Editor’s Note: Civilization is killing the planet. DGR believes that nature must be protected from civilization. Nature can come back from the damage that people have done but first the destruction must stop. While people can not survive without nature, nature does not need people to survive, but it could use some help to repair the damage done. That requires activism from ordinary people to counter the extractive greed of the profit motive. This is why we must organize and survive to fight another day.
Although DGR agrees with much of this article we make note that the opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Deep Green Resistance, the News Service or its staff.
Climate activist Clover Hogan says environmental activists face growing challenges not just from outside their movements, but also from within.
She shares how the prevalence of unpaid labor can make young activists’ lives even more difficult in the present while they advocate for a more livable future.
Add to that criticism for perceived imperfections over lifestyle choices and infighting between colleagues that can lead some to choose not to identify as activists at all, or leave movements altogether, she says.
On this episode of the podcast, Hogan discusses these challenges in addition to direct and existential threats that environmental defenders face worldwide, and how she thinks more inclusive and effective activism can be fostered.
There’s “this myth [of] perfection within activism and I think that’s something that sort of barricades lots of people, whether they consider themselves activists or not, from even engaging in the issues,” says Clover Hogan, a climate activist and founder of the youth-led nonprofit Force of Nature.
In addition to increased criminalization of protests worldwide, environmental activists face a wide range of difficult social, financial and physical risks to their lives and careers. These are challenges Hogan speaks about on this latest episode of the Mongabay Newscast.
Listen here:
Hogan also speaks candidly with fellow activists about the challenges activists face both outside and within environmental spaces on the third season of her Force of Nature Podcast, Confessions of a Climate Activist, highlighting the paradoxical standards that activists are held to, when the systems upon which societies are structured make alternative lifestyle choices a near impossibility.
“It’s no accident that we spend so much of our time thinking about our individual lifestyles and not thinking about how do we actually hold these systems accountable,” she says. “One of the ways that we’ve tackled that and addressed it in the podcast is with climate confessions [to] point at how silly it is that we feel guilty about [our] individual actions … against the scale of the problem that is, frankly, being driven by these huge organizations.”
Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website, or download our free app for Apple and Android devices to gain instant access to our latest episodes and all of our previous ones.
Banner image: Clover Hogan (center) speaking in Paris, France. Photo courtesy of Clover Hogan.
Mike DiGirolamo is a host & associate producer for Mongabay based in Sydney. He co-hosts and edits the Mongabay Newscast. Find him on LinkedIn, Bluesky and Instagram.
Photo by Heather Mount on Unsplash
The whole environmental movement has been hijacked by the cleverly engineered panic about the myth that greenhouse gases from combustion are heating up the climate and the equally absurd notion that a warmer world would be a bad thing. Neither of these claims is true. They are being advanced by the nuclear industry to make the public accept nuclear power as a ”safe, clean, and green” alternative.
The real issue that environmental activists must face up to is the huge overgrowth of the human population, far more than the world can support regardless of whatever lifestyles anyone adopts.
There is little or no truth to the leftist mantra of ”capitalist greed” as the explanation for environmental destruction. 8,000,000,000 humans will destroy nature under any social / economic system and with any lifestyles. But my experience if I mention overpopulation in environmentalist circles is that sooner or latter someone will accuse me of racism and compare me to the Nazis.
To have any hope of effectiveness the movement must give up these two myths: that climate collapse is due to greenhouse gases and that eco-collapse is due to a few rich bastards who want more money. A strong movement to depopulate the world might still work even in the short time that is left, but so far I see no movement even talking about these matters.
I’m not going to argue about your provably false statements about greenhouse gases and global warming. I do agree that only phony environmentalists obsess on global warming, to the exclusion of other environmental and ecological issues, because while global warming is an existential problem, there are many other environmental and ecological problems that are root causes, some of them being more important, like the human-caused extinction crisis.
What I WILL say here is this: Without industrial society we wouldn’t have global warming, and if you love the Earth and the native life here, you are opposed to industrial society. Even industrial society isn’t a root cause of these problems, but eliminating it would be a great start to fixing the extreme and massive ecological and environmental problems that humans have caused and are still causing.
I also agree with you that human overpopulation IS one of the twin PHYSICAL root causes of all these problems the other being unnatural lifestyles/overconsumption. There’s no point in arguing over which root cause is worse or more important because they both need to be fixed, but if I were forced to choose one, I’d fix overpopulation, because that alone would fix many of the unnatural lifestyles/overconsumption problems.
Capitalism is a cancer that must be cut out, along with its rich owners. Allowing these things just allows more immoral and harmful killing, and ecological destruction. Definitely not root causes, but evils nonetheless.
