Editors note: this piece is dated, and contains some generalizations, but is nonetheless a valuable overview of why civilization (definition here) is not sustainable or desirable.
Nothing in human existence has had a more profoundly negative impact on our quality of life than civilization. As we have already seen, it introduced the unnecessary evil of hierarchy (see thesis #11); it introduced the difficult, dangerous, and unhealthy agricultural lifestyle (see thesis #9); it makes us sick (see thesis #21), but provides no better medicine to counterbalance that effect (see thesis #22). It introduced endemic levels of stress, a diet and lifestyle maladapted and deleterious to our health, war as we know it, and ecological disaster, but it has given us nothing to counterbalance those effects; it has no monopoly on medicine, or knowledge in general (see thesis #23), or even art (see thesis #24), making the overall impact of civilization on quality of life disastrous.
Measuring quality of life is always a tricky thing, but the United Nations’ “Human Development Index” (HDI) looks at three criteria: longevity, knowledge, and standard of living. In the case of the HDI, all three are measured in ways biased towards civilization. For example, longevity is measured by life expectancy at birth—a measure which presumes the common civilized assumption that life begins at birth. It does not weight the average with abortions, for example, even though there is disagreement even within our own culture of when life begins. Given such disagreement, we should not be terribly surprised to learn that other cultures have different measures of when life begins. Foraging cultures, for example, often believe that life begins at age two, and thus classify infanticide and abortion in the same category. Children are often not named or considered persons until that time. A !Kung woman goes into labor, and walks into the bush—maybe she comes back with a baby, and maybe she doesn’t. Whether stillborn or killed at birth, it’s not considered any business of anyone else’s. This kind of attitude has given foragers a very high infant mortality rate, leading many naive commentators to assume that their way of life must be terribly afflicted with disease to claim so many infants, and ultimately taking the skewed statistics that arise from such a practice to make statements on forager quality of life. In fact, all such commentary provides is a glimpse of the power of ethnocentrism to skew even what we might consider unbiased statistics.
A less biased measurement might take expected age of death at a given age. Richard Lee noted that up to 60% of the !Kung he encountered were over 60 (in Western countries, that number is 10-15%). The table provided by Hillard Kaplan, et. al, in “A Theory of Human Life History Evolution: Diet, Intelligence, and Longevity” is quite instructive. Comparing the Ache, Hazda, Hiwi and !Kung shows an average probability of survival to age 15 of 60% (reflecting the enormous impact of normative infanticide), but the expected age of death at age 15 shoots up to 54.1. In Burton-Jones, et. al, “Antiquity of Postreproductive Life: Are There Modern Impacts on Hunter-Gatherer Postreproductive Life Spans?” another table is presented on p. 185, showing that at age 45, women of the !Kung could expect to live another 20.0 years for a total of 65 years, women of the Hadza could expect to live another 21.3 years for a total of 66.3 years, and women of the Ache could expect to live another 22.1 years for a total of 67.1 years. We should also bear in mind that all of the forager cultures examined to derive these statistics live in the Kalahari Desert—an extremely marginal and difficult ecosystem, even for foragers. Could we expect significantly higher numbers from foragers, if they were allowed to roam the sub-Saharan savannas to which humans are adapted, or verdant forests? We can only speculate, though the intuitive assumption would be affirmative.
An expected age of death of 54.1, or even 67.1, may seem dismal to us in the United States, but here in 1901, life expectancy was 49. It has only been very recently that civilized life expectancy has caught up to that of the most marginal foragers. Moreover, in thesis #8, we explored the relationship between the First World and the Third World. Focusing on First World statistics produces the same skewed result as focusing only on medieval royalty, to the exclusion of the peasants they relied upon for their abundance. The worldwide average life expectancy, then, is a far more relevant measure than the United States’. That number is currently 67 years—exactly the number Burton-Jones found for !Kung women eking out a living in the Kalahari. After all the incredible advances made in our life expectancy—advances which are now slowing, due to the diminishing marginal returns of medical research (a point addressed explicitly in thesis #15)—we have only managed to raise our life expectancy to that of the most meager and marginalized foragers.
Caspari & Lee, in “Older age becomes common late in human evolution,” show a trend of increasing longevity that goes back not to the origins of civilization, but to the Upper Paleolithic Revolution. We see forager longevity extending through the Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and into historical times prior to being wiped out by the onslaught of civilization. In those meager areas where they have not been wiped out, forager longevity continues to grow longer, even though the marginal nature of their ecosystem makes for a fairly harsh life.
