On July 24th, 2017, Ruby Montoya and Jessica Renzicek made a public statement admitting that they had carried out multiple acts of sabotage against the then-under-construction Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in Spring 2017 during the #NoDAPL #StandingRock movement. The two activists set fire to heavy machinery and used blow torches to damage the oil pipeline and valves in an effort to decisively halt the project.
While the Dakota Access Pipeline was ultimately completed, their actions singlehandedly delayed construction for months. Jessica and Ruby are calling on others to consider similar tactics in their struggles against pipelines and other destructive projects.
On June 30, Jessica was sentenced to eight years in prison. Now, Ruby is scheduled to appear in Federal Court to argue that Energy Transfer Partners lied and demonized her and Jessica to try and get them locked up as “eco-terrorists.” Her defense, if successful, could set important legal precedents for eco-activists around the country.
To do this, she needs financial help. Please donate here to support Ruby’s legal defense. Funding will go directly to her attorney, Daphne Silverman.
JESSICA REZNICEK SUPPORT WEBSITE (Jessica is now a political prisoner and we encourage supporters to write letters to her): https://supportjessicareznicek.com/
In 2016, Greenland’s then minister responsible for economic development, Vittus Qujaukitsoq, welcomed the appointment of Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of Exxon Mobil, as US secretary of state. Despite representing the centre-Left party Siumut (Forward) and being surrounded by some of the most visible consequences of the warming world, Qujaukitsoq and his colleagues saw the growing potential for mining and drilling brought by the melting glaciers on the world’s biggest island as an opportunity to bring in the cash which would allow the long-desired independence from Denmark.
They aren’t alone. While the melting of Arctic ice is causing the world’s oceans to overflow and disrupting its weather systems, it has also unleashed a whole new geopolitical race. Earlier this year, the US Geological Survey estimated that the region’s rocks contain 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil, and 30% of undiscovered gas – carbon sinks which have been greedily eyed up by states and oil companies alike. And many of these reserves lie in the seas west of Greenland – where there are an estimated 17.5 billion undiscovered barrels of oil, enough to supply the whole planet for six months, at current usage rates.
And because the Arctic is the fastest warming part of the planet, the ice shielding these prehistoric deposits from prying drills is thinning, and disappearing, at an alarming rate.
But if some see this as an opportunity, others understand the absurdity of using climate change as a means to extract more fossil fuels and further change the climate. And this, alongside broader questions about mining, have shaped politics in the country this year.
In the spring, the governing Siumut party split, and its liberal coalition partners, the Democrats, resigned from the government, triggering a snap election in May.
The winner was the eco-socialist party Inuit Ataqatigiit. And in June, the new government banned all future oil and gas exploration from Greenland’s territory.
“The price of oil extraction is too high. This is based upon economic calculations, but considerations of the impact on climate and the environment also play a central role in the decision,” the government stated in July.
It’s not just oil and gas drilling that are contentious. When Donald Trump notoriously inquired about purchasing the island in 2019, he’d just had a briefing on its deposits of a number of minerals, many of which are likely to play a crucial role in the geopolitics of the coming decades. Among these are large quantities of uranium, and what are thought to be the world’s second biggest reserves of rare earth minerals – demand for which has soared in recent years because of their use in batteries for electric cars, computer chips and other tools of the high tech, low carbon economy.
Seen that way, Trump’s statement was probably less a random outburst and more a crude expression of the reality of Greenland’s role in the future of global geopolitics.
Biden, as ever, works in more subtle ways. In February, in discussion with tech giants like Alphabet (Google) and Facebook, he signed an executive order instigating a review of the supply chain of rare earth metals due to a global shortage and China’s dominance of the market. It seems implausible that the review won’t have produced significant discussion in US intelligence circles about the world’s largest deposits outside China, just a few hundred miles from Maine.
In March, the Polar Research and Policy Initiative expressed concerns about “the security implications of China’s near monopoly of rare earths and other minerals for the UK and its North American, European and Pacific allies”, especially given their significance to “strategically important sectors such as defence and security, green energy and technology”. The think tank called on the ‘five eyes’ intelligence alliance between the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada to team up with Greenland as part of a strategic resources partnership.
