Featured image: on the evening of May 28th, protesters stormed the 3rd Police Precinct Building in Minneapolis and set it aflame.
This week has seen a series of uprisings in major cities across the United States, touched off by yet another execution carried out in the streets by the racist police forces. This time, the victim was George Floyd in Minneapolis – but his murder comes only weeks after a SWAT team gunned down another black civilian, Breonna Taylor, in Louisville and vigilantes murdered Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia.
Deep Green Resistance condemns these white supremacist killers, the cowards who enable them, and the entire structure of our settler-colonial law enforcement system. Further, we stand with the revolutionaries who are struggling against these oppressive forces in Minneapolis, Louisville, and beyond.
Police violence is one of the great injustices of our time. All told, police in the United States have killed at least two hundred citizens since the beginning of this year, and will likely kill more than five hundred by the year’s end. We often describe these killings as “senseless,” but in truth they hold a perfectly sensible function: Terrorizing and traumatizing oppressed communities.
These killings are not random, nor are they the result of individual bad actors. They disproportionately impact black and brown people – by some estimates, unarmed people of color are 60% more likely to be gunned down than unarmed whites – and they are encouraged by systematic racism at every level of the law enforcement system. Combining this atrocious violence with obvious and inexcusable racial disparities in stops, searches, and arrests, victims of colonialism in this settler nation have every right to see the police as an occupying force and resist them accordingly. The state has made its values clear.
Not every action undertaken during an uprising like this will be justifiable, either strategically or morally. But any supposedly “progressive” or “social justice” organization – let alone a revolutionary one – ought to save its condemnations for the white supremacists who have impoverished and abused these communities for generations, and we must offer our support and assistance to those activists and organizers on the ground who are working hard to struggle effectively against tyranny.
The mythology of white America has always centered on a supposed love for freedom and admiration of resistance. Yet the same white people who shout about “authoritarianism” when the state requires them to wear a face mask will demand black and brown people in this country submit to arbitrary humiliation, abuse, and even murder. As an organization, we reject this racist, cowardly nonsense, and we affirm the right of oppressed communities to defend themselves by any means necessary.
In the Deep Green Resistance book, Derrick Jensen asks, “What would you do if space aliens had invaded this planet, and they were vacuuming the oceans, and scalping native forests, and putting dams on every river, and changing the climate, and putting dioxin and dozens of other carcinogens into every mother’s breast milk, and into the flesh of your children, lover, mother, father, brother, sister, friends, into your own flesh? Would you resist?”
And we can ask the same question today of those who condemn these uprisings: What would you do if space aliens patrolled your community, killing innocents with impunity in the middle of the street? What if they promised every time to do better, while the bodies kept piling up? What if they stopped you on the way to work, or to school, or to the playground with your children? What if they harassed you and abused you and jailed you for petty crimes, or no crime at all? What if you weren’t safe, even in your own bedroom at night? Would you resist? Would you condemn those who did? If not, then you must not let the familiarity of this barbarous system pacify you.
Deep Green Resistance also condemns those who use uprisings like this as an opportunity to act out their macho fantasies. Already, we have seen reports of white “allies” engaging in pointless vandalism and deliberately provoking confrontations with police, or making increasingly reckless calls for escalation. There is no place in a serious revolutionary movement for the glorification of violence and disorder, especially by those who come from communities that will not bear the brunt of the consequences. A world of difference exists between strategic resistance, militant or otherwise, and random destruction; both dogmatic pacifism and reflexive violence can derail revolutionary movements.
The struggle for environmental justice is inseparable from the struggle against white supremacy, just as it is inseparable from the struggle for women’s liberation. And in turn, the abolition of patriarchy and settler-colonialism is necessary to save the land we live on. The dominant culture that is killing the planet cannot be stopped without sustained resistance against all forms of oppression, and we applaud those who are risking their lives to resist white power.
Should any revolutionaries in the area need of support, please reach out to us. We can provide platforms to amplify your voice, training, access to resources, allies, and more.
What would a revolutionary permaculture movement look like? As food shortages begin to sweep the world, the prospect of a Deep Green Resistance—a movement combining relocalization with organized political resistance—grows ever more relevant.
As coronavirus unravels global supply chains, wildfires cool in Australia, Arctic ice continues to decline, and 2019 goes down as the 2nd hottest year on record, we all know how bad things are.
Unless there is fundamental change to the socio-economic fabric of global societies, the future is bleak.
Here in the United States, both major political parties are completely insane. Even the most progressive Democratic politicians are only proposing what amount to relatively minor reforms to the economic systems we live under.
Policy proposals like The Green New Deal in the U.S. and plans like the Energiewende in Germany aim to maintain a modern, high-energy consumption lifestyle while only changing the sources of energy we use. Much more is needed.
As we accelerate further into global crisis, we are seeing increased instability around the world. Refugees are on the march, food instability is rising, extreme weather events are becoming commonplace, and as a result authoritarianism is on the rise. Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro, and Erdogan reflect the hopes of a fearful population looking for a strong patriarch figure to lead them to safety.
But there is no safety to be had behind walls and armies, not when the world is burning.
Industrial Civilization is Fragile
A founding principle of Deep Green Resistance is the understanding that modern industrial civilization is fragile. While globalized supply chains enable the system to easily recover from regional shocks, industrial capitalism is highly vulnerable to global disruptions, as CoViD-19 has shown.
We are seeing cracks in the industrial food system, which is leading people to question modernity. This questioning is a good thing. It’s essential that we begin a wholesale shift away from high-energy, consumeristic lifestyles and towards local, small-scale, low-energy ways of life. We need to abandon industrial capitalism before it destroys all life on the planet.
Various movements such as Transition Towns and permaculture have been saying this for a long time. Their message is essential, but in my opinion incomplete. The dominant culture has always destroyed and exploited low-energy, small scale, sustainable human communities.
That’s what colonization is. And it’s still going on today. A failure to grapple with the racist violence necessary to maintain and expand modern civilization is one reason why permaculture movements have remained mostly white and middle-class (capitalism, and poor people’s resulting lack of access to land and free time, are another critical factor in this).
Building a Revolutionary Permaculture Movement
Therefore, not only do we need to relocalize, we also need community defense and resistance movements dedicated to pro-actively dismantling industrial civilization in solidarity with colonized peoples and indigenous communities. We can’t just walk away. We have to fight like hell and bring a revolutionary edge to all of our organizing. We have to combine building the new with burning the old. The faster the system comes to a halt, the more life will remain. And there is no time to waste. This is probably the only way to save the planet and guarantee a livable future.
