by DGR News Service | Jul 30, 2016 | ANALYSIS, Colonialism & Conquest, Repression at Home, The Problem: Civilization
Aric McBay
Originally published at inthewake.org
When some people hear that we want to “end civilization” they initially respond negatively, because of their positive associations with the word “civilization.” This piece is an attempt to clarify, define and describe what I mean by “civilization.”
One dictionary definition1 reads:
civilization
- a society in an advanced state of social development (eg, with complex legal and political and religious organizations); “the people slowly progressed from barbarism to civilization” [syn: civilisation]
- the social process whereby societies achieve civilization [syn: civilisation]
- a particular society at a particular time and place; “early Mayan civilization” [syn: culture, civilisation]
- the quality of excellence in thought and manners and taste; “a man of intellectual refinement”; “he is remembered for his generosity and civilization” [syn: refinement, civilisation]
The synonyms include “advancement,” “breeding,” “civility,” “cultivation,” “culture,” “development,” “edification,” “education,” “elevation,” “enlightenment,” “illumination,” “polish,” “progress,” and “refinement”. Of course. As Derrick Jensen asks, “can you imagine writers of dictionaries willingly classifying themselves as members of ‘a low, undeveloped, or backward state of human society’?”
In contrast, the antonyms of “civilization” include “barbarism,” “savagery,” “wilderness,” and “wildness.” These are the words that civilized people use to refer to those they view as being outside of civilization—in particular, indigenous peoples. “Barbarous,” as in “barbarian,” comes from a Greek word, meaning “non-Greek, foreign.” The word “savage” comes from the Latin “silvaticus” meaning “of the woods.” The origins seem harmless enough, but it’s very instructive to see how civilized people have used these words2:
barbarity
- The quality of being shockingly cruel and inhumane [syn: atrocity, atrociousness, barbarousness, heinousness]
- A brutal barbarous savage act [syn: brutality, barbarism, savagery]
savagery
- The quality or condition of being savage.
- An act of violent cruelty.
- Savage behavior or nature; barbarity.
These associations of cruelty with the uncivilized are, however, in glaring opposition to the historical record of interactions between civilized and indigenous peoples.
Let us take one of the most famous examples of “contact” between civilized and indigenous peoples. When Christopher Columbus first arrived in the “Americas” he noted that he was impressed by the indigenous peoples, writing in his journal that they had a “naked innocence … They are very gentle without knowing what evil is, without killing, without stealing.”
And so he decided “they will make excellent servants.”
In 1493, with the permission of the Spanish Crown, he appointed himself “viceroy and governor” of the Caribbean and the Americas. He installed himself on the island now divided between Haiti and the Dominican republic and began to systematically enslave and exterminate the indigenous population. (The Taino population of the island was not civilized, in contrast to the civilized Inca who the conquistadors also invaded in Central America.) Within three years he had managed to reduce the indigenous population from eight million to three million. By 1514 only 22,000 of the indigenous population remained, and after 1542 they were considered extinct.3
The tribute system, instituted by [Columbus] sometime in 1495, was a simple and brutal way of fulfilling the Spanish lust for gold while acknowledging the Spanish distaste for labor. Every Taino over the age of fourteen had to supply the rulers with a hawk’s bell of gold every three months (or, in gold-deficient areas, twenty-five pounds of spun cotton; those who did were given a token to wear around their necks as proof that they had made their payment; those did not were … “punished” – by having their hands cut off … and [being] left to bleed to death.4
More than 10,000 people were killed this way during Columbus’ time as governor. On countless occasions, these civilized invaders engaged in torture, rape, and massacres. The Spaniards
… made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow; or they opened up his bowels. They tore the babes from their mother’s breast by their feet and dashed their heads against the rocks … They spitted the bodies of other babes, together with their mothers and all who were before them, on their swords.5
On another occasion:
A Spaniard … suddenly drew his sword. Then the whole hundred drew theirs and began to rip open the bellies, to cut and kill – men, women, children and old folk, all of whom were seated off guard and frightened … And within two credos, not a man of them there remains alive. The Spaniards enter the large house nearby, for this was happening at its door, and in the same way, with cuts and stabs, began to kill as many as were found there, so that a stream of blood was running, as if a number of cows had perished.6
This pattern of one-way, unprovoked, inexcusable cruelty and viciousness occurred in countless interactions between civilized and indigenous people through history.
This phenomena is well-documented in excellent books including Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present, Kirkpatrick Sale’s The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. Farley Mowat’s books, especially Walking on the Land, The Deer People, and The Desperate People document this as well with an emphasis on the northern and arctic regions of North America.
There is also good information in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States. Eduardo Galeando’s incredible Memory of Fire trilogy covers this topic as well, with an emphasis on Latin America (this epic trilogy reviews numerous related injustices and revolts). Jack D Forbes’ book Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism and Terrorism is highly recommended. You can also find information in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, although I often disagree with the author’s premises and approach.
