by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 1, 2013 | Male Violence
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin
I wish this was just a nightmare. My friend is gone and I want her back. She was killed several weeks ago—violently, sadistically, suddenly—and for several weeks I’ve been crying. My head keeps shaking. I whisper to myself: “No. No. No.” Over and over. More than anything else right now, I want this to not be real. But it is the victim herself who would have been the first to remind me: men’s violence against women, the cruelty of this culture, is all too real.
The pain of the world has come home. What words could do it justice? I dredged some up to speak at her funeral, but even then this tragedy felt like a bad dream. It still does.
Just one night before her death, we were making dinner plans for the coming week. Just a few days before that, we were on the phone expressing how much we’ve missed one another. “I’m listening to Regina Spektor and thinking of you,” I said. “Aw, thank you for thinking of me,” she said. “I’d love to see you soon.”
After one unfathomable instance, after one piece of the most horrible of news, our plans are shattered, our relationship gone, my heart broken.
Jessie and I met because we both wanted to change the world; because we both believed that, in the words of a feminist writer we mutually admired, “there are certain kinds of pain that people should not have to endure.”
With her easy smile, a lot of laughter, and a propensity to start so many deeply profound conversations in one sitting, Jessie was a gust of wonder, passion, and beauty. She asked the big questions and, as best she could, tried to live out the answers every day. Her wish was only for others to try, too.
The personal and political were inseparable for Jessie. She was at once a musician, an activist, a daughter, and a friend. She was so much more than any one title could describe. And every aspect of who she was depended on the other; their coming together is what made her life as rich as it was, what made her as dynamic a person as she was, what moved her to change her corner of the world, as she did.
Together, we cooked, we walked in the woods, we talked politics, we talked relationships, we made music, we did activism. We were sternly serious and blissfully silly.
Jessie would sit at the piano and let the music of her life release. She asked me to sing along, which I feebly did. Meanwhile, not so feebly, I stood back and witnessed in awe the undeterred passion flowing out of my friend’s throat and fingertips. It gave me shivers and put tears in my eyes.
Her voice still thunders in my mind. Her songs still have me mesmerized. Her honest longing for justice still humbles me. Her courage in fighting for it still shows me a way to live my life.
Like so much that is alive and beautiful in this world, Jessie was stolen from us. She was a flame snuffed out by the very violence she strived to stop. She was vanished by hands of destruction: a fate Jessie firmly stood against when faced by vulnerable people and a vulnerable planet; a fate that came, in its unspeakable horror, to take her from her safest place, on some random morning.
It’s hard—near impossible—to piece together letters that come close to spelling the magnitude of how wrong this all is. The contrast of her life—which, in her last days, she said explicitly she was loving—and her death—which was cruel beyond sane human comprehension—is staggering. It is heart-breaking.
What can I do with this broken heart? Try as I may, wish as I might, nothing—not the recounting of memories, not the consoling conversations, not the longest of cries, not the steadfast declarations of activism, not the time spent with those who have loved her most and remind me of her most—will bring her back. So, what to do?
If Jessie’s life was made of music, she’d tell me to just keep singing along. She’d tell me, in the simple, honest terms she was so fond of, to simply keep trying; to try at life. As long as I’ve known her, I’ve been better for it. I’ve been encouraged to ask more questions, to be more loving, to sing more and worry less. Why stop now?
Little is as sobering as death. Its lesson is basic: take nothing for granted.
What good is this lesson without my friend? There’s no solace here, just truth in the most truthful sense; the truth that breaks hearts and buoys them.
The truth is I miss Jessie; I want her to be here. The truth is I’m still alive and I have to go on. The truth is I have, at every moment, the choice to embody the wonder and beauty and passion that she embodied.
What I can’t do—and will not do—is forget. Jessie, in life or death, cannot be distilled to a thirty-second news story. She is not just some girl from some small town whom some tragic thing happened to; the once living, now deceased, occasionally remembered. She is not just another victim with a fate too sad to mention.
This dissociating, this forgetting, is what allows us to carry on, quiet and complacent, in the face of glaring and devastating injustice. It is what allows the perpetrators to carry on, too.
The casualties of this culture far outnumber those who survive it. Each one has a story; friends and family in mourning; dreams and passions forever lost.
