Last Wednesday, bulldozers entered the Loma Charco Azul Biological Reserve (LCABR) in the Dominican Republic and began clearing vegetation for agricultural development. The move stunned local conservationists who had not been notified ahead of time of the project. Although Charco Azul Biological Reserve is home to a wealth of threatened species—including the world’s largest population of the Critically Endangered Ricordi’s iguana (Cyclura ricordi)—the destruction of the reserve was signed off by the Dominican Republic’s Minister of the Environment, Bautista Rojas Gómez.
“The current Minister of the Environment simply does not care about protected areas. Other Ministry technical staff had denied the permit, but he signed it off himself, yielding to pressure from the Agrarian Institute,” Yolanda Leon, a biologist and president of the local NGO Grupo Jaragua, told mongabay.com.
Grupo Jaragua, which focuses on conservation efforts in the southwestern portion of the Dominican Republic, has called on the government to immediately halt the clearing. Meanwhile the National Institute of Lawyers for the Protection of the Environment are preparing to take legal action over the destruction, arguing that the clearing of a protected area is illegal under national law, reports the Environment News Service. To date, around ten hectares have been cleared, but the government plans on clearing over a hundred hectares.
The agricultural project is reportedly a part of a relocation project for families that have been impacted by rising water levels in nearby Enriquillo Lagoon. However, Grupo Jaragua warns that the arid land around Loma Charco Azul Biological Reserve is little suitable for farming.
“Many other areas have been cleared nearby and no land has been allotted to local people, nor water systems have been installed, they remain fallow.”
However even if the clearing stops, the situation has already created conflict in the region.
“The nearby locals who’ve been promised the land are threatening […] violence against the ministry, environmental groups and any iguana they find unless they receive the land,” Leon notes.
Charco Azul Biological Reserve, which was only established in 2009, is notable for housing around 600 Ricordi’s iguana, a species which is down to just a few thousand individuals and is only found in the Dominican Republic. These iguanas are known for their blood-red eyes. In addition, the reserve is home to endemic species like the least pauraque (Siphonorhis brewsteri), the Hispaniolan racer snake (Haitiophis anomalus), and a tree cactus (Dendrocereus undulosus).
Most recently researchers have discovered the presence of the Hispaniolan solenodon (Solenodon paradoxus) in the park as well. Listed as Endangered, the solenodon is one of the world’s most bizarre mammals: it is the only mammal to shoot venom out of its teeth like a snake. The solenodon is also a living fossil: virtually unchanged in the fossil record, solenodons ran underneath the feet of dinosaurs 75 million years ago. The Hispaniolan solenodon’s only living relative is in Cuba and is Critically Endangered.
The Loma Charco Azul Biological Reserve is apart of the UNESCO Jaragua-Bahoruco-Enriquillo Biosphere Reserve.
Thi Sieu says her family lived for generations on a small plot of land studded with cashew trees until they fell victim to an alleged land grab by powerful local elites, a fate shared with many indigenous farmers in Vietnam’s lush central hills.
All land in the communist nation is owned by the state and usage rights are frequently opaque, allowing corrupt local officials and well-connected businessmen to seize land with impunity, according to activists speaking to AFP.
The Central Highlands have long been a hotbed of discontent over land rights, thanks in part to government schemes luring big agricultural firms and lowland migrants seeking their fortunes in booming cashew, coffee and rubber industries.
Official figures show the area’s population surged from 1.5 million in 1975 to around six million in 2010, prompting complaints from indigenous minorities of forced evictions by newly arrived ethnic Kinh, who make up 90 percent of the population.
Thi Sieu is a M’Nong, one of a patchwork of indigenous minorities which make up the remaining 10 percent of Vietnam’s roughly 90 million people.
She said her family’s trees were felled and ancestral graves destroyed in 2011 to make way for a rubber plantation run by a private company operating with the support of local officials.
“They said if we did not go they would beat us and kill us. There was no compensation at all. They cut down our trees. We lost everything — our land and our crops,” Sieu, 42, told AFP.
