“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.
This new movement is called bright green environmentalism.
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.”
Facts about renewable energy are worse than inconvenient.
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.
There are solutions, once we confront the actual problem.
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.
There’s no time for despair.
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.
For this episode of The Green Flame, Jennifer Murnan and Max Wilbert discuss extreme weather around the world. As the Arctic is experiencing catastrophic low ice formation, wildfires have swept western Turtle Island this summer and fall, and storms have pounded southeast Asia and the Caribbean. We include excerpts from a January podcast covering the megafires in Australia, discuss the rise of extreme weather under global warming, the basic science of why this occurs, and more.
From this episode:
Max Wilbert: It’s not too late. This can be a really heavy topic, but I want to emphasize for people that any change that we can make right now, any reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, is going to make the future less grim.
Any natural habitats that we can protect will be a reserve of biodiversity, will be a potential climate corridor, to help adaptation, to help the natural world, both non-humans and humans, to to to be more resilient in the face of what is coming.
I personally will not give up until every last living thing on this planet is dead, and that’s because I love this living world and it’s so important that we keep fighting no matter what.
Jennifer Murnan: Thank you, Max. I’d like to offer some insights too from from what I’ve observed. I can’t help but realize the immensity of what we are gifted by life. As you strip away the biological communities then you’re faced with the raw elements and one of the things that struck me is that the fires are creating their own weather.
That strikes me in a kind of poetic sense. Yes, you take away the mitigating forces of life and the balancing forces of life in this beautiful symphony of beings and what can be created, and you strip that away, and then you’re faced with the raw elements.
So what’s the reaction? I want to put all of my all of my belief all of my effort all of my energy all of my courage all of my fight into my fellow beings and into protecting and defending and loving the life that’s around me because i just got this massive lesson in what life is capable of. I’ve also read about mass extinctions that the planet has gone through before. I know that you can get through, and that life is part of getting through all of this. Much of the brilliance is in the smallest beings that are here. That’s where I find my courage and my strength right now, is from from life itself.
Max: I couldn’t agree more that life on this planet is so incredibly resilient and wants to live so badly. I’m always astounded at life’s capacity to hang on, whether it is plants growing out of the cracks in the sidewalk, or whether it’s in the Chernobyl irradiated zone where wildlife is flourishing despite some of the most toxic conditions on the planet, whether it is the salmon who are hanging on despite their streams having been dammed for 50, 60, 70 years, whether it is the trees who are ;osing their ability to reproduce in their home ranges but human beings are helping them migrate northwards to adapt to global warming. That’s already taking place. The natural world wants to live and is incredibly adaptive to varying natural conditions which are often pretty extreme throughout the Earth’s history. The world can survive a great deal. All we have to do is get industrial civilization out of the way, and help in that adaptation process.
Our music for this episode comes by the hand of DENNI.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
For this episode, we speak with Laura Cunningham of Basin and Range Watch about dozens of large solar energy projects threatening the Mojave and Great Basin deserts in Nevada and eastern California. We explore why utility-scale solar built on habitat is not a solution.
From this episode:
Now that I have seen ten years of solar build out. I was opposing the giant Ivanpah solar power towers in Eastern California deserts. That was a beautiful sloping desert next to the Mojave national preserve, full of Mojave yuccas, rare plants, wild flower blooms. We’d find horn lizards, black throated sparrows. cactus rinds, beautiful little slidewater snakes, harmless, just wanting to live in this area. Tortoises, a lot of tortoises. And it all got flattened, graded, run over by heavy machinery. Now it’s just a disturbed weed field with a giant fence around it. I looked about it. The whole of project – I think it was about 400 MW of energy, but it had a natural gas backup. Then we saw others, and others, still others. Tens of thousands of acres of deserts going under the blades of solar panels. I have not noticed a decline in carbon emissions. Of course, this is just one part of the world: the Mojave desert.
