancholy.
Peace shattered when angry men came running over a distant hill. Sunlight glinted off weapons. I ducked down hoping the grass would hide me. The men spread out along the river bank. I saw their hands covered in mud and blood reach into the grassroots. I watched them wrap grass around their hands, intertwining their fingers with grass stalks. Then, they tore the grass up in patches, leaving flayed spaces of naked dirt. Each time they ripped, I felt pain like someone was ripping skin from my body.
I did not want the men to see me. At first, I managed to contain the pain in soft whimpers. Eventually, with each patch of grass ripped from the earth, the pain became unbearable. I screamed. The men noticed me, grabbed me, and rubbed my face in the bare dirt. When they wrapped the hair on my scalp around their hands, intertwining their grubby fingers with my hair, I knew the pain that was coming. They ripped the hair from my forehead to the top of my skull. I woke writhing and screaming.
At first, I thought this nightmare was simply a message to remind my readers of the cruel settler colonialism Ireland endured – especially my Irish American readers who have benefited so much from the colonization of North America. After I wrote the section about the colonization of Ireland being a dress rehearsal for the colonization of North America, however, my ancestors were not satisfied. I felt an itchy determination to bring some beauty out of this terrible history.
While I was researching and writing about this history, several times I found myself absent-mindedly humming the tune of the “The Wind That Shakes the Barley.” When I remembered that the tune was in my nightmare, I knew I had to learn more about the song.
“The Wind That Shakes the Barley” is a haunting Irish ballad that was written by Robert Dwyer Joyce in the mid-1800s about theIrish Rebellion of 1798. The song tells the tale of a young Irish rebel who says good-bye to his lover before he joins the rebellion. His lover is shot during the fighting and the young rebel returns home to bury her.
Barley is a symbol of Irish resistance to colonization.
Irish rebels, most of whom were woefully impoverished, often carried barley in their pockets to eat while on the march. Many of these men wore their hair closely cropped as a sign of opposition to the powdered wigs worn by British aristocrats. Because of this, these Irish rebels were called “croppies.” When the Irish Rebellion of 1798 was brutally suppressed, the British threw slaughtered rebels into mass unmarked graves known as “croppy-holes.”
The barley in the pockets of the slain rebels grew from the croppy-holes. And, just as the barley grows every spring from the croppy-holes, fed by the bodies of Irish rebels, Irish resistance to colonization sprouts anew in each generation, fed by the memories of our ancestors – those men and women brave enough to sacrifice everything to resist colonization.
I wept when I learned about the barley growing from the mass graves of massacred Irish rebels. I wept for their courage. I wept for the beauty of their story. I also wept because I yearned for a symbol with as much power as barley that could remind the Irish in America of our ancestors’ legacy of resistance.
When I finished weeping, my ancestors gave me the symbol I yearned for.
I heard the Canada geese before I saw them. My ancestors’ songs carried with the honking geese songs to announce their arrival. The geese swept low in a disciplined formation over the Ohio River. In flying columns, they evoked the rebels of old on the march. They got so close I could see their silver feathers quivering as they descended. I sensed my ancestors on the wind that shook the goose wings.
Originally used to describe the departure of an Irish Catholic army to France after being defeated by William of Orange’s Protestant army in 1691, the term “wild geese” has been used in Irish history to describe Irish soldiers who left to fight in foreign armies. Most of these soldiers fled poverty. Many of them joined foreign armies to fight against the British. Some of these soldiers joined foreign armies to gain valuable training that they could return with and use to defend their homes.
I am American because some of my ancestors fled Ireland in the early 1850s, just after the Potato Famine and British colonial policies killed millions of Catholic Irish. Like the Irish wild geese, my ancestors fled poverty and starvation. They survived. So, I live.
Now, whenever I hear echoes of honking geese, I hear my ancestors. They are with me. They say: Resist.
Will Falk is the author of How Dams Fall: On Representing the Colorado River in the First-Ever American Lawsuit Seeking Rights for a Major Ecosystem and a practicing rights of Nature attorney. Rights of Nature advocates work to transform the legal system so that it recognizes the “personhood” of natural beings. Throuout 2020, Falk will travel through the Ohio River Basin asking the Ohio River the two questions he asks any client who steps into his office: “Who are you?” And, “What do you need?”