Greenland, says the website Mining Technology, “could be vital for tipping the scales in a trade war between global superpowers”.
In the midst of this global gallop for Greenland, with the world’s major powers, billionaire investors and intelligence agencies getting in on the act, the country has had some coverage in the global media of late.
What is often left out of the conversation, however, is the fascinating domestic dynamics among this Arctic island’s 57,000 people. Greenlanders’ struggle for sovereignty in the context of global capitalism, extractivism and climate collapse is an inspiring example of 21st-century indigenous resistance.
A young socialist indigenous climate leader
“There are two issues that have been important in this election campaign: people’s living conditions is one. And then there is our health and the environment,” Inuit Ataqatigiit leader Múte Bourup Egede told the Greenlandic public broadcaster KNR following his election victory in April.
Egede, 34, is the youngest prime minister Greenland’s had since it achieved a degree of home rule in the 1970s, and has led the democratic socialist and pro-independence party since 2018.
In the recent election, the party, known as IA, centred its campaign on its opposition to an international mining project by Greenland Minerals, an Australian-based and Chinese-owned company that is seeking to extract uranium and neodymium from the Kvanefjeld mine in the south of the country. Neodymium is a crucial component of a broad range of technologies, from some kinds of wind turbine to electric cars, because it can be used to make small, lightweight, but powerful and permanent magnets, while uranium is used for both nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
“We must listen to the voters who are worried. We say no to uranium mining,” Egede told the KNR. His party also promised to ban all explorations of radioactive deposits, and, while it does not oppose the mining of rare earth minerals in principle, it insists it must be better regulated.
Egede and the IA won 37% of the vote, ending the tenure of Siumut, the party which had been in power for most of the time since 1979. Siumut was supportive of the Kvanefjeld mining project, assisting Greenland Minerals to gain preliminary approval and ending a previous zero tolerance policy for uranium mining.
There is now a bill being debated in the Greenland parliament to ban the uranium mining project and all mining that contains radioactive by-products.
According to Mark Nuttall, an anthropologist at the University of Alberta and the head of the Climate and Society research programme at the Greenland Climate Research Centre: “This [election] has sent shivers down the spine of many mining executives as to what kind of future mining would take place in Greenland.”
Under the direction of Egede, the IA-led government has also taken several significant steps in recent months to curb fossil fuel production.
Last week in Glasgow, Egede announced that Greenland will be joining the Paris Agreement. In 2016, under the leadership of Siumut, Greenland had invoked a territorial exemption to the climate agreement when Denmark joined.
Greenland, which is technically a self-governing territory of Denmark, claimed at the time that the country was dependent on its oil, gas and natural mineral reserves for its economy.
“The Arctic region is one of the areas on our planet where the effects of global warming are felt the most, and we believe that we must take responsibility collectively. That means that we, too, must contribute our share,” Egede said last week.
Egede’s government also pledged to develop its renewable energy capability, especially hydropower: “Greenland has hydropower resources that exceed our country’s needs. These large hydropower resources can be utilised in collaboration with national and international investors who need large amounts of cheap and renewable energy.”
The Northwest Passage
The rush for the rare earth minerals vital to so many low carbon technologies isn’t the only way that climate change is moving the country from the periphery of global geopolitics to its core. When the huge container ship the Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal in March, the world was reminded how much of its trade passes through its two major transcontinental waterways – Suez and Panama.
As much of the Arctic Ocean becomes ice-free for greater parts of the year, new potential trade routes open up, most significantly, the Northwest Passage across the top of North America, and the Northern Sea Route, above Eurasia.
The vast majority of Greenland’s settlements – including the capital, Nuuk – lie on the west coast of the country, along the Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay. When travelling from Asia or western North America to Europe or the east coast of North America through the Northwest Passage, this is the final stretch, positioning Nuuk as a potential hub on a future major shipping route.
The struggle for sovereignty
Nearly 90% of the population of Greenland are indigenous Inuit people, who have inhabited the island for thousands of years. Although they’ve been colonised for the last thousand years by Nordic powers, they have maintained their own language and culture.
