by DGR News Service | Mar 30, 2014 | Male Supremacy, Strategy & Analysis, White Supremacy
By Kourtney Mitchell / Deep Green Resistance
On June 28, 1964, Malcolm X gave a speech at the Founding Rally of the Organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU) at the Audubon Ballroom in New York. In the speech, he stated what became his most famous quote:
We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.
Interestingly, X was popularizing a line from a play titled Dirty Hands by the French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre, which debuted in 1948:
I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.
There are some really important ideas presented in both of these quotes. Sartre succinctly summarized the primary struggle for the socially conscious – that society as we know it is divided into classes, and that social change is not achieved merely by refusing to behave like dominant classes, but by ultimately dismantling the power structures upholding this stratification.
X’s spin on this was equally profound. The white power structure of his time enacted brutal and morally reprehensible repression on the masses of black people in the United States, and X was stating the very real yet existential condition: that this repression was a dehumanizing tactic, upheld by violence and enslavement, and that the response to this repression must equal the scope of the problem. Simply put, white supremacism will use any and all means necessary to maintain power, and thus those fighting against it must do the same.
The modern environmental and social justice movement could learn a thing or two from these quotes. Any one who is not meditating in a cave should realize by now that this culture we live in – industrial civilization – is quickly killing the planet. All life support systems on Earth are declining, and have been doing so for several decades. As a matter of fact, since the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, generally considered the birth of the modern environmental movement, there has not been a single peer-reviewed article contradicting that statement.
This should ring some alarms for everyone, but surely for those in the movement, right? One would think so, but unfortunately this does not seem to be the case. Instead, what we are seeing is a continued ignorance of the true scale of environmental destruction, and a refusal to be honest about what it will take to stop it. What we are seeing is a constant faith on popular protest and nonviolence as the end goal of resistance, a hegemonic adherence to pacifism.
At the same time that nearly all native prairies are disappearing, and insect populations are collapsing, and the oceans are being vacuumed, and nearly two hundred species of animals are going extinct every single day, women are also being raped at a rate of one every two minutes. A black male is killed by police or other vigilantes at a rate of one every 28 hours. There are more slaves today than at any time during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. And indigenous cultures and languages are being wiped off the planet.
It is apparently certain that for all of our good intentions – our feelings of loving-kindness, taking the moral high ground and being the change we wish to see in the world – we are failing, and miserably. We are losing.
This must change.
It is time to face the truth, a truth climate scientists, indigenous warriors and anyone who is half awake have been telling us for a really long time – our planet is being killed, and we must fight back to end the destruction before all life on the planet perishes for good.
A starting point for establishing an effective response to environmental destruction and social oppression is to develop a clear understanding of the mechanisms for this arrangement. The dominant classes of people who are enacting this brutality utilize concrete systems of power to do so, namely industrial capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy and human supremacism.
These institutions of power are run by people – human beings, who instead of holding a reverence for life and love of freedom, value privilege and power above all else. This system is based upon, and would quickly collapse without, widespread and pervasive violence. Privilege is upheld by violence, because no one willingly cedes their freedom and autonomy unless forced to do so.
There is a necessary realization one must have when considering all of this, and it is a realization many in the so-called movement are yet to have: as the oppression of human and non-human communities and the destruction of the planet is being enacted by a particular class of people – that is, a group of people sharing a real or perceived identity and having similar goals and the means to achieve those goals – it is also being endured by a particular class of people.
Men, as a class of people whose collective behavior has a very real effect, are oppressing women as a class. This is not to claim that every single man on the planet has some palpable sense of hating women, but it does mean that to be a man in this society is to behave in a socialized manner that oppresses women.
Whites as a class of people are oppressing people of color. This is not to say that every single white-identified person on the planet has some palpable sense of hating people of color, but that to be white in this society is to behave in a manner that oppresses people of color in at least some ways.
If the violence is enacted by classes, the resistance must also exist on the class-level. It has never been enough for the individual to make personal, lifestyle changes so that they can feel better about themselves while the rest of the people in their class suffer. Systems of oppression are not defeated by individuals – they are defeated by organizing with others, a collective struggle.
This is what it means to be radical. As radicals, we aim to get to the root of the problem. Radical anti-racists understand that the white identity is based upon privilege, and that privilege is inherently oppressive to people of color. Radical anti-sexists understand that the concept of gender is built upon male dominance and female submission, which is inherently oppressive to women. And radical environmentalists understand that industrial civilization – based upon extraction, destructive agricultural practices and the genocide of indigenous cultures – is killing the planet.
From there, we draw the line. A radical’s primary goal is not to combat the symptoms of oppression – we do not merely wish to navigate the gender spectrum, toying with it at will as some kind of protest. We wish to abolish gender, recognizing it as the primary basis for women’s oppression. And we do not wish to merely give people of color a bigger slice of the pie in the white supremacist power structure. We wish to abolish white supremacy altogether, and furthermore to overcome the concept of race itself. Radical environmentalists cannot afford to continue to espouse technological fixes for a problem caused by technology and extraction. No, industrial civilization is wholly irredeemable, and no amount of technology can fix it.
What should be apparent is that our movement needs more than nonviolence and good feelings. We need to mount a serious threat to the power structures, one that is forceful and continuous. We need militant action. Those killing the planet will not stop unless forced to do so.
Nonviolence is a powerful tactic when correctly applied, but it alone cannot match the scale of destruction. When coupled with strategic attacks on the infrastructure of oppression, it can result in concrete, lasting change.
And this is the strategy of Deep Green Resistance. As an aboveground movement, we use nonviolent direct action, putting our bodies between life and those who wish to destroy it. Though we have no connection to (and no desire to have a connection with) any underground that may exist, we actively support the formation of an underground, encouraging militant resistance that will bring down oppressive institutions for good.