The same kind of attacks civilized people committed against indigenous peoples were also consistently perpetrated against non-human animal and plant species, who were wiped out (often deliberately) even when civilized people didn’t need them for food; simply as blood-sport. For further readings on this, check out great books like Farley Mowat’s extensive and crushing Sea of Slaughter, or Clive Ponting’s A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (which also examines precivilized history and European colonialism).
With this history of atrocity in mind, we should (if we haven’t already) cease using the propaganda definitions of civilized as “good” and uncivilized as “bad” and seek a more accurate and useful definition. Anthropologists and other thinkers have come up with a number of somewhat less biased definitions of civilization.
Nineteenth century English anthropologist E B Tylor defined civilization as life in cities that is organized by government and facilitated by scribes (which means the use of writing). In these societies, he noted, there is a resource “surplus”, which can be traded or taken (though war or exploitation) which allows for specialization in the cities.
Derrick Jensen, having recognized the serious flaws in the popular, dictionary definition of civilization, writes:
I would define a civilization much more precisely, and I believe more usefully, as a culture – that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts – that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (civilization, see civil: from civis, meaning citizen, from latin civitatis, meaning state or city), with cities being defined – so as to distinguish them from camps, villages, and so on – as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life.
Jensen also observes that because cities need to import these necessities of life and to grow, they must also create systems for the perpetual centralization of resources, yielding “an increasing region of unsustainability surrounded by an increasingly exploited countryside.”
Contemporary anthropologist John H Bodley writes: “The principle function of civilization is to organize overlapping social networks of ideological, political, economic, and military power that differentially benefit privileged households.”7 In other words, in civilization institutions like churches, corporations and militaries exist and are used to funnel resources and power to the rulers and the elite.
The twentieth century historian and sociologist Lewis Mumford wrote one of my favourite and most cutting and succinct definitions of civilization. He uses the term civilization
… to denote the group of institutions that first took form under kingship. Its chief features, constant in varying proportions throughout history, are the centralization of political power, the separation of classes, the lifetime division of labor, the mechanization of production, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak, and the universal introduction of slavery and forced labor for both industrial and military purposes.8
Taking various anthropological and historical definitions into account, we can come up with some common properties of civilizations (as opposed to indigenous groups).
- People live in permanent settlements, and a significant number of them in cities.
- The society depends on large-scale agriculture (which is needed to support dense, non-food-growing urban populations).
- The society has rulers and some form of “aristocracy” with centralized political, economic, and military power, who exist by exploiting the mass of people.
- The elite (and possibly others) use writing and numbers to keep track of commodities, the spoils of war, and so on.
- There is slavery and forced labour either by the direct use of physical violence, or by economic coercion and violence (through which people are systematically deprived of choices outside the wage economy).
- There are large armies and institutionalized warfare.
- Production is mechanized, either through physical machines or the use of humans as though they were machines (this point will be expanded on in other writings here soon).
- Large, complex institutions exist to mediate and control the behaviour of people, through as their learning and worldview (schools and churches), as well as their relationships with each other, with the unknown, and with the nature world (churches and organized religion).
Anthropologist Stanley Diamond recognized the common thread in all of these attributes when he wrote; “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home”.9
This common thread is control. Civilization is a culture of control. In civilizations, a small group of people controls a large group of people through the institutions of civilization. If they are beyond the frontier of that civilization, then that control will come in the form of armies and missionaries (be they religious or technical specialists). If the people to be controlled are inside of the cities, inside of civilization, then the control may come through domestic militaries (ie, police). However, it is likely cheaper and less overtly violent to condition of certain types of behaviour through religion, schools or media, and related means, than through the use of outright force (which requires a substantial investment in weapons, surveillance and labour).
That works very effectively in combination with economic and agricultural control. If you control the supply of food and other essentials of life, people have to do what you say or they die. People inside of cities inherently depend on food systems controlled by the rulers to survive, since the (commonly accepted) definition of a city is that the population is dense enough to require the importation of food.
For a higher degree of control, rulers have combined control of food and agriculture with conditioning that reinforces their supremacy. In the dominant, capitalist society, the rich control the supply of food and essentials, and the content of the media and the schools. The schools and workplaces act as a selection process: those who demonstrate their ability to cooperate with those in power by behaving properly and doing what they’re told at work and school have access to higher paying jobs involving less labour. Those who cannot or will not do what they’re told are excluded from easy access to food and essentials (by having access only to menial jobs), and must work very hard to survive, or become poor and/or homeless. People higher on this hierarchy are mostly spared the economic and physical violence imposed on those lower on the hierarchy. A highly rationalized system of exploitation like this helps to increase the efficiency of the system by reducing the chance of resistance or outright rebellion of the populace.
The media’s propaganda systems have most people convinced that this system is somehow “natural” or “necessary”—but of course, it is both completely artificial and a direct result of the actions of those in power (and the inactions of those who believe that they benefit from it, or are prevented from acting through violence or the threat of violence).
In contradiction to the idea that the dominant culture’s way of living is “natural,” human beings lived as small, ecological, participatory, equitable groups for more than 99% of human history. There are a number of excellent books and articles comparing indigenous societies to civilization:
These sources show there were healthy, equitable and ecological communities in the past, and that they were the norm for countless generations. It is civilization that is monstrous and aberrant.