But it does make me think more recently: how much solar will it take to cover the desert before we see that downturn in carbon emissions? I think never. It’s this never ending scenario of needing more and more land, but we are not going to reduce our standard of living. I’ve heard different numbers regarding the pandemic: 17% decline in carbon emissions, maybe it was 12. A sort of a gigantic lowering of carbon emission, what we’d been wanting to have. But it took us really lowering our standard of living. Being much more efficient. Not burning a lot of fossil fuels. That’s actually, maybe, what we have to do in a non-pandemic situation: alter our whole way of living on the globe. And it’s a daunting task. Here we are going to build 60,000 acres of photovoltaic projects. Some of them will have Lithium-ion battery bank storage on protected Joshua tree habitats. That, I predict, will not lower carbon emissions one iota.
Our music for this episode is Melodi från Vest-Agder by Tim Eastwood of Dic Penderyn.
Featured Image: Women in 1919 Revolution in Egypt via Flickr
5. Deep Green Resistance means repair of human cultures
That repair must, in the words of Andrea Dworkin, be based on “one absolute standard of human dignity.” That starts in a fierce loyalty to everyone’s physical boundaries and sexual integrity. It continues with food, shelter, and health care, and the firm knowledge that our basic needs are secure. And it opens out into a democracy where all people get an equal say in the decisions that affect them. That includes economic as well as political decisions. There’s no point in civic democracy if the economy is hierarchical and the rich can rule through wealth.
People need a say in their material culture and their basic sustenance.
For most of our time on this planet, we had that. Even after the rise of civilization, there were many social, legal, and religious strictures that protected people and society from the accumulation of wealth. There exists an abundance of ideas on how to transform our communities away from domination and accumulation and toward justice and human rights. We don’t lack analysis or plans; the only thing missing is the decision to see them through.
We also need that new story that so many of the Transitioners prioritize. It’s important to recognize first that not everyone has lost their original story. There are indigenous peoples still holding on to theirs. According to Barbara Alice Mann,
The contrast between western patriarchal and Iroquoian matriarchal thought could not be more clear.… I do not think it is possible to examine the real impetus behind mother-right unless we walk boldly up to the spiritual underpinnings of its systems. By the same token, we cannot free ourselves of the serious damage of patriarchy, unless we appreciate where matriarchy’s spiritual allegiances lie.
The Iroquois are unapologetic about the fact that spirit informs and undergirds all our social, economic, and governmental structures. Every council of any honor begins with thanksgiving, that is, an energy-out broadcast, to make way for the energy in-gathering required by the One Good Mind of Consensus. When a council fails, people just assume that the faithkeeper who opened it did a poor job in the thanksgiving department. In a thanksgiving address, all the spirits of Blood and Breath (or Earth and Sky) are properly gathered and acknowledged, with the ultimate acknowledgment being that the One Good Mind of Consensus requires the active participation of not just an elite but everyone in the community. This is a foundational insight of all matriarchies.
She describes a culture where “things happen by consultation, not by fiat,” based on a spiritual understanding of everyone’s participation in the cosmos rather than the “paranoid isolation” brought on by the temper tantrums of a sociopathic God. This is the difference between cultures of matriarchy and patriarchy, egalitarianism and domination, participation and power.
Such stories need to be told, but more, they need to be instituted. All the stories in the world will do no good if they end with the telling.
One institution that deserves serious consideration is a true people’s militia. Right now in the United States only the right wing is organizing itself into an armed force. In 2009, antigovernment militias, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “the paramilitary arm of the Patriot movement,” grew threefold, from forty-two to 127. We should be putting weapons in the hands of people who believe in human rights and who are sworn to protect them, not in those of people who feel threatened because we have a black president.
If jack-booted, racist, and increasingly paranoid thugs coalesce into an organized movement with its eye on political power, we don’t need to relive Germany in 1936 to know where it may end, especially as energy descent and economic decline continue. Contemporaneous with a people’s militia would be training in both the theory and practice of mass civil disobedience to reject illegitimate government or a coup if that comes to pass. Gene Sharp’s Civilian-Based Defense explains how this technique works with successful examples from history. His book is a curriculum that should be added to Transition Towns and other descent preparation initiatives.
