Whether by war, famine, resource depletion, socioeconomic failure, or destruction of the natural environment, all empires eventually crumble. What will happen when the collapse of the American empire culminates?
History is a graveyard of civilizations: the Western Chou, the Mayan, the Harappan, the Mesopotamian, the Olmec, the Chacoans, the Hohokam, the Mississippian, the Tiahuanaco, the Mycenean, the Roman, and countless others.
These societies were overrun by disease, or war, or famine. In most cases, they undermined their own ecological foundations—a situation that may sound familiar.
“Collapse,” writes archaeologist and historian Joseph Tainter, “is a recurrent feature of human societies.” But there is an important distinction to be made between societies that create an ideology of growth and an economy of ecological imperialism, and those that do not.
To choose two examples, both the San people of the Kalahari and the various Aboriginal Nations, in what is now Australia, existed in a more or less stable-state for tens of thousands of years. But these were not civilizations, according to the definition I am using. In other words, they were not ecological imperialists, but rather ecological participants.
For the average person living today in Washington D.C., Beijing, or London, the collapse of civilization is hard to fathom. Similarly, the people of ancient cities could not imagine their world crumbling around them—until it did.
Goods and services are traded around the world. The average dinner plate contains ingredients grown in five different nations. Rather than living in an empire with discrete boundaries, we live within a global civilization. It feels stable, permanent.
At least, it did until recently. The past month has upended many of our preconceptions. And the reality, of course, is that modern civilization is neither stable nor permanent. This society is destroying the ecological foundation that not only allows it to exist, but supports the fabric of life itself.
People living in rich nations are insulated from the reality of this ecological collapse, since our food no longer comes from the land where we live, but is imported from far away. Technology allows us to ignore the collapse of fish populations, of plankton populations, of topsoil. When the cod fisheries collapse, the industrial fishing corporations can simply begin to fish another far-flung corner of the globe, until that ocean too is devoid of fish. When the soil is lifeless, desiccated, and eroded, industrial farmers can simply apply more chemical fertilizers.
Modern life is based on the use of non-renewable resources, and on the over-exploitation of renewable resources. By definition, this cannot last.
The decline and fall of the American empire has already begun.
McCoy estimates that, no later than 2030, the US dollar will cease to the currency of global trade. This “reserve currency” status makes the US the center of the global economy, and directly provides the US economy with more than $100 billion in “free money” per year. As McCoy writes, “One of the prime benefits of global power is being on the winning side of grand imperial bargain: you get to send the nations of the world bundles of brightly colored paper, whether British pound notes or US Treasury bills, and they happily hand over goods of actual value like automobiles, minerals, or oil.” A fall from reserve currency status will lead, McCoy says, to sustained “rising prices, stagnant wages, and fading international competitiveness” in the United States.
“Will there be a soft landing for America thirty or forty years from now?
Don’t bet on it. The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state.”
The mechanics of the decline and fall of the U.S. American empire have been well documented by others. But what hasn’t been discussed, and what I am interested in exploring here, is the implications of this decline and collapse for revolutionaries.
What will the decline of the American empire mean for those of us fighting for justice?
As revolutionaries, we must be “internationalists.” That is, we must understand and design our strategy in a way that confronts capitalism, civilization, and empire as global systems, not merely national ones. So in this sense, a reorientation of global power is nothing more than that—a shifting of polarity.
We need to be prepared for the international impacts, but also the domestic implications of these shifts. As the axis of global power moves away from Washington and towards “the world island”—Beijing, New Delhi, Moscow—we are seeing a rise in imperial impetuousness, racism, and reaction typified by Trump. Author Richard Powers calls this “a tantrum in the face of a crumbling control fantasy.”
How will the collapse of American empire play out?
Will it (ironically) mirror the decline of the USSR, where Russia now has the most billionaires per capita in the world, an ex-KGB dictator, and an economic system dominated by collaborations between organized crime and corporate capitalism? Will it mirror the more gradual, socially moderated collapse of the UK? Will we see a full-on Children of Men or Elysium-style dystopia?