What we also see, archaeologically, is a massive crash in life expectancy associated with the innovation of agriculture. Dickson’s Mounds, already discussed in thesis #6, shows a catastrophic drop-off in life expectancy. We see the same pattern repeated wherever agriculture enters. Until recently, average agricultural life expectancy tended to vary between 20 and 35 years, while even the Kalahari foragers likely enjoyed the same 54.1 years they do today. Life expectancy in the First World is now in the low 70’s; in the Third World, however, it is still often in the 30’s.
The second criteria the U.N.’s index measures is knowledge, but here they use literacy as a stand-in. We have already discussed the high level of knowledge in primitive cultures in thesis #23, but such systems of knowledge are rarely written. Though impressive, they are of a different kind than literate knowledge. The U.N.’s measure systematically ignores this body of knowledge, however, by judging only by literacy. As Walter Ong explores in Orality and Literacy, orality, though it differs greatly from literacy, is by no means inferior to it.
It is by the third criterion, “standard of living,” that the disaster of civilization is laid bare, though it is once again obscured in the U.N. index by a systematically biased metric, in this case, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita at purchasing power parity (PPP) in U.S. dollars. This is an intrinsically consumeristic metric that systematically sidelines the world’s “original affluent societies” by measuring a wealth they have no need for, and neglecting the wealth they possess in abundance. While foragers equal civilization on the first two criteria, they excel on the third.
On the very first day of any introductory economics class, a student learns the concept of scarcity, presented as an unassailable truth which forms the rock-solid cornerstone of all economic theory. Scarcity simply means that there is not enough of a given resource to satisfy the desires of everyone; therefore, some system must be established to control access to the scarce resource. As Marshall Sahlins points out in his famous essay, “The Original Affluent Society”:
Modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world’s wealthiest peoples.
The market-industrial system institutes scarcity, in a manner completely without parallel. Where production and distribution are arranged through the behaviour of prices, and all livelihoods depend on getting and spending, insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity….
Yet scarcity is not an intrinsic property of technical means. It is a relation between means and ends. We should entertain the empirical possibility that hunters are in business for their health, a finite objective, and that bow and arrow are adequate to that end.
Sahlins goes on to explain the wealth that foragers enjoy. They do not place much value in possessions, since these are a double-edged sword to the nomad. Since the items they need are so easily manufactured from freely available, abundant raw materials, foragers typically display a “scandalous” nonchalance with them. As Martin Gusinde remarked regarding his time with the Yahgan in The Yamana:
The European observer has the impression that these Indians place no value whatever on their utensils and that they have completely forgotten the effort it took to make them. Actually, no one clings to his few goods and chattels which, as it is, are often and easily lost, but just as easily replaced… The Indian does not even exercise care when he could conveniently do so. A European is likely to shake his head at the boundless indifference of these people who drag brand-new objects, precious clothing, fresh provisions and valuable items through thick mud, or abandon them to their swift destruction by children and dogs…. Expensive things that are given them are treasured for a few hours, out of curiosity; after that they thoughtlessly let everything deteriorate in the mud and wet. The less they own, the more comfortable they can travel, and what is ruined they occasionally replace. Hence, they are completely indifferent to any material possessions.
Sahlins also notes that foragers enjoy a terrifically varied diet, one virtually assured against famine. Le Jeune despaired of the Montagnais’ laid-back attitude, writing:
In the famine through which we passed, if my host took two, three, or four Beavers, immediately, whether it was day or night, they had a feast for all neighbouring Savages. And if those People had captured something, they had one also at the same time; so that, on emerging from one feast, you went to another, and sometimes even to a third and a fourth. I told them that they did not manage well, and that it would be better to reserve these feasts for future days, and in doing this they would not be so pressed with hunger. They laughed at me. ‘Tomorrow’ (they said) ‘we shall make another feast with what we shall capture.’ Yes, but more often they capture only cold and wind.
The European Le Jeune was anxious about how they would survive, but the foragers were so completely confident in their ability to feed themselves that they refused to store food, and ate recklessly. Among most foragers, the concept of starvation is unthinkable. If this represents any kind of primordial “Eden,” then it is typified by the injunction of the gospels, “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.” (Matthew 6:26) Of course, foragers have lean times like any other, and Sahlins supposes that there may be more to their lack of food storage than simple ideology: “Thus immobilised by their accumulated stocks, the people may suffer by comparison with a little hunting and gathering elsewhere, where nature has, so to speak, done considerable storage of her own—of foods possibly more desirable in diversity as well as amount than men can put by.” Food storage would encumber their movement, which would push them towards sedentism—and thus push them towards over-exploiting a given area.
