by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 1, 2018 | Strategy & Analysis
Editor’s note: The following is from the chapter “Decisive Ecological Warfare” of the book Deep Green Resistance: A Strategy to Save the Planet. This book is now available for free online.
by Aric McBay
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!
—Mario Savio, Berkeley Free Speech Movement
To gain what is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else.
—Bernadette Devlin, Irish activist and politician
BRINGING IT DOWN: COLLAPSE SCENARIOS
At this point in history, there are no good short-term outcomes for global human society. Some are better and some are worse, and in the long term some are very good, but in the short term we’re in a bind. I’m not going to lie to you—the hour is too late for cheermongering. The only way to find the best outcome is to confront our dire situation head on, and not to be diverted by false hopes.
Human society—because of civilization, specifically—has painted itself into a corner. As a species we’re dependent on the draw down of finite supplies of oil, soil, and water. Industrial agriculture (and annual grain agriculture before that) has put us into a vicious pattern of population growth and overshoot. We long ago exceeded carrying capacity, and the workings of civilization are destroying that carrying capacity by the second. This is largely the fault of those in power, the wealthiest, the states and corporations. But the consequences—and the responsibility for dealing with it—fall to the rest of us, including nonhumans.
Physically, it’s not too late for a crash program to limit births to reduce the population, cut fossil fuel consumption to nil, replace agricultural monocrops with perennial polycultures, end overfishing, and cease industrial encroachment on (or destruction of) remaining wild areas. There’s no physical reason we couldn’t start all of these things tomorrow, stop global warming in its tracks, reverse overshoot, reverse erosion, reverse aquifer drawdown, and bring back all the species and biomes currently on the brink. There’s no physical reason we couldn’t get together and act like adults and fix these problems, in the sense that it isn’t against the laws of physics.
But socially and politically, we know this is a pipe dream. There are material systems of power that make this impossible as long as those systems are still intact. Those in power get too much money and privilege from destroying the planet. We aren’t going to save the planet—or our own future as a species—without a fight.
What’s realistic? What options are actually available to us, and what are the consequences? What follows are three broad and illustrative scenarios: one in which there is no substantive or decisive resistance, one in which there is limited resistance and a relatively prolonged collapse, and one in which all-out resistance leads to the immediate collapse of civilization and global industrial infrastructure.
NO RESISTANCE
If there is no substantive resistance, likely there will be a few more years of business as usual, though with increasing economic disruption and upset. According to the best available data, the impacts of peak oil start to hit somewhere between 2011 and 2015, resulting in a rapid decline in global energy availability.1 It’s possible that this may happen slightly later if all-out attempts are made to extract remaining fossil fuels, but that would only prolong the inevitable, worsen global warming, and make the eventual decline that much steeper and more severe. Once peak oil sets in, the increasing cost and decreasing supply of energy undermines manufacturing and transportation, especially on a global scale.
The energy slide will cause economic turmoil, and a self-perpetuating cycle of economic contraction will take place. Businesses will be unable to pay their workers, workers will be unable to buy things, and more companies will shrink or go out of business (and will be unable to pay their workers). Unable to pay their debts and mortgages, homeowners, companies, and even states will go bankrupt. (It’s possible that this process has already begun.) International trade will nosedive because of a global depression and increasing transportation and manufacturing costs. Though it’s likely that the price of oil will increase over time, there will be times when the contracting economy causes falling demand for oil, thus suppressing the price. The lower cost of oil may, ironically but beneficially, limit investment in new oil infrastructure.
At first the collapse will resemble a traditional recession or depression, with the poor being hit especially hard by the increasing costs of basic goods, particularly of electricity and heating in cold areas. After a few years, the financial limits will become physical ones; large-scale energy-intensive manufacturing will become not only uneconomical, but impossible.
A direct result of this will be the collapse of industrial agriculture. Dependent on vast amounts of energy for tractor fuel, synthesized pesticides and fertilizers, irrigation, greenhouse heating, packaging, and transportation, global industrial agriculture will run up against hard limits to production (driven at first by intense competition for energy from other sectors). This will be worsened by the depletion of groundwater and aquifers, a long history of soil erosion, and the early stages of climate change. At first this will cause a food and economic crisis mostly felt by the poor. Over time, the situation will worsen and industrial food production will fall below that required to sustain the population.
There will be three main responses to this global food shortage. In some areas people will return to growing their own food and build sustainable local food initiatives. This will be a positive sign, but public involvement will be belated and inadequate, as most people still won’t have caught on to the permanency of collapse and won’t want to have to grow their own food. It will also be made far more difficult by the massive urbanization that has occurred in the last century, by the destruction of the land, and by climate change. Furthermore, most subsistence cultures will have been destroyed or uprooted from their land—land inequalities will hamper people from growing their own food (just as they do now in the majority of the world). Without well-organized resisters, land reform will not happen, and displaced people will not be able to access land. As a result, widespread hunger and starvation (worsening to famine in bad agricultural years) will become endemic in many parts of the world. The lack of energy for industrial agriculture will cause a resurgence in the institutions of slavery and serfdom.