I want to tell Jessie’s story forever. I want to tell every story of every stolen life as much as I possibly can. I can’t forget Jessie—her laugh, her music, her political vigor, her sitting across the table from me on that night of the full moon—even if I wanted to. I can’t forget the hollow her death has created within me and within this world.
So, what do we do? What do we who love life and love justice and love Jessie do now? First we mourn; then we fight. And all the while, we keep the flames of our love alive: for each other, for this planet, for you, Jessie.
It is utterly stunning how, within the subtleties of a single relationship, we can find something so blazingly true and real and beautiful as to see in it the love that is the fabric of our world; a love worth living and dying for. When those subtleties, and the relationship itself, are stolen from us, it is the meaning of the whole world that shakes beneath us and, eventually, guides us forward. Such is precisely how precious life is.
As her father said, “Jessie’s death crystallizes things. There is a war between forces of life and death. We can either let a small group of people fight it out while the rest of us sit by, or we can get in there.”
Jessie’s kindness radiates still. Jessie’s fight is unfinished. To honor our dear friend, let us now love deeply, defend fiercely, and put an end to violence against women and the culture which fosters it.
I love you, Jessie, and I miss you more than words can explain. I had more to learn from you, more to experience alongside you, more love to give you.
First I’ll mourn. Then I’ll fight. All the while, I’ll love you.
Beautiful Justice is a monthly column by Ben Barker, a writer and community organizer from West Bend, Wisconsin. Ben is a member of Deep Green Resistance and is currently writing a book about toxic qualities of radical subcultures and the need to build a vibrant culture of resistance. He can be contacted at benbarker@riseup.net.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 30, 2013 | Climate Change, Protests & Symbolic Acts
By Sarah Moles / Generation Alpha
Seven environmental activists today stole a ‘Carbon Bomb’ from the offices of transport company Aurizon (link www.aurizon.com.au) in Brisbane, Australia. The action signified the launch of their shop front hunger strike, pressuring Aurizon to withdraw planned capital from the largest coal complex in the world, planned for the Galilee Basin in their state of Queensland. Burning the coal from this complex is forecast to release over 700 million tons of carbon pollution each year, more than the total emissions Australia, the UK or Canada.
The hunger strike is part of the Over Our Dead Bodies (link www.OverOurDeadBodies.net) campaign, run by 40,000-strong Generation Alpha (link www.facebook.com/GenerationAlpha). Campaign coordinator Ben Pennings told the gathering media:
We’re here because Aurizon plan to bail out debt-ridden Indian company GVK, allowing them to dig up the first 3 coal mines in the Galilee Basin. Mining the Galilee is like setting off a bomb. This amount of carbon pollution is a deadly catastrophe, an environmental crime. So we’ve taken this carbon bomb from Aurizon to symbolize our intentions to stop them.
The campaign is designed to provide unique financial pressure on Aurizon, a rail freight company that specializes in coal. Activists in Australia but also internationally are committing to actions on the campaign website (link www.OverOurDeadBodies.net) that will cost Aurizon significant time and money. These include direct action and civil disobedience aimed at delaying infrastructure, hampering day-to-day operations and even targeting the company’s CEO and board members. Mr. Pennings said:
Aurizon have been ignoring the legitimate concerns of the environment movement for too long. So activists around the country are getting ready for direct action, to make the precarious finances of this complex even more so. Governments aren’t protecting our future, so we will.
The activists included former Australian Senator Andrew Bartlett (link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Bartlett). Andrew expressed his frustration with the lack of political engagement on climate change, saying:
We will be on a public hunger strike from today, engaging community members to understand that we can’t have the biggest coal complex on the planet, we can’t ignite this carbon bomb, and still avoid catastrophic climate change. We don’t want short-term mining projects that destroy communities and the environment. We want renewable power and long-term sustainable industries integrated into our communities.
For more on the Over Our Dead Bodies campaign, see http://www.OverOurDeadBodies.net
For the Hunger Strikers blog, see http://www.OverOurDeadBodies.net/blog
Generation Alpha’s Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/GenerationAlpha
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 28, 2013 | Gender
By John Stoltenberg
This article was originally published by Feminist Current, and is republished here with permission from the author.