To gather such a bounty, foragers work much less than we do today. Richard Lee’s initial assessment of the !Kung work week is neatly summarized by Sahlins:
Despite a low annual rainfall (6 to 10 inches), Lee found in the Dobe area a “surprising abundance of vegetation”. Food resources were “both varied and abundant”, particularly the energy rich mangetti nut- “so abundant that millions of the nuts rotted on the ground each year for want of picking.” The Bushman figures imply that one man’s labour in hunting and gathering will support four or five people. Taken at face value, Bushman food collecting is more efficient than French farming in the period up to World War II, when more than 20 per cent of the population were engaged in feeding the rest. Confessedly, the comparison is misleading, but not as misleading as it is astonishing. In the total population of free-ranging Bushmen contacted by Lee, 61.3 per cent (152 of 248) were effective food producers; the remainder were too young or too old to contribute importantly. In the particular camp under scrutiny, 65 per cent were “effectives”. Thus the ratio of food producers to the general population is actually 3:5 or 2:3. But, these 65 per cent of the people “worked 36 per cent of the time, and 35 per cent of the people did not work at all”!
For each adult worker, this comes to about two and one—half days labour per week. (In other words, each productive individual supported herself or himself and dependents and still had 3 to 5 days available for other activities.) A “day’s work” was about six hours; hence the Dobe work week is approximately 15 hours, or an average of 2 hours 9 minutes per day.
This is the oft-quoted “two hours a day” statistic, but it has come under fire from critics who point out that Lee did not add in other necessary activities, such as creating tools and food preparation. So, Lee returned to do further study with these revised definitions of “work,” and came up with a figure of 40-45 hours per week. This might seem to prove that hunter-gatherers enjoy no more leisure than industrial workers, but the same criticisms laid against Lee’s figures also apply against our “40 hour work week.” Not only is that increasingly a relic of a short era sandwiched between union victories and the end of the petroleum age as the work week stretches into 50 or even 60 hours a week, but it, too, does not include shopping, basic daily chores, or food preparation, which would likewise swell our own tally. Finally, the distinction between “work” and “play” is not nearly as clear-cut in forager societies as it is in our own. Foragers mix the two liberally, breaking up their work haphazardly, and often playing while they work (or working while they play). The definition of work which inflates the total to 40-45 hours per week includes every activity that might be considered, regardless of its nature. Even the most unambiguous “work” of foragers is often the stuff of our own vacations: hunting, fishing, or a hike through the wilds.
We assume that agriculture allowed people greater leisure and thus time to develop civilization. On the contrary; agriculture drastically cut our leisure time, and much of our quality of life. Civilization, then, is a contrivance to salvage what we can from a difficult and maladaptive way of life. The typical means of measuring quality of life are all distinctly biased, and for good reason: we can scarcely conceive of the abundance and affluence enjoyed by foragers. They have their health, unlike us; they have a reliable, diverse diet, unlike us; they have leisure time, unlike us. The past 10,000 years have constituted an unmitigated disaster in every dimension possible. Civilization is unprecedented in the scope and speed of its failure.
On this episode of the Green Flame, we speak with Claude Marks, former political prisoner and activist, director of the Freedom Archives, about COINTELPRO and state repression of revolutionary movements. We hear from Will Falk, activist, radical movement lawyer and writer, about security culture. And for our skill, we focus on operational security. This show also includes a poem by Sekou Kambui, and music by Dead Prez and Beth Quist.
“We know now that people like Martin Luther King Jr. where under constant surveillance including plots and attempts to create so much chaos in their lives that they [are] destabilized emotionally with intent”. — Claude Marks
“It’s really important that people not think of law or Security Culture as this bulletproof vest that you can put on that is going to keep you completely safe”. — Will Falk
The Green Flame is a podcast of Deep Green Resistance. You can find episodes on the DGR News Service, as well as on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Communiqué from the Popular Indigenous Council of Guerrero-Emiliano Zapata (CIPOG-EZ) on the recent murder of its members, Bartolo Hilario Morales and Isaías Xanteco Ahuejote.
May 2019, Lower Mountains of the State of Guerrero.
