That the real world is the source of our own lives, and the lives of others. A weakened planet is less capable of supporting life, human or otherwise. Thus the health of the real world is primary, more important than any social or economic system, because all social or economic systems are dependent upon a living planet: without a living planet you don’t have any social or economic systems whatsoever. It is self-evident that to value a social system that harms the planet’s capacity to support life over life itself is literally insane, in terms of being out of touch with physical reality.
That any way of life based on the use of nonrenewable resources is by definition not sustainable.
That any way of life based on the hyperexploitation of renewable resources is by definition not sustainable: if, for example, there are fewer salmon return every year, eventually there will be none. This means that for a way of life to be sustainable, it must not harm native communities: native prairies, native forests, native fisheries, and so on.
That the real world is interdependent, such that harm done to rivers harms those humans and nonhumans whose lives depend on these rivers, harms forests and prairies and wetlands surrounding these rivers, harms the oceans into which these rivers flow. Harm done to mountains harms rivers flowing through them. Harm done to oceans harms everyone directly or indirectly connected to them.
That you cannot argue with physics. If you burn carbon-based fuels, this carbon will go into the air, and have effects in the real world.
That creating and releasing poisons into the world will poison humans and nonhumans.
That no one, no matter now rich or powerful, should be allowed to create poisons for which there is no antidote.
That no one, no matter how rich or powerful, should be allowed to create messes that cannot be cleaned up.
That no one, no matter how rich or powerful, should be allowed to destroy places humans or nonhumans need to survive.
That no one, no matter how rich or powerful, should be allowed to drive human cultures or nonhuman species extinct.
That reality trumps all belief systems: what you believe is not nearly so important as what is real.
That on a finite planet you cannot have an economy based on or requiring growth. At least you cannot have one and expect to either have a planet or a future.
That the current way of life is not sustainable, and will collapse. The only real questions are what will be left of the world after that collapse, and how bad things will be for the humans and nonhumans who come after. We hold it as self-evident that we should do all that we can to make sure that as much of the real, physical world remains intact until the collapse of the current system, and that humans and nonhumans should be as prepared as possible for this collapse.
That the health of local economies are more important than the health of a global economy.
That a global economy should not be allowed to harm local economies or landbases.
That corporations are not living beings. They are certainly not human beings.
That corporations do not in any real sense exist. They are legal fictions. Limited liability corporations are institutions created explicitly to separate humans from the effects of their actions—making them, by definition, inhuman and inhumane. To the degree that we desire to live in a human and humane world—and, really, to the degree that we wish to survive—limited liability corporations need to be eliminated.
That the health of human and nonhuman communities are more important than the profits of corporations.
We hold it as self-evident, as the Declaration of Independence states, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it. . . .” Further, we hold it as self-evident that it would be more precise to say that it is not the Right of the People, nor even their responsibility, but instead something more like breathing—something that if we fail to do we die. If we as a People fail to rid our communities of destructive institutions, those institutions will destroy our communities. And if we in our communities cannot provide meaningful and nondestructive ways for people to gain food, clothing, and shelter then we must recognize it’s not just specific destructive institutions but the entire economic system that is pushing the natural world past breaking points. Capitalism is killing the planet. Industrial civilization is killing the planet. Once we’ve recognized the destructiveness of capitalism and industrial civilization—both of which are based on systematically converting a living planet into dead commodities—we’ve no choice, unless we wish to sign our own and our children’s death warrants, but to fight for all we’re worth and in every way we can to overturn it.
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Here is a list of our initial demands. When these demands are met, we will have more, and then more, until we are living sustainably in a just society. In each case, if these demands are not met, we will, because we do not wish to sign our own and our children’s death warrants, put them in place ourselves.
We demand that:
Communities, including nonhuman communities, be immediately granted full legal and moral rights.
Corporations be immediately stripped of their personhood, no longer be considered as persons under the law.
Limited liability corporations be immediately stripped of their limited liability protection. If someone wants to perpetrate some action for which there is great risk to others, this person should be prepared to assume this risk him- or herself.
Those whose economic activities cause great harm—including great harm to the real, physical world—be punished commensurate with their harm. So long as prisons and the death penalty exist, Tony Hayward of BP and Don Blankenship of Massey Coal, to provide two examples among many, should face the death penalty or life in prison without parole for murder, both of human beings and of landbases. The same can be said for many others, including those associated with these specific murders and thefts, and including those associated with many other murders and thefts.
Environmental Crimes Tribunals be immediately put in place to try those who have significantly harmed the real, physical world. These tribunals will have force of law and will impose punishment commensurate with the harm caused to the public and to the real world.
The United States immediately withdraw from NAFTA, DR-CAFTA, and other so-called “free trade agreements” (if it really is “free trade,” then why do they need the military and police to enforce it?) as these cause immeasurable and irreparable harm to local economies in the United States and abroad, and to the real, physical world. They cause grievous harm to working people in the United States and elsewhere. Committees should be formed to determine whether to try those who signed on to NAFTA for subverting United States sovereignty, and for Crimes Against Humanity for the deaths caused by these so-called free trade agreements.
The United States remove all support for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Both of these organizations cause immeasurable and irreparable harm to local economies in the United States and abroad, and to the real, physical world. They cause grievous harm to working people in the United States and elsewhere.
The United States recognize that it is founded on land stolen from indigenous peoples. We demand a four stage process to rectify this ongoing atrocity. The first stage consists of immediately overturning the relevant parts of the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. M’Intosh, which includes such rationalizations for murder and theft as, “However extravagant the pretension of converting the discovery of an inhabited country into conquest may appear; if the principle has been asserted in the first instance, and afterwards sustained; if a country has been acquired and held under it; if the property of the great mass of the community originates in it, it becomes the law of the land, and cannot be questioned.” We demand that this pretense, this principle, not only be questioned but rejected. The second is that all lands for which the United States government cannot establish legal title through treaty must immediately be returned to those peoples from whom it was stolen. Large scale landowners, those with over 640 acres, must immediately return all lands over 640 acres to their original and rightful inhabitants. Small scale landowners, those with title to 640 acres or less, who are “innocent purchasers” may retain title to their land (and this same is true for the primary 640 acres of larger landowners), but may not convey this title to others, and on their deaths it passes back to the original and rightful inhabitants. The third phase is for the United States government to pay reparations to those whose land they have taken commensurate with the harm they have caused. The fourth phase is for each and every treaty between the United States government and sovereign indigenous nations to be revisited, with an eye toward determining whether the treaties were signed under physical, emotional, economic, or military duress and whether these treaties have been violated. In either of these cases the wrongs must be redressed, once again commensurate with the harm these wrongs have caused.
The United States government will provide reparations to those whose families have been harmed by chattel slavery, commensurate with the harm caused.
Rivers be restored. There are more than 2 million dams in the United States, more than 60,000 dams over thirteen feet tall and over 70,000 dams over six and a half feet tall. Dams kill rivers. If we removed one of these 70,000 dams each day, it would take 200 years to get rid of them all. Salmon don’t have that time. Sturgeon don’t have that time. We demand that no more dams be built, and we demand the removal of five of those 70,000 dams per day over the next forty years, beginning one year from today. Remember, physical reality is more important than your belief system.
Native prairies, wetlands, and forests be restored, at a rate of five percent per year. Please note that tree farms or “forests” managed for timber are not the same as native forests, any more than lawns or corn fields are prairies, and any more than concrete sluices are wetlands. Please note also that if all of the prairies and forests east of the Mississippi River were restored, the United States could be a net carbon sink within five years, even without reducing carbon emissions.
An immediate end to clearcutting, “leave tree,” “seed tree,” “shelter tree” and all other “even age management” techniques, no matter what they are called, and no matter what rationales are put forward by the timber industry and the government. All remaining native forests are immediately and completely protected.
An immediate end to destruction of prairies and wetlands. All remaining prairies and wetlands are immediately protected.
The United States government immediately begin strict enforcement of the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and other acts aimed at protecting the real, physical world. All programs associated with these Acts must be fully funded. This includes the immediate designation of Critical Habitat for all species on the wait list.
Each year the United States must survey all endangered species to ascertain if they are increasing in number and range. If not, the United States government will do what is required to make sure they do.
The United States government do whatever is necessary to make sure that there are fewer toxins in every mother’s breast milk every year than the year before, and that there are fewer carcinogens in every stream every year than the year before.
The United States government do whatever is necessary to make sure that there are more migratory songbirds every year than the year before, that there are more native fish every year than the year before, more native reptiles and amphibians, and so on.