As society becomes more volatile, those who have best prepared themselves will be the most likely to survive and influence the course of the future. As Vince Emanuele has written, “the next recession will be the icing on the cake. Once the economy collapses and the American Empire is forced to retreat from various parts of the globe, immigrants, Muslims, blacks, and poor whites will be the targets of state and non-state violence. The only way we’ll survive is through community and organizing.”
Vince wrote those words months ago. Now, that recession has now arrived. Times have changed faster than minds have changed.
How should we respond to the current situation?
In crisis lies opportunity. Emergencies clarify things. Bullshit gets less important and truth becomes more self-evident. That is the case now, as well. Reality is imposing itself on us. Any faith in capitalism, in globalization—hell, in the grocery store—has been shattered. The ruling class is weakened. And the lessons are clear.
Globalization is dying. Sure, the system might repair itself and reassemble transnational supply chains. Coronavirus is unlikely to end it all. But the fragility and unreliability of just-in-time industrial food delivery is now obvious. We need to build robust local food systems using sustainable, biodiverse and soil-growing methods.
Organizations already exist that are doing this work. They need funding and support to rapidly scale up. Local governments should be pressured to direct funds towards these projects and make land available for urban and peri-urban gardening, and people should begin volunteer brigades to do the labor.
Food is just the beginning. Globalization isn’t a threat just because it will collapse; it is a threat if it continues as well. Local production of water, clothing, housing, healthcare, and other basic necessities must begin as well. There are cooperative and truly sustainable methods with which this could be done.
Mutual aid is the new rallying cry of the 21st century. There will be no individual survival. Our best hope for creating a better world—and for survival—lies in banding together, building small-scale, localized communities based on human rights and sustainability, pressuring local governments to join—or simply replacing them if they cannot respond—and preparing for the challenges to come.
The longer business as usual continues, the worse off we will be. Governments are already descending into fascism in a vain attempt to be “great again.” Expansions of the surveillance state, police powers, and repression will only deepen as ecological collapse undermines stability.
Each day more forests logged, more carbon in the atmosphere, more species driven extinct. More wealth in the hands of the elite and more poverty, disease, and hopelessness for the people. Remember: the air is cleaner now than you have ever seen it. It can only remain that way if these global supply chains do not re-start.
The sooner we dismantle industrial supply chains, the better off the people and the planet will be. Tim Garrett, a climate scientist at the University of Utah, says that “Only complete economic collapse will prevent runaway global climate change.” He bases this conclusion on climate models he designs. Garrett’s calculations show that industrial civilization is a “heat machine,” and only the total collapse of industrial civilization will permit life on Earth to survive the ongoing mass extinction, and global warming.
To borrow Marxist language, we need to not only seize the means of production away from the ruling class, we need to destroy much of the means of production, because what it produces is ecocide.
Collapse Does Not Have to Be Bad
Some people inaccurately view collapse as a state of total lawlessness; in other words, the disintegration of society. More accurately, collapse refers to a rapid, radical simplification in society, such as the breakdown of “normal” economic, social, and political institutions.
Under this definition, a more or less global collapse of industrial civilization within the next 50 or 100 years—possibly much sooner—is almost a certainty. A NASA-commissioned study in the journal of Ecological Economics found a few years ago that “the system is moving towards an impending collapse” due to destruction of the planet and economic stratification. They write that their model, using conditions “closely reflecting the reality of the world today… find[s] that collapse is difficult to avoid.”
This does not have to be a bad thing. A managed collapse, or reduction in complexity, is the best way to ensure human rights and sustainability moving forward. In the book Deep Green Resistance, the authors advocate for a political movement that could help speed up certain aspects of collapse, while fighting others, to maximize good outcomes. As the book explains:
“Many different mechanisms drive collapse, not all equally desirable. Some [can be] intentionally accelerated and encouraged, while others are slowed or reduced. Energy decline by decreasing consumption of fossil fuels is a mechanism of collapse highly beneficial to the planet and humans, and that mechanism is encouraged. Ecological collapse through habitat destruction and biodiversity crash is also a mechanism of collapse, but is slowed or stopped whenever possible… The collapse of large authoritarian political structures allows small-scale participatory structures. The collapse of global industrial capitalism allows local systems of exchange, cooperation, and mutual aid.”