Slavery does not occur in a political vacuum. Threatened by economic and energy collapse, some governments will fall entirely, turning into failed states. With no one to stop them, warlords will set up shop in the rubble. Others, desperate to maintain power against emboldened secessionists and civil unrest, will turn to authoritarian forms of government. In a world of diminishing but critical resources, governments will get leaner and meaner. We will see a resurgence of authoritarianism in modern forms: technofascism and corporation feudalism. The rich will increasingly move to private and well-defended enclaves. Their country estates will not look apocalyptic—they will look like eco-Edens, with well-tended organic gardens, clean private lakes, and wildlife refuges. In some cases these enclaves will be tiny, and in others they could fill entire countries.
Meanwhile, the poor will see their own condition worsen. The millions of refugees created by economic and energy collapse will be on the move, but no one will want them. In some brittle areas the influx of refugees will overwhelm basic services and cause a local collapse, resulting in cascading waves of refugees radiating from collapse and disaster epicenters. In some areas refugees will be turned back by force of arms. In other areas, racism and discrimination will come to the fore as an excuse for authoritarians to put marginalized people and dissidents in “special settlements,” leaving more resources for the privileged.2 Desperate people will be the only candidates for the dangerous and dirty manual labor required to keep industrial manufacturing going once the energy supply dwindles. Hence, those in power will consider autonomous and self-sustaining communities a threat to their labor supply, and suppress or destroy them.
Despite all of this, technological “progress” will not yet stop. For a time it will continue in fits and starts, although humanity will be split into increasingly divergent groups. Those on the bottom will be unable to meet their basic subsistence needs, while those on the top will attempt to live lives of privilege as they had in the past, even seeing some technological advancements, many of which will be intended to cement the superiority of those in power in an increasingly crowded and hostile world.
Technofascists will develop and perfect social control technologies (already currently in their early stages): autonomous drones for surveillance and assassination; microwave crowd-control devices; MRI-assisted brain scans that will allow for infallible lie detection, even mind reading and torture. There will be no substantive organized resistance in this scenario, but in each year that passes the technofascists will make themselves more and more able to destroy resistance even in its smallest expression. As time slips by, the window of opportunity for resistance will swiftly close. Technofascists of the early to mid-twenty-first century will have technology for coercion and surveillance that will make the most practiced of the Stasi or the SS look like rank amateurs. Their ability to debase humanity will make their predecessors appear saintly by comparison.
Not all governments will take this turn, of course. But the authoritarian governments—those that will continue ruthlessly exploiting people and resources regardless of the consequences—will have more sway and more muscle, and will take resources from their neighbors and failed states as they please. There will be no one to stop them. It won’t matter if you are the most sustainable eco-village on the planet if you live next door to an eternally resource-hungry fascist state.
Meanwhile, with industrial powers increasingly desperate for energy, the tenuous remaining environmental and social regulations will be cast aside. The worst of the worst, practices like drilling offshore and in wildlife refuges, and mountaintop removal for coal will become commonplace. These will be merely the dregs of prehistoric energy reserves. The drilling will only prolong the endurance of industrial civilization for a matter of months or years, but ecological damage will be long-term or permanent (as is happening in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). Because in our scenario there is no substantive resistance, this will all proceed unobstructed.
Investment in renewable industrial energy will also take place, although it will be belated and hampered by economic challenges, government bankruptcies, and budget cuts.3 Furthermore, long-distance power transmission lines will be insufficient and crumbling from age. Replacing and upgrading them will prove difficult and expensive. As a result, even once in place, electric renewables will only produce a tiny fraction of the energy produced by petroleum. That electric energy will not be suitable to run the vast majority of tractors, trucks, and other vehicles or similar infrastructure.
As a consequence, renewable energy will have only a minimal moderating effect on the energy cliff. In fact, the energy invested in the new infrastructure will take years to pay itself back with electricity generated. Massive infrastructure upgrades will actually steepen the energy cliff by decreasing the amount of energy available for daily activities. There will be a constant struggle to allocate limited supplies of energy under successive crises. There will be some rationing to prevent riots, but most energy (regardless of the source) will go to governments, the military, corporations, and the rich.