DGR is also dedicated to the work of helping to rebuild or to build new, sustainable human communities. We are working towards a culture of resistance – where oppression and ecocide are not tolerated, and where people incorporate resistance into their everyday lives. We work to establish solidarity and genuine alliance with oppressed communities, always keeping an eye towards justice, liberating our hearts and minds from the hegemonic tendencies of privileged classes. DGR understands that marginalized communities have been on the front lines of resistance from the very beginning, defending their way of life and reclaiming their autonomy. For too long, pacifists and dogmatic nonviolent activists have left the hard work of actual resistance to those marginalized groups, shying away from the real fight. No more – it is now time for men to combat sexism, for whites to combat racism, and for the civilized of this culture to fight against industrial empire and bring it down.
This analysis and this strategy should be inspiring. But what is more inspiring is that we have the means to achieve our goals. We know how to bring down industrial capitalism, which is controlled by critical nodes of technology and extraction. When these nodes are attacked and brought down in a way preventing their rebuilding, the system begins to collapse. The mechanisms of control – the military, the police and the media – cannot operate without consistent input of fossil fuels and willing agents.
When this system falls, the living world will rejoice. Two hundred species of animals who would have gone extinct will instead live and flourish. Indigenous communities will reclaim their traditional homelands. The salmon will begin to spawn anew with each dam taken down, and the rivers will rush with life.
This is the world for which we fight. And we intend to win.
Let’s Get Free! is a column by Kourtney Mitchell, a writer and activist from Georgia, primarily focusing on anti-oppression and building genuine alliance with oppressed communities. Contact him at kourtney.mitchell@gmail.com.
by DGR News Service | Feb 8, 2014 | Alienation & Mental Health, Movement Building & Support
By Susan Hyatt and Michael Carter / DGR Southwest Coalition
This article is the first part of a series on mental health. You can read part two: “Mental Illness As a Social Construct” and part three: “Medicating”.
The environmental crisis consists of the deterioration and outright destruction of micro and macro ecosystems worldwide, entailing the elimination of countless numbers of wild creatures from the air, land, and sea, with many species being pushed to the brink of extinction, and into extinction. People who passively allow this to happen, not to mention those who actively promote it for economic or other reasons, are already a good distance down the road to insanity. Most people do not see, understand, or care very much about this catastrophe of the planet because they are overwhelmingly preoccupied with grave psychological problems. The environmental crisis is rooted in the psychological crisis of the modern individual. This makes the search for an eco-psychology crucial; we must understand better what terrible thing is happening to the modern human mind, why it is happening, and what can be done about it.
—Glenn Parton, “The Machine in Our Heads”
A thesaurus entry for “inhuman” includes cruel, brutal, ruthless, and cold-blooded. If one is merciless, callous, and heartless, one is the very opposite of human, the antithesis of what it means to be a standard example of Homo sapiens sapiens. If being human means we are for the most part kind-hearted, compassionate, and sensitive creatures, then the destruction of the planet—“the deterioration and outright destruction of micro and macro ecosystems worldwide…the elimination of countless numbers of wild creatures from the air, land, and sea,” goes against humanness. It’s a product of something against our nature, an anti-human system.
We propose a name for this system: civilization. While civilization connotes nurturing, safe, and supportive conditions synonymous with humanity itself, we maintain that the great paradox of this age is that civilization is the opposite of all these things. Civilization must consume whole biomes of living things—including humans—to concentrate the material wealth needed to support human populations too large to be sustained by their immediate surroundings. Because the planet’s resources are finite and there are no perpetual means of running the modern economy—no replacement for the fossil fuels needed for industry, no New World of topsoil to extract agricultural food from—we are living in a time when a single way of life, a particular cultural strategy is based on eventual total consumption. This culture isn’t widely perceived as being fundamentally reckless or harmful, but for our purposes here the negative effect of modern, industrial civilization on the biosphere is a given. [1] Our aim is to examine the mental and emotional health of civilized people, how this drives the cultural strategy of civilization, and how those who oppose it might best fortify their mental and emotional defenses.
Individualism as Isolation
In the US, where most resource consumption takes place [2], the overarching importance of the individual is a hallmark myth. Not that US citizens don’t enjoy a comparable amount of political and personal freedom—though this is eroded day by day—but rather it’s a part of our national consciousness that US citizens are free to do what they wish within a very reasonable framework of Constitutionally balanced rules. The effect of being alone to fend for one’s self, though, has much more to do with insecurity and dependence than it does personal liberty.
By isolating individuals and glamorizing independence, people can then be easily groomed for fealty to power. We grew up pledging allegiance to a flag and can name the tune of the national anthem in three notes; more immediately most of us depend on someone else writing a paycheck for our sustenance. Nevertheless we like to think of ourselves as a nation of individualists. This is easy to believe. It allows us to feel good about ourselves regardless of accomplishment or character by the expedient of being born here.
Yet our material well-being requires a tremendous amount of power over other nations, peoples, and species; this power can only be exerted by institutions whose behavior isn’t governed at all by our own personal sense of justice or fair play. We have nearly no say in the conduct of states and corporations, and so long as we can pretend our inherent merit as US citizens, their conduct can usually be denied or ignored. They do our job, we do ours: that’s the American Way. Keeping this order is relatively easy; just laying claim to an abstract, inspirational word can suffice. The company responsible for the January, 2014 chemical spill in West Virginia’s Elk River was named “Freedom Industries.”
Nationalism is only an example of this wider condition. The arbitrary advantage of US citizenship can be compared to the advantages of being male, or white, or wealthy; they all depend on powerful organizations that exist for their own reasons, and mine our lives for their power as surely as they mine mountains for coal. Notions of individual, national, race, or gender virtue serve their goals (of accumulating wealth and power) by masking our exploited condition with a sense of deserved good fortune. Those in power hide behind emotionally potent ideas like freedom that relatively privileged groups are eager to protect. It’s only chance to be born a white male American, yet plenty of them volunteer for militaries that supposedly defend freedom. Far fewer would volunteer to die for oil company profits, though many of them inadvertently do.
Individuality is a valuable trait, especially in a culture devoted to cultivating oblivious consumer and sacrificial classes. [3] But its value in overcoming blind conformity and vacuous rewards can become idealized as an end unto itself—individualism. When civilized power is essentially inescapable, a foundering ship, individuality seems to restore a sense of personal worth and even social sanity. Yet individuality is more like a life preserver than the sailboat of a sustainable and independent culture—perhaps useful, but doing little to affect the power over our lives. When it becomes indoctrinated as individualism, it can actually benefit those in power because of its mistrust of group belonging that stifles organizing. The demonizing of labor unions is a classic example.
