Editor’s Note: The following is a response we got on our recent article Ways to Fight Reliance on the Violent War Economy. We believe that discourses and discussions are important to further our analysis. In order to encourage that, we encourage our readers to participate in comments at the end of the article. You could also send us written responses to us. If you want to submit responses to any of our published pieces, please mail it to newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org putting “Letter to Editor” as a subject.
War Is A Result of Competition for Land
The article “Ways to Fight Reliance on the Violent War Economy” is superficially a feel-good take about promoting peace instead of war, promoting community and collaboration instead of competition. The author correctly identifies how the global human supremacy culture (although she doesn’t call it that) we all live within rewards a belief that we are somehow separate from the natural world, rather than human animals living as part of and utterly dependent on the natural world; a belief that results in a war economy—a culture and economy that is at war with the natural world, and with the living beings, including humans, who live on Earth.
However, many of the author’s suggestions for cultivating a peace economy fall short. I’ll highlight just a few of the problems I see with the article.
The author suggests we move into a culture of peace by beginning with ourselves. “We begin to break our war economy habits… we purposefully invest ourselves at the local level in what is often called the peace economy—the caring, sharing, supportive economies that already exist all around us.”
I completely agree that all efforts to end industrial civilization must begin with ourselves—we must, after all, understand deep in our own hearts that industrial civilization is a war on nature and thus a war on each of us as individuals—but we cannot stop there. We know that personal change does not equal political or social change. We must go beyond personal change if we have any hope of dismantling this ecocidal way of life.
We all live in local communities to one degree or another. Some of us are invested in these local communities more than others; some participate by supporting local farmers and buying local goods and services rather than from big international conglomerates; others participate by offering services to help families in need or by volunteering in their communities. I am lucky to live in a community where people are heavily invested in these ways. But it should be obvious that participating in our local communities does very little to stop the global industrial Machine. It makes us feel good. It helps some local people. It fosters community spirit and resilience that will be vital once this insane way of life collapses.
But it’s not enough. To stop the Machine, we must do more. We must actively fight against it, either as above ground activists building campaigns against mines, against development, against logging, and so on, or as underground activists working to dismantle the industrial Machine with direct action.
I don’t want to suggest that encouraging people to participate in a “peace economy” is a waste of time; it isn’t. But we must always understand that it is not enough. We must be willing to fight back in this war on nature.
In addition, while many of the author’s concrete suggestions might sound good on the surface, some encourage and contribute to the “war economy” the author is purportedly advocating against.
Here are just a few notes I made while reading the author’s suggestions.
In one of the points, the author suggests that “Creative cooperatives are reclaiming real estate and … shaping the culture of cities across the U.S.” and that this can help build a “peace economy”. In a later point, the author notes the “free-food fridges stocked in cities around the world” to help people get through the initial phase of the ongoing Covid pandemic.
While providing better access to housing, community spaces, and food to underserved communities in cities is certainly a good thing, the author fails to note that cities themselves are incredibly destructive, requiring the support of often 100 times or more land than the city itself takes up, thus taking land away from the natural world in order to support the large populations of cities. This is not “peace”; this is war on nature. Cities are an integral part of the “war economy” and our goal should be to eliminate them, not make them incrementally better.
In another point, the author suggests that dam removal on the Klamath River is the result of “Indigenous-led community activism.” While I certainly support everyone opposing dams and advocating that dams be removed from rivers, unfortunately the Klamath River Dams coming down has little to do with Native American activism, and everything to do with economics. The cost of building mandated fish ladders would have been much more than removing the dams, and the dams produced less than 2% of one utility’s electricity supply. It simply made economic sense to remove the dams.
Economics is usually the reason projects destructive to the environment fail or are cancelled, despite the efforts of activists. The reason is that the law in the United States (and in most countries) does not protect the environment; indeed, the law actively and directly supports and encourages development and extraction. A prime example of this is the 1872 U.S. mining law which says that extraction is the highest use of U.S. public land. Not even the minerals below the surface in our National Parks are exempt from the right, by law, of corporations to extract those minerals if it’s economical. It is essentially illegal to refuse corporations access to these minerals for extraction.
Rather than make a feel-good but erroneous point about indigenous-led activism and the Klamath River dams, the author might have better made her point by discussing community efforts to pass Rights of Nature legislation, or by pointing out the futility of fighting corporations and states via the law and encouraging communities to band together and take direct action instead.
The author writes that “Fire recovery efforts in Oregon and California have largely been community-led, and networks have formed among neighbors to create resilience and support—including grief spaces like those created in Ashland, Oregon, which provide a space for people to share their experiences of loss.” While I agree that it is wonderful communities have come together to support one another after losing their homes in fires across Oregon and California, the truth is that many of the homes and towns lost to fire in these states were built where they should never have been built—in areas particularly susceptible to fire (natural or otherwise). These houses and towns were likely built on the dead bodies of the natural communities these areas previously supported. As these states become more and more populated, developments expand into more fire-prone areas that inevitably burn. Rebuilding these developments might sound good on the surface, but look more closely and we see that this simply perpetuates the idea that humans can use the environment however we want, rather than respecting limits of population and development, and the right of nature to exist and flourish.
The last point I’ll mention is about the author’s suggestion that “People are reimagining safety through alternatives to policing.” I will be the first to acknowledge that police have become militarized in recent years and this is dangerous and counter-productive. However, we also know that most underserved city communities want more police, not fewer. This has been stated so many times now, the idea that “alternatives to policing” in cities is actually desirable should have been put to rest.
When we shove hundreds of thousands or millions of people together in a city–an unnatural habitat for humans evolved to live in tribes of 150 or so with lots of space in between–police are an unfortunate requirement in order to keep the peace because the “rats in the cage” so-to-speak (with apologies to rats) will fight each other to the death in these unnatural and cruel conditions.
