![Electric Vehicles: Back to the Future? [Part 2/2]](https://dgrnewsservice.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2021/11/Illustration_017.jpg)
by DGR News Service | Nov 21, 2021 | Climate Change, Mining & Drilling, The Problem: Civilization
By Frédéric Moreau
Read Part 1 of this article here.
While the share of solar and wind power is tending to increase, overall energy consumption is rising from all sources — development, demography (a taboo subject that has been neglected for too long), and new uses, such as digital technology in all its forms (12% of the electricity consumed in France, and 3% worldwide, a figure that is constantly rising, with digital technology now emitting more CO2 than air transport⁴⁴). Digital technology also competes with vehicles, especially electric ones, in terms of the consumption of metals and rare earths. This is perfectly logical since the renewable energy industry, and to a lesser extent the hydroelectric industry (dams), requires oil, coal and gas upstream to manufacture the equipment. Solar panels look indeed very clean once installed on a roof or in a field and which will later produce so-called “green” electricity.
We almost systematically forget, for example, the 600 to 1,500 tons of concrete for the wind turbine base, often not reused (change of model or technology during its lifespan, lack of financing to dismantle it, etc.), which holds these towers in place. Concrete that is also difficult to recycle without new and consequent energy expenditures, or even 5,000 tons for offshore wind turbines⁴⁵. Even hydrogen⁴⁶, which inveterate techno-futurists are now touting as clean and an almost free unlimited energy of tomorrow, is derived from natural gas and therefore from a fossil fuel that emits CO2. Because on Earth, unlike in the Sun, hydrogen is not a primary energy, i.e. an energy that exists in its natural state like wood or coal and can be exploited almost immediately. Not to mention that converting one energy into another always causes a loss (due to entropy and the laws of thermodynamics; physics once again preventing us from dreaming of the mythical 100% clean, 100% recyclable and perpetual motion).
Consequently oil consumption, far from falling as hoped, has instead risen by nearly 15% in five years from 35 billion barrels in 2014 to 40 billion in 2019⁴⁷. Moreover, industry and services cannot resign themselves to the randomness of the intermittency inherent in renewable energies. We cannot tell a driver to wait for the sun to shine or for the wind to blow again, just as the miller in bygone days waited for the wind to grind the wheat, to charge the batteries of his ZOE. Since we can hardly store it in large quantities, controllable electricity production solutions are still essential to take over.
Jean-Marc Jancovici⁴⁸, an engineer at the École des Mines, has calculated that in order to charge every evening for two hours the 32 million electric cars, that will replace the 32 million thermal cars in the country⁴⁹, the current capacity of this electricity available on demand would have to be increased sevenfold from 100GW to 700GW. Thus instead of reducing the number of the most polluting installations or those considered rightly or wrongly (rather rightly according to the inhabitants of Chernobyl, Three Miles Island and Fukushima) potentially dangerous by replacing them with renewable energy production installations, we would paradoxically have to increase them. These “green” facilities are also much more material-intensive (up to ten times more) per kWh produced than conventional thermal power plants⁵⁰, especially for offshore wind turbines which require, in addition to concrete, kilometers of additional large cables. Moreover the nuclear power plants (among these controllable facilities) cooling, though climate change, are beginning to be made problematic for those located near rivers whose flow is increasingly fluctuating. And those whose water, even if it remains abundant, may be too hot in periods of heat wave to fulfill its intended purpose, sometimes leading to their temporary shutdown⁵¹. This problem will also be found with many other power plants, such as those located in the United States and with a number of hydroelectric dams⁵². The disappearance of glaciers threaten their water supply, as is already the case in certain regions of the world.
After this overview, only one rational conclusion can be drawn, namely that we did not ask ourselves the right questions in the first place. As the historian Bernard Fressoz⁵³ says, “the choice of the individual car was probably the worst that our societies have ever made”. However, it was not really a conscious and deliberate “choice” but a constraint imposed on the population by the conversion of the inventors/artisans of a still incipient automobile sector, whose limited production was sold to an equally limited wealthy clientele. The first cars being above all big toys for rich people who liked the thrills of real industrialists. Hand in hand with oil companies and tire manufacturers, they rationalized production by scrupulously applying Taylorist recipes and developed assembly lines such as Ford’s Model T in 1913. They then made cars available to the middle classes and over the decades created the conditions of compulsory use we know today.
Streetcars awaiting destruction. Photo: Los Angeles Times photographic archive.