Our mostly unrecognized dilemma is that we’re physiologically “primitive” social animals living under the rule of a dictatorial, isolating, extraction culture. Unless we are able to participate in it, we’re shunted into extremely uncomfortable conditions of poverty and wretchedness, scavenging the carcasses left by agriculture and industry. The authors, Hyatt and Carter, are relatively wealthy by global standards, with our access to the resources that civilization has up for sale. Yet we live mostly hand to mouth. There is very little in the way of socially stabilized security in our lives. If we stop working for a month or two the kitchen cabinets quickly empty; stop work for a while more and we’re evicted from our homes. Because we aren’t allowed to fashion a comfortable dwelling from the wild and freely hunt or gather our food, we must join in working for it, which means we must consume gasoline, industrial food, and electricity. None of these things will remain available forever. More urgently, there is about forty-one years of topsoil left [4], and without topsoil, there will be no food for anyone or anything. Ultimately, civilization has undermined all security, for everyone.
Human beings tend to want consistency, and their organizations tend to conserve the status quo. The idea of “behaviorally modern” humans, creatures on a progressive trajectory, has no real physical evidence. [5] We are creatures of the Paleolithic, identical to people of at least 190,000 years ago. [6] Our brains and bodies are those of people who hunted animals with stone-pointed spears and lived in clan or tribal groups. There was no spontaneous human revolution that changed that. Cities and the industries needed to support their regionally unsustainable appetites did not arise simultaneously from the sum of individual impulses for toil and control, but rather spread by resource warfare. [7] What we see now is the global dominance of a single, war- and extraction-dependent social strategy. Paradoxically this seemingly unifying strategy instead isolates us, picking us apart from the close-knit and small scale cultures our ancestors evolved to form. Even if we’re lucky enough to have a close family or uncommonly good friends, we are all expected to more or less make it on our own. Our health can’t help but be affected by that dramatic change. It is critical for anyone working for social justice and sustainability to recognize this.
Defying Social Order
Because of the inherent injustice involved with work, where lower social and economic classes must be maintained to do dangerous or menial labor, it takes denial and silence to keep civilization running. Confronting social and environmental injustice necessarily begins with breaking denial and silence. This can be very hard to do, as anyone who has broken free of any abusive situation knows. Our own avoidance tendencies can be strong and impossible even to see, and our human animal selves shy from the fear of standing up to those with power over us. The elaborate structures of power now in place are so immense and deeply embedded that defiance of them seems ludicrous and foolhardy, the very definition of quixotic. The system’s many dependents and hired goons stand behind them, no matter how atrocious its actions. Attack Freedom Industries, you may as well attack freedom itself. So of course most people never will.
For those who are willing to fight back, anger at injustice can make us think we can defy unjust systems by social transgression, such as alcohol and drug abuse, promiscuity, petty crime, and other self-destructive practices. In reality, these are enactments of civilization which encourage us to hate ourselves and to reproduce our own subordination. Self-harm and isolated disobedience does the police work of oppression, essentially for free, as a kind of safety valve. Just as it’s too much for individuals to be burdened with systemic problems, defying social order is an overwhelming task for one person. Serious resistance requires a community, and a healthy community requires us to make internalized oppression visible. It is helpful to remember that many of our troubles aren’t our own fault, but are necessary creations of civilization, meant to keep us enslaved.
The contrived circumstances we live under are full of paradoxes and confusion; it’s easy to fall into despair and apathy. The dominant culture that is consuming the world—and any chance of a sane and intact society—demands our time and loyalty, and it’s far easier to give them up than to fight. A paradox that can help is realizing we must take care of ourselves to be ready and able to take care of anything or anyone else. This seems counter to the impulses of altruism that often drive activists, but it really isn’t. Warriors must eat, they must have some sense of support and approbation; if this doesn’t come from their toxic society, it must come from somewhere else. The energy, endurance, and courage it takes to stop a coal mine cannot itself be mined from our bodies and spirits, leaving us empty, but rather must be cultivated and maintained as living things.
In his early years of activism, Carter spent a great deal of time and money fighting National Forest timber sales in a conservative Montana community where environmentalists were mostly ridiculed and hated outright. His colleagues were scattered and remote, usually also alone. He believed himself an appeal-writing machine, and fueled his effort with alcohol and a carbohydrate-heavy vegetarian diet. Eventually the pressure and isolation exhausted his ability to keep up his work, and the self-abuse didn’t become visible for years.
Civilization, based on power-over, undermines our sense of self and our meanings for existence. Nearly every child is raised in some form of domestic captivity under civilization, and many continue to be victimized by control and dominance, resulting in what psychiatrist Judith Herman calls Complex Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD). [8] Traumatic events make us question basic human relationships; we lose a sense of belonging, and our lives fill with stress and loneliness. Women in this culture often experience further trauma as the victims of male violence. In Hyatt’s case, male violence left her with undiagnosed PTSD for over three years; the medical industry offered pills and relaxation techniques to cover up the symptoms. This is the typical solution offered by modern medicine: one that blames the individual and isolates us further. No one has to be passively victimized by institutional pressure, though; people can be responsible for themselves, for the predictable consequences of their actions and choices. This doesn’t mean anyone has to take on what isn’t theirs—a recovery plan that favors pharmaceutical companies, for instance.
A healthier strategy is to value our response to trauma. The symptoms of PTSD, such as avoidance, emotional numbing, self-blame, and helplessness, are reasonable reactions to an inhuman system. PTSD sufferers have been so traumatized that we often blame ourselves for our symptoms. Active resistance reduces the feeling of despair and helplessness. Resistance even reduces the feeling of humiliation brought on by toleration of abuse and the humiliation in feeling we are to blame for the trauma. Recovery requires that we retell our trauma stories and engage with a healthy community, which can be hard to find. Support groups such as Al-anon and Alcoholics Anonymous may be a helpful place to start.
