Global Extraction Film Festival
9-12 September 2021
The Global Extraction Film Festival (GEFF), launched last year by Esther Figueroa (Vagabond Media) and Emiel Martens (Caribbean Creativity), has announced the selection of over 150 films for GEFF2021. The festival, which will be available online for free from September 9-12, aims to bring attention to the destructive impacts of extractive industries and to highlight communities across the world who are bravely defending against annihilation while creating livable futures.
GEFF2021 will feature 4 programs with over 150 documentaries and urgent shorts from over 40 countries, with a wide range of compelling topics that everyone needs to think about. Where, how and by whom is the food we eat, water we drink, clothes we wear, materials in our technology, the energy that powers our lives produced and transported? What are we to do with the billions of tons of waste we create daily? What is our relationship to other species and all life on the planet? Extraction has caused the anthropocene; the climate crisis is real and cannot be wished away or solved by magical technologies based on extraction.
PROGRAM ONE: GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES Our General Selection film program, Global Perspectives, offers 26 feature documentaries and urgent shorts that focus on interrelated issues affecting the world, such as the climate <crisis, water, food, energy, mining, overtourism, colonial legacies. Selected films include Bright Green Lies,whichexposes the extraction dependent and ecologically destructive reality of “green” technological solutions; Grit, which tells the story of Dian, who at 6 years old, along with 60,000 displaced people, suffered from an industrial accident in Indonesia, and later becomes a political activist fighting for justice; Gather and Final Straw, Food, Earth, Happiness, whichpresent ancient alternatives to industrial agriculture; Sustenanceand The Superfood Chain,whichexplore the food we eat, where it comes from and the consequences of global food chains; and Eating up Easter and Crowded Out: The Story of Overtourism, which demonstrate that tourism is a highly extractive industry.
PROGRAM TWO: FOCUS ON THE AMERICAS This special Focus on the Americas is our most extensive and prominent GEFF2021 film program offering over 100 feature documentaries and urgent shorts from 30 countries in the Americas, from Argentina in the South to Canada in the North and across the Caribbean islands. The Americas are central to the creation of the modern world. This is because the ecocidal and genocidal pillaging and settlement of the Americas by European Imperial powers led to the wealth of Europe (and later North America), and to the extraction intensive industrial revolution that accelerated the anthropocene and caused the climate emergency in which we are now living. Understanding extraction in the Americas is requisite for understanding the global political economy. Understanding the Americas is also essential to realizing there are Indigenous alternatives to planetary destruction, that communities throughout the Americas have been resisting erasure for centuries, and continue to protect and defend that which is necessary to all life.
PROGRAM THREE: HUMAN-ANIMAL STUDIES over 10 feature documentaries and urgent shorts about the relationship between humans and animals, and the impact of the extractive industries on animals. Humans are animals who dominate the planet and decide which other animals have value, are our food, our friends, our enemies, are pests, can be sacrificed, made extinct. For example, selected feature Artifishal – The Fight to Save Wild Salmon, shows the devastating impact of dams and farmed salmon on wild salmon populations., while The Last Male on Earth tells a tale of extinction.
PROGRAM FOUR: PRESENTED BY PATAGONIA This special selection offers 8 feature documentaries and urgent shorts produced by Patagonia Films about people fighting for environmental and food justice, to protect last wild places and species, to find community based solutions. For example, DamNation – The Problem with Hydropower chronicles the United States of America’s nationally promoted narrative of man’s domination of nature, then decades later, the realization that humans are completely dependent on nature, that large-scale dams are one of our very worst inventions and should be removed. Two other selected Patagonia films, Public Trust – The Fight for America’s Public Lands andLawqa – Que el Parque Vuelva a Ser Parque show how public lands and national parks in the USA and Chile have been handed over to extractive industries, removing the people, plants and animals who used to be there, and polluting and degrading the environment.
GEFF2021 EVENTS Along with these four Film Programs, there will be panel discussions about extractive industries and their impacts on specific places and peoples, as well as Q&A with filmmakers. These events are hosted by GEFF’s partners including Deep Green Resistance, London Mining Network, Asia-Pacific Ecological Network, Red Thread, Freedom Imaginaries.
Note: DGR is organizing two events for GEFF2021. The first is a discussion on Bright Green Lies with Director Julia Barnes at 4 PM (Pacific Time) September 11. You can find the Facebook page here. The second is a discussion with director on how films can be used for resistance at 5 AM (Pacific Time) September 11. You can contact DGR Asia Pacific to join the event.
A: Mainstream media is the set of media companies that dominate mass mediums. Also known as corporate/mass/monopoly media, mainstream media consists of cable news channels, major periodicals, film studios, and the like. The corporate press is the subset of mainstream media companies that deal in news. Mainstream media has a monopoly on the information and symbols that get disseminated widely to the public, as alternative media only reaches small audiences of niche consumers. Five companies control 90 percent of US media.
Q: What’s the problem with mainstream media?
A: Mainstream media outlets are (subsidiaries of) for-profit corporations acting in the system of capitalism. Therefore, their central objective is to maximize quarterly gain for their shareholders, the majority of which are multibillion-dollar financial institutions. Because corporations are responsible to stockowners first, capitalist accumulation comes at the expense of workers and the environment, as businesses exploit cheap labor and extract resources in the most efficient manner, no matter how ecologically devastating that may be, in an effort to increase surplus value for the owning class.
Mainstream news sources rely on advertising to generate revenue, meaning they need to sell marketing opportunities to other corporations. Because of this arrangement, mainstream media cannot sincerely critique corporate capitalism, as it would be self-sabotage to challenge the very system on which their business model depends.
Q: Mainstream sources don’t criticize capitalism, so what?