It is this same trio (General Motors, Standard Oil and Firestone mainly, as well as Mack Truck and Phillips Petroleum) that was accused and condemned in 1951 by the Supreme Court of the United States of having conscientiously destroyed the streetcar networks and therefore electric public transport. They did so by taking advantage after the 1929 crash, of the “godsend” of the Great Depression, which weakened the dozens of private companies that ran them. Discredited and sabotaged in every conceivable way — including unfair competition, corruption of elected officials and high ranking civil servants, and recourse to mafia practices — streetcars were replaced first by buses, then by cars⁵⁴. This was done against a backdrop of ideological warfare, that began decades before the “official” Cold War, which an equally official History tells us about: socialist collectivism — socialist and anarchist ideas, imported at the end of the nineteenth century by immigrants from Europe and Russia, deemed subversive because they hindered the pursuit of private interests legitimized by Protestantism — countered, with the blessing of the State, by liberal individualism. This unbridled liberalism of a country crazing for the “no limits” way was also to promote the individual house of an “American dream” made possible by the private car, which explains so well the American geography of today, viable only thanks to fossil fuels⁵⁵.
Today not many people are aware of this, and very few people in the United States remember, that city dwellers did not want cars there. They were accused of monopolizing public space, blamed for their noise and bad odors. Frightened by their speed and above all they were dangerous for children who used to play in the streets. Monuments to those who lost their lives under their wheels were erected during demonstrations gathering thousands of people as a painful reminder⁵⁶. In Switzerland the canton of Graubünden banned motorized traffic throughout its territory at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was only after quarter of a century later, after ten popular votes confirming the ban, that it was finally lifted⁵⁷.
Left: Car opposition poster for the January 18th, 1925, vote in the canton of Graubünden, Switzerland. Right: Saint-Moritz, circa 1920. Photo: Sammlung Marco Jehli, Celerina.
The dystopia feared by the English writer George Orwell in his book 1984 was in fact already largely underway at the time of its writing as far as the automobile is concerned. In fact by deliberately concealing or distorting historical truths, although they have been established for a long time and are very well documented, it is confirmed that “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” A future presented as inescapable and self-evident, which is often praised in a retroactive way, because when put in the context of the time, the reticence was nevertheless enormous⁵⁸. A future born in the myth of a technical progress, also far from being unanimously approved, in the Age of Enlightenment. The corollary of this progress would be the permanent acquisition of new, almost unlimited, material possessions made accessible by energy consumption-based mass production and access to leisure activities that also require infrastructures to satisfy them. International tourism, for example, is by no means immaterial, which we should be aware of when we get on a metallic plane burning fossil fuel and stay in a concrete hotel.
With the electric car, it is not so much a question of “saving the planet” as of saving one’s personal material comfort, which is so important today, and above all of saving the existing economic model that is so successful and rewarding for a small minority. This minority has never ceased, out of self-interest, to confuse the end with the means by equating freedom of movement with the motorization of this very movement.
The French Minister of the Economy and Finance, Bruno Le Maire declared before the car manufacturers that “car is freedom⁵⁹”. Yet this model is built at best on the syllogism, at worst on the shameless and deliberate lie of one of the founders of our modern economy, the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste. He said: “Natural resources are inexhaustible, for without them we would not obtain them for free. Since they can neither be multiplied nor exhausted, they are not the object of economic science⁶⁰“. This discipline, which claims to be a science while blithely freeing itself from the constraints of the physical environment of a finite world, that should for its part submit to its theories nevertheless by exhausting its supposedly inexhaustible resources and destroying its environment. The destruction of biodiversity and its ten-thousand-years-old climatic stability, allowed the automobile industries to prosper for over a century. They have built up veritable financial empires, allowing them to invest massively in the mainstream media which constantly promote the car, whether electric or not, placing them in the permanent top three of advertisers.
To threaten unemployment under the pretext that countless jobs depend on this automobile industry, even if it is true for the moment, is also to ignore, perhaps voluntarily, the past reluctance of the populations to the intrusion of automobiles. The people who did not perceive them at all as the symbol of freedom, prestige and social marker, even as the phallic symbol of omnipotence that they have become today for many⁶¹. It is above all to forget that until the 1920s the majority of people, at least in France, were not yet wage earners. Since wage employment was born in the United Kingdom with the industrial revolution or more precisely the capitalist revolution, beginning with the textile industry: enclosure and workhouses transformed peasants and independent artisans into manpower. Into a workforce drawn under constraint to serve the private capital by depriving them of the means of their autonomy (the appropriation of communal property). Just as imported slaves were on the other side of the Atlantic until they were replaced by the steam engine, which was much more economical and which was certainly the true abolitionist⁶². It is clear that there can be no question of challenging this dependence, which is now presented as inescapable by those who benefit most from it and those for whom it is a guarantee of social stability, and thus a formidable means of control over the populace.