“Most of the land in our area now belongs to those who have money. Many of them are Kinh people,” she said.
“Our M’Nong community does not have much land now. We’ve been kicked out of areas that we had been living in for generations. We’re forced to become farm labourers,” Sieu added.
Many such local tribes — collectively known as Montagnards — sided with the US-backed south during Vietnam’s decades-long war. Some are calling for more autonomy, while others abroad even advocate independence for the region.
The last major protests against the loss of traditional lands to large-scale plantations was in 2004, and the government is still hunting down those involved. Eight men were recently jailed for up to 11 years for a demonstration in 2002.
‘Robbing villagers’ land for profit’
Three decades ago, before Vietnam abolished collectivisation and began a process of market reforms, land disputes were largely based on demographics and history, and concentrated in “diem nong” hot spots like the Central Highlands.
But as the country developed and land values rose, the trouble spread to cities where land values are higher.
People realised that by owning land close to cities they could “make seriously more money” than from remote coffee plantations, said Professor Adam Fforde, a Vietnam expert at Australia’s Victoria University.
According to octogenarian activist Le Hien Duc — who began working on land issues in the 1980s — once-isolated cases of land grabbing have become “rampant.”
“Local officials are robbing the villagers’ land for profit,” said Duc, who once worked for the country’s revered founding President Ho Chi Minh.
Villagers have no way to seek redress, as local authorities — their first avenue for complaint — are usually involved in the corrupt land deals, she said, calling for a clear land law and a serious anti-graft drive.
Nationwide, some 70 percent of complaints filed to authorities concern land.
“But there is no solution,” Duc said. “The people get kicked around like a ball between different levels of government — local, district, province. Then finally, they go to Hanoi.”
Daily protests in the capital
Sieu has travelled to Hanoi three times — at great personal expense — to file complaints to get her land in the Central Highlands back, without success. She is far from alone in making the attempt.
Come rain, shine or police crackdown, protesters can be found standing on a busy street corner near several government buildings in central Hanoi, holding handwritten signs detailing their land grievances.
“I have been here four months. The police have tried to remove me many times. But I will not leave — we will not leave — until they fix this problem,” said Do Thi Ngoc Nguyen from southern Dong Nai province.
With all land owned by the state, people must rely on land use rights certificates, but in reality they offer limited protection.
The problem is set to become more acute this year with the expiry of 20-year land use leases, which give many farmers some legal claim to their land. The government has not made it clear how the issue will be addressed.
“The robbery of the land, by local government, officials and enterprises, is the root of all the instability we see,” one leading Hanoi-based Vietnamese academic said on condition of anonymity, citing a growing number of protests in the capital.
“The villagers always lose,” he said, explaining that authorities commandeer the land in the name of “public interest” only to sell it to developers who build expensive houses and shopping malls.
Public opinion is firmly on the side of the land protesters.
Farmer Doan Van Vuon became a folk hero after using homemade shotguns to resist forced eviction last year — an incident that prompted one popular blog to name him “Person of the Year 2012”. He was jailed for five years in April.
Other land defenders have paid a different price. Le Thach Ban, 74, walks with a limp after being attacked by thugs last year when he refused to give up his land for a development in Hung Yen province near Hanoi.
“I had a punctured lung, head injuries, three broken ribs and spent 23 days in hospital,” he said, vowing to stay despite the efforts to remove him.
“We will defend the land that belonged to our ancestors,” he said.
Over two million deaths occur each year as a direct result of human-caused outdoor air pollution, a new study has found.
In addition, while it has been suggested that a changing climate can exacerbate the effects of air pollution and increase death rates, the study shows that this has a minimal effect and only accounts for a small proportion of current deaths related to air pollution.
The study, which has been published today, 12 July, in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters, estimates that around 470,000 people die each year because of human-caused increases in ozone.
It also estimates that around 2.1 million deaths are caused each year by human-caused increases in fine particulate matter (PM2.5) – tiny particles suspended in the air that can penetrate deep into the lungs, causing cancer and other respiratory disease.