Norsemen first settled on the island in the tenth century, and in 1261 Greenland formally became part of Norway. In 1814 Greenland became a Danish territory – and in 1953 the island became fully integrated into the Danish state. (During World War II, when Denmark was conquered by the Nazis, Greenland was de facto under US control.)
“The official Danish view was that Greenland was actually a dependency; it wasn’t a colony in the sense of its colonies in the West Indies and other places,” Nuttall explained. This, he said, was “because of this historic view that Greenland had long been part of this Nordic Commonwealth from the Norse settlements of the tenth century onwards”.
But the Inuit people don’t always see it that way. During the Black Lives Matter global movement in 2020, younger Greenlanders, including the 21-year-old hip hop artist Josef Tarrak-Petrussen, called for the removal of Danish colonial statues in Nuuk.
Denmark finally granted home rule in 1979. And in 2008 Greenland voted in favour of the Self-Government Act, which transferred more power to the island’s government – and effectively marked the beginning of state formation.
This self rule act recognises Greenland as a nation with the right to independence if it chooses it. Currently Greenland has nearly full sovereignty, with the exception of the areas of foreign policy and defence. The Arctic island currently receives an annual grant of around $585m from Denmark.
In recent years, questions around sovereignty have in many ways defined the political and environmental policies of the island. Many of the political parties support independence.
However, this financial dependence on Denmark makes the prospect of full independence quite difficult: the grant accounts for nearly 20% of the island’s income, while fishing makes up around 90% of its exports.
In order to gain full autonomy from Denmark, Greenland needs to develop a self-sufficient economy. However, this likely requires the development of lucrative extractive industries which will deepen the island’s dependence on (foreign) international capital.
“If we go back ten years, mining was seen as the major way to [become politically independent], and there was great excitement,” said Nuttall.
However in recent years this attitude towards mining has changed considerably due to a host of factors including a downturn in global commodity markets, a greater emphasis on renewable energy and attention given to the climate crisis.
“Mining is going to be one pillar of an economic development strategy that will include other things such as the development of tourism, expansion of the fishing industry… and expanding renewables,” Nuttall explained.
The current government is now focusing on investments in the island’s enormous hydropower potential, which has the potential to grow as glaciers melt and which will allow a reduction in petrol imports, one of the country’s main expenses. Kalistat Lund, the minister for agriculture, self-sufficiency, energy and environment, stated that the government is “working to attract new investments for the large hydropower potential that we cannot exploit ourselves”.
The island is also currently expanding its airports and promoting tourism. Currently the only flights available to Greenland are from Reykjavik or Copenhagen.
Greenland often appears in discussions about climate change – usually in the context of films of starving polar bears, adorable Arctic foxes and rutting muskox; or melting glaciers diverting the Gulf Stream and raising global sea levels, flooding cities across the planet. Ice cores from Greenland, like those of Antarctica, help us understand historic variations in the composition of our atmosphere and in our climate, and have been vital for scientists’ understanding of the science of climate change.
These things are all true, and each Arctic species being pushed to extinction by the warming of the world is a tragedy. But what’s also true is that Greenland is home to tens of thousands of people, with their own history and culture, politics and organisations; a people who, after a thousand years of colonisation, are starting to assert both their independence from Denmark and their sovereignty in the face of the global market. And, who, along with other indigenous communities around the world, are starting to lead a fightback against the industrial, extractive capitalism that’s killing the planet.
Fall foliage season is a calendar highlight in states from Maine south to Georgia and west to the Rocky Mountains. It’s especially important in the Northeast, where fall colors attract an estimated US$8 billion in tourism revenues to New England every year.
As a forestry scientist, I’m often asked how climate change is affecting fall foliage displays. What’s clearest so far is that color changes are occurring later in the season. And the persistence of very warm, wet weather in 2021 is reducing color displays in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic. But climate change isn’t the only factor at work, and in some areas, human decisions about forest management are the biggest influences.
Longer growing seasons
Climate change is clearly making the Northeast warmer and wetter. Since 1980, average temperatures in the Northeast have increased by 0.66 degrees Fahrenheit (0.37 Celsius), and average annual precipitation has increased by 3.4 inches (8.6 centimeters) – about 8%. This increase in precipitation fuels tree growth and tends to offset stress on the trees from rising temperatures. In the West, which is becoming both warmer and drier, climate change is having greater physiological effects on trees.