A: They propagandize it. Mainstream media’s most consequential accomplishment is the widespread inculcation of unquestioned consumer capitalism. First of all, the corporate press runs ads that instill consumer culture. Far worse, since mainstream broadcasts and publications are the only sources of information that effortlessly reach the masses, and because they perpetually contest, if not ignore, critical analysis of the system of capitalism, they end up prescribing it. The bulk of this propagandization is carried out unconsciously. Mass entertainment media inculcates the images and icons of capitalism.
Corporate newspeople, often having graduated from elite private schools, are hired at major media companies precisely for their uncriticalness towards existing power structures. Thus, mainstream commentators naturally and genuinely downplay, when they don’t ignore, news that reflects unfavorably on the economic status-quo. They do this actively (e.g., by playing “both sides”) and passively (e.g., by reporting systemic consequences as independent events). A serious critic of capitalism would never achieve a position of influence in mainstream media, indeed none have.
Sometimes unorthodox takes are published in unnoticed places, but never enough to gain much attention. Furthermore, news industry editors reserve the right to unilaterally redraft stories before they reach the public. As a result, journalists self-censor, whereby they come to exclude facts and suppress sentiments that they know their editor would disfavor or delete. Editors report to CEOs on boards of directors.
Q: Sure, but I’m free to read and watch what I want right? Why don’t people just find better sources?
A: In theory individuals can engage with whatever news sources they find to be the best. The reality is that quality, alternative publications, although numerous, are for all intents and purposes undiscoverable. Some of the richest and most powerful (media) companies in the world, such as Google, Facebook, household publishers and broadcast networks, broadly control the distribution of information. Anyone can produce anything they want, the challenge lies in finding an audience.
For-profit companies determine what you get, and even more importantly what you don’t get, when you search the web, turn on the television, and so on. This state of affairs is problematic seeing as it would be against the best interest of multibillion-dollar corporations to surface information that calls into question the system of capital growth from which they derive their power.
Furthermore, monopoly media sets the boundaries of acceptable politics in virtue of its ubiquity. Dissenting perspectives are considered “radical”, “unrealistic”, or just plain whacky in popular discourse, however rational or evidenced they might be.
Q: So everything I read in the corporate press is propaganda?
A: No! In fact, on issues that can be covered honestly in the absence of systemic analysis, mainstream news sources can be excellent. Although weak language and out of touch presuppositions abound, that which gets published is not usually problematic. What really matters are the events and opinions that are omitted and marginalized, rather than headlined.
Major news media companies appease their shareholders and advertisers every time they ignore a case of corporate exploitation. When problems brought about by capitalism become too big for mainstream sources to ignore, it’s better for business that they scapegoat foreign countries and domestic minorities. Major media corporations also wield algorithms that facilitate endless entertainment.
Q: What’s the most important thing that mainstream media mistreats?
A: Climate change, taking for granted the understanding that it is the biggest story of our time, if not the most important event in human history. The corporate press has virtually ignored climate change, at best relegating crucial reports to back pages. Examples of incommensurate climate coverage are inexhaustible. Infamously, ABC News spent more time on the Royal Baby in one week than on climate change in all of 2018, the fourth hottest year on record.
In 2019, when atmospheric CO2 levels surpassed 415 parts per million for the first time since the Pliocene Epoch 3 million years ago, no major publications reported the measure, even though Exxon Mobil predicted it decades in advance. Instead, the morning after the climacteric was recorded the front page of the New York Times worried about the economics of “Trump’s Trade War”, the plight of the jobless in “Coal Country”, and the impending “5G Apocalypse”.
Mainstream media hasn’t brought attention to the fact that land surface temperatures in Siberia now exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit annually, threatening the stability of permafrost that stores significantly more carbon than is in the atmosphere. These are not facts that people should have to seek out, given what’s at stake. Twenty percent of all human deaths are caused by fossil fuel emissions. A press that serves the public would track corporate pollution in an effort to safeguard global health. The corporate press, which serves tycoons, tracks the stock market as a measure of “economic health”.
Citizens are also uninformed about inspiring environmental developments, such as the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. Increasingly severe extreme weather events continue to be treated as shocking anomalies in mainstream news, which blames “Humanity” for the overt climate crimes that mass media is an accessory to.Ecocide is not in “Human Nature”. Humans have lived on Earth for hundreds of millennia. Most of us have not fatally robbed or contaminated the planet. Corporations have. Anthropogenic climate change coincides with the ascent of industrial capitalism, which major media protects by maligning Humanity.
Q: But that’s because most people don’t care about climate change and capitalism. Mass media produces content that people want to consume.
A: Vice versa. Corporate media manufactures interests. Things that are marketed and attended to the most in mass media become culturally significant in virtue of the attention they receive. In other words, popular concern is socialized via media coverage. Nevertheless, most people are concerned with climate change, in one way or another, because they experience it.
In fact, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication has found that more than 3/4 of US citizens are expressly interested in news stories pertaining to climate change. No matter, a minimally decent media would inform the masses about the state of the climate.
Q: Why does mainstream media ignore climate change if it really poses such a big risk?
A: Never mind the fact that climate change is the greatest known threat to civilization, even if corporate media in theory stood to profit from frequent and honest climate coverage, they couldn’t in reality for one simple reason. Climate change is caused by the very system of capital accumulation that sustains mainstream media companies.
Corporations disharmonize nature when they plunder ecosystems for nonrenewable resources, manufacture unnecessary products, ship them across the world unsustainably, and poison the biosphere with waste. This rapacious activity is executed at incomprehensible speeds and on devastating scales. Corporate capitalism thus affects climate change more than anything else.
Worthwhile analyses of climate change cannot ignore the history of capitalism, and workable solutions must advocate for the end of corporate capitalism as we know it. Therefore, major media companies need to dodge the issue by definition. They aren’t just choosing more lucrative stories to tell. There is no choice for them to make.