Living inside of the controlling environment of civilization is an inherently traumatic experience, although the degree of trauma varies with personal circumstance and the amounts of privilege different people have in society. Derrick Jensen makes this point very well in A Language Older than Words (Context Books, 2000), and Chellis Glendinning covers it as well in My name is Chellis.
Endnotes
1. Definition of “civilization” is from WordNet R 2.0, 2003, Princeton University
2. Definitions of “barbarity” and “savagery” are from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, 2000, Houghton Mifflin Company.
3. I owe many of the sources in this section to the research of Ward Churchill. The figure of eight million is from chapter six of Essays in Population History, Vol I by Sherburn F Cook and Woodrow Borah (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). The figure of three million is from is from a survey at the time by Bartolome de Las Casas covered in J B Thatcher, Christopher Columbus, two volumes (New York: Putnam’s, 1903-1904) Vol 2, page 384 ff. They were considered extinct by the Spanish census at the time, which is summarized in Lewis Hanke’s The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philapelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1947) page 200 ff.
4. Sale, Kirkpatrick. The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1990) page 155.
5. de Las Casas, Bartolome. The Spanish Colonie: Brevisima revacion (New York: University Microfilms Reprint, 1966).
6. de Las Casas, Bartolome. Historia de las Indias, Vol 3, (Mexico City: Fondo Cultura Economica, 1951) chapter 29.
7. Bodley, John H, Cultural Anthropology: Tribes, States and the Global System. Mayfield, Mountain View, California, 2000.
8. Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Human Development, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1966, page 186.
9. Diamond, Stanley, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 1993, page 1.
Photo by Henry Chen on Unsplash
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 30, 2016 | Movement Building & Support
Why all permaculture designs should include supporting a culture of resistance
This essay originally appeared at Colorado Permaculture Guild
By Jennifer Murnan / Deep Green Resistance
Currently, permaculture operates in the realm of bright green environmental activism and seemingly believes that the current culture can be transformed. Why should permaculturalists choose to align themselves with the deep green environmentalists that support dismantling civilization in the belief that it is irredeemable, and, in fact, is destroying life on our planet?
Here are the few reasons that have occurred to me:
The Permaculture movement has always run counter to the beliefs and principles of global civilization. It views nature as a partner, a teacher, and a guide whom we honor and are totally dependent on. This is completely contrary to the cultural view of western civilization; that the natural world is here to serve us, to be used and abused at will, and that this abuse is justifiable.
Permaculture practice, by definition, is an attempt to depart from the model of exploitation and importation of resources necessitated by civilization. To live permanently in one place is the antithesis of the pattern exhibited repeatedly by civilizations. Civilizations cannot live in place. They violently import and exploit their human and natural resources, exhaust their ecosystems, experience population overshoot, and collapse leaving an impoverished land base in their wake. Western industrial civilization is currently playing this scenario out on a global scale. Permaculture not only cannot exist within the confines of civilization, it cannot coexist with a civilization that is devouring the world. I believe it is neither ethical or practical on the part of permaculturalists to attempt to do so.
Another reason lies in the common visions of the primacy of the earth shared by deep green and permaculture activists. The first ethic in permaculture is “Care for the Earth.” Without this basis, the second and third ethics, “Care for people,” and “Redistribute surplus to one’s needs,” are impossible. Healthy organisms produce a surplus as a way to feed and enrich the ecosystem in which they exist. Simply put, there is no health unless the earth is cared for first.
As Derrick Jensen states in Premise Sixteen of Endgame “The Earth is the point. It is primary. It is our home. It is everything.”
There are attitudes shared by Permaculture and the Deep Green movement. Permaculturalists believe in working with nature and not against it. Fostering a respect for all life is inherent in permaculture practice. Valuing people and their skills creates more diversity, creativity and productivity in permaculture and deep green communities. Alignment between Deep Green and the Permaculture movements is especially apparent in two permaculture design principles. Seeking to preserve, regenerate and extend all natural and traditional permanent landscapes is a goal of both communities. Preserving and increasing biodiversity of all types is recognized as being essential for survival by both Deep Greens and Permaculturalists.
A primary reason for permaculture to become part of a culture of resistance is that permaculture’s two guiding principles logically mandate dismantling civilization. The precautionary principle states that we should take seriously and act on any serious or destructive diagnosis unless it is proven erroneous.
Civilization has proven itself to be destructive to ecosystems since its inception. Western industrial civilization is causing the wholesale destruction of every ecosystem on Earth. Aric McBay writes, “The dominant culture eats entire biomes. No, that is too generous, because eating implies a natural biological relationship; This culture doesn’t just consume ecosystems, it obliterates them, it murders them, one after another. This culture is a ecological serial killer, and it’s long past time we recognize the pattern.”
A large scale and effective response to this destruction is necessary. The tactics of the environmental movement, up to this point have been insufficient. We are losing. It is time to change our strategy. This is why the Deep Green movement is advocating for all tactics to be considered as a means to stop the murder of the Earth. This includes, but is not limited to, practicing permaculture, legislation, legal action, civil-disobedience, and industrial sabotage.