Immediate closure of all US military bases on foreign soil. All US military personnel are to be immediately brought home.
An immediate ban on the direct or indirect use of mercenaries (“military contractors”) by the US government and all associated entities.
A reduction in the US military budget by 20 per year, until it reaches 20 percent of its current size. Then it will be maintained at no larger than that except in case of a war that is declared only by a direct vote of more than 50 percent of US citizens (and to last only as long as 50 percent of US citizens back it). This will provide the “peace dividend” politicians lyingly promised us back when the Soviet Union collapsed, and will balance the US budget and more than pay for all necessary domestic programs.
The United States officially recognize that capitalism is based on subsidies, or as Dwayne Andreas, former CEO of ADM said, “There isn’t one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market. Not one! The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.” He’s right. For example, commercial fishing fleets worldwide receive more in subsidies than the entire value of their catch. Timber corporations, oil corporations, banks, would all collapse immediately without massive government subsidies and bailouts. Therefore, we demand that the United States government stop subsidizing environmentally and socially destructive activities, and shift those same subsidies into activities that restore the real, physical, world and that promote local self-sufficiency and vibrant local economies. Instead of subsidizing deforestation, subsidize reforestation. Instead of subsidizing the oil industry, subsidize relocalization. Instead of subsidizing fisheries depletion, subsidize fisheries restoration. Instead of subsidizing plastics production, subsidize cleaning plastics from the ocean. Instead of subsidizing the production of toxics by the chemical industries, subsidize the cleaning up of these toxics, both from our bodies and from the rest of the real, physical world.
Scientific consensus is that to prevent even more catastrophic climate change than we and the rest of the world already face, net carbon emissions must be reduced by 80 percent. Because we wish to continue to live on a habitable planet, we demand a carbon reduction of 20 percent of current emissions per year over the next four years.
The enshrinement in law of the right for workers to collectively bargain. In case of strikes, if police are brought in at all, it must be to protect the right of workers to strike. If police force anyone to come to terms, they must force the capitalists.
That laws against rape be enforced, even against those who are rich, even those who are famous athletes, even those who are politicians, even those who are entertainers.
The enshrinement in law of the precautionary principle, which states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or the real, physical world, then the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action. In the absence of conclusive proof, no action may be taken. For example, no chemicals would be allowed to be released into the environment without conclusive proof that they will not harm the public or the environment.
No new chemicals be released into the real, physical world until all currently used chemicals have been thoroughly tested for toxicity, and if found to have any significant chance of harming the public or the environment, these chemicals must be immediately and without exception withdrawn from use.
The immediate, explicit, and legally binding recognition that perpetual growth is incompatible with life on a finite planet. We demand that economic growth stop, and that economies begin to contract. We demand immediate acknowledgement that if we do not begin this contraction voluntarily, that this contraction will take place against our will, and will cause untold misery.
That overconsumption and overpopulation must be addressed in methods that are not racist, colonialist, or misogynist. We must recognize that humans, and especially industrial humans, have overshot the planet’s carrying capacity. We must recognize further that while overconsumption is more harmful than overpopulation, both are harmful. We must further recognize that right now, more than fifty percent of the children who are born are not wanted. We demand that all children be wanted. We recognize that the single most effective strategy for making certain that all children are wanted is the liberation of women. Therefore we demand that women be given absolute reproductive freedom, and that all forms of reproductive control be freely available to women. We demand that those who attempt to deny women this freedom be punished by law.
The United States government put an immediate end to absentee land ownership. No one shall be allowed to own land more than one-quarter of a mile from his or her home.
Land ownership patterns change. Land ownership is more concentrated in the United States than in many countries the United States derides as antidemocratic: five percent of farmers in Honduras own 67 percent of the arable land, while in the United States five percent of landowners (not citizens) own 75 percent of the land (California is in many ways worse: twenty-five landowners own 58 percent of the farmland). To rectify this, no one shall be allowed to own more than 640 acres. All title to individual or corporate land holdings over 640 acres are to be immediately forfeited. These lands will be first in line for restoration to native forest, prairie, wetland, and so on. Lands not suitable for these purposes will be used to provide housing for those who cannot afford it.
An immediate end to factory farming and to monocrop agriculture, two of the most destructive activities humans have ever perpetrated. We demand a return to perennial polycultures.
An immediate end to soil drawdown. Because soil is the basis of terrestrial life, no activities will be allowed which destroy topsoil. All properties over sixty acres must have soil surveys every ten years (on every sixty acre parcel), and if they have suffered any decrease of health or depth of topsoil the lands will be confiscated and given to those who will build up soil.
An immediate end to aquifer drawdown. No activities will be allowed which draw down aquifers.
Provision of free food, shelter, and medical necessities to all residents.
Immediate increase in the tax rate to 95 percent for all gross earnings over one million dollars per year by persons or entities.
An immediate and permanent halt to all fracking, mountaintop removal, tar sands extraction, nuclear power, and offshore drilling.
An immediate and permanent halt to all energy production that is harmful to the real, physical world. This includes the manufacture of solar photovoltaics, windmills, hybrid cars, and so on.
Removal of plastic from the ocean. Each year the ocean must have 5 percent less plastic in it than the year before.
Each year the oceans must have 5 percent more large fish than the year before.
The United States Constitution be rewritten to destroy the primacy it gives to the privatization of profits and the externalization of costs by the wealthy, and to make its primary purpose not the preservation of the wealth and power of the already wealthy and powerful, but rather to protect human and nonhuman communities—to protect the real, physical world—and enforcably to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet.
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We hold these further truths also to be self-evident:
That demands without means to enforce them are nothing more than begging. We are not begging. We are demanding.
Power is not a mistake, and those in power will not suddenly have attacks of conscience. Social change has never occurred through waiting for the rich or powerful to develop consciences, and it never will.
Those in power will not act different than they have acted all along, and they will not act against the power of capital. We hold it as self-evident that the rich and powerful have no reason to stop the rich from stealing from the poor nor the powerful from destroying more of the real, physical world than they already have. That is, they have no reason except us. Our lives and the life of the planet that is our only home is on the line. We no longer have the luxury of allowing those in power to continue. If those in power won’t accede to these demands, then they need to not be in power, and we need to remove them from power, using any means necessary.
We hold it as self-evident, as the Declaration of Independence states, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it. . . .”
World leaders are congratulating themselves on a set of promises they will never be able to keep without taking on the immense power of the fossil fuel industry.
World leaders and the international media are hailing the deal struck in Paris as a “major leap for mankind” in the fight against climate change, but there are many reasons to remain deeply skeptical. Three stand out in particular.
1) NO ACTIONS, JUST WORDS
To begin with, the climate deal contains a lot of pretty words, but no commitments to concrete actions. Nowhere in the agreement do governments stipulate the steps they will take to meet their ambitious target of keeping global temperatures “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.”
This target can only be met if 90 percent of the world’s remaining fossil fuels are kept in the ground. By mid-century, the 195 signatories would need to have achieved a near-complete decarbonization of the world economy.
This would in turn require a rapid and wholesale shift away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy sources. Yet the agreement does not contain any concrete road map on how to bring about such a radical transformation. The words “fossil fuels”, “oil” or “coal” are not even mentioned in the text.
Instead, world leaders have agreed on a voluntary system whereby countries are required to submit emission reduction plans which are then reviewed every five years, with the aim of speeding up reductions over time. These targets are not legally binding, however, and even if they had been, there would be no way to enforce compliance.
James Hansen, the leading ex-NASA climate scientist, is clear in his assessment:
It’s a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will continue to be burned.
2) THE NUMBERS DON’T ADD UP
But let’s assume for a moment that governments really do live up to the letter of their agreement and reduce emissions in line with the pledges they have made under their “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDCs).
Even if all individual pledges in the INDCs are met, the world would still be on course for an average global temperature increase of at least 2.7°C — an amount widely considered by scientists to bring about a catastrophic destabilization of the global climate and planetary life-support systems.
Assuming an even more optimistic scenario in which governments were to take their collective 1.5°C pledge seriously and adjust their INDCs in line with this goal, the climate change that is already locked into the system as a result of past emissions will make this target next to impossible to reach.
As Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at Oxford University, notes: “Human-induced warming is already approaching one degree and is predicted to be at 1.2C by 2030, so 1.5C will be a challenge.”