Today, we are repeatedly told that “the American [and by extension Western] way of life is non-negotiable⁶³. “Sustainable development,” like “green growth,” “clean energy” and the “zero-carbon” cars (as we have seen above) are nothing but oxymorons whose sole purpose is to ensure the survival of the industries, on which this way of life relies to continue enriching their owners and shareholders. This includes the new information and communication industries that also want to sell their own products related to the car (like artificial intelligence for the autonomous car, and its potential devastating rebound effect). To also maintain the banking and financial systems that oversee them (debt and shareholders, eternally dissatisfied, demanding continuous growth, which is synonymous with constant consumption).
Cheerful passengers above flood victims queing for help, their car is shown as a source of happiness. Louisville, USA, 1937. Photo: Margaret Bourke-White, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
All this with the guarantee of politicians, often in blatant conflicts of interest. And all too often with the more or less unconscious, ignorant or irresponsible acceptance of populations lulled into a veritable culture of selfishness, more than reluctant from now on to consent to the slightest reduction in material comfort. Which they have been so effectively persuaded can only grow indefinitely but made only possible by the burning of long-plethoric and cheap energy. This explains their denial of the active role they play in this unbridled consumerism, the true engine of climate change. Many claim, in order to relieve themselves of guilt, to be only poor insignificant creatures that can in no way be responsible for the evils of which they are accused. And are quick to invoke natural cycles, even though they are often not even aware of them (such as the Milankovitch cycles⁶⁴ that lead us not towards a warming, but towards a cooling!), to find an easy explanation that clears them and does not question a comfortable and reassuring way of life; and a so disempowering one.
Indeed people, new Prometheus intoxicated by undeniable technical prowess, are hypersensitive to promises of innovations that look like miracle solutions. “Magical thinking”, and its avatars such as Santa Claus or Harry Potter, tends nowadays to last well beyond childhood in a highly technological society. Especially since it is exalted by the promoters of positive thinking and personal development. Whose books stuff the shelves in every bookstore, reinforcing the feeling of omnipotence, the certainty of a so-called “manifest destiny”, and the inclination to self-deification. But this era is coming to an end. Homo Deus is starting to have a serious hangover. And we are all already paying the price in social terms. The “gilets jaunes” or yellow vests in France, for example, were unable to accept a new tax on gas for funding renewables and a speed reduction on the roads from 90km/h down to 80km/h. Paying in terms of climate change, which has only just begun, from which no one will escape, rich and powerful included.
Now everyone can judge whether the electric car is as clean as we are constantly told it is, even to the point of making it, like in Orwell’s novel, an indisputable established truth, despite the flagrant contradiction in terms (“war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”). Does the inalienable freedom of individual motorized mobility, on which our modern societies are based, have a radiant future outside the imagination and fantasies of the endless technophiles who promise it to us ; just as they promised in the 1960s cities in orbit, flying cars, space stations on the Moon and Mars, underwater farms… And just as they also promised, 70 years ago, and in defiance of the most elementary principle of precaution, overwhelmed by an exalted optimism, to “very soon” find a definitive “solution” to nuclear waste; a solution that we are still waiting for, sweeping the (radioactive) dust under the carpet since then…
Isn’t it curious that we have focused mainly on the problem of the nature of the energy that ultimately allows an engine to function for moving a vehicle and its passengers, ignoring everything else? It’s as if we were trying to make the car as “dematerialized” as digital technology and the new economy it allows. Having succeeded in making the charging stations, the equipment, the satellites and the rockets to put them in orbit, the relay antennas, the thousands of kilometers of cables, and all that this implies of extractivism and industries upstream, disappear as if by magic (and we’re back to Harry Potter again). Yet all very material as is the energy necessary for their manufacture and their functioning, the generated pollution, the artificialization of the lands, etc.⁶⁵
Everlasting promises of flying cars, which would turn humans into new Icarius, arenearly one and a half century old. Future is definitely not anymore what it used to be…
Everyone remains free to continue to take the word of economists who cling like a leech to their sacrosanct infinite growth. To believe politicians whose perception of the future is determined above all by the length of their mandate. Who, in addition to being subject to their hyperactive lobbying, have shares in a world automobile market approaching 1,800 billion Euros per year⁶⁶ (+65% in 10 years, neither politicians nor economists would balk at such growth, which must trigger off climax at the Ministry of the Economy!). That is to say, the 2019 GDP of Italy. Moreover, in 2018 the various taxes on motor vehicles brought in 440 billion Euros for European countries⁶⁷. So it is implicitly out of the question to question, let alone threaten the sustainability of, this industrial sector that guarantees the very stability of the most developed nations.