The failure of mainstream political parties of technological solutions are becoming increasingly clear to average people. They are looking for solutions. Popular movements are becoming increasingly confrontational. But still, it is very rare that anyone is able to articulate a feasible alternative to the dominant culture, the techno-industrial economic system.
A politicized permaculture movement has this alternative. A political permaculture movement, allied with resistance movements and working to rapidly re-localize and de-industrialize human populations could provide a feasible alternative to partisan gridlock while demonstrating a tangible real-world alternative. This movement needs to begin at the local and regional levels, seizing power in schools, county offices, water and soil boards, and building our own power structures through localized food networks, housing, labor, and political organizing.
I have heard it said that permaculture is a revolution disguised as gardening. Perhaps it is time to drop the disguise.
Our Pilot Project
In Oregon, Deep Green Resistance is engaged in a community mutual aid project in collaboration with local indigenous organizers and other allies. We are distributing to the community free of charge:
Food
Seeds and gardening supplies
Plant starts
Gardening pamphlets and guides
Freshly-hatched ducklings and information as to their care
Seedlings of native oak trees
We have chosen to distribute native oak seedlings because native oak savanna is the most endangered habitat in the country. More than 95% of it has been destroyed since colonization. Second, because acorns can be a valuable staple food. Third, because planting native oak trees (and assisting in the northward migration of valuable non-native food trees) can help begin the transition to perennial food systems while both mitigating and preparing for global warming and biodiversity collapses (oaks are prized by wildlife and oak savanna is an extremely biodiverse habitat).
At the same time, we are also distributing political literature and engaging in (socially-distanced) conversations with our community members about these issues. Our goal is to strengthen and build local food systems, and also resistance networks with radical analysis of the political situation.
Oregon is perhaps ahead of the curve. It’s a mostly rural state with a relatively small population. It has long been a hub for local food production, permaculture, and relocalization. These projects will be harder to implement in urban communities, and poverty compounds all the challenges. However, the skills to live sustainably already exist. The barriers are time, funding, political education, and most importantly the will of the people. As the famous saying goes, only ourselves can free our minds. Free your mind and begin to build this new revolutionary transformation.
We hope to see this project replicated around the world. We take inspiration from the many people already engaged in this sort of work, especially those who combine ecological awareness, practical relocalization, and revolutionary resistance. Contact us for more information, to get involved, or to have a conversation about implementing similar projects in your community.
Max Wilbert is a third-generation political dissident, writer, and wilderness guide. He has been involved in grassroots organizing for nearly 20 years. His essays have been published in Earth Island Journal,Counterpunch, DGR News Service, and elsewhere, and have been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, and French. His second book, Bright Green Lies, is scheduled for release in 2021.
In this piece of writing Rebecca shares her deep connection with nature, her journey in love, courting and listening for responses. She illuminates how a culture of resistance sown from fierce love can empower us to stop oppression and injustice.
Do you remember the first time you fell in love? What did it bring alive? I was fifteen. His wavy, dark hair shook when he spoke, accentuating his expressions. His brown eyes flickered from behind his round spectacles on the few occasions I glanced at him. It was the 80s. He was an oddball in a jean jacket with a smiley face on the back. He spoke things I thought, but never said. Perhaps they were truths I didn’t even know I held. I was quiet. I hadn’t lived in a world where people were allowed to be so honest, but he didn’t seem to need permission.
We were in the same classes and the school play. His presence pierced the shallow high school drudgery. I’d spent many days near him, but one day awoke to the horror of discovering something had shifted inside me. I wanted to be nearer to him, yet I felt terrified to get any closer. A new angst grew within me—nothing would ever be the same.
I imagined that if we spoke, he’d understand what I wanted to say. I was too shy to approach him. I wrote to him in my journal, his name spelled backwards for secrecy, “Dear Ydna.” I missed being around him in summertime. In a flash of boldness, I looked up his number in the phone book and called. I asked if he’d like to meet in the park and go swinging. He agreed. I felt like myself on the swings—with my body in motion, my words could flow easier.
In the years that followed, we were in the same circle of friends. Without knowing I was doing it, I apprenticed to what I loved about him: the courage to speak out, inhabit my depths, and be odd (authentic). We wrote for the school newspaper in our senior year. I wroteeditorials seeking a more meaningful life and critiquing high school—hairspray to cliques to prom to our classes.
My love for this boy altered me, and it never required we even hold hands. It awoke a longing that stirred my feelings,incited my imagination, catalyzed my actions. I grew to understand the yearnings of my heart and began to find my voice and engage with those around me. I grew into someone beyond whom I thought I could be.
Romance
Romance is more than a pleasurable feeling. It’s more than finding your other half in another human. It isn’t acquisition, and it’s not sex either. Real romance opens us to the mystery and depth of our longing and unveils the secrets of our heart. Suddenly, what is truly meaningful is alive and close enough to move toward, but far enough away that we ache for it. This may impel us to act courageously. As we serve what we love, we honor it. Perhaps we become closer somehow. This guides whom we become.
Romancecan mature us into becoming someone who has the capacity to serve the world—someone willing to offer their life to what matters most. Our longingis a guidepost, offering the first scent on the path. My affection for my high school love called me out of my inner world and had me risk sharing myself. As the qualities I admired in him—authenticity, articulation, and courage—developed in me, I became more myself.
Just as romance may open our hearts and inspire our creativity, it may also initiate us into the transpersonal. We may experience the Divine, Goddess, or Mystery through the other. Many nature-based and indigenous cultures, such as the Tz’utujil Mayan culture, didn’t allow their young to touch one another until after they’d been initiated. Their readiness wasn’t determined by age, but by their infatuation, a “precious brush” with seeing and wanting “the devastating, delicious, ecstatic, and painful presence of the Divine.”
Men and women were separated from each other and the village for a year. They grieved and courted the Divine—that which they could love, but never possess—with love poems, and in so doing became capable of loving another human who could be forgiven for small thoughts and deeds.
The Inner Beloved
Romantic love can carry us to the transcendent or sink us into the depths of our truest nature. The attractive qualities we project onto another when we fall in love exist in us, too. While we may not fully embody these qualities, we can cultivate them. Through romantic love, we may encounter our inner beloved, the true other half of our psyche, who may appear in dreams, fantasies, or in the attractive qualities we project. The anima is the intuitive, feminine, heart-based side of ourselves, while the animus is the masculine, intellectual, action-oriented side of ourselves.