To meet the 1.5°C target, a tremendous amount of resources would have to be made available — both to fundamentally transform energy, transport and agricultural systems in the advanced economies and to help the poorer countries “leapfrog” the transition to a post-carbon, renewable energy future.
Here again, the numbers fall hopelessly short. Rich countries have pledged to raise $100 billion for investment in green energy in developing countries, but it is not clear how this money will be raised — and the amount remains woefully inadequate at any rate.
The $100 billion pales in comparison to the United States’ $600 billion annual military budget, or the trillions upon trillions spent — without second thoughts or public oversight — on bailing out banks. The contrast in these numbers shows where the real priorities of rich countries continue to lie.
3) CORPORATE POWER REMAINS UNCHECKED
Preventing catastrophic climate change is impossible without keeping the vast majority of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground, and any attempt to keep fossil fuels in the ground will inevitably involve a head-on confrontation with the fossil fuel industry, whose extractive business model would be completely destroyed by any meaningful transition towards a post-carbon economy.
A post-carbon future would mean no more gasoline-fueled cars by 2050, no more coal-fired power plants, no more fracking, no more oil-fueled ships and planes, no more tar sands and offshore drilling, no more gas lines — nothing. Deforestation would have to be brought to a complete halt and methane emissions would have to be drastically reduced, requiring far-reaching limits on the growth of animal agriculture.
Yet in a capitalist world economy that thrives on cutthroat competition between companies and nations alike, world leaders will be hard-pressed to forsake their access to cheap energy, cheap food and cheap building materials — even if they have formally “agreed” on reversing the consequences of such cheap resources for the climate.
Governments worldwide still spend an estimated $5,300 billion per year on various (direct and indirect) fossil fuel subsidies. This would all need to be cut and moved immediately towards research, development and deployment of renewable technologies. Yet where are the commitments to do so? They are nowhere to be seen in this text.
This climate deal has the mark of the fossil fuel industry stamped all over it. By failing to commit to concrete actions and a clear, enforceable road map, by fudging the numbers and not committing sufficient resources to an immediate and wholesale energy transformation, and by systematically refusing to tax carbon and take on the immense power of the fossil-fuel industry, world leaders have signed an accord they clearly cannot keep.
The sentimental liberals among them may be patting one another on the back today, announcing this “historic compromise” to the press with tears in their eyes, but humanity — and the world’s poor above all — will be paying the price for their collective failure to move beyond empty gestures.
The task now falls upon the social movements to confront the immense power of the fossil fuel industry on the ground. Every new coal mine, every new oil well, every new gas pipeline will be one too many. If none of them will stop this madness, it will have to be us. The situation is now critical.
At least this accord will give global legitimacy to the radicalization of the climate justice movement and the intensification of our struggles from below.
There isn’t a chance in hell that something like the original Wilderness Act could be passed today. Environmentalists today are too much on the defensive. Sure, there have been green platforms and policy papers, but nothing I’ve read matches the urgency of this moment. So I decided to draft a declaration. It goes like this:
We, the citizens of the United States of America, hold these truths to be self-evident: that a rapid decline in living conditions is taking place all around us; that compromise is no longer an adequate way forward (and perhaps never was); that more drastic measures must be taken immediately in order to preserve a livable planet. From these beliefs springs the following list of demands:
We demand that the United States Constitution be rewritten to explicitly prohibit the privatization of profits and the externalization of costs by the wealthy, and to immediately grant both human and nonhuman communities full legal and moral rights. Corporations should no longer be considered persons under the law. Limited liability corporations must be immediately stripped of their limited liability protection. Those whose economic activities cause great harm—including great harm to the real, physical world—should be punished. Environmental Crimes Tribunals must be immediately put in place to try those who have significantly harmed the real, physical world. These tribunals should have the force of law and should be expected to impose punishment commensurate with the harm caused to the public and to the planet.
We demand the immediate, explicit, and legally binding recognition that perpetual growth is incompatible with life on a finite planet. Economic growth must stop, and economies must begin to contract. We demand acknowledgment that if we don’t begin this contraction voluntarily, it will take place against our will, and will cause untold misery.
We demand that overconsumption and overpopulation be addressed through bold and serious measures, but not by approaches that are racist, colonialist, or misogynist. Right now, more than 50 percent of the children who are born into this world are unwanted. We demand that all children be wanted. The single most effective strategy for making certain that all children are wanted is the liberation of women. Therefore we demand that women be given absolute economic, sexual, and reproductive freedom, and that all forms of reproductive control become freely available to all.
There is consensus among the scientific community that in order to prevent catastrophic climate change beyond what the industrial economy has already set in motion, net carbon emissions must be reduced by 80 percent as soon as possible. Because we wish to continue to live on a habitable planet, we demand a carbon reduction of 20 percent of current emissions per year over the next four years.
Dwayne Andreas, former CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, has said, “There isn’t one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market. Not one! The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.” He’s right. Capitalism is based almost entirely on subsidies. For example, commercial fishing fleets worldwide receive more in subsidies than the entire value of their catch. Timber corporations, oil corporations, banks—all would collapse immediately without massive government subsidies and bailouts. Therefore, we demand that the United States government stop subsidizing environmentally and socially destructive activities, and shift those same subsidies into activities that restore biotic communities and that promote local self-sufficiency and vibrant local economies.
We demand an immediate and permanent halt to all extractive and destructive activities: fracking, mountaintop removal, tar sands production, nuclear power, and offshore drilling chief among them. The list of activities to be halted must also include the manufacture of photovoltaic panels, windmills, hybrid cars, and so on. We must find nondestructive ways of becoming a sustainable society.
We demand an immediate end to monocrop agriculture, one of the most destructive activities humans have ever perpetrated. All remaining native forests must be immediately and completely protected. We demand an end to clearcutting, “leave tree,” “seed tree,” “shelter tree,” and all other “even-aged management” techniques, no matter what they are called, and no matter what rationales are put forward by the timber industry and the government to justify them. Likewise, we demand that all remaining prairies and wetlands be permanently protected.
Further, we demand that all damaged lands be restored, from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters. Because soil is the basis of terrestrial life, no activities should be allowed that destroy topsoil. All properties over sixty acres must have soil surveys performed every ten years, and if they have suffered any decrease in health or depth of topsoil, the lands shall be confiscated and ownership transferred to those who will build up soil.
We demand that no activities that draw down aquifers be allowed, and that all polluted or compromised rivers and wetlands be restored. There are more than 2 million dams in the United States, more than 60,000 dams over thirteen feet tall and more than 70,000 dams over six and a half feet tall. If we removed one of these 70,000 dams each day, it would take 200 years to get rid of them all. Salmon don’t have that much time. Sturgeon don’t have that much time. Therefore, we demand that no more dams be built, and we demand the removal of five dams per day over the next forty years, beginning one year from today.
We demand that the United States make an annual survey of all endangered species to ascertain if they are increasing in number and range, and if they are not, we demand that steps be taken to make sure that they do. The U.S. government must be charged with the task of doing whatever is necessary to make sure that there are more migratory songbirds every year than the year before, that there are more native fish every year than the year before, more native reptiles and amphibians.
The United States must immediately withdraw from NAFTA, DR-CAFTA, and other so-called free trade agreements, because these agreements cause immeasurable and irreparable harm to working people, local economies. Likewise, we demand that the United States remove all support for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, because these organizations promote and support vast infrastructure projects such as highways, dams, thermal power projects, and mines that disrupt or destroy entire biomes and dispossess and immiserate hundreds of thousands of people (in India alone, 50 million people have been displaced by large “development” projects).
From this day forward, the only conditions under which the United States of America should go to war is by a direct vote of more than 50 percent of U.S. citizens. Furthermore, we demand immediate closure of all U.S. military bases on foreign soil. All U.S. military personnel should be brought home within two years. The U.S. military budget must be reduced by 20 percent per year, until it reaches 20 percent of its current size. This will provide the “peace dividend” politicians promised us back when the Soviet Union collapsed, will balance the U.S. budget, and will more than pay for all necessary domestic programs, starting with biome repair and including food, shelter, and medical care for all.
In addition to the aforementioned, we demand that the U.S. government itself undergo a significant transformation in recognition of the fact that it can only be of, by, and for the people if it is concurrently of, by, and for the earth. And no, the fact that the animals and plants and natural communities don’t speak English is not a valid excuse for failing to provide for their well-being.
Once these demands have been met, we will come up with more, and then more, until we are living in a sane, just, and sustainable culture. We believe that such a culture is our birthright, both as human beings with inalienable rights and as animals who love our home. We have not forgotten that the Declaration of Independence states that when a government becomes destructive of our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.