Co-author of the study, Jason West, from the University of North Carolina, said: “Our estimates make outdoor air pollution among the most important environmental risk factors for health. Many of these deaths are estimated to occur in East Asia and South Asia, where population is high and air pollution is severe.”
According to the study, the number of these deaths that can be attributed to changes in the climate since the industrial era is, however, relatively small. It estimates that a changing climate results in 1500 deaths due to ozone and 2200 deaths related to PM2.5 each year.
Climate change affects air pollution in many ways, possibly leading to local increases or decreases in air pollution. For instance, temperature and humidity can change the reaction rates which determine the formation or lifetime of a pollutant, and rainfall can determine the time that pollutants can accumulate.
Higher temperatures can also increase the emissions of organic compounds from trees, which can then react in the atmosphere to form ozone and particulate matter.
“Very few studies have attempted to estimate the effects of past climate change on air quality and health. We found that the effects of past climate change are likely to be a very small component of the overall effect of air pollution,” continued West.
In their study, the researchers used an ensemble of climate models to simulate the concentrations of ozone and PM2.5 in the years 2000 and 1850. A total of 14 models simulated levels of ozone and six models simulated levels of PM2.5.
Previous epidemiological studies were then used to assess how the specific concentrations of air pollution from the climate models related to current global mortality rates.
The researchers’ results were comparable to previous studies that have analysed air pollution and mortality; however, there was some variation depending on which climate model was used.
West added, “We have also found that there is significant uncertainty based on the spread among different atmospheric models. This would caution against using a single model in the future, as some studies have done”.
If you’ve been a sentient being for the last few months, you’ve probably been watching some of the most curious weather events happening throughout the world.
Of particular concern for many scientists has been the Arctic sea ices melt, which dropped to its lowest level on record last summer. In the first few months of this year, large cracks were witnessed in the sea ice, indicating a great possibility that it has entered a death spiral and will disappear completely in the summer months within the next two years.
The rapid melt (and eventual disappearance) of the ice is having drastic affects on the jet stream in the northern hemisphere, creating powerful storms and extreme weather events, largely outside the comprehension of many scientists.
Jeff Masters, meteorology director at the private service Weather Underground states: “I’ve been doing meteorology for 30 years and the jet stream the last three yeas has done stuff I’ve never seen. […] The fact that the jet stream is unusual could be an indicator of something. I’m not saying we know what it is.”
For example, in May there were wildfires caused by excessive heat in California while at the same time there was more than a foot of snow in Minnesota. Spring in Colorado started with early wildfires and was subsequently followed by massive flooding. Massive floods have been devastating much of the northern hemisphere this spring, including Canada, the United States, Europe, India, and Russia.
Last week, Alaska saw its hottest days on record where the town of McGrath, Alaska hit 94 F degrees while just a few weeks earlier the local temperature was 15 F degrees. There have also been extreme heat waves throughout the southwest United States, some temperatures above 130 F degrees, also resulting in wildfires that spread to more than 6,000 acres in two days and killed 19 firefighters in Arizona.
This is catastrophic – most scientists have recognized any significant rise above 1 C will usher in irreversible changes that will threaten nearly all biological life on this planet.
Carbon dioxide has an approximate thirty-year time lag between its release into the atmosphere and its corresponding affect on average global temperature. Even if we stop all emissions today – keeping it at 400 ppm – we still have nearly thirty years of warming and climatic changes to undergo.
And right now, nothing that we are currently observing matches up with any of the models that we have – a stark acknowledgment that this historical moment we find ourselves in exists largely beyond our ability to comprehend it let alone predict its movement.
We are in uncharted territory – we are facing challenges never before experienced in the history of the human species. This presents a grave problem: if the best science we have today cannot accurately offer any model predictions for the path that we are currently on, how can we effectively plan for the future?
The honest truth: we can’t. We cannot effectively plan for a future that is beyond all known human experience.
The best that we can do now is stop exacerbating the problem – stop contributing to the rapidly accelerating decline and destruction of the Earth’s biosphere and ecosystems.