Mainstream news sources genuinely could not sustain serious reporting on the issue of climate change, because if they were honest they would connect climate change to capitalism and thereby alienate major advertisers and investors, which would risk revenue, hence the ability to disseminate information to the masses In other words, any news outlet that commits itself to adequate climate coverage consequently forfeits the resources it would need to be mainstream. Under present conditions, if climate change really threatened civilization – as a matter of fact it does – mass media could not inform us. Whether or not they would is a worthless question.
Q: If climate change threatens civilization, it poses a risk to the system of capitalism. Why would the corporate press underplay climate change if it endangered future accumulation?
Due to the principle that returns on investment are better made sooner rather than later, the owning class continues to discount the changing climate to the end of ensuring short-term profit. Crucially, corporations do not merely maximize shareholder wealth. They function explicitly to make stockholders as wealthy as possible, as fast as possible, ad infinitum.
According to the impossible logic of capitalism, corporations can go on making next-quarter profits forever, even if they come at the expense of deadly future losses. Business as usual presumes infinite growth on a finite planet. As already set forth, it is not the case that mainstream media downplays climate change by way of focusing on more engaging, and therefore more profitable, subject matter. To the contrary, the climate crisis presents a unique opportunity for awesome and sensational, thus bankable, story telling.
Instead, because capitalist accumulation causes climate change, by downplaying the issue mainstream sources avoid having to call into question the process that generates profit in the first place. In a word, mass media companies do not minimize climate change because they are too busy making short-term profit, but, much more fundamentally, they do so to protect from mass disapproval the whole enterprise of short-term profit making.
Q: What do we do?
A: Consume critically. Read. Study climate science. Explore social science (start with Native American history and graduate to Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift). Peruse not-for-profit publications at their intersect like Climate and Capitalism. Make a list of independent and alternative sources that consistently apply decent moral standards, maintain respectable historical records, and publish global perspectives, especially those that confront tyranny and champion the oppressed. Watch Koyaanisqatsi. Unlearn everything.
Then act. Mostly listen, but talk too. Spreading the word goes much further than people appreciate. Also ride a bike. Garden, share, resist, do what feels right. Another world is possible. Good luck.
The somber truth is that the vast bulk of nature’s staggering abundance has already disappeared. We live in a world characterized primarily by the relative silence and emptiness of its natural spaces. Underlying this devastation is the ideology of human supremacy—claiming innate superiority over nonhuman forms of life. But is human supremacy innate to humanity, or rather something specific pertaining to our dominant culture?
The nonhuman creatures with whom we share the Earth are being systematically annihilated by the Great Acceleration, as they lose their habitat, get hunted down, or poisoned by our pollution. There has been a 68 percent decline in vertebrate populations worldwide since 1970, with freshwater species such as amphibians registering a jaw-dropping 84 percent loss. Insects have been faring just as badly, with reports of “insectageddon” from some areas that have seen populations crashing toward extinction levels—such as the Monarch butterflies that migrate annually from Mexico to the United States, and have declined by 98 percent over the past thirty years.
There have been five mass extinctions of life in Earth’s history, caused by cataclysms such as volcanic eruptions or meteorite impact. Scientists warn that human activity is now causing species to go extinct at a thousand times the normal background rate, and that if we continue at this rate for a few more decades, we will have triggered the Sixth Extinction. Leading experts in the field, such as biologist E. O. Wilson, predict that half of the world’s estimated eight million species will be extinct or at the brink of extinction by the end of this century unless humanity changes its ways.
Why don’t we react in unbridled outrage to the devastation of the natural world taking place before our eyes? A major reason is that we don’t realize what we’ve lost. Back in 1968, in a song that became an icon of the environmental movement, Joni Mitchell sang about paving paradise and putting up a parking lot, making the point that you never know what you’ve got until it’s gone. She stirred millions of hearts—but she was wrong. The disturbing reality is that, once it’s gone, people forget they ever had it. Whatever conditions people grow up with are the ones they generally consider normal. This is a tribute to the amazing plasticity of the human mind, but it means that we tend to take for granted things that should never be accepted.
This phenomenon, known as “shifting baseline syndrome,” was first discovered by fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly, who was researching the drastic reduction in the size of catch off the eastern seaboard of North America, which had declined by 97 percent since written records began, although the fishermen remained strangely unconcerned. He realized that each generation viewed the baseline as whatever they caught at the beginning of their career, regardless of how much smaller it was than the previous generation, leading to what he called “the gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance” of fish populations. Shifting baseline syndrome has since been shown to be pervasive everywhere in the world.
The somber truth is that the vast bulk of nature’s staggering abundance has already disappeared. We live in a world characterized primarily by the relative silence and emptiness of its natural spaces. It’s only when we read accounts of wildlife from centuries ago that we realize how much is gone. One eighteenth-century writer, standing on the shores of Wales, described schools of herrings five or six miles long, so dense that “the whole water seems alive; and it is seen so black with them to a great distance, that the number seems inexhaustible.” In the seventeenth-century Caribbean, sailors could navigate at night by the noise of massive shoals of sea turtles heading to nesting beaches on the Cayman Islands. In the Chesapeake Bay, plagued today by polluted dead zones, hunters harvested a hundred thousand terrapins a year for turtle soup. In the nineteenth century, passenger pigeons would blot out the sun when they appeared in massive flocks throughout the eastern United States. The last one died in a zoo in 1914.
The Great Dying
In normal times, extinction is a natural part of evolution: new species evolve from prior existing species, meaning that, rather than dying out, “extinct” species are really the progenitors of new ones. When extinctions occur, however, as part of a mass extinction, they represent a grave and permanent loss to the richness of life. Species exterminated by human development are wiped out from nature’s palette, terminating any possibility of further evolutionary branching. The average lifespan of a species is roughly a million years—the unfolding story of each one is, in E. O. Wilson’s words, a unique epic. We’ve seen how life’s prodigious diversity on Earth can be understood as nature’s own evolved intelligence, earned over billions of years. Through extinction, we are dumbing down nature, eliminating the plenitude it has so painstakingly accumulated.