Remember that civilization is the root cause of trauma. By contrast, non-coercive cultures have few mental health disorders. Bruce Levine notes that “Throughout history, societies have existed with far less coercion than ours, and while these societies have had far less consumer goods and what modernity calls ‘efficiency,’ they also have had far less mental illness. This reality has been buried, not surprisingly, by uncritical champions of modernity and mainstream psychiatry.” [9]
Building a resistance to fight for social justice and sustainability might begin with attentive self-care and a dignified, gentle, and supportive culture. In the essays that follow, we’ll examine the effects of civilized society on mental and emotional health, and explore ways of bolstering our health and well-being so we may ready ourselves to fight. Addiction, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder are all conditions Hyatt and Carter have personally experienced and emerged from intact. It is our hope that our history and study will aid resisters in their own personal engagement and public struggle, that they may emerge intact and successful.
John Trudell said, “We understand the pollution of the air, of the water, we understand the pollution of the environment has come from this plundering and mining of the planet in an irresponsible manner. But you think about every fear, every doubt, every insecurity, every way that we ever beat ourselves up inside of our own heads — that is the pollution left over from the mining of our spirit.” As activists, we must question not only the logic of a culture that consumes its own future—eradicating the soil, water, and atmosphere needed for life—we must question the system and culture that leads to addiction, abuse, and hopelessness; the destruction of our very living self.
References
[1] Madhusree Mukerjee, “Apocalypse Soon: Has Civilization Passed the Environmental Point of No Return?” Scientific American, May 23, 2012, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=apocalypse-soon-has-civilization-passed-the-environmental-point-of-no-return
“Has Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?” University of California—Berkeley, as reported in Science Daily, March 5, 2011, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110302131844.htm
These are only approximately representative examples; many more can be found with the most casual perusal of the daily news. Because it’s so continual and overwhelming, it tends to escape public attention.
[2] “While the consumer class thrives, great disparities remain. The 12 percent of the world’s population that lives in North America and Western Europe accounts for 60 percent of private consumption spending, while the one-third living in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 3.2 percent.” “The State of Consumption Today,” Worldwatch Institute, January 8, 2014, http://www.worldwatch.org/node/810
[5] “There are no such things as modern humans, Shea argues, just Homo sapiens populations with a wide range of behavioral variability. Whether this range is significantly different from that of earlier and other hominin species remains to be discovered. However, the best way to advance our understanding of human behavior is by researching the sources of behavioral variability in particular adaptive strategies.” John J. Shea, “Homo Sapiens is as Homo Sapiens was: Behavioral Variability vs. ‘Behavioral Modernity’ in Paleolithic Archaeology,” Current Anthropology 2011; 52 (1): 1, as reported in Science Daily, February 15, 2011, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110214201850.htm
[7] Thomas B. Bramanti, W. Haak, M. Unterlaender, P. Jores, K. Tambets, I. Antanaitis-Jacobs, M.N. Haidle, R. Jankauskas, C.-J. Kind, F. Lueth, T. Terberger, J. Hiller, S. Matsumura, P. Forster, and J. Burger, “Europe’s First Farmers were Immigrants: Replaced Their Stone Age Hunter-gatherer Forerunners.” Science 2009, DOI: 10.1126/science.1176869, as reported in Science Daily, September 4, 2009, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090903163902.htm
This is one reference among many that underscores that agriculture and the cultures it supports did not “arise” worldwide as of some spontaneous awakening, but rather was spread by conquest.
[8] “What happens if you are raised in captivity? What happens if you’re long-term held in captivity, as in a political prisoner, as in a survivor of domestic violence?” Judith Herman, M.D. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1997. See pages 74-95 for more information on captivity and C-PTSD.
Susan Hyatt has worked as a project manager at a hazardous waste incinerator, owned a landscaping company focused on native Sonoran Desert plants, and is now a volunteer activist. Michael Carter is a freelance carpenter, writer, and activist. His anti-civilization memoir Kingfisher’s Song was published in 2012. They both volunteer for Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition.
From DGR Southwest Coalition: “An Inhuman System”
by DGR News Service | Feb 6, 2014 | Building Alternatives, Noncooperation, Strategy & Analysis
By Norris Thomlinson / Deep Green Resistance Hawai’i
The situation in many third world countries could actually improve because of the global economic collapse. First world countries would no longer enforce crushing debt repayment and structural adjustment programs, nor would CIA goons be able to prop up “friendly” dictatorships. The decline of export-based economies would have serious consequences, yes, but it would also allow land now used for cash crops to return to subsistence farms.
–from the Deep Green Resistance Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy
David Holmgren, co-originator of permaculture, has a long history of thoughtful and thought-provoking publications, including design books from the original Permaculture One to his 2002 Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability. He’s written numerous essays over 35 years, ranging from the specifics of agricultural vs forestry biomass for fuel, to the future of energy decline.
I’ve long admired and respected Holmgren’s thinking, so I was looking forward to reading his new “Crash on Demand” (PDF), an update of his 2007 “Future Scenarios” projections for global developments. I felt especially intrigued that he has arrived at conclusions similar to my own, regarding not just the inevitability, but the desirability of a crash of the financial system as soon as possible. But the article disappointed me; I think Holmgren is soft-selling his realizations to make them palatable to a hoped-for mass movement. Interestingly, even this soft-sell is being rejected by the permaculture blogging community.
