What this adds up to should be clear enough, yet many people who should know better choose not to see it. This is business-as- usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed, ambition-addled destruction of the wild, the unpolluted, and the nonhuman. It is the mass destruction of the world’s remaining wild places in order to feed the human economy. And without any sense of irony, people are calling this “environmentalism.”1 —PAUL KINGSNORTH
Once upon a time, environmentalism was about saving wild beings and wild places from destruction. “The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind,” Rachel Carson wrote to a friend as she finished the manuscript that would become Silent Spring. “That, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done.”2 She wrote with unapologetic reverence of “the oak and maple and birch” in autumn, the foxes in the morning mist, the cool streams and the shady ponds, and, of course, the birds: “In the mornings, which had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, and wrens, and scores of other bird voices, there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marshes.”3 Her editor noted that Silent Spring required a “sense of almost religious dedication” as well as “extraordinary courage.”4 Carson knew the chemical industry would come after her, and come it did, in attacks as “bitter and unscrupulous as anything of the sort since the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species a century before.”5 Seriously ill with the cancer that would kill her, Carson fought back in defense of the living world, testifying with calm fortitude before President John F. Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee and the U.S. Senate. She did these things because she had to. “There would be no peace for me,” she wrote to a friend, “if I kept silent.”6
Carson’s work inspired the grassroots environmental movement; the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); and the passage of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. Silent Spring was more than a critique of pesticides—it was a clarion call against “the basic irresponsibility of an industrialized, technological society toward the natural world.”7 Today’s environmental movement stands upon the shoulders of giants, but something has gone terribly wrong with it. Carson didn’t save the birds from DDT so that her legatees could blithely offer them up to wind turbines. We are writing this book because we want our environmental movement back.
Mainstream environmentalists now overwhelmingly prioritize saving industrial civilization over saving life on the planet. The how and the why of this institutional capture is the subject for another book, but the capture is near total. For example, Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute and Earth Policy Institute—someone who has been labeled as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers” and “the guru of the environmental movement”8—routinely makes comments like, “We talk about saving the planet.… But the planet’s going to be around for a while. The question is, can we save civilization? That’s what’s at stake now, and I don’t think we’ve yet realized it.” Brown wrote this in an article entitled “The Race to Save Civilization.”9
The world is being killed because of civilization, yet what Brown says is at stake, and what he’s racing to save, is precisely the social structure causing the harm: civilization. Not saving salmon. Not monarch butterflies. Not oceans. Not the planet. Saving civilization. Brown is not alone. Peter Kareiva, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, more or less constantly pushes the line that “Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of [human] people…. Conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to [human] people.”10 Bill McKibben, who works tirelessly and selflessly to raise awareness about global warming, and who has been called “probably America’s most important environmentalist,” constantly stresses his work is about saving civilization, with articles like “Civilization’s Last Chance,”11 or with quotes like, “We’re losing the fight, badly and quickly—losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.”12
We’ll bet you that polar bears, walruses, and glaciers would have preferred that sentence ended a different way.
In 2014 the Environmental Laureates’ Declaration on Climate Change was signed by “160 leading environmentalists from 44 countries” who were “calling on the world’s foundations and philanthropies to take a stand against global warming.” Why did they take this stand? Because global warming “threatens to cause the very fabric of civilization to crash.” The declaration con- cludes: “We, 160 winners of the world’s environmental prizes, call on foundations and philanthropists everywhere to deploy their endowments urgently in the effort to save civilization.”13
Coral reefs, emperor penguins, and Joshua trees probably wish that sentence would have ended differently. The entire declaration, signed by “160 winners of the world’s environmental prizes,” never once mentions harm to the natural world. In fact, it never mentions the natural world at all.
Are leatherback turtles, American pikas, and flying foxes “abstract ecological issues,” or are they our kin, each imbued with their own “wild and precious life”?14 Wes Stephenson, yet another climate activist, has this to say: “I’m not an environmentalist. Most of the people in the climate movement that I know are not environmentalists. They are young people who didn’t necessarily come up through the environmental movement, so they don’t think of themselves as environmentalists. They think of themselves as climate activists and as human rights activists. The terms ‘environment’ and ‘environmentalism’ carry baggage historically and culturally. It has been more about protecting the natural world, protecting other species, and conservation of wild places than it has been about the welfare of human beings. I come at from the opposite direction. It’s first and foremost about human beings.”15
Note that Stephenson calls “protecting the natural world, protecting other species, and conservation of wild places” baggage. Naomi Klein states explicitly in the film This Changes Everything: “I’ve been to more climate rallies than I can count, but the polar bears? They still don’t do it for me. I wish them well, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that stopping climate change isn’t really about them, it’s about us.”
