In this short but very dense talk, Kat Lillian Hellwoman is explaining the connection between transgenderism, transhumanism and the 4th industrial revolution and the scary future vision that lies behind the relentless push of transgenderism by rich technocrats, governments and institutions.
Editor’s note: While it’s true that “it is the profit machine that is polluting our atmosphere, warming our planet, and destroying our ecosystems”, the real root of human destructiveness lies further back in history, when groups of people started agriculture, building cities and forming human supremist ideologies that disconnected human cultures from all other living beings.
This article originally appeared in The Ecologist.
Featured image: “Unless” by Nell Parker
“Pathogens, a great and terrible global threat to human and many a non-human alike, [are] as much a Sword of Damocles hovering above civilisation as climate change.”
Evolutionary epidemiologist Rob Wallace wrote this in 2015. But he and many colleagues have been issuing increasingly urgent warnings since the 1990s that globalised agribusiness is breeding and spreading new, deadly, fast-transmission viruses.
The urgency around pandemics began to ramp up around the same time calls for climate action became mainstream. Many of us have been focused on the climate emergency – and nothing here should be taken to imply we were wrong – but the last year has taught a sharp lesson: deadly pathogens pose an equally menacing threat to human civilisation.
Since the first United Nations COP conference on global warming in 1995, the climate emergency has got much worse. Carbon emissions have accelerated from 26 billion tonnes in 1995 to 37 billion tonnes in 2018. Atmospheric concentrations have risen from 350ppm in 1990 to 410ppm today. Half the increase in average global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution has occurred since 1995. The average volume of Arctic sea-ice has roughly halved in the last 40 years. Whatever the metric, the same story.
The effects are all around us. More frequent and more intense heat-waves are causing increases in wildfires, droughts, and desertification. Rising and warming seas are causing heavier rainfall, more serious flooding, more frequent mega-storms, and the inundation of coastal areas. These changes are driving the world’s sixth mass extinction, with species loss running at 1,000 times the normal rate. Climate change is destroying livelihoods, increasing disease, displacing people.
We stand on the brink of critical tipping-points when incremental shifts lead to sudden and irreversible lurches in the Earth’s ecosystem. Among the potential tipping-points are: abrupt collapse of the West Antarctic ice-sheet; abrupt collapse of the East Antarctic ice-sheet; abrupt collapse of the Greenland ice-sheet; thawing of Arctic permafrost and release of methane gas; rapid deforestation of the Amazon; and failure of the Atlantic Gulf Stream. Some scientists fear a ‘global cascade’ of interacting tipping-points.
The failure of the global political elite is systemic. It is not that we do not know what to do. It is not that the wrong policies have been adopted. It is that the economic and geopolitical system – the current world order – cannot deliver the radical action necessary.
The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), representing the world’s leading industrial economies, considered the pre-pandemic global growth rate of three percent to have been too low. Yet such annual growth rate means a doubling in the size of the world economy every quarter century.
The fossil-fuel corporations plan to extract twice the amount of coal, oil, and gas between now and 2030 than can be burned if we are to restrict global temperature rise to the 1.5ºC ‘aim’ of the Paris Agreement.
This ‘aim’ is not ambitious enough: most climate scientists predict severe damage to the Earth’s eco-system with this level of warming. But even this ‘aim’ falls well below the ‘pledges’ of the COP participants, which, even if implemented, are expected to result in a disastrous 3ºC of global warming. Many leading scientists think we are heading for at least 4ºC of global warming.
The term ‘metabolic rift’ has been used by some radical commentators, like John Bellamy Foster, to describe what is happening. I prefer ‘rupture’ because it better captures the violence of a corporate capitalist system that is out of control and tearing apart human societies and natural ecosystems.
Metabolism is a scientific word to do with how chemical changes reconfigure energy and sustain life. All of us need to get science-wise, to understand what is happening to our planet, to get a handle on what I am calling the ‘Dual Metabolic Rupture’.
Humans are part of Nature. On the one hand, we are animals with material needs and organic form. On the other, our actions impact upon the rest of Nature, sometimes degrading it, sometimes remodelling it, always having an effect.
All the products of human labour are therefore part of Nature. Everything we do to provide ourselves with a livelihood involves drawing upon the resources of Nature and refashioning them into new forms.
These processes are not reversible, but they may be repeatable. If a glacier melts because the temperature rises, the water of which it is formed flows away. If a new glacier forms in the same place when the temperature falls again, it must be comprised of another body of water. In Nature, as in Society, everything is process and motion.
The energy involved in natural processes is a constant: it can be endlessly recycled, but it cannot be destroyed, so whatever you do, it will still be there in one form or another. This is one of the basic laws of physics (known as ‘the First Law of Thermodynamics’).
It follows that human beings may interact with Nature in ways that are ‘renewable’ or ‘sustainable’ – where energy is recycled in essentially repetitive ways – or in other ways that cause a metabolic ‘rupture’ or ‘rift’ – where energy is reconstituted as a destructive force.