Our guest for this show is Esther Figueroa. Esther is a Jamaican filmmaker, writer and advocate who in 2006 returned home to live in Jamaica after being based in Hawa’ii for 25 years. She has a long history of filmmaking, art, and community engagement to protect traditional cultures and the land. Dr. Figueroa has a PhD in linguistics and a masters degree in east asian langauges and literature. We talk about modernity, colonization, and aluminum mining in Jamaica.
Check out Esther’s video work on her YouTube channel, and two of her documentary films on The Paiute Salt Song Trail and the Reclamation of Polynesian Sailing Traditions.
Max: Your latest film is called “Fly Me to the Moon” and as you said it’s an exploration of modernity through the lens of aluminum and bauxite mining specifically bauxite mining. Bauxite is the ore that is being refined into aluminum. So could you talk a little bit about what are the problems of bauxite mining and what is aluminum used for? Just sort of a general overview of aluminum and then we can go from there into Jamaica and Cockpit Country specifically and some of the history of how that looked. I think in one of your emails that you sent me before the interview that the global aluminum industry uses more electricity than the entire continent of Africa.
Esther: Aluminum basically is the material that allowed for 20th century modernity. If people imagined what it means to be modern, it means mobility, it means electricity, it means tall buildings, it means fast-paced life. Think of fast food, think of the cans that you drink, you know, back in the 50s the TV dinners, chewing gum wrappers, it is what made this way of life from kitchen-ware to fast-food franchises, automobiles, airplanes. Now in the 21st century, you know, the things that we depend on all are devices and then, of course, the satellites that make all of this communication possible, but what it is that aluminum is the most abundant metal in the Earth. The most widely used non-first metal meaning non-iron. It’s lightweight, durable, malleable, non-corrosive and chemically reactive. The thing is though it’s the most abundant metal, it never is in the Earth singularly, in other words, it is always combined chemically with other types of metals, other types of chemical combinations and so, what happens is it that has to be separated out, so there are basically 3 processes.
The first is bauxite, what bauxite is it’s a type of soil, it’s the metal in the soil, and it’s different in different places but it is usually kind of reddish or yellowish, In Jamaica it’s reddish and in Jamaica it is over 25% of the island is bauxite. What makes it attractive is that it is very close to the surface so that it can be easily extracted so what it is this soil. The first stage is the extractive process and that’s basically strip-mining. So huge bauxite haul roads because the trucks are big, the machinery is big, are just basically gouged out of mountains, hill-sides, wherever the bauxite is, so that means huge deforestation and destruction of whatever flora is there.
And then the soil is dug out, put in trucks, which then drive to a place where each truck is weight and then they dump it, it’s kept in piles, and then it’s moved unto trains which then take it to the coast where it’s shipped out or it is put into to tramways that are aerial tramways that go straight down to the port and then shipped out or it is taken to Alumina refineries and that’s the second stage, that is all of this soil, and remember it takes hundreds of years to produce a centimeter of soil. This is the most basic thing apart from air and water that we need. And billions of tons of this soil is being dug up and sent away either on boat to North America or we have a few Alumina refineries in Jamaica.
About The Green Flame
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
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Fear of death is a motivation that has driven man to attempt to control death by controlling the world. In this piece, Aurora Linnea explores the patriarchal root behind the unending drive to control and ward off death.
Man is afraid to die. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death (1974), Ernest Becker proposed that, “of all things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death.” Becker studied the oeuvres of Brilliant Men – Freud, Kierkegaard – and struck upon Man’s predicament: Man is conscious, he observes that what lives will one day die; Man is aware he is alive, hence he will die, and he is afraid. He fears his body, the “terrifying dilemma” of that “material fleshy casing” yoking him to the physical world of creatures, the mortal, earthly world with its cycles circling birth into death, its inherent limits and exigencies. Being a living body reminds Man he will die; he is afraid. Man is afraid, all the man-made world has been built around his fear. Man’s fear of death has been the ulterior force goading human history along its ill-starred trajectory. Becker’s thesis: The history of Man is the history of his fear, understanding Man means understanding Man’s fear, Man does what Man does, Man is what Man has become, because he is afraid.
To be human, according to Becker, is to be terrified of death and to pass one’s life laboring to allay terror’s torments through “a defiance of and a denial of the real nature of the world.” That Man is a mortal animal is the wellspring of his suffering, in retaliation Man pits himself against the “inadmissible reality” of…reality itself. It is this dedication to existing in pained permanent opposition to material reality that Becker defines as the project of “humanization.”