Romance with an outer partner can bring joy and meaning, too—if we withdraw our idealizations—but a relationship with our inner beloved is vital. Following its call can inspire and guide us toward the deepest purpose of our soul. Soul is the unique place we were born to inhabit within the Earth community. It’s the myth or image that underlies the way we’re called to serve the world. We may encounter soul through the whispers and hints of our inner beloved, as well as in dreams and conversations with the natural world.
We can fall in love with anything, a concept, a forest, a work of art or a dying planet. Stepping toward the inner beloved may feel alluring and terrifying. The possibility of death may remind us of the vulnerability of life and the preciousness of every moment. Relating with our inner beloved aligns us with our imagination and deepens our relationship with our muse, who restores our visionary capacity and inspires our unique way of seeing the world.
Sourced in our deep imagination, we can live a muse-directed life where never-before-seen forms emerge through us, and we receive visions for how we might tend the world. The qualities of my high school love still live in me, alongside those of past and present loves. My inner beloved invites me to perceive the world in the way that only I can, informing how I listen, guide, and write.
The Natural World
Nature lives the most exquisite romance of all. Wind dances with trees, thunderstorms roar, and lightning brightens the sky. The cycles of the moon dance with the ocean’s tides. The sunrise bathes the mountains, rivers, and prairies in warmth and light. Bees pollinate flowers. The breeze makes music with the leaves. The crickets make a concert for the night. Rain offers itself to the grasses. Rivers carry their waters to the sea. Coyotes howl. Owls hoot. Frogs croak. The red-tailed hawk perches on a rock and spreads her wings to dry in the sun. A mourning dove’s call echoes on canyon walls.
Nature is our guide.
Romance is essential for it and imperative for us, too. And romance can happen between humans and non-humans. I’ve had extraordinary romances with tree and ocean, river and rainforest. We can tend our inner beloved and our outer relationships. Each may deepen the other. I remember the first night I spent on a river. I was in my mid-twenties on a multi-day raft trip down the Colorado River through Cataract Canyon. I stared up at the stars, planets, and galaxies twinkling in the night sky framed by the dark silhouettes of red rock walls. I couldn’t close my eyes, because I didn’t want to miss anything. The river glowed dark in the moon’s light while lapping at my toes in the sand.
Every river is uniquely magnificent—also dangerous, reminding us that the possibility of death is always near. Sometimes I awaken in the night with a knot in my stomach before guiding on a river. Sitting in meditation, I pray for my life. “Why go?” my fear voices interject. “Just stay home.” But the river calls.
When I’m in its flow, I feel alive. The ducks, beavers, and geese seem more alive too. Listening to the sound of ever-changing currents, I wonder what’s around the next bend. Sometimes the river asks me to surrender, and other times it challenges me to find my strength. My body loves this wordless conversation with waves. When the boat flips, I find myself underwater, immersed in the silence that lives there. Then my instinct emerges and propels my fight to the river’s turbulent surface.
Heartbreak
Our romance with the world brings us joy. We may smell the scent of honeysuckle, hear the song of crashing waves, or sense the moisture in the air after it rains. It also breaks our hearts, especially if we love the natural world, which is under assault.
My heart broke when three million gallons of toxic waste were dumped into the Animas River in the Gold King Mine spill of August 2015. I was a river guide, and it was then I began to learn about the waste that has always been there. With forty-four abandoned mines at its headwaters, toxins are always draining into it. The mine waste dumped into the river during the spill discharges every ten days, unnoticed. These draining mines dump three hundred million gallons of waste into the Animas every year.
Dams harm rivers too. There are about seventy-five thousand dams over six feet tall, including sixty-five thousand over twenty feet tall, and an estimated two million small dams in the United States alone. Dams kill fish, strangle streams, and harm entire ecosystems. Many dams no longer work or were illegal in the first place. When we imprison rivers, we clog the Earth’s blood, locking up everything downstream.
The harm is happening everywhere. Hundreds of species go extinct each day, as industrial civilization steals resources from the land and the poor. Personal lifestyle changes won’t stop the harm. The majority of consumption is commercial, industrial, and corporate, by agribusiness and government. Global industrial empire is built on conquest and the use of nonrenewable resources. It is inherently unsustainable. Much green technology requires mining, consuming, and ecosystem destruction. We will never be intact as long as the Earth is our captive.
Collapse
Fear constricts our hearts.We may even be consumed by it, if we are not in denial. There is no safe place. Some nights I lie awake feeling dread. There’s no security in ourgovernmentleaders or the structures of our industrial lifestyle. The coronavirus scare has offered us a frightening glimpse of things many people face every day: food shortages, deaths, loss of civil freedoms, and totalitarian leadership. COVID-19 has unveiled just how fragile our dominant system really is, and we may face a more extreme version of this in the future as seas rise, droughts increase, soil depletion and climate change continue, and clean water becomes even more scarce and precious.
I pray our fear gives rise to courage.
Industrial civilization is making the Earth uninhabitable for humans and most species. Collapse seems inevitable. Waiting for things to unravel could make the crash worse forboth humans and non-humanswho live through it, and thosewho come afterwards. Instead, we could love the wild world by championing the collapse of global empire. The sooner we stop this way of life, the more animals, fish, trees, and rivers will be left alive. The more likely there will be sustainable food sources for future generations. The natural world, developing nations, indigenous cultures, and rural people will immediately be better off post-collapse.
Government’s inability to respond to the covid-19 pandemic that threatens society reflects the incapacity to engage with the broader issues of environmental crisis. While the living world may appreciate the temporary slowing of the industrial machine, coronavirus highlights our dependence on a system that’s failing us. Our governments usethe pandemic to further destroy the planet. Recently, the Environmental Protection Agencysuspended environmental rules indefinitely, the secretary of the interior ordered the Mashpee Wampanoag Reservation “Disestablished”. It’s land taken out of trust. Several states have quietly passed laws criminalizing protests against fossil fuel infrastructure. Effectively addressing both the virus and our collapsing ecosystems would require recognizing our inherent connection: individual health is dependent on the overall health of everyone, rich and poor, marginalized and elite, human and nonhuman.
Grief
Grief is a way of loving that breaks our hearts open to the world. A nightmare jolts me awake. I’m swimming in dark water at night, and a crowd of people are swimming there, too. I’m afraid they’ll run me over. As I try to swim around them, someone swims underneath me and grabs my leg. I’m pulled down fast. I feel like I’m free falling. I can’t breathe.
I’m in love with water. Rivers and oceans are often in my dreams, but this time I’m terrified. As I re-enter the dream in my imagination, I feel lost in blackness. I don’t know which way is up. The pressure is crushing. I can’t move my lungs against the heaviness. I feel the visceral nightmare inflicted on nature every day.