Let us take two contrasting examples. A hoe-cultivator who harvests a garden plot of cassava, feeds the tubers and leaves to her pigs, and then lets them roam to manure the plot, is engaged in a recycling of energy that is ecologically sustainable.
Corporations that extract oil, refine it into petroleum, and then sell it to other corporations to burn in jet engines are doing something quite different: theirs is not a renewable process, but a release of carbon waste into the atmosphere and a permanent remodelling of the Earth’s metabolism.
The basic rhythms of pre-capitalist societies were determined by the cycle of the seasons. But capitalism is a system of competitive capital accumulation hard-wired by the profit motive for exponential growth.
The former were always essentially local or regional, so that what happened in one place had limited impact in others: the latter is now a fully globalised system which has the whole of humanity and the entire global environment in its grasp.
In the end, it is simple: it is the profit machine that is polluting our atmosphere, warming our planet, and destroying our ecosystems.
But that’s not all it’s doing.
The system – let’s define it: globalised, financialised monopoly-capitalism – is blind to everything except the balance sheet, the bottom line, the annual profit.
The lords of capital have turned the Earth – its lands, its waters, its minerals – into private property. They have commodified its ecosystems and appropriated its bounty. And in their wake they spew waste and pollution that become ‘externalities’ for which others must pay.
Where to start? The catalogue of devastation is so long. Forests are cut down, wetlands drained, soils eroded. Water extraction turns farmland into desert. Chemicals are dumped in oceans, lakes, and rivers. Toxins leak into groundwater. Fertilisers, herbicides, and pesticides contaminate food supplies.
Landfills overflow with synthetic waste. Nuclear power plants melt down and fill air, land, and sea with carcinogenic particles. A chemical smog fills urban streets and poisons children on the way to school. Plastic waste degrades into trillions of microscopic specks that infect every living organism.
Now, from deep within this mayhem, a second titan of destruction has emerged to stand alongside the mega-threat of climate change: pandemic disease.
Both titans are formed of trillions of tiny particles. Climate change is driven by atoms of carbon dioxide – tiny particles of dead organic matter pumped into the atmosphere when fossil fuels are burned. Pandemic disease is driven by microscopic parasites – tiny particles of living organic matter that breed, spread, and evolve by infecting the bodies of animals.
But that does not mean Covid-19 is a natural disaster, any more than carbon pollution. Nor is it an Act of God or a ‘Chinese’ conspiracy. Covid is a human-made catastrophe, as much an artefact of the Anthropocene as global warming.
I agree with colleagues who argue that the Holocene is over. This is the term we have used to describe the last 11,700 years of Earth history, since the end of the last Ice Age – until now. From around 1950, and at an accelerating rate since, the Earth system has been undergoing radical change as a result of human action. We have entered a new geological era in which Anthropos (the Greek word for human) is the primary agent of change. The primary form of change is metabolic rupture.
Covid-19 is a pandemic disease of the Anthropocene’s metabolic rupture.
Mainstream commentary on the pandemic is refracted through a neoliberal prism. Attention focuses on immediate problems and proximate causes. I am not talking about serial liars like Johnson and his third-rate cabinet of public-school toffs and corporate spivs. I am talking about more honest commentators keen to see through the spin and smoke-cloud that shields a corrupt and incompetent political class.
But it is not enough to expose the negligence, crony capitalism, and eugenicist experiments of the Tories – the failure of test-and-trace, the lack of PPE, the locking down too late and lifting too early, the discharging of the sick into care homes, the spreading of the virus in schools and universities, and so much more.
It is necessary, but not enough. The narcissistic charlatan who runs the government might eventually be thrown out. But so what? There is a much bigger issue: the metabolic rupture between corporate agribusiness and natural ecology that has created the multiple global incubators of new deadly diseases.
In 1950, a large proportion of the Earth’s people were peasant farmers, predominantly in the Global South. As recently as 1980, only 20 percent of China’s population was urban; the proportion today is 60 percent. A growing number of those who remain in the villages, moreover, have been transformed into wage-labourers.
The advance of corporate agribusiness is relentless. As I write, the Hindu-chauvinist regime of Narendra Modi is facing an uprising of small farmers whose livelihoods are threatened with destruction by neoliberal ‘reform’. So desperate is their plight that record numbers of India’s small farmers have been committing suicide.
As well as destroying traditional communities, agribusiness is expanding into the wilderness, uprooting forests, destroying the diversity and balance of natural ecologies, and replacing them with vast monocultures. Half the habitable surface of the Earth is now devoted to agriculture, with millions of acres added every year.
Much of the crop-land produces animal feed for the hundreds of millions of cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry being fast-fattened for the global supply-chains that loop the world. The mega-complexes of Big Farm’s industrialised animal production are laced around and between the mega-slums of the Global South’s ever-growing urban proletariat.
This is what links a remote bat-cave in hinterland China with the morgues of New York and London. Big Farm batters down natural ecology, destroying diversity and firebreaks. Viruses that would have burnt themselves out in the forest for lack of carriers adapt to a new ecology of monoculture, animal factories, and slum cities; they mutate and evolve and then achieve fast-track transmission through mass concentrations of the same species.