Terminal as extinctions are, the virtual disappearance of most populations of existing species, known as extirpations, are perhaps even more devastating. It’s been calculated that, since the rise of human civilization, Earth has lost 83 percent of its wild mammals, 80 percent of marine mammals, and about half the biomass of trees and plants—a worldwide elimination of life’s abundance that has been aptly named by biologist Norman Myers “the Great Dying.” The species we view as iconic of nature’s magnificence, such as lions, tigers, elephants, and whales—now barely eking out an existence—were once prolific around the world. It’s estimated that, as late as 1800, twenty-six million elephants roved Africa. There are now barely four hundred thousand. The spectacular vista of wildebeest migrating in their millions across the plains of Africa is itself facing extinction, with the few remaining wildebeest finding migration routes blocked by fences, settlements, and roads. And the Great Dying continues at an ever-increasing pace: 2,000-year-old baobab trees that were around when Jesus lived suddenly dying off; three billion animals lost in Australia’s wildfires of 2019–20. In the words of environmental writer J. B. Mackinnon, “extirpation is the great, sucking retreat of the tide of life.”
The next time you go for a hike in nature, and marvel at its beauty, take a moment to realize that you are looking at a pale, shrunken wraith of what it once was. An accumulation of studies around the world measuring the declines of species and ecosystems indicates that overall we’ve lost around ninety percent of nature’s profusion. We live, Mackinnon observes, in a “ten percent world.” Those of us who gain sustenance from the sacred beauty of nature sometimes like to think of it as a temple. But, as Mackinnon notes, “a greater truth should be foremost in mind: Nature is not a temple, but a ruin. A beautiful ruin, but a ruin all the same.”
The ideology of human supremacy
It’s rather stunning to consider that all this destruction has been carried out by a species that has been around for less than 0.01 per cent of life’s history; a species that makes up just 0.01 percent of all life on Earth as measured by biomass. While some, such as Ecomodernist Stewart Brand, may glorify humanity’s ascendance declaring “We are as gods,” there are other ways to see it. Humanity has undoubtedly developed unprecedented power, but much of it has been used for destruction. What would other animals say about humans, if they had the opportunity? The animals that still remain on Earth are suffering an apocalypse unlike anything that has occurred in the history of this planet. Other mass extinctions happened through geophysical events that no-one was responsible for, such as volcano eruptions or meteorites. This one is a deliberate and systematic annihilation of life executed by one species with full knowledge of what it’s doing. It may be the Sixth Extinction, but as some have pointed out, a more apt name would be the First Extermination Event.
With the exception of a few hardy survivors such as cockroaches, rats, and pigeons, the animals that have been spared extirpation or extinction are mostly those which have been domesticated, such as cows, chickens, and pigs. But the word domestication doesn’t hint at the reality of their existence. For the most part, these animals are enslaved, brutally tortured, and mercilessly slaughtered merely for human convenience. The ongoing atrocity of the systematic torment administered in the name of humanity to 74 billion animals a year—each one a sentient creature with a nervous system as capable of registering excruciating pain as you or I—must represent the single greatest cataclysm of suffering that life on Earth has ever experienced. It’s most likely, as ecophilosopher Derrick Jensen points out, that if animals could speak, they would tell us that when they see the face of a human, they don’t see a god—they see the devil.
But, of course, they can’t speak, and that is why this ongoing holocaust continues with barely a mention in public discourse. Ever since the rise of agrarian civilizations, cultures have justified their domination over those they conquered by claiming innate superiority. In recent centuries, as Europeans subjugated other regions, a discourse of white supremacy—one that retains its pernicious power even today—asserted superiority over other races. Among those who recognize its toxic qualities, white supremacy is understood as a form of violence that inflicts suffering on others while simultaneously damaging the perpetrator by binding them to a system of brutality. What is less recognized is that the ideology of human supremacy—claiming innate superiority over nonhuman animals—has a similarly malignant effect.
Human supremacy is so embedded within our cultural norms that it is barely even discussed. As ecological philosopher Eileen Crist describes, “it is indoctrinated into humans from a tender age, without time-out, hammered into the human mind by innumerable conditioning feats of the dominant anthropocentric culture.” It is, however, a specific ideology with origins in the Western worldview that desacralized nature, turning it into a resource to exploit. Ultimately, it is the ideology of human supremacy that allows us to maltreat animals in factory farms, blow up mountaintops for coal, turn vibrant rainforest into monocropped wastelands, trawl millions of miles of ocean floor with nets that scoop up everything that moves—while glorying in the Anthropocene, claiming that nature only exists to serve human needs. Because it’s all around us and almost never mentioned, human supremacy is easy to ignore—but once you recognize it, you see it everywhere you look.
Anthropocene. . . or Capitalocene?
Once one becomes aware of the enormity perpetrated by the human race, it can sometimes lead to a revulsion against our own species. “We are serial killers beyond reason,” writes one author. Others occasionally liken the human race to a cancer, which spreads uncontrollably until it kills its host. Is it, however, human nature that has caused this unfolding catastrophe, or something specific pertaining to the dominant culture?
When malignant cancer cells spread, they generally do so on account of abnormalities in their DNA that cause them to ignore regulatory feedback from neighboring cells, leading to uncontrolled proliferation. Some see this kind of dynamic in global capitalism, which requires perpetual growth in production and consumption of resources just to remain stable. Rather than viewing humanity as a species overwhelming nature, they see the system of norms, laws, and power relations instituted by global capitalism as the source of this massive disruption. As such, they suggest that the “Anthropocene” is a misnomer: it unfairly lays the blame for climate breakdown and ecological collapse on all humans throughout history, whereas it’s really only a small minority of humans in the past few centuries. The numbers back them up: the advanced OECD countries, representing only 18 percent of the global population, account for 74 percent of global GDP, and are responsible for 73 percent of the carbon emitted since 1850. On average, a single U.S. citizen emits five hundred times as much carbon as a citizen of Ethiopia or Cambodia. The true name of our era, they argue, should be the Capitalocene.
