In this short excerpt from the last episode of The Green Flame podcast, Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith offer a poetic reading from a piece by C.S. Lewis, originally written in 1948, in which the author speaks of the threat of nuclear war and how to live in an age of existential threats.
“In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. How are we to live in an atomic age? I am tempted to reply, ‘why as you would have lived in the 16th century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might have landed and cut your throat every night, or indeed as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented, and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors: anesthetics. We have that still.
It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things: working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a a game of darts, not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies, a microbe can do that, but they need not dominate our minds.”
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.
Coronavirus rarely kills people directly—so why are people dying? This piece from Paul Feather, animist farmer and writer, challenges simplistic, reductionist thinking, and proposes a synthesis approach to understanding the current crisis.
Sixty five thousand, six hundred and fifty two. As of this writing, John Hopkins reports this death toll from coronavirus [the official death toll is now above 100,000].
It’s strange to me, the way we count these deaths. I would like to count them differently. I would like to use science, even though the scientists won’t. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how you count things, but this particular number—or rather its rate of growth—has lost us our constitutional right to assemble. A third of the world’s population is on lockdown with more to come no doubt, and I fear for the suffering that results from these restrictions.
So maybe we should check our numbers.
Our culture has a strange idea of cause and effect.
It’s very reduced; we have a tendency to explain very complex situations with very singular causes. (This is often useful: reduction is the key to controlling things, and to placing blame.)
However, reducing everything down to single causes—like cause of death from a virus—isn’t helpful for deep understanding of complex situations, nor is it good science. I’ll be cautious of speaking for cultures that aren’t mine, but a broad study of language and culture would probably show that there are other ways to perceive the world and better forms of science. This reduced view just happens to be the one we’re born into.
There are many reasons that people die. This is especially true in a situation as complex as global pandemic where economic factors clash with public health and culture; where death can result or be prevented by membership in a privileged group or by access to technology.
In such a complex system, we must resist the temptation and habit to reduce the cause of death to a single root and throw out every other contributing factor no matter how important it may be. Many of the reasons that people are now dying are long-term, structural problems that make us fragile to pandemic. These are the macro-causes of death, but we tend to ignore them in favor of short-term micro-causes, such as the presence of this particular virus at this particular time.
Here’s a metaphor. If I remove 90% of the structural members in your house and then the wind blows your house down, should we say that the wind caused your house to fall? Would that be good science? And if many houses had been sabotaged in this way, but we published statistics about house failures due to wind damage (mentioning nothing about sabotage), wouldn’t these be misleading statistics? And any policy based on those numbers bad policy?
Our health has been sabotaged. The saboteurs continue to profit. Death was coming. This disease is only the wind.
Cause of Death: The Chronic Health Crisis
There are many studies showing that people are much more likely to die after coronavirus infection if they already suffer from one of the many chronic health problems that plague our civilization such as diabetes, hypertension, COPD, cancer, and more. In some studies, as many as 99% of patients who died after contracting COVID-19 had a comorbidity of this kind (and that wouldn’t even include unreported asymptomatic cases). Further, it’s also clear that comorbidities make us more likely to contract the virus in the first place.
What this means is that tens of thousands of people are dying from complex situations involving at least two causes—virus and chronic condition—but we are reducing that situation to a single cause when we report the cause of death as COVID-19. These chronic conditions inflate COVID-19 death tolls, and the roles of Pepsi-co, Nestlé, and McDonald’s; Philip Morris, Bayer, and Pfizer; Monsanto, Sinopec, and Shell—the role of the poisons produced by these companies are not accounted for. These factors are being distilled out of the death tolls.
If we accounted for comorbidity as a very well-documented factor in deaths that have occurred over the past several months—as well as for those that will occur in the upcoming months—we would not attribute these deaths to the virus. We would, in fact, see a sharp rise in death rates associated with the chronic diseases of civilization. Policy initiatives and public response to that spike in death rates might look more like shutting down the local Frito-Lay plant than taking our right to assembly and confining abused women in homes with their now unemployed abusers.
Please Note: for some reason, when I’ve made this argument people seem to hear that I think the deaths of sick people don’t count, because they were sick anyway, or they were old, and they don’t matter. That is NOT what I am saying at all. I am refusing to distill the cause for these deaths into a virus when people have been dying all along and will continue to die from poisons that corporations produce and shove down our throats or release into our waters and soils. I insist that these deaths be counted, but I refuse that they should be counted so wrongly. It is true that COVID-19 is a factor in these deaths, but co-morbidity is an almost necessary condition for death as well, and our death tolls do not reflect this.
Sixty nine thousand, four hundred, and forty four. I step away from my writing for a few hours, dig a little in the garden, plant a row of potatoes, and 3,792 people have died “from coronavirus.”
There are other, perhaps less well-studied factors in these deaths as well. It is particularly strange how we’ll reduce cause of death to a virus, but then suddenly open our minds to other factors when it suits our political agenda or narrative. So for instance, my liberal friends will dispute the above argument about chronic disease as a cause of death but blithely attribute (and perhaps rightly) any number of deaths to Trump’s early denial of the crisis and his refusal to mobilize infrastructure to produce more ventilators.
Why don’t we have enough ventilators?
It would be possible to have a culture that was prepared for this tragedy. Many experts have foreseen it, and the only real answer to our lack of preparation is that we didn’t care. We do not value caring. Riane Eisler, in her book The Real Wealth of Nations, sketches the structure of a caring economy that would—among other things—reduce incarceration, empower women, and fairly compensate caregivers, healthcare workers, and educators. Such a structure would certainly value preparedness for pandemic.