The global supply-chains of giant transnationals with operations in half a dozen countries and markets in a thousand cities do the rest.
Once a new variant is established, it replicates by the trillion at hyper-speed, throwing up chance mutations, testing new ways of spreading. The disease becomes endemic and chronic – embedded in human society – and continues to evolve, waging a relentless life-or-death struggle against lockdowns and vaccines by constant shape-sifting in its efforts to breach the defences.
This – the pandemic diseases created and spread by corporate agribusiness – is then layered over societies mired in poverty and stripped of public health-provision by neoliberal ‘structural adjustment programmes’, privatisation, and austerity cuts.
The epidemiologists have been warning of the dangers for a quarter of a century. There have been dozens of outbreaks of different viruses or variants, all involving a similar basic mechanism: the introduction of a wild-animal virus, its transmission and evolution through factory-farm complexes, a jump from animal to human, often in mutant form, and rapid global spread through transnational supply-chains.
The warning, endlessly repeated, was that, sooner or later, one of the new diseases created by neoliberal capitalism would take off. But there is no profit in pandemic precaution.
The improvised plague cemeteries; the body-bags in the morgues; the patients breathing through ventilators; the traumatised and exhausted health workers; the everyday folk left grieving; the jobs lost, businesses gone bust, homes lost to the bailiffs; the swelling toll of mental breakdowns; the loneliness, the shrivelled lives, the sense of desolation and despair: all this and more amount to so many ‘externalities’ for the profit machine.
The machine carries on. It is being recalibrated. Some businesses may be shutting down, but big capital is highly mobile. The money moves at click-key speed. It flows from a place where profits are down to another where they are up.
America’s 660 billionaires, for example, are doing just fine right now. Since March last year, their wealth has increased 39 percent, from just under $3 trillion to more than $4 trillion today. It is the rest of us, of course, who pay for the system’s ‘externalities’.
Those ‘externalities’ now take the form of a Dual Metabolic Rupture between humanity and the planet, as industrial pollution destroys our ecosystem, and agribusiness generates wave after wave of killer pathogen. We are the inhabitants of a new geological age – the Anthropocene – in which globalised, financialised monopoly-capitalism has become an existential threat to life on Earth.
What happens next depends on what we do. The imperative to get active has never been greater.
Neil Faulkner is the author of A Radical History of the World and co-author of System Crash: an activist guide to making revolution.
By Straquez
Of course, Mexico has been in the front line of atrocities and destruction that come out of mining. Mexico is a land blessed with wide biodiversity that includes minerals that have caught the attention of foreign companies who then act as the machinery to do what this industrial culture does best –converting the living into the dead. High revenue for the company stakeholders, negative benefit for the inhabitants and nothing but endless destruction for the land.
It is said that Aztecs used to embellish and protect their bodies with jewelry, such as necklaces with charms and pedants, armlets, bracelets, leg bracelets, and rings. They would also use tools and vases fabricated with precious metals like gold and silver. These metals were found in deposits located on the surface and not underground like nowadays, this allowed the usage of such mineral resources without much effort or effect.
In 1521, Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was taken over by the Spanish army consolidating Mexico’s Conquest. From then on, mining as an industry started in Mexico as Spaniards started to exploit places where mineral deposits could be located. Mining was carried out mostly in the North and Center of what is now modern day Mexico. Many important mineral deposits started to be discovered in places that later would become famous as they would generate wealth (for whom?) and human settlements. It was only a matter of time before the land subject to mining would be turned into cities such as Guanajuato, San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas, Taxco, Chihuahua and Durango.
Mines kept spreading and mining created many jobs and wealth (I hate to be repetitive, but whose wealth?). Is there even a mention of all the evils done to the indigenous land and people? Not at all, the history of mining is portrayed as progress, as an unquestionable good thing, as a victory and in no terms as a defeat or loss. The whole History of Civilization is pretty much like that, now that I think of it.
When the Independence movement of Mexico started in 1810, mining projects were negatively affected and had to be stopped. It was not until 1823 when the movement ended that mining activity was restarted. Remember that I mentioned my surname Straffon being from Cornwall, England? Well, it was precisely during these years that the British Real del Monte Company was established thanks to English capital. This company provided both technology and workforce, some of it straight from Cornwall to re-establish silver mines located in Real del Monte, Hidalgo. 1,500 tons of equipment including 9 steam engines with their large boilers, 5 for pumping, 2 for crushing ore and 2 for use in powering saw mills; various pumps; large cast iron pipes to connect the pumps to be placed at the bottom of the mines with the surface. And so started the rebuilding and modernization of the district’s mining industry. The Cornish miners had brought the Industrial Revolution to Mexico.
By the beginning of the 20th century, Mexico was entering a major political transformation as new laws and codes were created. During Porfirio Diaz’ administration, for example, most of the railroad infrastructure was built all through the country, focusing on the main mining centers that were already established. Then the American corporations showed up offering the means for better extraction as mines during the times of Nueva España were certainly used, but could not be exploited to their maximum because Spain lacked the technology and resources to do so.