Editor’s note: While it’s true that “it is the profit machine that is polluting our atmosphere, warming our planet, and destroying our ecosystems”, the real root of human destructiveness lies further back in history, when groups of people started agriculture, building cities and forming human supremist ideologies that disconnected human cultures from all other living beings.
We thought climate catastrophe the main danger. Now we know there is another. A double-whammy ecological crisis threatens collapse into dystopian chaos.
“Pathogens, a great and terrible global threat to human and many a non-human alike, [are] as much a Sword of Damocles hovering above civilisation as climate change.”
Evolutionary epidemiologist Rob Wallace wrote this in 2015. But he and many colleagues have been issuing increasingly urgent warnings since the 1990s that globalised agribusiness is breeding and spreading new, deadly, fast-transmission viruses.
The urgency around pandemics began to ramp up around the same time calls for climate action became mainstream. Many of us have been focused on the climate emergency – and nothing here should be taken to imply we were wrong – but the last year has taught a sharp lesson: deadly pathogens pose an equally menacing threat to human civilisation.
Catastrophe
Since the first United Nations COP conference on global warming in 1995, the climate emergency has got much worse. Carbon emissions have accelerated from 26 billion tonnes in 1995 to 37 billion tonnes in 2018. Atmospheric concentrations have risen from 350ppm in 1990 to 410ppm today. Half the increase in average global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution has occurred since 1995. The average volume of Arctic sea-ice has roughly halved in the last 40 years. Whatever the metric, the same story.
The effects are all around us. More frequent and more intense heat-waves are causing increases in wildfires, droughts, and desertification. Rising and warming seas are causing heavier rainfall, more serious flooding, more frequent mega-storms, and the inundation of coastal areas. These changes are driving the world’s sixth mass extinction, with species loss running at 1,000 times the normal rate. Climate change is destroying livelihoods, increasing disease, displacing people.
We stand on the brink of critical tipping-points when incremental shifts lead to sudden and irreversible lurches in the Earth’s ecosystem. Among the potential tipping-points are: abrupt collapse of the West Antarctic ice-sheet; abrupt collapse of the East Antarctic ice-sheet; abrupt collapse of the Greenland ice-sheet; thawing of Arctic permafrost and release of methane gas; rapid deforestation of the Amazon; and failure of the Atlantic Gulf Stream. Some scientists fear a ‘global cascade’ of interacting tipping-points.
The failure of the global political elite is systemic. It is not that we do not know what to do. It is not that the wrong policies have been adopted. It is that the economic and geopolitical system – the current world order – cannot deliver the radical action necessary.
The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), representing the world’s leading industrial economies, considered the pre-pandemic global growth rate of three percent to have been too low. Yet such annual growth rate means a doubling in the size of the world economy every quarter century.
The fossil-fuel corporations plan to extract twice the amount of coal, oil, and gas between now and 2030 than can be burned if we are to restrict global temperature rise to the 1.5ºC ‘aim’ of the Paris Agreement.
This ‘aim’ is not ambitious enough: most climate scientists predict severe damage to the Earth’s eco-system with this level of warming. But even this ‘aim’ falls well below the ‘pledges’ of the COP participants, which, even if implemented, are expected to result in a disastrous 3ºC of global warming. Many leading scientists think we are heading for at least 4ºC of global warming.
Metabolic
The term ‘metabolic rift’ has been used by some radical commentators, like John Bellamy Foster, to describe what is happening. I prefer ‘rupture’ because it better captures the violence of a corporate capitalist system that is out of control and tearing apart human societies and natural ecosystems.
Metabolism is a scientific word to do with how chemical changes reconfigure energy and sustain life. All of us need to get science-wise, to understand what is happening to our planet, to get a handle on what I am calling the ‘Dual Metabolic Rupture’.
Humans are part of Nature. On the one hand, we are animals with material needs and organic form. On the other, our actions impact upon the rest of Nature, sometimes degrading it, sometimes remodelling it, always having an effect.
All the products of human labour are therefore part of Nature. Everything we do to provide ourselves with a livelihood involves drawing upon the resources of Nature and refashioning them into new forms.
These processes are not reversible, but they may be repeatable. If a glacier melts because the temperature rises, the water of which it is formed flows away. If a new glacier forms in the same place when the temperature falls again, it must be comprised of another body of water. In Nature, as in Society, everything is process and motion.
The energy involved in natural processes is a constant: it can be endlessly recycled, but it cannot be destroyed, so whatever you do, it will still be there in one form or another. This is one of the basic laws of physics (known as ‘the First Law of Thermodynamics’).
It follows that human beings may interact with Nature in ways that are ‘renewable’ or ‘sustainable’ – where energy is recycled in essentially repetitive ways – or in other ways that cause a metabolic ‘rupture’ or ‘rift’ – where energy is reconstituted as a destructive force.
Let us take two contrasting examples. A hoe-cultivator who harvests a garden plot of cassava, feeds the tubers and leaves to her pigs, and then lets them roam to manure the plot, is engaged in a recycling of energy that is ecologically sustainable.
Corporations that extract oil, refine it into petroleum, and then sell it to other corporations to burn in jet engines are doing something quite different: theirs is not a renewable process, but a release of carbon waste into the atmosphere and a permanent remodelling of the Earth’s metabolism.
The basic rhythms of pre-capitalist societies were determined by the cycle of the seasons. But capitalism is a system of competitive capital accumulation hard-wired by the profit motive for exponential growth.
The former were always essentially local or regional, so that what happened in one place had limited impact in others: the latter is now a fully globalised system which has the whole of humanity and the entire global environment in its grasp.