There are problems with holding the permaculture movement as the sole solution to global destruction. While transitioning to sustainability in our personal lives is important, even more important is confronting and dismantling the oppressive systems of power that promote unsustainability, exploitation and injustice on a global scale. In fact, if these systems are left in place, the gains made by the practice of permaculture will be washed away in civilization’s tidal wave of destruction.
“Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral and stupid. Sustainability, morality and intelligence (as well as justice) require the dismantling of any such economic or social system or at the very least disallowing it from damaging your landbase,” said Derrick Jensen.
The second guiding principle of permaculture, “intergenerational equity,” also necessitates immediate action in response to the destructive force of civilization. This principle states that future generations have the same rights as we do to food, clean air, water and resources. This statement applies to all humans and non-humans equally. On a daily basis entire species are being eliminated from this planet as result of the activities of industrial civilization. “intergenerational equity” for them has ceased to exist and every day this destruction continues more species go extinct. Allowing this to continue is unconscionable.
Permaculture is based on close observation of the natural world, and I believe can only realize its full potential in a human community that acknowledges the natural laws of its land base as primary. Practicing permaculture in any context other than this necessitates subverting our principles and betraying everything that nurtures and sustains us, all that is sacred, our living earth. We can only truly belong in a culture of resistance.
Both permaculturalists and deep greens know that the earth is everything, that there is no greater good than this planet, than life itself. We owe her everything and without her, we die.
This is it, we need each other, everyone, every tactic we can muster in defense of the earth.
We have never been able to afford civilization.
Lierre Keith: “The task of an activist is not to navigate around systems of oppression with as much personal integrity as possible. It’s to bring those systems down.”
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 6, 2013 | Alienation & Mental Health
By Vincent Kelley / Deep Green Resistance Great Plains & Eugene
Civilization’s continuance requires widespread denial among the populace of civilized nations. The denial of the inherent unsustainability and violence of civilization is, for example, pivotal in the conventional understanding of civilized existence as the most “advanced” or “highest” form of societal organization. While denial of the egregious material consequences of civilization is the most blatant example of this culture’s sickness, there’s an intuitive sense among those who are aware of civilization’s destructive nature that there are deeper socio-psychological problems in the substratum of civilized life. Although often undetected, the denial of impermanence is one of the strongest underlying forces behind civilization’s rapacity and attendant destructiveness.
Impermanence is inherent to existence regardless of sociocultural arrangements, present in cyclical indigenous cultures and contemporary linear industrial civilization alike. Despite this undeniable fact, the way a culture relates to impermanence plays a large part in determining its sustainability, the level of violence it perpetuates, and the internal well-being of its members.
One option is to accept and even embrace the basic uncertainty of an impermanent world. We may get sick at any time. We will certainty grow old. And, incontrovertibly, we will experience the most conspicuous and mysterious of impermanences: death. Another option is to tell ourselves that impermanence doesn’t exist. We can decide to fear old age, illness, and death. [2] as the greatest of horrors and center our morality around what historian Faisal Devji calls “life as an absolute value.” [3] Since death is an impermanence that cannot be avoided, it is worth reflecting further on its place in society and, in turn, our individual psychologies.
Just as patriarchy is viewed by some feminist philosophers, such as Ynestra King, as the root hierarchy from which all other forms of domination in society flow [4] a fear of fluidity, change, and passing away in life can often be traced back to a deep fear of death itself. Indeed, we sometimes speak of something “dying” in our life as it fades away. The civilized response to death, and all impermanence for that matter, is to resist it with all of one’s might. As activist and philosopher Charles Eisenstein notes, “[t]his is most obvious in our medical system, of course, in which death is considered the ultimate ‘negative outcome,’ to which even prolonged agony is preferable.” [5]
But if impermanence is part of life, and death is the paragon of impermanence, why can’t death also be seen as a part of life? Some cultures—clearly not our own—have understood death in this light. Indigenous scholar Jack Forbes points out that “'[s]oil fertility’ is, in large part, nothing but a measure of the extent to which a particular bit of ground is saturated with our dead ancestors and relatives,” and concludes that “[d]eath, then, is a necessary part of life.” [6] More concretely, we can observe this phenomenon when a nurse log facilitates the growth of burgeoning seedlings as itself decays. Going even further, Yaqui nagualli Juan Matus invites us to conceive of our death as a sort of gift for another, even if this other is only a micro-organism. [7]
So, as we can see, death—and impermanence more broadly—is inevitable personally and is even inextricably linked to life itself. However, attitudes towards death can be radically divergent, and, as I hope to demonstrate, tremendously consequential in our relationship to ourselves and the natural world.