The Fresnillo Company, Mazapil Cooper Co., Peñoles Mining Co., and Pittsburg & Mexico Tin Mining Co. were some of the companies looking to make a profit out of Mexico’s mines. Parallel industries started to rise, the economy diversified and the country’s elite dreamed of Mexico being on its way to becoming a world economy. Metallurgical processes were improved with maximum return on capital and mineral processing efficiency as the main goal. The bonanza would cease somewhat in the 1960s when the mining industry was nationalized and mine administration passed to the charge of Mexican professionals.
Then came NAFTA, and in 1992 mining laws were modified substantially in order to accommodate the demands of big national and transnational corporations. Compared to the prior 300 years, production of gold and silver doubled even though several communities resisted the exploitation. Social and environmental damage increased substantially as a consequence due to legal impunity and the ability of the mining organizations to trample over human rights. The Mexican Mining Law of 1992 is a unique and unconstitutional piece of legislation, and rides roughshod over earlier laws which allowed for judicial challenges and which consequently made it difficult for companies to carry on their business with impunity. The solution of the mining organizations was, of course, to create a whole web of corruption that extends to the three branches of government. We are still living the influence of NAFTA until this very day. Business as usual.
Doctor María Teresa Sánchez Salazar has set out very interesting mine “conflict maps” which consider many parameters including land conflict, environmental conflict, social conflict, labor conflict or a combination of those factors. Data shows that 75% of these conflicts have to do with land, that is, land grabs by the mining companies or due to environmental conflicts, and almost 70% of them happen in open-pit mines. Another interesting number – 60% of the conflicts have involved foreign company owned mines.
She adds that there are places where conflict started due to land grab and the subsequent leasing to mining companies and the implementation of ways to displace people from their native lands. Of a total of 181 natural areas, 57 have been leased for mining. Eight of them focus more than 75% of the surface to this activity. Twenty of them have at least 93% of their surface leased. One example is the Rayón National Park in Michoacan, its land is practically 100% leased for mining as well as Huautla Mountain Range that is between Morelos, Puebla and Guerrero.
Safety is also an issue for the Mexican mining sector. There are powerful cartels that have quite an influence in the entire country, including mining states such as Sonora, Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Guerrero. Mines have been object of many armed robberies that have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Extortion, threats and employee kidnapping have been the most common crimes reported by the mining companies.
If this was a Robin Hood kind of deal then I should certainly support it, but in the end workers are the most affected, operations are seldom slowed down and the exploitation just does not stop. If the criminal gangs were to take over, not much would change as, let’s be honest, both companies and cartels pretty much operate the same way but at a different scale.
In times prior to the year 1600, this area was inhabited by Opata indigenous settlements. In the year 1645 a mission named San Luis Gonzága de Bacadéhuachi was founded by the Jesuit missionary Cristóbal García. Its current inhabitants dedicate their lives to taking care of livestock and making cheese, bread and tortillas which are sold among themselves; within the world economy, they don’t have much of a choice. Being only 270 kilometers away from Hermosillo, capital of the State of Sonora, the road takes 5 hours to transit due to the uneven and complex terrain that in turn makes it a dangerous travel.
This town is on the same route of the high mountain range that takes you to Chihuahua, its neighbor state. This is a high-risk road as armed conflicts are constantly raging between groups that are looking to take control of this area. Some months ago, armed men went into the municipality creating such a situation and ending the peaceful environment to the point that the Mexican National Guard and the State Police now have to be constantly present.
Bacadehuachi has around 500 houses, most of them made of adobe, occupied by around 1,083 people according to the The National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI). It has cobblestone roads and few are made of concrete due to the minimal vehicle transit. It is more common to see people on horses or donkeys than in motor vehicles. Everything is around the corner, there are no gas stations nearby. It has 3 municipal police officers that issue around 10 different fines a year. There is only one health center for basic checkups and a doctor is available every 3 days.
Regarding education, only one preschool, one primary school and one secondary school exist. For those who want to receive higher education, their only choice is to go to Granados, a municipality 50 kilometers away from the town. The road is risky to say the least, young students must stay at the neighboring town and go back to their families at the weekends in a municipality sponsored bus. To go to college is a victory, a luxury, a rare occurrence for the townspeople.
Miguel Teran is a farmer and former owner of La Ventana ranch. He sold his land to Bacanora Lithium for the Sonora Lithium Project. He asserts that the first explorations started back in 1994. Geologists came to the La Ventana ranch in government cars. They took some soil samples, came back 8 years later, measured the land and after that they never came back. Ten years ago, Bacanora Lithium carried out some studies. They drilled around 115 holes with the permission of Miguel and then they offered to buy the land.
I told them: you know what you’re buying, but I don’t know what I’m selling. Don’t take advantage of me. That’s how the negotiation started, but they wanted to pay as if it was a mere piece of land.”
Miguel wasn’t disappointed yet he acknowledges that he could have made a better deal as he has since found out what treasure lies in the 1,900 hectares that were sold and integrated into the Sonora Lithium Project. For the time being and until the mineral is extracted, Miguel may allow his cows to graze there as stipulated in the contract.