I believe war is primarily the result of disputes over land, resources, and ideology–all related to ecological overshoot and civilization. One of the primary drivers of ecological overshoot is population, and it seems obvious that the more population increases, so too will disputes over land, resources, and ideology. Those who wish to foster a “peace economy” must surely recognize this. I’m surprised that “Educating women” and “Addressing over-population” are not mentioned in the article, because educating women is the primary way we can humanely reduce the human population on Earth and bring it below carrying capacity once again, resulting in far fewer reasons to war with one another.
Another glaring omission from this article is a biocentric view, one that centers the natural world. It is lovely to recognize and highlight where people are being kind to one another and attempting to reduce our impacts on the environment. But until we truly and deeply understand that we are human animals, and that the Machine—the war economy, as the author describes it—we have put in motion is completely at odds with the natural world and thus with ourselves, these paltry efforts at a peace economy will fail to make significant change in the war economy.
Ultimately, I find this article depressing. Not only does it spin unpeaceful things like cities and industrially-supported agriculture to try to sound positive, it is a reminder of how we grasp at ridiculously tiny straws to find anything even remotely positive to discuss in a world the Machine is rapidly destroying, with greater speed each and every day.
Yes, we should recognize the good things humans do to help each other. And, I believe, we should always describe the broader context of the culture in which these good things happen—the war on the natural world, which spawns countless wars against each other. Until we stop the war on the natural world, these wars we fight against each other will never end.
Fully agree with two exceptions, the first of which is more of an enhancement:
While Elisabeth is 100% correct that cities are very destructive to the natural world, she doesn’t discuss the current options. As it stands now, humans do far less harm living in cities than they do by living a “modern country” lifestyle, where rural lands are destroyed with roads, vehicles, power lines, etc. (not to mention agriculture, but eliminating that is an even longer-term goal than eliminating industrial society). We agree that the environmentally-friendly way to get rid of cities is to greatly lower human population, which will take hundreds of years. If people want to live rurally now, they should live without industrial conveniences like roads, vehicles, and electricity. Emptying cities so that massive hordes of people are disbursed into rural areas would do immense ecological harm.
As to alternatives to standard policing, I lived in the hood when I was younger. Where I lived was about 80% Black, and the people there considered the cops an occupying force and certainly didn’t want more of them; they wanted them gone. The more conservative members of those communities might want more cops because they’re afraid and don’t know where else to turn for protection, but what those people don’t realize is that the highest priority of cops isn’t to protect them or us, it’s to protect the rich and their money & property. Cops are basically the army of the rich, which Elisabeth’s comments about this shows that she clearly doesn’t know. I fully understand the rats-in-a-cage problem, but having an army of the rich oppressing, hararssing, and killing the poorest rats is neither a moral nor an effective solution. Elisabeth’s comments on this also fail to acknowledge the clear fact that policing is racist, and that many if not most white cops are also. The Chicago Tribune published a story based on research showing that half the white cops in Chicago were KKK, for example. It seems like we agree that greatly lowering human population is the only real solution to this problem, but things like community policing, de-militarizing the police, removing all special legal protections for police so that they may no longer act nor behave with impunity, and changing the police priorities from protection of the rich and their property to protecting all people equally, would at least mitigate all the horrible aspects of police and policing that exist now.
Elisabeth, yes, one of the keys is “…stop the war on the natural world…” Yet the following statement seems to flippantly disregard millions of people: “Cities are an integral part of the “war economy” and our goal should be to eliminate them, not make them incrementally better.” So what’s your plan to deal with the millions of people living in cities? Seems as much about curbing population growth, as you admirably address elsewhere in the article. Also, the war economy is entrenched in so many aspects of society: educational institutions, media, publishing, environmental groups and way more, as shown in the book “The Trillion Dollar Silencer: Why There Is So Little Anti-War Protest in the United States” by Joan Roelofs.
The way one eliminates cities is by lowering human population to the point where they’re no longer necessary of even possible. If you don’t do that and just eliminate cities, then you just destroy even more land with humans and their infrastructure. And BTW, we don’t need to curb population growth, we need to greatly lower human population. Those are two entirely different things.
The main reason that there is virtually no opposition to U.S. wars of empire in the U.S. is that there’s no draft. Opposing the draft during the Vietnam war was by far the biggest political mistake of my life, but it took me decades to realize it. Without a draft, Americans don’t feel any threat from U.S. wars, so even if they oppose them, they don’t do so strongly enough to do even mild things like protest against them. Retired Major Danny Sjursen has done excellent work on this, and having taught at West Point and been in combat zones, he’s not just some academic who has no clue about the real world regarding wars. I don’t at all disagree about all the propaganda, but we got that as kids during the Vietnam war too, and it didn’t keep us from being in open rebellion against it.
Jeff, yes, there’s the draft issue and some people simply don’t care about brown or whatever color people in another country, yet also If you read Roelofs book, one of the main reasons is $, as the title suggests. & “Lowering human population”, what does that mean?! Sounds rather callous. Curbing population growth IS a logical way moving forward.
“Lowering human population” means just that. I assume you’re asking what methods I’m advocating. My response is educating & empowering girls and women, as Elisabeth stated, free and easy access to unrestricted abortion, and a global one-child-family policy. I see nothing callous about any of that. What IS callous is continuing to allow humans to kill and destroy because of their gross overpopulation, which is the biggest problem on the planet ecologically and environmentally (and in many other ways also). Save your sympathies for the nonhumans on this planet, they’re the ones who really need them. Humans are thriving, our population is still increasing.
Jeff, what you describe is akin what i had stated and meant by, “curb population growth”. Simply stating “lowering human population” without specifics is what i meant by read as callous, so to my reading it didn’t mean “mean just that”. Obviously, you care about peoples.