And finally, Kumi Naidoo, former head of Greenpeace International, says: “The struggle has never been about saving the planet. The planet does not need saving.”16 When Naidoo said that, in December 2015, it was 50 degrees Fahrenheit at the North Pole, much warmer than normal, far above freezing in the middle of winter.
13 “Environmental Laureates’ Declaration on Climate Change,” European Environment Foundation, September 15, 2014. It shouldn’t surprise us that the person behind this declaration is a solar energy entrepreneur. It probably also shouldn’t surprise us that he’s begging for money.
14 “Wild and precious life” is from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day.” House of Light (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992).
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: 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”.
Nearly 100,000 people have signed a petition calling for the closure of a controversial oil and gas facility that has sickened residents of the U.S. Virgin Island. We in DGR deeply care about social justice, so we think it is important to expect president Biden to act against structural racism by shutting down an oil and gas facility that is poisoning a predominantly black community. But there are many oil refineries in the world and each one is poisoning their surrounding communities, human and nunhuman. As long as this cultures addiction to fossil fuels continues, it will obviously continue poisoning human and nonhuman communities.
This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
A controversial oil refinery on St. Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, is in the government’s crosshairs after a third incident in just three months has sickened people. On May 5, after gaseous fumes were released from one of the oil refining units of Limetree Bay Refining, residents of the unincorporated Caribbean territory reported a range of symptoms, including burning eyes, nausea and headaches, with at least three people seeking medical attention at the local hospital. At its peak in 1974, the facility, which opened in 1966, was the largest refinery in the Americas, producing some 650,000 barrels of crude oil a day. It restarted operations in February after being shuttered for the past decade.
A Limetree spokesperson said that there was a release of “light hydrocarbon odors” resulting from the maintenance on one of the refinery’s cokers, high heat level processing units that upgrade heavy, low-value crude oil into lighter, high-value petroleum products. The noxious odor stretched for miles around the refinery, remaining in the air for days and prompting the closure of two primary schools, a technical educational center and the Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV), which local officials said was shuttered because its employees “are affected by the strong, unpleasant gas like odor, in the atmosphere.”
Limetree and the U.S. government conducted their own air quality testing, with different results. The National Guard found elevated levels of sulfur dioxide, while the company said it detected “zero concentrations” of the chemical just hours later. “We will continue to monitor the situation, but there is the potential for additional odors while maintenance continues,” said Limetree, which is backed by private equity firms EIG and Arclight Capital, the latter of which has ties to former President Donald Trump. “We apologize for any impact this may have caused the community.”
The May 5 incident follows two similar incidents in April at the refinery that the Virgin Islands Department of Planning and Natural Resources (DPNR) concluded were caused by the emission of excess sulfur dioxide from the burning of hydrogen sulfide, one of the impurities in petroleum coke, a coal-like substance that accounts for nearly a fifth of the nation’s finished petroleum product exports, mainly going to China and other Asian nations, where it is used to power manufacturing industries like steel and aluminum. Days after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told the company that it was violating the Clean Air Act after the April incidents, Limetree agreed to resume sulfur dioxide monitoring, while contesting the violation. “If EPA makes a determination that the facility’s operations present an imminent risk to people’s health, consistent with its legal authorities, it will take appropriate action to safeguard public safety,” the agency said in a statement. The Biden EPA withdrew a key federal pollution permit for Limetree on March 25, but stopped short of shutting down the facility altogether.