Clever creature that he is, Man has refined methods for channeling his horror of reality/mortality into the noble enterprise of “humanization.” He dreams up solacing fantasies of immortality, identifying himself with deathless disembodied gods of his own creation. If Man scorns death for depriving him his right to control his own destiny, he rebels by devoting his life to seizing control over as much of the living world as he can manage. He dominates inferior beings, beasts, lesser men, the wilds. He accumulates wealth, to stand as an undying monument to his reign. He extends his dominion through conquest, subjugates whole peoples, builds empires. His yearly more efficient exploitation of the underlings over whom he rules sings to him reassurances of his limitless power. He abstracts his way to intellectual transcendence, leaving his body below. He invents machines to act as barriers between himself and nature, so his hands don’t get dirty. He entombs the natural world choked-out unseen within an encrustation of man-made artifice to find himself surrounded by the products of his own mind, every disruptive reminder of terrorizing reality extirpated from his field of vision.
Thus, Becker concludes, Man triumphs over “mere physicalness,” salvages himself from the clutches of death. Becomes human.
Man makes himself the Master.
Except Man does all that and still he dies, and sometimes, when reality creeps in from its appointed place exiled to the periphery onto the mainstage of the man-made world and the Master’s delusion-complex of power-and-control defenses against death begins to unravel, Man must take emergency action. Here we have the psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg, writing during the Second World War, to help us understand what comes next: “Man then resorts to the mobilization of his aggression, his hatred.” Through the conversion of fear into hatred enacted as violence against some chosen enemy, Man can restore the necessary sense of control and avoid the humiliation of being caught frightened. “The murderous drives,” Zilboorg explains, “enable us to feel masters over life and death.” He terms this the process of “overcoming death by means of murder,” and discourages readers from feeling overly distressed by Man’s tendency to transmute fear into “murderous hatred.” It’s human nature, after all, to lash out in rage against mortality.
Becker and Zilboorg wrote “Man” to denote “Humanity”; both presumed they were analyzing “human nature,” the “human condition.” In actuality their sex-specific terminology was entirely appropriate, their exclusion of women apt. The condition these authors elucidate is not the “human condition,” but the patriarchal one, the psychic disposition of human cultures malformed by millennia of male rule. ‘Man’ is not ‘humanity,’ but men, as in males—and in fact, only a small subset of males can be correctly included here. ‘Humanization’ via the rejection of physical reality, through domination and exploitation, delusions of control, and antagonistic violence has been largely the undertaking of Western patriarchal civilization. Given that those of us without the luck to have been born ruling-class males of European descent have historically been fodder for, rather than the innovators of, these patriarchal procedures, a clarifying revision of Becker’s thesis feels warranted.
The history of patriarchy is the history of men’s fear.
To understand patriarchal civilization means understanding the fear that lurks at the core of patriarchal masculinity; engineered and administered by ruling-class men, human society has become what it is today because the men in power are afraid to die.
Fear of death and its various palliations are so thoroughly embedded in the social machinery of Western patriarchal civilization that under normal circumstances, they pass below notice. Granted, to do so has called for the institutionalization of brutal hierarchies, oppressive empires, genocide, gynocide, ecocide, the pervading malaise of mass alienation, but the Masters have been reasonably successful in convincing themselves they’re not going to die. Their fear has been repressed and managed, sublimated into everyday atrocity. It is only when the patriarchal mind is cornered by a surprise encounter with reality/mortality and its defense mechanisms go into overdrive that the underlying fear hurtles to the fore.
What could be a more paradigmatic “surprise encounter with reality/mortality” than an infectious-disease pandemic?
Covid-19 has the Masters running scared. Patriarchal death-terror is a naked thing shivering on the table now, men’s strategies of self-defense newly conspicuous as they scramble to safeguard themselves against the affront of the unacceptable, inescapable essence of our human condition: that we are animals, vulnerable bodies, born of women, destined to die.
As the current menace to male immortality is a disease, an obvious place to begin a study of men’s fear is the social institution known as medicine. Fear of death shines more glaringly here than elsewhere as a general rule. In medicine, men are dealing directly with bodies, bodily functions, physical sensation; patriarchal conquest commences with the conquering of the body; hence, patriarchal medicine is a logical site for intensive death-terror management. Itself a product of patriarchal imperialism, achieved through the (often femicidal) overthrow of female lay healers during Europe’s Early Modern Period, modern Western medicine is grounded on two key precepts:
1) the body is a machine, to be serviced and repaired by experts.
2) death is an aberration, which men should eliminate.