Holmgren argues:
“For many decades I have felt that a collapse of the global economic system might save humanity and many of our fellow species great suffering by happening sooner rather than later because the stakes keep rising and scale of the impacts are always worse by being postponed.” (p 9)
“It seems obvious to me that it is easier to convince a minority that they will be better off disengaging from the system than any efforts to build mass movements demanding impossible outcomes or convincing elites to turn off the system that is currently keeping them in power.” (p 14)
“Mass movements to get governments to institute change have been losing efficacy for decades, while a mass movement calling for less seems like a hopeless case. Similarly boycotts of particular governments, companies and products simply change the consumption problems into new forms.” (p 22)
Holmgren proposes a possible solution:
“Given the current fragilities of global finance, I believe a radical change in the behaviour of a relatively small proportion of the global middle class could precipitate such a crash. For example a 50% reduction of consumption and 50% conversion of assets into building household and local community resilience by say 10% of the population in affluent countries would show up as 5% reduction in demand in a system built on perpetual growth and a 5% reduction in savings capital available for banks to lend.” (p 13)
Where I Agree
Holmgren couches his proposal almost rhetorically, apologetically, as if proactively halting the ecocidal system is crazy talk. He need not be so shy about advocating for collapsing the system! It follows very logically if you agree that:
- Industrial civilization is degrading our landbases every day it continues, far faster than we’re healing them
- Industrial civilization will collapse sooner or later regardless of what we do
- Industrial civilization will not divert its resources into healing our landbases before it collapses
The facts back up Holmgren’s assessment of our dire situation, including imminent climate catastrophe if we continue with anything like business as usual. Industrial civilization is driving 200 species extinct each day and threatening humans with extinction or at best a very miserable future on a burning planet. It is deforesting, desertifying, polluting, and acidifying forests, croplands, landbases, and oceans orders of magnitude faster than nature and all the hard-working permaculturists can heal the damage. The industrial economy consists of turning living ecosystems into dead commodities, and it won’t stop voluntarily. It’s headed for an endgame of total planetary destruction before itself collapsing.
So I fully agree with crashing the system as soon as possible, and I fully agree with getting as many people as possible to withdraw their dependence on and allegiance to the systems and structures of industrial civilization. We desperately need people preparing for crash and building resiliency, in human and in broader ecological communities.
Where I Disagree
We also need a viable strategy to stop the dominant culture in its tracks. We are, and will remain, a tiny minority fighting a system of massive power. Individual lifestyle changes do not affect the larger political systems. People “dropping out” is not enough, is not a solution, is not an effective, leveraged way to crash the system.
I worry about Holmgren’s speculative numbers. I assume the elite, who control a hugely disproportionate percentage of income and wealth, will be even harder to convince of voluntary simplicity than the average citizen. The poor generally don’t have the option to cut spending by 50%, and have few or no assets to divest from global corporate investments. My rough calculations (based on data here) suggest that in the US, 15% of earners between the 40th and 80th percentile (more or less the middle class) must adopt this economic boycott to slow consumption by 5%, and nearly 50% of the middle class must divest their savings to reduce nationwide investment in the global financial system by 5%.
Even hoping for just 15% of the US middle class, 18 million people would have to embrace substantial short-term sacrifice. (While decreasing consumption 50% and building gardens and other resiliency infrastructure, people must still work the same hours at their jobs. Otherwise they’ll simply be replaced by those who want to live the consumptive dream.) This lofty goal seems inconsistent with Holmgren’s recognition of the infeasibility of a mass movement.
History throws up more red flags. Again and again, when growth economies have encountered sustainable cultures, people from the growth economies have forced the others off their land, requiring them to integrate into the cash economy. The dominant culture will not gently relinquish access to resources or to consumer markets. It will retaliate with weapons honed over centuries, from taxes and outlawing sustainability to displacement and blatant conquest. On a less dramatic scale, banks can, if divestments sufficiently diminish the cash they’ve been hoarding for years, adjust fractional reserve rates to compensate. (Though precipitating a fast “run” on the banks could work very nicely to crash the financial system and wipe out faith in fiat money.)
Permaculture activists and thousands of other individuals and groups have for years urged people to consume less. Many good people have adopted voluntary simplicity, dropped out of the global economy, and built regenerative local systems. While this has immense value for the adopting individuals, and often ripples out to benefit the wider community, it hasn’t put a dent in the destruction by the larger financial system. New people are born or assimilated into the culture of consumption faster than people are dropping out.
Holmgren advocates more of the same permaculture activism, with little explanation of why it would now convince people in numbers thousands of times greater than in the past. He hopes the ever-more-obvious signs of imminent collapse will prompt a more rapid shift, but given our fleeting window of opportunity to act, we can’t bank on that hope.
Another Approach
Deep Green Resistance is a design book of what makes a good resistance movement, a permaculture analysis of influencing power and political systems. It arrives at the same conclusion as does Holmgren: we need to prepare for crash by building local resiliency, but the sooner industrial civilization comes down, the better. Its crash will leave the majority of humans better off short-term, as their landbases will no longer be plundered by the rich for resources. Crashing the system now will benefit all humans long-term, giving future generations better odds of enjoying liveable landbases on a liveable planet. And crashing the system now will obviously benefit the vast majority of non-humans, currently being poisoned, displaced, and exterminated.
If we truly hold as our goals halting ecocide and slashing greenhouse gas emissions as dramatically as Holmgren suggests, we must devise a realistic plan, based on a realistic assessment of our numbers and strengths, the vulnerabilities of industrial civilization, and how much longer the planet can absorb its blows. Recognizing our tiny numbers and relative weakness compared to the global system, and limited time before our planet is beaten into full ecosystem collapse, we must apply the permaculture principle of making the least change to achieve maximum effect.
The Deep Green Resistance book, as part of its strategy of implementing Decisive Ecological Warfare, examines more than a dozen historic and contemporary militant resistance movements. It concludes that “a small group of intelligent, dedicated, and daring people can be extremely effective, even if they only number one in 1,000, or one in 10,000, or even one in 100,000. But they are effective in large part through an ability to mobilize larger forces, whether those forces are social movements […] or industrial bottlenecks.”
Holmgren notes that it’s easier to convince a minority to disengage from the system than to spark a majority mass movement for true sustainability, but his plan relies on 10% of the population making dramatic change. DGR’s analysis suggests it’s easier yet to convince a tiny minority to take strategic direct action. The rest of the sympathetic population, whether 10% or just 1% of the general public, can provide material support and loyalty with much less immediate sacrifice than in Holmgren’s proposal.
The Movement to Emancipate the Niger Delta (MEND), with small numbers of people and meager resources, has used militant tactics against oil companies to routinely reduce oil output in Nigeria by 10-30%.
In April 2013, saboteurs in San Jose CA shot out transformers in an electrical substation, causing damage that took weeks to repair. The New York Times explains some of the difficulties involved in replacing transformers, especially if many were to fail in a short period of time.
We have more promising strategies available than hoping we can persuade 10% of the population to adopt voluntary simplicity, and hoping that will crash the financial system.