Care2 has launched a public petition—already signed by more than 98,000 people—urging President Biden to shut down the Limetree Bay Refining facility. The petition also notes the risk that the refinery poses to the island’s biodiverse wildlife, saying that “turtles, sharks, whales, and coral reefs… [are] threatened by the Limetree Bay Refining plant—both by what it’s done in the past, and by what it’s spewing right now.” The group also frames the human rights and environmental justice aspect of the ongoing public health situation on the island in historical terms: “On top of the obvious problem that no person should be poisoned with oil, St. Croix is an island with a highly disenfranchised population. The vast majority of residents are Black, the [descendants] of enslaved Africans brought to work on sugar and cotton plantations. For generations, the U.S. government has cared little about the well-being of people there.” (One recent example happened in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which landed on the island in September of 2017. Even two months after the storms hit, many residents of St. Croix who were evacuated to Georgia were unable to return home, and felt abandoned by the government. “I feel like we are the forgotten people and no one has ever inquired how do we feel,” said one of the St. Croix evacuees at the time.)
After the May 5 incident, Limetree said, “Our preliminary investigations have revealed that units are operating normally.” Perhaps it is normal for such facilities to emit toxic fumes. But what’s not normal is the fact that such fumes should present a constant threat to people and the environment, and that, according to the environmental group Earthjustice, about 90 million Americans live within 30 miles of at least one refinery. Adding insult to injury is the fact that Black people are 75 more likely to live near toxic, air-polluting industrial facilities, according to Fumes Across the Fence-Line, a report produced by the NAACP and the Clean Air Task Force, an air pollution reduction advocacy group. That report also found that more than 1 million African Americans face a disproportionate cancer risk “above EPA’s level of concern” due to the fact that they live in areas that expose them to toxic chemicals emanating from natural gas facilities.
You don’t need to live next door to a refinery to feel its impact on your health; in fact, you can be several miles away. A study conducted last year by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) found an increased risk of multiple cancer types associated with living within 30 miles of an oil refinery. “Based on U.S. Census Bureau data, there are more than 6.3 million people over 20 years old who reside within a [30-mile] radius of 28 active refineries in Texas,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Stephen B. Williams, chief of urology and a tenured professor of urology and radiology at UTMB. “Our team accounted for patient factors (age, sex, race, smoking, household income and education) and other environmental factors, such as oil well density and air pollution and looked at new cancer diagnoses based on cancers with the highest incidence in the U.S. and/or previously suspected to be at increased risk according to oil refinery proximity.”
In granting Limetree’s permit in 2018—a move that E&E News reported was made to “cash in on an international low-sulfur fuel standard that takes effect in January [2020]”—Trump’s EPA said that the refinery’s emissions simply be kept under “plantwide applicability limit.” But then in a September 2019 report on Limetree—which has been at the center of several pollution debacles and Clean Air Act violations for decades—the agency said that “[t]he combination of a predominantly low income and minority population in [south-central] St. Croix with the environmental and other burdens experienced by the residents is indicative of a vulnerable community,” and added the new requirement of installing five neighborhood air quality monitors. “[G]iven several assumptions and approximations… and the potential impacts on an already overburdened low income and minority population, the ambient monitors are necessary to assure continued operational compliance with the public health standards once the facility begins to operate,” the agency stated. Limetree has appealed this ruling with the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board, arguing that “the EPA requirements are linked to environmental justice concerns that are unrelated to operating within the pollution limits of the permit.”
“It is unclear when the EPA’s appeals board will rule on the permit dispute. The Biden-run EPA could withdraw the permit, and it is also reviewing whether the refinery is a new source of pollution that requires stricter air pollution controls,” reports Reuters, adding that the White House declined to comment.
President Biden has made environmental justice a central part of his policy, including the overhaul of the EPA External Civil Rights Compliance Office, which is responsible for enforcing civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex or disability. “For too long, the EPA External Civil Rights Compliance Office has ignored its requirements under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” states Biden’s environmental justice plan. “That will end in the Biden Administration. Biden will overhaul that office and ensure that it brings justice to frontline communities that experience the worst impacts of climate change and fenceline communities that are located adjacent to pollution sources.”
Now it is time for Biden to make good on his campaign promise. John Walke, senior attorney and director of clean air programs with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Reuters in March that the situation in St. Croix “offers the first opportunity for the Biden-Harris administration to stand up for an environmental justice community, and take a strong public health and climate… stance concerning fossil fuels.”
The stated mission of the EPA is “to protect human health and the environment.” When so many Americans face a disproportionate cancer risk simply by living near toxic industrial sites such as oil and gas refineries, the EPA is derelict in its duty. The Limetree Bay Refining facility has presented President Biden with an early test of his commitment to environmental justice. Considering the facility’s terrible legacy of ecological and civil rights violations, three new public health incidents in just the past two months, and the disproportionate and ongoing health risks faced by the community’s predominantly Black and low-income population, it is finally time for the federal government to revoke Limetree’s license to operate on St. Croix. This is a perfect chance for President Biden to show the country and the world just how serious he is about environmental justice.