These principles reflect the mechanistic worldview preached by Enlightenment-era Fathers of Science, most notably Rene Descartes, a Brilliant Man who nonetheless struggled to discern any appreciable differences between a dog and a clock. Carolyn Merchant has described how, with the rise of the mechanistic worldview, bodies were recast as machines at the same time as the earth was ideologically demoted to dead inert matter. And, as may be expected, both bodies and earth existed to be used and manipulated by those blessed with the gift of reason, i.e., elite white males.
The reduction of bodies to machines allowed men to imagine that they’d transcended base physicality; men were not their bodies, but the overseers and technicians of those bodies. When the unreliable body-apparatus inevitably malfunctioned, the Father-Doctors would be there to force it back into working order. They could feel themselves heroes, rescuing patients from the sinking ships of their failing bodies. Medical practice thus evolved to give men a taste of victory in what Marti Kheel calls patriarchal medicine’s “war against nature.” Man vs. Body, Man vs. Death. A proliferation of ever-more invasive, elaborate techno-interventions has been the Father-Doctors’ weaponry in this endless conflict, the more aggressive the better. In the ICU combat zones of patriarchal medicine, men aspire to beat death into submission.
In our present-day plague year, ventilators are the medical technology du jour. Coronavirus infection causes the lungs to fill with fluid, the ailing can’t breathe, their blood oxygen levels plummet, they rush to the hospital where they are hooked up to machines, to breathe for them. This has been so-called Best Practice. Medicine’s passion for ventilators has been such that, in the early weeks of the pandemic, the specter of ventilator shortages was a favored mass-media bogeyman. More recently, evidence has been piling up to suggest that ventilators are not the omnipotent emancipators-from-death we were promised. The force entailed in threading an 10”-long plastic tube down a person’s throat and pumping highly saturated oxygen into her lungs has a funny way of inflicting injuries that compromise her body’s ability to recover, while the long-term sedation required can result in permanent brain damage. One doctor has called placing Covid-19 patients on ventilators “almost a death sentence.” Now, some renegade clinicians are starting to suspect that, just maybe, less invasive, less aggressively technological approaches might be more conducive to survival.
Holding hostility towards the body as its premise, patriarchal medicine allots scarce attention (or funds) to the prevention of illness through cultivating the necessary conditions for bodily health, with health here defined as something more than just the absence of acute disease. Where the dominant attitude is rancor for the body as a glitchy machine and/or blundering heap of stupid flesh, there’s not much room for protective succor or nurturance. Instead, the prescription is a series of reactive assaults, to punish the treacherous body when it errs. Today’s patriarchal medicine is also capitalist-industrial medicine, which introduces a new incentive for the heavy emphasis on crisis-stage interventions: medical procedures, drugs, devices are saleable to consumers as market commodities. The health of the populace therefore interferes with the medical industry’s maximization of profits, making it minimally desirable.
The slew of ‘social distancing‘ guidelines handed down by the CDC and states’ “shelter-in-place” mandates seem to indicate a focus on prevention in the Covid-19 response program. However, these measures are not preventative, but reactionary last-minute interventions aimed at controlling an already critical pathology. And lest we forget, humanity’s last great hope still lies with the biotech industry, as the scientist-saviors toil away to develop (and test on sacrificial animals, and patent, and sell) a vaccine. Once again, man-made technology shall deliver us from death! Shifting attention from heroic interventions to meaningful prevention would require addressing the overall abysmal state of human and planetary health that has rendered our situation so precarious, a task the Father-Doctors have zero inclination to undertake. Where’s the money in it? Where’s the glory? To quote Ivan Illich, “What need is there to worry about a murderous environment when doctors are industrially equipped to act as life-savers!”
From fear of death to domestic violence
Outside of the hospital wards, in homes worldwide, women, children, and domesticated animals are locked-down alongside men socialized within patriarchy to alleviate their fear of death through domination and violence.
A man in eastern China beats his wife with a high-chair as she holds their infant daughter in the family’s kitchen; the woman loses feeling in her legs, falls to the floor, still grasping the child, she cannot say how many times the husband hit her. Reports in the U.S. surface of men forbidding wives and girlfriends to wash their hands, reveling in the women’s terror of infection, in the life-or-death power they, as men, can wield. An international upsurge in domestic violence reports, calls to domestic violence helplines: France, 30% increase; Singapore, 33% increase; Brazil, 40-50% increase; Bogota, Columbia, 225% increase; United Kingdom, 700% increase. In the first four weeks of the U.K.’s lockdown, 13 women and children were murdered by men, twice the standard femicide tally of two women per week. Within the first days of lockdown in Columbia, a man shot and killed his wife, his wife’s sister, his wife’s mother. Men murdered at least 1000 women in Mexico in the first three months of 2020. Between March 27 and April 2, with “shelter-in-place” laws spreading across the U.S., as gun and ammunition sales soared, there were at least 19 murder-suicides, nearly all of which involved a man shooting his wife or child before killing himself.