Quite literally: we have to completely dismantle the industrial economy, we have to do it soon, and really, we should have done it yesterday.
But even still, grinding industrial civilization to a complete halt today is only guaranteed to mitigate the pace at which we’re running – it is not yet clear that it will ultimately alter our direction. We have, at minimum, thirty more years of incomprehensible climate disruptions and changes to undergo no matter what happens today or tomorrow. Our only chance to still have a thriving and living planet following the coming decades is by making a complete, radical and rapid shift from the industrial economy.
The logic of industrial civilization and capitalism is immediacy – grow as quickly as possible, generate maximum profits in the shortest time, and deal with consequences and crises later (if at all). Long-term planning and strategizing is antithetical to, and bears no consequence on, the drive for capital accumulation, expansion, and domination.
This process, within the last 30-40 years alone, has resulted in such an expansive project of urbanization around the world that capitalism has triumphed over (read: conquered, murdered, and erased) all other ways of existing on this planet, human and non-human. We now live in a truly global industrial civilization – a monoculture of unprecedented scope; a totality of being and of tyranny.
To oppose this project of endless growth and centralization of control, we need to enter into the logic of a truly oppositional culture – a fundamental and radical break from of our entire material reality. This entails a complete negation of our current standard of living and entire way of being in the world. Anything short of this negation will only exacerbate the problem.
Acknowledging this does not mean that the task at hand is easy or that a majority of people will accept it as truth. In fact, even amidst collapse, most people will not resist the status quo and are likely to fight to the death to protect it.
If your experience is that your water comes from the tap and that your food comes from the grocery store then you are going to defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on that; if your experience is that your water comes from a river and that your food comes from a land base then you will defend those to the death because your life depends on them. So part of the problem is that we have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it and it’s very difficult physically for us to live outside of it.
But this also does not mean that the task at hand is any less true. It does mean, however, that if we wish to build our struggle for a truly just and sustainable future we must first do away with our delusions, re-focus our strategies to the most effective, and be radically uncompromising in our vision.
On June 25th, Barack Obama – a president whom, despite his rhetoric of care, spent all of the last five years of his presidency completely ignoring climate change – finally addressed the nation in a speech that was supposed to signal a “serious plan forward.”
Many “environmental” groups along with the mainstream media heralded the speech as being progressive and a great commitment to the crisis at hand. In reality, much of the speech was full of nothing more than the doublespeak typical of his presidential legacy.
In a move that many considered to be a “big victory,” the president merely stated that he will ask the State Department not to approve the final construction of the Keystone XL pipeline unless it can first determine that it “will not lead to a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions.”
This is certainly a sly trick designed to pacify a building resistance, an attempt to re-frame the debate and make it appear as if our best interests are dutifully being considered. However, to even pretend that it is at all possible that this pipeline would not lead to a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions is delusional.
While the fight against the KXL has been a fight against a pipeline, it is predominantly being waged as a fight against tar sands oil production entirely. It is incredibly easy to argue that one specific pipeline will not result in significant GHG emissions if we isolate it from the very process that demands its existence in the first place.
It is the extraction process itself that is the net greenhouse gas emitter destroying the planet – not merely the nodes at which its product is transported and consumed. Although this infrastructure should be equally opposed and dismantled, stopping one pipeline being built will only mean that others will replace it or other means will be developed to export its goods.
We should settle for nothing less than a complete end to all extraction processes. It is not even close to a victory until that happens.
Despite his attempt to appease environmentalists with this speech, there were some activist groups that were rightfully confused and enraged with his hypocritical stance. In a speech meant to signal commitment to slow climate change, President Obama continued to praise and support the fossil fuel industry and hydraulic fracturing for natural gas.
Chris Williams, author of Ecology and Socialism, examines the rhetoric and reality of this latest speech, providing a great reminder of whose interests this president actually serves – those of the ruling class. He also outlines some new ideas for Obama’s consideration:
If you’re serious about stopping global warming, you need to veto KXL.