One of the repercussions of the denial of impermanence is the privileging of preservation over experience itself. One need not look far to see the copious examples of this obsession in our culture. Often, taking pictures on a hike, for example, takes precedence over the experience of hiking itself. And, in some cases, the picture taking can even set up a wall of separation between “us” and “nature,” commodifying the latter while attempting to preserve a static conception of the former as a rigid identity. What about music? Do you ever find yourself at a concert thinking more about purchasing the band’s CD or looking them up on the internet than experiencing the music as it manifests around you? It’s not that these efforts to capture a fleeting moment are inherently wrong; they do become constricting, however, when they take priority over present-moment experience itself.
Indeed, when we valorize creation and preservation over decay and ephemerality—failing to see their inseparability—we are left in an existential bind where “making our mark,” so to speak, in an often physical manner, seems like the only sensible and worthwhile course of action. The drive to make a mark springs from a cultural belief that our value is dependent upon leaving something behind that will make us worthy in the eyes of society after we die, or at least place us in the category of people who worked for the cause of civilizational progress—bowing at the alter of the off limits idol of “human innovation.”
Hence, to have our very existence affirmed we are compelled to create something “permanent” as a testament to our worth. This mark-making often takes the form of environmental degradation and imperial conquest. We create toxic chemicals that will outlive us all, erect dams that alter the Earth’s orbit [8] and are more concerned about the future strength of the United States military, and the propagation of Western Civilization to “backwards” parts of the globe, than the availability of clean air and potable water. The paradox of all of this is that, in an effort to preserve, we destroy. Our fear of the impermanence inherent in existence has led us to create that which destroys and fail to realize the consequences as the pattern plays out time and time again.
Eisenstein writes that “[t]he whole American program now is to insulate oneself as much as possible from death—to achieve ‘security.’” [9] Concomitant with this false sense of security is a false sense of control. The desire for control is a result of denying impermanence. As an alternative to this denial, we can acknowledge that the world is full of ever-changing, largely unpredictable, and, above all, endlessly developing then decaying phenomena. Only then can the control imperative fall away, relegated to history as the ignorant, destructive, and ultimately self-defeating ideology that it is. Take technology. One of the alluring aspects of technology is the ability to control previously uncontrollable phenomena. But for us to be able to control something through technology, it’s presupposed that we have control over technology.
This is a misconception. Indeed, philosopher Tad Beckman asserts, in his reading of Martin Heidegger’s writings on technology, that technology is not merely “a complex of contrivances and technical skills, put forth by human activity and developed as means to our ends,” but instead is, in essence, “a vast system of organization which encompasses us rather than standing objectively and passively ready for our direction and control.” It is “an autonomous organizing activity within which humans themselves are organized.”[10] And, as Heidegger himself points out in The Question Concerning Technology, “the will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.” [11]
The same can be said of civilization as a whole. With its growth imperative it takes on an existence in itself within which humans must function. Our desire to control increases, paradoxically, in proportion to the increase of civilization’s control of our very existence. As cities grow and encompass the globe, dictating the terms of our existence, the surveillance state and the extirpation of biomes become all the more essential—two examples of this culture’s rapacious crusade of domination. In the process, the fallacy of infinite growth on a finite planet is implanted into our worldview, further reinforcing our denial of impermanence. In other words, the avariciousness inherent in the structure of civilization is matched by that of civilized humans, who have created a way of living which provides the illusion of control as it uncontrollably metastasizes across the planet.
The denial of impermanence is not only toxic to our individual selves, but also to those beings with which we enter into relationships, human and nonhuman, and the planet as a whole. At the root of our insecurity with impermanence is a fear, and, in the end, a misunderstanding of death, which is, in reality, a part of life. This leads us to devalue present-moment experience as we grasp at preservation and replicability. Finally, our faith in the religion of civilization has led us to become inextricably ensnared in civilization’s controlling trap, unable to see through the shadow of its edifices. Reflecting on the impermanence in our lives, and in the life of the decaying culture within which we live, is therefore critical in our struggle to engender a way of living that is free from the greed, exploitation, and devastation of civilization.
Notes
[1 ] See Derrick Jensen, Endgame: The Problem of Civilization (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), 40-41 for a discussion of cyclical vs. linear cultures.
[2] My invocation of the “old age, illness, and death” example is derived from Buddhist teachings. See for example the Upajjhatthana Sutta (AN 5.57): http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an05/an05.057.than.html.
[3] Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (United States: Harvard, 2012), 186.
[4] Andrew Brenna and Yeuk-Sze Lo, “Environmental Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/ethics-environmental/
[5] Charles Eisenstein, “The Ethics of Eating Meat: A Radical View,” Weston A. Price Foundation (June 30, 2002), at http://www.westonaprice.org/health-issues/ethics-of-eating-meat.
[6] Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and other Cannibals (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008 (1979)), 10-11.
[7] Ibid., 10.
[8] Malcolm W. Browne, “Dams for Water Supply Are Altering Earth’s Orbit, Expert Says,” New York Times (March 3, 1996), at http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/03/news/dams-for-water-supply-are-altering-earth-s-orbit-expert-says.html.
[9] Eisenstein, loc. cit.
[10] Tad Beckman, “Martin Heidegger and Environmental Ethics,” Harvey Mudd College (2000).