My research in tree physiology and dendrochronology – dating and interpreting past events based on trees’ growth rings – shows that in general, trees in the eastern U.S. have fared quite well in a changing climate. That’s not surprising given the subtle variations in climate across much of the eastern U.S. Temperature often limits trees’ growth in cool and cold regions, so the trees usually benefit from slight warming.
In addition, carbon dioxide – the dominant greenhouse gas warming Earth’s climate – is also the molecule that fuels photosynthesis in plants. As carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere increase, plants carry out more photosynthesis and grow more.
More carbon dioxide is not automatically good for the planet – an idea often referred to as “global greening.” There are natural limits to how much photosynthesis plants can carry out. Plants need water and nutrients to grow, and supplies of these inputs are limited. And as carbon dioxide concentrations rise, plants’ ability to use it decreases – an effect known as carbon dioxide saturation.
For now, however, climate change has extended the growing season for trees in the Northeast by about 10-14 days. In my tree ring research, we routinely see trees putting on much more diameter growth now than in the past.
This effect is particularly evident in young trees, but we see it in old trees as well. That’s remarkable because old trees’ growth should be slowing down, not speeding up. Scientists in western states have even noted this acceleration in bristlecone pines that are over 4,000 years old – the oldest trees in the world.
Fall colors emerge when the growing season ends and trees stop photosynthesizing. The trees stop producing chlorophyll, the green pigment in their leaves, which absorbs energy from sunlight. This allows carotenoid (orange) and xanthophyll (yellow) pigments in the leaves to emerge. The leaves also produce a third pigment, anthocyanin, which creates red colors. A longer growing season may mean that fall colors emerge later – and it can also make those colors duller.
A changing mix of trees
Climate isn’t the only thing that affects fall colors. The types of tree species in a forest are an even bigger factor, and forest composition in the eastern U.S. has changed dramatically over the past century.
Notably, eastern forests today have more species such as red maple, black birch, tulip poplar and blackgum than they did in the early 20th century. These trees are shade-tolerant and typically grow in conditions that are neither extremely wet nor extremely dry. They also produce intense red and yellow displays in the fall.
This shift began in the 1930s, when federal agencies adopted policies that called for suppressing all wildfires quickly rather than letting some burn. At that time, much of the eastern U.S. was dominated by fire-adapted oak, pine and hickory. Without fires recurring once or twice a decade, these species fail to regenerate and ultimately decline, allowing more shade-tolerant, fire-sensitive trees like red maple to invade.
There is evidence that some tree species in the eastern U.S. are migrating to the north and west because of warming, increasing precipitation and fire suppression. This trend could affect fall colors as regions gain or lose particular species. In particular, studies indicate that the range of sugar maples – one of the best color-producing trees – is shifting northward into Canada.
Intensive logging and forest clearance across the eastern U.S. through the mid-1800s altered forests’ mix of tree species.
Forests under pressure
So far it’s clear that warming has caused a delay in peak colors for much of the East, ranging from a few days in Pennsylvania to as much as two weeks in New England. It’s not yet known whether this delay is making fall colors less intense or shorter-lasting.
But I’ve observed over the past 35 years that when very warm and wet weather extends into mid- and late October, leaves typically go from green to either dull colors or directly to brown, particularly if there is a sudden frost. This year there are few intense red leaves, which suggests that warmth has interfered with anthocyanin production. Some classic red producers, such as red maple and scarlet oak, are producing yellow leaves.
Other factors could also stress eastern forests. Climate scientists project that global warming will make tropical storms and hurricanes more intense and destructive, with higher rainfall rates. These storms could knock down trees, blow leaves off those left standing and reduce fall coloration.
Maple leaves infected with a fungal pathogen that can lead to premature leaf loss.UMass Amherst, CC BY-ND
Forests shade the earth and absorb carbon dioxide. I am proud to see an increasing number of foresters getting involved in ecological forestry, an approach that focuses on ecosystem services that forests provide, such as storing carbon, filtering water and sheltering wildlife.