Actually, the population is being lowered already by industrial pollution. The reason fertility is decreasing in the industrialized countries is not voluntary use of contraception; it is lowered sperm counts and other forms of reproductive disfunction caused by the many unatural chemicals encountered in modern living. Radioactivity from both military and civilian suorces is another cause of fertility decline. The population growth problem will sooner or later be solved regardless of what anyone decideds to do. Unfortunately, the same fate awaits other species too,
Additionaly, the ongoing klimatsurtz is already resulting in a loss of agriucultural productivity, and as that goes on will cause more wars and civil disorder until the over population in the cities is solved by millions of humans recycling each other back into the food chain where they belong by figfhting over what scraps are left in the saupermarkets when the deliveries stop.
We can expect governments will impose rationing, price controls, martial law, and other ultimately useless measures to try to keep civilization going a bit longer, but those measures will fail and the few remaining city dwellers will fan out into rural areas and attempt to comandeer food from farmers. Rural communities will try to defend themselves against mobs from the cities. In some cases they will succeed and in some they will fail. In the long term, by which I mean possibly within the next ten years or so, civilization will be gone except from a few favored enclaves and the huge overgrowth of human population on this planet will be down to what the remaining ecosystem can support.
This is the most FAVORABLE scenario. It assumes no nuclear wars result from global food shortages and the lack of maintainance of nuclear reactors when civil order collapes does not result in too much damage to too great an area.
None of this is speculation. It is not something that is GOING to happen; it is ALREADY happening now. This breakdown of civilization is already well underway and cannot be stopped or prevented.
Civilization is broken beyond repair and there is no way to fix it. The sooner the collapse is completed the more of the natural world will be left to begin the recovery process and the faster and more complete the recovery will be. And 1000 years from now, when all the cities long have crumbled into ruins and wolves and grizlies hunt huge hers of bison across the unfenced plains, little bands of hunters sitting by their lonely campfires will tell stories of the times when men flew through the air and lit up the night with artificial lighting. And to be born among those people shall be the best of fates.
@Tzindaro
I agree with your vision, but I don’t agree that it’s already happening. I also don’t agree with predictions, which almost always turn out to be wrong even where all the supporting facts are correct (see The Population Bomb, for example).
Human population is still increasing, not decreasing. Yes, sperm count is way down, but that hasn’t kept people from overbreeding. The biggest population increase now is in Africa, and the birthrates there are very high.
Civilizations and societies are becoming ever more decadent, but that’s not the same as saying that they’re breaking down. Yes, they’re failing the majority of people, but civilization has always been that way (hunting & gathering is the only egalitarian way to live).
Think about what you’re saying: we shouldn’t bother with human overpopulation, because it’s not ecologically sustainable and will therefore fix itself. While that’s true EVENTUALLY, consider all the nonhumans, including ecosystems and their components, that will suffer, die, and be destroyed in the meantime. Infinitely better for humans to proactively fix this by limiting their families to one child than to wait until human population collapses of its own weight. That’s what we should advocate, not some nihilistic attitude that human overpopulation will just fix itself so why bother.
You say, ”Infinitely better for humans to proactively fix this by limiting their families to one child”. Given the opposition of almost everyone, just how do you expect to get that to happen? It will not happen voluntarily. Only a global totalitarian government could even make an attempt, and even China, the worst dictatorshop on the planet, failed due to too much opposition.
Opposition to such a demand is not only due to economic and social factors; the drive to have children is a biological instinct in all life forms, the strongest instinct we have. No amount of propaganda or indoctrination is going to eradicate it.
And even aside from that, there is simply no time. Even a 100% ban on all births would do nothing to prevent the population collapse that is already happening. The generation that is going to live through the collapse is already born, in fact, already adults. We are not talking about something that will happen at some time in the future unless something is done. We are talking about something that is now well underway. Simply reducing the present birth rate, an impossible fantasy anyway, would do nothing to help make it happen any sooner.
And the sooner the process moves on to the next stage, the stage when it becomes obvious even to the masses who prefer to deny it, the better off the small number of survivors will be. So the thing to do is not to try to prevent the collapse, but to try to speed it up. The sooner the breakdown is completed, the more of the biosphere will be left to start the healing after the Human Age is over.
I am not saying do nothing. There are things worth doing, but reducing the birth rate in a futile hope of keeping this civilization going is not one of them. Speeding up the ongoing process to bring about the end stages sooner is the most important thing to do. Large-scale destruction of agricultre to reduce food supplies is one example of things that could be helpful. Spreding of diseases and obstructing public health programs is another. Agitating for wars in major food producing regions like Ukraine is another way to help bring about the end of human interference with the biosphere a bit sooner.
If you are not willing to help speed up the collapse of civilization by large-scale sabotage, the second best thing to do is to work to preserve as much as possible of wilderness reserves and wildlife species as possible to act as seed beds after the end of human domination of the planet so the species there can spread out and recolonize their former range when the humans have left.
We seem to substantially agree on the ultimate goal — mine is to eventually lower human population to the hunter-gatherer level, which is 5-10 million globally, and return to living as hunter-gatherers (all of which will probably take 5-10,000 years) — but we totally disagree about tactics and strategies. You also have your facts completely wrong about a lot of this. Additionally, you totally misunderstand the reason that I want human population be lowered.
“Almost everyone” does not oppose limiting families to one child. People in China certainly support that, as they’ve continued to do so even after the policy was changed from one child to two, and that’s 1.5 BILLION people. And everyone who recognizes human overpopulation as the existential and root cause problem that it is who I’ve talked to favors this. YOU apparently don’t want it, so your attitude toward it clouds your judgment about it.
China’s one-child-family policy didn’t fail, it was a raging SUCCESS. It is credited with preventing approximately 400 MILLION births, and now the population in China has begun decreasing, almost certainly for the first time since Chinese civilization began.
As to the biological urge to breed, that’s correct. But you must be a man, because the vast majority of educated & empowered women don’t want more than one or two children. Additionally, if we didn’t control our natural urges, we’d be killing each other all the time.
As to what it would take to implement a one-child-family policy, the best way to move in that direction would be educating & empowering girls and women, along with educating everyone about the great harms that human overpopulation has caused and is still causing. As I’ve said on this site for years, this is a battle for the hearts & minds of people; we’re not going to be successful by force. Of course if I were dictator of the world I’d immediately implement a global one-child-family policy, but that kind of thing is pure fantasy.