Humans in other places and times have demonstrated caring societies. For instance, in The Chalice and the Blade, Eisler finds that Neolithic European societies were unmarked by social stratification or accumulation of private wealth. For thousands of years, these matrilineal goddess worshiping people developed technologies to “enhance quality of life” rather than for weaponry. However, towards the beginning of the historical period, invaders conquered these ancient partnership societies, and an unfortunate cultural transformation took place.
After a series of invasions, metalwork in this era began to be increasingly used for spears, swords, and daggers rather than fishhooks, awls, and woodworking tools; ‘chieftain graves’ appeared, in which an elite strongman was buried among rich gifts and the skeletons of his slaves and concubines. The symbols uncovered after this conquest indicate a patriarchal dominator culture that worshipped the blade, and who perceived power not as a generative force, but as the power to destroy, conquer, rape, and plunder. Modern civilization was born when the conquering dominator/patriarchy co-opted the symbols, myths, stories, laws, and writing of the matrilineal, goddess worshipping, egalitarian culture that they subjugated to create the society in in which we live today.
So we may blame Trump for his failure to mobilize our infrastructure to produce masks and ventilators, and I certainly believe in holding uncaring leaders accountable for their failures. But, we should not confuse this placement of blame with a ‘cause’ of death, for the systems that created this situation arose from what Friedrich Engels described as, “The world historical defeat of the female sex,” thousands of years ago. Irrespective of individual leaders, our dominator culture will never care if we have enough ventilators or enough doctors, nurses, and caregivers, or even if people die as long as there’s profit to be made. It’s slightly harder to know how to adjust COVID-19 death tolls to account for our uncaring culture than it is for well-studied chronic conditions, but I’d take any deaths that result from exceeding the capacity of our healthcare system, and chalk those up to the patriarchy.
Cause of Death: Colonization / Extraction
Certainly some number of otherwise healthy people with access to healthcare and a ventilator will be killed by this virus. But what caused the virus? (One problem with reduction is that it always leads to an endless chain of ‘causes.’) As endlessly hungry industrialized nations force their way into wild lands (or force people off of their native lands so that they flee into wild lands) multinational corporations expose us to more and more zoonotic diseases. This has become such a problem that the US Agency for International Development has financed a project called Predict to anticipate these outbreaks in order to rape these lands without such inconvenience. (Pandemic isn’t good for the bottom line after all.)
So, what portion of pandemic death tolls can’t be attributed to the prevalence of chronic health problems or our uncaring economic system starts to look like the exported cost of colonization by multinational corporations destroying what remains of the wild.
Sixty nine thousand, four hundred, and seventy nine. In the time it took me to write these last paragraphs, John Hopkins reports thirty-five more people died of civilization.
Cause of Death: Hierarchy
I do wish people would stay at home. However complex these systems may be, and however nuanced or broad our analysis, we should act to slow the progression of this disease. And if we did so voluntarily, there need be no attack on our rights. Why don’t we do this?
It’s hardly reasonable to reduce the behavior of millions of people to any meaningful cause, but we could muse on this a little. Who is most at risk from this disease? Death rates increase exponentially with age above sixty years, while deaths of people under thirty are mostly anecdotal. There is a clear generational divide in the risks that people face during this crisis, and there have been many frustrated critics who’ve observed that young people disproportionally fail at social distancing. But why wouldn’t young people act to protect their elders?
That’s an easy one. Young people have grown up with bleak prospects for the future and they can see that their elders who call the shots don’t much care. Young people have faced gun violence in their schools; surveyed oceans full of plastic; heard increasingly dire predictions about climate change; numbly watched as rhinos, orangutans, and polar bears marched toward extinction, and generally try not to think about what might be in their water and food. They have been defrauded by the educational system and placed in crippling debt without being provided skills that are relevant in this rapidly changing society. I could detail a list of grievances for young people against their elders that is every bit as long as Thomas Jefferson‘s against the King of England, and young people are barely more represented in our government than were colonial Americans.
We have a hierarchical social structure that concentrates power in the hands of certain groups of people who benefit at the expense of others. It is a complex arrangement of many different and overlapping groups that each exploit or are exploited by other groups. In this system, it is not reasonable to expect that any exploited group would voluntarily sacrifice their own freedom and well-being to protect the group that exploits them. Nor should they. Young people (and their children) will suffer hardship, have fewer resources, and probably live shorter lives to pay for the excesses of their parents and grandparents; and this is an injustice that we knowingly commit. Yet people act exasperated to see young people out on the beach during a pandemic and ask, “How can they be so irresponsible?”
We are now seeing—and will soon be seeing more—the deadly results of this hierarchical arrangement. What if older generations had made a good faith effort to stand up for their own children? What if elders had ceded some power, capital, and influence to the demands of future generations—demands that were loudly and clearly spoken but ignored? This did not happen, and now our hierarchical culture cannot muster the solidarity and mutual aid that would be needed to prevent deaths in this time of crisis.
Cause of Death: Civilization
The only good reduction is a synthesis. If we were to combine all of these causal factors, would there be a word that could contain them all? Could we then reduce these deaths that they tell us are caused by a virus to something that speaks for all of these causes together—of patriarchy, chronic disease, colonization, hierarchy, along with others upon which I have not elaborated: globalization, urbanization, political infighting—and what would that word be? It could only be our culture or our civilization as a whole.
When we bring all of these causes together, we must also note that COVID-19 death tolls pale in comparison to the daily death and suffering that results from that this collection of factors.