I am within my rights until I get in the way, but I have already bought some land.” Finally, he adds, “sometimes my car battery would fail and they would tell me that I had lithium here, but I only know about horses and chickens; not lithium.”
As a city-dweller, my experience with Nature has been for the most part parks and decorative gardens. Since I live so disconnected from the land itself, I can only enter into relationship with my own species, our creations and the animals we call pets. For a long time I’ve been scared of insects and even though working in a garden has helped diminish the feeling, I still feel uncomfortable in certain scenarios. Soil and its minerals are even weirder to me, because I had never considered them something other than a resource, a component that can be used for my benefit through technology. They don’t seem alive, they don’t seem to have any other purpose than sitting there for us to transform them into something else.
Perhaps my biggest realization during my journey to connect with the land is the enormous damage that Capitalism, Colonialism and Industrialism have inflicted on the planet. It has reached the point that we are also physically, psychologically, emotionally and spiritually bent and broken enough for us to barely notice the indifference and violence around us. Indifference and violence done to each other and to ourselves. And yet, those who notice don’t always take action. Even less, those who know and take action don’t have a clear idea, much less a strategy to stop the abuse.
This is not something that modern technology can fix. Not the electric cars, not the solar cells nor the electric batteries. Not the tote bags and the bamboo toothbrushes that you can use as compost. Our home is being gutted and we just stand there watching, unsure on what to do. When you actually want to stop a killer, you go ahead and do it. You don’t offer knives from recycled metal or whips made out of hemp. You go ahead and put an end to the abuse by neutralizing any capacity to inflict damage that the perpetrator might have. You stop the killing, you stop the behavior, you commit yourself to do so.
Today I read that only 3% of world’s ecosystems remain intact. Civilization is going down regardless of what we do. Nothing can grow indefinitely without collapsing. The real question is what will be left when our civilization goes down. Our struggle resides in stopping it before there is nothing left.
Cristopher Straffon Marquez a.k.a. Straquez is a theater actor and language teacher currently residing in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. Artist by chance and educator by conviction, Straquez was part of the Zeitgeist Movement and Occupy Tijuana Movement growing disappointed by good intentions misled through dubious actions. He then focused on his art and craft as well as briefly participating with The Living Theatre until he stumbled upon Derrick Jensen’s Endgame and consequently with the Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet both changing his mind, heart and soul. Since then, reconnecting with the land, decolonizing the mind and fighting for a living planet have become his goals.
By Lierre Keith, Derrick Jensen, and Max Wilbert
“The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind,” Rachel Carson wrote.“That, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done.”
Silent Spring, which inspired the modern environmental movement, was more than a critique of pesticides, it was a cri de couer against industrialized society’s destruction of the natural world.
Yet five decades of environmental activism haven’t stopped the destruction, or even slowed it. In those same decades, global animal populations have dropped by 70 percent. Right now, we are losing about one football field of forest every single second. Looking forward provides no solace: the oceans are projected to be empty of fish by 2048.
A salient reason for this failure is that so much environmentalism no longer focuses on saving wild beings and wild places, but instead on how to power their destruction. The beings and biomes who were once our concern have disappeared from the conversation. In their place we are now told to advocate for projects like the Green New Deal. While endangered ecosystems get a mention, the heart of the plan is “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources” in the service of industrial manufacturing.
Its advocates believe technology and design can render industrial civilization sustainable, and that “green technologies” are good for the planet. Some bright greens are well-known and beloved figures like Al Gore, Naomi Klein, and Bill McKibben as well as organizations like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and Audubon. These committed activists have brought the emergency of climate change into consciousness, a huge win as glaciers melt and tundra burns. But bright greens are solving for the wrong variable. Their solutions to global warming take our way of life as a given, and the planet’s health as the dependent variable. That’s backwards: the planet’s health must be more important than our way of life because without a healthy planet you don’t have any way of life whatsoever.
The bright green narrative has to ignore the creatures and communities being consumed. Take the Scottish wildcat, numbering a grim 35, all at risk from a proposed wind installation. Or the birds dying by the thousands at solar facilities in California, where concentrated sunlight melts every creature flying over.
Or the entire biome of the southern wetland forest, being logged four times faster than South American rainforests. Dozens of huge pulp mills export 100 percent of this “biomass” to Europe to feed the demand for biofuels, which bright greens promote as sustainable and carbon-neutral. The forest has a biological diversity unmatched in North America, lush with life existing nowhere else and barely hanging on. This includes the Southeastern American Kestrel. They need longleaf pine savannahs, and longleaf pine have been reduced to 3% of their range. The kestrels depend for their homes on red-cockaded woodpeckers, who exist as a whisper at 1% of historic numbers. Last in this elegiac sample is the gopher tortoise. Four hundred mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and insects cannot survive without the protective cover of the burrows dug by tortoises, tortoises now critically endangered. All these creatures are our kin: our fragile, wondrous, desperate kin, and environmentalists would have them reduced to pellets, shipped to Europe, and burned, while calling their slaughter “green.”