Uncontrolled collapse is a dire alternative. Even now, local and regional collapses are occurring around the globe. This is especially true in places like Syria, Libya, Pakistan, and Iraq where ecological destruction has combined with war.
But the problems are global. Water shortages, refugee crises, religious extremism, exploding population and consumption, toxification, mass extinction, soil drawdown, desertification, and extreme weather are all driving increased instability. It is emerging first in the poorest countries, but it is spreading fast.
Like revolutions and climate change, collapse is an organic process driven by the interplay of countless human and non-human factors, not a single event.
The world is changing.
We need to plan for tomorrow rather than building strategies purely based on the past. These times call for a two-pronged approach. First, we must build additional resiliency into our communities, relocalizing our food systems and reducing and eliminating reliance on big business and national/state government alike. Second, we must be prepared to take advantage of coming shocks to the economic and political system. We can use these breaks in normality as openings to dismantle oppressive systems of power and the physical infrastructure that is destroying our world.
This culture prioritizes the hoarding of private wealth over the public good. While billionaires enjoy their riches, the masses live on the brink of starvation. Food shortages during coronavirus are accelerating, and are a reminder of the importance of rebuilding local, sustainable food systems.
We cannot rely on the globalized economy any longer. It is time for the transition to a localized way of life begin in earnest.
Images and video of miles of cars lined up at food banks in San Antonio and other cities across the U.S. present a striking example of the economic effects of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, which has thrown at least 16 million Americans out of work in recent weeks and increased pressure on the distribution centers to provide key staples for a flood of needy people in the country.
“Unforgettable image: thousands of cars lined up at a San Antonio food bank today, the desperate families inside kept safely apart,” tweeted CNN senior editor Amanda Katz. “Breadline, 2020.”
On Thursday, San Antonio Food Bank creative manager Robert R. Fike posted a time-lapse video of the line of cars waiting to get supplies.
This is what I saw. Blistering heat. Folks in line since 7pm the night before. To get food. Hundreds of volunteers busting it to serve, so families could go home (probably to pass some out to their neighbors too) & get the nourishment they need.
“It was a rough one today,” San Antonio Food Bank president and CEO Eric Cooper told the San Antonio Express News. “We have never executed on as large of a demand as we are now.”
The onset of the coronavirus outbreak brought with it economic paralysis across the U.S. and the world, shutting down businesses around the world as people use social distancing and isolation to curb the spread of the disease. In the U.S., where lawmakers have largely dragged their feet on providing unemployed people with help, Americans are increasingly turning to charities like food banks to provide the means of survival.
…
According to the New York Times, food banks across the country are facing funding shortfalls in the face of increasing demand despite donations from the superrich:
Feeding America, the nation’s largest network of food banks, with more than 200 affiliates, has projected a $1.4 billion shortfall in the next six months alone. Last week, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, announced that he was donating $100 million to the group—the largest single donation in its history, but still less than a tenth of what it needs.
In January 2019, Business Insider calculated Bezos makes roughly $4,474,885 every hour, making his donation to Feeding America the equivalent of around 22-and-a-half hours of passive wealth generation.
San Antonio was not the only city to see record numbers of people seeking help and miles of cars waiting for food. Pittsburgh, Inglewood, Chicago, and Sunrise, Florida were among cities with packed roads leading to local facilities and massive amounts of food to be distributed.
A drone captured aerial images of the long line of cars in Sunrise, Florida, where motorists hoped to receive food from Feeding South Florida, a local food bank. https://t.co/cSiOZKd6qD
This morning, in the pouring rain, our office joined @BenHueso & @NoraVargasSD – and the @SDFoodBank in helping distribute 30lb food boxes to 1000 South Bay families! The need is heartbreaking, but the Food Bank is doing an incredible job! pic.twitter.com/ppkHaFtOVs
Feeding South Florida executive vice president Sari Vatske noted in an interview with the Daily Mail that with stay-at-home orders in her state curtailing the available workforce to handle an unprecedented surge in those needing aid, there may be trouble ahead in how to efficiently distribute the food.
“The math is not on our side,” said Vatske.