Malnourishment alone (certainly a legacy of colonization) kills 15,000 children every day, yet English speaking people in the global North don’t bring similar urgency to this crisis or even perceive it as an emergency, because the children dying are mostly black, brown, and far away.
It is only now—when our violent civilization generates a threat capable of piercing the armor of privilege—that we act to curb the effects of this violence; and then only by seeking to suppress the most micro-causal factor in this great chain of causes. As this micro-cause directly affects the global upper class, we fixate upon it, and most of us can’t perceive the extensive scope and nature of this crisis.
What to do with this analysis?
First, I think we should hold scientific organizations such as the WHO and the CDC accountable and demand that they publish uninflated death tolls that account for well-studied macro-causes of death such as co-morbidities.
This would be simple accounting, because it merely incorporates well-published data from studies that are entirely valid even in the language spoken by the scientific community. This alone would rapidly deflate COVID-19 death tolls and ease frightened citizens’ outcry for these draconian lockdowns that might endanger more people than they protect. It would also create a basis upon which to work toward dismantling the structures that are actually killing people. (Ideally, there would be some effort to account for economic factors that embody patriarchy, externalized costs of colonization, hierarchical power distributions, etc., but that might be a bit much for the modern scientific mind to bear.)
Additionally, I think we should refuse to cede the language space that attributes these deaths to COVID-19. I think we should go a step further than some existing observations that this virus is a disease of civilization, and refuse to acknowledge the virus as being a cause of death at all—or at least the most important one. For while coronavirus infection is a necessary condition for death from COVID-19, there are many other necessary conditions as well, and there are many cases where infection carries no risk at all or goes unnoticed. I think we should maintain our focus upon structural causes that killed people before this virus ever showed up, that are killing people now, and that will certainly kill people next year if we don’t completely restructure our society and destroy the economic system that makes those deaths profitable.
Seventy thousand, four hundred, and eighty two. I typically sleep on a piece of writing before making final edits, and in that time Johns Hopkins reports one thousand and three people have died from civilization. Seven and a half thousand children died from starvation in that same period of time.
The United States of America was founded on stolen land. The legacy of violence, discrimination, and criminal disregard for indigenous people continues today.
April 7, 2020
The undersigned Indigenous peoples and organizations write this letter to denounce the discriminatory response to COVID-19 and express our deep concern of the situation faced by hundreds of thousands of diverse Indigenous peoples of the immigrant community in the United States (U.S.), those in detention centers under the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), those survivingin makeshift camps on the northern Mexico border under the U.S. government’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), who are being systematically excluded in the COVID-19 pandemic response mechanisms.
We recognize that the global COVID-19 pandemic is affecting people indiscriminately. However, we highlight that the most vulnerable are the most affected and devastated by this pandemic: those living inextreme poverty and chronic malnutrition who are unable to access or pay for medical care, the undocumented, and those with limited English and/or Spanish languages, as they cannot understand the information about COVID-19 and/or express their medical and financial needs during this pandemic.
The lack of recognition of our Indigenous identity and the exclusion of our languages at the local, national, and international levels puts our lives at risk, threatens the survival of our People, and violates our rights of self-determination, autonomy and to be free from any kind of discrimination.
Language exclusion is illegal due to Executive Order 13166 regulating access to services provided to Persons with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) by federal departments, their agencies and the organizations contracted by them.
The Departments of Homeland Security (DHS), Health and Human Services (HHS), and The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) of The United States Department of State (DOS) program etc., are excluding our peoples and communities at the Southern border and throughout the U.S.
Specifically, the rights established in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), describe the minimum human rights standards such as the right to revitalize and use our languages (Art. 13), establish and use the media in our own languages (Art. 16), the right to better economic and social conditions, such as health, (Art. 21) and the right to determine and develop priorities in all areas, including health (Art. 23).
We are deeply concerned that these minimum standards are not met and as a result, our peoples are being excluded from essential information and services to survive the Pandemic.
The continued lack of information in Indigenous languages predisposes our peoples, an already extremely vulnerable group, to more difficulties and health impacts. We face the exclusion of our Indigenous languages, as well as the lack of recognition of our existence, resulting in dangerous consequences for our peoples and our survival. As background, the deaths of five Maya children at the facilities of the Border Patrol (BP) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) before the pandemic indicates, unfortunately, what wecan expect.
Faced by this situation, we Indigenous peoples and organizations are organizing and articulating efforts to respond to the needs and priorities of our peoples in our own geographic regions and at the national level. Asan example, we are creating materials in Indigenous languages with Public Service Announcement videos on notices, public services, and information about COVID-19, printed materials, and cards that identify our primary language (I speak cards).
However, we are deeply concerned that our peoples, who constitute a large majority in the public services sector in urban and rural areas (for example, agriculture, construction, domestic services, and cleaning); mostly undocumented, without health insurance and those living in poverty, are not being adequately informed about resources and services at this time. For example, being informed of where to find food and health centers and/or access to computers for distance learning for their sons and daughters in their respective locations. We are concerned that most members of our community are unable to benefit from local, regional and national programs and services due to their legal status.
We express our outrage because in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, our community continues to suffer deportations, family separations, immigration raids, and the lack or null attention in cases of people in detention with contagion of the virus under the responsibility of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The criminalization of our communities will only increase fear and panic and will unnecessarily contribute to dangerous conditions resulting in the further spread of COVID-19 perpetuating genocide against Indigenous peoples, a genocide that has a long and dark history in the United States, and throughout the Americas.