Undigested grief lived in the cancer I had when I was twenty-one. A nine-centimeter tumor grew in the two lymph nodes in front of my heart, awakening me to the dam within myself, like a concrete slab forced into a river, obstructing its flow. When we don’t grieve, we become as dangerous as a dammed river. Tears free our inner river and show us that we care. Elder Joanna Macy reminds us that from climate chaos to nuclear war, “there’s no danger so great as the deadening of our response.”
Grief longs for the impossible.
I wish my words could restore rivers, ecosystems, and justice. I wish writing about the problems meant they could be overcome. Instead, I feel uncertainty and doom which usher me into despair. I wonder if I can hold this. I struggle to make a difference. I sense myself in the dark waters, and I feel them asking me to let go. As my tears flow, I remember that allowing love’s waters to flow teaches me what I love.
Being in love makes me want to live, and to serve, even if it breaks my heart. We can love what we love, and this can guide us. As my tears flow, mysteries arise from my now exposed heart. I feel powerless to protect those I love, rivers, trees, animals, all wild places. Suddenly I hear Kahlil Gibran’s words about bleeding “willingly and joyfully” for what we love. I feel like I’m bleeding. I imagine that somehow the dark waters of my tears and heartbreak are feeding life.
Courtship
Loving what we love may feel vulnerable and painful, if we risk opening to it. We court by offering, by humbly and eloquently approaching and giving ourselves to what we love. We create the beauty for which we long by becoming what we love. I court through writing, but I’m not sure if it’ll make a difference. Perhaps it’s foolish. When we court what we love, we’re willing to fail. We may not fully understand what it is we seek. It’s always somewhat of a mystery, and we can be surprised, overjoyed, or terrified when “the incomprehensible” shows its divine face.
I’m deeply in love with the wild soul and mystery, as well as with nature. While apprenticing to be a soul guide at age thirty-three, I spoke of my longing to serve them, and my willingness to do whatever it takes to develop the capacity. I was married then, and soon my marriage began to unravel. I hiked into a red rock canyon to enact a ceremony, offering the red-tailed hawk feathers my partner had given me. The grief that followed nearly undid me. Is there anywhere I belong?
Six months later, I found myself on a river. A wave pulled me out of my boat, and I was swept underneath a major rapid without a life jacket. Being deep underwater felt much like my recent nightmare. I fought harder than I knew I could, made my way to the surface, and then to shore. I’d lost a shoe, but there was another in the sand. I put it on, shaking. I didn’t get on a river again for nine years. It took that long to understand what the river was trying to show me: I belong to the dark waters. Mythically, they are a place I am here to inhabit.
In courtship, we make an offering and listen for a response. We may be asked to step away or move toward something. It may challenge us, whether we relate with someone in particular or with everything. We turn toward the world full-hearted, in an ongoing relationship with the mystery of our love. As it reveals itself through dreams, nature, and our hearts, we act on behalf of what we most cherish, believe, or grieve. When we embody what it asks, it offers more, guiding us toward what is next in a life of creative service.
Our love calls us to serve the world. If we love nature, our activism can be a way of courting. Briony Penn, Ph.D., stopped a forest with old-growth Douglas fir and Garry oak from being logged on Salt Spring Island. They didn’t listen to her scientific arguments. “I was desperate,” she explained. So she rode a horse through town in a Lady Godiva-style protest, alongside five other bare-breasted women and thirty more demonstrators. The media werethere. That forest still lives.
Revolution
True love engenders the courage to stand up for what we love. The boy I loved in high school emboldened me to find my words and show myself. The river taught me that love is not only surrender, it is struggle. My love for the natural world demands an even greater strength, while activism protects particular places or species, revolution challenges the whole of global empire. Fueled by a fierce dedication to justice, ecological revolution asks us to stand in our power and ally ourselves to the physical living planet.
While romance invites us to surrender to love and receive the visions of our muse, revolution strengthens our capacity to stand in our power. Romance arises from our feminine side, an intuitive, heartfelt dreaming that mirrors the cave-womb in a woman’s body. Revolution is birthed externally from our masculine side, with its rational impulse to act and protect. Our feminine dreaming inspires action. As webring together our visionary and revolutionary natures, romance ignites revolution. Within our psyches and the larger world.
In a red rock canyon last May, my grief-love-longing ache stirred me to ask the Earth what she needs.
“Do you want me to stand up for you more somehow?” I asked.
“Yes, I would like that,” I felt the words arise from my belly and sit in my mind’s eye. “We need help.” My dreams echoed a similar response in the months that followed.
Guiding is a way I love mystery, soul, and Earth. I usher a kind of inner revolution in the human psyche, whereby nature and soul overthrow the current regime that directs a person’s life. I guide others to resource themselves in wholeness and allow their dreams, the natural world, and soul to lead them rather than less healthy aspects of their ego. This work is vital—it teaches self-healing, provides purpose, and brings alive what is most extraordinary in humans. Individual change can seed cultural transformation but the Earth remains imperilled and more is needed.
To belong to the Earth is to stand up for her. Joanna Macy named three dimensions of Ecological Revolution ~ 1) holding actions to stop the harm, 2) life sustaining practices, and 3) shifting consciousness. To be effective, these perspectives must work together. Tending the world begins with imagining the rivers running clear and the oceans full of fish, and envisioning what actions will make this happen.
Global industrial empire is destroying the living planet.
As revolutionaries, we stand with Earth, bear witness to the harm being done, express the reality of what’s happening, and defend what we love. We recognizeinjustice by observing how power operates and acknowledgingthe everyday cruelty of our society. Millions of people participate, either directly or as bystanders with benefits. It’s painful to experience our own complicity, but ecological revolution requires socio-political consciousness.
Power
Engaging politically is an act of love that attunes us to the challenges of the world and urges us to change things. I used to hate politics, because it seemed like a never-ending parade of lies and corruption I couldn’t stop. Perhaps I wasn’t able to stand in my power, or perhaps I’d grown up in a culture that taught me I had no power.
When I was young, my mom had my brother and I campaign for President Carter and then Mondale. They lost. My actions didn’t change anything. I joined my college boyfriend, a political science major and leader of the environmental action coalition, in debates and protests. His aim was to be president. I did not want to be the first lady. Engaging politically threatened to embed me in its web of injustice.
I am in love with rivers, trees, oceans, and animals, and love often calls us forth to reckon with what we’ve avoided.Change is difficult, because our dominant culture, based on multiple systems of power—industrialization, capitalism, and patriarchy—is rooted in violence, ecocide, and domination. It exploits the natural world and oppresses some people while privileging others.
Everyday violence is overlooked, because it’s considered normal.