[11] Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper, 1977 (1954), 5. I should note that Heidegger was critiquing technology as a “mode of Being-in-the-world,” not in the sense of “the machines and devices of the modern age,” per se (Michael Wheeler, “Martin Heidegger,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/heidegger/.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 12, 2013 | Agriculture, Building Alternatives, Climate Change
By Joshua Headley / Deep Green Resistance New York
In no other industry today is it more obvious to see the culmination of affects of social, political, economic, and ecological instability than in the global production of food. As a defining characteristic of civilization itself, it is no wonder why scientists today are closely monitoring the industrial agricultural system and its ability (or lack thereof) to meet the demands of an expanding global population.
Amidst soil degradation, resource depletion, rising global temperatures, severe climate disruptions such as floods and droughts, ocean acidification, rapidly decreasing biodiversity, and the threat of irreversible climatic change, food production is perhaps more vulnerable today than ever in our history. Currently, as many as 2 billion people are estimated to be living in hunger – but that number is set to dramatically escalate, creating a reality in which massive starvation, on an inconceivable scale, is inevitable.
With these converging crises, we can readily see within agriculture and food production that our global industrial civilization is experiencing a decline in complexity that it cannot adequately remediate, thus increasing our vulnerability to collapse. Industrial agriculture has reached the point of declining marginal returns – there may be years of fluctuation in global food production but we are unlikely to ever reach peak levels again in the foreseeable future.
While often articulated that technological innovation could present near-term solutions, advocates of this thought tend to forget almost completely the various contributing factors to declining returns that cannot be resolved in such a manner. There is also much evidence, within agriculture’s own history, that a given technology that has the potential to increase yields and production (such as the advent of the plow or discovery of oil) tends to, over time, actually reduce that potential and significantly escalate the problem.
Peak Soil
A largely overlooked problem is soil fertility. [1] A civilization dependent on agriculture can only “sustain” itself and “progress,” for as long as the landbase and soil on which it depends can continue to thrive.
The landscape of the world today should act as a blatant reminder of this fact. What comes to mind when you think of Iraq? Cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touches the ground? “The Fertile Crescent,” as this region is also known, is the cradle of civilization and if we take a look at it today we can quickly deduce that overexploitation of the land and soil is inherent to this way of life. The Sahara Desert also serves as a pressing example – a region once used by the Roman Empire for food cultivation and production.
But this problem has not escaped our modern industrial civilization either, even despite some technological advances that have been successful at concealing it. The only thing we have genuinely been “successful” at is postponing the inevitable.
Currently, industrial agriculture depletes the soil about a millimeter per year, which is ten times greater than the rate of soil formation. Over the last century, we have solved this problem by increasing the amount of land under cultivation and by the use of fertilizers, pesticides, and crop varieties.
Industrial civilization has expanded so greatly, however, that we currently already use most of the world’s arable land for agriculture. To solve the problems of peak soil today, as we have previously, would require doubling the land currently used for cultivation at the cost of some of the worlds last remaining forests and grasslands – most notably the Amazon and the Sahel. Not only is this option impractical, given the current state of the climate, it is wholly insane.
Another problem we face today is that more than a half-century of reliance on fertilizers and pesticides has severely reduced the level of organic matter in the soil. An advance in chemical fertilizers and/or genetic engineering of crops, while promising boosted yields in the near-term, will only further delay the problem while at the same time possibly introducing even greater health risks and other unforeseen consequences.
Decreasing Yields & Reserve Stocks
According to an Earth Policy Institute report in January, global grain harvests and stocks fell dangerously low in 2012 with total grain production down 75 million tons from the record year before. [2] Most of this decrease in production occurred as a result of the devastating drought that affected nearly every major agricultural region in the world. The United States – the largest producer of corn (the world’s largest crop) – has yet to fully recover from the drought last year and this is a cause for major concern.
Overall, global grain consumption last year exceeded global production requiring a large dependence on the world’s diminishing reserve stocks. And this isn’t the first time it has happened – 8 out of the last 13 years have seen consumption exceed production. In an escalating ecological crisis this is likely to be the new “normal.” This fact, in itself, is a strong indication that industrial civilization is dangerously vulnerable to collapse.
The issue here is two-fold: resource scarcity (industrial agriculture requires fossil fuels in every step of the process), soil degradation, and climate disruptions (droughts, floods, etc.) are severely reducing the yields of industrial agriculture; at the same time (and precisely because of those facts), we are becoming increasingly reliant on carryover reserve stocks of grains to meet current demands thus creating a situation in which we have little to no capacity to rebuild those stocks.