Conclusion
While I wholeheartedly agree with Holmgren’s analysis of our global predicament, and the desirability of crashing the system, his proposal for doing so seems ineffective. Certainly, we should work to disengage ourselves and neighbors from the global system, but we must combine building alternative structures with actively resisting and strategically sabotaging the dominant system.
Many people will disagree with the necessity of crashing the system, because they don’t think conditions are that bad, because they hold vague hopes that God or technology or permaculture will save us, because they fear that fighting back will increase the anger of our abusers, or because they value their own comfort more than the life of the planet. That’s fine; we can agree to disagree, though I encourage those people to further explore these ideas with their minds and with their hearts.
Many people do see the destructiveness of this culture, the inevitability of its crash, and the desirability of it crashing sooner than later; but won’t want to participate directly in bringing it down for any of many perfectly legitimate reasons. That’s fine, too. There’s lots of work to do, and a role for everyone. You can work on restoration of your landbase or crash preparation for your community while providing material and ideological support to those on the front lines. We can join together as “terra-ists”, with our hands not just in the soil as Holmgren defines the term, but also working with wrenches upon the wheels, the levers, and all the apparatus of industrial civilization.
Suggested Resources
- Endgame by Derrick Jensen, two volume analysis of the problems of civilization and the solution. Many excerpts available at the website.
- Deep Green Resistance book, laying out a realistic strategy to save the planet
- Liberal vs Radical video presentation by Lierre Keith, explaining the different approaches of these two different frameworks for perceiving the world
From Permaculture, Perennial Polycultures, and Resistance: Demand Crash! — A response to Holmgren’s “Crash on Demand”
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 5, 2013 | Alienation & Mental Health, Strategy & Analysis
By Vincent Kelley / One Struggle
I recently saw an Aquafina® bottle sitting on a table at my workplace. Its label read: “New! ECO-FINA Bottle™, 50% less plastic (*on average vs. 2002 bottle).” To start, it is ridiculous that PepsiCo, the producer of the Aquafina® brand, would lay any claim to social consciousness by offering a “greener” choice than its competitors. Pepsi drains aquifers in India [1], knowingly includes carcinogenic coloring in its soft drinks [2], and adopts racist hiring practices [3], just to name a few of the corporation’s psychopathic behaviors. This psychopathology, of course, is not unique to Pepsi—it is the modus operandi of the corporation itself as a legal-economic entity. [4]
But there is something else illustrated by the ECO-FINA water bottle that is common not only to corporations in the monopoly stage of capitalism [5], but to industrial civilization as a whole. Namely, the fabrication of meaningless choices while meaningful choices are systematically eliminated. Furthermore, as meaningful choices are eliminated, the hegemonic elites craft a distorted narrative that frames the oppressed as the agents of choice who “chose” such elimination.
Some examples: When Western nations colonized the Americas, India, Africa, or any other exploited region of the globe, the colonized peoples “chose” to abandon their traditional cultures to be players in the arena of industrial capitalism; when a woman is prostituted by a man, she “chose” to be in the industry; when a homeless person is terrorized by police, he “chose” to slack off and be a burden to the rest of society and, therefore, deserves the terrorizing. Indeed, the oppressor is an expert at using his agency to create a false narrative of the agency of the oppressed in an effort to legitimize his oppressing.
This agency narrative, if you will, is inculcated into every civilized human being by means of the patriarchal household, the coercive school system, the hierarchical workplace, and the stupefying television, lest any oppressed class should name the objective disparity in agency between the colonizer and the colonized, the pimp and the prostitute, or the homeless person and the cop, and act accordingly to dismantle the relationship of domination.
In the economic sphere, in order to convince us that we truly do have agency, the ruling class inundates us with a barrage of products to choose from: Baskin-Robbins 31 flavors, at least 31 brands of toothpaste to mitigate the damage done to our teeth and gums by the Baskin-Robbins ice cream, new and increasingly violent pornography for men to watch, and thousands of cosmetic products to distract women from—while often contributing to—their objectification in a pornified culture. And for those who are more “socially conscious” there is the ECO-FINA Bottle™, which allows you to love the ecocidal profits system twice as much as you consume half the amount of plastic!
This deluge of consumptive choices is exceedingly wasteful—US companies spent $131 billon on advertising in 2010 alone. [6] Additionally, when supported by “socially conscious” individuals, the valorization of choice by “progressive” consumers is inherently liberal—i.e. not radical—in its fixation on personal lifestyleism, as opposed to systemic change. And, most importantly, this barrage of choices in an economy that values production for production’s sake is disorienting and, as we will see, paradoxically coercive.
Sociologist of religion Peter Berger argues that, in modernity, individuals are forced to choose their religion or worldview. In the words of fellow sociologist Keith A. Roberts, “Berger did not view this situation as one in which the individual is free to choose. . . Rather, each person must choose; that is, one is coerced into doing so.” [7]
With an overabundance of worldviews in the religio-spiritual marketplace, from the range of conservative institutional religions to the assortment of New Age spiritualities of abstraction, the individual is acculturated into a milieu of unease and confusion vis-à-vis how to live in the world. While a plurality of choices is ostensibly appealing and progressive, it is ultimately coercive in the disorientation it engenders and the meaninglessness it obscures. [8]
Similarly, many other “choices” in our lives appear free and meaningful on the surface but are, in reality, unfree and meaningless.
Individually we can choose to fill up with regular, plus, or premium at the gas station, but we cannot choose to live in a society free from the destruction wrought by fossil fuel extraction and use. Individually we can choose whether to apply for a job at Walmart or one at McDonald’s, but we cannot choose to live in a society free from wage slavery. Individual men can choose not to abuse women, but women will never be able to choose a life without the threat or enactment of male pattern violence in a culture that extols institutionalized misogyny. Individual colonized peoples—more accurately the native elite, not the immiserated masses—can choose to work their way up in the bureaucracies of colonial or colonially-controlled governments, but they can never choose to return to the governing structures of their traditional culture. Individual students can choose whether or not to turn in their homework, but they cannot choose to escape from the coercion of compulsory schooling.