But if the people with the worst values are the ones with the guns and the training, we may be very sorry. This is a dilemma with which progressives and radicals should be grappling. A large and honorable proportion of the left believes in nonviolence, a belief that for many reaches a spiritual calling. But societies through history and currently around the globe have degenerated into petty tyrannies with competing atrocities. Personal faith in the innate goodness of human beings is not enough of a deterrent or shield for me.
A true people’s militia would be sworn to uphold human rights, including women’s rights. The horrors of history include male sexual sadism on a mass scale. Women are afraid of men with guns for good reason. But rape is not inevitable. It’s a behavior that springs from specific social norms, norms that a culture of resistance can and must confront and counteract, whether or not we have a people’s militia. We need a zero tolerance policy for abuse, especially sexual abuse.
Military organizations, like any other culture, can promote rape or stop it. Throughout history, soldiers, especially mercenary soldiers, have often been granted the “right” to rape and plunder as part of their payment. Other militaries have taken strong stands against rape. Writes Jean Bethke Elshtain, “The Israeli army … are scrupulous in prohibiting their soldiers to rape. The British and United States armies, as well, have not been armies to whom rape was routinely ‘permitted,’ with officers looking the other way, although British and American soldiers have committed ‘opportunistic’ rapes. Even in the Vietnam War, where incidents of rape, torture and massacre emerged, raping was sporadic and opportunistic rather than routine.” The history of military atrocities against civilians is a history; it’s not universal, and it’s not inevitable. Elshtain continues,
“War is not a freeform unleashing of violence; rather, fighting is constrained by considerations of war aims, strategies and permissible tactics. Were war simply an unbridled release of violence, wars would be even more destructive than they are.”
Western nations, over hundreds of years, assembled an unwritten code of conduct for militaries, known as the “customary law of war,” which tried to limit the suffering of soldiers and to safeguard civilians. This was eventually codified into the Hague Convention Number IV of 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1949. These attempted to limit looting and property destruction and to protect noncombatants. The Uniform Code of Military Justice is very clear that rape is unacceptable, and even gets the finer points of how “consent” with an armed assailant is a pretty meaningless concept. Elshtain also notes that “[the] maximum punishment for rape is death. Thus, interestingly, rape is a capital offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, by contrast to most civilian legal codes.
Getting the command structure to take rape and human rights abuses seriously is, of course, the next step. As Elshtain points out, “It is difficult to bring offenders to trial unless the leaders of the military forces are themselves determined to ferret out and punish tormentors of civilian populations. Needless to say, if the strategy is itself one of tormenting civilians, rapists are not going to be called before a bar of justice.”
It will be up to the founders and the officers of new communities to set the norms and to make those norms feminist from the beginning. The following would go a long way toward helping create a true people’s militia, and not just another organization of armed thugs to “trample the grass”—the women and girls who so often suffer when men fight for power.
Female officers. Women must be in positions of authority from the beginning, and their authority needs absolute respect from male officers.
Training curriculum that includes feminism, rape awareness, and abuse dynamics, and a code of conduct that emphasizes honorable character in protecting and defending human rights.
Zero tolerance for misogynist slurs, sexual harassment, and assault amongst all members.
Clear policies for reporting infringements and clear consequences.
Background checks to exclude batterers and sex offenders from the militia.
Severe consequences for any abuse of civilians.
A people’s militia could garner widespread support by following a model of community engagement, much as the Black Panthers grew through their free breakfast program. Besides basic activities like weapons training and military maneuvers, the militia could help the surrounding community with the kind of services that are always appreciated: delivering firewood to the elderly or fixing the roof of the grammar school. The idea of a militia will make some people uneasy, and respectful personal and community relationships would help overcome their reticence.