It is also very difficult to believe journalists who most often, except a few who are specialized, have a very poor command of the subjects they cover. Especially in France, even when they don’t just copy and paste each other. Moreover, they are mostly employed by media financed in large part, via advertising revenues among other things, by car manufacturers who would hardly tolerate criticism or contradiction. No mention of CO2-emitting cement broadcasted on the TF1 channel, owned by the concrete builder Bouygues, which is currently manufacturing the bases for the wind turbines in Fécamp, Normandy. No more than believing startups whose primary vocation is to “make money”, even at the cost of false promises that they know very few people will debunk. Like some solar panels sold to provide more energy than the sun works only for those who ignore another physical fact, the solar constant. Which is simply like making people believe in the biblical multiplication of loaves and fishes.
So, sorry to disappoint you and to hurt your intimate convictions, perhaps even your faith, but the electric car, like Trump’s coal, will never be “clean”. Because as soon as you transform matter from one state to another by means of energy, you dissipate part of this energy in the form of heat. And you inevitably obtain by-products that are not necessarily desired and waste. This is why physicists, scientists and Greta Thunberg kept telling us for years that we should listen to them. The electric car will be at best just “a little less dirty” (in the order of 0 to 25% according to the various studies carried out concerning manufacturing and energy supply of vehicles, and even less if we integrate all the externalities). This is a meager advantage that is probably more socially acceptable but it is quickly swallowed up if not solely in their renewal frequency. The future will tell, at least in the announced increase of the total number of cars, with a 3% per year mean growth in terms of units produced, and of all the infrastructures on which they depend (same growth rate for the construction of new roads). 3% means a doubling of the total number of vehicles and kilometers of roads every 23 years, and this is absolutely not questioned.
Brittany, France, August 2021.
42 With 8 billion tons consumed every year, coal stands in the very first place in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. International Energy Outlook, 2019.
43 https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/edition-numerique/chiffres-cles-du-climat/7-repartition-sectorielle-des-emissions-de
44 & https://web.archive.org/web/20211121215259/https://en.reset.org/knowledge/our-digital-carbon-footprint-whats-the-environmental-impact-online-world-12302019
45 https://actu.fr/normandie/le-havre_76351/en-images-au-havre-le-titanesque-chantier-des-fondations-des-eoliennes-en-mer-de-fecamp_40178627.html
46 https://www.connaissancedesenergies.org/fiche-pedagogique/production-de-lhydrogene
47 https://www.iea.org/fuels-and-technologies/oil & https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/energy-economics/statistical-review/bp-stats-review-2019-full-report.pdf & https://www.ufip.fr/petrole/chiffres-cles
48 https://jancovici.com/
49 Atually there are 38.2 million cars in France, more than one for two inhabitants:
50 Philippe Bihouix and Benoît de Guillebon, op. cit., p. 32.
51 https://www.lemonde.fr/energies/article/2019/07/22/canicule-edf-doit-mettre-a-l-arret-deux-reacteurs-nucleaires_5492251_1653054.html & https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/energy-water-collision
52 https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/inconvenient-truth-droughts-shrink-hydropower-pose-risk-global-push-clean-energy-2021-08-13/
53 Co-author with Christophe Bonneuil of L’évènement anthropocène. La Terre, l’histoire et nous, Points, 2016 (The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, Verso, 2017).
54 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242431866_General_Motors_and_the_Demise_of_Streetcars & Matthieu Auzanneau, Or noir. La grande histoire du pétrole, La Découverte, 2015, p.436, and the report written for the American Senate by Bradford C. Snell, Public Prosecutor specialized in anti-trust laws.
55 James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, Free Press, 1994.
56 Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic. The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, The MIT Press, 2008.