Again, human population on Earth is INCREASING, not decreasing as you repeatedly falsely claim. I certainly wish it were decreasing, but that’s not the case.
I don’t advocate greatly lowering human population for the purpose “of keeping this civilization going.” I advocate greatly lowering human population for the benefit of the Earth, its ecosystems & habitats, and all the NONhuman life here. Civilization is the problem, which Derrick Jensen mentions all the time, and it’s caused solely by human overpopulation. Having no children is the BEST thing that any of us can do for all those entities that I mentioned.
Finally, I also disagree that ecotage, causing wars, or any other destructive and fatal activity like that is the best thing we can do, or even a good thing. Sure, if it had a chance of realizing the result we want it might be, but it doesn’t. Furthermore, as we used to say in Earth First!, war is bad for all species, and it’s also very ecologically destructive. How can you advocate for the natural world and support war? What your guerilla tactics would do is cause a major backlash, and cause people to hate the natural environment and people like us who fight for it even more than they already do. Humans have to evolve mentally and spiritually so that they STOP WANTING to act and behave the way they do, and instead start focusing on expanding their consciousness and leaving everyone/everything else alone to the greatest extent possible, eventually returning to living as hunter-gatherers. If we don’t win the hearts & minds, we lose, simple as that. We are a small fraction of 1% of humans, and even with the best possible guerilla warfare, we have no chance of bringing down civilization by ecotage or anything similar.
There have been countless speculations on what an extraterrestrial culture would be like. Almost all of them have started with the assumption that however different from the cultures of earth, they would follow the same basic trajectory in their history. And there is an assumption that if they are capable of getting here from another planet, they must be farther along that path than we are.
So, let us examine some aspects of our own history and see where our own culture came from and where it is going.
The story we were told in school is simple: humans started out as simple hunter-gatherers, living in a state of nature, then, after some millions of years, suddenly changed to peasant-farmers, using metal tools instead of stone, growing food instead of searching for it wherever it migfht be, and living in large dense concentrations under kings and religious rulers. Since then, we are told, it has been a steady march to ever-greater technological mastery over the environment, interupted only by wars and ocassional natural catastrophes
The story is simple in it’s outlines and most people believe it. In fact, enormous peer presure is exerted upon anyone who expresses any doubt. But the whole story is wrong. Nothing of the kind ever took place.
As is agreed by almost everyone, humans originated ( however that may have been, and for whatever reasons ) a long time ago. For most of the time since then they lived as hunter-gatherers. They have only begun to use metal implements, organize into large-scale communities, fight organized wars, use most forms of technology, and countless other inovations, within the last 10,000 years. Indeed, most of the main inovations are as recent as only the last 5,000 years or so.
If you backtrack the earth and other solar system objects by computer, you find that starting around 12,000 years ago the earth intercepted a swarm of meteors in space. These interceptions have recurred every seven or eight centuries since, though with diminishing intensity each time. And each time they occur, changes take place in human history.
There were repeated and drastic changes in the global climate. There were mass extinctions, especially of the largest and most important members of most continental ecosystems. There was massive desertification. And humans began to change from hunters and gatherers to farmers and city-dwellers.
Cities depend on farming. Large organized empires depend on farming. To fight a war, an empire must have both a large enough population and a surplus of food to feed non-productive soldiers. Nothing we would call ciivilization could exist without farming. What does farming depend on?
You can dig up enough ground with a digging stick to grow a little extra food to suplement gathering wild foods, but you cannot plough a large enough field to feed yourself and several other people that way. Farming had to wait for the invention of the plough. And you cannot plough up much land with a plough made of wood. The plough had to wait for the use of metal.
In the times before the meteors hit the earth, the earth was much more highly charged than it is today. The meteor storms discharged a lot of that charge and it has never recovered to what it was before that. And the use of metals had to wait for the reduction in charge because until then metals could not be used. It hurt to touch anything made of metal. A touch would cause a painful shock every time.
So the discharging of a large part of the global charge was the needed pre-condition for development of a civilization that uses metals in it’s technology, gets most of it’s food from farming, and has a large enough population to have urban populations that do other things instead of gathering food for a living. And if there had not been a swarm of meteors in the right orbit to hit the earth, we would all still be hunter-gatherers with a stone-age technology.
So any extraterrestrials we encounter in space will not have a modern-type technology unless they too have had a similar experience in their history. Civilizations do not happen inevitably. They happen because of a specific set of environmental conditions and while the laws of biology indicate there could be, indeed probably are, many planets with humans more or less like those on earth, even possibly many that are identical to the degree we can detect, they are almost certain to be hunter-gatherers, not urban engineers.
But there will be other difference also. The same meteor storms that made possible development of metal-using technology also caused certain changes in the behavior of the vast majority of human culutres. Maybe a few rainforest tribes escaped the devastation and environmental changes enough to remain sane, but the majority of humans did not.emerge unscathed. Almost all human cultures literally went insane from the trauma and have remained so ever since.
And all the cultures that have developed since the meteor storms are dependent on that insanity. To give only one example, no healthy person, feeling alive and aware of his own body and emotions, would consent to spend his working life deep in a mine,.digging for coal or iron. So in a society of sane people, coal and iron would not be dug. People brought up free and capable of independent thinking would not join a regimented army. So large empires would not exist. People would not live in large cities unless they were out of contact with their biological instincts. So there would be no large cities.
So any extraterrestrial civilization that becomes able to make ships able to carry them from there to here will have to suffer from the same mental illness that prevails on earth. If they do not, they will remain hunter-gatherers and not develop a technology able to bring them here.
This means that any extraterrestrial culture that visits us will almost certainly resemble our own. Not in all details, just as there are some minor differences between the cultures of China and Europe, but in the essential matter of being insane.
