This is an excerpt from the book Bright Green Lies, P. 20 ff
By Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert
What this adds up to should be clear enough, yet many people who should know better choose not to see it. This is business-as- usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed, ambition-addled destruction of the wild, the unpolluted, and the nonhuman. It is the mass destruction of the world’s remaining wild places in order to feed the human economy. And without any sense of irony, people are calling this “environmentalism.”1 —PAUL KINGSNORTH
Once upon a time, environmentalism was about saving wild beings and wild places from destruction. “The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind,” Rachel Carson wrote to a friend as she finished the manuscript that would become Silent Spring. “That, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done.”2 She wrote with unapologetic reverence of “the oak and maple and birch” in autumn, the foxes in the morning mist, the cool streams and the shady ponds, and, of course, the birds: “In the mornings, which had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, and wrens, and scores of other bird voices, there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marshes.”3 Her editor noted that Silent Spring required a “sense of almost religious dedication” as well as “extraordinary courage.”4 Carson knew the chemical industry would come after her, and come it did, in attacks as “bitter and unscrupulous as anything of the sort since the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species a century before.”5 Seriously ill with the cancer that would kill her, Carson fought back in defense of the living world, testifying with calm fortitude before President John F. Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee and the U.S. Senate. She did these things because she had to. “There would be no peace for me,” she wrote to a friend, “if I kept silent.”6
Carson’s work inspired the grassroots environmental movement; the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); and the passage of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. Silent Spring was more than a critique of pesticides—it was a clarion call against “the basic irresponsibility of an industrialized, technological society toward the natural world.”7 Today’s environmental movement stands upon the shoulders of giants, but something has gone terribly wrong with it. Carson didn’t save the birds from DDT so that her legatees could blithely offer them up to wind turbines. We are writing this book because we want our environmental movement back.
Mainstream environmentalists now overwhelmingly prioritize saving industrial civilization over saving life on the planet. The how and the why of this institutional capture is the subject for another book, but the capture is near total. For example, Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute and Earth Policy Institute—someone who has been labeled as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers” and “the guru of the environmental movement”8—routinely makes comments like, “We talk about saving the planet.… But the planet’s going to be around for a while. The question is, can we save civilization? That’s what’s at stake now, and I don’t think we’ve yet realized it.” Brown wrote this in an article entitled “The Race to Save Civilization.”9
The world is being killed because of civilization, yet what Brown says is at stake, and what he’s racing to save, is precisely the social structure causing the harm: civilization. Not saving salmon. Not monarch butterflies. Not oceans. Not the planet. Saving civilization. Brown is not alone. Peter Kareiva, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, more or less constantly pushes the line that “Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of [human] people…. Conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to [human] people.”10 Bill McKibben, who works tirelessly and selflessly to raise awareness about global warming, and who has been called “probably America’s most important environmentalist,” constantly stresses his work is about saving civilization, with articles like “Civilization’s Last Chance,”11 or with quotes like, “We’re losing the fight, badly and quickly—losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.”12
We’ll bet you that polar bears, walruses, and glaciers would have preferred that sentence ended a different way.
In 2014 the Environmental Laureates’ Declaration on Climate Change was signed by “160 leading environmentalists from 44 countries” who were “calling on the world’s foundations and philanthropies to take a stand against global warming.” Why did they take this stand? Because global warming “threatens to cause the very fabric of civilization to crash.” The declaration con- cludes: “We, 160 winners of the world’s environmental prizes, call on foundations and philanthropists everywhere to deploy their endowments urgently in the effort to save civilization.”13
Coral reefs, emperor penguins, and Joshua trees probably wish that sentence would have ended differently. The entire declaration, signed by “160 winners of the world’s environmental prizes,” never once mentions harm to the natural world. In fact, it never mentions the natural world at all.
Are leatherback turtles, American pikas, and flying foxes “abstract ecological issues,” or are they our kin, each imbued with their own “wild and precious life”?14 Wes Stephenson, yet another climate activist, has this to say: “I’m not an environmentalist. Most of the people in the climate movement that I know are not environmentalists. They are young people who didn’t necessarily come up through the environmental movement, so they don’t think of themselves as environmentalists. They think of themselves as climate activists and as human rights activists. The terms ‘environment’ and ‘environmentalism’ carry baggage historically and culturally. It has been more about protecting the natural world, protecting other species, and conservation of wild places than it has been about the welfare of human beings. I come at from the opposite direction. It’s first and foremost about human beings.”15
Note that Stephenson calls “protecting the natural world, protecting other species, and conservation of wild places” baggage. Naomi Klein states explicitly in the film This Changes Everything: “I’ve been to more climate rallies than I can count, but the polar bears? They still don’t do it for me. I wish them well, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that stopping climate change isn’t really about them, it’s about us.”