To the Zapatista Army of National Liberation
To the National Indigenous Congress
To the Indigenous Governing Council
To the People of Guerrero
To the Peoples of Mexico and the World
To the National and International Sixth
To the Networks of Resistance and Rebellion
To the CIG Support Networks
Twenty days after the cowardly murder of our brothers, Lucio Bartolo Faustino and Modesto Verales Sebastián, impunity continues at the three levels of government. We the Nahua people of the mountains of the state of Guerrero are grieving and angry. We publicly denounce the hideous murder of our brothers, Bartolo Hilario Morales and Isaías Xanteco Ahuejote, who were both Indigenous Nahuas and local promoters of the Popular Indigenous Council of Guerrero – Emiliano Zapata (CIPOG-EZ). The people who carried out this atrocious assassination are professional paramilitaries. They were not satisfied to just to take their lives away; they denigrated them, showing no mercy in this extrajudicial assassination. They dismembered them and put our compañeros in bags. They thought through this vile act they would also demean their story and denigrate their lives. They are wrong.
Not only are they wrong, but the dignity of their lives stands in contrast to the cowardice acts of the murderers. The peoples of CIPOG-EZ and CNI of Guerrero, Mexico are keeping alive the memory of the men and women who have lost their lives in the struggle for the reconstitution of collective rights. We therefore ask the dignified people of Mexico and of the world to remember and spread the word about the history of our murdered brothers and their struggle to defend life; Bartolo Hilario Morales and Isaías Xanteco Ahuejote. Lucio Bartolo Faustino and Modesto Verales Sebastián.
We hold the three levels of government categorically responsible: the federal government headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the state government of Héctor Astudillo Flores and the municipal government of Jesús Parra García. Each level of government has held no one accountable, passing the ball to each other saying that the problems were inherited from past governments. This is the PRI attitude that has immersed our country into a bloodbath. There is no “transformation” that wants to change things and it seems that the only important changes occur in the upper spheres of government. The people in power don’t care about the lives of the people below.
The different narco-paramilitary groups have operated for more than twenty-five years in the region of Chilapa, in complicity with the Mexican State, and today is no exception. The state regime has tried over and over to divide our people and we have resisted the war of extermination for more than five hundred years. Our crime has been to defend our territory from the extraction of what they call “natural resources” which for us are sacred mountains or water springs and life. We struggle to maintain the principles that we inherited from our grandparents, which we call “uses and customs”.This world is very different than the one that the Mexican State has formed which goes against our form of community government.
Our towns are suffering systemic violence in which our women, children and men go missing or are murdered, and nothing seems to happen. Everything remains in complete impunity for this bad government, where one of the strategies of the state is to create terror in the heart of our people. Using torture, psychological warfare, death threats, and persecution against all members who promote community development.
We as Indigenous peoples ask ourselves over and over: Why is there so much dehumanization? Why is human life not worth more? Why are some lives worth less than others? And it seems that those on top see us at the bottom as commodities. We ask ourselves again and again, how would the powerful, the governments with more than 30 million votes, react if this violence were to happen to one of their relatives? Or if they were missing, were tortured and viciously murdered or are those acts only reserved for us?
As a national Indigenous movement we fight to reconstruct the social fabric of our people. We are fighting to re-establish peace in our communities, and seek to recognize and reconstruct our indigenous languages, culture and the thinking of our peoples that is interwoven with mother earth.
On May 23, 2019 around 1:30 pm, our brothers Bartolo Hilario Morales and Isaías Xanteco Ahuejote went missing near Chilapa de Álvarez, Guerrero. On the morning of May 24 we learned the terrible news; their lifeless bodies were found. Today we are making a public denunciation and asking for honest and dignified comrades from Mexico and the world; no matter how much they want to destroy us, today let us embrace the history of struggle, which is the history of struggle of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico and the world.
We demand justice for our murdered brothers: Bartolo Hilario Morales and Isaías Xanteco Ahuejote. Lucio Bartolo Faustino and Modesto Verales Sebastián. May the pain that overwhelms us today as relatives, friends and compañeros in struggle, not remain in impunity, nor be forgotten.
FRATERNALLY:
Justice for Bartolo Hilario Morales and Isaías Xanteco Ahuejote, CNI members!
Justice for Lucio Bartolo Faustino and Modesto Verales Sebastián, CIPOG-EZ member and former member of the CIG and CNI!
Justice for Gustavo Cruz Mendoza, Indigenous communicator assassinated from the CIPO-RFM!
Justice for Samir Flores Soberanes, Indigenous communicator assassinated!
Stop the counterinsurgency war against the EZLN!
Freedom for Fidencio Aldama of the Yaqui tribe!
Never again a Mexico without us!
