Join Us Today
Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, Max Wilbert, and grassroots organizers from around the world for a special 3-hour live streaming event, Ending The Greenwashing, starting at 1pm Pacific Time and hosted by Deep Green Resistance.
This event will explore in detail the topic of greenwashing.
Around the planet, mining companies, energy producers, automakers, engineering firms, and investors are gearing up for a new industrial revolution: the “green economy” transition. Trillions of dollars in public subsidy are being redirected to support this. Climate change is a crisis, and fossil fuels must be stopped. But will this project actually help the planet?
The evidence, to be frank, isn’t good.
From north to south, east to west, “renewable” energy operations are bulldozing rare ecosystems, trampling community rights, and looking far too similar to fossil fuels for comfort. The promise of a “green” industrial economy is rapidly being revealed as an illusion meant to generate profits and prevent us from recognizing the truth: that we need fundamental, revolutionary changes in our economy and culture — not just superficial changes to our energy sources.
This event will introduce you to on-the-ground campaigns being waged around the planet, introduce various strategies for effective organizing, and rebut false solutions through readings of the new book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, and discuss philosophy of resistance. There will be opportunities to ask questions and participate in dialogue during the event.
The mainstream environmental movement is funded mainly by foundations which don’t want revolutionary change.
Radical organizations like Deep Green Resistance therefore rely on individual donors to support activism around the world, which is why Ending The Greenwashing is also a fundraiser. We’re trying to raise funds to support global community organizing via our chapters, fund mutual aid and direct action campaigns, and make our core outreach and organizational work possible.
Whether or not you are in a financial position to donate, we hope you will join us today on April 17th for this event!
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/5248823575192797/
Event will be live streamed on this page: https://givebutter.com/endthegreenwash
I’ve been arguing this for around 20 years. The ONLY real solutions to environmental and ecological problems are steep reductions in human consumption and population, the former of which will require living a lot more simply and naturally, especially for those of us in the developed countries. All technology is ecologically and environmentally harmful, regardless of whether some is more harmful than others. And don’t forget human overpopulation, which is just as much of a root cause of these problems as overconsumption. Without fixing both of these problems, the environmental & ecological killings, harms, and destruction will continue.
Where I differ from DGR is that I don’t think that it’s at all realistic to expect these needed changes to happen overnight; humans didn’t create this mess overnight, and we’re not getting out of it overnight either. These are very long-term goals that won’t be achieved for hundreds to thousands of years, depending on exactly what you want to achieve. We definitely need to get started immediately — the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step — but don’t expect even your great grandchildren — if you have any, refraining from breeding is the best thing that humans can do for the natural world — to see the changes we seek.
BTW, just bought the book, looking forward to reading it.
Since I didn’t receive this notification of an April 17 event until today (April 18), I was unable to participate — which is a fitting start to my brief comment.
Obviously, we don’t have the “hundreds or thousands” of years Jeff spoke of to make the necessary changes. By most mainstream (i.e., corporate and bureaucratic) estimates, at best we have less than a decade to begin making, using, wasting, and destroying less, and radically reversing our so-called “way of life” — which is an obscene euphemism in its own right.
How can a human-driven mass extinction be called a “way of life”? Civilization is a way of death, exterminating numerous species every day of the year. And the practical deadline for reversing the insanity of human supremacy was probably sometime around 1900. If we had begun a global revolution to reverse humanity’s obsession with “more” before the Wright Brothers invaded the air, and when there were still more horses than cars on city streets, we might have had a fair shot at survival. Today, the best we can realistically hope for is to slightly cushion the crash of civilization.
Since the birth of the first city and the beginnings of the monetary system, our culture has been based on MORE. The Hebrew Bible (which dates back approximately 3000 years) wastes just 25 of its 23,000 verses before “giving” humans dominion over the Earth, and only another two before telling us to “be fruitful and multiply.” And those two obscenities constitute the founding principles of civilization.
The situation we face today is similar to the one migrants in leaky, overloaded boats face in trying to reach Europe. There are at least ten times as many people alive today as could survive without industry. And it’s industry that’s destroying Earth. A global one-child policy would take 200 years to reach a population that might be sustainable without fossil fuels. And even by the most optimistic estimates, we have less than the lifetime of a horse in which to become “carbon neutral.”