The indigenous, the poor, women, people of color, and most especially the natural world are subordinate. They are objectified as commodities. Even though it may seem like those who are marginalized consent to this hierarchy, it is not voluntary. It is expected that they will submit. They (most) do so to survive. Our global industrial-agro-corporate-military complex is powerful. It will use force. Activists who defend wild places are often imprisoned or killed. Pipelines are built. Oceans fill with plastic. Ice melts. Those with power have armies, courts, prisons, taxes, and the media.
Resistance is power.
A culture of resistance sown from fierce love can empower us to stop oppression and injustice. Theinstitutions that control society can be dismantled, and we can remember another way to live. The Underground Railroad was controversial at the time Harriet Tubman was guided by God to free slaves. We need a similar kind of boldness now. Reasoned requests will not stop systems of power. Our legal system is designed to support them. A voluntary transformation is unlikely. Our withdrawal allows the planet to go on being harmed.
Organized political resistanceis crucial. All strategies must be considered, from “revolutionary law-making to strategic non-violence to coordinated sabotage of industrial infrastructure.” The Earth and future humans need us to come together in a co-creative partnership with the natural world. We need to stand in our love and power, to abolish the violence against our planet. To stop industrialization, patriarchy, and capitalism, which place the privilege of a few over the welfare of all humans, nonhumans and Mother Earth. We must not overlook the urgency of this moment.
Dark Waters
I have always been in love with dark waters. As a teen, I often sat at the edge of the sea near my home at night. I preferred it there, imaging myself submerged under water. I felt the presence of another world with its potent unseen possibilities. When I emerged from the river missing a shoe at thirty-three, it was a call to live with one foot in the dark waters. Similar to the myth of Persephone, who lives half her life in the underworld.
The dark waters are a mythic place I inhabit that gives me soul power. These waters are pure mystery and the womb from which all things are born. They invite dissolution and steep us in uncertainty. Most of our universe is darkness, confirming the existence of mystery, more is unknown than is known. Sixty-eight percent of the universe is dark energy and twenty-seven percent is dark matter. Less than five percent of our world is real matter, everything else understood by science. When we’re in darkness, our eyes cannot see, so our imagination , a powerful and intuitive strategy to listen, grows stronger. Visions and unique phenomena emerge from darkness which can source our romance and our revolution.
Primordial waters are a mythological motif found across cultures, a cosmic ocean or a celestial river enveloping the universe and symbolizing chaos and the source of creation. The womb of dark waters is a feminine place from which visions arise and all actions are best sourced. We are born of the womb and return to the dream stream every night. When our day world finds us overly focused on the masculine tendency to act, our psyches become as out of balance as our culture. We restore the feminine when we listen to our dreams, our muse, and the dark mystery. It is as radical and necessary to let these visionary womb waters guide us as it is to confront patriarchy.
I offeredvows to the dark waters several years ago, while guiding on an island near the Irish lands of my ancestors. A seal’s head surfaced only a few feet away. Peering into its soft, dark eyes carried me into the depths of the ocean. I return to those depths in my imagination often. When I perceive the world from these dark waters, I feel a heaviness against my chest which grounds me in the Earth and is fraught with grief. My eyes well with tears as I feel love for the world. I stare into the blackness, longing for a vision, awaiting the mystery of things. Living here feels powerful and vulnerable.
I invite others into the dark waters—you, too, may close your eyes and be there now, in your imagination. Sensing the world from here is a unique and valuable vantage. I have witnessed the dark waters usher inner revolution in the human psyche time and again. How I long to bring these revolutionary powers to the planetary!
The dark waters are wiser than us. Returning to these mystical depthsallies us with the greater forces of unseen worlds and infuses our romance and revolution with a fierce creativity that allows the Earth to dream through us so that we may act both mythically and directly.
Nicolas Casaux outlines the history of humankind, the domestication of animals, and how easily we share disease—the real origins of coronavirus.
By Nicolas Casaux
There’s an apocryphal aphorism, often attributed to Rousseau, which states that “Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces”. Every day that passes is a new chance to realize this.
The spread of pandemics such as that of the Wuhan coronavirus is one of the many threats to which globalized techno-industrial civilization inevitably exposes itself; one of the many potential disasters it generates and which threatens to destroy it. However, it is vital to consider the real origins of pandemics such as this. As an article recently published on the website of the famous American History Channel points out, they constitute a recent phenomenon on the scale of human history, peculiar to “civilization”:
“Communicable diseases existed during humankind’s hunter-gatherer days, but the shift to agrarian life 10,000 years ago created communities that made epidemics more possible. Malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy, influenza, smallpox and others first appeared during this period. The more civilized humans became, building cities and forging trade routes to connect with other cities, and waging wars with them, the more likely pandemics became.”
“Before extensive human travel, migratory birds that nested together combined long-distance travel with crowding to constitute, perhaps, the main vector for the spread of disease over distance. The association of infection with crowding was known and utilized long before the actual vectors of disease transmission were understood. Hunters and gatherers knew enough to stay clear of large settlements, and dispersal was long seen as a way to avoid contracting an epidemic disease. (…)
The importance of sedentism and the crowding it allowed can not be overestimated. It means that virtually all infectious diseases due to microorganisms specifically adapted to Homo sapiens came into existence only in the past ten thousand years. Many of them perhaps only in the past five thousand. They were, in the strong sense, a “civilizational effect.” These historically novel diseases—cholera, smallpox, mumps, measles, influenza, chicken pox, and perhaps malaria—arose only as a result of the beginnings of urbanism and, as we shall see, agriculture. (…)
No account of the epidemiology of the Neolithic is complete without noting the key role of domesticates: livestock, commensals, and cultivated grains and legumes.
The key principle of crowding is again operative. The Neolithic was not only an unprecedented gathering of people but, at the same time, a wholly unprecedented gathering of sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, dogs, cats, chickens, ducks, geese. To the degree that they were already “herd” or “flock” animals, they would have carried some species-specific pathogens of crowding. Assembled for the first time around the domus, in close and continuous contact, they quickly came to share a wide range of infective organisms. Estimates vary, but of the fourteen hundred known human pathogenic organisms, between eight hundred and nine hundred are zoonotic diseases, originating in nonhuman hosts. For most of these pathogens, Homo sapiens is a final “dead-end” host: humans do not transmit it further to another nonhuman host. (…)
The multispecies resettlement camp was, then, not only a historic assemblage of mammals in numbers and proximity never previously known, but it was also an assembly of all the bacteria, protozoa, helminthes, and viruses that fed on them. The victors, as it were, in this pest race were those pathogens that could quickly adapt to new hosts in the domus and multiply.