Energy constraints will make it impossible to even attempt any full-scale infrastructure overhauls like hydrogen economies (which wouldn’t solve the problem anyway). Biofuels will take off in many areas, despite the fact that they mostly have a poor ratio of energy returned on energy invested (EROEI). The EROEI will be better in tropical countries, so remaining tropical forests will be massively logged to clear land for biofuel production. (Often, forests will be logged en masse simply to burn for fuel.) Heavy machinery will be too expensive for most plantations, so their labor will come from slavery and serfdom under authoritarian governments and corporate feudalism. (Slavery is currently used in Brazil to log forests and produce charcoal by hand for the steel industry, after all.)4 The global effects of biofuel production will be increases in the cost of food, increases in water and irrigation drawdown for agriculture, and worsening soil erosion. Regardless, its production will amount to only a small fraction of the liquid hydrocarbons available at the peak of civilization.
All of this will have immediate ecological consequences. The oceans, wracked by increased fishing (to compensate for food shortages) and warming-induced acidity and coral die-offs, will be mostly dead. The expansion of biofuels will destroy many remaining wild areas and global biodiversity will plummet. Tropical forests like the Amazon produce the moist climate they require through their own vast transpiration, but expanded logging and agriculture will cut transpiration and tip the balance toward permanent drought. Even where the forest is not actually cut, the drying local climate will be enough to kill it. The Amazon will turn into a desert, and other tropical forests will follow suit.
Projections vary, but it’s almost certain that if the majority of the remaining fossil fuels are extracted and burned, global warming would become self-perpetuating and catastrophic. However, the worst effects will not be felt until decades into the future, once most fossil fuels have already been exhausted. By then, there will be very little energy or industrial capacity left for humans to try to compensate for the effects of global warming.
Furthermore, as intense climate change takes over, ecological remediation through perennial polycultures and forest replanting will become impossible. The heat and drought will turn forests into net carbon emitters, as northern forests die from heat, pests, and disease, and then burn in continent-wide fires that will make early twenty-first century conflagrations look minor.5 Even intact pastures won’t survive the temperature extremes as carbon is literally baked out of remaining agricultural soils.
Resource wars between nuclear states will break out. War between the US and Russia is less likely than it was in the Cold War, but ascending superpowers like China will want their piece of the global resource pie. Nuclear powers such as India and Pakistan will be densely populated and ecologically precarious; climate change will dry up major rivers previously fed by melting glaciers, and hundreds of millions of people in South Asia will live bare meters above sea level. With few resources to equip and field a mechanized army or air force, nuclear strikes will seem an increasingly effective action for desperate states.
If resource wars escalate to nuclear wars, the effects will be severe, even in the case of a “minor” nuclear war between countries like India and Pakistan. Even if each country uses only fifty Hiroshima-sized bombs as air bursts above urban centers, a nuclear winter will result.6Although lethal levels of fallout last only a matter of weeks, the ecological effects will be far more severe. The five megatons of smoke produced will darken the sky around the world. Stratospheric heating will destroy most of what remains of the ozone layer.7 In contrast to the overall warming trend, a “little ice age” will begin immediately and last for several years. During that period, temperatures in major agricultural regions will routinely drop below freezing in summer. Massive and immediate starvation will occur around the world.
That’s in the case of a small war. The explosive power of one hundred Hiroshima-sized bombs accounts for only 0.03 percent of the global arsenal. If a larger number of more powerful bombs are used—or if cobalt bombs are used to produce long-term irradiation and wipe out surface life—the effects will be even worse.8 There will be few human survivors. The nuclear winter effect will be temporary, but the bombing and subsequent fires will put large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, kill plants, and impair photosynthesis. As a result, after the ash settles, global warming will be even more rapid and worse than before.
Nuclear war or not, the long-term prospects are dim. Global warming will continue to worsen long after fossil fuels are exhausted. For the planet, the time to ecological recovery is measured in tens of millions of years, if ever.9 As James Lovelock has pointed out, a major warming event could push the planet into a different equilibrium, one much warmer than the current one.10 It’s possible that large plants and animals might only be able to survive near the poles.11 It’s also possible that the entire planet could become essentially uninhabitable to large plants and animals, with a climate more like Venus than Earth.
All that is required for this to occur is for current trends to continue without substantive and effective resistance. All that is required for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing. But this future is not inevitable.
Image: public domain
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 10, 2018 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
by Wanted9867 / Reddit
I have lived on 300 acres in west central Florida near the coast for 29 years. I could write a book about what I have seen growing up, but now…now I don’t want to talk about what is left there. Perhaps though, I should.
Little…nothing. The land was a sawmill between 1903-1915 but before and since it was untouched. Signs of the old sawmill are still there, the stills to boil out turpentine are still standing. The woods are quiet now. There are no squirrels left in the trees. The undergrowth is perpetually dry when it’s not raining every day. There is no in-between. The giant Pileated woodpeckers that used to float beneath the canopy between the trees are long gone. The monkey sized fox squirrels disappeared around 2000. I recall seeing the last one in January of 2001, his big bushy tail flowing behind him as he ran up a tall pine tree. I didn’t at the time know of the change that this indicated. The fireflies that would fill the yard beneath the oak trees by the tens of thousands during those steamy late summer evenings are gone now. I haven’t seen one of the fly looking variety since 1997. My dad used to tell me stories that as a kid he’d pull those glowing tails off and stick them on the headlights of his model cars. And how I’d roll my eyes and complain how I’d heard that story before…Jesus, Dad I miss those days now. I found one single firefly this summer- but a different variety…some type of beetle and the first in near two decades. I frantically scrambled to catch him and hold him carefully in my hand. “Where are the rest of you?” I cried.