FACED BY THIS SITUATION, WE REQUEST THE SUPPORT TO INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND ORGANIZATIONS, ANDTOOUR INDIGENOUS PROPOSAL BEFORE COVID-19
First, that the local, municipal, state and federal governments consult with our organizations and peoples to learn about our existence and needs.
Second, that the different government agencies support strategies already led by Indigenous peoples rooted in our experience and knowledge of the needs and priorities identified by our own peoples and communities.
Third, financial support:
Any legislation to provide COVID-19 relief and the benefits derived from such legislation must be accessible to Indigenous peoples.
The Interpretation of COVID-19 services and benefits legislated by Congress at the end of March 2020 in Indigenous languages.
Technical support to our organizations for our Educational Campaigns on COVID-19.
The creation of a communication mechanism / platform such as a telephone line and a website aimed for Indigenous peoples in priority languages so that they are aware of the resources available to them.
Fourth, the assignment of contact people between government agencies and our organizations to support prevention, mitigation, and monitoring of COVID-19, and the exchange of community and government resources.
During this time of crisis for humanity, we unite as one voice and express our concerns, but also our recommendations to meet the needs of our peoples, who survive their respective realities based in our languages, traditions, worldview and experiences.
Together, valuing and respecting the diversity of all our communities, peoples and cultures, we will be able to respond to the needs of our peoples and future generations.
LA Comunidad Ixim, Maya Collective in Los Angeles, CA
Alianza de Organizaciones Guatemaltecas de Houston
Red de Pueblos Trasnacionales/Transnational Villages Network (Pueblos Nahuas-Tlaxcalteca, Mixteco y Nahua/ Nahuas-Tlaxcalteca, Mixteco and Nahua Peoples)
Red de Intérpretes Indígenas/Network of Indigenous Interpreters (Pueblos Mixteco, Tlapaneco, Nahua, Mam, Cuicateco, and Kichwa)
Colectivo de Intérpretes Comunitarios Pixan Konob’de Champaign IL
Ben Warner relates the coronavirus pandemic to the wetiko disease, what Jack Forbes calls “a spiritual sickness with a physical vector”—the disease of colonization.
By Ben Warner
A virus has been infecting humanity for centuries and it threatens all life on earth. This virus of selfishness is named Wetiko by many indigenous Americans. It is a form of psychosis, an infection of the mind and spirit that allows the creation of this cannibalistic culture often called Western Civilisation.
“Now, were Columbus and his fellow European exploiters simply “greedy” men whose “ethics”were such as to allow for mass slaughter and genocide? I shall argue that Columbus was a wétiko, that he was mentally ill or insane, the carrier of a terribly contagious psychological disease, the wétiko psychosis. The Native people he described were, on the other hand, sane people with a healthy state of mind. Sanity or healthy normality among humans and other living creatures involves a respect for other forms of life and other individuals, as I have described earlier. I believe that is the way people have lived (and should live). The wétiko psychosis, and the problems it creates, have inspired many resistance movements and efforts at reform or revolution. Unfortunately, most of these efforts have failed because they have never diagnosed the wétiko as an insane person whose disease is extremely contagious.”
Although Covid-19 is not “the cure” as some misanthropes claim, it does expose some truths, allowing us time to identify the real problems and reflect on ways to build an effective resistance to solve it.
What kind of culture needs a virus that attacks the respiratory system to force it to make behavioral changes that reduce levels (in China, the UK, Australia and worldwide) of nitrogen dioxide, a gas that increases the likelihood of respiratory problems? The decline of air pollution over China is estimated to have saved 77,000 lives.
What kind of culture needs a respiratory virus to save people from choking to death on the poison it produces? A wetiko culture.
While reports of nature and dolphins returning to the ancient city of Venice were exaggerated, why did the tweet that started it become viral? Why did so many people love the idea that nature might be reclaiming one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations?
It is likely that globalized capitalism caused this pandemic. What other form of human organization would lead to a marketplace selling highly-stressed animals, thus creating the conditions for a virus to cross the species barrier? Even if the virus originated in America, as some claim, it was spread by globalized transport. What other system would create the trade links and transportation to allow this virus to spread rapidly?
There is a strong likelihood of more viruses emerging with every bit of nature we destroy. Industrial civilization is the only human culture that extinguishes biodiversity at such an unprecedented level that it makes mass pandemics almost inevitable.
In a sane and healthy culture families forced to stay at home due to a disaster would not fear violence from members of their own household. In the Wetiko infected culture we have already seen an increase of men inflicting domestic violence (worldwide, France, the UK, the USA, South Africa) on the women and children they should be caring for. This culture of dominance is one we should all reject. By objectifying every being and viewing them simply as resources to be consumed; women, forests and all of wild nature become resources to be used, abused, tortured and killed.
Medical experts predicted this crisis. Governments and the ruling class knew what was coming, but did not meaningfully try to stop it. They simply planned the best way they could extract capital from it. They asked themselves how they could turn the virus and its consequences into a resource. This neoliberalcabal, includes the World Economic Forum (an organization which only represents leading global companies) and, which is now in partnership with the United Nations and World Health Organization. The response to this crisis is being controlled by global corporations. Do you think they care about you, or their profit margins?
The global elite tell us “we are all in this together.” If that is true then why did Prince Charles and Boris Johnson get tested when displaying mild symptoms? Meanwhile our nurses and doctors remain untested. The authorities are using this pandemic as an excuse to take away our rights and force us to comply with their agenda. How exactly have the authorities provided the services you need?