Editor’s note: This is a difficult concept to understand. The reason is because we have been taught the opposite all our lives. Taxes don’t fund spending. The spending must be done first so that taxes can be paid. So it is not tax and spend, it is spend and tax. Our taxes don’t fund anything. That is why nobody asks how are we going to fund the military. Money is a government issued tax credit. Its value is derived from the violence that may be necessary to collect the tax. The government creates money by giving it to people for goods and/or services(guns or butter). Which then gives those people the ability to pay the tax. People accept the money out of fear of that violence. The tax collector has to be paid or promised to be paid before they perpetuate that violence(police). The money must be created first so that people can pay their taxes with it. It is spent into existence. Taxes create the necessity for money. A “deficit” just keeps score of how much extra money the government paid to people but was not collected as taxes. Much like beyond a certain point, how much money you have is just keeping score. The government cannot run out of its own money. Just like a baseball game has no limit on the score. What a government spends(creates) its money for are political decisions which are only constrained by the physical “resources” of the living planet.
The government must raise funds through taxation or borrowing in order to spend. In other words, government spending is limited by its ability to tax or borrow.
With government deficits, we are leaving our debt burden to our children.
Government budget deficits take away savings.
Social Security is broken.
The trade deficit is an unsustainable imbalance that takes away jobs and output.
We need savings to provide the funds for investment.
It’s a bad thing that higher deficits today mean higher taxes tomorrow.
How does civilization collapse? First slowly, then suddenly. Civilizational complexity solves human problems. – (Joseph Tainter) Maybe that is a solution in search of a problem. Never asking, just because we can does not mean that we should, e.g., technology, splitting the atom, agriculture.
The pioneering research by one of the founders of economic anthropology is essential for understanding the social and institutional processes that gave rise to money as we know it.
The late 19th century saw economists, mainly German and Austrian, create a mythology of money’s origins that is still repeated in today’s textbooks. Money is said to have originated as just another commodity being bartered, with metal preferred because it is nonperishable (and hence amenable to being saved), supposedly standardized (despite fraud if not minted in temples), and thought to be easily divisible—as if silver could have been used for small marketplace exchanges, which was unrealistic given the rough character of ancient scales for weights of a few grams.[1]
This mythology does not recognize government as having played any role as a monetary innovator, sponsor, or regulator, or as giving money its value by accepting it as a vehicle to pay taxes, buy public services, or make religious contributions. Also downplayed is money’s function as a standard of value for denominating and paying debts.[2]
Although there is no empirical evidence for the commodity-barter origin myth, it has survived on purely hypothetical grounds because of its political bias that serves the anti-socialist Austrian school and subsequent “free market” creditor interests opposing government money creation.
Schurtz’s Treatment of Money as Part of the Overall Social System
As one of the founders of economic anthropology, Heinrich Schurtz approached the origins of money as being much more complex than the “economic” view that it emerged simply as a result of families going to the marketplace to barter. Surveying a wide range of Indigenous communities, his 1898 book, An Outline of the Origins of Money, described their trade and money in the context of the institutional system within which members sought status and wealth. Schurtz described these monetary systems as involving a wide array of social functions and dimensions, which today’s “economic” theorizing excludes as external to its analytic scope.
Placing money in the context of the community’s overall system of social organization, Schurtz warned that anyone who detaches “sociological and economic problems from the environment in which they emerged… their native land… only carries away a part of the whole organism and fails to understand the vital forces that have created and sustained it.”
Looking at Indigenous communities as having preserved presumably archaic traditions, Schurtz viewed trade with outsiders as leading wealth to take an increasingly monetary form that eroded the balance of internal social relations. Schurtz deemed the linkage between money, debt, and land tenure to lie beyond the area on which he focused, nor did he mention contributions to group feasts (which historian Bernard Laum suggested as the germ from which Greek obols and drachmas may have evolved).[3]
The paradigmatic forms of Indigenous wealth were jewelry and other items of personal adornment, decorations, and trophies, especially foreign exotic products in the form of shells and gemstones or items with a long and prestigious history that gave their wearers or owners status.
Thorstein Veblen would call the ownership and display of such items conspicuous consumption in his 1899 book, TheTheory of the Leisure Class. They had an exchange value, as they do today, but that did not make them monetary means of exchange. Schurtz saw many gray areas in their monetization: “Beads made of clay and stone are also crafted by Indigenous people and widely used as ornaments but rarely as money.”
At issue was how a money economy differs from barter and from the circulation and exchange of useful and valued items in a social economy. Was Indigenous exchange and wealth pre-monetary, an archaic seed that led to money’s “more ideal forms?”
Schurtz’s Distinction Between Inside-Money and Outside-Money
Exchange with outsiders was typically conducted by political leaders as the face of their communities to the outside world. Trade (and also payment of tribute) involved fiscal and social relations whose monetary functions differed from those of the domestic economy but ended up dovetailing with them to give money a hybrid character. Schurtz distinguished what he called outside-money from inside-money, with outside-money ultimately dominating the inside monetary system.
“The concept of money,” he wrote, originated “from two distinct sources: What functions as the foundation of wealth and measure of value for property and serves social ends within a tribe is, in its origins, something entirely different from the means of exchange that travels from tribe to tribe and eventually transforms itself, as a universally welcomed commodity, into a kind of currency.”
Inside-money was used within communities for their own exchange and wealth. Outside-money was derived from transactions with outsiders. And what was “outside” was a set of practices governing trade outside the jurisdiction of local governance.[4]
Schurtz’s distinction emphasized a characteristic of trade that has continued down through today’s world: the contrast between domestic payments subject to checks and balances to protect basic needs and navigating status hierarchies but (ideally) limiting sharp wealth disparities, and exchange with outsiders, often conducted on islands, quay areas, or other venues socially outside the community’s boundaries, subject to more impersonal standardized rules.
Throughout the ancient world, we find offshore island entrepots wherever they are conveniently located for conducting trade with outsiders.
These islands kept foreign contact at arm’s length to prevent mercantile relations from disturbing the local economic balance. Egypt restricted foreign contacts to the Delta region where the Nile flowed into the Mediterranean. For the Etruscans, the island of Ischia/Pithekoussai became the base for Phoenician and Greek merchants to deal with the Italian mainland in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. North Germans seem to have conducted the Baltic amber trade through the sacred island of Helgoland.
“The emergence of specific internal monetary systems is always supported by the inclination to transform outside-money into inside-money, and to employ money not to facilitate external trade, as one might assume according to common theories, but rather to obstruct it,” Schurtz concluded. In his chapter, “Metal as Ornament and Money,” he pointed out that it was foreign trade that led metal to become the primary form of money. “While most varieties of ornament-money gradually lose their significance, one of them, metal-money, asserts its ground all the more and finally pushes its competitors out of the field.” He added that: “Metal-money made from noble metals is not a pure sign-money, it is at the same time a valuable commodity, the value of which depends on supply and demand. In its mature form, it therefore in itself embodies the fusion of inside-money with outside-money, of the sign of value and valuable property with the means of exchange.”[5]
This merging of inside- and outside-money is documented already in the third millennium BCE in the Near East. Silver-money was used for long-distance trade and came to be used for domestic enterprise as well, while grain remained the monetary vehicle for denominating agrarian production, taxes, and debt service on the land, and for distribution to dependent labor in Mesopotamia’s temples and palaces.
Schurtz also questioned whether the dominance of metallic money emerged spontaneously in many places or whether there was a diffusion from a singular origin, that is, “whether a cultural institution has grown in situ or whether it has been transferred from other regions through migration and contact between societies.” The diffusion of Mesopotamian weights is associated with silver points to its diffusion from that region, as does the spread of the region’s practice of setting interest rates simply for ease of calculation in terms of the local fractional arithmetic system (60ths in Mesopotamia for a shekel per mina a month, 10ths or percentages in decimalized Greece, and 12ths in Rome for a troy ounce per pound each year).
Checks and Balances to Prevent the Selfish Concentration of Wealth
What does seem to have developed spontaneously were social attitudes and policies to prevent the concentration of wealth from injuring economic balance. Wealth concentration, especially when achieved by depriving cultivators of their means of livelihood, would have violated the ethic of mutual aid that low-surplus economies need as a condition for their resilience.