The tortoise holes are still there- abandoned. The rattlesnake dens beneath the palmettos are empty. The vile bugs I feared so much I now miss. The palmetto bugs, the spiders, the beetles, the variety…where did all the moths go? How heartbreaking it is to remember falling asleep hearing that old purple bug zapper light buzzing downstairs on the porch. In the mornings I’d pick through the hundreds of dead moths. Now there is nothing. At night…now only mosquitoes. 20 years ago the night sky would be filled with bats eating the moths and other flying insects. We had a single apparently sick and very very small bat nest in the back shed back in the winter of 2008. He was so small. He hung there for weeks before finally leaving as well. He never came back. None have returned since.
In the woods there were once deer, boar, turkey, foxes, bobcats and all manner of Florida wildlife. They have all gone now. In the sandy patches I would walk to as a child to look at the hundreds of animals tracks there are now none. No animals cross these areas any longer aside from the occasional raccoon or opossum. The variety is gone, there seems to be nothing left. The trees are still there…for now. The woods are still alive, but their heartbeat is faint. The animals within are now gone. Its soul.
It is sterile and frightening. Echoing like an empty gym.
This property was the last bastion for miles around. Untouched for a hundred years. Then, siege was laid upon it. Roads border this chunk of land on three sides. Across these roads used to be vast stretches of similarly untouched land where I assume these vanished animals would roam to. The streets used to be silent at night, traffic during the days was always minimal. Currently these roads are being widened and traffic is dense. There is nowhere left for the animals to roam to, and they died as a result.
Now these adjacent stretches of land were wiped clean. In 2006 they began developing thousands of acres into subdivisions. Scouring the earth clean and wiping out any trace of anything that came before. Thousands of acres wiped clean, fire hydrants and sewers dug in, roads lain, street signs erected…but then something funny. The bubble burst. The paper chase, the thoughtless, senseless, sickening race that resulted in this utter rape ended. The contractors put up their tools and went home. It was over, completed. Now everything was quiet.
This was an extremely rural area. Land was readily available but nobody had any real reason to come here. 2008 came and these enormous empty plots of planned land sat empty save for 3 or 4 model homes. It is like some sort of Orwellian dystopia. Three homes spaced out across a 200 acre planned and laid out subdivision. I can think of at least five major subdivisions within 5 miles of the house that fit this description. It makes me feel sick. Such destruction, such immense waste. Sometimes I want to scream and beat my fists on the ground. Gas stations and hotels and strip malls and retail centers all erupted from the earth long after the housing bubble burst. The corporate boom would continue its rape of my home town for some time yet. Now they too are empty. FOR RENT signs in the windows of the empty strip malls. Gas stations boarded up. The Taco Bell that closed and has traded hands 10 times between various failed franchises…the waste of it all crushes my soul.
I no longer feel comfortable going into the woods I grew up in. It is too empty and it feels different. It always feels as if something is watching me. I feel it may be the trees gazing upon me knowing the destruction, the hideous things we have done to them. I feel guilt.
It is only 2018. What have we done? How were we all so blind? The Matrix struck far closer to home than I think we all gave it credit for.
The way it was was the best it was ever gonna get. I realize that now looking back on my childhood.
We do not have much time left, I hope. I am rather confident of it.
Editor’s note: this originally appeared as commentary titled “Trust your senses. We are all front-line observers to species/habitat destruction in our own backyards” on the Reddit community r/collapse, and has been republished with permission of the author.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 5, 2018 | The Problem: Civilization
Featured image: satellite photograph of wildfire raging in Greenland, as seen from space. NASA Earth Observatory
by Pray for Calamity
It is easy to get lost. The digital world exists parallel to the real, and just by flicking a finger across a piece of glass, one can open a doorway to all of the happenings any other human has written of, or photographed, or filmed. My morning ritual includes making a cup of tea, hopefully before my daughter has woken, and through the steam that rises from my cup I read what news of the wider world has come through my various feeds.
Fires rage in the Arctic, and in Greece, and in the American West. Heat has gripped the globe from Japan to Algeria to Portugal. There are floods, and parched farm fields, desperate refugees, and the most grotesque horror show of state sponsored famine and homicide in Yemen.
Pounding footsteps move across the floor from my daughter’s bedroom through the kitchen. I exit the digital. My daughter lumbers to me with tired eyes and I know she wants to be picked up, and to be held.