In households where men beat women, there is an 89% likelihood that domesticated animals are also victims of male violence.
In Peru, at least one girl-child was reported raped each day for the first 17 days of quarantine. In Bolivia, police say they have been receiving more than four dozen reports of violence against children, including sexual violence, daily since the country’s lockdown began. By the close of March, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) helpline had experienced a 22% increase in the number of minors calling in; 67% of minor callers identified their abusers as family members. Reports of online child sexual exploitation to cybertip hotlines are up by an average of 30% globally. Livestreaming the sexual abuse of children has spiked. Experts say: To meet the demand for new child pornography, more children are being abused on camera.
Male violence: common factor in every “disaster”
Intensifying male violence against women is recognized as a regular feature of cataclysms.
Noted in the aftermath of the eruption of Mount St. Helens, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 recession, Hurricane Sandy. The 2013-2017 Ebola outbreak in West Africa corresponded with an epidemic of violence against women and girls, which included increases in trafficking, child marriage, sexual exploitation, and rape. Public health experts cite “stress” as explanation for men’s brutality when catastrophe strikes. When men feel they have lost control, when they sense their mortality encroaching. When circumstances force men to confront reality.
It can be presumed that women are also “stressed” by volcanoes and hurricanes and bankruptcy and plagues, but women do not relieve the stress they feel by beating their partners, killing their partners, raping children. Women do not learn to restore their sense of control through violence against social subordinates when threatened, as men do, to mitigate their fear. That death-defying trick is reserved for patriarchy’s Master class, while women are its first-line victims.
In a patriarchal society, women are the primary underclass; wherever else a woman is slotted in the social hierarchy, she is below some man.
Every man is above some woman: women are easy targets, then, when men get that stressed-out urge to dominate. But violence against women as a male strategy of death-terror management has deeper roots; a woman is more than an easy target for men’s ‘murderous hatred,’ she is the perfect target. The female, by patriarchal construction, symbolizes bodily existence. As Elizabeth Spelman writes in “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views” (1982), man-made culture split mind from body; men cast off the fleshliness they feared by claiming Mind for themselves, while portraying women as mindless Body. What is body-identified is also nature-identified, and both are inferior to Mind/Man, both are despised, for how they represent the origins of male mortality. In the Western patriarchal tradition, it is not only women debased to low status by identification with body/nature, but also nonhuman animals and nonwhite “savages.” We are the brute races, death’s emissaries, the Master’s enemies. And among these evils, a woman is often the most accessible. In the comfort of his own home a man can revenge himself by ravaging the concrete being of the woman he “loves,” or possesses: his own personal scapegoat.
He conquers, controls, degrades and destroys her, and in so doing, Man fantasizes he has defeated death. Yet still he will die; he is still afraid. So he sets his sights on larger prey. He has cut down the woman. Colonized the savage. Slaughtered the animal. Mutilated the body. But the natural world persists, uncontrollable reality/mortality mocking Man’s Master-Mind dominion. Earth: the matrix of our materiality, loathsome Mother of all Mothers, the ultimate body, bearer of the sum vulnerability of all mortal creatures. Women’s and nature’s victimization by patriarchal civilization emerge as parallel phenomena, as men strive to realize immortality through last-ditch rituals of violent domination. The ghastly irony is that in his denial of death, Man’s legacy is a human society condemned to self-obliterate. Fear of death becomes fear of life becomes the Masters’ murderous hatred for the living world. Breaking News: “A top nuclear security official says the U.S. must move ahead with plans to ramp up production of key components for the nation’s nuclear arsenal despite the challenges presented by the coronavirus.”
Life itself, in the terminal phase of patriarchy’s war against reality/mortality, is Man’s enemy, so life must be mastered, and when that fails, exterminated. And Man will fail. He is failing already. At the helm of his death-machine the Master is terrified, raging against reality, the natural world—and we cannot be afraid, neither to live nor to die, whatever it takes, in defense of life, we have to stop him.
Aurora Linnea is a librarian and ecofeminist pariah living near the Atlantic Ocean.
Featured image: anatomical sketch by Leonardo da Vinci.
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