Featured image via Oxfam, CC BY 2.0. A child stands before mass graves of 70 people dead due to famine in Kenya, 2011.
Our planet has a carrying capacity for each species with a particular way of life. Industrialized humans (in fact, civilized societies in general) have exceeded that carrying capacity by both our population and our extraction-based way of life.
The assumption that an infinite growth is possible in a finite planet is inherently flawed. Any system based on this assumption is inherently unsustainable and waiting to collapse. This overshoot poses a risk for other natural communities relying on Earth as well as for the future generations of life that are yet to come.
The following is an excerpt from Overshoot by Wiliam Catton. Catton’s work is well-written, compelling, and deeply researched. He explains the greatest problems facing humanity as a result of the collective absence of an ecological perspective and reluctance to face limits to growth. While there may be elements of his presentation you disagree with, the ecological fundamentals he presents are simply true.
In a future that is as unavoidable as it will be unwelcome, survival and sanity may depend upon our ability to cherish rather than to disparage the concept of human dignity. My purpose in writing this book has been to enhance that ability by providing a clear understanding of the ecological context of human life.
It is axiomatic that we are in no way protected from the consequences of our actions by remaining confused about the ecological meaning of our humanness, ignorant of ecological processes, and unmindful of the ecological aspects of history. I have tried to show the real nature of humanity’s predicament not because understanding its nature will enable us to escape it, but because if we do not understand it we shall continue to act and react in ways that make it worse.
Competition Across Time
On the banks of the Volga in 1921 a refugee community was visited by an American newspaper correspondent who had come to write about the Russian famine. Almost half the people in this community were already dead of starvation. The death rate was rising. Those still surviving had no real prospect of prolonged longevity. In an adjacent field, a lone soldier was guarding a huge mound of sacks full of grain. The American newsman asked the white-bearded leader of the community why his people did not overpower this one guard, take over the grain, and relieve their hunger. The dignified old Russian explained that the sacks contained seed to be planted for the next growing season. “We do not steal from the future,” he said.
Today mankind is locked into stealing ravenously from the future. That is what this book is about. It is not just a book about famine or hunger. Famine in the modern world must be read as one of several symptoms reflecting a deeper malady in the human condition— namely, diachronic competition, a relationship whereby contemporary well-being is achieved at the expense of our descendants. By our sheer numbers, by the state of our technological development, and by being oblivious to differences between a method that achieved lasting increments of human carrying capacity and one that achieves only temporary supplements, we have made satisfaction of today’s human aspirations dependent upon massive deprivation for posterity.
People of one generation have become indirect and unwitting antagonists of subsequent generations. Yet diagnoses of our plight— even ecological analyses—have not made clear one essential point. A major aim of this book is to show that commonly proposed “solutions” for problems confronting mankind are actually going to aggravate those problems. Proposed remedies for various parts of our predicament need to be evaluated by asking whether they will intensify the adversary relationship between people living today and people of the next generation, and the next…
The overlooked differences between methods that permanently enlarged human carrying capacity and more recent methods that have only enabled us temporarily to evade the world’s limits can be seen if we contrast the way people used to seek the good life versus today’s substitute expedient. In the mid-nineteenth century it was “Go west, young man, and grow up with the country”—i.e., go where there is new land to take over, and use such an increment of carrying capacity to prosper. At the start of America’s third century, however, it was “Try to speed up the economy”—i.e., try to draw down the finite reservoir of exhaustible resources a bit faster.
Because this book is meant to overcome our habit of mistaking techniques that evade limits for techniques that raise them, it is, in a sense, a book about how to read the news perceptively in revolutionary times. That cannot be done without certain unfamiliar but increasingly indispensable concepts. “Carrying capacity” is one of them. Until recently, only a few people outside such occupations as wildlife management or sheep and cattle ranching have even known this phrase. Its vital importance to all of us has not been as obvious as it is now becoming. The time has come for scholars and everyone else to take a piercing look at the relationship between the earth’s changing capacity to support human inhabitants and the changing load imposed by our numbers and our requirements. The direction of recent change makes this relationship just about the most important topic there is for people to know about, and think about. We have come to the end of the time when it didn’t seem to matter that almost no one saw the difference between ways of enlarging human carrying capacity and ways of exceeding it.