Foresters can help to slow climate change by revegetating open land, increasing forests’ biodiversity and using highly adaptable tree species that are long-lived, produce many seeds and migrate over time. Shaping eastern forests to thrive in a changing climate can help preserve their benefits – including fall color displays – well into the future.
Editor’s note: From the 15th to the 22th of November, in different countries, the Glasgow Agreement is articulating mobilizations, protests and blocks against one of the biggest oil & gas companies in the world: Total.
The social alliance to take on global capitalism must be global, radical, popular, tactically, and strategically focused, while at the same time flexible and imaginative.
Is climate collapse close to being averted? How close are we to winning? Is the climate justice movement organized to win? Are current strategies and tactics enough? What else do we need to try and how fast? The Glasgow Agreement, People’s Climate Commitment, is a global platform of grassroots and social movements for climate justice. It is planning on going after French multinational Total simultaneously all around the world this November, in an action called Collapse Total, and organising climate justice caravans in all continents next Spring.
As fossil fuel investment and projects jump from country to country, as their destruction-ridden profit keeps on building on the collapse of the climate, tactics and strategies on the global scale must be tried.
The climate justice movement is pursuing the task of taking on the entire global fossil industry, that is, global capitalism. Yet, as it remains mostly a group of dispersed, uncoordinated, and loosely connected movements, how can this task become achievable? Fossil capitalism has its fingers everywhere, in each government, every press agency, every media outlet and network, in anything that money can buy. It articulates its strategies, coordinates its wars and dictates the policies that have been dooming us to climate collapse. They have known about climate change since the 1960’s. They have coordinated for decades to spread misinformation to mislead Humanity and cut the essential action to prevent climate chaos.
The climate justice movement needs a lot of imagination to break the mold of its own business as usual, like most social movements that have gotten used to normality, procedure, method and repetition. To overcome these challenges, the movement needs to permanently test new tactics and strategies.
Collapse Total is focusing on one of the many and influential tentacles of fossil fuel capitalism. From the 15th to the 22th of November, in different countries, the Glasgow Agreement is articulating mobilizations, protests and blocks against one of the biggest oil & gas companies in the world: Total. This French multinational is neck deep into promoting the climate collapse, with mass investments in new fossil fuel projects, oil and gas fields, pipelines, offshore drilling, fracking destruction, tar sands and the destruction of lives and the livelihoods of millions of indigenous communities, peasants and every landscape they set their eyes on. They have spent billions to make trillions. They have hired armies of lobbyists, mercenaries, and political campaigners to keep oil and gas flowing, in whichever situation. They have known about their impact on the climate since at least 1971, yet have always promoted denialism. They are the glowing example of the fossil fuel multinational, dooming us while hiring public relations’ experts. It has recently changed its name to Total Energies, changed its logo and announced a net zero target for 2050. Yet, Total it is planning to drill around fifty exploratory oil and gas wells this year alone (in Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Namibia, South Africa, Kenya, Lebanon, Oman, USA, Bulgaria, Bolivia, two in Angola, two in Papua New-Guinea, two in Norway, two in Malaysia, two in Mexico, three in Cyprus, three in the UK, four in Brazil, four in Myanmar, six in Guyana and eight in Suriname).
Total is one of the biggest historical contributors to the climate crisis, with higher emissions than most countries in the world. With the pushback from climate protests in the last years, they have greenwashed themselves to try and look like something else, while pushing for EACOP, a new massive pipeline in Uganda and Tanzania, increasing the production oil and gas in war-devastated Iraq, prompting a military dictatorship in Myanmar or receiving full state protection in Northern Mozambique, while local communities are devastated by climate change and gas-related terrorism. They maintain their support for fracking in Vaca Muerta, Argentina, for tar sands in Canada and oil and gas all around. They never stopped. They never will. Unless they are forced to stop.
As fossil fuel investment and projects jump from country to country, as their destruction-ridden profit keeps on building on the collapse of the climate, tactics and strategies on the global scale must be tried.