What was occurring was the first massive surge of pathogens across the species barrier, establishing an entirely new epidemiological order.
The narrative of this breach is naturally told from the (horrified) perspective of Homo sapiens. It cannot have been any less melancholy from the perspective of, say, the goat or sheep that, after all, did not volunteer to enter the domus. I leave it to the reader to imagine how a precocious, all-knowing goat might narrate the history of disease transmission in the Neolithic.
The list of diseases shared with domesticates and commensals at the domus is quantitatively striking. In an outdated list, now surely even longer, we humans share twenty-six diseases with poultry, thirty-two with rats and mice, thirty-five with horses, forty-two with pigs, forty-six with sheep and goats, fifty with cattle, and sixty-five with our much-studied and oldest domesticate, the dog. Measles is suspected to have arisen from a rinderpest virus among sheep and goats, smallpox from camel domestication and a cowpox-bearing rodent ancestor, and influenza from the domestication of waterfowl some forty-five hundred years ago. The generation of new species-jumping zoonoses grew as populations of man and beasts swelled and contact over longer distances became more frequent. It continues today. Little wonder, then, that southeast China, specifically Guangdong, probably the largest, most crowded, and historically deepest concentration of Homo sapiens, pigs, chickens, geese, ducks, and wild animal markets in the world, has been a major world petri dish for the incubation of new strains of bird and swine flu.
The disease ecology of the late Neolithic was not simply a result of the crowding of people and their domesticates in fixed settlements. It was rather an effect of the entire domus complex as an ecological module.
The clearing of the land for agriculture and the grazing of the new domesticates created an entirely new landscape, and an entirely new ecological niche with more sunlight, more exposed soils, into which new suites of flora, fauna, insects, and microorganisms moved as the previous ecological pattern was disturbed.”
It is therefore with the advent of civilization, several thousand years ago, that these problems emerged. Subsequently, it was with the beginnings of globalization, several centuries ago, that they gained in intensity, importance and danger. Ray Grigg, a Canadian author, explains it admirably in a short text that I will reproduce below, in full:
“About 250 million years ago, all the distinct continents on Earth existed as one large land mass called Pangea. Over millions of years, at a speed comparable to the growth of fingernails, the shifting tectonic plates of the planet fractured and separated Pangea into the different continents we know today. Some of the puzzle’s pieces still fit together, although many of the shapes are now deformed by various geological dynamics. The east side of South America, for example, fits nicely against the west side of Africa, and North America can be moved across the Atlantic so that the Caribbean snuggles into the northwest bulge of Morocco.
The division of Pangea into separate continents had huge environmental implications. First, and perhaps foremost, it meant that species could no longer move freely around one large land mass. The fractures that filled with oceans isolated them, the drifting segments slowly developed very unique ecologies, and distinctive plants and animals evolved in adaptation to those local peculiarities.
This was the situation encountered by humans as they began moving around the planet about 70,000 years ago. Just a mere 500 years ago, during a surge of exploration and colonization, Europe was sending ships to North and South America, to Asia, Africa and elsewhere. The continents, once ecologically isolated for millions of years, were now being reconnected – not geologically by the movement of tectonic plates but by the physical movement of humans transporting commercial products, plants, animals, viruses and their own particular cultures. The world would never again be the same.
Clearly, this process did not suddenly begin with the arrival of Columbus on a remote Caribbean island in 1492. Commercial products and ideas were travelling between Europe and Asia before then. The Bubonic Plague reached Venice from an eastern seaport a few years prior to 1348, before ravishing Europe in successive waves of pandemic death. But the diseases to which Europeans had developed some immunity – smallpox, measles, mumps, chicken pox, rubella, typhus and cholera – were transported to the New World by later explorers, with devastating consequences to the native populations. Think of this as the beginning of globalization.
Globalization is, in effect, a return to Pangea. In the blink of a geological eye, all the barriers that once separated the continents into distinct ecologies are now being dismantled by the international movement of goods, species and people. Norway rats reached most of the world’s ports on sailing ships, traumatizing every ecology where they arrived – sometimes remedial efforts compounded the trauma by introducing other species that were supposed to predate the rats. Eccentric immigrants imported rabbits to Australia and starlings to North America, both species inflicting devastating damage across their respective continents.
Indeed, globalization is a kind of ecological short-circuiting that throws biological systems into pandemonium.
More than 250 foreign marine species now inhabit San Francisco Bay, transported there by ballast water discharged by freighters from around the world. The same process has brought an estimated 300 exotic plants and animals to the Great Lakes. The Asian carp that now threaten the entire diversity of the Missouri and Mississippi River systems came from a few fish that washed away from nearby ponds during a flood – these voracious fish are now poised to reach the Great Lakes, expanding their sphere of ecological catastrophe. Atlantic salmon, which belong in the Atlantic Ocean, were deliberately imported to the Pacific for commercial reasons, with complex impacts that could damage an entire marine ecology.
Globalization has essentially removed the barriers of time and space that once protected ecologies from contamination and disruption. Diseases, fungi, insects, mammals, amphibians, birds and plants are all distributed helter-skelter around the planet by ships, planes, cars, luggage, souvenirs, shoes, bodies and just about anything else that moves. The various results are species displacement, population explosions and extinctions.
Ecologies that are wholly incapable of dealing with oil get blanketed in it as international pipelines and global tanker traffic disperse this crude energy from sites of supply to demand. AIDS, a world killer of millions, escaped from an isolated African village because of the mass movement of people around the planet. An obscure disease such as West Nile virus spreads across North America after it inadvertently arrives in a mosquito aboard an airplane arriving in New York from southern Europe. Deadly influenzas skitter around the world with the tides of international travellers.
This globalizing process is even wreaking havoc on distinctive human cultures, as travel, technology and media contaminate unique ways of thinking and understanding.
Well-adapted lifestyles are destroyed during this great homogenization process. Languages, essential to preserving and perpetuating cultures, are being obliterated at the rate of one per week. And globalization confuses and debilitates national and local politics as every trade agreement erodes the democratic process by shrinking individual autonomy and robbing resident people of self-determination.
Large as Pangea must have been, it had valleys, deserts, mountains and rivers that would have constrained the movement of species. But, in the New Pangea, no obstacle is great enough to halt the massive tide of movement that is sweeping over the planet. The ecological disturbances it creates are unparalleled in Earth’s history.”
Having highlighted the real origins of the coronavirus it should be obvious that the Covid-19 pandemic is only one logical and unavoidable consequence, among many others, of globalization. Civilization,is a way of life that is harmful to all life on Earth. It has been constantly ravaging nature for several millennia. It is a culture which constitutes, both socially and ecologically, a real human and natural disaster.