“Oh, my girl. My wonderful girl.”
She doesn’t say anything, her head on my shoulder, facing away so that I can smell her long hair. My exhale is deep and satisfied. She is right where I want to be. An hour later as we walk our stone driveway to go feed our chickens and ducks, I watch her small legs plodding along in pink plastic rain boots. The air is cool, actually, and I realize that this is my real, and that all of those terrible things I read about in the quiet dawn are far away, if they exist at all.
—
I have a fascination with orienteering. A while back a friend gave me his compass, which his father had given to him. I already had a compass, a cheap one that stayed packed in my camping bag. This new one my friend gave to me is much nicer. It has a weight to it that makes it feel significant and truthful, like the weight of a proper kitchen knife or an old, leather bound dictionary.
Upon receiving this gift from my friend, I realized I only ever used a compass to figure out which direction was which, but that I really had no idea how to properly use a compass in accordance with a map. So I began to read instructions on how to do so online, and even watched some videos on orienteering.
The word “orient” is saddled with an enormous historical and social burden. It is a derivation of the latin word for “east,” (the opposite being “occident,” a derivation of “west”) and is typically used to refer to the continent of Asia. Of course, what is “east” (or west, for that matter) really depends on where you are standing, so to conceive of the orient as Asia is to be speaking from a European perspective geographically, or at least as one influenced by European perspective. This is all rather contemporary though, as in Ancient Rome, anything south of the city of Rome was the Orient, as they had drawn in their minds an east-west line running through that city, and made determinations based on whether one lived above or below it. We seem to often set ourselves as a fixed point, the pivot of the spinning needle that whirls around us.
A map is wonderful, as it is a representation of terrain. But if you don’t know where you are, a map can be worse than useless. A compass is very useful, as it can point you in a cardinal direction. But without a map, the name of any given direction becomes trivia.
To “orient” seems to literally mean to find east, the direction we know we can reliably look to find the rising sun. When lost, one must orient themselves or remain so. One must align the compass with the map before shooting a bearing and heading out into the wilderness.
—
In my moments of greater clarity, I want to absolve myself of all political inclination. If I ask myself, point blank, “what is it I am most concerned about?” the answer comes quite quickly: Ecology, the living world. My great worry regarding the world at large centers on the fact that human industrial civilization is every day bringing the web of life closer to the brink of total collapse. Through climate change, extinctions, pollution, the promulgation of invasive species, and the conversion of wild spaces into regions managed and exploited for extraction and production, human civilization is destroying everything upon which it stands. With such an insurmountable threat bearing down, it seems silly to get drawn into conflicts over petty human arguments. Of course, most of what is trumpeted by the TV and print news seems to be just this, at least in comparison to the storm looming over us.
But it happens. I get pulled into the gyre. Despite my desire to stay focused on the material world beneath my feet, the political nature of industrial collapse maintains itself as undeniably evident. As the conditions under which people exist continue to get worse, conflicts expand, and those in power exploit these circumstances for their own gain. Thus it is that ideologues create out groups of others – immigrants, Muslims, black folk, the poor – who they soak with blame for the downward trend lines that define our age. So it is that we have endless wars at home and abroad, with piles of dead victims of drone assassination and cages full of terrified children.
Like it or not, collapse is political. Will the downward slope of Hubbert’s peak be pocked with debt prisons or bread lines? Will the despair of climate chaos be met with concentration camps or communes? Will we slouch towards Olduvai while erecting walls or by tearing them down? Even if we believe all our best efforts will fail us, even if we believe that the wounds we have inflicted on the world are too deep to heal, and that a great suffering is certain, wouldn’t at the end of it all we prefer to fail at decency than to succeed at evil?
Of course, determining the difference can be quite tricky. All men mean well, it is said. Good and evil are meaningless terms, like north and south. If you know nothing of the terrain, if you have no map, you’re likely to just walk downhill because it’s easier.
—
“The core question that brings liberalism, conservatism, nationalism and identity politics into conflict with each other is a fundamental one: who has the authority to describe society? Whose version of history will be heard?”
This is an excerpt from a recent editorial in The Guardian by William Davies entitled, “The Free Speech Panic: How the Right Concocted a Crisis.” I was struck by the clarity of this concept. So much of the current argument, or rather, the tangled mess of arguments surrounding politics, individual identity, national identity, and so forth stems from this very conundrum. Who gets to draw the map? By whose standards do we orient ourselves?
Daily the world is changing in ways that were not foretold by those who have been tasked with explaining reality. By neglecting to confront the crisis of net energy decline, by declining to confront the crisis of debt based money on a finite planet, by declining to confront the crisis of ecological overshoot, the social caste of media makers and politicians have left people scraping to understand the knock on effects that have rippled through society because of these very crises.