There may be some like the Klingons, violent and agressive, and some like the Vulcans, cold and detached, and some like the Bajorans, mystical, and some like the Frengi, aquisitive to an extreme, and some like the Romulans, regimented with rigid disciplne, and some like the Borg, all individuality submerged in a collective mind.
But there will be none who are emotionally healthy; if they are able to get into space, they will have to be a neurotic race, suffering from the same constellation of emotional illnesses that mankind has suffered from for the past several thousand years. Otherwise, they will not be in space; they will be hunting for food in a vast wilderness on a planet that remains almost entirely in it’s natural condition.
And all this is true regardless of any minor differences they may exhibit from humans of earth. It is true of all mammals on earth, not just humans. It will be true regardless of if a species is telepathic or not, even to the extent of being a Borg-like collective mind. Unless a species is too different from us for us to be able to comunicate, their basic psychological functions will be the same.
And since the root cause of human insanity is a cosmic accident, one not likely to have happened anywhere else that human life has arisen, there will be no aliens coming here to contact us.
We should just cut to the chase: as long as humans want and allow wealth in any form, there is zero hope. There is likely zero hope anyway, and I’ve reached a point where I’m good with that, but there absolutely is zero hope for anything to get better as long as human wealth and wealth seeking exist. Because that simply is not how this planet works. It’s not how anything alive evolved. There is no evidence whatsoever of any species taking hundreds and thousands of times more than necessary from its environment to sustain biological life and still having an environment left to provide a future.
Indigenous people and Nature cultures around the world had it figured out. They were not “primitive”. They were sophisticated in understanding their environments and biological life. They also understood well that humans are animals, too, and our real needs are as simple as those of the other animals. Those needs begin with air, and continue to include food, water, and shelter in most climates, which can include clothing. Humans need community because we won’t survive long without each other. And we need medicine when we are ill or injured. We need to be free of aggression and abuse.
We may want much more, and depending on our culture we can be programmed to believe our wants are needs, especially if we are born in so-called western civilization, which is really western hubris and predation. But we don’t actually need much in life. If our real needs are met and we are unhappy, then we have a psychological problem, and it’s likely a societal problem. Our way of life does not work. Period. It has never worked.
We will not live within our material and moral limits. It’s why Europeans have violently invaded virtually every single country on the planet over the past 500 years, sometimes repeatedly as in the case of Vietnam and South Africa, stealing the entire western hemisphere, Australia, New Zealand, all the Pacific and Caribbean island nations, several regions of Africa, and in every instance we have brought extreme destruction of the natural world and the original inhabitants, extreme wealth disparity, and organized violence for the purpose of seeking wealth.
Well, we’ve run out of planet, and that’s just how it is. We’re going to have to deal with the consequences. Everything is. Nothing alive is getting out of what we’ve done, and there are no fixes within the dominant paradigm.
Except for your hopelessness, I fully agree. Let’s take this one step further. One of the main reasons that modern humans balk at living naturally is that they consider living that way to be primitive and boring. After all, what would people do if they’re not chasing money & material things, then playing with their new toys? The answer is that the only legitimate role for humans on this planet is to expand our consciousness. See this book outline for details: https://rewilding.org/fixing-humans-by-expanding-our-consciousness/
BTW, don’t confuse “hope” with “realistic expectations.” As to the latter, mine are as low as yours. But I still maintain hope, because I’ve learned that if you keep trying, you never know what might happen, regardless of how unlikely it seems.
I agree. It is our bigotry toward Nature cultures like those of the Native Americans that keeps us from seeing the brilliance of their cultures, and they were and are brilliant cultures. Life is not boring when everywhere you look there is beauty, intelligence, purpose and giving, literally love in abundance.
I also agree that expanding our consciousness is the only legitimate role for humans once their real needs are met. We have access to dimensions far beyond this one from within. Those Nature cultures understood that one, too.
I have plenty of hope. I’m quite certain that this world is not all there is to reality, and that, in fact, it’s not even the “real” world. Many people come to that conclusion when we expand our consciousness enough. But, no, I don’t have much hope for the future of the planet, and I don’t look for it at this stage. Nothing alive but me needs “hope”, anyway, and if I don’t need it, that’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned. I will still try to live doing as little harm as possible to the rest of sentient life for my own conscience and peace of mind, for the quality of my own life while I’m here.
A correction: Nothing alive but me needs MY hope. What people need from me is behaviors.
Thanks for the link and the interesting essay, Jeff. Are you Jeff Hoffman?
You and I agree on a lot, whether you are the author or you simply agree with it. I am also a great admirer of the Buddhists, and obviously, of traditional indigenous societies. I would only say this; the essay is primarily discussing changes in personal and societal values, and in human behaviors. I believe that the only thing that changes “consciousness” is kundalini. Just to be very clear here. Changes in values are not changes in consciousness, even though we say that all the time.
I’m all for changing consciousness in many of the ways mentioned in the essay.
I have given these questions a great deal of thought my entire life, more than most people, because of my mixed-culture life. I don’t think agriculture is the big bugaboo that westerners think it is. We in the west have been taught that agriculture had the same societal and environmental drawbacks everywhere that it had in Eurasia, but that view is now changing among scholars, and for good reason.
Native Americans throughout this hemisphere had agriculture for an estimated 8,000 to 9,000 years, and they rarely overran their environments. The Mayans did overrun theirs, of course, or it is assumed they did, and the Aztecs and Incas might have eventually. I don’t know enough about them. But those people didn’t make up the majority of the people in the hemisphere, and agriculture was widespread, even among small tribes. The Kogi did not overrun their environment, and they are considered to have been a “civilization”.
Here in what is now the US there was agriculture throughout the entire eastern portion of the country, from Florida to Canada, throughout the midwest, the Great Lakes region, and the southwest. Nonetheless, those societies and cultures remained sustainable even with agriculture.