Reynard Loki is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor and chief correspondent for Earth | Food | Life. He previously served as the environment, food and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s Top 50 Health & Environmental Journalists to Follow in 2016. His work has been published by Yes! Magazine, Salon, Truthout, BillMoyers.com, AlterNet, Counterpunch, EcoWatch and Truthdig, among others.
In her “Letter to Greta Thunberg” series, Katie Singer explains the real ecological impacts of so many modern technologies on which the hope for a bright green (tech) future is based on.
Even when reality is harsh, I prefer it. I’d rather engineers say that my water could be off for three hours than tell me that replacing the valve will take one hour. I prefer knowing whether or not tomatoes come from genetically modified seed. If dyeing denim wreaks ecological hazards, I’d rather not keep ignorant.
The illusion that we’re doing good when we’re actually causing harm is not constructive. With reality, discovering true solutions becomes possible.
As extreme weather events (caused, at least in part, by fossil fuels’ greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions) challenge electrical infrastructures, we need due diligent evaluations that help us adapt to increasingly unpredictable situations—and drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and ecological damage. I have a hard time imagining a future without electricity, refrigerators, stoves, washing machines, phones and vehicles. I also know that producing and disposing of manufactured goods ravages the Earth.
Internationally, governments are investing in solar photovoltaics (PVs) because they promise less ecological impacts than other fuel sources. First, I vote for reviewing aspects of solar systems that tend to be overlooked.
Coal-fired power plants commonly provide electricity to smelt silicon for solar panels. Photo credit: Petr Štefek
Hazards of Solar Photovoltaic Power 1. Manufacturing silicon wafers for solar panels depends on fossil fuels, nuclear and/or hydro power. Neither solar nor wind energy can power a smelter, because interrupted delivery of electricity can cause explosions at the factory. Solar PV panels’ silicon wafers are “one of the most highly refined artifacts ever created.”[1] Manufacturing silicon wafers starts with mining quartz; pure carbon (i.e. petroleum coke [an oil byproduct] or charcoal from burning trees without oxygen); and harvesting hard, dense wood, then transporting these substances, often internationally, to a smelter that is kept at 3000F (1648C) for years at a time. Typically, smelters are powered by electricity generated by a combination of coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydro power. The first step in refining the quartz produces metallurgical grade silicon. Manufacturing solar-grade silicon (with only one impurity per million) requires several other energy-intensive, greenhouse gas (GHG) and toxic waste-emitting steps. [2] [3] [4]
2. Manufacturing silicon wafers generates toxic emissions In 2016, New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation issued Globe Metallurgical Inc. a permit to release, per year: up to 250 tons of carbon monoxide, 10 tons of formaldehyde, 10 tons of hydrogen chloride, 10 tons of lead, 75,000 tons of oxides of nitrogen, 75,000 tons of particulates, 10 tons of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, 40 tons of sulfur dioxide and up to 7 tons of sulfuric acid mist. To clarify, this is the permittable amount of toxins allowed annually for one metallurgical-grade silicon smelter in New York State. [5] Hazardous emissions generated by silicon manufacturing in China (the world’s leading manufacturer of solar PVs) likely has significantly less regulatory limits.
3. PV panels’ coating is toxic PV panels are coated with fluorinated polymers, a kind of Teflon. Teflon films for PV modules contain polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) and fluorinated ethylene (FEP). When these chemicals get into drinking water, farming water, food packaging and other common materials, people become exposed. About 97% of Americans have per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs) in their blood. These chemicals do not break down in the environment or in the human body, and they can accumulate over time. [6] [7] While the long-term health effects of exposure to PFAs are unknown, studies submitted to the EPA by DuPont (which manufactures them) from 2006 to 2013 show that they caused tumors and reproductive problems in lab animals. Perfluorinated chemicals also increase risk of testicular and kidney cancers, ulcerative colitis (Crohn’s disease), thyroid disease, pregnancy-induced hypertension (pre-eclampsia) and elevated cholesterol. How much PTFEs are used in solar panels? How much leaks during routine operation—and when hailstorms (for example) break a panels’ glass? How much PTFE leaks from panels discarded in landfills? How little PFA is needed to impact health?