The U.N. says we’ll be 40% short of global water requirements by 2030. With aquifers running dry from the Middle East to Kansas, countries from Somalia to the U.S. could face food shortages by the end of the decade.
By industry projections, computers alone will also exceed any possible electric power generation by 2040.
Meanwhile, U.N. supported estimates say the global number of hunger-driven migrants will be in the hundreds of millions by 2050. And that is just one of the factors behind the now famous estimate that civilization will collapse irreversibly, sometime between 2040 and 2060 (“Scientific Reports,” May 2020).
“Do the math,” as the saying goes. The best we can realistically hope for now is to prepare for that collapse, while feverishly working to minimize the damage to nature.
We’re on the global Titanic. The ship of that name was on a week-long voyage, and sank in two hours, drowning over two-thirds of its passengers. Think of the world as that ill-fated ship, and the 21st century as its voyage to New York.
Most people still think technology will save us, just as they thought the Titanic was unsinkable. But the world’s economy is based on an absurd demand for perpetual growth — which, on a finite planet, is an inescapable formula for self-destruction. And yet, all projections show that growth will end in this century. Even in the nicest way possible (declining birth rates, everywhere but Africa), population is expected to reach a peak of 9.7 billion by 2064. In the not-so-nice ways mentioned above, on the other hand, we’ll crash into the wall of scarcity long before that.
We might wish for common sense to sink in sooner, with a rational, collective decision to end the cattle, automotive, and airline industries tomorrow morning, stop making babies, and reorganize our economies toward making, using, importing, and exporting as little as possible — as opposed to the current ethic of using up the planet as fast as possible.
But humans are much too stupid to do that. The fact that we’re the only species that doesn’t respect natural limits of growth is absolute, irrefutable proof that intelligent life on Earth hit its peak with dolphins, parrots, ravens, bonobos, and the octopus. I’d give a pass to a few humans, such as the Buddha or Chief Seattle. But they’re an insignificant minority. The only indigenous tribes that aren’t wearing tee shirts and Chinese flip-flops appear to be the ones that haven’t discovered them yet.
To be clear, I did not say that we have hundreds to thousands of years to fix these massive problems. What I said is that it’s not realistic to expect them to get solved any sooner than that. I don’t know how long we have, and neither does anyone else to any substantial degree of certainty. Obviously, as you point out, looking at the facts the chances of fixing the problems before the massive ecological collapse that has already begun is completed seem extremely bleak. But just because we don’t have hundreds to thousands of years to fix these problems doesn’t mean that they can be fixed any sooner than that.
I would say that the world’s economy is based on destroying the Earth, because it’s all based on “natural resources” (a horrible euphemism for portions of the living Earth), which have to be extracted but which never should be.
There are some hunter-gatherers who have rejected modern living. I agree that this is a minuscule minority of humans, but these groups do exist.
During the presentation, Lierre Kieth stated that humans are “apex predators.” This is totally false and couldn’t be more biologically ignorant. Humans are omnivores, NOT PREDATORS, who only eat meat occasionally in nature, because most hunts are unsuccessful, and because humans don’t need to eat meat that often. Her comments about humans being unable to eat grass or bark and therefore needing to eat a lot of meat were similarly ridiculous: humans are perfectly capable of eating fruits and vegetables that grow in nature and don’t need to eat grass or bark. We can get all the protein we need from plants, the only reason that we need to eat animals is for vitamin B-12, and that only very occasionally.
Not true. Humans can get a lot of meat from small game hunting.
What part of my comment do you claim is not true? I can substantiate everything I said, and whether humans “can get a lot of meat from small game hunting” is irrelevant to anything I said. Do you even know what the terms “apex predator” and “omnivore” mean?
Re Jeff’s comment on meat, I used to wonder how two of the most muscular and impressive creatures on the planet (Brahma bulls and silverback gorillas) acquired such amazing bodies without eating meat. Then I learned that they get all the animal-based nutrients they need, just from the bugs and microbes they ingest accidentally, by grazing and not washing the soil off the roots of plants.
The “animal-based nutrients they need” is probably vitamin B-12, though that’s just a guess based on what humans need. They certainly don’t get any substantial amount of protein from the tiny amount of insects they accidentally ingest while grazing.
FWIW, I’ve eaten ants, worms, and grasshoppers. And fried grasshoppers are just as enjoyable as onion rings or fried oysters.