4. Deep Green Resistance requires repair of the planet
This principle has the built-in prerequisite, of course, of stopping the destruction. Burning fossil fuels has to stop. Likewise, industrial logging, fishing, and agriculture have to stop. Denmark and New Zealand, for instance, have outlawed coal plants—there’s no reason the rest of the world can’t follow.
Stopping the destruction requires an honest look at the culture that a true solar economy can support. We need a new story, but we don’t need fairy tales, and the bread crumbs of windfarms and biofuels will not lead us home.
To actively repair the planet requires understanding the damage. The necessary repair—the return of forests, prairies, and wetlands—could happen over a reasonable fifty to one hundred years if we were to voluntarily reduce our numbers. This is not a technical problem: we actually do know where babies come from and there are a multitude of ways to keep them from coming. As discussed in Chapter 5, Other Plans, overshoot is a social problem caused by the intersections of patriarchy, civilization, and capitalism.
People are still missing the correct information. Right now, the grocery stores are full here. In poor areas, the so-called food deserts may be filled with cheap carbohydrates and vegetable oil, but they are still full. But how many people could any given local foodshed actually support, and support sustainably, indefinitely? Whatever that number is, it needs to be emblazoned like an icon across every public space and taken up as the baseline of the replacement culture. Our new story has to end, “And they lived happily ever after at 20,000 humans from here to the foothills.”
This is a job for the Transitioners and the permaculture wing, and so far, they’re getting it wrong. The Peak Oil Task Force in Bloomington, Indiana, for instance, put out a report entitled Redefining Prosperity: Energy Descent and Community Resilience. The report recognizes that the area does not have enough agricultural land to feed the population. They claim, however, that there is enough land within the city using labor-intensive cultivation methods to feed everyone on a “basic, albeit mostly vegetarian diet.” The real clue is that “vegetarian diet.” What they don’t understand is that soil is not just dirt. It is not an inert medium that needs nothing in order to keep producing food for humans. Soil is alive. It is kept alive by perennial polycultures—forests and prairies. The permanent cover protects it from sun, rain, and wind; the constant application of dead grass and leaves adds carbon and nutrients; and the root systems are crucial for soil’s survival, providing habitat for the microfauna that make land life possible.
Perennials, both trees and grasses, are deeply rooted. Annuals are not. Those deep roots reach into the rock that forms the substrate of our planet and pull up minerals, minerals which are necessary for the entire web of life. Without that action, the living world would eventually run out of minerals. Annuals, on the other hand, literally mine the soil, pulling out minerals with no ability to replace them. Every load of vegetables off the farm or out of the garden is a transfer of minerals that must be replaced. This is a crucial point that many sustainability writers do not understand: organic matter, nitrogen, and minerals all have to be replaced, since annual crops use them up.
John Jeavons, for instance, claims to be able to grow vast quantities of food crops with only vegetable compost as an input on his Common Ground demonstration site. But as one observer writes,
Sustainable Laytonville visited Common Ground. The gardens could only supply one meal a day because they didn’t have enough compost. The fallacy with Biointensive/Biodynamic and Permaculture is that they all require outside inputs whether it’s rock phosphate or rock dusts, etc. There is no way to have perpetual fertility and take a crop off and replace lost nutrients with the “leftovers” from the area under cultivation … even if the person’s urine, poop and bones were added back.
I have built beautiful garden soil, dark as chocolate and with a scent as deep, using leaves, spoiled hay, compost, and chickens. But I eventually was forced to realize the basic arithmetic in the math left a negative number. I was shifting fertility, not building it. The leaves and hay may have been throwaways to the lawn fetishists and the farmers, but they were also nutrients needed by the land from which they were taken. The suburban backyard that produced those leaves needed them. If I was using the leaves, the house owner was using packaged fertilizer instead. The addition of animal products—manure, bloodmeal, bonemeal—is essential for nitrogen and mineral replacement, and they are glaringly absent in most calculations I’ve seen for food self-sufficiency. Most people, no matter how well-intentioned, have no idea that both soil and plants need to eat.”