People are finding themselves lost in a wilderness of information that runs contrary to the official “everything is fine” narrative put forth by the state and capital. In this rugged and dark place, people are seeking to orient themselves so that they can understand just what is required of them in order to survive and to provide a future for themselves and their families. Whether it is a young college student wondering if it makes sense to take on a debt load in order to attain an education, or a middle age worker wondering why the hell it is so damn hard to pay for a home, and food, and healthcare for their family, people eventually recognize that the explanations for the world around them that they are being fed by those in power do not match the geography of their day to day existence.
When the political narrative one has been given fails, all a person can do is look around and scan the horizon for recognizable features, looking for enough of the familiar so they can finally mark an X and at least understand where exactly they stand.
To orient oneself in a social space can be difficult, and one ultimately does so by recognizing who they are not. Other people become boundary markers, warnings of what not to do, how not to be. Group identities form, people join teams, they carry flags, we don’t necessarily know who we are, but we damn well know we aren’t them.
You’re with us or you’re against us. Better dead than red. Bash the fash! West is best. Resist! Traitor!
Who gets to draw the map? As climate change progresses and the wealth gap grows wider and the pain and struggle of every day life grows more intolerable for the average person, this question will be the hill we die on.
—
My wife plunges a knife into a dark green watermelon. It is near perfectly round and about the size of a bowling ball. The second one we pulled from our garden this summer, it is at a perfect stage of ripeness. Standing in the kitchen the three of us spit small black seeds into a glass bowl as we enjoy the sweetness of the fruit.
The rinds get dumped in the chicken paddock, and I lock the door to the coop. The sun has set behind me as I walk silently back towards the house. Even when we tell people how to get here, our little plot of land can be very hard to find.
Originally published on Pray for Calamity. Republished with permission.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 4, 2018 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. / Transition Times
We are living in epic times. Mighty planetary changes are underway, and perhaps our pop culture is so obsessed with superheroes because only legendary heroes could successfully battle the dragons we face today.
I have been writing Transition Times for seven years now. When I started this blog, I was following the lead of environmental activist writers like Bill McKibben, Mark Hertsgaard, Elizabeth Kolbert and Derrick Jensen, who were sounding the alarm about climate change and biodiversity loss, translating the sober measurements of science into terms a lay audience could understand.
In the climate change movement then, the watchwords were “mitigate” and “adapt.” We could mitigate the damage that climate change would cause by reducing carbon emissions, trying to keep things more or less under control while we busied ourselves with adapting, by, for example, shifting to renewable energy sources and hybridizing flood- and drought-resistant grains.
Meanwhile, wildlife biologists were keeping track of the grim march of the Sixth Great Extinction, already well underway—not only for animals but also for marine life and plants on land and sea.
Seven years on, the scenarios I was absorbing with shock, outrage and fear at the beginning of Transition Times have come true, and then some. Monster storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, heat waves, melting glaciers and tundra at the poles, staggering biodiversity loss, climate refugees (both human and non-human)—all of this has moved out of the realm of science fiction into the daily headlines.
Hence our desperate casting about for superhero help.
In the United States, the Gilgamesh crowd is in power—you remember Gilgamesh: the brawny young king who murdered the guardian of the cedar forest and cut it all down to build his grand city. Later in his epic he wanders around the world searching unsuccessfully for a route to immortality, strangely symbolizing the downfall of all humans who think only of short-term gain: you can’t take it with you.
Those at the helm of the U.S. economy today are willing to cut it all down. Who cares about helping endangered species? Who cares about national parks or ocean sanctuaries—drill, baby, drill! Who cares about the national debt? Print some more paper, acquire some more debt, let the suckers who come after us figure out how to pay.
And pay we will. The entire Earth community will pay for the savage destruction of climate and environment underway now. It’s not just the Sixth Great Extinction, it’s also a planetary reset we’re witnessing in these early years of the 21stcentury, on the scale of the shift from the Mesozoic to the Cenozoic eras, when the dinosaurs went extinct.
But this time, it’s not a meteor shaking things up on Earth. It’s the planet’s most successful species, homo sapiens—the smart apes—ruining things for everyone.
I am not proud to be a human being these days. I am not proud to be an American.
But I do cling to a tattered shred of hope in remembering the much-vaunted ethical, moral compass of humans, and the legendary innovative ingenuity of Americans.
If climate change, habitat and species loss continue unabated, we will be the first species on the planet to knowingly bring about our own destruction. For make no mistake, humans will go down with everything else on the planet. A few may survive—but civilization as we have created it, a la Gilgamesh, will go down.
Is this something we are really willing to have on our collective conscience?
Especially when we could have prevented it?
I take hope from the fierce rhetoric of Pope Francis, and other activists who are firing up environmental protection with religious fervor: Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is a great example of a scientist who is appealing to the faithful, and also using pop culture to reach the masses.