Lowering human population requires educating and empowering girls and women, making birth control and abortion free, easily accessible, and unrestricted, and probably also a global one-child-family policy. Getting the human population back down to an ecologically-balanced number will take a long time, measured in hundreds of years. No other methods will work, and many, like wars, have been proven to have the opposite effect eventually. How much time it would take doesn’t matter, because we can’t do anything about that.
BTW, I often experience the same reaction when I mention human overpopulation, even to one of my friends who’s a former Earth First!er, albeit one of the more conservative ones. When we say that we need to lower human population, they hear us advocating for killing people, and some are so brainwashed with human supremacism that they think that we’re only talking about certain groups of people when in fact we’re talking about all humans.
My evidence on greenhouse gases and warmer climates can be summed up as follows:
The greenhouse effect of water vapor is around 100 times as much per unit volume as that of CO2, and there is at least 100 times as much of it in the atmosphere, so there is about 10,000 times as much greenhouse effect from water vapor as from CO2. And since the amount of water vapor fluctuates from year to year by at least 15%, any effect from CO2 would be undetectable.
If you seal a greenhouse air tight and pump in added CO2 the plants will grow bigger. But there are millions of old farmers and gardeners who are old enough to remember 50 years ago and none of them reports his crops are growing bigger now than they did then.
We are being told that a few degrees warmer planet would be a disaster, but the climate of the last few centuries has been an anomoly. In the Late Middle Ages the climate was several degrees warmer than it has been since, and in the Climatic Optimum, between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago, there was no pack ice in the Arctic Ocean and the tree line extended right up to the shores of that ocean in both North America and Siberia.
Most forms of life in severe cold or dry regions suvive in spite of those conditions, not because of them. And most can easily adapt to a warmer and wetter climate.
Anyone claiming that a warmer earth would be harmful to the biosphere should be asked to explain those facts.
I agree that capitalism is an evil that we would be better off without, but I would add that any form of socialism is likewise something we would be better off without. A change of ownership from capitalists to the public in general would do little to solve the problems that rest on wrong scientific theories, mechanistic technologies, and general irrationality that dominates all cultures.
Your prescription for lowering population is nothing but wishful thinking. Educating giirls and women and ”empowering” them is not going to happen, at least not in any realistic time frame. Most parts of the world are going in the opposite direction, with more religious and conservative governments coming into power nearly everywhere.
Just how do you suppose a global one child policy can happen? It would require a global dictatorship to ride rough shod over the religious feeling of most of the world. Who do you think will have the power to do that? Even China, arguably the worst totalitarian state on the planet, failed to accomplish that aim.
Birth control and abortion will probably become illegal in many countries soon, if they are not already. And in any event, it is now too late for those methods to help anyway. if it takes centuries to lower the population, there will be nothing left alive on earth by the time it happens.
Fortunately, there is a factor working in our favor: pollution.
Actually, the population is being lowered already by industrial pollution. The reason fertility is decreasing in the industrialized countries is not voluntary use of contraceptionby educated and ”empowered” women; it is lowered sperm counts and other forms of reproductive disfunction caused by the many unnatural chemicals encountered in modern living. Radioactivity from both military and civilian sources is another cause of fertility decline. The population growth problem will sooner or later be solved regardless of what anyone decides to do. Unfortunately, the same fate awaits other species too,
Additionaly, the ongoing klimatsurtz is already resulting in a loss of agricultural productivity, and as that goes on will cause more wars and civil disorder until the over population in the cities is solved by millions of humans recycling each other back into the food chain where they belong by fighting over what scraps are left in the supermarkets when the deliveries stop.
We can expect governments will impose rationing, price controls, martial law, and other ultimately useless measures to try to keep civilization going a bit longer, but those measures will fail and the few remaining city dwellers will fan out into rural areas and attempt to commandeer food from farmers. Rural communities will try to defend themselves against mobs from the cities. In some cases they will succeed and in some they will fail.
In the long term, by which I mean possibly within the next ten years or so, civilization will be gone except from a few favored enclaves and the huge overgrowth of human population on this planet will be down to what the remaining ecosystem can support.
This is the most FAVORABLE scenario. It assumes no nuclear wars result from global food shortages and the lack of maintainance of nuclear reactors when civil order collapes does not result in too much damage to too great an area.
None of this is speculation. It is not something that is GOING to happen; it is ALREADY happening now. This breakdown of civilization is already well underway and cannot be stopped or prevented.