In the end, it is simple: it is the profit machine that is polluting our atmosphere, warming our planet, and destroying our ecosystems.
But that’s not all it’s doing.
Anthropocene
The system – let’s define it: globalised, financialised monopoly-capitalism – is blind to everything except the balance sheet, the bottom line, the annual profit.
The lords of capital have turned the Earth – its lands, its waters, its minerals – into private property. They have commodified its ecosystems and appropriated its bounty. And in their wake they spew waste and pollution that become ‘externalities’ for which others must pay.
Where to start? The catalogue of devastation is so long. Forests are cut down, wetlands drained, soils eroded. Water extraction turns farmland into desert. Chemicals are dumped in oceans, lakes, and rivers. Toxins leak into groundwater. Fertilisers, herbicides, and pesticides contaminate food supplies.
Landfills overflow with synthetic waste. Nuclear power plants melt down and fill air, land, and sea with carcinogenic particles. A chemical smog fills urban streets and poisons children on the way to school. Plastic waste degrades into trillions of microscopic specks that infect every living organism.
Now, from deep within this mayhem, a second titan of destruction has emerged to stand alongside the mega-threat of climate change: pandemic disease.
Both titans are formed of trillions of tiny particles. Climate change is driven by atoms of carbon dioxide – tiny particles of dead organic matter pumped into the atmosphere when fossil fuels are burned. Pandemic disease is driven by microscopic parasites – tiny particles of living organic matter that breed, spread, and evolve by infecting the bodies of animals.
But that does not mean Covid-19 is a natural disaster, any more than carbon pollution. Nor is it an Act of God or a ‘Chinese’ conspiracy. Covid is a human-made catastrophe, as much an artefact of the Anthropocene as global warming.
I agree with colleagues who argue that the Holocene is over. This is the term we have used to describe the last 11,700 years of Earth history, since the end of the last Ice Age – until now. From around 1950, and at an accelerating rate since, the Earth system has been undergoing radical change as a result of human action. We have entered a new geological era in which Anthropos (the Greek word for human) is the primary agent of change. The primary form of change is metabolic rupture.
Covid-19 is a pandemic disease of the Anthropocene’s metabolic rupture.
Pandemic
Mainstream commentary on the pandemic is refracted through a neoliberal prism. Attention focuses on immediate problems and proximate causes. I am not talking about serial liars like Johnson and his third-rate cabinet of public-school toffs and corporate spivs. I am talking about more honest commentators keen to see through the spin and smoke-cloud that shields a corrupt and incompetent political class.
But it is not enough to expose the negligence, crony capitalism, and eugenicist experiments of the Tories – the failure of test-and-trace, the lack of PPE, the locking down too late and lifting too early, the discharging of the sick into care homes, the spreading of the virus in schools and universities, and so much more.
It is necessary, but not enough. The narcissistic charlatan who runs the government might eventually be thrown out. But so what? There is a much bigger issue: the metabolic rupture between corporate agribusiness and natural ecology that has created the multiple global incubators of new deadly diseases.
In 1950, a large proportion of the Earth’s people were peasant farmers, predominantly in the Global South. As recently as 1980, only 20 percent of China’s population was urban; the proportion today is 60 percent. A growing number of those who remain in the villages, moreover, have been transformed into wage-labourers.
The advance of corporate agribusiness is relentless. As I write, the Hindu-chauvinist regime of Narendra Modi is facing an uprising of small farmers whose livelihoods are threatened with destruction by neoliberal ‘reform’. So desperate is their plight that record numbers of India’s small farmers have been committing suicide.
As well as destroying traditional communities, agribusiness is expanding into the wilderness, uprooting forests, destroying the diversity and balance of natural ecologies, and replacing them with vast monocultures. Half the habitable surface of the Earth is now devoted to agriculture, with millions of acres added every year.
Much of the crop-land produces animal feed for the hundreds of millions of cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry being fast-fattened for the global supply-chains that loop the world. The mega-complexes of Big Farm’s industrialised animal production are laced around and between the mega-slums of the Global South’s ever-growing urban proletariat.
This is what links a remote bat-cave in hinterland China with the morgues of New York and London. Big Farm batters down natural ecology, destroying diversity and firebreaks. Viruses that would have burnt themselves out in the forest for lack of carriers adapt to a new ecology of monoculture, animal factories, and slum cities; they mutate and evolve and then achieve fast-track transmission through mass concentrations of the same species.
The global supply-chains of giant transnationals with operations in half a dozen countries and markets in a thousand cities do the rest.
Once a new variant is established, it replicates by the trillion at hyper-speed, throwing up chance mutations, testing new ways of spreading. The disease becomes endemic and chronic – embedded in human society – and continues to evolve, waging a relentless life-or-death struggle against lockdowns and vaccines by constant shape-sifting in its efforts to breach the defences.
Warning
This – the pandemic diseases created and spread by corporate agribusiness – is then layered over societies mired in poverty and stripped of public health-provision by neoliberal ‘structural adjustment programmes’, privatisation, and austerity cuts.
The epidemiologists have been warning of the dangers for a quarter of a century. There have been dozens of outbreaks of different viruses or variants, all involving a similar basic mechanism: the introduction of a wild-animal virus, its transmission and evolution through factory-farm complexes, a jump from animal to human, often in mutant form, and rapid global spread through transnational supply-chains.
The warning, endlessly repeated, was that, sooner or later, one of the new diseases created by neoliberal capitalism would take off. But there is no profit in pandemic precaution.
The improvised plague cemeteries; the body-bags in the morgues; the patients breathing through ventilators; the traumatised and exhausted health workers; the everyday folk left grieving; the jobs lost, businesses gone bust, homes lost to the bailiffs; the swelling toll of mental breakdowns; the loneliness, the shrivelled lives, the sense of desolation and despair: all this and more amount to so many ‘externalities’ for the profit machine.