And finally, Kumi Naidoo, former head of Greenpeace International, says: “The struggle has never been about saving the planet. The planet does not need saving.”16 When Naidoo said that, in December 2015, it was 50 degrees Fahrenheit at the North Pole, much warmer than normal, far above freezing in the middle of winter.
1 Paul Kingsnorth, “Confessions of a recovering environmentalist,” Orion Magazine, December 23, 2011.
2 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publishing, 1962), 9.
3 Ibid, 10.
4 Ibid, 8.
5 Ibid, 8.
6 Ibid, 8.
7 Ibid, 8.
8 “Biography of Lester Brown,” Earth Policy Institute.
9 Lester Brown, “The Race to Save Civilization,” Tikkun, September/October 2010, 25(5): 58.
10 Peter Kareiva, Michelle Marvier, and Robert Lalasz, “Conservation in the Anthropocene: Beyond Solitude and Fragility,” Breakthrough Journal, Winter 2012.
11 Bill McKibben, “Civilization’s Last Chance,” Los Angeles Times, May 11, 2008.
12 Bill McKibben, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” Rolling Stone, August 2, 2012.
13 “Environmental Laureates’ Declaration on Climate Change,” European Environment Foundation, September 15, 2014. It shouldn’t surprise us that the person behind this declaration is a solar energy entrepreneur. It probably also shouldn’t surprise us that he’s begging for money.
14 “Wild and precious life” is from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day.” House of Light (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992).
15 Gabrielle Gurley, “From journalist to climate crusader: Wen Stephenson moves to the front lines of climate movement,” Commonwealth: Politics, Ideas & Civic Life in Massachusetts, November 10, 2015.
16 Emma Howard and John Vidal, “Kumi Naidoo: The Struggle Has Never Been About Saving the Planet,” The Guardian, December 30, 2015.
Spot on Derrick! When I campaigned in Earth First! in the 1980s, this is what we were about. Some of us were opposed to agriculture and some weren’t, but we were all opposed to industrial society.
I read the book and agree with just about all of it, though I wish you had compared the harms caused by using fossil fuels and uranium for energy with the harms caused by changing sources to solar and wind (to the extent possible). There can be no doubt that living industrially is war against the Earth regardless of the sources of energy used, but if you’re going to claim that solar and wind are worse than what we have now, you need to provide a side-by-side comparison. To be clear, I fully agree that we need to live a lot more simply & naturally, not fantasize that merely changing sources of energy will solve anything, but again a detailed comparison would have been nice.
As I have said many times (still without being arrested for terrorism), if there were a button I could push that would instantly and painlessly vaporize the human race, Muhammad Ali in his prime wasn’t fast enough to keep me from pushing that button.
Yes, there are people I love — from legends of the past, like Chief Seattle and Rachel Carson, to the tribes and individuals today who carry on their struggle. But by and large, we are inherently susceptible to the lures of civilization. And whatever good might be done by the tiny minority, our ability to grasp physical objects and the complexities of science mean that we will always be vulnerable to the temptations of the “richer and easier life” that civilization promises.
Look at the number of people from “contacted” tribes who have succumbed to the lure of tee shirts, eyeglasses, plastic sandals, radios, and outboard motors, before telling me that “some of us are okay,” and that we can break our addiction to industrial conveniences. Where is the invisible line between spears, bows and arrows, crossbows, guns, artillery pieces, and B-52s?
Even raccoons and swallows love industry, when it comes to such luxuries as cat food, basements, and the overhanging eaves that make such tempting nest sites. We all want to be more comfortable, and we’ll all take the easy way out, given the choice.
Show me the hungry fisherman or black bear who won’t take a package of fresh salmon over the uncertainties of catching a fish today. Civilization is an addiction that claims most of us with a single sip. A philosophy or religion that teaches “Only Nature” is just one thirsty human and a cold bottle of beer away from alcoholism.