First, industrial civilization requires industrial levels of energy. Second is that fossil fuel — especially oil — is functionally irreplaceable. Scaling renewable energy technologies like solar, wind, hydro, and biomass, would constitute ecocide. Twelve percent of the continental United States would have to be covered in windfarms to meet electricity demand alone. To provide for the U.S.A.’s total energy consumption, fully 72% of the continent would have to be devoted to wind farms. Meanwhile, solar and wind development threaten to destroy as much land as projected urban sprawl, oil and gas, coal, and mining combined by 2050.
Finally, solar, wind, and battery technologies are, in their own right, assaults against the living world. From beginning to end, they require industrial-scale devastation: open-pit mining, deforestation, soil toxification that’s permanent on a geologic timescale, extirpation of vulnerable species, and use of fossil fuels. In reality, “green” technologies are some of the most destructive industrial processes ever invented. They won’t save the earth. They’ll only hasten its demise.
Simply put, we have to stop destroying the planet and let the world come back. A recent study in Nature found we could cut the carbon added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution in half by reverting 30% of the world’s farmland to its natural state. This would also preserve 70% of endangered animals and plants. This is the lowest of low hanging fruit when it comes to combating climate change and healing our planet. Everywhere there are examples of how the wounded are healed, the missing appear, and the exiled return. Forests repair, grasses take root, and soil sequesters carbon. It’s not too late.
The green new deal has reforestation as one of its goals, but it’s not the main goal, as it should be. If environmentalism is going to help save the planet — and if it’s going to respond to global warming commensurate with the threat — it needs to return to its roots, and remember the love that founders like Rachel Carson had for the land. We need to pledge our loyalty to this planet, our only home.
Wildcats and kestrels need us now. We have to take back our movement and defend our beloved. How can we do less? And with all of life on our side, how can we lose?
Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert are the authors of the forthcoming book, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It. The book will be available March 16th, but you can pre-order to your local bookstore or library via IndieBound now.
In this 1965 thesis, Lewis Mumford describes the organizational structure and functioning of industrial civilization. Mumford warns that the modern systems of technology (technics) ultimately undermine human freedom and the biological integrity of life on Earth.
“DEMOCRACY” is a term now confused and sophisticated by indiscriminate use, and often treated with patronizing contempt. Can we agree, no matter how far we might diverge at a later point, that the spinal principle of democracy is to place what is common to all men above that which any organization, institution, or group may claim for itself? This is not to deny the claims of superior natural endowment, specialized knowledge, technical skill, or institutional organization: all these may, by democratic permission, play a useful role in the human economy. But democracy consists in giving final authority to the whole, rather than the part; and only living human beings, as such, are an authentic expression of the whole, whether acting alone or with the help of others.
Around this central principle clusters a group of related ideas and practices with a long foreground in history, though they are not always present, or present in equal amounts, in all societies. Among these items are communal self-government, free communication as between equals, unimpeded access to the common store of knowledge, protection against arbitrary external controls, and a sense of individual moral responsibility for behavior that affects the whole community. All living organisms are in some degree autonomous, in that they follow a life- pattern of their own; but in man this autonomy is an essential condition for his further development. We surrender some of our autonomy when ill or crippled: but to surrender it every day on every occasion would be to turn life itself into a chronic illness. The best life possible-and here I am consciously treading on contested ground- is one that calls for an ever greater degree of self-direction, self-expression, and self-realization. In this sense, personality, once the exclusive attribute of kings, belongs on democratic theory to every man.
In framing this provisional definition I trust that I have not, for the sake of agreement, left out anything important. Democracy, in the primal sense I shall use the term, is necessarily most visible in relatively small communities and groups, whose members meet frequently face to face, interact freely, and are known to each other as persons. As soon as large numbers are involved, democratic association must be supplemented by a more abstract, depersonalized form. Historic experience shows that it is much easier to wipe out democracy by an institutional arrangement that gives authority only to those at the apex of the social hierarchy than it is to incorporate democratic practices into a well-organized system under centralized direction, which achieves the highest degree of mechanical efficiency when those who work it have no mind or purpose of their own. The tension between small-scale association and large-scale organization, between personal autonomy and institutional regulation, between remote control and diffused local intervention, has now created a critical situation.
I wish it were possible to characterize technics with as much hope of getting assent, with whatever quizzical reserves you may still have, as in this description of democracy. But the very title of this paper is, I confess, a controversial one; and I cannot go far in my analysis without drawing on interpretations that have not yet been adequately published, still less widely discussed or rigorously criticized and evaluated. My thesis, to put it bluntly, is that from late neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable. If I am right, we are now rapidly approaching a point at which, unless we radically alter our present course, our surviving democratic technics will be completely suppressed or supplanted, so that every residual autonomy will be wiped out, or will be permitted only as a playful device of government, like national ballotting for already chosen leaders in totalitarian countries.