57 https://www.avenir-suisse.ch/fr/vitesse-puanteur-bruit-et-ennuis/ & Stefan Hollinger, Graubünden und das Auto. Kontroversen um den Automobilverkehr 1900-1925, Kommissionsverlag Desertina, 2008
58 Emmanuel Fureix and François Jarrige, La modernité désenchantée, La Découverte, 2015 & François Jarrige, Technocritiques. Du refus des machines à la contestation des technosciences, La Découverte, 2014.
59 Journée de la filière automobile, Bercy, December 02, 2019.
60 Cours complet d’économie politique pratique, 1828.
61 Richard Bergeron, le Livre noir de l’automobile, Exploration du rapport malsain de l’homme contemporain à l’automobile, Éditions Hypothèse, 1999 & Jean Robin, Le livre noir de l’automobile : Millions de morts et d’handicapés à vie, pollution, déshumanisation, destruction des paysages, etc., Tatamis Editions, 2014.
62 Domenico Losurdo, Contre-histoire du libéralisme, La Découverte, 2013 (Liberalism : A Counter-History, Verso, 2014) & Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present, Longman, 1980 (Une Histoire populaire des Etats-Unis de 1492 a nos jours, Agone, 2003) & Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery, The University of North Carolina Press, 1943.
63 George H.W. Bush, Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, 1992.
64 https://planet-terre.ens-lyon.fr/ressource/milankovitch-2005.xml
65 Guillaume Pitron, L’enfer numérique. Voyage au bout d’un like, Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2021.
66 https://fr.statista.com/statistiques/504565/constructeurs-automobiles-chiffre-d-affaires-classement-mondial/
67 Source: ACEA Tax Guide 2020, fiscal income from motor vehicles in major European markets.
by DGR News Service | Nov 2, 2021 | Climate Change, Education, Human Supremacy, Indirect Action, The Problem: Civilization, The Solution: Resistance
This is an excerpt from the book Bright Green Lies, P. 20 ff
By Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert
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.
1 Paul Kingsnorth, “Confessions of a recovering environmentalist,” Orion Magazine, December 23, 2011.
2 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publishing, 1962), 9.
3 Ibid, 10.
4 Ibid, 8.
5 Ibid, 8.
6 Ibid, 8.
7 Ibid, 8.
8 “Biography of Lester Brown,” Earth Policy Institute.
9 Lester Brown, “The Race to Save Civilization,” Tikkun, September/October 2010, 25(5): 58.
10 Peter Kareiva, Michelle Marvier, and Robert Lalasz, “Conservation in the Anthropocene: Beyond Solitude and Fragility,” Breakthrough Journal, Winter 2012.
11 Bill McKibben, “Civilization’s Last Chance,” Los Angeles Times, May 11, 2008.
12 Bill McKibben, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” Rolling Stone, August 2, 2012.
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).
15 Gabrielle Gurley, “From journalist to climate crusader: Wen Stephenson moves to the front lines of climate movement,” Commonwealth: Politics, Ideas & Civic Life in Massachusetts, November 10, 2015.
16 Emma Howard and John Vidal, “Kumi Naidoo: The Struggle Has Never Been About Saving the Planet,” The Guardian, December 30, 2015.
by DGR News Service | Sep 2, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change, Education, Mining & Drilling, Toxification
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, which exposes 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, which present ancient alternatives to industrial agriculture; Sustenance and The Superfood Chain,which explore 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 and Lawqa – 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.
Contact:
Emiel Martens: emiel@caribbeancreativity.nl
Esther Figueroa: vagabondmedia1@mac.com
PRESS KIT: https://bit.ly/GEFF2021-Google-Drive
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.
by DGR News Service | Jul 26, 2021 | Climate Change, Colonialism & Conquest, Education, Strategy & Analysis
Editor’s note: The mainstream media is not only minimizing climate change but all the horrors of corporate capitalism.
This article originally appeared in Climate&Capitalism.
By Tyler Poisson
Q: What is mainstream media?
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.
Tyler Poisson is a public school teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts. He wrote this pamphlet for distribution in his community. We think other activists may find it useful: Click here to download a printable version (pdf) of the pamphlet.
by DGR News Service | Jul 15, 2021 | Human Supremacy
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?
This excerpt originally appeared in Resilience.
Excerpted from The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe (published in June in the UK, and available July 13 in the US)
Shifting baseline syndrome
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.
Explore The Web of Meaning further on Jeremy Lent’s website. The book is now available for purchase in the UK and in the USA/Canada.