If you’re serious about moving away from dirty energy, then there needs to be a strict timeline established for the complete phasing-out of all coal and nuclear plants by 2030 and their replacement, not with natural gas or nuclear, but with wind and solar power.
If you’re really serious about carbon pollution, you can’t with any honesty discuss solutions without making massive cuts in military spending. The Department of Defense is responsible for 80 percent of the U.S. government’s energy consumption, and the U.S. military is by far the biggest polluter on the planet. Radical reductions in spending on the Pentagon are essential for human survival.
You made no mention of the need for enormous investment in and expansion of public transit. If you’re serious about addressing climate change and making our cities more livable and the air more breathable, you will take the money you just saved by cutting military expenditures and apply it to the construction of new rail, light rail, tram and bus service, between and within cities, obviating the need for cars.
These ideas are some of the more prevalent solutions that are often tossed around in environmental and social justice circles. While the intention may be sincere, simply advocating for a shift from “dirty energy” (coal, oil, nuclear) to “clean energy” (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, etc.) does a great disservice for generating informed decision-making at such a critical historical moment.
While these energieshavemanyflaws, one of the greatest problems with their proponents is that they do not fundamentally put into question our standard of living or way of being in the world.
An often-cited study by these proponents is the work of Mark Z. Jacobson who, mere weeks after Hurricane Sandy devastated the Northeast U.S., presented the economic argument for investing in renewable energies. His plan calls for a complete shift off fossil fuels and towards a rapid investment in wind and solar power for the entire state of New York by the year 2030.
Not only was this study completed on the premise that our culture does not dramatically change its standard of living, the study fails to even acknowledge the resources required to build these new energy infrastructures.
These energy sources are not free from fossil fuels and are dependent on rare earth metals and minerals; this sort of rapid technological and social shift will require massive extractive processes – a price we simply cannot afford if we wish to stop the destruction of this planet.
If we wish to create a “sustainable” future that is also just, a question that should be immediately asked is: Where are these resources coming from? From whose land will we steal from in order to build this renewable-energy utopia? Despite the fact that New York State ranks in or near the top third of U.S. mineral production, none of the crucial metals and minerals currently used for the development of solar panels and wind turbines can be found here – we will have to steal these resources from some other land base.
Even more problematic, Jacobson’s study does not entirely take into consideration (to the extent that it is possible) the severe climatic disruptions we are unavoidably set to experience in the coming decades. The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice in the next few years will result in rising sea levels that could displace more than 400 million people globally. Is it worth the investment for an entirely new energy infrastructure that may ultimately be irrelevant by the time it can be actualized?
To continue to advocate for these “solutions,” is to continue living in the delusion that we can have our current standard of living and have a planet too. As Robert Jensen articulates in his article, “Get Apocalyptic: Why Radical is the New Normal“:
…Toughest to dislodge may be the central illusion of the industrial world’s extractive economy: that we can maintain indefinitely a large-scale human presence on the earth at something like current First-World levels of consumption. The task for those with critical sensibilities is not just to resist oppressive social norms and illegitimate authority, but to speak a simple truth that almost no one wants to acknowledge: The high-energy/high-technology life of affluent societies is a dead end. We can’t predict with precision how resource competition and ecological degradation will play out in the coming decades, but it is ecocidal to treat the planet as nothing more than a mine from which we extract and a landfill into which we dump.
We cannot know for sure what time the party will end, but the party’s over.
Our primary goal and vision for the world is a living planet. Nothing else matters. The biggest challenge to that goal is the industrial economy and it’s a moving target. If we have any chance at stopping it we cannot have a strategy that is focused solely on the injustices of today. Our actions and strategies should be based on where we’re heading – and where we’re heading is nothing short of near-term extinction.
This is not hyperbole or metaphor. 200 species went extinct today and another 200 species will go extinct tomorrow. 400,000 people die every year from climate-related deaths. A war has been declared against the living the world and we ought to start articulating which side we’re on, and we ought to seriously start fighting back.