Has a similar tactic to this been tried before? Shell Must Fall is probably the referential for going after a single company, with a strong focus on Royal Dutch Shell’s AGM in the Netherlands and its shareholders, with a focus on disrupting it to prevent the company from proceeding with its regular business by disrupting its administrative order. Collapse Total proposes to act in a broader sense, by going after Total’s infrastructures, headquarters, offices, banks and gas stations, with different tactics that fit local conditions.
This is, of course, only a small step, as there are dozens of other companies willing and able to take over Total’s place that need to be dismantled, and after this action, a thorough evaluation of its impact must be made. Will it be something to replicate, to adjust or to be written off the movement’s parafernalia of tools? Does it contribute to building up the movement and to weaken fossil capitalism? Only experience will provide the answer.
On the other hand, in the Spring of 2022, a great climate justice caravan will travel in different continents, crossing territories in the frontlines of the climate crisis and the climate justice struggles to directly connect to communities. Much like great historical political caravans—the Salt March, the Selma to Montgomery march, the World March of Women—this caravan will walk for hundreds of kilometers and talk to thousands of people, to bring the climate crisis and its connections to the capitalist system of destruction and oppression to the fore. It will signal top-emitting infrastructures in its path, pointing out the culprits for the current situation. It will look to broaden alliances, campaigns, connecting struggles and peoples to achieve an ever broader scope of action and a vision for the future.
The social alliance to take on global capitalism must be global, radical, popular, tactically and strategically focused, while at the same time flexible and imaginative. It must try, try and try until it finds the tools to win. It is quite an enormous task, to take on global capitalism, and it will need to be taken one step at a time, but there’s a deadline. We need to win before we are out of time.
BREAKING: As Joe Biden talks of being a climate leader at #COP26 in Glasgow we received our first letter & update from #JessicaReznicek for the people. Jessica is a climate / water protector political prisoner in the U.S. who was labeled a terrorist just months ago by the US government for her nonviolent action against #DAPL. She asked we share this with all of you!
I am reaching back out to you to express gratitude for your love and support. These are without doubt difficult times, but your kindness helps to soften the blow. The human spirit certainly is resilient and with your prayers and friendship I am able to overcome obstacles much more gratefully.
A few updates in my world: Through the help of many supporters I am excited to say I have sent out my admissions form to the University of Colorado and in January plan to be enrolled in B.S. Sociology program.
I’ve been approved to volunteer at snow shoveling this coming winter. I’m so happy to very soon be getting outdoors more!
In 2 weeks I’ll be completing a tutoring program and will soon be tutoring my fellow inmates in GED classes, creative writing, empowering women courses and more. Great opportunity for me given so many obstacles.
I am making progress in being accepted into the PAWS program. I am currently being recommended to fill a position that will be opening in January. The new puppies will be arriving at the end of December.
As for hobbie I’m drawing a lot and learning to play the piano. Super peace-giving pastimes.
Anyway, I love you all. I truly do. I am human, so it would be dishonest to not share the other side of things. I’m battling depression and at times still in shock about where I am and for how long I’ll be here. One day at a time! Thank you again for your prayers and love, Peace, Jessica Reznicek”
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Please continue to share Jessica’s story as her appeal & petition move forward!
What this adds up to should be clear enough, yet many people who should know better choose not to see it. This is business-as- usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed, ambition-addled destruction of the wild, the unpolluted, and the nonhuman. It is the mass destruction of the world’s remaining wild places in order to feed the human economy. And without any sense of irony, people are calling this “environmentalism.”1 —PAUL KINGSNORTH
Once upon a time, environmentalism was about saving wild beings and wild places from destruction. “The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind,” Rachel Carson wrote to a friend as she finished the manuscript that would become Silent Spring. “That, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done.”2 She wrote with unapologetic reverence of “the oak and maple and birch” in autumn, the foxes in the morning mist, the cool streams and the shady ponds, and, of course, the birds: “In the mornings, which had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, and wrens, and scores of other bird voices, there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marshes.”3 Her editor noted that Silent Spring required a “sense of almost religious dedication” as well as “extraordinary courage.”4 Carson knew the chemical industry would come after her, and come it did, in attacks as “bitter and unscrupulous as anything of the sort since the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species a century before.”5 Seriously ill with the cancer that would kill her, Carson fought back in defense of the living world, testifying with calm fortitude before President John F. Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee and the U.S. Senate. She did these things because she had to. “There would be no peace for me,” she wrote to a friend, “if I kept silent.”6
Carson’s work inspired the grassroots environmental movement; the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); and the passage of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. Silent Spring was more than a critique of pesticides—it was a clarion call against “the basic irresponsibility of an industrialized, technological society toward the natural world.”7 Today’s environmental movement stands upon the shoulders of giants, but something has gone terribly wrong with it. Carson didn’t save the birds from DDT so that her legatees could blithely offer them up to wind turbines. We are writing this book because we want our environmental movement back.