Consequences of Economic Shutdown
The community-strengthening sectors such as; arts and culture, local markets and small businesses have been forced to close and are unlikely to survive. They could be taken over by multinationals or simply disappear. Sectors that serve capital (finance, big tech, mining, construction, energy, industrial agriculture etc.) either continue unabated with their destruction or will be revived and bailed out when the lockdown ends. In fact promises of bailouts have already started.
Working class people cannot work from home. They have to work to stock the supermarket shelves and make sure we have food to eat. Most of these people are women, so once again, poor women will suffer the most. The majority of the global poor do not have access to healthcare and are starving to death amid food shortages (the Philippines, India)
It is likely that after this pandemic, governments and the global elite will implement the green new deal. This will not benefit the environment nor will it benefit poor communities. It will benefit the corporate sector. What is happening currently may have far reaching implications; we may never return to normal. We are already seeing countries pass laws to force medical treatments on patients who do not want them. In some countries (e.g. Sweden) there has already been microchipping of people. It is voluntary at the moment, but for how long? Elsewhere there is evermore increased, intrusive surveillance. People are being fined thousands of dollars for simply leaving their homes. Some medical professionals are advocating for infrared-visible tattoos for those who have been vaccinated—a procedure with unknown effects on health and privacy. Could we see governments make this compulsory?
It is hardly surprising that with at least 200 species going extinct each day we are fast approaching the 6th mass extinction. What else can we expect from a culture ruled by psychopaths?
Covid-19 provides the privileged with a frightening glimpse of what many face in the present and what we are very likely to face on an increasing scale in the future. Panic buying, massmigrations, starvation, reduction or complete loss of civil freedoms, social unrest and nations switching from fake democracies (inverted totalitarianism) to outright dictatorships. As species extinction, soil depletion and climate change continue to accelerate we could all face a more extreme version of this.
What Can We Do?
In this culture, there are people who value (and hold) power and money over relationships and love. By taking a bird’s eye view we can remember the importance of building communities and take decisive, effective action. Those of us who value relationships and love rather than money and power need to prepare ourselves. We need to help others prepare. While the media propagates panic, we need to organize collectively.
We must engage with every form of effective resistance. We need to talk with each other. We need to be united. We must collaborate with others whenever we share a common goal. Here are some specific examples.
Go On Strike
In late 2019 and early 2020, striking French electrical workers cut off the power to major corporations, including Amazon and government agencies. Previous French strikes have seen transport workers park trucks across the entrance to oil refineries and ports, shutting them down. We can learn from the French workers’ unions. A strategic general strike could shut down whole industries.
Build Community Defense Networks and Practice Discipline and Skills
Neighborhood organizing. The military and the police serve the interests of the ruling class. We should keep them out of our neighborhoods by forming our own defense forces and patrols. Emphasizing community safety and mutual aid. We should confront, record and prevent racist policing. This is one way to create a sense of neighborhood sovereignty. Refuse to report on your neighbors, instead help each other out. Defend small business and community infrastructure, drive out industries exploiting neighborhood land and labor, and resist corporate takeover.
Engage in Rent Strikes and Debt Strikes
The economy doesn’t need our labor, as evidenced by, the UK government paying people not to work. To continue the economy needs us as consumers. We could stop paying rent and paying off our debts. We could boycott the economy altogether and provide for our own needs from a land base. We have the collective power to take down the economic system.
Create Mutual Aid Systems and Local Food
We could grow food together, providing for others in our neighborhoods. Get to know neighbors in person. We need to abandon any belief that the government will provide for us and start providing for ourselves. As millions of people lose their jobs, they will see that the money economy does not serve us. This could promote opportunities to explore localized economies that do not depend on money and the global economy.
Learn and Teach Practical Skills
Offer skill shares such as food production, permaculture, maintenance and repair, crafts, direct democracy, local culture, arts and healing. All these skills can be learnt and taught. Learning together strengthens community and supports neighborhood well-being.
Raise Awareness About Political Issues and Revolutionary Analysis
Increase understanding about where political power is held, and how it is being exercised. It is in globalist institutions (World Economic Forum, World Bank, United Nations, International Monetary Fund) and Big Tech. It is not in regional, national or local governments. Power is being exercised electronically, including through surveillance, it need not be exercised overtly.
The more organized we can be in building resistance, in localizing economies, the easier it will be for everyone. Global economic collapse is inevitable. Bringing it about and/or supporting transition is important work. We can find vulnerabilities in the structure, as the French Union workers did. We can start conversations to consider the possibility of life without electricity as an option. Without it the ruling class have fewer ways to extend power over us. We could support direct action to target the electricity grid and shut down the energy industry.We could be at the point in history when revolution to overthrow capitalism is inevitable. We need to be ready.
Ben Warner is a longtime guardian with DGR, a teacher, and an activist.
Disclaimer: This article was based on information and evidence available at the time of writing. The situation is changing quickly. Please, post links to anything you believe is relevant in the comments section, so the article can be updated as necessary. The links and questions in this article invite you to seek answers for yourself, engage critical thinking and investigate. You may not agree with everything. However, now more than ever, we need to collaborate and unite for revolutionary change, whenever and wherever we can.
These are very important questions. They deserve a detailed response.
We must begin with this: no one has a plan to deal with nuclear issues, because there are no solutions. This is the insanity of the nuclear industry: to willfully unearth and concentrate radioactive material in a way that increases its deadliness by millions of times. Nuclear waste will remain toxic for billions of years.