The data on which this thesis is based are familiar; but their significance has, I believe, been overlooked. What I would call democratic technics is the small scale method of production, resting mainly on human skill and animal energy but always, even when employing machines, remaining under the active direction of the craftsman or the farmer, each group developing its own gifts, through appropriate arts and social ceremonies, as well as making discreet use of the gifts of nature. This technology had limited horizons of achievement, but, just because of its wide diffusion and its modest demands, it had great powers of adaptation and recuperation. This democratic technics has underpinned and firmly supported every historic culture until our own day, and redeemed the constant tendency of authoritarian technics to misapply its powers. Even when paying tribute to the most oppressive authoritarian regimes, there yet remained within the workshop or the farmyard some degree of autonomy, selectivity, creativity. No royal mace, no slave-driver’s whip, no bureaucratic directive left its imprint on the textiles of Damascus or the pottery of fifth-century Athens.
It begins around the fourth millennium B. C. in a new configuration of technical invention, scientific observation, and centralized political control that gave rise to the peculiar mode of life we may now identify, without eulogy, as civilization. Under the new institution of kingship, activities that had been scattered, diversified, cut to the human measure, were united on a monumental scale into an entirely new kind of theological technological mass organization. In the person of an absolute ruler, whose word was law, cosmic powers came down to earth, mobilizing and unifying the efforts of thousands of men, hitherto all too autonomous and too decentralized to act voluntarily in unison for purposes that lay beyond the village horizon.
The new authoritarian technology was not limited by village custom or human sentiment: its Herculean feats of mechanical organization rested on ruthless physical coercion, forced labor and slavery, which brought into existence machines that were capable of exerting thousands of horsepower centuries before horses were harnessed or wheels invented. This centralized technics drew on inventions and scientific discoveries of a high order: the written record, mathematics and astronomy, irrigation and canalization: above all, it created complex human machines composed of specialized, standardized, replaceable, interdependent parts-the work army, the military army, the bureaucracy. These work armies and military armies raised the ceiling of human achievement: the first in mass construction, the second in mass destruction, both on a scale hitherto inconceivable. Despite its constant drive to destruction, this totalitarian technics was tolerated, perhaps even welcomed, in home territory, for it created the first economy of controlled abundance: notably, immense food crops that not merely supported a big urban population but released a large trained minority for purely religious, scientific, bureaucratic, or military activity.
To begin with, the democratic economy of the agricultural village resisted incorporation into the new authoritarian system. So even the Roman Empire found it expedient, once resistance was broken and taxes were collected, to consent to a large degree of local autonomy in religion and government. Moreover, as long as agriculture absorbed the labor of some 90 per cent of the population, mass technics were confined largely to the populous urban centers. Since authoritarian technics first took form in an age when metals were scarce and human raw material, captured in war, was easily convertible into machines, its directors never bothered to invent inorganic mechanical substitutes. But there were even greater weaknesses: the system had no inner coherence: a break in communication, a missing link in the chain of command, and the great human machines fell apart. Finally, the myths upon which the whole system was based-particularly the essential myth of kingship-were irrational, with their paranoid suspicions and animosities and their paranoid claims to unconditional obedience and absolute power.
By now you doubtless see the point of this brief historic excursus. That authoritarian technics has come back today in an immensely magnified and adroitly perfected form. Up to now, following the optimistic premises of nineteenth century thinkers like Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, we have regarded the spread of experimental science and mechanical invention as the soundest guarantee of a peaceful, productive, above all democratic, industrial society. Many have even comfortably supposed that the revolt against arbitrary political power in the seventeenth century was causally connected with the industrial revolution that accompanied it. But what we have interpreted as the new freedom now turns out to be a much more sophisticated version of the old slavery: for the rise of political democracy during the last few centuries has been increasingly nullified by the successful resurrection of a centralized authoritarian technics-a technics that had in fact for long lapsed in many parts of the world.
At the very moment Western nations threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercion of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries,the ultimate tendency of this system might be in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that has now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual cost to life.
Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has as last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometime actively disobedient servo-mechanisms, still human enough to harbor purposes that do not always coincide with those of the system. Like the earliest form of authoritarian technics, this new technology is marvelously dynamic and productive: its power in every form tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientific knowledge or of industrial assembly lines
As with the earliest forms of authoritarian technics, the weight of effort, if one is to judge by national budgets, is toward absolute instruments of destruction, designed for absolutely irrational purposes whose chief by-product would be the mutilation or extermination of the human race. Even Ashurbanipal and Genghis Khan performed their gory operations under normal human limits
The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented. Like the Pharaohs of the Pyramid Age, these servants of the system identify its goods with their own kind of well-being: as with the divine king, their praise of the system is an act of self-worship; and again like the king, they are in the grip of an irrational compulsion to extend their means of control and expand the scope of their authority. In this new systems-centered collective, this pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike Job’s God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.
The danger to democracy does not spring from any specific scientific discoveries or electronic inventions. The human compulsions that dominate the authoritarian technics of our own day date back to a period before even the wheel had been invented. The danger springs from the fact that, since Francis Bacon and Galileo defined the new methods and objectives of technics, our great physical transformations have been effected by a system that deliberately eliminates the whole human personality, ignores the historic process, overplays the role of the abstract intelligence, and makes control over physical nature, ultimately control over man himself, the chief purpose of existence. This system has made its way so insidiously into Western society, that my analysis of its derivation and its intentions may well seem more questionable-indeed more shocking-than the facts themselves.