In other words, we have ample, but usually meaningless, choices within the confines of a culture that strives to obliterate the choices that are truly meaningful. As Noam Chomsky insightfully notes, “[t]he smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. . .” [9]
Analogously, we have numerous choices within the spectrum of civilization, but these choices are rendered meaningless in the face of what is excluded from the realm of choice. [10]
To drink clean water, to be free from the threat of violence, to have healthy biotic communities, to have a respite from the incessant war on the health and diversity of our emotional experience—none of these things were ever on the table for us to choose. Instead, we’re stuck with 31 flavors of ice cream and an ECO-FINA™ water bottle.
But there is something meaningful you can choose. You can choose to resist. If you are reading this article, you possess the social and cultural capital to resist industrial civilization in at least some way, be it by material support to radical movements, grassroots organizing, or decisive actions against the central loci of industrial civilization itself. Instead of falling into the trap of the oppressors’ agency narrative, the promise of gratification in a plethora of consumer goods, or the lighter conscience of “environmentally-friendly” personal lifestyle choices, strike at the nodes of power, and strike now. The impoverished colonial subject, the tortured prostituted woman, the terrorized homeless man, the nearly exterminated Cross River gorilla, the toxified oceans, and the ravaged forests—they can’t wait any longer. Now is the time to fight.
[1] India Resource Center and Community Resource Centre, “Deception with Purpose: Pepsico’s Water Claims in India,” India Resource Center (Nov. 30, 2011), at http://www.indiaresource.org/news/2011/pepsipositivewater.html.
[2] April M. Short, “Despite Claims to the Contrary, Pepsi Is Still Using Caramel Coloring Linked to Cancer,” AlterNet (July 4, 2013), at http://www.alternet.org/food/pepsis-caramel-coloring-probably-causes-cancer. , and adopts racist hiring practices3
[3] Sam Hananel, “Pepsi Beverages Pays $3.1M In Racial Bias Case,” The Huffington Post (Jan. 11, 2012).
[4] See, for example, Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (New York: Free Press, 2004), 79, 135.
[5] See, for example, John Bellamy Foster, “The Epochal Crisis,” *Monthly Review *(2013, Volume 65, Issue 05, October)*, *at http://monthlyreview.org/2013/10/01/epochal-crisis
[6] Kim Bhasin, “The 12 Companies That Spend The Most on Advertising,” Business Insider (Jun. 22, 2011), at http://www.businessinsider.com/companies-that-spend-the-most-on-advertising-2011-6?op=1.
[7] Keith A. Roberts, Religion in Sociological Perspective (United States: SAGE Publications, 2011), 307.
[8] I am not arguing that someone born into a household with repressive religious doctrines and practices should, in an ideal world, stick with her original religion. I am simply contending that a religion can be good in itself in the absence of other choices for its adherents to compare it with. Indeed, a member of a sustainable and compassionate indigenous culture does not need a profusion of worldviews to compare to her own in order to know that she is living ethically.
[9] Noam Chomsky, The Common Good, (Odonian Press, 1998), 43.
[10] Those of us who are relatively privileged in the rich, Western capitalist countries, of course, have more meaningful choices than those in poor countries. That said, even our meaningful choices are drastically reduced the longer civilization exists.
"But there is something else illustrated by the ECO-FINA water bottle
that is common not only to corporations in the monopoly stage of
capitalism, but to industrial civilization as a whole."
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 4, 2013 | Colonialism & Conquest, Mining & Drilling
By Joshua Headley / Deep Green Resistance New York
“Sustainability” is the buzzword passed around nearly every environmental and social justice circle today. For how often the word is stated, those who use it rarely articulate what it is that they are advocating. And because the term is applied so compulsively, while simultaneously undefined, it renders impossible the ability of our movements to set and actualize goals, let alone assess the strategies and tactics we employ to reach them.
Underneath the surface, sustainability movements have largely become spaces where well-meaning sensibilities are turned into empty gestures and regurgitations of unarticulated ideals out of mere obligation to our identity as “environmentalists” and “activists.” We mention “sustainability” because to not mention it would undermine our legitimacy and work completely. But as destructive as not mentioning the word would be, so too is the lack of defining it.
When we don’t articulate our ideals ourselves we not only allow others to define us but we also give space for destructive premises to continue unchallenged. The veneer of most environmental sustainability movements begins to wither away when we acknowledge that most of its underlying premises essentially mimic the exact forces which we allege opposition.
Infinite Substitutability
The dominant culture currently runs on numerous underlying premises – whether it is the belief in infinite growth and progress, the myth of technological prowess and human superiority, or even the notion that this culture is the most successful, advanced and equitable way of life to ever exist.
These premises often combine to form the basis of an ideological belief in infinite substitutability – when a crisis occurs, our human ingenuity and creativity will always be able to save us by substituting our disintegrating resources and systems with new ones.
And by and large, most of us accept this as truth and never question or oppose the introduction of new technologies/resources in our lives. We never question whom these technologies/resources actually benefit or what their material affects may be. Often, we never question why we need new technologies/resources and we never think about what problems they purport to solve or, more accurately, conceal entirely.
A big barrier to getting to these questions is the fact that most of us identify with this process even despite the fact that it is causing our own dispossession. A high-energy/high-technology culture has produced a multi-generational dependence on the ability of this culture to “progress” from one technology/resource to another, from one crisis to another. Without this continual process, our culture and entire way of living in the world today would imminently collapse and be unable to exist.
Isn’t the very presence of this culture a testament to this ideology? What is the progress of civilization but the (forced) substitution of other cultures for this one? A substitution of biological and cultural diversity for assimilation into a monoculture?
The path of progress is the path of infinitely substituting cultures, technologies, resources, and entire species and ecosystems for the maintenance of one specific way of life, for one specific species – humans. In only a few hundred years, industrial civilization has circled the globe and systematically destroyed the very fabric of life that ushered it into existence in the first place.
Entire peoples, languages, cultures, histories, stories, artifacts, medicines, tools, relationships, species, and ecosystems have been conquered, destroyed, and erased to give space and priority to a monoculture of violence, exploitation, domination and endless growth – all under the assumption that this is, progressively, the best that we can do as intelligent human beings.