Viewing money as part of the overall social context, Schurtz described “the social transformation brought about by wealth” as a result of monetizing trade and its commercial pursuit of profit, or “acquisitiveness”:
“[E]veryone is now compelled to join in the competition for property or he will be pulled into the vortex created by one of the newly emerging centers of power and property, where he will need to work hard to be able to live at all. For the property owner, no temporal limit constrains his view on the perpetual increase of his wealth.”
Schurtz characterized the economic mentality as a drive for “the unlimited accumulation of movable property,” to be passed on to one’s children, leading to the creation of a wealthy hereditary class. If archaic societies had this ethic, could ancient civilizations have taken off? How did they prevent the growth of wealth from fostering an oligarchy seeking to increase its wealth at the expense of the community at large and its resilience?
Schurtz reviewed how Indigenous communities typically avoided that fate by shaping a social value system that would steer wealth away from being used to achieve predatory power over others. He cited numerous examples in which “immense treasures often accumulate without reentering the transactions of daily life.” One widespread way to do this was simply to bury wealth. “The primitive man,” he wrote, “believes that he will have access to all the goods given to him in the grave, even in the afterlife. Thus, he too knows no bounds to acquisition.”
Taking his greed and wealth with him to use in the hereafter prevents hoarded wealth from being inherited “and growing into a dangerous instrument of power” by becoming dynastic; ultimately operating “on the belief that the deceased does not give up his rights of ownership but jealously guards over his property to ensure that no heir makes use of it.” A less destructive removal of wealth from its owners was to create an ethic of peer pressure in which individuals gained status and popular acclaim by accumulating wealth to give away. Schurtz wrote:
“[R]emnants of the ancient communism remain alive enough for a long time to effectively block attempts to amass as many assets as possible in a single hand. And in places without an actual system of debt and interest, the powerful individual, into whose house the tributes of the people flow, has indeed little choice but to ‘represent’ by way of his wealth: in other words, to allow the people to participate in his indulgences.”
Such an individual achieves philanthropic renown by generously distributing his possessions to “his friends and followers, winning their hearts and thereby establishing real power based on loyal devotion.” One widespread practice was to celebrate marriages, funerals, and other rites of passage by providing great feasts. This “extraordinary… destruction and squandering of valuable property, particularly livestock and food, during those grand festivals of the dead that evolved out of sacrifices and are, among some peoples, not only an effective obstacle to the accumulation of wealth but have turned into economic calamities” when families feel obliged to take on debt to host such extravagant displays.
Religious officials and temples often played a role in such rituals. Noting that “money, trade, and religion had a good relationship with one another in antiquity,” Schurtz cited the practice of donating wealth to temples or their priesthoods. But he recognized that this might enable them to “gain dominance through the ownership of money” under their control.
“The communist countermeasures against wealth generally do not endure,” Schurtz wrote. “Certain kinds of property seem to favor greed directly, especially cattle farming, which can literally turn into a hoarding addiction.” He described communalistic values of mutual aid as tending to break down as economies polarized with the increase in commercial wealth.
Schurtz also noted that the social checks on personal wealth-seeking did not apply to economies that developed a “system of debt and interest.” Wealth in the form of monetary claims on debtors was not buried and could hardly be redistributed to the population at large, whose members typically were debtors to the rising creditor interest.
The only way to prevent such debts from polarizing society was to cancel them. That is what Near Eastern rulers did, but Schurtz’s generation had no way of knowing about their Clean Slate proclamations.
Starting with the very outset of debt records c. 2500 BCE in Sumer, and continuing down through Babylonia, Assyria, to their neighbors, and on through the early first millennium BCE, rulers annulled financial claims on agrarian debtors. That prevented creditors from concentrating money and land in their own hands. One might say that these debt cancellations and land redistributions were the Near Eastern alternative to destroying material wealth to preserve balance. These royal acts did not destroy physical wealth but simply wiped out the debt overhead to maintain widespread land tenure and liberty for the population at large.
Canceling agrarian debt was politically feasible because most personal debts were owed to the palace sector and its temples or their officials. Royal Clean Slates seemed so unthinkable when they began to be translated around the turn of the last century that early readers hardly could believe that they actually were enforced in practice. François Thureau-Dangin’s French translation of the Sumerian ruler Enmetena’s (c. 2400 BCE) proclamation in 1905 was believed by many observers to be too utopian and socially disruptive to have been followed in practice, as was the Biblical Jubilee Year of Leviticus 25.[6]
But so many such proclamations have been found, extending so continuously over thousands of years—along with lawsuits in which judges upheld their increasing detail—that there is no doubt that these acts did indeed reconcile the accumulation of monetary wealth with social resilience by blocking the creation of predatory oligarchies such as those that would emerge in classical Greece and Rome and indeed survive into today’s world.
Monetary Innovations in the Bronze Age Near Eastern Palaces and Temples
Economic documentation in Schurtz’s day was able to trace monetary practice only as far back as classical Greece and Rome. There was a general belief that their practices must have evolved from Indigenous Indo-European speakers. Marcel Mauss would soon treat the gift exchange of the Kwakiutl tribe of the Canadian Pacific Northwest (with their competitive one-upmanship) as the prototype for the idea of charging interest. But monetary interest has a specific stipulated rate, with payments due on specific periodic dates set by written contracts. That practice stems from Sumer in the third millennium BCE, along with silver (and grain) money and related financial innovations in the economic big bang that has shaped subsequent Western economic evolution.
Money’s function as a standard of valuation did not play a big role in Schurtz’s survey. But subsequent archaeological research has revealed that money’s emergence as part of an overall institutional framework cannot be understood without reference to written account-keeping, denominating debt accruals, and fiscal relations. Money, credit/debt, and fiscal obligations have all gone together since the origins of written records in the ancient Near East.
Near Eastern fiscal and financial records describe a development of money, credit, and interest-bearing debt that neither the barter theory nor Schurtz’s ethnographic studies had imagined. Mesopotamia’s “more ideal” money evolved out of the fiscal organization of account-keeping and credit in the palaces and temples of Sumer, Babylonia, and their Bronze Age neighbors (3200–1200 BCE). These Near Eastern economies were larger in scale and much more complex and multilayered than most of the Indigenous communities surveyed by Schurtz.
In contrast to largely self-sufficient communities, southern Mesopotamia was obliged to engage in large-scale and long-distance trade because the region’s river-deposited soil lacked metal, stone, and even hardwood. The region’s need for raw materials was far different from the trade and “monetization” of luxuries by the relatively small-scale and self-sufficient communities studied by Schurtz and hypothesized by economists imagining individuals bartering at their local market. In these communities, he noted: “The amount of metal shaped into ornaments almost always far outweighs the amount transformed into practical tools.” Mesopotamia’s trade had to go far beyond personal decorative luxuries and prestige commodities or trophy items.
An entrepreneurial merchant class was needed to obtain these raw materials, along with a specialized labor force, which was employed by the temples and palaces that produced most export handicrafts, provisioned corvée labor to work on public infrastructure, served as mints and overseers of weights and measures, and mediated most monetary wealth and debt. This required forward planning and account-keeping to feed and supply labor (war widows, orphans, and slaves) in their weaving and other handicraft workshops and to consign their output to merchants for export. Calculating the cost of distributing food and raw materials within these large institutions and valuing their consignment of goods to merchants required designing standard weights and measures as the basis for this forward planning. Selecting monetary units was part of this standardization of measuring costs and value.
This made possible the calculation of expected rental income or shortfalls, along with profit-and-loss statements and balance sheets. The typical commodity to be distributed was grain, which served as a standard of value for agrarian transactions and credit balances that mounted up during the crop year for advances to sharecroppers, consumption such as beer from ale-women, and payments to priests for performing ceremonial functions. Their value in grain was to be paid at harvest time.
The calculation of food rations for distribution to the various grades of labor (male, female, and children) enabled the costs to be expressed in grain or in workday equivalents.
Schurtz would have called this grain “inside-money,” and regarded as “outside-money” the silver minted by temples for dealing with foreign trade and as the basic measure of value for business transactions with the palace economy and for settling commercial obligations. A mina (60 shekels) of silver was set as equal to a corresponding unit of grain as measured on the threshing floor. That enabled accounts to be kept simultaneously in silver and grain.
The result was a bi-monetary grain-silver standard reflecting the bifurcation of early Mesopotamian economies between the agrarian families on the land (using grain as “inside-money”) and the palatial economy with its workshops, foreign trade, and associated commercial enterprise (using silver as “outside-money”).
Prices for market transactions with outsiders might vary, but prices for debt payments, taxes, and other transactions with large institutions were fixed.