4. Manufacturing solar panels generates toxic waste. In California, between 2007 and the first half of 2011, seventeen of the state’s 44 solar-cell manufacturing facilities produced 46.5 million pounds of sludge (semi-solid waste) and contaminated water. California’s hazardous waste facilities received about 97 percent of this waste; more than 1.4 million pounds were transported to facilities in nine other states, adding to solar cells’ carbon footprint. [8]
5. Solar PV panels can disrupt aquatic insects’ reproduction. At least 300 species of aquatic insects (i.e. mayflies, caddis flies, beetles and stoneflies) typically lay their eggs on the surface of water. Birds, frogs and fish rely on these aquatic insects for food. Aquatic insects can mistake solar panels’ shiny dark surfaces for water. When they mate on panels, the insects become vulnerable to predators. When they lay their eggs on the panels’ surface, their efforts to reproduce fail. Covering panels with stripes of white tape or similar markings significantly reduces insect attraction to panels. Such markings can reduce panels’ energy collection by about 1.8 percent. Researchers also recommend not installing solar panels near bodies of water or in the desert, where water is scarce. [9]
Solar PV users may be unaware of their system’s ecological impacts. Photo credit: Vivint Solar from Pexels
6. Unless solar PV users have battery backup (unless they’re off-grid), utilities are obliged to provide them with on-demand power at night and on cloudy days. Most of a utility’s expenses are dedicated not to fuel, but to maintaining infrastructure—substations, power lines, transformers, meters and professional engineers who monitor voltage control and who constantly balance supply of and demand for power. [10] Excess power reserves will increase the frequency of alternating current. When the current’s frequency speeds up, a motor’s timing can be thrown off. Manufacturing systems and household electronics can have shortened life or fail catastrophically. Inadequate reserves of power can result in outages.
The utility’s generator provides a kind of buffer to its power supply and its demands. Rooftop solar systems do not have a buffer.
In California, where grid-dependent rooftop solar has proliferated, utilities sometimes pay nearby states to take their excess power in order to prevent speeding up of their systems’ frequency. [11]
Rooftop solar (and wind turbine) systems have not reduced fossil-fuel-powered utilities. In France, from 2002-2019, while electricity consumption remained stable, a strong increase in solar and wind powered energy (over 100 GW) did not reduce the capacity of power plants fueled by coal, gas, nuclear and hydro. [12]
Comparing GHG emissions generated by different fuel sources shows that solar PV is better than gas and coal, but much worse than nuclear and wind power. A solar PV system’s use of batteries increases total emissions dramatically. Compared to nuclear or fossil fuel plants, PV has little “energy return on energy Invested.” [13]
7. Going off-grid requires batteries, which are toxic. Lead-acid batteries are the least expensive option; they also have a short life and lower depth of discharge (capacity) than other options. Lead is a potent neurotoxin that causes irreparable harm to children’s brains. Internationally, because of discarded lead-acid batteries, one in three children have dangerous lead levels in their blood. [14] Lithium-ion batteries have a longer lifespan and capacity compared to lead acid batteries. However, lithium processing takes water from farmers and poisons waterways. [15] Lithium-ion batteries are expensive and toxic when discarded. Saltwater batteries do not contain heavy metals and can be recycled easily. However, they are relatively untested and not currently manufactured.