The proper functioning of (industrial) civilization depends on (requires) the destruction of nature. The prosperity of humankind on Earth depends on establishing harmonious and respectful relations with nature. The survival of civilization is contrary to the survival of humankind and the natural world.
May covid-19 serve as an eye-opener.
May we find the strength, the will and the means to stop civilization in its tracks before it is too late.
Nicolas is a French environmental activist and member of DGR. He works as an editor and translator for the french publishing house Editions LIBRE, which he cofounded.
Coronavirus rarely kills people directly—so why are people dying? This piece from Paul Feather, animist farmer and writer, challenges simplistic, reductionist thinking, and proposes a synthesis approach to understanding the current crisis.
Sixty five thousand, six hundred and fifty two. As of this writing, John Hopkins reports this death toll from coronavirus [the official death toll is now above 100,000].
It’s strange to me, the way we count these deaths. I would like to count them differently. I would like to use science, even though the scientists won’t. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how you count things, but this particular number—or rather its rate of growth—has lost us our constitutional right to assemble. A third of the world’s population is on lockdown with more to come no doubt, and I fear for the suffering that results from these restrictions.
So maybe we should check our numbers.
Our culture has a strange idea of cause and effect.
It’s very reduced; we have a tendency to explain very complex situations with very singular causes. (This is often useful: reduction is the key to controlling things, and to placing blame.)
However, reducing everything down to single causes—like cause of death from a virus—isn’t helpful for deep understanding of complex situations, nor is it good science. I’ll be cautious of speaking for cultures that aren’t mine, but a broad study of language and culture would probably show that there are other ways to perceive the world and better forms of science. This reduced view just happens to be the one we’re born into.
There are many reasons that people die. This is especially true in a situation as complex as global pandemic where economic factors clash with public health and culture; where death can result or be prevented by membership in a privileged group or by access to technology.
In such a complex system, we must resist the temptation and habit to reduce the cause of death to a single root and throw out every other contributing factor no matter how important it may be. Many of the reasons that people are now dying are long-term, structural problems that make us fragile to pandemic. These are the macro-causes of death, but we tend to ignore them in favor of short-term micro-causes, such as the presence of this particular virus at this particular time.
Here’s a metaphor. If I remove 90% of the structural members in your house and then the wind blows your house down, should we say that the wind caused your house to fall? Would that be good science? And if many houses had been sabotaged in this way, but we published statistics about house failures due to wind damage (mentioning nothing about sabotage), wouldn’t these be misleading statistics? And any policy based on those numbers bad policy?
Our health has been sabotaged. The saboteurs continue to profit. Death was coming. This disease is only the wind.
Cause of Death: The Chronic Health Crisis
There are many studies showing that people are much more likely to die after coronavirus infection if they already suffer from one of the many chronic health problems that plague our civilization such as diabetes, hypertension, COPD, cancer, and more. In some studies, as many as 99% of patients who died after contracting COVID-19 had a comorbidity of this kind (and that wouldn’t even include unreported asymptomatic cases). Further, it’s also clear that comorbidities make us more likely to contract the virus in the first place.
What this means is that tens of thousands of people are dying from complex situations involving at least two causes—virus and chronic condition—but we are reducing that situation to a single cause when we report the cause of death as COVID-19. These chronic conditions inflate COVID-19 death tolls, and the roles of Pepsi-co, Nestlé, and McDonald’s; Philip Morris, Bayer, and Pfizer; Monsanto, Sinopec, and Shell—the role of the poisons produced by these companies are not accounted for. These factors are being distilled out of the death tolls.
If we accounted for comorbidity as a very well-documented factor in deaths that have occurred over the past several months—as well as for those that will occur in the upcoming months—we would not attribute these deaths to the virus. We would, in fact, see a sharp rise in death rates associated with the chronic diseases of civilization. Policy initiatives and public response to that spike in death rates might look more like shutting down the local Frito-Lay plant than taking our right to assembly and confining abused women in homes with their now unemployed abusers.
Please Note: for some reason, when I’ve made this argument people seem to hear that I think the deaths of sick people don’t count, because they were sick anyway, or they were old, and they don’t matter. That is NOT what I am saying at all. I am refusing to distill the cause for these deaths into a virus when people have been dying all along and will continue to die from poisons that corporations produce and shove down our throats or release into our waters and soils. I insist that these deaths be counted, but I refuse that they should be counted so wrongly. It is true that COVID-19 is a factor in these deaths, but co-morbidity is an almost necessary condition for death as well, and our death tolls do not reflect this.
Sixty nine thousand, four hundred, and forty four. I step away from my writing for a few hours, dig a little in the garden, plant a row of potatoes, and 3,792 people have died “from coronavirus.”
There are other, perhaps less well-studied factors in these deaths as well. It is particularly strange how we’ll reduce cause of death to a virus, but then suddenly open our minds to other factors when it suits our political agenda or narrative. So for instance, my liberal friends will dispute the above argument about chronic disease as a cause of death but blithely attribute (and perhaps rightly) any number of deaths to Trump’s early denial of the crisis and his refusal to mobilize infrastructure to produce more ventilators.
Why don’t we have enough ventilators?
It would be possible to have a culture that was prepared for this tragedy. Many experts have foreseen it, and the only real answer to our lack of preparation is that we didn’t care. We do not value caring. Riane Eisler, in her book The Real Wealth of Nations, sketches the structure of a caring economy that would—among other things—reduce incarceration, empower women, and fairly compensate caregivers, healthcare workers, and educators. Such a structure would certainly value preparedness for pandemic.
Humans in other places and times have demonstrated caring societies. For instance, in The Chalice and the Blade, Eisler finds that Neolithic European societies were unmarked by social stratification or accumulation of private wealth. For thousands of years, these matrilineal goddess worshiping people developed technologies to “enhance quality of life” rather than for weaponry. However, towards the beginning of the historical period, invaders conquered these ancient partnership societies, and an unfortunate cultural transformation took place.
After a series of invasions, metalwork in this era began to be increasingly used for spears, swords, and daggers rather than fishhooks, awls, and woodworking tools; ‘chieftain graves’ appeared, in which an elite strongman was buried among rich gifts and the skeletons of his slaves and concubines. The symbols uncovered after this conquest indicate a patriarchal dominator culture that worshipped the blade, and who perceived power not as a generative force, but as the power to destroy, conquer, rape, and plunder. Modern civilization was born when the conquering dominator/patriarchy co-opted the symbols, myths, stories, laws, and writing of the matrilineal, goddess worshipping, egalitarian culture that they subjugated to create the society in in which we live today.