I understand—I really do—why a lot of people raised to be a man are seeking a gendered sense of self that is separate and distinct from all that has been called out lately as toxic masculinity. These days a penised person* would have to be really clueless not to notice all the manhood-proving behaviors that have been critiqued as hazardous to well-being (one’s own and others’). However much that penised person accepts the mounting critique of standard-issue masculinity, he might reasonably be wondering what manhood-authenticating behaviors are exempt from it: What are the ways to “act like a man” that definitively keep one from being confused with “men behaving badly”? Or, put more personally: What exactly does one do nowadays to inhabit a male-positive gendered identity that feels—and is—worthy of respect (by oneself and others)?
At the same time—as if in an alternate universe—there are legions of people raised to be a man who have been exposed to the criticism of masculinity but are rejecting and resisting the critique with all their might, almost at a cellular level, the way a body’s immune system generates antibodies to fend off an invading infection. For these penised people, criticism of any masculinity is experienced as an attack on all masculinity. Simmering resentment, eruptive anger, and backlash are but a few symptoms of their abreaction. What’s going on inside—where they feel their authentic “This is who I am”—is a life-and-death struggle against what they perceive portends personal annihilation.
For the sake of clarity, I’ll name these two characterizations Reformers and Conservers. Of course these are not the only segments of the penised population. But I’m going to assume they are both prominent enough that most readers will recognize them in broad outline. And I’m going to assume, further, that most readers place some sort of valuation on these two personas. One is better than the other, most readers are probably thinking. One is Good Guy and one is Bad Guy. And no matter whether you believe that Reformers are the real good guys or Conservers are the real good guys, what will likely be on your mind is that one does a superior job of “doing masculinity” while the other does an inferior job.
Notice how the better-than/worse-than categorization scheme comes mentally into play? It kicks in like a habit whenever one’s acculturated higher cortex is presented with any question having to do with manhood. The brain has been conditioned since childhood to perceive the social gender identity manhood through a lens of better than/worse than. It’s how we all learned to experience the identity, and it’s how we all know to recognize “who’s the man there.” It’s also how some of us embody credible manhood if and when we can, and it’s what all of us try to keep safe from if and when we can’t. Because this interior superior/inferior typology is intractably linked to interactional cognition of the gender identity manhood, it’s no wonder that neither Resisters nor Conservers get round to thinking about the template very critically.
But we must do that. We actually must. Our lives depend upon it.
For reasons implicit in my opening paragraph about Reformers, the notion of “healthy masculinity” has caught on in many circles the past few years. People convene about it, organize and workshop about it, tweet and blog about it, and in general work conscientiously at making the concept mean something viable and valuable that will fill an emptiness in Reformers’ lives—the yawning void left when, beginning a few decades ago, “He acts just like a man” began to shift from laudatory to derogatory.
Conservers, of course, don’t think there’s anything unwell about masculinity at all. And they definitely believe that masculinity ought not be impugned—as, in truth, it is—by the expression “healthy masculinity.” Imagine how a patient in a cancer ward would feel if a newly enlightened roommate began rejoicing about having healthy cancer. Probably offended. Maybe pissed off. Similarly a Conserver will never be persuaded that the masculinity he aspires to and embodies is unhealthy, or an affliction of some sort. Instead, the Conserver will regard the innuendo of “healthy masculinity” as itself a form of life-threatening attack.
Now, call me crazy, but I don’t see much long-term promise in talking only to Reformers or only to Conservers. And I certainly see no advantage in sending a message—“healthy masculinity”—that is sure to exacerbate the gender anxiety of anyone who doesn’t believe that subscribing to analog masculinity somehow makes a person sick. Shutting off communications with Conservers from the get-go by talking of “healthy and unhealthy masculinity” is at best vain and counterproductive and at worst inflammatory. Numerically Conservers represent a lot of penised people; they probably represent more than Reformers, who are still a minority inside the Conserver-dominant culture. But besides being a triggering turnoff to Conservers, there’s an even bigger problem with talking of “healthy masculinity”: It’s based on a well-meaning but ultimately faulty premise. It’s not the right fix for the problem. It’s actually a “cure” that reinvigorates a “disease.”
Many folks of goodwill want whatever’s wrong with the social gender identity manhood to be fixed comprehensively. Their hope is that the fix will avert all those male-gender-identity flare-ups that are well known to cause collateral damage. They want to live in a world where there is no need to be afraid of someone simply because they were born penised and socialized to be a man. In short, they want more harmony among human beings than we are presently accustomed to on the planet.