I’m reminded of a recent quote from MEND (Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta), a militant group successful at halting more than 28% of Nigeria’s oil output between 2006 and 2009, which articulates the situation succinctly:
From today, every tanker vehicle we find distributing petroleum products including propane gas has become a legitimate target in our war against injustice, corruption, despotism and oppression.
This is the kind of vigor we need to be generating in our own movement. Never before have the lines between those who seek to destroy this planet and those who seek a radically different future, been so clearly drawn and defined. Yet, there is a degree of hesitancy within the majority of activist circles in the West that is painstakingly paralyzing our movements from reaching its goals.
If we stand in solidarity with all the human and non-human lives that have been lost, or are routinely brutalized to this way of life, we must fundamentally reject our own standards of living and ideals about how to enter into relationship with each other and with the land. Knowing that we have now entered a historical moment of incomprehensible climatic disruptions and changes for the foreseeable future, we’d be better to do away with our delusions sooner rather than later.
BREAKDOWN is a biweekly column by Joshua Headley, a writer and activist in New York City, exploring the intricacies of collapse and the inadequacy of prevalent ideologies, strategies, and solutions to the problems of industrial civilization.
Heavily-armed, masked paramilitary forces descended upon the Gogebic Taconite mining site in Wisconsin over the weekend, much to the chagrin of local residents and elected officials.
“I’m appalled,” state Sen. Bob Jauch (D) told The Wisconsin State Journal on Monday. “There is no evidence to justify their presence.”
Jaunch sent a letter to Gogebic President Bill Williams on Monday demanding the company remove the guards, which he called “common in third world countries,” but stressed that “they don’t belong in Northern Wisconsin.”
The company brought in the paramilitary forces after being confronted by a group of about 15 protesters in June. At least one of the demonstrators, a young woman, was hit with misdemeanor charges for trying to take a camera away from one of the company’s geologists. Gogebic claims they’ve since caught several people illegally camping on their property and did not want to take any chances.
The company hired by Gogebic is Arizona-based Bulletproof Securities, which boasts that many of their employees are ex-military and many of their clients are celebrities and government officials. They certainly look the part, too: photos of Bulletproof guards at the Gegebic site published by the Wisconsin progressive blog Blue Cheddar show men who look very much like special forces soldiers, complete with assault rifles and black masks.
“Do they have the authority to use those weapons? If so, on who?” Jauch asked the Journal. “I don’t know if there’s a hunting season right now except maybe for rabbit, but you shoot a rabbit with that, all you’ll end up with is fur. What would you use those weapons for except to hurt somebody?”
The mining site they’re protecting in the Penokee Mountains is highly controversial and critics say in violation of a treaty with Native Americans.
Video shot by Wisconsin-based website Indian Country TV over the weekend featured at least one of the paramilitaries wearing full camoflage and a military-style net over his face — an image that would have been completed by an assault rifle, if he hadn’t left it sitting on the passenger’s seat of his vehicle, right next to a cameraman.
“What happened to your fancy guns?” the cameraman asked. “Look at that. Very close by. Who are you going to shoot?”
“It’s a security protocol,” the guard replied, refusing to provide his name or his employer’s name.
“You’re being caught up in a national phenomenon,” the cameraman informed the guard. “We’ve got reporters calling from all over the country wondering about the occupation of Penokee Mountains Heritage Park by people who’ve got automatic weapons. And the question is, ‘Why?’”
A spokesperson for Gogebic told The Cap Times on Tuesday that they’re considering restricting their drilling sites from public access, which wouldn’t be an option until December when the state begins accepting applications.
This video is from Indian Country TV, published July 7, 2013.
By Vincent Kelley / Deep Green Resistance Great Plains & Eugene
Civilization’s continuance requires widespread denial among the populace of civilized nations. The denial of the inherent unsustainability and violence of civilization is, for example, pivotal in the conventional understanding of civilized existence as the most “advanced” or “highest” form of societal organization. While denial of the egregious material consequences of civilization is the most blatant example of this culture’s sickness, there’s an intuitive sense among those who are aware of civilization’s destructive nature that there are deeper socio-psychological problems in the substratum of civilized life. Although often undetected, the denial of impermanence is one of the strongest underlying forces behind civilization’s rapacity and attendant destructiveness.