How do we react to this? Where do we go from here? It’s essential to debate this issue. Let’s begin by examining the three main parts of the nuclear industry: nuclear weapons, nuclear power plants and reactors, and nuclear waste.
Nuclear Weapons
Nuclear weapons are quite stable, and will not—as far as we know—explode on their own.
Alan Weisman writes, “The fissionable material inside a basic uranium bomb is separated into chunks that, to achieve the critical mass necessary for detonation, must be slammed together with a speed and precision that don’t occur in nature.”
The biggest danger of nuclear weapons is that they will be used in warfare. The threat is very real. And this risk will continue as long as nuclear arsenals are maintained in working order. And they are not just being maintained. They’re being expanded.
Even if nuclear weapons are never again used, they will corrode over time, releasing radiation from the weapons-grade uranium and plutonium inside them. This radiation will seep into groundwater and soil.
While high-energy industrial societies continue, the threat of nuclear war will only grow more serious. We support all efforts to reduce the risk of nuclear war through de-armament, dismantling of the industry, regulation and control measures, etc.
Nuclear Power Plants and Reactors
There are more than 440 nuclear reactors around the world, and each is a disaster waiting to happen.
Nuclear reactors are most dangerous in two situations: first, as at Fukushima, when direct physical damage to the plant disables back-up generators and other safety equipment. And second, as at Chernobyl, when design flaws combine with user error to create a catastrophic failure.
Charles Perrow called these types of situations “system accidents.” A system accident is when multiple failures in a complex system interact with each other in unforeseen ways, creating a larger unexpected problem. His conclusion was that nuclear technology should be abandoned completely.
Reactors are designed to cope with simple black-outs, so failure of the electrical grid is one of the least dangerous of possible disruptions to a nuclear plant. It is unlikely that a single dramatic blackout will collapse the industrial economy and cause widespread nuclear catastrophe.
However, lasting power disruptions to nuclear facilities can lead to meltdowns. This will happen no matter what. Increasing extreme weather events, economic instability, refugee crises and war will lead to blackouts and brownouts. Societies must prepare for this by safely dismantling nuclear power plants as quickly as possible.
It is possible that in the future, an increasing number of medium-scale power disruptions will encourage the decommission of nuclear power plants, or at least force closer attention to safety precautions. For example, several countries have started to shut down or put on hold their nuclear programs since the Fukushima disaster in Japan.
We support the expansion of these efforts. The nuclear power industry must be shut down. Engineers, politicians, and civil society have a responsibility to shut down the nuclear industry and dismantle it as “safely” as possible. The problem is, there is no safe when you are dealing with materials that will kill for billions of years.
And not only is the nuclear industry not shutting down—it is expanding. According to the World Nuclear Association, there are 55 nuclear power plants currently under construction.
Nuclear Waste
The most serious problem related to the nuclear industry isn’t reactors, but the radioactive waste they create. In the United States alone, there is at least 500,000 tons of Uranium-235—depleted uranium leftover from nuclear reactors. This material has a radioactive half-life of 4.5 billion years.
Depleted reactor fuel is (oddly enough) is more than a million times as radioactive as when it was raw ore. And the amount of it is growing steadily. Globally, around 13,000 tons of depleted fuel accumulates every year.
Ironically, depleted Uranium is often used in warfare, since it makes effective armor-piercing ammunition. In some locations, notably Falluja, U.S. military depleted uranium ammunition has led to explosions in birth defects and cancer.
Stored radioactive waste was the major issue with the Fukushima meltdown in 2011—not the power plant itself. Stored radioactive waste was the largest concern during the fires near the Los Alamos nuclear waste storage area in both 2000 and 2011, and after the near-flooding of a nuclear reactor in Mississippi in 2011. The reactor at any given nuclear plant contains only a small amount of active fuel compared to the spent fuel held within temporary storage facilities.
There is no good way to store this waste. No matter how it is contained—baked into glass sheets, poured into 55-gallon drums, encased in giant steel flasks and entombed in concrete, buried under mountains—it is still a threat to future life. Metal corrodes. Glass breaks. Earthquakes upend mountains. And 500 million years from now, this material will still kill any living creature that approaches it.
Are We “Hostages to Modernity”?
In a recent public panel, a public intellectual used the phrase “hostages to modernity” to describe how we are ‘locked in’ to a high-energy, industrial way of life because we must steward the nuclear industry. Is this true? Are we hostages to modernity?
In a sense, we are. The technical knowledge and engineering capacity to deal with nuclear issues as safely as possible is the sole domain of industrial society.
And yet this is an oversimplification of a complex situation. As we have seen, industrial societies are creating more nuclear power, more weapons, and more toxic waste far faster than any dismantling or cleanup is proceeding. And any “cleanup” that is being done is necessarily partial. Chernobyl is still toxic, as is Rocky Flats, Los Alamos, and Fukushima. There is no way to clean up these problems—only to mitigate some of the dangers.
So What Is To Be Done?
We believe the most responsible approach combines accelerated dismantling and cleanup of the nuclear industry using modern tools with a rapid dismantling of industrialism itself.
The ruling class is building more nuclear power and pushing us ever deeper into a full-on ecological apocalypse. Species extinctions. Extreme weather. Ocean acidification. Dead zones. Overfishing. Desertification. We are in a situation of converging crises.