Popular Indigenous Council of Guerrero-Emiliano Zapata (CIPOG-EZ)
Regions Costa Chica, Costa Montaña, Montaña Alta and Montaña Baja de Guerrero
The yellow vests movement has been struggling for six month now. Half a year. This is a record-breaking movement in France by its length. Commentators no longer refer to the May 1968 movement, but go back to several democratic protests that occurred during the 19th century. This movement is interesting for the ecological resistance, first because it gives an insight of what future social instability or chaos might look, like in phase 3 of the decisive ecological warfare (DEW), due to the grow of inequalities and ecological disruptions. It is also very interesting in a tactical point of view, because that kind of future mass movement could constitute strong levers (as only few people are part of the radical movement) to help the resistance, in an opportunistic way, to harry and destabilize civilization, with the unintentional help from people who are little concerned by ecological issues. The simplistic and anthropocentric yellow vests saying “end of the world, end of the month, same struggle” designed in order to reply to the unfair pseudo-ecological taxes, could, not for the reason they primarily think, have unexpected ecological benefits by disrupting the techno-industrial system. Then, the question to us is how can we support and strengthen these movements whenever they spontaneously emerge in order to achieve these benefits.
The yellow vests movement started in October 2017 on social networks with a great fed up against the president Emmanuel Macron’s policies. His policies are mainly in favor of the riches and the big companies, doing them one fiscal gifts after another, while the country middle class is becoming poorer and poorer. The movement was specifically triggered by the increase of the fuel tax, the hardening of mandatory vehicle safety inspections (with the unsaid goal, behind security and ecological arguments, to stimulate the growth of the cars sales) and the reduction of the speed limit from 90 to 80 km/h. The increase of this tax was part of a pack of so-called ecological measures of the “extreme centrist” and liberal government of Emmanuel Macron. The minister of ecology Nicolas Hulot, known for being anything but a radical ecologist, resigned a few weeks earlier in August 2018, denouncing his own powerlessness in this government and the impossibility for him to implement the ecological measures he aimed at. This man, quite popular in France, was only a store front for the government. Actually, the current trend in liberal politics is to make poor classes bear the weight of the pseudo-ecological transition, via guilt, individual change and taxes rather than global systemic changes, industry restriction and fair laws, that would, for instance, tax the airplanes fuel, which is « duty free » for the airlines, at the same level than people pay for everyday fuel.
In October-November 2018, people started to put a yellow vest on their car dashboard (a few years ago, it became mandatory to keep one in every car for security reasons), in order to show their disagreement with Macron. This was a huge success, with a majority of cars on the road displaying it. Then, it took the form, since the 17th November 2018, of huge protests every Saturday, not only in Paris but also all across the country. Other actions are also conducted during the week, including the permanent occupation of hundreds of traffic circles. It managed to cause millions of losses to businesses like supermarkets, multinationals, and, among others, luxury shops on the Champs Elysées.
The movement was first watched suspiciously by a part of the left-wing for several reasons, but mainly because they believed the mainstream media’s speech. First, it looked anti-ecological and formed of “rednecks”, many said. Cars, as everyone acknowledge now, are part of the ecological problem, and the movement started as a popular protest against the fuel tax (coined pejoratively by some as a « Jaquerie », a term that refer in France to Middle Age protests against taxes). Also, as a popular mass movement, very diverse political tendencies were represented. Nationalism and sovereignty, as cross-political tendencies (from left- and right-wing both), are quite common in the movement. The national flag, seldom used by the left (except by Jean-Luc Mélenchon who tried to bring it back into fashion to prevent from the extreme-right monopolizing it), is often present in the occupied places or during the protests. This made many think that the movement was led by extreme right-wing people, but later this turned out to be wrong. Along the same lines, the presence of racists and anti-Semitics have been over-emphasized since the beginning by the media in order to discredit the movement.
Actually, mostly, those taking part to the demonstrations were new to politics and militancy, and never formerly campaigned. Like vomiting, it was natural to them, everywhere in the country, to reject as a whole the current political system, all parties included, that was cooking them on a low heat. It was visceral. This led them to banish all party banners or distinctions. Many of these people are anarchists without even knowing it. All actions, blockading, occupations and protests are self-organized, principle deeply rooted into the movement.
Consistently, no official authorization requests, with some official leader that would be responsible for the protest, were sent to the administration, which is decreed by law in France. This is a natural consequence of the fact that the movement was spontaneously born on social networks, rejects the government rules of the game and is almost totally horizontal. People are very mistrustful to any representative, who could negotiate and betray his fellows by compromising with the authorities. Some people in the movement have more influence than other, but either they refuse to become representative of the others, because they don’t feel legitimate, either when they try to, they are immediately rejected by the majority of the others.