The difference between humans and nonhumans relevant to your comment is that unlike nonhumans, humans have opposable thumbs, can walk upright, have highly developed intellect (some would say overdeveloped), and have a highly developed self-consciousness (some would say overdeveloped). These things combined make humans exponentially more powerful than any nonhumans, in fact more powerful than all the nonhumans put together. Humans alone have the ability to practice agriculture, mine, and live industrially.
Sure, all species try to conserve energy and will therefore take the easy path every time, but only humans can create the destructive choices that make that easy path. On the other hand, humans can choose to live lightly on the Earth and focus on expanding our consciousness instead of harmfully manipulating the physical/natural world. I understand your position that humans won’t do so, but my position is that we have to keep trying because there’s no viable alternative.
Wow, this really is radical stuff, but you know that already. I’m reading with sympathy, trying to learn what it *feels* like to think this way. My take on the world has often been that best articulated by Arthur Schopenhauer, and brilliantly summed up in his book on the philosopher by the late Bryan Magee, which I’d like to quote in full:
QUOTE But there is something horror-stricken about Schopenhauer’s view of the world which is foreign to Plato. In passages (and there are many of them) like that quoted on p. 146 the tone is one of Swiftean revulsion, half the revulsion being at the global and unending prospect of anguish, the other half at the pointlessness of it all. He loved animals, and his permanent sense of the reality behind the phrase ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ was like an unhealing wound: he actually *felt* the fact that at every single moment, in all the continents of the world, thousands of screaming animals are in the process of being torn to pieces alive. This alone, he thought, is enough to make the world a terrible place. Towards humans his attitude was a more ambivalent one, in which compassion was qualified by contempt, though both were experienced pungently. So vivid was his sense of the cruelty, violence and aimlessness of both animal and human worlds that it amounted to a horror of life as such. He believed it would have been better for most living creatures never to have been born. He cited with approval Swift’s ‘custom of celebrating his birthday, not as a time of joy, but of sadness, and of reading on that day the passage from the Bible where Job laments and curses the day on which it was said in the house of his father that a man-child had been born’. END QUOTE
Well, phew! Heady stuff… But if anything has been likely to make me think again, it’s been reading that huge and fascinating book, Deep Green Resistance and watching some of your videos and reading a few of the blogs (a work still in progress for me). Yes, life does have to feed on life and probably there’s inescapably something inherently violent and destructive about it. Even vegans eating, for instance, an innocuous carrot, are doing violence to that carrot’s right to existence.
Your videos and photos alone on this site show a very different view from that of the old pessimist (who nevertheless despite all managed to enjoy good food, a night at the theatre, music and even, apparently, the complementary sex.
But I wont hide the fact that it’s hard for me, and not merely because I’m a retired medical doctor (and not a vet), to think of ‘non-human people’ as you do: I’m working on it, but it’s a huge leap. I don’t have a naïf, innocent view of humans and human nature, believe me, I really don’t. But it’s hard for me not to agree with e.g. that quote above from Naomi Klein, which I suppose makes me a speciesist. And yet there’s another voice I’m listening to with, as I said, sympathy.
One day, with the news of climate catastrophe, growing more alarming by the hour, there may well be no human beings around. (I remember reading that of all species that have ever existed on earth, some 95 – 98% have gone extinct: we’re not immune from that fate.) What will that be like? Is that question even meaningful in such a circumstance, there might be nothing for anything to be ‘like’. I might even argue that with humans, *meaning* came into the world, and when humans go, yes there’ll be animals (alright if you insist! ‘non-human people’) but unless evolution again discovers that degree of conscious awareness which allows us humans to say ‘We’re here and we *know* that we’re here, there’ll simply be no meaning.
To talk in metaphorical capitalistic terms (!) for a second, there’s a price to pay for everything. To cite Schopenhauer again, he wrote that life isn’t, as people often depict it, a ‘gift’, but bears more the character of a loan. The interest, he claimed, was paid in daily unremitting labour, hardship and pain, physical and mental, and the capital was paid at death. And when, he asked, was this debt incurred? At the very moment of conception.
You’ve certainly opened my mind to new ways of thinking about the world and for that I thank you. But it’s been quite a shock. Good wishes!