In these dangerous times, nuclear meltdowns are just one of the catastrophes we face. And regardless of the scale of their horror, we have seen that life can survive nuclear catastrophe. The current “exclusion” zone around Fukushima encompasses about 600 square kilometres of land. This temporary boundary will probably — like Chernobyl—ironically end up ecologically richer over the coming decades. Chernobyl was a horrible disaster. Yet it has had a positive ecological outcome: industrial human activity has been kept out of the area and wildlife is flourishing. There are now packs of wolves, endangered horses, wild boar and roe deer running wild in Chernobyl. It’s one of the most important wild bird areas in all of Europe. Hanford is the same. The nuclear waste at Hanford keeps one stretch of the Columbia River more wild than anywhere else, and it is this stretch that is the most important section of the river for wild fish.
This is not to say that the radiation doesn’t harm wildlife. It’s estimated that there is 50% less biodiversity in the most radioactive areas around Chernobyl.
Nonetheless, it is clear that the day-to-day workings of industrial civilization are more destructive to life on this planet than a nuclear catastrophe. It would be hard to do worse than Chernobyl.
More nuclear disasters will almost inevitably occur in the coming decades, whether or not the electrical grid is dismantled. Hazardous radioactive waste will accumulate as long as industrial civilization continues, and there are no safe long-term storage facilities anywhere in the world. So nuclear reactors will become more and more dangerous as larger and larger stockpiles of spent fuel are kept on-site.
Future nuclear disasters from shoddily-maintained plants will be very bad, but business as usual is far more destructive. And while nuclear radiation diminishes over time, unless something decisive is done, greenhouse gases levels will increase faster and faster as they pass tipping points.
There is no easy answer here. There is no simple solution. There is only the urgency that comes from confronting a stark reality. The nuclear industry must be dismantled—just like the fossil fuel industry, the mining industry, the industrial logging and fishing industries, the industrial agriculture industry. It must be shut down.
Further Reading and Videos
Nuclear weapons, power and waste create an immense amount of risk to the entire natural world (including humans). A number of civilian and military nuclear accidents have happened. These lists are incomplete, only include accidents, and do not account for the planned and deliberate harm caused by the mining, production, storage, waste disposal, or use of radioactive materials at weapons.
On top of that, mining for uranium itself is destructive to the land as well as the lives that depend on the land. Here’s an article about Uranium Mining On Navajo Indian Land.
This excerpt comes from the Introduction to Dahr Jamail‘s book, The End of Ice. Dahr Jamail is an award winning journalist and author who is a full-time staff reporter for Truthout.org. His work is currently focusing on Anthropogenic Climate Disruption.
Featured image: a rapidly melting glacier on Tahoma (Mt. Rainier), by Max Wilbert.
Our planet is rapidly changing, and what we are witnessing is unlike anything that has occurred in human, or even geologic, history. The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, both greenhouse gases, has been scientific fact for decades, and according to NASA, “There is no question that increased levels of greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response.” Evidence shows that greenhouse gas emissions are causing the Earth to warm ten times faster than it should, and the ramifications of this are being felt, quite literally, throughout the entire biosphere. Oceans are warming at unprecedented rates, droughts and wildfires of increasing severity and frequency are altering forests around the globe, and the Earth’s cryosphere—the parts of the Earth so cold that water is frozen into ice or snow—is melting at an ever-accelerating rate. The subsea permafrost in the Arctic is thawing, and we could experience a methane “burp” of previously trapped gas at any moment, causing the equivalent of several times the total amount of CO2 humans have emitted to be released into the atmosphere. The results would be catastrophic.
Climate disruption brings with it extreme weather, too, such as hurricanes and floods. For instance, a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, leading to an increase in the frequency of severe major rain events, such as Hurricane Harvey over Houston during the summer of 2017, which dropped so much rain that the weight of the water actually caused the Earth’s crust to sink two centimeters.
Earth has not seen current atmospheric CO2 levels since the Pliocene, some 3 million years ago. Three-quarters of that CO2 will still be here in five hundred years. Given that it takes a decade to experience the full warming effects of CO2 emissions, we are still that far away from experiencing the impact of all the CO2 that we are currently emitting. Even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions, it would take another 25,000 years for most of what is currently in the atmosphere to be absorbed into the oceans. Climate disruption is progressing faster than ever, and faster than predicted. Seventeen of the eighteen hottest years [now, eighteen of the nineteen hottest years] ever recorded have occurred since the year 2001. The distress signals from our overheated planet are all around us, with reports, studies, and warnings increasing daily. Every single worst-case prediction made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about the rise in temperatures, extreme weather, sea levels, and the increasing CO2 content in the atmosphere have fallen short of reality. Countless glaciers, rivers, lakes, forests, and species are already vanishing at a pace never seen before, and all of this from increasing the global mean temperature by “only” 1°C above preindustrial baseline temperatures. According to some scientists, it could rise as much as a 10°C by the year 2100.6
A study led by James Hansen, the former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warned that even staying within a 2°C temperature-warming limit has caused unstoppable melting in both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. This will raise global sea levels by as much as ten feet by the year 2050, inundating numerous major coastal cities with seawater.7 New York, Boston, Miami, Tampa, New Orleans, Jakarta, Singapore, Osaka, Tokyo, Mumbai, Kolkata, Dhaka, and Ho Chi Minh City are only a few examples of cities that will, sooner or later, have to be moved or abandoned to the sea.
Mountaineering in today’s climate-disrupted world is a vastly different endeavor than it used to be. Glaciers are vanishing before our eyes, having shrunk to the lowest levels ever recorded, and they are now melting faster than ever. In North America, 70 percent of the glaciers in western Canada are projected to be gone by 2100. Montana’s Glacier National Park will most likely not have any active glaciers by 2030. The Matanuska Glacier’s ancient ice is, by now, rapidly vanishing. Dramatic changes are occurring even in the planet’s highest and coldest places. Even Mount Everest (Sagarmatha/Chomolungma) is transforming, as thousands of glaciers across the Himalayas will likely shrink by up to 99 percent by 2100. A child born today will see an Everest largely free of glaciers within her lifetime.