The movement also came quickly, due to police clampdown, to a high level of violence, with bloody police confrontations and devastated urban areas. The violence levels culminated the Saturday 6th of December 2018, when the people came in front of the Elysée, with a helicopter ready to extract Macron if by chance they succeeded to enter the palace (at this time a lot of people were burning or guillotining life-size Macron dolls across the country), and more recently the Saturday 23th March and the May Day 2019 with new hardcore clashes in Paris. A funny Saturday was, at the beginning of January, when people used a pallet truck to smash open the front door of the ministry of the government spokesperson Benjamin Grivaux.
Since the beginning, the only political answers to the movement are denial and frightening post-truth answers, which challenge the understanding of anyone with a minimum of intellectual honesty. The police clampdown worsens every week. Now, the yellow vests not only risk to loose a hand or an eye because of riot guns and grenades (with thousands of injured people, some of which victims of war wounds say the hospital staffs), but also risk suffocation. By their unheard amount, concentration and composition, the chemical weapons the police now use can no longer by called “tear gazes”. The gazes that are being used since the 13th of April cause suffocation, burns, non-stop vomiting, consciousness loss. Many kids or elders passing by are also hit.
All these things are quite new to French leftists, and far from the usual, almost traditional, protests the militants are used to, like trade-union-like ones or Occupy-Indignados-like ones. It is uneasy to protest side-by-side with persons that are sometimes politically or socially far from us. For these different reasons, unsurprisingly, the trade unions are very reluctant and, until very recently, seldom called to protest with the yellow vests or, at least, to a supporting strike.
Moreover, except the black bloc, this level of violence is completely unusual to most pacifist leftists and syndicalists, whose order service usually get along with police forces to supervise the protests (and, as I saw in December 2018, sometime block the tail of the procession to let free rein to the police for repressing the yellow vests that are at the front!). The trade-unions called to protest for May Day, but Philippe Martinez, the president of the CGT, had to sneak out because he was scared by the violence of the police clampdown!
Since the beginning of the movement, I finally observe the idea that pacific protests are ineffective gradually spreading in circles that I knew to be pacifists, with a higher violence level tolerance than before. The yellow vest sum it up in the saying: “no breakers, no 20h” (20h refers to the evening news in France). This shift is perceptible in a growing part of the population, despite the unanimous condemnation of violence in the media by the whole Paris intelligentsia (which is very annoyed by the Saturday chaos in its streets), main-stream personalities, journalists, and politics.
Happily, the few extreme right-wing people who took part to the first demonstrations either gradually stopped to mobilize or gradually tempered their opinions by an osmosis phenomenon that, fortunately, occurred in the company of people from other political sides. Very unlikely, according to the caricature the media tried to picture them, within a few weeks, the movement resulted in people to unite in favor of social justice, whatever their political background was, and for the introduction of direct democracy measures in the constitution like the unanimously claimed Citizens’ Initiative Referendum (RIC). Their first 42 claims of the beginning of December were enlightening. Weeks passing, as the goals of the movement got more clearly defined, left-wing militant started to join the popular movement. Interestingly, even if most of their claims are social justice ones, they still often refuse to be politically labeled as left-wing, in order to exclude nobody. The no banner principle is still strictly applied (except for the yellow ones, and the anarchist ones maybe).
The time many leftists and ecologists took to enter in motion (for those that did it) is at the same time wise, and an error. Of course, waiting and observing, when we face an uncertain situation, is wise. But this is also a strategic error, because timing is strategic. And I am the first to recognize my error. Opportunities do not necessarily occur twice. The repression arsenal of the power grows weekly bigger and bigger. Drones, new authoritarian laws, semi-lethal weapons, more powerful chemical weapons (forbidden by the Geneva convention, and used against our own population, what a joke!), urban tanks, chemical marking of the demonstrators with synthetic DNA in the water canon, automatic face recognition with AI, psychological techniques for terror, censorship and targeted arrests in collaboration with Facebook…
This is also an error because we let the others do the toughest job, in the darkest of the winter. And finally because when you miss the departure, it is difficult to catch-up the train. It would be a shame that the French left miss the revolution they have been expecting for ages, isn’t it?
I noticed something of interest for us, that was little commented (but fact-checked) among the huge feed of daily news. Among all the arbitrary arrests, the government targeted and sued ordinary people (who sometime got months of jail) who, in Facebook comments, naively encouraged or called to block refineries and (for a retired man) to blow them up if the government didn’t give in the people’s claims. This means the government is very afraid of that kind of blockage, which can paralyze the country within a few day. It can be quite fast, as we have only a few refineries in France.