It has now become essential to recognize that all creatures, human or otherwise, impose a load upon their environment’s ability to supply what they need and to absorb and transform what they excrete or discard. An environment’s carrying capacity for a given kind of creature (living a given way of life) is the maximum persistently feasible load—just short of the load that would damage that environment’s ability to support life of that kind. Carrying capacity can be expressed quantitatively as the number of us, living in a given manner, which a given environment can support indefinitely.
When the load at a particular time happens to be appreciably less than the carrying capacity, there is room for expansion of numbers, for enhancement of living standards, or both. If the load increases until it exceeds carrying capacity, overuse of the environment reduces its carrying capacity. That is why it has become important to recognize the difference between increasing the number an environment can support indefinitely and surpassing that number by “accepting” environmental damage. Overuse of an environment sets up forces that will necessarily, in time, reduce the load to match the shrinkage of carrying capacity.
As these points begin to indicate, in order really to understand our future we need a clear-headed ecological interpretation of history, because the pressure of our numbers and technology upon manifestly limited resources has already put out of reach the previously acceptable solutions to many of our problems. There remains steadfast resistance to admitting this, but facts are not repealed by refusal to face them. On the other hand, even the “alarmists” who have been warning of grave perils besetting mankind have not fathomed our present predicament.
I speak of “predicament,” not “crisis,” because I refer to conditions that are not of recent origin and will not soon abate.
In brief, that predicament and its background can be outlined as follows: Human beings, in two million years of cultural evolution, have several times succeeded in taking over additional portions of the earth’s total life-supporting capacity, at the expense of other creatures. Each time, human population has increased. But man has now learned to rely on a technology that augments human carrying capacity in a necessarily temporary way—as temporary as the extension of life by eating the seeds needed to grow next year’s food. Human population, organized into industrial societies and blind to the temporariness of carrying capacity supplements based on exhaustible resource dependence, responded by increasing more exuberantly than ever, even though this meant overshooting the number our planet could permanently support. Something akin to bankruptcy was the inevitable sequel.
Old Ideas, New Situation
The sequel has begun to happen, but it is not generally recognized for what it is. We have come to a time when old assumptions that compel us to misunderstand what is happening to us have to be abandoned.
We and our immediate ancestors lived through an age of exuberant growth, overshooting permanent carrying capacity without knowing what we were doing. The past four centuries of magnificent progress were made possible by two non-repeatable achievements: (a) discovery of a second hemisphere, and (b) development of ways to exploit the planet’s energy savings deposits, the fossil fuels. The resulting opportunities for economic and demographic exuberance convinced people that it was natural for the future to be better than the past. For a while that belief was a workable premise for our lives and institutions. But when the New World became more populated than the Old World had been, and when resource depletion became significant, the future had to be seen through different lenses.
Assumptions that were once viable but have become obsolete must be replaced with a new perspective, one that enables us to see more effectively and to understand more accurately. This book seeks to articulate that needed perspective. It is no easy task, for the new way of seeing must differ sharply from traditional assumptions. Being unfamiliar, the new perspective will initially be distasteful and seem implausible. We shall continue to wish that some of the experiences it enables us to understand more clearly were not happening. But if we have the wisdom implied by the name we gave our own species, we must face the fact that continued misunderstanding of unwelcome experiences cannot prevent them from happening and cannot insulate us from their consequences.
People accustomed to expectations of magnificent progress have been appalled to find that they have lost their confidence in the future. The idea that mankind could encounter hardships that simply will not go away was unthinkable in the Age of Exuberance. This idea must be faced in the post-exuberant world. It seemed at last that it might really be faced when the thirty-ninth president of the United States decided (shortly after taking office) to emphasize energy conservation in response to manifest depletion of once-abundant fuels, rather than resorting to the traditional American urge to “produce our way out” of mounting difficulties. Important options had been lost irretrievably when humanity irrupted beyond the earth’s permanent carrying capacity. New and different imperatives now must be faced. Their ecological basis must be seen.