Schurtz’s conclusion that the rising dominance of commercial money tended to break down domestic checks and balances protecting the Indigenous communities that he studied is indeed what happened when commercial debt practices were brought from the Near East to the Aegean and Mediterranean lands around the eighth century BCE.
Having no tradition of royal debt cancellations as had existed in the Near East ever since the formative period of interest-bearing debt, the resulting decontextualization of credit practices fostered financial oligarchies in classical Greece and Rome. After early debt cancellations and land redistribution by populist “tyrants” in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, the ensuing classical oligarchies resisted popular revolts demanding a revival of such policies.
The dynamics of interest-bearing debt and the pro-creditor debt laws of classical antiquity’s creditor oligarchies caused economic polarization that led to five centuries of civil warfare. These upheavals were not the result of the coinage that began to be minted around the eighth century BCE, as many 19th-century observers believed, mistakenly thinking that Aegean coinage was the first metallic money. Silver-money had been the norm for two millennia throughout the Near East, without causing disruption like that experienced by classical antiquity. What polarized classical antiquity’s economies were pro-creditor debt laws backed by political violence, not money.
Conclusion and Discussion
Schurtz’s starting point was how communities organized the laws of motion governing their distribution of wealth and property. He viewed money as emerging from this institutional function with a basically communalistic ethic. A key characteristic of Indigenous economic resilience was social pressure expecting the wealthy to contribute to social support. That was the condition set by unwritten customs for letting some individuals and their families become rich.
Schurtz and subsequent ethnologists found a universal solution for reconciling wealth-seeking with community-wide prosperity to be social pressure for wealthy families (that was the basic unit, not individuals) to distribute their wealth to the citizenry by reciprocal exchange, gift-giving, mutual aid, and other forms of redistribution, and providing large feasts, especially for rites of passage.
This was a much broader view than the individualistic economic assumption that personal gain-seeking and, indeed, selfishness were the driving forces of overall prosperity. The idea of monetizing economic life under communalistic mutual aid or palace direction was and remains anathema to mainstream economists, reflecting the worldview of modern creditors and financial elites. Schurtz recognized that mercantile wealth-seeking required checks and balances to prevent economies from impoverishing their members.
The problem for any successfully growing society to solve was how to prevent the undue concentration of wealth obtained by exploitative means that impaired overall welfare and the ability of community members to be self-supporting. Otherwise, economic polarization and dependency would lead members to flee from the community, or perhaps it simply would shrink and end up being defeated by outsiders who sustained themselves by more successful mutual aid.
As noted above, Schurtz treated the monetization of wealth in the form of creditor claims on debtors as too post-archaic to be a characteristic of his ethnographic subjects. But what shaped the context for monetization and led “outside-money” to take priority over inside-money were wealth accumulation by moneylending and the fiscal and military uses of money. Schurtz correctly rejected Bruno Hildebrand’s characterization of money as developing in stages, from small-scale barter to monetized economies becoming more sophisticated as they evolved into financialized credit economies.[7]
And, in fact, the actual historical sequence was the reverse. From Mesopotamia to medieval Europe, agrarian economies operated on credit during the crop year. Monetary payment occurred at harvest time to settle the obligations that had accumulated since the last harvest and to pay taxes. This need to pay debts was a major factor requiring money’s development in the first place. Barter became antiquity’s final monetary “stage” as Rome’s economy collapsed after its creditor oligarchy imposed debt bondage and took control of the land.
When emperors were unable to tax this oligarchy, they debased the coinage, and life throughout the empire devolved into local subsistence production and quasi-barter. Foreign trade was mainly for luxuries brought by Arabs and other Near Easterners. The optimistic sequence that Hildebrand imagined not only mistakenly adopted the barter myth of monetary origins but also failed to take debt polarization into account as economies became monetarized and financialized.
Schurtz described how the aim of preventing the maldistribution of wealth was at the heart of Indigenous social structuring. But it broke down for various reasons. Economies in which family wealth took the form of cattle, he found, tended to become increasingly oppressive to maintain the polarizing inequality that developed. The same might be said of credit economies under the rising burden of interest-bearing debt. Schurtz noted the practice of charging debtors double the loan value—and any rate of interest indeed involves an implicit doubling time.
That exponential dynamic is what polarizes financialized economies. In contrast to Schurtz, mainstream economists of his generation avoided dealing with the effect of monetary innovation and debt on the distribution of wealth. The tendency was to treat money as merely a “veil” of price changes for goods and services, without analyzing how credit polarizes the economy’s balance sheet of assets and debt liabilities. Yet, the distinguishing feature of credit economies was the use of moneylending as a lever to enrich creditors by impoverishing debtors. That was more than just a monetary problem. It was a political creditor/debtor problem and, ultimately, a public/private problem.
The issue was whether a ruler or civic public checks would steer the rise in monetary wealth in ways that avoided the creation of creditor oligarchies.
Most 19th-century and even subsequent economic writers shied away from confronting this political context, leaving the most glaring gap in modern economic analysis. It was left to the discovery of cuneiform documentation to understand how money first became institutionalized as a vehicle to pay debts. This monetization was accompanied by remarkable success in sustaining rising wealth while preventing its concentration in the hands of a hereditary oligarchy. That Near Eastern success highlights what the smaller and more anarchic Western economies failed to achieve when interest-bearing debt practices were brought to the Mediterranean lands without being checked by the tradition of regular cancellation of personal nonbusiness debt.
Credit and monetary wealth were privatized in the hands of what became an increasingly self-destructive set of classical oligarchies culminating in that of Rome, which fought for centuries against popular revolts seeking protection from impoverishing economic polarization.
The devastating effects of transplanting Near Eastern debt practices into the Mediterranean world’s less communalistic groupings show the need to discuss the political, fiscal, and social-moral context for money and debt. Schurtz placed monetary analysis in the context of society’s political institutions and moral values and explained how money is a product of this context and, indeed, how monetization tends to transform it—in a way that tends to break down social protection. His book has remained relatively unknown over the last century, largely because his institutional anthropological perspective is too broad for an economics discipline that has been narrowed by pro-creditor ideologues who have applauded the “free market” destruction of social regulation aimed at protecting the interests of debtors.
That attitude avoids recognizing the challenges that led the Indigenous communities studied by Schurtz, and also the formative Bronze Age Near East, to protect their resilience against the concentration of wealth, a phenomenon that has plagued economies ever since classical antiquity’s decontextualization of Near Eastern debt practices.
Under the banner Oil Kills, small groups of activists have occupied airport departure lounges, plane cabins, terminals, tarmacs and roads across three continents — and they aren’t done yet. Here are the numbers so far: 500 people, 31 airports, 22 groups, 166 arrests, 42 people on remand in prison — all in support of their one demand.
The coalition formed when members of Extinction Rebellion, the A22 Network and Stay Grounded began reaching out to other groups globally. What resulted was an unprecedented alliance of civil resistance groups focused on the sustained disruption of airports — a key pillar of the fossil fuel economy.
Unifying aims, collective strategy and diverse tactics
All Oil Kills participants are committed to nonviolent direct action and to the central demand, but from there, individual creativity and context has led to an array of actions. The resulting structure is a decentralized yet cohesive power bloc with unified aims that becomes more than the sum of its parts, rather than a lowest common denominator coalition.
Each participating group has adopted the central demand that governments must work together to establish a legally binding treaty to stop extracting and burning oil, gas and coal by 2030, as well as supporting and financing poorer countries to make a fast, fair and just transition. But each local group also brings its own unique knowledge and demands which are in turn supported by the coalition. Futuro Vegetal in Spain, for example, focuses on the imperative to adopt a plant-based agri-food system while Students Against EACOP in Uganda demand a stop to the East African Crude Oil Pipeline — and all stand in solidarity with one another.
Each group also brings its own creative tactics, from airport glue-ins, to plane occupations, to spray-painting terminals, to street marches. “The airports don’t know what to expect because we don’t even know exactly what to expect from each other — it’s beautiful and effective,” said a coalition member who requested to remain anonymous for legal reasons.
On Aug. 9, Students Against EACOP in Uganda joined the Oil Kills campaign, planning a peaceful march to the parliament in Kampala and the delivery of a petition demanding an end to the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, and for their government to sign the treaty to end fossil fuels.