That’s because they never lost sight of sustainability because of their values, and their love of the Earth and all its life. They practiced birth and population control to remain sustainable, and they kept their agriculture at sustainable levels. They continued with hunting and fishing and gathering of wild foods, ensuring that their environments could continue to support those practices. They had agriculture for thousands of years, and yet when Europeans arrived here they also had thriving populations of native fauna, including all the large predators. That’s only because of their societal and cultural values, not because they couldn’t because they were “primitive”, as we are taught.
Their view was that every animal was necessary to the whole, or it wouldn’t exist. Their view was based on astute observation of their environment, too; it wasn’t just a nice belief. Their love of and identification with the other animals was seen in their personal names, the names of their clans, their myths, including their origin myths, in their spirit guides, their totems, dances, and stories and songs. Their love of and identification with Nature including the other animals permeated their cultures. If you read historical records of their statements, when they tried to explain themselves to their European conquerors they could barely express reality without mentioning the waters, the trees, and the other animals. Chief Joseph is documented to have said that, “The measure of the land and the measure of our bodies are the same.”
I agree so much with the essay’s points regarding the anthropocentrism, which absolutely is a type of worship of humans and human supremacy, an illusion and a delusion of our western worldview. People may be the same biologically and with the same capacity for moral understanding around the world, but cultures are not the same. Cultures have us living in different realities. Some of those realities are better and more true than others.
I agree with what you wrote with the exception of your comments about agriculture. I also want to clarify what I mean by expanding consciousness.
Expanding consciousness includes expanding things like wisdom and empathy, the latter with all life, not merely humans. Ideally everyone would eventually become totally enlightened, but that’s not needed in order for people to expand their consciousness enough to radically change their attitudes, feelings, and thus behaviors.
Agriculture by definition means killing native plants in order to plant crops. Animal agriculture means domesticating animals and breeding them into some unnatural species, and is the most harmful form of agriculture, as evidenced by the fact that cattle grazing is now one of the great harms that humans are causing to the Earth and the native life here.
Globally, humans started using agriculture 10-12,000 years ago. At that time, humans had been around for about 190,000 years, and the human population had reached its ecological equilibrium at 5-10 million. Agriculture caused a major population explosion for the same reason that we all learned in the Petri dish experiment in high school biology: give animals more food and you get more animals, and agriculture provided an unnatural overabundance of food.
Furthermore, killing any form of life except to eat it is totally immoral in my view, and I can’t imagine any other legitimate viewpoint on that. Agriculture kills native plants in order to plant crops, so it’s immoral. For that reason also, agriculture is wrong.
My understanding of the Native Turtle Island cultures is different than yours. Yes, there was agriculture in the eastern portion, but most of the tribes (as opposed to most of the people, because agriculturalists overpopulate) were hunter-gatherers. South of here, the Incas and the Aztecs were also grossly overpopulated, and it was just a matter of time before they went the way of the Mayans or became like Europeans and Asians, ruining everything with their agriculture and overpopulation. I know of no agriculture from the plains to the Pacific Ocean in what is now the U.S. with the sole exceptions of the Hopi and the so-called Pueblo (colonizer name), the latter of whom overshot their environment and virtually died out. I think that all the supposedly new information on this is revisionist BS for the purpose of propagandizing how great agriculture is.
Humans lived 95% of our existence as hunter-gatherers, and all other animals live that way. There is no reason to use agriculture when living as hunter-gatherers is the only natural way to live and works just fine. I advocate for the Earth, its ecosystems and habitats, and all the native wildlife here, not for humans. I don’t care if humans think that agriculture makes their lives easier or more convenient, it’s harmful to the all other life on Earth. Traditional indigenous societies generally if not all have an absolute prohibition against digging into the Earth, which pretty much precludes agriculture.
Yes, that’s how many people use the word “consciousness,” and there is no doubt we can change some people’s *perceptions* through education or socialization, and that education or teaching can change feelings and attitudes. At least until societal pressures and influences change them again.
I am very knowledgeable about the indigenous cultures of what is now the US., and not merely academically, but with academic and living knowledge. Agriculture was widespread across the Americas. Whether it led to over-population is a values debate, as are perceptions and values judgments of natural perfection. There was agriculture throughout Central America, and in the Amazon. The Incas were predominately agricultural, and the Quechua people still make up the largest indigenous population remaining in the entire hemisphere.
The “three sisters”, corn, beans and squash, were ubiquitous among most of the tribes and populations. In this country, farming was widespread among all the tribes across the entire southeast, what Europeans called the “five civilized tribes,” the Muskogean peoples, the Creeks, Choctaws, Seminoles, and Chickasaws, and the Cherokees, who are Iroquoian people. It was from these tribes that Europeans learned to hybridize plants, something Native people had been doing for centuries upon centuries. Agriculture existed from Maine to Wisconsin, and into Canada.
According to the Indigenous Saskatchewan Encyclopedia, “There was pre-European contact agriculture even in the northerly stretches of the plains that became Canada. Agriculture was a far more ancient and indigenous tradition on the Great Plains than equestrian culture, which was only introduced after European contact. Groups such as the Mandan, Arikira and Hidatsa maintained a flourishing agricultural economy on the upper Missouri as far north as North Dakota.”
Agriculture was not in evidence among the plains tribes, or in the Pacific Northwest, but food was so abundant in the PNW that it wasn’t needed. The salmon, in particular, was plentiful in the extreme. Most of the tribes of California did not have agriculture because of the arid climate, but the Paiutes did. There is archaeological evidence of agriculture in several sites in Arizona and New Mexico going back more than 4,000 years.
In my experience and well over 65 years of of study, traditional indigenous societies did not and do not have a prohibition of poking the small holes in the Earth that they poked for farming, as *most* of them were agricultural. But they did have prohibitions against digging for mining and other exploitative purposes, which blows Jared Diamond’s “they would have if they could have” bad theories away, but he’ll never know that. They could have, but they just didn’t want to, because of their different values. I’m glad you do know that, however, and thank you for it.