Here we understand how this culture and its ruling classes pursue the principle of infinite substitutability for the purposes of “sustainability.” To sustain our standard of living, to sustain progress and growth, and to sustain the industrial economy. The principle is based on the premise that if we allocate our current resources towards the research and development of alternatives, we can solve all problems relating to shortages in energy and raw materials, infinitely – there is no limit to human ingenuity and creativity to problem solve.
A major problem of this principle though, despite its title, is that it is actually difficult to apply indefinitely. As discussed in Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, the marginal costs of research and development have grown so high it is questionable whether technological innovation will be able to contribute as much to the solution of future problems as it has to past ones.
“Consider, for example, what will be needed to solve problems of food and pollution. Meadows and her colleagues note that to increase world food production by 34 percent from 1951 to 1966 required increases in expenditures on tractors of 63 percent, on nitrate fertilizers of 146 percent, and on pesticides of 300 percent. The next 34 percent increase in food production would require even greater capital and resources inputs. Pollution control shows a similar pattern. Removal of all organic wastes from a sugar-processing plant cost 100 times more than removing 30 percent. Reducing sulfur dioxide in the air of a U.S. city by 9.6 times, or of particulates by 3.1 times, raises the cost of control by 520 times.” [1]
And for the most part, we already see this within the fossil fuel industry itself. Since 2005, global production of conventional oil and gas has plateaued – and has even begun to decrease in many parts of the world. This has forced the industry to substitute conventional methods of oil and gas production for extremely destructive “unconventional” methods, which have not only significantly increased the amount of expenditures required for production but has also increased its environmental risks and impacts.
We have to drill deeper and deeper for harder-to-reach resources, which are also dirtier and less desirable than their predecessors, requiring more and more processing and development in order for the final product to be sold on the market and used in our daily lives. The costs, economically and ecologically, are skyrocketing and the returns on these investments are marginally lower than their conventional counterparts. Eventually, it will not be economically feasible to pursue these resources either and more expenditures will be devoted to researching and developing yet another alternative at even higher cost and lower benefit.
It’s a vicious cycle that is turning the entire living world into dead commodities, and because it is based on a principle of infinite substitutability, it will never end unless we force it to stop.
Definite Sustainability
The principle of infinite substitutability permeates through our entire culture, beyond its usage by the ruling classes and fossil fuel industry. In fact, by analyzing the currently proposed alternatives discussed throughout the sustainability movement, we see that they are equally bound by the same logic – either subconsciously or consciously.
A typical conversation regarding a sustainable future will generally be backed by a few overarching premises: (1) our current society is inherently unsustainable; (2) we have the resources and technology to research and develop alternatives; and (3) renewable energies such as solar and wind power can provide enough energy to sustain current standards of living. Often, none of these premises are expounded upon, let alone critically assessed or challenged.
To even begin discussing sustainability in any definite, concrete way, we need to be clear with that we mean. Industries and governments routinely explain that the actions they take are concrete steps towards sustainability. But do we actually believe them? It’s obvious that the only thing they genuinely wish to sustain is their power.
So what does “sustainability” mean in the context of an environmental movement?
We quickly recognize that our current society is inherently unsustainable on the obvious reality that our society, in its quest for infinite growth on a finite planet, simply cannot last forever and is currently rapidly drawing down on the Earth’s capacity to support future generations of life.
From this conclusion, a useful definition of sustainability might be a way of life characterized by the conscious recognition of limits in such a way as to “minimize damage to the planets future ability to support not only ourselves and our posterity, but also other species upon whose coexistence we may be more dependent than we have yet learned to recognize.” [2]
In this definition, the goal of sustainability is not to figure out how to maintain current structures and ways of living into the future, but instead the goal is to figure out how to maintain the possibility of life for multiple future generations to come. These are two distinct definitions with divergent implications and goals.
When our movement is based on a premise that we have the resources and technology to research and develop alternatives, we are essentially distracting ourselves from the real problems. This premise, left unchallenged, supports the idea that simply substituting dwindling, outdated and destructive resources for more equitable, beneficial and progressive resources (e.g. solar and wind) can solve the current ecological crisis outright. At face value, it’s hard to see how this premise differs from the fossil fuel industry and the principle of infinite substitutability.
Right now, the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) for nearly all “renewable” energies is significantly low compared to fossil fuels, even lower than most unconventional extraction processes such as deep-water drilling, hydraulic fracturing, mountaintop removal, and tar sands oil production. The industry can be expected to continue these practices until they become economically unfeasible or until the EROEI of these sources drops below that of “renewable” energies, a process we can see developing as some multinational corporations are already incentivizing this transition.
If we reduce our goals of sustainability to a substitution problem, and follow with a premise that renewable energies can provide enough energy to sustain current standards of living, we uncritically accept the idea that our current standards of living are acceptable and ideal for the future. Not only does this completely erase the history of violence that gives grounding to this way of living but also it ultimately suggests that this violence should continue in order to elevate the rest of the world to these standards.
We must fundamentally ask ourselves: are we trying to sustain our high-energy/high-technology standards of living (which are undoubtedly destroying the planet), or are we trying to sustain the ability of this planet to be conducive to all life?
The point here isn’t to state that we shouldn’t be looking for alternatives or working to build them, but that we should be careful not to fall into the logic of the dominant culture we allege to oppose. When our solutions begin to sound nearly identical to the solutions proposed by the ruling classes, we ought to be concerned. Perhaps the solution is not rooted in the substitutions of technologies/resources for others, but rather in the complete abandonment of these technologies/resources.
Will we find, as have some past societies, that the cost of overcoming our problems is too high relative to the benefits conferred? Will we find that not solving the technology/resource problem of our high standards of living is the most economical and just option?
References
[1] Tainter, Joseph. The Collapse of Complex Societies, pg. 212
[2] Catton Jr., William. Destructive Momentum: Could An Enlightened Environmental Movement Overcome it?
BREAKDOWN is a biweekly column by Joshua Headley, a writer and activist in New York City, exploring the intricacies of collapse and the inadequacy of prevalent ideologies, strategies, and solutions to the problems of industrial civilization.