Impermanence is inherent to existence regardless of sociocultural arrangements, present in cyclical indigenous cultures and contemporary linear industrial civilization alike. Despite this undeniable fact, the way a culture relates to impermanence plays a large part in determining its sustainability, the level of violence it perpetuates, and the internal well-being of its members.
One option is to accept and even embrace the basic uncertainty of an impermanent world. We may get sick at any time. We will certainty grow old. And, incontrovertibly, we will experience the most conspicuous and mysterious of impermanences: death. Another option is to tell ourselves that impermanence doesn’t exist. We can decide to fear old age, illness, and death. [2] as the greatest of horrors and center our morality around what historian Faisal Devji calls “life as an absolute value.” [3] Since death is an impermanence that cannot be avoided, it is worth reflecting further on its place in society and, in turn, our individual psychologies.
Just as patriarchy is viewed by some feminist philosophers, such as Ynestra King, as the root hierarchy from which all other forms of domination in society flow [4] a fear of fluidity, change, and passing away in life can often be traced back to a deep fear of death itself. Indeed, we sometimes speak of something “dying” in our life as it fades away. The civilized response to death, and all impermanence for that matter, is to resist it with all of one’s might. As activist and philosopher Charles Eisenstein notes, “[t]his is most obvious in our medical system, of course, in which death is considered the ultimate ‘negative outcome,’ to which even prolonged agony is preferable.” [5]
But if impermanence is part of life, and death is the paragon of impermanence, why can’t death also be seen as a part of life? Some cultures—clearly not our own—have understood death in this light. Indigenous scholar Jack Forbes points out that “'[s]oil fertility’ is, in large part, nothing but a measure of the extent to which a particular bit of ground is saturated with our dead ancestors and relatives,” and concludes that “[d]eath, then, is a necessary part of life.” [6] More concretely, we can observe this phenomenon when a nurse log facilitates the growth of burgeoning seedlings as itself decays. Going even further, Yaqui nagualli Juan Matus invites us to conceive of our death as a sort of gift for another, even if this other is only a micro-organism. [7]
So, as we can see, death—and impermanence more broadly—is inevitable personally and is even inextricably linked to life itself. However, attitudes towards death can be radically divergent, and, as I hope to demonstrate, tremendously consequential in our relationship to ourselves and the natural world.
One of the repercussions of the denial of impermanence is the privileging of preservation over experience itself. One need not look far to see the copious examples of this obsession in our culture. Often, taking pictures on a hike, for example, takes precedence over the experience of hiking itself. And, in some cases, the picture taking can even set up a wall of separation between “us” and “nature,” commodifying the latter while attempting to preserve a static conception of the former as a rigid identity. What about music? Do you ever find yourself at a concert thinking more about purchasing the band’s CD or looking them up on the internet than experiencing the music as it manifests around you? It’s not that these efforts to capture a fleeting moment are inherently wrong; they do become constricting, however, when they take priority over present-moment experience itself.
Indeed, when we valorize creation and preservation over decay and ephemerality—failing to see their inseparability—we are left in an existential bind where “making our mark,” so to speak, in an often physical manner, seems like the only sensible and worthwhile course of action. The drive to make a mark springs from a cultural belief that our value is dependent upon leaving something behind that will make us worthy in the eyes of society after we die, or at least place us in the category of people who worked for the cause of civilizational progress—bowing at the alter of the off limits idol of “human innovation.”
Hence, to have our very existence affirmed we are compelled to create something “permanent” as a testament to our worth. This mark-making often takes the form of environmental degradation and imperial conquest. We create toxic chemicals that will outlive us all, erect dams that alter the Earth’s orbit [8] and are more concerned about the future strength of the United States military, and the propagation of Western Civilization to “backwards” parts of the globe, than the availability of clean air and potable water. The paradox of all of this is that, in an effort to preserve, we destroy. Our fear of the impermanence inherent in existence has led us to create that which destroys and fail to realize the consequences as the pattern plays out time and time again.