About this, the government did a master stroke in Novembre 2018 just after the first protest. They postpone their new tax on heavy trucks to avoid the truck drivers to join the yellow vests. Indeed, the drivers know how much the country depends on them, and know how to block easily all the country’s large retailers and fuel supplies. Their protests are usually very efficient and listened to by the power.
Radical ecologist could strengthen movements like the yellow vests and use them as levers. If they do not directly serve the ecological movement, on one hand they serve social justice, with is always desirable, and on the other hand, they also destabilize the techno-industrial system by blocking supermarkets, breaking multinationals front stores, cutting roads and borders, or blocking oil refineries. In December 2018, the French power was surprised and destabilized by the breadth and the strength of this movement, and this is the kind of weakness we are looking for to generalize in the future.
While gentle ecologists pacifically parade in useless climate walks, at the same time, yellow vests are having violent assaults with the police in other areas of the city, breaking bones, loosing eyes, hands, and for some of them, dying. As radicalists, given the choice, we should know were the battle takes place and not to be late.
This is of course a brief and incomplete account of the yellow vest movement, whose forms are very diverse and shape-shifting.
By Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A / Image: CC BY 3.0
One voice from the wilderness is too weak to be listened to. My voice, for example, is not clear enough, strong enough, loud enough or adequately established so as to be heard. How can any person in a position of influence among our most wealthy and powerful leaders possibly be expected to receive a ‘best available science message’ until we and others who are similarly situated speak out, as if with one voice, about what could be somehow real, according to the best available science and ‘lights’ we possess?
Declining fertility rates virtually everywhere on Earth need not blind us to the undeniable, ongoing annual increases of absolute global human population numbers. Human numbers have exploded by more than 5 billion on earth in the past three score and ten years. This population growth ‘trajectory’ is patently unsustainable on a planet with the size, finite resources and frangible ecology of Earth. Please consider how the growth of human numbers worldwide is caused by the spectacular production and distribution of food for human consumption. With each passing year more people are being fed and more people are going hungry.
For years we have been encouraged to ‘think globally’. Let us hope that it is not too late to begin ‘acting globally’. There is no time to waste because untethered overproduction, overconsumption and overpopulation activities of the human species are on the verge of causing a global ecological wreckage of the planet we inhabit by turning Earth’s land surface into mountains of human detritus and its seas into sewers.
As things stand, the leading self-righteous elders in the world, on our watch, are charting a course to the future that will wreak havoc on what is surely sacred and normalize what is plainly profane…come what may. And these self-proclaimed ‘masters of the universe’ erroneously believe that they can have some faraway island or mega-yacht to which an escape from the global ecological wreckage would be possible. More evidence of immaculate hubris, I suppose.
Those few with power would like the status quo to remain as is; whereas, the many, too many, without power want necessary change and a ‘course correction’ while a ‘window of opportunity’ remains open. Note to us all: the window is closing steadily in our time. When unbridled production, consumption and propagation activities of the human species are occurring synergistically, expanding rampantly and effectively overspreading earth, perhaps this moment in space-time is an occasion to do something that is different and somehow right… for a change.
No one knows what is possible once we begin somehow to do things differently from the ways that we are doing things now here on our planet. At the moment we know that silence has overcome science; that greed has vanquished fairness and equity; that ignorance and stupidity have almost obliterated common sense and reason; that hubris has virtually annihilated humanness. Like it or not, ready or not, we are presented with enormous challenges.
Let us hope that our most able responses to the human-induced and -driven existential ecological threats looming ominously before humanity do not come too late to make a difference that makes a difference. There is much to do. Human limits, global planetary limitations and time constraints are the factors to which we are called upon to respond ably with all deliberate speed.
If only the world worked the way we want it to! That all-too-human creatures of Earth were actually self-proclaimed ‘masters of the universe’ in more ways than ‘name only’. By evading extant scientific knowledge about our distinctly human creatureliness and the biophysical limitations of the planet we inhabit; by widely sharing and consensually validating utterly false, hubristic thinking regarding our seemingly god-like super-human capabilities and Earth as a maternal presence eternally giving; by denying that earth is relatively small and finite with a frangible environment, it may be that the human community is not able to evade the consequences of our patently unsustainable behavior. Can we rise above our apparent incapacity to respond ably or not? Can we do so in a short time-frame so we avoid insurmountable ‘doomsday scenarios’?
Note the exquisite talents demonstrated by the savants among us or the teachers, poets, artists from whom there emanates universally shared, humane values, principles and practices for living or the leaders who have not sold out their souls for the poisoned fruits of power, gluttony, greed, wrath, pride, envy and effortless ease. The global challenges presented to our generation of elders are likely different from the threats to human well-being that had to be confronted by our ancestors. But that does not mean, even for a moment, that their challenges were either more or less difficult from the ones we face.