What’s needed now is a dramatic shift in cultural worldview: from Gilgamesh to Noah, from swash-buckling drill-slash-burn to the moral and technological leadership that gets an Ark built before the floods come.
Because the floods, they are a’comin’. They’re already here, along with the wildfires and droughts and heat domes and all the rest of it. The wild animals are feeling the stresses as much or more than humans…there’s no AC or helicopters coming for them.
Meanwhile our politicians are still busying themselves with archaic ideas like national borders and tariff tit-for-tats. Climate change knows no borders. Noah didn’t ask to see passports as he loaded the climate refugees, human and non-human, into his ship.
We are all Earthlings now. If there’s any upside to climate change, it may be that the fact of our global, interspecies interdependence is now blazingly clear and undeniable.
In the epic of the 21stcentury, we’re at a crossroads. Who will we follow, Gilgamesh or Noah? If we want to save ourselves and as many other beloved Earthlings as possible (plants, insects, birds, animals, marine life), there is no time to waste.
Noah is in all of us, and we’re all in this together. If we have the will, we can find ways to mitigate and adapt and survive what’s coming.
Can we find the will?
Every day is a cliffhanger lately…tune in next time for the next chapter of “Gilgamesh vs. Noah: The Epic Battle for the Future, No. 2018.”
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 28, 2018 | Protests & Symbolic Acts
Featured image: Destruction in León. Source anonymous. The official death toll from explosions of state violence has risen to 63.
by Laura Blume / Intercontinental Cry
Over the past week, Nicaragua has erupted in protests. While this current crisis started over pension reform, its development has revealed far greater rifts. It appears Nicaraguans have finally had enough of the Ortega regime. They are demanding that the corruption and oppression end. For many, it may seem shocking that a country that re-elected President Daniel Ortega for his third consecutive term in November 2016, with a reported 72 percent of the national vote could now, less than two years later, have taken to the streets en masse demanding his immediate removal from office.
I first visited Nicaragua in 2012, and have spent extensive time in the country over the past two years undertaking ethnographic fieldwork as part of my PhD dissertation. Each time I arrived in Nicaragua, I heard more and more people express mounting levels of frustration with the political situation. Yet, it was a frustration that the majority internalized and kept mainly to themselves, mentioning it to me only in private spaces and usually when other Nicaraguans were not around. As someone explained to me on one of my first trips to the country, “On the street, we’re all Sandinistas. We have to be if we want to work and have our kids go to school. But in private… well, there you may hear another story.”
I began hearing people who had fought in the 1978-79 Sandinista Revolution and 1981-90 Contra War lament that the current government now resembled the Somoza dynasty they had fought so hard and sacrificed so much to overthrow. Many people told me they were still a Sandinista, just not a Danielista, highlighting their commitment to the ideals of the historic fight against dictatorship and the Sandinista Revolution, but fundamental disagreement with the current regime.
Hearing about corruption and repression is one thing, but witnessing it is another. In November 2017, in Bilwi, the capital city of the North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region of Nicaragua, I watched the Ortega Administration steal a local election. As I felt the burn of tear gas deployed against peaceful protestors and watched National Police – trucked in from the capitol – fire live rounds at the crowds, perspective on Nicaraguan politics changed, permanently.
In the 2017 municipal elections in Bilwi, the primary match-up was between two parties: the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional, Sandinista National Liberation Front) and the indigenous Miskitu party YATAMA (Yatama Aslatakanka Masrika Nani/Sons of the Mother Earth). I decided I would try and divide my time between the contacts I had from each party, hoping to remain impartial. On election day, I spent the morning with a contact who supported the FSLN. I accompanied them as they drove FSLN voters to the polls. At one point, they admitted to me that certain claims of the opposition were valid: Nicaragua was a dictatorship. But they countered that not all dictatorships were bad, exclaiming, “just look at all the progress in Cuba!”
Around 4 pm that afternoon, I arrived at a voting center with a YATAMA contact. Although the official closing time for the center was 6pm, elections officials were shutting its doors. People became angry that they were not being allowed to vote. The situation grew tense as a crowd formed. People reported facing harassment from authorities – including two women who told me about threats of sexual violence – when they tried to demand their right to vote. I remember thinking how my FSLN contacts had stressed to me that they would be voting early in the day, and making sure other FSLN supporters did the same. Did they know this would occur in the afternoon? Reports of similar problems soon emerged from other voting centers around Bilwi.
A few hours later, waiting outside the same voting center in a crowd of YATAMA supporters as they observed a contested re-count of votes, I noticed a new group of people arriving – all young and male. They began encircling the YATAMA supporters and jeering at them. One of the young men tossed a handful of dirt towards them, clearly trying to instigate a fight. Thankfully, the YATAMA supporters did not take the bait. But in that moment, I got a glimpse of the nature of the Sandinista turbas, the same groups of youths who are now terrorizing various parts of the Pacific coast and the capital city of Managua.