The answer to this question is both paradoxical and ironic. Present day technics differs from that of the overtly brutal, half-baked authoritarian systems of the past in one highly favorable particular: it has accepted the basic principle of democracy, that every member of society should have a share in its goods. By progressively fulfilling this part of the democratic promise, our system has achieved a hold over the whole community that threatens to wipe out every other vestige of democracy. The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the community may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires.
In a word, if one surrenders one’s life at source, authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated and magnified.
“Is this not a fair bargain?” those who speak for the system will ask. “Are not the goods authoritarian technics promises real goods? Is this not the horn of plenty that mankind has long dreamed of, and that every ruling class has tried to secure, at whatever cost of brutality and injustice, for itself?”
I would not be little, still less deny, the many admirable products this technology has brought forth, products that a self-regulating economy would make good use of. I would only suggest that it is time to reckon up the human disadvantages and costs, to say nothing of the dangers, of our unqualified acceptance of the system itself. Even the immediate price is heavy; for the system is so far from being under effective human direction that it may poison us wholesale to provide us with food or exterminate us to provide national security, before we can enjoy its promised goods. Is it really humanly profitable to give up the possibility of living a few years at Walden Pond, so to say, for the privilege of spending a lifetime in Walden Two? Once our authoritarian technics consolidates its powers, with the aid of its new forms of mass control, its panoply of tranquilizers and sedatives and aphrodisiacs could democracy in any form survive? That question is absurd: life itself will not survive, except what is funneled through the mechanical collective. The spread of a sterilized scientific intelligence over the planet would not, as Teilhard de Chardinso innocently imagined, be the happy consummation of divine purpose: it would rather ensure the final arrest of any further human development. Again: do not mistake my meaning.
What means must be taken to escape this fate? In characterizing the authoritarian technics that has begun to dominate us, I have not forgotten the great lesson of history: Prepare for the unexpected! Nor do I overlook the immense reserves of vitality and creativity that a more humane democratic tradition still offers us. What I wish to do is to persuade those who are concerned with maintaining democratic institutions to see that their constructive efforts must include technology itself. There, too, we must return to the human center. We must challenge this authoritarian system that has given to an under dimensioned ideology and technology the authority that belongs to the human personality. I repeat: life cannot be delegated.
Curiously, the first words in support of this thesis came forth, with exquisite symbolic aptness, from a willing agent but very nearly a classic victim of the new authoritarian technics. They came from the astronaut, John Glenn, whose life was endangered by the malfunctioning of his automatic controls, operated from a remote center. After he barely saved his life by personal intervention, he emerged from his space capsule with these ringing words: “Now let man take over!” That command is easier to utter than obey. But if we are not to be driven to even more drastic measures than Samuel Butler suggested in Erewhon, we had better map out a more positive course: namely, the reconstitution of both our science and our technics in such a fashion as to insert the rejected parts of the human personality at every stage in the process. This means gladly sacrificing mere quantity in order to restore qualitative choice, shifting the seat of authority from the mechanical collective to the human personality and the autonomous group, favoring variety and ecological complexity, instead of stressing undue uniformity and standardization, above all, reducing the insensate drive to extend the system itself, instead of containing it within definite human limits and thus releasing man himself for other purposes. We must ask, not what is good for science or technology, still less what is good for General Motors or Union Carbide or IBM or the Pentagon, but what is good for man: not machine-conditioned, system-regulated, mass-man, but man in person, moving freely over every area of life.
The very leisure that the machine now gives in advanced countries can be profitably used, not for further commitment to still other kinds of machine, furnishing automatic recreation, but by doing significant forms of work, unprofitable or technically impossible under mass production: work dependent upon special skill, knowledge, aesthetic sense. The do-it-yourself movement prematurely got bogged down in an attempt to sell still more machines; but its slogan pointed in the right direction, provided we still have a self to do it with. The glut of motor cars that is now destroying our cities can be coped with only if we redesign our cities to make fuller use of a more efficient human agent: the walker. Even in childbirth, the emphasis is already happily shifting from an officious, often lethal, authoritarian procedure, centered in hospital routine, to a more human mode, which restores initiative to the mother and to the body’s natural rhythms.
The replenishment of democratic technics is plainly too big a subject to be handled in a final sentence or two: but I trust I have made it clear that the genuine advantages our scientifically based technics has brought can be preserved only if we cut the whole system back to a point at which it will permit human alternatives, human interventions, and human destinations for entirely different purposes from those of the system itself. At the present juncture, if democracy did not exist, we would have to invent it, in order to save and re-cultivate the spirit of man [sic].
Lewis Mumford (October 19, 1895 – January 26, 1990) was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer. Mumford made signal contributions to social philosophy, American literary and cultural history and the history of technology.
This article was originally published The Johns Hopkins University Press in Technology and Culture, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter, 1964), pp. 1-8.
Featured image by KennyOMG, CC BY SA 4.0. Inline image by RW Kenny, CC BY SA 4.0.