Kamya Carlos, a student at Kyambogo University and spokesperson for Students Against EACOP, connects the inequitable and ecocidal nature of today’s airline industry to its origins in neocolonial extractivism. “New oil, gas and coal infrastructure continues to exacerbate the climate crisis. As the global temperatures hit their tipping points it is clear that projects such as the East African Crude Oil Pipeline should never be constructed in the first place,” he said. “These projects, which end up being used almost exclusively by rich people and polluting the atmosphere, should never be allowed by right thinking members of society. We demand the government to sign a fossil free treaty and call an end to EACOP.”
Even though police repression represents a major threat, on Aug. 27, 20 climate activists and persons affected by the oil pipeline came back out in another peaceful march to petition Uganda’s Ministry of Energy. They were again violently dragged from the street by police in fatigues and held on remand until Sept. 6, when the court finally granted their release on bail. All 20 have been ordered to appear for a hearing on Nov. 12.
“The resilience under extreme repression shown by Students Against EACOP is an inspiration and metaphor for the Oil Kills movement,” said Jamie McGonagill, an Oil Kills member from XR Boston. “We refuse to die.”
You can’t arrest a rising sea
As of this writing, 22 Oil Kills activists remain in custody in Uganda, six in Germany and 14 in the U.K. Speaking to the increasing criminalization of dissent, McGonagill explained that “draconian responses that imprison nonviolent climate activists, especially as we’ve seen lately in the U.K. and in Uganda, show that the authorities misunderstand us. They will not stop us. We will just get more and more creative.”
Oil Kills is not alone in facing repression. On Aug. 8 in New York City, a 63-year-old grandfather and professional cellist, John Mark Rozendaal, was arrested and hit with a criminal contempt charge, carrying a maximum sentence of seven years in jail, for performing Bach’s “Suites for Cello” at Citibank’s headquarters. Rozendaal was participating in the Summer of Heat campaign to pressure Citibank to divest from fossil fuels through sustained nonviolent civil disobedience. Connecting this case to the burgeoning international movement, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders Mary Lawlor, in following Rozendaal’s case, has expressed her “strong concern” at the severity of the charges.
In a disturbing trend that has become the new normal in Italy, peaceful eco-activists are being branded a “danger to security and public order,” served with specious charges, banned from cities without trial, and criminalized under anti-terrorist laws intended to prosecute the Mafia.
Last week in the U.K., several high profile journalists and activists affiliated with the movement for Palestinian liberation were arrested in a sweep by counter-terrorism police for their opposition to genocide. They have been held under Section 12 of the U.K.’s Terrorism Act, which outlaws support for a “proscribed organization.” Such an application of the law would mean that you can go to jail for 14 years for expressing an opinion.
XR NYC organizer Meg Starr, a long-time Puerto Rican solidarity activist and coordinator of the XR Allies sub-circle, noted that the links between genocide and ecocide — in Palestine and elsewhere — are becoming clearer and more important to emphasize. “Our targeting of Citibank,” Starr commented, “included a focus on Citi’s major support of the Israeli military as part of their role as the world’s leading financier of oil and gas expansion.”
“Repression is not a gradual process, it leaps out at you and takes you off guard,” he warned from his prison cell. “Do you remember the Solidarity leaders in Poland? They were invited into talks with the Polish government but when they got to the meeting, they were arrested in one fell swoop and imprisoned for years. You don’t think it will happen to you and then it does.”
Hallam’s message is that we can expect more repression, but that authorities must also expect more resistance. “You can’t negotiate with physics, with a thousand peer-reviewed articles,” he wrote. “Just Stop Oil reminds us what resistance, that far-off folk memory relegated to Netflix, actually looks like in the present moment. Thousands of arrests, hundreds of imprisonments and a five-year sentence for making a speech.”
In a statement announcing a pause in international actions to allow politicians to consider their demands, Oil Kills echoed the realism of Hallam’s framing. “The facts are clear, we are flying towards the obliteration of everything we know and love. Continuing to extract and burn oil, gas and coal is an act of war against humanity. …To know these facts and yet to have no plan to end the extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal is reckless and immoral.”
They point out that while activists sounding the alarm and demanding change are increasingly criminalized, our politicians are actually the ones who are complicit in the greatest crime in human history. “Whether those in charge realize that they are engaging in genocide is not the question. For this is how it will be seen by the next generation and all future generations,” Oil Kills warned. “For now we are taking a pause, but governments must take heed: you cannot arrest your way out of this, just as you cannot imprison a flood or serve injunctions on a wildfire.”
Oppose oil injustice, propose mobility justice
Stay Grounded is a network of individuals, local airport opposition and climate justice groups, NGOs, trade unions, initiatives fostering alternatives to aviation like night trains and organizations supporting communities that struggle against offset or projects to develop so-called “sustainable aviation fuels.” Importantly, Stay Grounded goes beyond affirming the conclusion that business as usual is not an option, and stands for a 13-step program to transform transport, society and the economy to be just and environmentally sound.
“Flying is the fastest way to fry the planet so it’s key to start by cutting pointless and unfair flights like private jets or short haul flights,” said Inês Teles, a spokesperson for Stay Grounded and an Oil Kills member. “Our actions disrupting airports should be a shock to the system that is driving us towards climate catastrophe.”
In summary, Stay Grounded’s program begins with a positive vision for justice. It includes advice for achieving a just transition, shifting to other modes of transportation, developing economies of short distances and changed modes of living, as well as strong political commitments for land rights, human rights and climate justice.
Their program then details what must be avoided — obvious yet important items like growing the harmful air travel industry, including infrastructure expansion, loopholes and privileges for aviation, and common greenwashing pitfalls like carbon offsetting, biofuels, and illusory technocentric fixes.
Though Stay Grounded’s aims are more specific to the air travel industry than Oil Kills’ unifying demand for a treaty to end fossil fuels by 2030, coalition members are able to build on these positive aims, utilizing leadership from frontline communities affected by the air travel industry. Sharing and even cross-pollinating pro-social and ecologically healthy programs, in addition to opposing destructive practices, has been an effective way of galvanizing and sustaining support across diverse movements and communities.
Covering activism isn’t activist
The choice to focus on disrupting the air travel industry in order to pressure governments to adopt a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty is as bold as the demand itself. Much of the media’s reaction so far has been unsurprisingly harsh, condemning the disruptions as “not the right way to do it.” Very little critical analysis has been audible above the din, but that doesn’t mean critical analysis isn’t happening.
It turns out, if you actually listen to them, that Oil Kills activists take strategy extremely seriously — after all, they’re knowingly putting their own freedom on the line through their actions. That is not a decision to be taken lightly, especially in today’s legal context. While news coverage of their “stunts” has circulated widely, what about the reasons behind their actions and assessments of their impact?
Covering climate activism well is a critical part of getting the climate story right. Too often journalism focuses on protesters’ tactics and not the problems they’re drawing attention to or the arguments they’re making. In a recent roundtable discussion, author, journalist and activist Bill McKibben urged fellow journalists to consider that, “we can serve our audiences better, treating activists as the newsmakers they are, rigorously evaluating their arguments as we would a public official.”
Journalists often shy away from foregrounding activists as sources of information and analysis for fear of being perceived to be more “activist” than “objective.” This framing is entirely misleading however, and can more accurately be explained as the pressure to avoid platforming those seeking to change the system in deference to those whose position exists to maintain the system. Why is a politician or a business owner an appropriate subject, but not an activist? There is no objectivity in this, but there are salaries and awards.
The myth that journalism must keep activism at arms length also misses the point that many of these ordinary people taking action are some of the best informed on the biggest news story of our time: the climate and ecological emergency. Activists have been speaking on climate science and policy for decades, many have even been personally affected by ecological disaster, but they have been almost exclusively ignored by the mainstream press. After decades of fossil fuel industry gaslighting, it turns out the activists have been right all along. It’s past time to hear these people out as legitimate subjects and newsmakers, able and deserving to speak about their work and their areas of expertise.
Why target air travel?
First, the obvious answer: oil kills. And the air travel industry is very, very oily. Aviation is by far the mode of transport with the biggest climate impact. If aviation was a country, it would be one of the top 10 emitters.
Emissions from aviation are rising more rapidly than any other sector of the economy. The number of aircraft and the number of passenger-miles flown is expected to double over the next 20 years. If left unchecked, they could consume a full quarter of the available carbon budget for limiting temperature rise to 1.5 C.