Man is like every other species in being able to reproduce beyond the carrying capacity of any finite habitat. Man is like no other species in that he is capable of thinking about this fact and discovering its consequences. Thinking about other species, man has seen their dependence upon environmental chemistry and upon the energy of sunlight. Man has recognized the many-faceted interdependence of diverse organisms, their impact upon their habitat, their impermanence, and their inability to foresee and evade the processes leading to their 6 own displacement by successors. Thinking about our own species, however, at least until April, 1977, too many of us imagined ourselves exempt, supernatural. Until a president not yet worn down by the compromises inherent in office-holding nudged Congress and the American people into serious discussions of conservation, men and women throughout the United States and many other lands relied on technological progress to cure the very afflictions it had been causing.
Nature is going to require reduction of human dominance over the world ecosystem. The changes this will entail are so revolutionary that we will be almost overwhelmingly tempted instead to prolong and augment our dominance at all costs. And, as we shall see, the costs will be prodigious. We are likely to do many things that will make a bad situation worse. It is hoped that the kind of enlightenment offered in this book may help curtail such tendencies.
The paramount need of post-exuberant humanity is to remain human in the face of dehumanizing pressures. To do this we must learn somehow to base exuberance of spirit upon something more lasting than the expansive living that sustained it in the recent past. But, as if we were driving a car that has become stuck on a muddy road, we feel an urge to bear down harder than ever on the accelerator and to spin our wheels vigorously in an effort to power ourselves out of the quagmire. This reflex will only dig us in deeper. We have arrived at a point in history where counter-intuitive thought-ways are essential.
The indigenous community of Didipio on the island of Luzon in the northern Philippines has been resisting foreign gold mining for decades. The gold mine, owned by Oceana Gold Philippines, Inc. (OGPI), has destroyed massive areas of jungle, poisoned the land and water, and displaced hundreds of villagers.
Two resistance figures were shot and killed by anonymous gunmen in 2012, but resistance has continued.
In June 2019, a key mining permit expired. The local community has been fighting this whole time and sensed an opportunity, so they erected a roadblock to stop OGPI from accessing the mine. Last month, the company tried repeatedly to access the site but were rebuffed by non-violent protests.
On April 6th, 2020, Philippine police forces violently dismantled the roadblock, as this video shows. One leader, anti-mining advocate Roland Pulido, chairman of Didipio Earth Savers’ Movement Association (Desama), was arrested and others were beaten.
The Oceana Gold and Copper mine, located in Barangay Didipio, Nueva Vizcaya, was the first mining project awarded a Financial Technical Assistance Agreement (FTAA) by the Philippine government, allowing the company to operate large-scale mining explorations, 100% owned by foreign investor OceanaGold Corporation.
The mine is located in an area in which the majority of people are indigenous. It has become a much contested site due to large complaints over human rights violations as well as environmental destruction. The company has been alleged to have obtained a Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) of affected communities by creating a ‘council of elders’ comprised by people that either did not belong to the affected communities, or received rewards in exchange for their consent.
Awarded with the FTAA in the 1990s, the company started project [in the year] 2000. Formal petitions against the FTAA were lodged in 2006 but dismissed. On October 2, 2009, it was reported that the company forcefully evicted local villagers without prior consent, bulldozed and burned 187 houses, assisted by private security forces, using teargas and violence against villagers and neighbors who resisted leaving.
In relation to the tension surrounding the mine, Kalikasan reported that in December 2012, two opponents of large-scale mining; both members of the Didipio Earthsavers’ Multipurpose Association (DESAMA), were killed by unidentified assailants in Didipio, Nueva Vizcaya. Cheryl Ananayo, was shot dead along with her cousin-in-law Randy Nabayay as they were riding to Didipio at 6:00PM on December 7, 2012.
DESAMA is a people’s organization opposed to the ongoing implementation of the 17,626-hectare Didipio gold-copper project owned by Australian large-scale miner OceanaGold Corporation. Nabayay was a small-scale miner who had differences with OceanaGold over his property. Ananayo was with her 4 year-old child and carrying her 3 month-old baby, both unharmed.
The Commission for Human Rights (CHR) of the Philippines urged the government to withdraw the FTAA due to large evidences of rights abuses. However, the government apparently sided with the company, which claimed to do “ethical, responsible, and sustainable mining.”