The machine carries on. It is being recalibrated. Some businesses may be shutting down, but big capital is highly mobile. The money moves at click-key speed. It flows from a place where profits are down to another where they are up.
America’s 660 billionaires, for example, are doing just fine right now. Since March last year, their wealth has increased 39 percent, from just under $3 trillion to more than $4 trillion today. It is the rest of us, of course, who pay for the system’s ‘externalities’.
Those ‘externalities’ now take the form of a Dual Metabolic Rupture between humanity and the planet, as industrial pollution destroys our ecosystem, and agribusiness generates wave after wave of killer pathogen. We are the inhabitants of a new geological age – the Anthropocene – in which globalised, financialised monopoly-capitalism has become an existential threat to life on Earth.
What happens next depends on what we do. The imperative to get active has never been greater.
Editor’s note: This essay reminds me of premise ten from Derrick Jensen’s book Endgame: “The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.”
According to The Parable of the Poisoned Well, there once lived a king who ruled over a great city. He was loved for his wisdom and feared for his power. At the heart of the city was a well, the waters of which were clean and pure and from where the king and all the inhabitants drank. But one evening an enemy entered the city and poisoned the well with a strange liquid. Henceforth, all who drank from it went mad.
All the people drank the water, but not the king, for he had been warned by a watchman who had observed the contamination. The people began to say, “The king is mad and has lost his reason. Look how strangely he behaves. We cannot be ruled by a madman, so he must be dethroned”.
The king sensed his subjects were preparing to rise against him and grew fearful of revolution. One evening he ordered a royal goblet to be filled from the well and drank from it deeply. The next day there was great rejoicing among the people, for their beloved king had finally regained his wisdom and sanity.
According to Fromm, we are inclined to see incidents of mental illness as individual and isolated disturbances, while acknowledging — with some discomfort, perhaps — that so many of these incidents should occur in a culture that is supposedly sane. Fromm haunts our self-image even today, attempting to unsettle these assumptions of sanity:
Can we be so sure that we are not deceiving ourselves? Many an inmate of an insane asylum is convinced that everybody else is crazy, except himself.
In an age now widely described as the Anthropocene, the conventionally held distinction between sanity and insanity is at risk of collapsing … and taking our civilisation with it.
The line shifts over time
At least since Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1961), it has been understood that the idea of (in)sanity is an evolving, socially constructed category. Not only does the medical validity of mental health diagnoses and treatments shift with the times, but what has been judged “sane” in one era has the potential to blur into what is not in another — and without announcement.
This can disguise the fact that social practices or patterns of thought that may once have been considered healthy may now be properly diagnosed as unhealthy. And while this can apply to individual cases, there is no reason to think it should not also apply more broadly to a society at large. A society might go insane without being aware of its own degeneration.
One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to recognise, with Foucault, that power shapes knowledge. If profits and economic growth are the benchmarks of success in a society, it simply may not be profitable to expose a society as insane, and even members of an insane society may sooner choose wilful blindness than look too deeply into the subconscious of their own culture.
How can we be so sure of our own sanity, asked psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, pictured in 1974. Wikimedia Commons
If our society is not sane — and I find myself pointing towards this thesis — another question follows: what might sanity look like in an insane world?
I come to these questions without mental health training or expertise, but simply as an ordinary member of late-stage capitalist society, one suffering in his own way and trying to understand the mental health burdens that accompany our ecocidal and grossly inequitable mode of civilisation. I make no comment on the very real biophysical causes for mental illness, such as chemical imbalances or physical injury.
Instead, I reflect, at a “macro” level, on the sanity or insanity of the dominant culture and political economy in contemporary capitalist societies such as Australia, asking how the world “out there” can impact the inner dimension of our lives.
Following Fromm’s lead, I inquire not so much into individual pathology, but into what he calls “collective neuroses” and “the pathology of normalcy”. Of course, collective neuroses are not easily observed, for they are, by nature, the background fabric of existence and so easily missed.
Drinking the Kool-Aid
At first, I tried to distil a positive life lesson from the Parable of the Poisoned Well, but I quickly realised this was the wrong way to approach it.
There is arguably no moral guidance in the fable, only an amoral social insight. If there is a lesson, it is that sometimes it is easier or safer simply to conform to common assumptions or practices, no matter how dubious or absurd they are, to avoid being socially ostracised. If you do not go with the flow you may be deemed mad, so it may be better just to blend in and drink the Kool-Aid.
A second reading of the parable points to the relativity of notions of sanity, again suggesting that what’s sane or insane isn’t fixed, but is culturally dependent: a person is sane if they “function” well enough in the society, even if that society is sick.
It is this relativity of sanity that Fromm calls into question in The Sane Society. “The fact that millions of people share the same vices,” he wrote, “does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”
He felt that society needed certain objective conditions to be sane, including environmental sustainability. If too many of humankind’s most basic needs were not being met despite unprecedented capacity, he felt it would be proper to declare a society sick, even if the behaviour producing the sickness was widespread and validated by its own internal cultural logic.
What is “normal” behaviour today? The climate emergency points to our fatal addiction to fossil fuels. We know their combustion is killing the planet, but we can’t help ourselves. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988 to advise us on the science of climate change, yet here we are, more than 30 years later, and carbon emissions continue to rise (excepting only the years of financial crisis or pandemic). We emit 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, in full knowledge of their impacts.
In 2019, fossil fuels supplied around 85 per cent of global primary energy demand. Driven by a fetish for economic growth, voters support politicians who bring lumps of coal into a parliament for a laugh and enthusiastically build new fossil fuel power stations. It is a tragedy disguised as a grim joke.
Scientists warn that current trajectories of climate heating are not compatible with civilisation as we know it, with potentially billions of lives at risk this century, both human and non-human. You know something is wrong when the Arctic is burning. And yet nothing is more “normal” than hopping into a fossil-fuelled car or consuming products shipped around the world to satisfy the carboniferous desires of affluent society.