Civilization is broken beyond repair and there is no way to fix it. The sooner the collapse is completed the more of the natural world will be left to begin the recovery process and the faster and more complete the recovery will be.
And 1000 years from now, when all the cities long have crumbled into ruins and wolves and grizlies hunt huge herds of bison across the unfenced plains, little bands of hunters sitting by their lonely campfires in the wilderness will tell stories of the times when men flew through the air and lit up the night with artificial lighting. And to be born among those people shall be the best of fates.
—Ted Lazar
Re: Past Climates:
The ice core method of estimating past climates is not reliable because the untested assumption is made that each separate ice layer represents an entire year. In fact, it is more likely that each separate snowfall followed by a partial melting results in a noticeable layer in the ice.
If this interpretation is followed, the time frame is telescoped considerably. The changes in climate become very sharp and discontinuous. This is exactly what would be expected from global catastrophes such as massive meteoric bombardment or volcanism.
In the most likely scenario, the earth was hit by a swarm of meteors. As a result, planet-wide earthquakes, massive volcano eruptions, and great changes in climate took place on a global scale.
This catastrophic change would have erased most of the evidence of what came before it. Much of what has been taken as evidence of ice ages is really the traces left by the catastrophes. I doubt the claim that there was ever any ice age. But there could very well have been several short periods of intense cold.
The only climate regime we know anything about with any certainty other than our own is the one immediately prior to our own. That one was much warmer and wetter than the climate that has prevailed for the last 5,000 years or so. I therefore regard a warmer and wetter climate as the normal and original one for this planet.
If the natural climate of the earth is warmer and wetter, and the change to the present climate, as we know it from the history of the last 5,000 years is an aberration caused by an astronomical accident, most of the life forms on earth would be best adapted to the original climate. That in fact is what we can observe in the paleontological record.
Most cold weather species continue to exist in spite of, not because of, intense cold. In deserts the same is true. Most desert species survive the dryness, but could survive even better if there was more water available.
While a minority of species would be restricted in range or numbers if the climate returned to normal, few would find survival impossible. There were always a few areas where cold conditions prevailed. There was no ice in the Arctic Basin, or on the coastal plains of Greenland or Antarctica, but both those landmasses have high-elevation interiors where there was ice even in warmer ages. Rivers formed by melt water runoff from those ice caps would have created cold estuaries where cold-water marine organisms could have lived.
On the whole, given the far greater exuberance of life in the tropics and subtropics, I would expect the biosphere as a whole to greatly benefit from a return to the climate that prevailed before the accidental change to the one we know now.
While there would certainly be some dislocations, on balance, the ecological effects would be beneficial. The end result would be the return of the Early Holocene, in both climate and biota.
And that would be a very good thing.
https://archive.org/details/BorisovCanManChangeClimateProgress1973
As a consequence of massive pollution of the food and water supply, human fertility in the most industrialized countries has declined sharply in recent decades and is now at a crisis level. Additionally, many cases of reproductive failure are being labeled as something else.
Within four years of hitting the market viagra became the worlds best selling drug, with more than 4,000,000 prescriptions a year. A man who needs viagra before the age of 80 is effectively sterile since he cannot reproduce with techological aid.
A woman who gives birth to an infant that cannot survive without medical intervention is also to be counted as sterile, as is a woman who has more than one miscarriage or stillbirth or a child that dies before the age of five, indicating a weak immune system.
Sperm counts have declined sharply and fertility clinics are doing a booming business. So are adoption agencies, another indicator of infertility among people who want a child.
The huge increase in the number of people suffering from pre-natal brain damage to their hypothalamus, the part of the brain that controls autonomic responses, including sexual response, and consequently feeling attracted to members of their own sex instead of an appropriate sexual mate has reached epidemic proportions, as has the number of people who are incapable of feeling their own bodily proprioceptive sensations, resulting in confusion as to which sex they belong to. These people also must be classed as infertile even if they happen to be physically capable of reproduction since their brain damage prevents them from exercising that ability.
Population figures for Europe and North America show zero or even in some cases negative growth in the native-born white population. Population growth in most industrialized countries is driven solely by immigration from more backward countries where modern forms of pollution have not yet taken place.
If these trends continue the contraction of populations in the most civilized countries will soon reach a point where it can no longer be concealed by politically motivated claims that ”more women are choosing the use birth control”. This forlorn hope, that ”educating and empowering women leads to lower birth rates” cannot withstand close examination. In countries where birth rates have fallen it is industrialization with the resultant pollution that has been mainly responsible for the lower birth rates, not any wished for social changes.
Correction to line three in pargraph two: That should read ”without”, not ”with”.