Mainstream environmentalists now overwhelmingly prioritize saving industrial civilization over saving life on the planet. The how and the why of this institutional capture is the subject for another book, but the capture is near total. For example, Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute and Earth Policy Institute—someone who has been labeled as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers” and “the guru of the environmental movement”8—routinely makes comments like, “We talk about saving the planet.… But the planet’s going to be around for a while. The question is, can we save civilization? That’s what’s at stake now, and I don’t think we’ve yet realized it.” Brown wrote this in an article entitled “The Race to Save Civilization.”9
The world is being killed because of civilization, yet what Brown says is at stake, and what he’s racing to save, is precisely the social structure causing the harm: civilization. Not saving salmon. Not monarch butterflies. Not oceans. Not the planet. Saving civilization. Brown is not alone. Peter Kareiva, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, more or less constantly pushes the line that “Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of [human] people…. Conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to [human] people.”10 Bill McKibben, who works tirelessly and selflessly to raise awareness about global warming, and who has been called “probably America’s most important environmentalist,” constantly stresses his work is about saving civilization, with articles like “Civilization’s Last Chance,”11 or with quotes like, “We’re losing the fight, badly and quickly—losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.”12
We’ll bet you that polar bears, walruses, and glaciers would have preferred that sentence ended a different way.
In 2014 the Environmental Laureates’ Declaration on Climate Change was signed by “160 leading environmentalists from 44 countries” who were “calling on the world’s foundations and philanthropies to take a stand against global warming.” Why did they take this stand? Because global warming “threatens to cause the very fabric of civilization to crash.” The declaration con- cludes: “We, 160 winners of the world’s environmental prizes, call on foundations and philanthropists everywhere to deploy their endowments urgently in the effort to save civilization.”13
Coral reefs, emperor penguins, and Joshua trees probably wish that sentence would have ended differently. The entire declaration, signed by “160 winners of the world’s environmental prizes,” never once mentions harm to the natural world. In fact, it never mentions the natural world at all.
Are leatherback turtles, American pikas, and flying foxes “abstract ecological issues,” or are they our kin, each imbued with their own “wild and precious life”?14 Wes Stephenson, yet another climate activist, has this to say: “I’m not an environmentalist. Most of the people in the climate movement that I know are not environmentalists. They are young people who didn’t necessarily come up through the environmental movement, so they don’t think of themselves as environmentalists. They think of themselves as climate activists and as human rights activists. The terms ‘environment’ and ‘environmentalism’ carry baggage historically and culturally. It has been more about protecting the natural world, protecting other species, and conservation of wild places than it has been about the welfare of human beings. I come at from the opposite direction. It’s first and foremost about human beings.”15
Note that Stephenson calls “protecting the natural world, protecting other species, and conservation of wild places” baggage. Naomi Klein states explicitly in the film This Changes Everything: “I’ve been to more climate rallies than I can count, but the polar bears? They still don’t do it for me. I wish them well, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that stopping climate change isn’t really about them, it’s about us.”
And finally, Kumi Naidoo, former head of Greenpeace International, says: “The struggle has never been about saving the planet. The planet does not need saving.”16 When Naidoo said that, in December 2015, it was 50 degrees Fahrenheit at the North Pole, much warmer than normal, far above freezing in the middle of winter.
13 “Environmental Laureates’ Declaration on Climate Change,” European Environment Foundation, September 15, 2014. It shouldn’t surprise us that the person behind this declaration is a solar energy entrepreneur. It probably also shouldn’t surprise us that he’s begging for money.
14 “Wild and precious life” is from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day.” House of Light (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992).