As Joseph Tainter describes in The Collapse of Complex Societies, a society becomes vulnerable to collapse when investment in complexity begins to yield a declining marginal return. Stress and perturbation are common (and constant) features of all complex societies and they are precisely organized at high levels of complexity in order to deal with those problems. However, major, unexpected stress surges (which do occur given enough time) require the society to have some kind of net reserve, such as excess productive capacities or hoarded surpluses – without such a reserve, massive perturbations cannot be accommodated. He continues:
“Excess productive capacity will at some point be used up, and accumulated surpluses allocated to current operating needs. There is, then, little or no surplus with which to counter major adversities. Unexpected stress surges must be dealt with out of the current operating budget, often ineffectually, and always to the detriment of the system as a whole. Even if the stress is successfully met, the society is weakened in the process, and made even more vulnerable to the next crisis. Once a complex society develops the vulnerabilities of declining marginal returns, collapse may merely require sufficient passage of time to render probable the occurrence of an insurmountable calamity.” [3]
Current global reserve stocks of grains stand at approximately 423 million tons, enough to cover 68 days of consumption. As population and consumption levels continue to rise while productive capacities fall, we will be more and more dependent on these shrinking reserves making our ability to address future stresses to the system significantly low.
Disappearance of the Arctic Sea Ice
One such “insurmountable calamity,” may be quickly on the horizon. This week, senior US government officials were briefed at the White House on the danger of an ice-free Arctic in the summer within two years. One of the leading scientists advising the officials is marine scientist Professor Carlos Duante, who warned in early April:
“The Arctic situation is snowballing: dangerous changes in the Arctic derived from accumulated anthropogenic green house gases lead to more activities conducive to further greenhouse gas emissions. This situation has the momentum of a runaway train.” [4]
Over the last few years, the excessive melting occurring in the Arctic region due to rising global temperatures has altered the jet stream over North America, Europe, and Russia leading to the very unprecedented heat waves and droughts responsible for most of the declining returns in agricultural production in recent years. As the warming and melting continue, these extreme weather events will exponentially get worse. In addition, the melting of the sea ice will significantly raise sea level with the potential to displace more than 400 million people.
The UK-based Arctic Methane Emergency Group recently released a public statement also indicating:
“The weather extremes from last year are causing real problems for farmers, not only in the UK, but in the US and many grain-producing countries. World food production can be expected to decline, with mass starvation inevitable. The price of food will rise inexorably, producing global unrest and making food security even more of an issue.” [5]
Social, Political, and Economic Instability
No civilization can avoid collapse if it fails to feed its population, largely because continued pressures on the system will result in the disintegration of central control as global conflicts arise over scarce necessities. [6] This process can occur rapidly and/or through a gradual breakdown. A likely scenario of rapid collapse would be the breakout of a small regional nuclear war – such as between Pakistan and India – which would create a “nuclear winter” with massive global consequences. If that could be avoided, then the threat of collapse will likely be more gradual through the continued decrease of marginal returns on food and essential services.
As these crises continue to increase in frequency and severity, their convergences will usher in a period of prolonged global unrest. [7] This was directly seen as a result of the 2007-08 grain crisis in which many countries restricted exports, prices skyrocketed, and food riots broke out in dozens of countries. Many of those countries were located within the Middle East and are credited as the fundamental circumstances that gave way to the Arab Spring in 2011.
This year the food price index is currently at 210 – a level believed to be the threshold beyond which civil unrest is probable. Further, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization is already reporting record high prices for dairy, meat, sugar and cereals and also warns – due to the reduced grain stocks from last year’s droughts – that prices can be expected to increase later this year as well.
Another factor driving up the costs of food is the price of oil. Because the entire industrial agriculture process requires the use of fossil fuels, the high price of oil results in a corresponding rise in the price of food. The future of oil production and whether we have reached “peak oil” may still be a matter of contention for some, but the increasing reliance on extreme energy processes (tar sands, hydraulic fracturing, mountaintop removal, etc.) is a blatant indication that the days of cheap petroleum are over. This implies that costs for energy extraction, and therefore the price of oil and food, will only continue to rise dramatically in the foreseeable future.
As the struggle for resources and security escalates, governments around the world will rely more heavily upon totalitarian forms of control and reinforcement of order, especially as civil unrest becomes more common and outside threats with other countries intensify. However, this is also likely to be matched by an increase in resistance to the demands of the socio-political-economic hierarchies.
Emerging Alternatives
As system disruptions continue to occur and food and other essential resources become scarcer, remaining populations will have to become locally self-sufficient to a degree not seen for several generations. The need for restructuring the way in which our communities have access to food and water is greater now than perhaps ever before – and there are more than a few examples being built around the world right now.
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of hearing a presentation at the Ecosocialist Conference in NYC on precisely these alternatives. Speaking on a panel entitled “Agriculture and Food: Sustainable or Profitable?” was David Barkin, a Distinguished Professor at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City, who has been collaborating with thousands of communities in Mexico and Latin America involved in constructing post-capitalist societies. [8]
In his presentation he spoke greatly about local groups – comprising of 30,000-50,000 people each, together being more than 130 million people – throughout Mexico and Latin America that are rebuilding their societies based on five principles that were written by the communities themselves and then systematized.