If our ancestors had not acknowledged, addressed and overcome the challenges before them, I dare say that we would not be here now. It does not appear that our generation of elders has so much as begun to struggle in a meaningful way with the global challenges before us. We collectively have been running away from our responsibilities and duties to the family of humanity and Earth’s well-being in general.
Our children and their children after them will say that we have failed them. Their true statement, perhaps spoken someday soon as a refrain, is not acceptable and cannot become our enduring legacy to life on this planet and to the planet, itself. We cannot luxuriate in our willful ignorance and self-serving hysterical blindness any longer.
The moment to step up, take hold, and move forward courageously is at hand. The time has come to accept the challenges already dimly visible in the offing.
Let us speak out as if we are a million voices because so many of us remaining electively mute make us complicit in the destruction of Earth and life as we know it. Are better, more responsible courses of action available to us? If so, other ways of going forward need to be discovered, discussed and implemented, fast.
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Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A. established The AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population in 2001. He lives in Fearrington Village, NC, USA and can be contacted at sesalmony@aol.com.
Editors Note: the international refugee crisis is driven by war, imperialism, and destruction of the planet. In other words, it is driven by civilization, or “the culture of empire.” DGR is opposed to empire and we see the refugee crisis as a humanitarian emergency. We believe that the best way to fight this crisis is to fight it’s underlying cause, by dismantling civilization. Learn more on the DGR website.
Washington, D.C. – May 16, 2019 – Today, the International Mayan League denounces the latest victim of death and murder at the U.S/Mexico border, a 2 ½ year-old toddler, a boy from Chiquimula, Guatemala. This tragic loss comes on the heels of the death of 16-year-old Juan de León Gutiérrez of the Maya Ch’orti’ people – also from Chiquimula. For the last year our people have been under constant attacks at the border. Since May 2018 we have lost five lives from Guatemala. First, Claudia Patricia Gómez González (Maya Mam) 20 years old who was shot in the head by a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) Agent; then 7-year-old Jakelin Caal (Maya Q’eqchi’), and 8-year-old boy Felipe Gomez Alonzo (Maya Chuj) both died in December while in CBP custody. Now, we have lost two more lives. How many more children must die before there is collective outrage, actions, denouncements? How many more times do we need to say this is a crisis specifically affecting indigenous children and youth?
We, indigenous peoples, are the majority in Guatemala and continue to be disproportionately impacted because our basic human rights are denied by the Guatemalan government and all sectors of society. We are forced to flee only to encounter inhumane treatment and human rights violations at the U.S./Mexico border in violation of international law. The Guatemalan and the United States governments must be held accountable for the deaths of our children. Impunity for their deaths is not an option and we demand justice and peace for their families.
Children, explicitly indigenous children, are some of the most victimized. In fiscal year 2019 alone, 19,991[1] Guatemalan unaccompanied children have been apprehended at the border. The number of Guatemalan family units has soared to 114,778, the highest for all the Central American countries[2]. Considering indigenous peoples are the majority in Guatemala, contrary to government admission, we strongly believe that these statistics reflect that thousands of Maya children and families are seeking refuge. Their indigenous identities must be acknowledged and documented.
Each indigenous child whose life has been stolen was forced to migrate because they are the most affected by centuries of structural inequality and discrimination in Guatemala. They often have no future in their rural and extremely impoverished communities. Many have little access to formal education and likely only speak their native language, an additional barrier that hinders their communication with authorities or service providers when migrating. We are outraged by these tragedies and demand the following from the government of the United States. There must be exhaustive, fair and transparent investigations by the Office of the Inspector General, Department of Homeland Security into all the deaths at the border; a dialogue with leaders of the Guatemalan Maya diaspora for the development of humane immigration policies; and recognition and implementation of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as the bare minimum standard for the respect and protection of indigenous peoples’ rights in forced migration.
Almost exactly at the 1-year anniversary of the murder of Claudia Patricia Gómez González of the Maya Mam Nation, we are reliving another nightmare, the death of a toddler. We are tired of being treated as if our lives do not matter. We will not stand idly by as our children are murdered by inhumane policies and practices rooted in hatred, fear, and racism.
The International Mayan League has been working in defense of indigenous human rights for many years, and since last year, trying to raise awareness that most of the children, youth, and families coming from Guatemala are indigenous. They are a Mayan women-led grassroots organization working directly with and for their people, and are entirely volunteer-based.