But here’s the rub: Any movement or campaign to remedy manhood cannot itself replicate the better-than/lesser-than oneupsmanship upon which—inside everyone’s head—manhood is definitionally predicated. Every time our acculturated brains want to identify certain penised people who are “doing masculinity” superiorly, we are reactivating the same mental scripts that were imprinted in us when we watched, or participated in, our earliest mano-a-mano fights. Someone was the victor. Someone was the loser. That was the way we learned the meaning of “manhood.” And that winner/loser, dominant/subordinate definitional prototype does not just vanish into thin air.
Instead we have to figure out a way to retrain brains, and reframe what the problem is precisely. To explain what I mean, I’m going to digress a bit and talk about what’s known as bystander-intervention training.
Basically bystander-intervention training is a program to equip penised people with communication skills, empathy, emotional intelligence, relational tactics, and a sense of personal agency to intervene when they see another penised person about to commit a sexual assault. Bystander-intervention training is widely regarded as one of the most effective means of primary sexual-assault prevention in social situations such as bars and parties where there are likely to be observers.
A big part of the program is teaching trainees (who tend to be Reformers) how to address one or several other penised people (often but not always Conservers) in a way that will effectively interrupt a probable assault-in-progress, create an exit option for a probable victim, and—here’s the tricky part—not precipitate a cockfight with the probable perp.
There are many worthy aspects of bystander-intervention training but the one I want to focus on is this: It is practice acting out of one’s moral agency without trying to prove one’s manhood. This is a discipline that is learnable, replicable, and rememberable. One reason a trainee knows the discipline is important is that he knows darn well what will happen if he does try to prove his manhood in such a situation: The contretemps will turn to combat of one sort or another, because the very act of trying to demonstrate one’s own manhood vis-à-vis another penised person will fuel the other person’s manhood-demonstrating responses (which are fired up already, as evidenced by the sexual-assault-in-progress).
And when a trainee overcomes his own anticipatory dread of what might happen to him if he intervenes—when in real life he actually does step up and say or do something that interrupts what might have ended harmfully—he learns another powerful lesson: “I did that. I said that. I stopped that.” Put another way: “I acted out of my own moral agency and I can take personal responsibility for the consequence of that action.”
Of course, those words are not literally what runs through the ex-bystander’s mind. But there’s a distinct experience captured in that moment. It’s the experience of acting out of one’s conscience and being who one is.
I submit that when we connect the dots of moments like that—real-time instances of embodied ethics and accountability—a new picture of the problem will emerge alongside a new recognition of the solution.
Learning how to act out of one’s moral agency with consistency—how to tap into one’s capacity for ethical choice-making in a way that other people can come to expect one to do—is not a gendered behavior (it doesn’t come with any particular plumbing), nor is it a gendering behavior (it doesn’t make someone more anything except more human).
Another digression.
Ever notice how frequently the words “Real men don’t…” appear in male-pattern-violence** prevention campaigns? “Real men don’t buy girls.” “Real men don’t hit women.” “Real men don’t rape.” The list goes on. “Real men don’t…” has become a Reformers’ mantra. (No pun intended.)
But there are three problems with “Real men don’t…” The first is that the trope conceals and obscures the actual dynamic between manhood-proving and male-pattern violence. Men rape in order to experience themselves as real men. Men hit women in order to show they are the man there. Men buy prostituted women and children in order to get off like a real man—the payoff promised and promoted by pornography. (And that’s the functional purpose of the so-called money shot: to show a penised person ejaculating in circumstances that authenticate him as a real man.)
The second problem with “Real men don’t…” follows from the first: It is a meaningless message to the audience it is intended to reach. Announcing that “real men” don’t commit male-pattern violence is utterly unpersuasive to anyone for whom doing male-pattern violence makes him feel like a “real man.”
And the third problem with “Real men don’t…” is that while it preaches to the Reformer choir, it sends an unhelpful message. It keeps moral choice-making locked into gender identity rather than allowing it to express moral identity. It keeps “who I am here and now” inside the straightjacket of “I am nobody if not a man.” Moreover, by evoking the construct real manhood, “Real men don’t…” retriggers and reifies the anxiety that pervaded every penised person’s upbringing: “Am I a real-enough boy?” “Am I real-enough man?” “How can I convince myself and others?”