Annual crops use up the organic matter in the soil, whereas perennials build it. Processes like tilling and double digging not only mechanically destroy soil, they add oxygen, which causes more biological activity. That activity is the decay of organic matter. This releases both carbon and methane. One article in Science showed that all tillage systems are contributors to global warming, with wheat and soy as the worst. This is why, historically, agriculture marks the beginning of global warming. In contrast, because perennials build organic matter, they sequester both carbon and methane, at about 1,000 pounds per acre. And, of course, living forests and prairies will not stay alive without their animal cohorts, without the full complement of their community.
So be very wary of claims of how many people can be supported per acre in urban landscapes. It is about much more than just acreage. If you decide to undertake such calculations, consider that the soil in garden beds needs permanent cover. Where will that mulch come from? The soil needs to eat; where will the organic material and minerals come from? And people need to eat. We cannot live on the thin calories of vegetables, no matter how organic, to which 50,000 nerve-damaged Cubans can attest. So far, the Transitioners, even though many of them have a permaculture background, seem unaware of the biological constraints of soil and plants, which are, after all, living creatures with physical needs. In the end, the only closed loops that are actually closed are the perennial polycultures that this planet naturally organizes—the communities that agriculture has destroyed.
But as we have said, people’s backyard gardens are of little concern to the fate of our planet. Vegetables take up maybe 4 percent of agricultural land. What is of concern are the annual monocrops that provide the staple foods for the global population. Agriculture is the process that undergirds civilization. That is the destruction that must be repaired. Acre by acre, the living communities of forests, grasslands, and wetlands must be allowed to come home. We must love them enough to miss them and miss them enough to restore them.
The best hope for our planet lies in their restoration. Perennials build soil, and carbon is their building block. A 0.5 percent increase in organic matter—which even an anemic patch of grass can manage—distributed over 75 percent of the earth’s rangelands (11.25 billion acres) would equal 150 billion tons of carbon removed from the atmosphere. The current carbon concentrations are at 390 ppm. The prairies’ repair would drop that to 330 ppm. Peter Bane’s calculations show that restoring grasslands east of the Dakotas would instantaneously render the United States a carbon-sequestering nation. Ranchers Doniga Markegard and Susan Osofsky put it elegantly: “As a species, we need to shift from carbon-releasing agriculture to carbon-sequestering agriculture.”
That repair should be the main goal of the environmental movement. Unlike the Neverland of the Tilters’ solutions, we have the technology for prairie and forest restoration, and we know how to use it. And the grasses will be happy to do most of the work for us.
The food culture across the environmental movement is ideologically attached to a plant-based diet. That attachment is seriously obstructing our ability to name the problem and start working on the obvious solutions. Transition Town originator Rob Hopkins writes, “Reducing the amount of livestock will also be inevitable, as large-scale meat production is an absurd and unsustainable waste of resources.” Raising animals in factory farms—concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—and stuffing them with corn is absurd and cruel. But animals are necessary participants in biotic communities, helping to create the only sustainable food systems that have ever worked: they’re called forests, prairies, wetlands. In the aggregate, a living planet.
That same ideological attachment is the only excuse for the blindness to Cuban suffering and for the comments that 30 percent of Cubans are “still obese.” That figure is supposed to reassure us: see, nobody starves in this regime. What such comments betray is a frank ignorance about human biology. Eating a diet high in carbohydrates will make a large percentage of the population gain weight. Eating any sugar provokes a surge of insulin, to control the glucose levels in the bloodstream. The brain can only function within a narrow range of glucose levels. Insulin is an emergency response, sweeping sugar out of the blood and into the cells for storage. Insulin has been dubbed “the fat storage hormone” because this is one of its main functions. Its corresponding hormone, glucagon, is what unlocks that stored energy. But in the presence of insulin, glucagon can’t get to that energy. This is why poor people the world over tend to be fat: all they have to eat is cheap carbohydrate, which trigger fat storage. If the plant diet defenders knew the basics of human biology, that weight gain would be an obvious symptom of nutritional deficiencies, not evidence of their absence. Fat people are probably the most exhausted humans on the planet, as minute to minute their bodies cannot access the energy they need to function. Instead of understanding, they are faced with moral judgment and social disapproval across the political spectrum.