Once the FSLN victory was announced, YATAMA supporters took to the streets to protest what they perceived as a fraudulent outcome. While I had tried to remain politically neutral, I certainly empathized with their frustration. The irregularities at the voting centers seemed far too widespread to consider the FSLN win a fair one. Moreover, those who did vote for the FSLN often did so because they felt obliged to do so. As one young woman told me, she had wanted to support YATAMA, but voted for the FSLN since she was fearful of losing her university scholarship.
FSLN-controlled media outlets declared that the YATAMA supporters were causing mayhem in the city, but they were certainly not alone on the streets. Groups of the FSLN youth were out in force, fighting against the YATAMA supporters and vandalizing properties. The YATAMA house and radio station (which serves as one of the few Miskitu-language services in the region) and famous defiant Indian statue were all destroyed, which some audacious Sandinista sources blamed on YATAMA supporters. Through all of this, the protesters faced violent government suppression, including tear gas and even gunfire. Adding to the disarray, groups of criminals who claimed no political loyalties took advantage of the chaos to loot local businesses. One jokingly asked me if I wanted any new electro-domestic appliances from Gallo Más Gallo.
Injured protesters taking refuge in the YATAMA house, before it was burned to the ground. Photo by author.
After a day and a half of the protests, the local airport was shut down and rumors circulated that troops would soon blockade the road. I decided it was time for me to leave town.
Unbeknownst to me, a fight at the bus station broke out 15 minutes prior to my departure time. When I arrived, it was full of police and special forces from Managua, antimotines. As I approached the bus, eager to leave, an official stopped me. He claimed that he had seen me the day before at the protests and ordered that nearby police search my luggage as he closely examined my passport. He demanded my name, which he wrote down. Without my permission, he took a photo of my face with his phone to send to “central.” He also insisted that I hand over my cellphone and delete any protest photos.
The official also accused me of supporting YATAMA and of even working for the CIA – a potentially grave accusation in a country still reeling from the U.S. infringements of the 1980s. I insisted I was a poor graduate student incapable of backing any foreign political party and that I did not work for any government agency. (I was tempted to point out that a CIA agent would have nicer transportation than the local 18-hour “chicken” bus from Bilwi to Managua I was taking, but decided that snark would not help in this situation.) Finally, the official let me go and I boarded the bus. I have never been so relieved to take a seat and settle in for the grueling ride to the capital as I was at the moment the bus finally puttered out of the tiny Bilwi bus depot.
Upon arrival on the Pacific side of the country, a few of my friends joked that I needed to go buy some pro-FSLN swag to help improve my image in the eyes of the government. The Pacific side of Nicaragua was mostly calm after the municipal elections, and most of the people I spoke with dismissed the chaos in Bilwi as something unique to the dynamics on the indigenous-dominated and long-fractious Miskitu Coast. Yet, no Nicaraguan I spoke with was surprised by my tale of police harassment and voter suppression. The most common response to my depiction of the ways the FSLN had strategically manipulated the election outcome was laughter; this was all very old news to Nicaraguans.
Now, in April 2018, the protests are not specific to an election, led by an opposition party, or isolated in a remote part of the country. The protests are occurring all across the heartland of supposed FSLN support. The below photo is from Friday night in León, where the FSLN won the 2017 municipal elections with over 80 percent of the vote. While the government says right wing-backed criminals are responsible for the vandalism, witnesses say it was the Sandinista turbas who were, quite literally in this case, pouring gasoline on the fire.
Some Nicaraguans tell me that the situation has started to calm down. Others say it is just the calm before the storm. Regardless, even if things settle down this time, the mask of democracy has been torn off the Ortega regime. So far, during less than a week of protests, at least 63 people have been killed*, and many more are injured or missing. Nicaraguans are now publicly speaking out against their repressive government, and hundreds of thousands are taking to the streets. Yet, dictators rarely cede power in response to protest, and so this struggle is unlikely to be a fast or an easy one.
I initially wanted to write about what I witnessed in Bilwi, but I decided to stay silent, for the same reason that Nicaraguans do not like to talk about politics on the street: speaking out against the Ortega regime almost always has consequences in Nicaragua. This government has expelled several researchers and academics before me, threatening them along the way. But, now, like so many of my friends in Nicaragua and on their behalf, I am enraged by what is happening. It is hard to silently watch the videos of a journalist being shot in the head in a city that I have come to consider a second home, or of students and protestors being beaten, abducted, and even killed by government forces along streets I have walked too many times to count. As a friend in Managua recently told me, “it is difficult to feel so impotent, but you know what is beautiful? To be next to someone who you do not know but you help and you defend because they believe in the same thing you do.” I cannot be on the streets of Managua marching with the protestors right now, but I can provide a voice that amplifies the calls of those protesters – and as an academic, further evidence that supports their cause.