Construction was completed in 2012 and commercial production started on April 1, 2013. Since production started, increasing contamination of rivers by heavy metals has been recorded, significantly exceeding the standard safety limits, thus, strongly affecting the environment and the livelihood of local communities. People living next to the river, as well as downstream, are concerned about declining fish stock and irrigation of nearby agricultural fields. Increasing noise and air pollution adds to the situation, while the company was further accused of avoiding tax payments.
Nowadays, petitions and protests against the Didipio mine, targeting the company and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) issuing the permits, go on. On the national level, the OceanaGold mine is one of many mines, causing severe tensions between corporate interests in search of new commodity frontiers and indigenous communities, aiming to preserve their identities, opposing these trends which they call “development aggression.”
The Philippines is a dangerous place for indigenous land defenders and environmentalists. Thirty were murdered in 2018 alone (number aren’t yet available for 2019).
The following is a statement made on the Alyansa Tigil Mina (ATM) Facebook Page. ATM is an alliance of mining-affected communities and their support groups of NGOs/POs and other civil society organizations who are opposing the aggressive promotion of large-scale mining in the Philippines.
Press Release: Condemnation of violent dispersal of peoples’ barricade in Nueva Vizcaya
April 6, 2020, Quezon City – Alyansa Tigil Mina (ATM) strongly condemns the violent dispersal by the police against indigenous community leaders in Brgy. Didipio, Kasibu, Nueva Vizcaya, late afternoon today.More than 100 personnel of the Philippine National Police from the regional and Quirino provincial units escorted a diesel tanker and forcibly entered the premises of the Didipio mine of Oceana Gold Philippines, Inc. (OGPI).
Violence erupted when local residents resisted the entry and stood their ground to prevent the entry of the diesel tanker. A barricade has been set-up by local groups in July 2019, when the mining contract of OGPI expired. Financial and Technical Assistance Agreement No. 1 (FTAA #1) expired last June 20, 2019, and has since been left pending at the Office of the President.
Reportedly, the mining company and its escort brandished a letter dated January 2020 from the Office of Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea endorsing the entry of fuel trucks inside the mining area.
This forced entry of the diesel tanker is illegal and against the people of Nueva Vizcaya. The mining contract has expired so there is no activity allowed inside the mine. The local governments have not given any permit for the mining company to operate. The area is part of the Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) order of Pres. Duterte, therefore no work activity is permitted.
This is a clear violation of the work-stoppage, the physical distancing and the quarantine procedures imposed by the ECQ in the whole Luzon island.More importantly, the barricade set-up by local organizations DESAMA, BILEG, AMKKAS and SAPAKKMI is a clear indication of the rejection of the people to the continued illegal operations of OGPI in Brgy. Didipio.
We call on the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) to immediately conduct an investigation to this tragic and unnecessary confrontation. We demand that DENR urgently issue a cease-and-desist order to OGPI on their illegal operations in Didipio. We insist that the DILG conduct an investigation on the conduct and performance of PNP elements in Region 2, Quirino Province and the Municipality of Kasibu, but specifically violations of the quarantine rules by the OGPI itself.
The use of violence by the police today is a reflection of the blind and draconian measures that this government is willing to use to pursue the greedy interests of the mining industry. The local leaders sustained injuries when the police used unnecessary force in dismantling the barricade. Our alliance strongly denounces this ferocious and aggressive behavior of the PNP against a non-violent and legitimate protest action of Didipio residents.
We note with anger similar instances in the past few weeks of illegal mining activities in the town MacArthur (Leyte), the island of Homonhon in Guiuan, Eastern Samar and clandestine drilling operations in Tampakan, South Cotabato.
We support the continued resistance of the people of Kasibu against the mining operations of OGPI in Didipio. The recent quarantine procedures have harshly impacted the people there when they lost income and livelihoods. Their access to food and health supplies were severely constrained. This violent dispersal has only added more misery to their fragile lives.
For details:
Jaybee Garganera, ATM National Coordinator – (+63) 9175498218 / nc@alyansatigilmina.net
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.