That last problem with “Real men don’t…” points to the fundamental problem with the idea of “healthy masculinity.” Talk about “healthy masculinity” sounds good—at least to the ears of Reformers and people who wish to love them. It offers individual respite from the incessant headlines about men’s crimes against women and other men; it functions as a feel-good exemption from being implicated. It helps one belong to a tribe of other “healthy masculinity” devotees—a comfortable camaraderie in which one can feel safe from all those perilous challenges to one’s manhood elsewhere.
And yet the idea of “healthy masculinity” does not liberate conscience from gender. “Healthy masculinity” keeps conscience gendered. And it’s not.
Conscience is human. Human only. And only human.
John Stoltenberg has explored the distinction between gender identity and moral identity in two books: “Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice“ and “The End of Manhood: Parables on Sex and Selfhood“ His new novel, GONERZ, projects a radical feminist vision into a post-apocalyptic future. John conceived and creative-directed the acclaimed “My strength is not for hurting” sexual-assault-prevention media campaign, and he continues his communications- and cause-consulting work through media2change. He tweets at @JohnStoltenberg and @media2change.
Two notes on usage:
* I began using the term “penised person” in The End of Manhood in order to keep clear that so-called anatomical sex is merely a trait (like eye or hair color), not a ground of being.
** And I use the term “male-pattern violence” instead of the more common (but less precise) “gender-based violence.”
From Feminist Current: http://feministcurrent.com/7868/why-talking-about-healthy-masculinity-is-like-talking-about-healthy-cancer/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 10, 2013 | White Supremacy, Worker Exploitation
By Adon Apamea / Deep Green Resistance Middle East & North Africa
Dubai is an interesting city. A thriving futuristic metropolis in the heart of the desert considered to be the crown jewel of modernity with indoor ski resorts, gulf courses, fully computerized metros, giant air-conditioned shopping malls, and the tallest skyscrapers in the world.
Built upon the oil money and over the desert’s sands starting from 1970s, Dubai is rootless more than any other city in the world. With a few thousand original natives, Dubai attracts millions of people today from around the world who come to live and work, or to just take a look at the legendary city.
The dispossessed, like yours truly, come to Dubai for work when all other possibilities are blocked. Some of the latter enter the city with the dream of doing big money. Some come out of desperation while the rest are forced into cheap labor or sold as slaves for the sex industry.
The possessed – those who have loads of money and are possessed with making more money and power, also come to Dubai. Most of them come to squeeze the life out of the first group for profit while some just want to show off their fortune or discover what the fuss is about.
The dispossessed sit on the bottom while the possessed sit on top. The hierarchy looks something like this: native Emirati men – specifically those possessing money, power and oil – sit on top, white western men sit right next or beneath them managing the growth of one of the fastest cities in the world. Some brown men, mainly from Pakistan and India, sit in the third row, and more whitish people and some Arabs sit somewhere in the fourth row making the middle management and landlords of the city. East Asians sit on the fifth row doing all the blue collar jobs, answering phone calls, making deliveries, and fixing air conditioners. And last a majority of Pakistanis, Indians, Bengalis and Sirilankans sit in the last row, building the city in the scorching heat, cleaning houses, and opening doors. In the shadows, an unknown number of women, from all nationalities of the third world are sex slaves, without passports or means to escape their slavery.
In any work, being a white westerner ensures you get a salary four or five folds the one that any person of a brown nationality would get for exactly the same job. An IT engineer of Indian nationality might get a salary of 1500 USD. A British would get 6000 USD for the same job in the same company, just for being white. This is how the system works. Everyone knows it; brown people make jokes about it. White people rarely laugh. In Dubai you discover that racial hierarchy isn’t a theory in a book.
The dispossessed, however, largely share an illusion absent amongst the possessed, that they can join the upper class if they work hard enough. The banks are especially fond of fostering this hope: it just takes a few weeks of living in Dubai to become eligible for a fat bank loan. Agents will knock on your door, call your phone, and come to your office trying to sell you easy loans and premium credit cards. You can wake up a poor man in the morning, and in the afternoon walk from the doors of a bank with a small fortune.