I’m not telling you this to change your “consciousness”, nice as that might be for me, if not for you, but to show that you are quite incorrect in your knowledge of the sustainable cultures of the indigenous people of the western hemisphere. They had beautiful cultures, and they could have continued for many more thousands of years. Even with a few beans and popcorn. They were really cool.
Let’s agree to disagree regarding Natives’ use of agriculture or lack thereof. It’s not the heart of this issue. Even if there was more extensive use of agriculture by Natives in the Americas than I acknowledge, that doesn’t make it right or even OK.
Agriculture is NOT natural, and I consider it an affront to nature, a violation of the natural order, and an attack on the Earth and all who live here. One of the major attitude changes that humans need to make is greatly reducing their hubris, which goes along with greatly reducing their egos. Thinking that we know better than nature and will therefore use agriculture instead of hunting and gathering is caused human hubris. Using agriculture for the purpose of making humans’ lives better — I disagree that it actually does, but that’s another issue — at the expense of the Earth and all the other life here is immoral and disgusting, and an expanded human consciousness would greatly increase our empathy for the Earth, its ecosystems & habitats, and other species, so that we wouldn’t do things that supposedly benefit us and harm them.
Any population that exceeds that which is possible as hunter-gatherers is overpopulated, because it takes the unnatural overabundance of food provided by agriculture to allow and sustain that number of people. Again, Nature should regulate these things, not humans. I think that this is our biggest disagreement: I strongly oppose humans violating the natural order, in this case by using agriculture instead of living as hunter-gatherers. There will always be far more about life and the universe that humans don’t know than they do, and we need to be humble enough to work within the natural order instead of subverting it by using our overdeveloped intellect,* in this case by using agriculture.
* One of the major problems with humans is that they obsess on the intellect and ignore intuition. The opposite would be far better, but what’s best is a proper balance. Obsession with the intellect causes things like nuclear weapons, to list the most extreme example.
I cannot appear to reply to your most recent comment. Not sure if the screen has grown too narrow, if I don’t understand the format, or if DGR is tired of the conversation.
What we need to disagree on is ideology. I think it does matter that some agrarian people had vibrant, excruciatingly healthy, biodiverse environments that were full of all the native fauna. I think it matters that they had thousands of years of collective knowledge of Nature and successful balance with their environment. I think it matters an enormous amount. That’s a value judgment, just as a purist intellectual ideology of Nature is all about value judgments.
I find your statements confusing. You promote elevating “consciousness” as a solution, but in fact the only consciousness you approve of is the one that says that people should accept any kind of natural damage to them so long as they never do what you consider unnecessary damage to so much as a field of dandelions. I do not personally believe that is actually any degree of elevated human consciousness. Neither do I agree that all changes in perception are actual changes in “consciousness”. To a large degree I subscribe to the modern scientific definition of consciousness, which is that there are three known states – waking consciousness, non-dreaming sleep states, and dream states. I also subscribe the belief that spirituality is real, and we can experience spiritual consciousness, sometimes.
Nearly all of life survives by doing damage to something else alive. That’s how Nature works. And there are ample instances in Nature of conditions allowing various species to overpopulate and destroy ecosystems, not just humans. The presence or absence of nearly all animal species alters ecosystems, even the presence or absence of insects. Nature survives these changes because of two things, balance and adaptation, or what we call evolution.
Even when their populations are kept in check, beavers gnaw down more healthy trees than they need to sustain life. Should humans kill beavers to keep their dams from destroying acres and acres of vegetation that don’t actually benefit those animals? Beavers can do it “naturally” but humans cannot? I don’t find that logical or meaningful.
Obviously the philosophical crucible here is believing that humans are actually sufficiently smarter than beavers so as not to take more than they need beyond what is necessary to have food, a warm lodge, and a healthy world that is fair and respectful to everything alive. Indeed, some people were very smart, but not all. Some people not only had a healthy world, they had plenty of food, and long healthy lives. Adult Kogi of Columbia expect to live to be ninety years old. I find it interesting that if you watch the documentaries about the Kogi they do not express continuous intellectualizations and value judgments. They discuss the “Great Mother,” their love for her, their observations, and how they spend their time in a kind of collective meditation that joins Her in bringing life and balance to the planet and to themselves. They are not passive recipients of whatever falls from the sky, and they have been farmers for thousands of years.
I think understanding Nature matters, and people who were and are hunter-gatherers and some primarily agricultural people like the Kogi had and have a highly sophisticated understanding of Nature, along with a supreme love of it. I don’t discount them in favor of assumptions about prehistoric humans whose thinking and knowledge and lives about which we can only speculate.
Nature made people, too. I don’t subscribe to the nonsense that because human existence is “natural” that everything humans do, no matter how destructive, is also “natural”. That is insane. Or just stupid. I’m a moralist. I think suffering matters, and I think inflicting suffering matters. Unfortunately, suffering is built into this world and is required at certain times. It is inherent to the process going on here. I don’t agree with an ideology that would inflict tremendous suffering on humans, either, consigning them to a life where, according to archaeology, more than an estimated 15% of them had traumatic head/brain injuries, assumed to have been from hunting big animals with spears, among other drawbacks.
I think a lot of knowledge matters. If you don’t have the benefit of indigenous knowledge and wisdom, at least some living understanding of biology matters, and to me it matters a lot. I’m not interested in, especially, western ideology, whatever version they come up with. We’ve seen centuries of that, and it’s been the worst thing that ever happened to the planet and it has caused untold suffering. It’s an ongoing cycle of people who know they really screwed up before, but they have THE answer now, and everyone needs to get on board.
What people need to do is get rid of wealth. Ironically, it’s the one thing they, especially creative westerners, never talk about. They talk about the problems inherent in the fact that they don’t share the wealth, they talk about the supposed problem of the colonized becoming the colonizers, like anyone really has any other choice, and they talk about ideologies for how to “teach” people so we can all get on board with their vision of how to run the world. They talk about almost everything but their need to eliminate all wealth and live within their own material and moral limits, because they see that as impossible. Maybe they are right. And maybe fixing them cannot be done. But I’m done. Thank you for the conversation.