- Self-management; through a process of participatory democracy
- Solidarity; through rejecting the notion of wage-labor and re-organizing the entire work process
- Self-sufficiency; which includes contacts and exchanges between many organizations so that you are not limited to the resource or climate-base of a single community but a development of trade networks
- Diversification
- Sustainable regional resource management; most communities in Mexico and Latin American define a region based on the natural definition of watersheds, although that may not be the most applicable natural definition in other parts of the world
He also spoke of groups such as the EZLN as examples of groups building alternative models – not models that are working at a super-structural level to change government policy, but models that give power and control directly to the community for the purposes of self-sufficiency and sustainability.
In Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador there is a phrase “El Buen Vivir” or “Sumak Kawsay,” – a cosmology that is said to come from indigenous cultures – that is actually informing how communities are rebuilding. It is proposed to promote sustainable relationships with nature and for communities to be less consumerist.
In addition to radically rebuilding our communities so that they exist not only wholly independent from industrial agriculture but also in harmony with the natural world, we need to build a greater resistance movement against industrial infrastructure that continues to threaten the very possibility of people all over the world from taking these steps.
Mining and its infrastructure, which is required for the development of solar panels and wind turbines, uses gigantic volumes of water for it to work. Because of this, in many parts of Mexico (where North American mining companies currently have concessions on 40% of the country’s land area) and Latin America, mining is a question of taking water away from agriculture. The struggle against mining is not just a struggle against environmental destruction, but it is a struggle for food.
The same can be said of foreign investments in wind turbine farms in Mexico and Puerto Rico, where local communities actually oppose these “renewable energy” infrastructures because they not only degrade the environment but also because it steals land that might otherwise be used for the direct needs of the locality.
Those of us in the most developed and industrialized nations need to radically alter our conceptions of sustainability and what is possible – a process that should be guided and influenced by those currently most vulnerable. Many well-meaning activists in the West tend to take perspectives that never really question our own standard of living – a standard of living David Barkin so rightfully articulated as an abomination.
We tend to favor “green energy” projects and the further development and industrialization of the “Global South” so that we don’t fundamentally have to make any sacrifices ourselves. Embedded in these perspectives are the racist and colonialist ideas that less developed countries in the world either don’t know what they want or don’t have the ability to create what they want themselves and thus need the technology and advances of the West to save them.
David Barkin’s presentation was a blatant reminder that this is far from the truth. Right now, in Mexico and Latin America, there are communities directly involved in building their own alternatives. And these aren’t communities of just a few hundred people; these aren’t small, insignificant projects. These are communities as large as 50,000 people each – an entire network of more than 130 million people – directly struggling and fighting for a radically different future.
We have much to learn and our time is running out. As industrial agriculture’s ability to produce food for the global population continues to decline, our resistance and our alternatives must escalate in lockstep – and there’s no reason for us to continue to ignore the alternative models and successes of our brothers and sisters in the rest of the world.
References
[1] Peak Soil
http://newint.org/features/2008/12/01/soil-depletion/
[2] Earth Policy Institute, Grain Harvest
http://www.earth-policy.org/indicators/C54/grain_2013
[3] Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies
[4] White House Warned on Imminent Arctic Ice Death Spiral
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/may/02/white-house-arctic-ice-death-spiral
[5] Governments must put two and two together, and pull out all stops to save the Arctic sea ice or we will starve
http://www.ameg.me/index.php/2-ameg/49-announcement-governments-must-put-two-and-two-together-and-pull-out-all-stops-to-save-the-arctic-sea-ice-or-we-will-starve
[6] Can a Collapse of Global Civilization Be Avoided?
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1754/20122845.full#sec-4
[7] Why Food Riots are Likely to Become the New Normal
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2013/mar/06/food-riots-new-normal
[8] David Barkin – Ecosocialist Conference
http://youtu.be/6nJesyB5bdI?t=23m35s
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 11, 2013 | Alienation & Mental Health
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin
The dominant culture, industrial civilization, is insane. Literally. It is in direct opposition to life. We can see this by looking from any angle: an economic system based on the infinite consumption of living beings; the spiritual sickness that allows clear-cuts, rape, conquest, and oceanic dead-zones; social rewards for those who can fuck others over most efficiently. as the world burns, the destructiveness of this culture has become too clear for debate.
Consuming the living and converting them into dead products is essential to the functioning of civilization. indeed, it is the meaning of the word “production”. civilization as a whole can be defined by its material functioning: a culture based on the growth of cities, with cities being defined as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life. it can also be described as a system that socially rewards (and requires) exploitation, domination, and atrocity. Both definitions reveal civilization’s fundamental death urge.
What is killed by civilization includes the psyches and souls of human beings. Consider, for example, the global scale of people struggling with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Bi-Polar Disorder (at least two million people in the United States alone), Depression, and Anxiety. Consider also lives wasted in wage slavery, addiction, and apathy. Some know mental struggle more intimately than others, but the dominant culture makes all of its members sick.
This book is for those who feel, in their bones, the struggle of living in such a culture, and for those who love life and want to fight back. The numerous activists, artists, and writers who have contributed to this book also surely know this struggle. Included here is a compilation of personal stories, essays, artwork, and maps for healing, all pointing towards, and developing an answer to, this general question: what does it mean to be sane in an insane culture?
Download Mental Health & Civilization: A Compilation