And thus the mighty machine continues its march onward, greased by the sweat and blood of poor people… and by their dreams as well.
Being in the desert, everything in Dubai is imported and packaged in neat plastic or metal containers: water, food, cars, buildings, furniture, and people. The world’s most exotic fruits and foods are available at any supermarket year round, but everything tastes the same. High-tech electronics and the most sophisticated cars in the world are all here too. Even portable ACs, in case you wanted to sit on the balcony in the summer’s desert and you disagree with the temperature. One building in Dubai for example, Burj Khalifa, spends the equivalent of 29.000.000 lb (13.000 tons) of melting ice in one day on cooling. Dubai has 80.000 multistory buildings.
You don’t even have to go to the grocery store or any place else to buy your stuff; the bottom strata of the dispossessed class will cycle in the scorching heat to deliver anything you need to your front door so you don’t move your ass one inch from the sofa. The dispossessed then get a killing tan and skin diseases. The possessed get fat. Doctors and personal fitness trainers make more money.
People who spend a long time here speak of Dubai as a city designed to take back everything it gives to a person. If you don’t have what it takes, the attractions and the marketed lifestyle in the shiny city will invite you to put all the money you made on doing and buying stuff you don’t need before you step your foot again on a plane. Many people leave Dubai in debt.
Dubai is described as the highest expression of civilization, and it really is. It’s a money making machine, and it does a hell of a good job at it. The people who can see the truth, however, would call it for what it is: a monster. A monster devouring the desert, once filled with delicate ecosystems and countless animals and plants. A monster devouring the world, one packaged fruit at a time. A monster devouring its people, one broken spirit at a time.
Dubai though, is not an exception. If you really think about it, Dubai is every city in the world…
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 4, 2013 | Colonialism & Conquest, Mining & Drilling
By Joshua Headley / Deep Green Resistance New York
“Sustainability” is the buzzword passed around nearly every environmental and social justice circle today. For how often the word is stated, those who use it rarely articulate what it is that they are advocating. And because the term is applied so compulsively, while simultaneously undefined, it renders impossible the ability of our movements to set and actualize goals, let alone assess the strategies and tactics we employ to reach them.
Underneath the surface, sustainability movements have largely become spaces where well-meaning sensibilities are turned into empty gestures and regurgitations of unarticulated ideals out of mere obligation to our identity as “environmentalists” and “activists.” We mention “sustainability” because to not mention it would undermine our legitimacy and work completely. But as destructive as not mentioning the word would be, so too is the lack of defining it.
When we don’t articulate our ideals ourselves we not only allow others to define us but we also give space for destructive premises to continue unchallenged. The veneer of most environmental sustainability movements begins to wither away when we acknowledge that most of its underlying premises essentially mimic the exact forces which we allege opposition.
Infinite Substitutability
The dominant culture currently runs on numerous underlying premises – whether it is the belief in infinite growth and progress, the myth of technological prowess and human superiority, or even the notion that this culture is the most successful, advanced and equitable way of life to ever exist.
These premises often combine to form the basis of an ideological belief in infinite substitutability – when a crisis occurs, our human ingenuity and creativity will always be able to save us by substituting our disintegrating resources and systems with new ones.
And by and large, most of us accept this as truth and never question or oppose the introduction of new technologies/resources in our lives. We never question whom these technologies/resources actually benefit or what their material affects may be. Often, we never question why we need new technologies/resources and we never think about what problems they purport to solve or, more accurately, conceal entirely.
A big barrier to getting to these questions is the fact that most of us identify with this process even despite the fact that it is causing our own dispossession. A high-energy/high-technology culture has produced a multi-generational dependence on the ability of this culture to “progress” from one technology/resource to another, from one crisis to another. Without this continual process, our culture and entire way of living in the world today would imminently collapse and be unable to exist.
Isn’t the very presence of this culture a testament to this ideology? What is the progress of civilization but the (forced) substitution of other cultures for this one? A substitution of biological and cultural diversity for assimilation into a monoculture?
The path of progress is the path of infinitely substituting cultures, technologies, resources, and entire species and ecosystems for the maintenance of one specific way of life, for one specific species – humans. In only a few hundred years, industrial civilization has circled the globe and systematically destroyed the very fabric of life that ushered it into existence in the first place.