I don’t want any part of a culture that inflicts that kind of cruelty and humiliation on anyone. Shaun Chamberlin writes, “The perception of heavy meat eaters could be set to change in much the same way that the perception of [SUV] drivers has done.” Even if he was right that meat is inherently a problem, this attitude of shaming people for their simple animal hunger is repugnant. Half the population—the female half—already feels self-loathing over every mouthful, no matter what, and how little, is on their plates. Food is not an appropriate arena for that kind of negative social pressure, especially not in an image-based culture saturated in misogyny. Food should be a nourishing and nurturing part of our culture, including our culture of resistance. If Chamberlin wants an appropriate target for social shaming, he can start with men who rape and batter, and then move on to men who refuse to get vasectomies—that would be a better use of his moral approbation.
Getting past that ideological attachment would also bring clarity to the bewildered attitude that underlies many of these “radical” writers’ observations about dietary behavior. Accepting that humans have a biological need for nutrient-dense food, it’s no longer a surprise that when poor people get more money, they will buy more meat. They’re not actually satisfied on the nutritional wonders of a plant-based diet. Ideology is a thin gruel and imposing it on people who are chronically malnourished is not only morally suspect, it won’t work. The human animal will be fed. And if we had stuck to our original food, we would not have devoured the planet.
Restoring agricultural land to grasslands with appropriate ruminants has multiple benefits beyond carbon sequestration. It spells the end of feedlots and factory farming. It’s healthier for humans. It would eliminate essentially all fertilizer and pesticides, which would eliminate the dead zones at the mouths of rivers around globe. The one in the Gulf of Mexico, for instance, is the size of New Jersey. It would stop the catastrophic flooding that results from annual monocrops, flooding being the obvious outcome of destroying wetlands.
It also scales up instantly. Farmers can turn a profit the first year of grass-based farming. This is in dramatic contrast to growing corn, soy, and wheat, in which they can never make a profit. Right now six corporations, including Monsanto and Cargill, control the world food supply. Because of their monopoly, they can drive prices down below the cost of production. The only reason farmers stay in business is because the federal government—that would be the US taxpayers—make up the difference, which comes to billions of dollars a year. The farmers are essentially serfs to the grain cartels, and dependent on handouts from the federal government. But grass-fed beef and bison can liberate them in one year. We don’t even need government policy to get started on the most basic repair of our planet. We just need to create the demand and set up the infrastructure one town, one region at a time.
Land with appropriate rainfall can grow two steers per acre. But those steers can be raised in two ways. You can destroy the grasses, plant corn, and feed that corn to CAFO steers, making them and their human consumers sick in the process. Or you can skip the fossil fuels and the torture, the habitat destruction, the dead zones that used to be bays and oceans, and let those steer eat grass. Either method produces the same amount of food for humans, but one destroys the cycle of life while the other participates in it. I can tell you with certainty which food the red-legged frogs and the black-footed ferrets are voting for: let them eat grass.
Repairing those grasslands will also profoundly restore wildlife habitat to the animals that need a home. Even if the rest of the above reasons weren’t true, that repair would still be necessary. The acronym HANPP stands for “human appropriation of net primary production.” It’s a measure of how much of the biomass produced annually on earth is used by humans. Right now, 83 percent of the terrestrial biosphere is under direct human influence, and 36 percent of the earth’s bioproductive surface is completely dominated by humans. By any measure, that is vastly more than our share. Humans have no right to destroy everyone else’s home, 200 species at a time. It is our responsibility not just to stop it, but to fix it. Civilizations are, in the end, cultures of human entitlement, and they’ve taken all there is to take.
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