Second, oil isn’t extracted equitably, burned equitably, and neither does it kill equitably. At the turn of the millennium, less than 5 percent of the world’s population had ever sat in an aircraft. But it is mostly non-flyers who bear the brunt of the climate crisis and the negative effects of airport expansion like land grabbing, noise, particle pollution and health issues. Communities in the Global South that have barely contributed to the crisis are affected most. Indeed, well before the repression of the Oil Kills coalition, climate activists — especially in Latin America — have faced what is being termed “ecopoliticide”: the targeted and strategic murder of those who dare take action.
Stephen Okwai, a project affected person who has joined the movement to stop the EACOP pipeline in Uganda, feels there is now greater risk in inaction than in protesting. A project affected person, or PAP, is a legal term for the people directly affected by land acquisition for a project through loss of part or all of their assets including land, houses, other structures, businesses, crops/trees and other components of livelihoods. They are legally owed compensation, but in the case of Okwai and others affected by EACOP, there has been no such justice.
“Currently most of us in western Uganda are being disturbed,” he explained. “You cannot know when the rain is going to start and when it will stop yet most of these people are farmers. The effect of this oil project is greatly impacted on the people.”
After he was arrested during the Aug. 27 march in Kampala, Robert Pitua, a member of Oil Kills, Students Against EACOP, and a PAP, said that, “Livelihood restoration programs [have been] insufficient, and now we cannot manage to restore the initial livelihoods we had. Most people are given unfair and inadequate compensation.” This structural and planned destruction of hundreds of communities has left PAPs no choice but to resist, and is the source of a common refrain in Students Against EACOP’s demonstrations: “We refuse to die.”
This leads to the third reason to target aviation. The Oil Kills uprising is highlighting that the problem of aviation is part of a bigger story of injustice — it is in fact a pillar helping to hold up a system of injustice. The air travel industry is contrary to the need to eliminate fossil fuel use; it is tied to the military-industrial complex; and it is connected with the undue influence of big business on public policy, including trade, economic development and climate.
“Not only is the air travel industry a cornerstone of globalized fossil capitalism, but it is also a symbol of inequity,” Jamie McGonagill said. “By disrupting a major column of the system, we aim to disrupt the system itself.”
Rather than plentiful data and common sense reasoning, it is more often a powerful underlying consciousness that has spurred many to action. When asked why it was necessary to disrupt air travel across Europe and North America, Just Stop Oil spokespeople replied, “because governments and fossil fuel producers are waging war on humanity. Even so-called climate leaders have continued to approve new oil, gas and coal projects pushing the world closer to global catastrophe and condemning hundreds of millions to death.”
The Oil Kills coalition has rallied around reality with the seriousness it deserves, refusing dystopia by disrupting it, and demanding a clear and urgent path towards repair. “Our leaders from wealthier countries must seek a negotiating mandate for an emergency Fossil Fuel Treaty,” said coalition members in an Aug. 14 statement. “They also need to immediately finance and support poorer countries to make a fast, fair and just transition.”
If increased media attention on the climate and ecological emergency is any indicator of success, and it is, the Oil Kills uprising is punching well above its weight. “Oil Kills” was mentioned over 2,900 times in the press during the first week of the campaign. The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative has also never attracted so much media attention worldwide, with an increase of over 1,000 percent in mentions from the week prior to the campaign’s launch. Oil Kills actions drew comments from politicians, government officials and from the vice president of Norwegian oil giant, Equinor. For only 500 people spread out over three continents, they have indeed been hard to ignore.
It is true, not all publicity is created equal — but pleasing the general public is not always the priority. In a recent article, Mark Engler and Paul Engler, coauthors of “This is an Uprising,” discussed why protest works even when not everyone likes them. They explain that a very common result is that, when asked about a demonstration that makes news headlines, respondents will report sympathy for the protesters’ demands, but they will express distaste for the tactics deployed. They will see the activists themselves as too noisy, impatient and discourteous.
The coauthors, both experienced activists and resistance scholars, point out that this is actually an age-old dynamic, and one addressed eloquently by Martin Luther King Jr. in his renowned 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” They explain that, “this letter was written not as a response to racist opponents of the movement, but rather to people who professed support for the cause while criticizing demonstrations as ‘untimely’ and deriding direct action methods. ‘Frankly I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was ‘well timed’ in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation,’ King quipped. But confronting these criticisms, he made the case for why the movement’s campaigns were both necessary and effective.”
In a similar vein, Oil Kills participants, like medical student Regina Stephan who recently took action at the Berlin airport with Letzte Generation, feel they have no choice but to act: “Just yesterday, the state of Lower Saxony gave the green light for new gas drilling off Borkum,” Stephan said. “That can’t be true! As long as our decision-makers work hand in hand with the fossil fuel companies and put profit before human life, I’m standing here — on the tarmac — and I can’t help it!”
Joining in this sentiment, Anja Windl, who took action at Stuttgart airport said very succinctly: “As long as our livelihoods are being systematically destroyed, our protests will not stop.”
Importantly, Oil Kills participants are not demanding that everyone utilize the same tactics. Rather, these activists are urging others to join the climate justice movement in diverse ways. Anja continued, “if you also want to campaign for an end to fossil fuels, you don’t have to sit on an airfield like I did: Just come to a Disobedient Assembly near you!”
In recent years, there has been considerable research published that attempts to measure radical flank effects and track the polarizing effects of movements. Mark Engler and Paul Englers’ analysis cautions that, “while there are limits to how much protest impacts can be precisely quantified, the cumulative result of such research, in the words of one literature review, is to point to ‘strong evidence that protests or protest movements can be effective in achieving their desired outcomes,’ and that they can produce ‘positive effects on public opinion, public discourse and voting behavior.’” They conclude that both the historical experience of organizers and recent studies provide backing for the idea that “support for a movement’s issue can grow, even when a majority of people do not particularly like the tactics being used.”
Finally, success cannot be fully measured by public opinion, especially when the strategy is to trouble public consensus. Oil Kills has been very clear that they are not acting in order to sooth or please anyone — they are intentionally sounding the alarm as a way of empowering people to act. By treating the climate crisis as a crisis, and reacting accordingly, activists are, in a sense, giving other people permission to do the same and showing them how. It’s like when someone is real with you and that makes you feel like you can be real too — and we all need to get real, real fast. The spell of complacency is like the tranquilizer that helps walk a cow to slaughter. Oil Kills is shouting, “wake up and live!”
In a debrief by the Oil Kills campaign on Aug. 16, they addressed the public: “it is time to face reality: no one is coming to save us. There is no free pass, no shelter from the coming storm. Our best chance of survival is to resist. To join the growing numbers of ordinary, everyday people, from across the globe who are refusing to stand by while hundreds of millions of innocent people are murdered.”
Offering a pathway forward out of doom, Oil Kill’s messaging has remained crystal clear: “The climate crisis will not end until every single country has phased out fossil fuels, [and] those who bear the greatest responsibility and have the greatest capacity must do the most … In this time of crisis, we expect our governments to work collaboratively, as we have done, and negotiate a Fossil Fuel Treaty to end the war on humanity before we lose everything.”
The next rebellion is coming
Coming back down from the hugeness of our crisis and into ourselves as individuals often causes a feeling of paralysis, especially for the majority of people not yet interconnected within communities of resistance and solidarity. But there have been actions where small groups or even lone activists have held up an Oil Kills banner and received media coverage and support because they are part of a global campaign which can’t be ignored. Every single contribution adds to that.
In a Sept. 6 letter to climate activist prisoners of conscience, Naomi Klein wrote, “In a world that was right-side up, you would be celebrated as the ones who helped break the spell that is setting our world on fire. In truth, your actions could still do that, if enough people know about them.”
It continues to be an urgent and essential task to ensure that more and more people do know about Oil Kills and other manifestations of resistance, but it is also evident that the world’s elites already understand the threat that these actions represent — the threat of mass uprising. That threat is precisely why nonviolent direct action in defense of planetary life is being criminalized so viciously.
Klein continued, “Movements against climate arson are already converging with movements against genocide and unfettered greed. The next wave of rebellion is coming. Along with the tankers, I see it clearly on the horizon.” The Oil Kills uprising and fellow movements around the world have placed their bodies between those tankers and our shared future to say, “here, and no further.”
If enough of us line up behind them, their actions could very well lead the way to an adoption of a treaty to end fossil fuels by 2030 — that remains to be won. What is for certain is that their actions are troubling the autopilot system, disrupting the mechanics of fossil-capital’s death march and creating desperately needed space to pursue alternate routes. Whatever else lies on the horizon, their contributions are already impacting the world in ways we cannot yet know, but will be unlikely to forget.