Entire peoples, languages, cultures, histories, stories, artifacts, medicines, tools, relationships, species, and ecosystems have been conquered, destroyed, and erased to give space and priority to a monoculture of violence, exploitation, domination and endless growth – all under the assumption that this is, progressively, the best that we can do as intelligent human beings.
Here we understand how this culture and its ruling classes pursue the principle of infinite substitutability for the purposes of “sustainability.” To sustain our standard of living, to sustain progress and growth, and to sustain the industrial economy. The principle is based on the premise that if we allocate our current resources towards the research and development of alternatives, we can solve all problems relating to shortages in energy and raw materials, infinitely – there is no limit to human ingenuity and creativity to problem solve.
A major problem of this principle though, despite its title, is that it is actually difficult to apply indefinitely. As discussed in Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, the marginal costs of research and development have grown so high it is questionable whether technological innovation will be able to contribute as much to the solution of future problems as it has to past ones.
“Consider, for example, what will be needed to solve problems of food and pollution. Meadows and her colleagues note that to increase world food production by 34 percent from 1951 to 1966 required increases in expenditures on tractors of 63 percent, on nitrate fertilizers of 146 percent, and on pesticides of 300 percent. The next 34 percent increase in food production would require even greater capital and resources inputs. Pollution control shows a similar pattern. Removal of all organic wastes from a sugar-processing plant cost 100 times more than removing 30 percent. Reducing sulfur dioxide in the air of a U.S. city by 9.6 times, or of particulates by 3.1 times, raises the cost of control by 520 times.” [1]
And for the most part, we already see this within the fossil fuel industry itself. Since 2005, global production of conventional oil and gas has plateaued – and has even begun to decrease in many parts of the world. This has forced the industry to substitute conventional methods of oil and gas production for extremely destructive “unconventional” methods, which have not only significantly increased the amount of expenditures required for production but has also increased its environmental risks and impacts.
We have to drill deeper and deeper for harder-to-reach resources, which are also dirtier and less desirable than their predecessors, requiring more and more processing and development in order for the final product to be sold on the market and used in our daily lives. The costs, economically and ecologically, are skyrocketing and the returns on these investments are marginally lower than their conventional counterparts. Eventually, it will not be economically feasible to pursue these resources either and more expenditures will be devoted to researching and developing yet another alternative at even higher cost and lower benefit.
It’s a vicious cycle that is turning the entire living world into dead commodities, and because it is based on a principle of infinite substitutability, it will never end unless we force it to stop.
Definite Sustainability
The principle of infinite substitutability permeates through our entire culture, beyond its usage by the ruling classes and fossil fuel industry. In fact, by analyzing the currently proposed alternatives discussed throughout the sustainability movement, we see that they are equally bound by the same logic – either subconsciously or consciously.
A typical conversation regarding a sustainable future will generally be backed by a few overarching premises: (1) our current society is inherently unsustainable; (2) we have the resources and technology to research and develop alternatives; and (3) renewable energies such as solar and wind power can provide enough energy to sustain current standards of living. Often, none of these premises are expounded upon, let alone critically assessed or challenged.
To even begin discussing sustainability in any definite, concrete way, we need to be clear with that we mean. Industries and governments routinely explain that the actions they take are concrete steps towards sustainability. But do we actually believe them? It’s obvious that the only thing they genuinely wish to sustain is their power.
So what does “sustainability” mean in the context of an environmental movement?
We quickly recognize that our current society is inherently unsustainable on the obvious reality that our society, in its quest for infinite growth on a finite planet, simply cannot last forever and is currently rapidly drawing down on the Earth’s capacity to support future generations of life.
From this conclusion, a useful definition of sustainability might be a way of life characterized by the conscious recognition of limits in such a way as to “minimize damage to the planets future ability to support not only ourselves and our posterity, but also other species upon whose coexistence we may be more dependent than we have yet learned to recognize.” [2]
In this definition, the goal of sustainability is not to figure out how to maintain current structures and ways of living into the future, but instead the goal is to figure out how to maintain the possibility of life for multiple future generations to come. These are two distinct definitions with divergent implications and goals.