We’re deforesting the planet and destroying topsoil to feed a population that is growing by over 200,000 people every day. The United Nations projects we’ll have reached almost ten billion people by mid-century.
This human dominance of the planet under global capitalism is contributing to a holocaust of biodiversity loss, with the World Wildlife Fund recently reporting that populations of vertebrate species have declined by 68 per cent since 1970. We are living through the sixth mass extinction, driven by human economic activity that is not just normal but encouraged, rewarded and widely admired.
Empire marches on like a snake eating its own tail, pursuing growth for growth’s sake — the ideology of a cancer cell.
For whom, then, do we destroy the planet? Is a greater abundance of “nice things” what we are lacking in the overdeveloped world? Or is there, as historian and philosopher Lewis Mumford once opined, an inner dimension to our crises that must be resolved before the outer crises can be effectively met?
Nice things that fail to meet our needs become trash, polluting the planet. Alexander Schimmeck/Unsplash, CC BY
How easy it is to live life regurgitating the prewritten script of advanced industrial society: cogs in a vast machine, easily replaced. Perhaps we see our disenchantment reflected in the eyes of those tired, alienated commuters, a class into which it is so easy to fall simply by virtue of being subjects of the capitalist order. We all know that there is more to life than this.
We find ourselves living in an age where the old dogmas of growth, material affluence and technology are increasingly exposed as false idols. Like a fleet of ships that has been unmoored in a storm, our species is drifting in dangerous seas without a clear sense of direction.
Where are the new sources of meaning and guidance that all societies need to fight off the ennui? Pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim used the term “anomie” to refer to a condition in which a culture’s traditional norms have broken down without new norms arising that can give sense to a changing world. Perhaps this is the term that best explains our existential condition today.
I am reminded of a poem by Michael Leunig:
They took him on a stretcher
To the Home for the Appalled
Where he lay down in the corner
And be bawled and bawled and bawled.
‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ he wailed,
When asked about his bawling,
‘It’s the world that needs attention;
It’s so utterly appalling.’
What is a sane reaction to an insane society?
One could go on, but it would be perverse to do so. “Doom porn” is not my business or purpose. But there is a case for diagnosing our society as insane — not as rhetorical strategy, but in the pursuit of literal truth.
If an individual knowingly destroyed the conditions of his or her own existence, we’d question their sanity. If a mother only fed her children if she could make a profit, we’d doubt the soundness of her mind. If a father took all the household wealth and left the rest of the family in destitution while building bombs in the basement that could destroy the neighbourhood, we’d call him psychopathic.
And yet these are characteristics of our society as a whole. Fromm would not permit us to diagnose ourselves and our society as sane just because the actions that produce the features outlined above are considered “normal”. There is a pathology to our normalcy — my own regrettably included — and this pathology is no less pathological just because it is shared by millions upon millions of people.
‘A sane person in an insane society must appear insane.’ Kurt Vonnegut. Shutterstock
There are negative mental health effects that might naturally and justifiably arise when otherwise sane people find themselves living in an insane world. The paradox that threatens to emerge has already been variously noted.
In Welcome to the Monkey House, Kurt Vonnegut Jnr writes, “a sane person in an insane society must appear insane”. Thomas Stephen Szasz contends: “Insanity is the only sane reaction to an insane society”. And the British psychiatrist R. D. Laing said insanity was “a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world”. I think I recall Star Trek’s Dr Spock saying something similar.
How can we not get depressed when reading the newspapers today or watching our politicians go about their business with such confident incompetence? How can we not grieve the wildlife and natural habitat being destroyed each moment? What parent can look to the future and not feel a foreboding dread at what world their children and grandchildren will inherit?
At the same time, and because of that dread, it is hard to maintain the emotional resources to care for strangers or “join a movement” when stress, agitation, worry and busyness clutter our mental lives. This can make society seem like a harsh place, lacking in generosity of spirit or compassion.
Whether it’s from watching white supremacists march or listening to climate deniers speak from platforms in parliament and mass media, a nausea sets in, a sickness not so much of the mind but of the soul.
This is an existential diagnosis, not a medical or psychiatric one. It would be wrong to make peace with this madness. The world we live in should not be treated as normal, and it should not be a sign of good health to become “well adjusted” to a society that is casually practising ecocide, celebrating narcissism, institutionalising racism and assessing the value of all things according to the cold logic of profit maximisation.
It is okay not to feel okay
We must not assume behaviour that makes an individual “functional” within a sick society is sufficient evidence of their sanity. In such a society, it is okay not to feel okay, to cry and feel grief, to feel dread and alienation. In our tears, let us find solidarity, for we are not alone.
Remember this when you wake up prematurely in the morning with an anxiety without object, or as you stare at the ceiling late at night as you try to fall asleep. You are not losing your mind. It is precisely because you have a grip on reality that reality seems so out of whack.
On my third reading of the Parable of the Poisoned Well, I noticed something I had missed — it was the watchman, the man who warned the king not to drink the poisoned water the rest of the citizenry had already consumed.
Wanting to quash the revolutionary sentiment, the king succumbed to public pressure and eventually drank from the well in order to fit in. But what about the watchman? Is it possible he never drank the poisoned water and remained sane in an insane society? Did that made him seem mad?
Perhaps my thoughts here are those of a watchman, someone who has tried not to drink the Kool-Aid, who has attempted to resist the pathology of normalcy.
Admittedly, I have questioned my own sanity at times — when, for example, I’ve found myself dancing in the middle of a busy intersection with Extinction Rebellion, risking arrest. What had driven me to act in a way that sees me surrounded by police with batons, guns and pepper spray? They sure looked mad.
Call me crazy, but I’ll finish with the words often attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche: “Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music”.