…
Before embarking on this book, I already knew the extent to which human-caused climate disruption had advanced. I had lived in Alaska for a decade beginning in 1996 and had spent time on the glaciers there. As early as the late nineties, large portions of the holiday season would go by in Anchorage without any snow on the ground, the waterfalls that my climbing friends and I had used for ice climbing barely froze some winters, and we could see the glaciers we used to traverse to access peaks shrinking from year to year. But I wasn’t aware of what was happening in the oceans and the rain forests. I wasn’t aware of the rise in sea levels and the changing climate’s impact on biodiversity.
I started reporting on the environment and climate in 2010, and since then I’ve published more than one hundred articles about climate disruption and given many lectures and radio interviews on the subject. This work established the foundation of my research, so by the time I began my field research for this book, I knew what to expect: that humans had already altered planetary climate systems. That is why, rather than the more commonly used “climate change,” I prefer to use the term “anthropogenic (human-caused) climate disruption.” Without question, the human race is responsible.
My original aim with this book was to provide a view of what was happening around the world: from the heights of Denali to the Great Barrier Reef; from the remote, windswept islands in the Bering Sea to the Florida coast. I wanted to explore how the forests across the western United States were impacted by drought and wildfire and investigate what was happening to the Amazon, the largest rain forest on Earth. Knowing that most people will likely never visit most of these places, I hoped to bring home to the reader the urgency of our planetary crisis through firsthand accounts of what is happening to the glaciers, forests, wildlife, coral reefs, and oceans, alongside data provided by leading scientists who study them.
The reporting in this book has turned out to be far more difficult to deal with than the years I spent reporting from war-torn Iraq. But I have come to realize that only by sharing an intimacy with these places can we begin to know, perhaps love, and certainly care for them. Only by having this intimacy with the natural world can we fully understand how dramatically our actions are impacting it.
In Nepal, the sacred mountain Machhapuchchhre rises abruptly on the eastern boundary of the Annapurna Sanctuary. As a child, I came across a photograph of this peak in a geography textbook and was immediately captivated by its majesty. Shaped like a fish’s tail, the knife-edged ridge that forms its summit is a seemingly paper-thin line of rock that drops precipitously on either side, causing the apex of the peak, which is nearly half a mile higher than the top of Denali, to be one of the more dramatic summits anywhere. It is a masterpiece of nature.
The Nepalese believe Machhapuchchhre is sacred to Shiva, one of the primary deities of Hinduism, who is known as both “the Destroyer” and “the Transformer” and believed to be without form—limitless, transcendent, and eternally unchanging. The mountain is forbidden to climbers, and to this day no human has ever stood atop that summit. I believe this is a just decision, and I have always wished more parts of Earth could be placed out of human reach.
Staring at that picture as a youth, time would cease to exist. I fell in love with Machhapuchchhre, and in the process I became enraptured with all mountains. When I was ten years old, I saw the Rocky Mountains of Colorado for the first time, their silhouettes against the setting sun, and I was awestruck. In the fall of 1995, I traveled to Alaska and drove a short way into Denali National Park and Preserve. When the afternoon clouds parted to reveal the majesty of Denali’s summit, my first inclination was to bow in wonderment. A year later I moved to Alaska and trained myself in the mountaineering skills I needed to access these sanctuaries that stand far from the violence, speed, and greed of our increasingly dystopian industrial society. The Scottish American naturalist, author, philosopher, and early wilderness-preservation advocate John Muir captured my feelings precisely: “I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.”
A glacier is essentially suspended energy, suspended force. It is time, in that sense, life, frozen in time. But now, these frozen rivers of time are themselves running out of time. The planet’s ecosystems, now pushed far beyond their capacity to adapt to human-generated traumas and stresses, are in a state of free fall. Similar to how I watched hundreds of years of time compressed into glacial ice flash before my eyes in a matter of seconds as I fell into the crevasse, Earth’s species, glaciers, rivers, lakes, and forests are, in the blink of a geologic eye, falling into oblivion.
Modern life has compressed time and space. Through air travel or instantaneous communication and access to information you can traverse the globe in a matter of hours or gain knowledge nanoseconds after a question is posed. The price for this, along with everything we want, on demand, all the time, is a total disconnection from the planet that sustains our lives.
I venture into the wilds and into the mountains in large part to allow space and time to stretch themselves back to what they were. The frenetic pace of contemporary life is having a devastating impact on this planet. Humans have transformed more than half the ice-free land on Earth. We have changed the composition of the atmosphere and the chemistry of the oceans from which we came. We now use more than half the planet’s readily accessible freshwater runoff, and the majority of the world’s major rivers have been either dammed or diverted.
As a species, we now hang over the abyss of a geoengineered future we have created for ourselves. At our insistence, our voracious appetite is consuming nature itself. We have refused to heed the warnings Earth has been sending, and there is no rescue team on its way.
The term “Anthropogenic Climate Disruption” is used to highlight the origins of current climate change in human activities, as opposed to other climate changes that have occurred in human history. Melting of the glaciers is one such effect of the Anthropogenic Climate Disruption.It can, in turn, cause problems like climate migration, rising sea level, etc. Learn more about the issue in Dahr Jamail’s book, The End of Ice.