The reason it’s irrelevant whether and how many Natives used agriculture is because agriculture is ecologically harmful and destructive. Natives who used agriculture are just as harmful as colonizers who used it, and you’re just making a case against the human race by claiming that Natives used agriculture too. If you disagree that agriculture is harmful, then that’s where our disagreement lies.
You seem to claim that the Natives here both used agriculture and lived in natural ecological balance with their habitats, ecosystems, and fellow beings. That’s no different than the “green” technology people who claim that we can maintain these unnatural lifestyles without harming anything if we just change our sources of energy. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, and there’s nothing natural about agriculture. Again, the only legitimate excuse for killing any other being is to eat them, and humans don’t eat the plants they kill in order to plant crops. Furthermore, replacing native vegetation with crops is, BY DEFINITION, ecological harm, and it also harms the animals who depend on those native plants.
You misinterpret what I mean by expanding consciousness and why I think it’s the only real solution here. Expanding consciousness is a very broad concept, and does not necessarily create a specific ideology. However, if people were to expand their consciousness, they would also necessarily expand their empathy and wisdom. By expanding the latter two sufficiently, they would feel one with all life, and would not harm other life just to make things easier or more convenient for themselves, or even just better just for themselves at the expense of others. Like everything else in life, this is about proper balance between doing enough to survive and living as harmlessly as possible. As I wrote in the book outline, humans’ ONLY legitimate role on this planet is to expand our consciousness, and the outline explains why. We are by far the most powerful beings on the planet, and with that great power comes great responsibility, the latter of which unfortunately humans have totally ignored and abdicated.
You may be more intellectual, and I am definitely more intuitive. I’ll go with Buddhism and Taoism any day over science, and I definitely don’t look to science for things that are intuitive like consciousness. This is, again, one of the major problems with humans, obsessing on the intellect instead of expanding wisdom & empathy and focusing on their intuition. Moreover, western science is very mechanistic and reductionist, and I totally reject both worldviews and perceptions except for use in discreet situations (i.e., looking at things where reductionism or a mechanistic view is necessary, but definitely not looking at the big pictures).
Again, the HUGE difference between humans and other species is that other species almost never kill anything they don’t eat (beavers being the lone exception of any significance that I can think of). Of course we all kill to eat and otherwise affect ecosystems and habitats, but by comparing the natural actions of other species with humans, you’re engaging in the propaganda technique called “false equivalence.” There is no comparison between the great harms that humans cause and the natural actions of other species. “Ecology” is the study of how all species acting together form a web of life in which all are interdependent. Human actions — starting with causing extinctions when we began leaving Africa, then accelerating when we started using agriculture and began overpopulating, accelerating again with things like mining and industrial living, and again with modern technology — are well outside these natural practices and behaviors. Humans fit the medical definition of being a cancerous tumor on the Earth, and that’s not my opinion, it’s a FACT, as explained to me by a medical doctor. No other species even approaches that.
Your comparison of beavers cutting down trees to humans doing so is also false equivalence. Beavers don’t ruin ecosystems with logging like humans do. The deserts in the Middle East were much smaller until humans killed a bunch of trees there, destroying forests and turning them into deserts. Beavers don’t do anything like that, instead just killing trees where they’re numerous and can easily grow back. Just look at what the Earth looked like before humans started using agriculture compared to what it looks like now: basically two different planets. No other species takes more than what it needs to any substantial effect, nor does any other species overpopulate for any substantial amount of time before its population is lowered by natural processes. Humans have, unfortunately, managed to circumvent natural processes, thereby causing immense ecosystem damage and killing species to the point of extinction. We are the Nazis of the species!
Another problem with agriculture is how much land it takes up. Humans currently occupy most of the terrestrial land on Earth, which is totally immoral. If you oppose industrial society, then human population must first be lowered to one billion globally in order to avoid mass human starvation. But even at that level, the amount of land destroyed by agriculture would be unconscionable. The least harmful and only natural way to live is as hunter-gatherers, and even though returning to living like that is a long-term goal, it should be our ultimate PHYSICAL goal. The ultimate goal should be to expand our consciousness to the point where we evolve past existing as corporeal beings. See the Star Trek episode from the original series called Errand of Mercy for an example of what I mean.
Don’t confuse being informed with being “intellectual”. I have taken the time to be informed about biology, about Nature, and to live with Nature in one of the last true wildernesses remaining in the world for almost forty years.
Yes, millions of people not only had small-scale agriculture and had vibrant, lush ecosystems full of biodiversity and millions upon millions of animals of every species, we don’t even know how many, those people controlled their birth rates and populations, too, specifically to maintain their environments. If you are not aware of that you are not very familiar with Derrick Jensen’s work. A couple of examples, just a few, are the plains bison, the number of which were at least 30 million, and some people say it was 60 million. Another is the passenger pigeons, flocks of so many birds that they darkened the skies to something close to nighttime darkness for days when a single flock passed overhead. There were wolves and mountain lions, every kind of predator, and raptors from coast to coast. That’s the truth and it has zero relationship to the lies about green technology. But you can tell yourself that, and no one can stop you.
Absolutely other animals than humans overkill. It is well documented. Orcas, brilliantly intelligent animals, overkill. Bears get into killing frenzies in some circumstances and overkill. So do wolves, weasels, and even spiders overkill. You can see that fact in your own home if you leave the spider webs alone and take the time to look at them. Lots of animals overkill. Including those beavers.
I really am done, now. Adios.
More than 50% of all land under cultivation is used to grow tobacco, sugar, tea, coffee, alcoholic beverages, and biofuel.
Additionally, the oceans are about fished out and need a toal ban on fishing for at least 100 years to recover.
A lot of land is also used to grow crops to feed livestock, mainly cattle. Animal agriculture is by far the worst type of agriculture for multiple reasons, this being one of them.