When our movement is based on a premise that we have the resources and technology to research and develop alternatives, we are essentially distracting ourselves from the real problems. This premise, left unchallenged, supports the idea that simply substituting dwindling, outdated and destructive resources for more equitable, beneficial and progressive resources (e.g. solar and wind) can solve the current ecological crisis outright. At face value, it’s hard to see how this premise differs from the fossil fuel industry and the principle of infinite substitutability.
Right now, the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) for nearly all “renewable” energies is significantly low compared to fossil fuels, even lower than most unconventional extraction processes such as deep-water drilling, hydraulic fracturing, mountaintop removal, and tar sands oil production. The industry can be expected to continue these practices until they become economically unfeasible or until the EROEI of these sources drops below that of “renewable” energies, a process we can see developing as some multinational corporations are already incentivizing this transition.
If we reduce our goals of sustainability to a substitution problem, and follow with a premise that renewable energies can provide enough energy to sustain current standards of living, we uncritically accept the idea that our current standards of living are acceptable and ideal for the future. Not only does this completely erase the history of violence that gives grounding to this way of living but also it ultimately suggests that this violence should continue in order to elevate the rest of the world to these standards.
We must fundamentally ask ourselves: are we trying to sustain our high-energy/high-technology standards of living (which are undoubtedly destroying the planet), or are we trying to sustain the ability of this planet to be conducive to all life?
The point here isn’t to state that we shouldn’t be looking for alternatives or working to build them, but that we should be careful not to fall into the logic of the dominant culture we allege to oppose. When our solutions begin to sound nearly identical to the solutions proposed by the ruling classes, we ought to be concerned. Perhaps the solution is not rooted in the substitutions of technologies/resources for others, but rather in the complete abandonment of these technologies/resources.
Will we find, as have some past societies, that the cost of overcoming our problems is too high relative to the benefits conferred? Will we find that not solving the technology/resource problem of our high standards of living is the most economical and just option?
References
[1] Tainter, Joseph. The Collapse of Complex Societies, pg. 212
[2] Catton Jr., William. Destructive Momentum: Could An Enlightened Environmental Movement Overcome it?
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.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 2, 2013 | Climate Change, Toxification
By Fiona Harvey / The Guardian
A major survey of the coral reefs of the Caribbean is expected to reveal the extent to which one of the world’s biggest and most important reserves of coral has been degraded by climate change, pollution, overfishing and degradation.
The Catlin scientific survey will undertake the most comprehensive survey yet of the state of the region’s reefs, starting in Belize and moving on to Mexico, Anguilla, Barbuda, St Lucia, Turks & Caicos, Florida and Bermuda.
The Catlin scientists said the state of the regions’ reefs would act as an early warning of problems besetting all of the world’s coral. As much as 80% of Caribbean coral is reckoned to have been lost in recent years, but the survey should give a more accurate picture of where the losses have had most effect and on the causes.
Loss of reefs is also a serious economic problem in the Caribbean, where large populations depend on fishing and tourism. Coral reefs provide a vital home for marine creatures, acting as a nursery for fish and a food resource for higher food chain predators such as sharks and whales.
Stephen Catlin, chief executive of the Catlin Group, said: “It is not only important that scientists have access to this valuable data, but companies such as ours must understand the impact that significant changes to our environment will have on local economies.”
Globally, coral reefs are under threat. The future of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia is in doubt as mining and energy companies want to forge a shipping lane through it to form a more direct link with their export markets.
Warming seas owing to climate change can lead to coral being “bleached” – a state where the tiny polyps that build the reefs die off. The US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts increasing frequency and severity of mass bleaching events as global warming takes effect.
Richard Vevers, director of the project, told the Guardian that one important role of the new survey would be to describe a new “baseline” to establish how far such problems have taken their toll to date, which will enable future scientists to judge how degradation – or conservation – progresses.
He said the team of scientists would also probe the underlying reasons for such degradation, with a view to informing conservation efforts.
The team will use satellite data as well as direct observations to assess the reefs. As part of the survey, they will develop software that marine scientists can apply to other reefs around the world. A new camera has been constructed to assist their efforts.
Vevers said: “The Caribbean was chosen to launch the global mission because it is at the frontline of risk. Over the last 50 years 80% of the corals have been lost due mainly coastal development and pollution. They now are also threatened by invasive species, global warming and the early effects of ocean acidification — it’s the perfect storm.”
From The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/01/caribbean-coral-reef-loss