Eisenstein writes that “[t]he whole American program now is to insulate oneself as much as possible from death—to achieve ‘security.’” [9] Concomitant with this false sense of security is a false sense of control. The desire for control is a result of denying impermanence. As an alternative to this denial, we can acknowledge that the world is full of ever-changing, largely unpredictable, and, above all, endlessly developing then decaying phenomena. Only then can the control imperative fall away, relegated to history as the ignorant, destructive, and ultimately self-defeating ideology that it is. Take technology. One of the alluring aspects of technology is the ability to control previously uncontrollable phenomena. But for us to be able to control something through technology, it’s presupposed that we have control over technology.
This is a misconception. Indeed, philosopher Tad Beckman asserts, in his reading of Martin Heidegger’s writings on technology, that technology is not merely “a complex of contrivances and technical skills, put forth by human activity and developed as means to our ends,” but instead is, in essence, “a vast system of organization which encompasses us rather than standing objectively and passively ready for our direction and control.” It is “an autonomous organizing activity within which humans themselves are organized.”[10] And, as Heidegger himself points out in The Question Concerning Technology, “the will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.” [11]
The same can be said of civilization as a whole. With its growth imperative it takes on an existence in itself within which humans must function. Our desire to control increases, paradoxically, in proportion to the increase of civilization’s control of our very existence. As cities grow and encompass the globe, dictating the terms of our existence, the surveillance state and the extirpation of biomes become all the more essential—two examples of this culture’s rapacious crusade of domination. In the process, the fallacy of infinite growth on a finite planet is implanted into our worldview, further reinforcing our denial of impermanence. In other words, the avariciousness inherent in the structure of civilization is matched by that of civilized humans, who have created a way of living which provides the illusion of control as it uncontrollably metastasizes across the planet.
The denial of impermanence is not only toxic to our individual selves, but also to those beings with which we enter into relationships, human and nonhuman, and the planet as a whole. At the root of our insecurity with impermanence is a fear, and, in the end, a misunderstanding of death, which is, in reality, a part of life. This leads us to devalue present-moment experience as we grasp at preservation and replicability. Finally, our faith in the religion of civilization has led us to become inextricably ensnared in civilization’s controlling trap, unable to see through the shadow of its edifices. Reflecting on the impermanence in our lives, and in the life of the decaying culture within which we live, is therefore critical in our struggle to engender a way of living that is free from the greed, exploitation, and devastation of civilization.
Notes
[1 ] See Derrick Jensen, Endgame: The Problem of Civilization (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), 40-41 for a discussion of cyclical vs. linear cultures.
[2] My invocation of the “old age, illness, and death” example is derived from Buddhist teachings. See for example the Upajjhatthana Sutta (AN 5.57): http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an05/an05.057.than.html.
[3] Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (United States: Harvard, 2012), 186.
[4] Andrew Brenna and Yeuk-Sze Lo, “Environmental Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/ethics-environmental/
[5] Charles Eisenstein, “The Ethics of Eating Meat: A Radical View,” Weston A. Price Foundation (June 30, 2002), at http://www.westonaprice.org/health-issues/ethics-of-eating-meat.
[6] Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and other Cannibals (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008 (1979)), 10-11.
[7] Ibid., 10.
[8] Malcolm W. Browne, “Dams for Water Supply Are Altering Earth’s Orbit, Expert Says,” New York Times (March 3, 1996), at http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/03/news/dams-for-water-supply-are-altering-earth-s-orbit-expert-says.html.
[9] Eisenstein, loc. cit.
[10] Tad Beckman, “Martin Heidegger and Environmental Ethics,” Harvey Mudd College (2000).
[11] Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper, 1977 (1954), 5. I should note that Heidegger was critiquing technology as a “mode of Being-in-the-world,” not in the sense of “the machines and devices of the modern age,” per se (Michael Wheeler, “Martin Heidegger,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/heidegger/.