So we may blame Trump for his failure to mobilize our infrastructure to produce masks and ventilators, and I certainly believe in holding uncaring leaders accountable for their failures. But, we should not confuse this placement of blame with a ‘cause’ of death, for the systems that created this situation arose from what Friedrich Engels described as, “The world historical defeat of the female sex,” thousands of years ago. Irrespective of individual leaders, our dominator culture will never care if we have enough ventilators or enough doctors, nurses, and caregivers, or even if people die as long as there’s profit to be made. It’s slightly harder to know how to adjust COVID-19 death tolls to account for our uncaring culture than it is for well-studied chronic conditions, but I’d take any deaths that result from exceeding the capacity of our healthcare system, and chalk those up to the patriarchy.
Cause of Death: Colonization / Extraction
Certainly some number of otherwise healthy people with access to healthcare and a ventilator will be killed by this virus. But what caused the virus? (One problem with reduction is that it always leads to an endless chain of ‘causes.’) As endlessly hungry industrialized nations force their way into wild lands (or force people off of their native lands so that they flee into wild lands) multinational corporations expose us to more and more zoonotic diseases. This has become such a problem that the US Agency for International Development has financed a project called Predict to anticipate these outbreaks in order to rape these lands without such inconvenience. (Pandemic isn’t good for the bottom line after all.)
So, what portion of pandemic death tolls can’t be attributed to the prevalence of chronic health problems or our uncaring economic system starts to look like the exported cost of colonization by multinational corporations destroying what remains of the wild.
Sixty nine thousand, four hundred, and seventy nine. In the time it took me to write these last paragraphs, John Hopkins reports thirty-five more people died of civilization.
Cause of Death: Hierarchy
I do wish people would stay at home. However complex these systems may be, and however nuanced or broad our analysis, we should act to slow the progression of this disease. And if we did so voluntarily, there need be no attack on our rights. Why don’t we do this?
It’s hardly reasonable to reduce the behavior of millions of people to any meaningful cause, but we could muse on this a little. Who is most at risk from this disease? Death rates increase exponentially with age above sixty years, while deaths of people under thirty are mostly anecdotal. There is a clear generational divide in the risks that people face during this crisis, and there have been many frustrated critics who’ve observed that young people disproportionally fail at social distancing. But why wouldn’t young people act to protect their elders?
That’s an easy one. Young people have grown up with bleak prospects for the future and they can see that their elders who call the shots don’t much care. Young people have faced gun violence in their schools; surveyed oceans full of plastic; heard increasingly dire predictions about climate change; numbly watched as rhinos, orangutans, and polar bears marched toward extinction, and generally try not to think about what might be in their water and food. They have been defrauded by the educational system and placed in crippling debt without being provided skills that are relevant in this rapidly changing society. I could detail a list of grievances for young people against their elders that is every bit as long as Thomas Jefferson‘s against the King of England, and young people are barely more represented in our government than were colonial Americans.
We have a hierarchical social structure that concentrates power in the hands of certain groups of people who benefit at the expense of others. It is a complex arrangement of many different and overlapping groups that each exploit or are exploited by other groups. In this system, it is not reasonable to expect that any exploited group would voluntarily sacrifice their own freedom and well-being to protect the group that exploits them. Nor should they. Young people (and their children) will suffer hardship, have fewer resources, and probably live shorter lives to pay for the excesses of their parents and grandparents; and this is an injustice that we knowingly commit. Yet people act exasperated to see young people out on the beach during a pandemic and ask, “How can they be so irresponsible?”
We are now seeing—and will soon be seeing more—the deadly results of this hierarchical arrangement. What if older generations had made a good faith effort to stand up for their own children? What if elders had ceded some power, capital, and influence to the demands of future generations—demands that were loudly and clearly spoken but ignored? This did not happen, and now our hierarchical culture cannot muster the solidarity and mutual aid that would be needed to prevent deaths in this time of crisis.
Cause of Death: Civilization
The only good reduction is a synthesis. If we were to combine all of these causal factors, would there be a word that could contain them all? Could we then reduce these deaths that they tell us are caused by a virus to something that speaks for all of these causes together—of patriarchy, chronic disease, colonization, hierarchy, along with others upon which I have not elaborated: globalization, urbanization, political infighting—and what would that word be? It could only be our culture or our civilization as a whole.
When we bring all of these causes together, we must also note that COVID-19 death tolls pale in comparison to the daily death and suffering that results from that this collection of factors.
Malnourishment alone (certainly a legacy of colonization) kills 15,000 children every day, yet English speaking people in the global North don’t bring similar urgency to this crisis or even perceive it as an emergency, because the children dying are mostly black, brown, and far away.
It is only now—when our violent civilization generates a threat capable of piercing the armor of privilege—that we act to curb the effects of this violence; and then only by seeking to suppress the most micro-causal factor in this great chain of causes. As this micro-cause directly affects the global upper class, we fixate upon it, and most of us can’t perceive the extensive scope and nature of this crisis.
What to do with this analysis?
First, I think we should hold scientific organizations such as the WHO and the CDC accountable and demand that they publish uninflated death tolls that account for well-studied macro-causes of death such as co-morbidities.
This would be simple accounting, because it merely incorporates well-published data from studies that are entirely valid even in the language spoken by the scientific community. This alone would rapidly deflate COVID-19 death tolls and ease frightened citizens’ outcry for these draconian lockdowns that might endanger more people than they protect. It would also create a basis upon which to work toward dismantling the structures that are actually killing people. (Ideally, there would be some effort to account for economic factors that embody patriarchy, externalized costs of colonization, hierarchical power distributions, etc., but that might be a bit much for the modern scientific mind to bear.)
Additionally, I think we should refuse to cede the language space that attributes these deaths to COVID-19. I think we should go a step further than some existing observations that this virus is a disease of civilization, and refuse to acknowledge the virus as being a cause of death at all—or at least the most important one. For while coronavirus infection is a necessary condition for death from COVID-19, there are many other necessary conditions as well, and there are many cases where infection carries no risk at all or goes unnoticed. I think we should maintain our focus upon structural causes that killed people before this virus ever showed up, that are killing people now, and that will certainly kill people next year if we don’t completely restructure our society and destroy the economic system that makes those deaths profitable.
Seventy thousand, four hundred, and eighty two. I typically sleep on a piece of writing before making final edits, and in that time Johns Hopkins reports one thousand and three people have died from civilization. Seven and a half thousand children died from starvation in that same period of time.