8. Huge solar arrays require huge battery electric storage systems (BESS). A $150 million battery storage system can provide 100 MW for, at most, one hour and eighteen minutes. This cannot replace large-scale delivery of electricity. Then, since BESS lithium-ion batteries must be kept cool in summer and warm in winter, they need large heating, ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC) systems. (If the Li-ion battery overheats, the results are catastrophic.) Further, like other batteries, they lose their storage capacity over time and must be replaced—resulting in more extraction, energy and water use, and toxic waste. [16]
9. Solar PV systems cannot sufficiently power energy guzzlers like data centers, access networks, smelters, factories or electric vehicle [EV] charging stations. If French drivers shifted entirely to EVs, the country’s electricity demands would double. To produce this much electricity with low-carbon emissions, new nuclear plants would be the only option. [17] In 2007, Google boldly aimed to develop renewable energy that would generate electricity more cheaply than coal-fired plants can in order to “stave off catastrophic climate change.” Google shut down this initiative in 2011 when their engineers realized that “even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adaptation of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions…. Worldwide, there is no level of investment in renewables that could prevent global warming.” [18]
10. Solar arrays impact farming. When we cover land with solar arrays and wind turbines, we lose plants that can feed us and sequester carbon. [19]
11. Solar PV systems’ inverters “chop” current and cause “dirty” power, which can impact residents’ health. [20]
12. At the end of their usable life, PV panels are hazardous waste. The toxic chemicals in solar panels include cadmium telluride, copper indium selenide, cadmium gallium (di)selenide, copper indium gallium (di)selenide, hexafluoroethane, lead, and polyvinyl fluoride. Silicon tetrachloride, a byproduct of producing crystalline silicon, is also highly toxic. In 2016, The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimated that the world had 250,000 metric tons of solar panel waste that year; and by 2050, the amount could reach 78 million metric tons. The Electric Power Research Institute recommends not disposing of solar panels in regular landfills: if modules break, their toxic materials could leach into soil. [21] In short, solar panels do not biodegrade and are difficult to recycle.
To make solar cells more recyclable, Belgian researchers recommend replacing silver contacts with copper ones, reducing the silicon wafers’ (and panels’) thickness, and removing lead from the panels’ electrical connections. [22]
Aerial view of a solar farm. Photo credit: Dsink000
13. Solar farms warm the Earth’s atmosphere.
Only 15% of sunlight absorbed by solar panels becomes electricity; 85% returns to the environment as heat. Re-emitted heat from large-scale solar farms affects regional and global temperatures. Scientists’ modeling shows that covering 20% of the Sahara with solar farms (to power Europe) would raise local desert temperatures by 1.5°C (2.7°F). By covering 50% of the Sahara, the desert’s temperature would increase by 2.5°C (4.5°F). Global temperatures would increase as much as 0.39°C—with polar regions warming more than the tropics, increasing loss of Arctic Sea ice. [23] As governments create “green new deals,” how should they use this modeling?
Other areas need consideration here: dust and dirt that accumulate on panels decreases their efficiency; washing them uses water that might otherwise go to farming. Further, Saharan dust, transported by wind, provides vital nutrients to the Amazon’s plants and the Atlantic Ocean. Solar farms on the Sahara could have other global consequences. [24]
14. Solar PV users may believe that they generate “zero-emitting,” “clean” power without awareness of the GHGs, extractions, smelting, chemicals and cargo shipping involved in manufacturing such systems—or the impacts of their disposal. If our only hope is to live with much less human impact to ecosystems, then how could we decrease solar PVs’ impacts? Could we stop calling solar PV power systems “green” and “carbon-neutral?” If not, why not?
Katie Singer’s writing about nature and technology is available at www.OurWeb.tech/letters/. Her most recent book is An Electronic Silent Spring.
REFERENCES
1. Schwarzburger, Heiko, “The trouble with silicon,” PV Magazine, September 15, 2010.
3. Kato, Kazuhiko, et. al., “Energy Pay-back Time and Life-cycle CO2 Emission of Residential PV Power System with Silicon PV Module,” Progress in Photovoltaics: Research and Applications, John Wiley & Sons, 1998.
4. Gibbs, Jeff and Michael Moore, “Planet of the Humans,” 2019 documentary about the ecological impacts and money behind “renewable” power systems, including solar, wind and biomass. www.planetofthehumans.com
7. Rich, Nathaniel, “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare,” January 6, 2016. About attorney Robert Bilott’s twenty-year battle against DuPont for contaminating a West Virginia town with unregulated PFOAs. See also Todd Haynes film, “Dark Waters,” 2019.
9. Egri, Adam, Bruce A. Robertson, et al., “Reducing the Maladaptive Attractiveness of Solar Panels to Polarotactic Insects,” Conservation Biology, April, 2010.
10. “Exhibit E to Nevada Assembly Committee on Labor,” Submitted by Shawn M. Elicegui, May 20, 2025, on behalf of NV Energy.
15. Katwala, Amit, “The spiraling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction,” 8.5.18; https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact. Choi, Hye-Bin, et al., “The impact of anthropogenic inputs on lithium content in river and tap water,” Nature Communications, 2019.
