There is a family of bacteria dwelling in soil, in water.
Some reside in the bodies of cows. Humans domesticate cows, for meat, milk, labor.
Cows are corralled in large groups, in small spaces, near to human settlements. The bacteria, disturbed by the upset of their microbial life-ways, shift their behavior. Now they move quickly between cows, they become more aggressive. Cows get sick.
Increased human-cow contact allows bacteria to pass from bovine into human bodies, and adapt to their newfound hosts. Humans build cities, into whose crowded centres ever more people migrate, to live breathing a grey swill of fumes, eating poorly, labouring to exhaustion in cramped, lightless, unventilated factories.
Going home to rundown tenements on piled garbage streets. It is the dawn of the glorious new Industrial Age, and in their great cities, humans are coughing blood. A bacterial disease is diagnosed: tuberculosis.
Over a century later, it continues to quietly fell over a million of the world’s poor each year.
There is a virus in the bellies of wild ducks, harmless to the birds. As ducks fly pond to pond they shed the virus into water, infecting other birds, who fly to other ponds, infecting yet more birds.
Humans domesticate ducks and begin raising them in captivity. Birds in cages have no ponds to fly to, so the virus cannot reproduce itself as it once did—it must change its habits. It adapts.
Now, it transmits rapidly between birds. It grows more virulent, since it no longer needs a living host: in captivity, healthy birds cannot flee the dying. The virus learns flexibility. It infects.
Soldiers are packed into squalid barracks, undernourished, cold and damp. Their immune systems exhausted by the stresses of combat. Outside the trenches, humans live in greater density, in closer proximity, in larger cities than ever before.
Many are recovering from immunity-battering bouts of measles, tuberculosis. A formerly innocuous bird virus spills into human bodies as a formidable pathogen. It spreads person to person across the earth’s surface until one-third of the total human population is ill. 50 million are estimated dead.
It is the Flu of 1918, the deadliest pestilence in human history.
There is a virus, its natural reservoir a small, insect-eating bat whose home is the forest. The forests are shrinking. Human cities go on expanding, there are more factories, more farms where humans store their captive legions of birds and pigs.
The bats’ habitat is fragmented by deforestation. The stress of that loss strains the sensitive animals’ immune systems, exciting the expression of a latent virus. Flying through what remains of the forest, stressed bats shed the virus. Now other animals are infected.
Humans hunt and trap wild animals and sell them at urban wildlife markets. The concentration of different animal species creates a fertile medium for viral recombination. Sustained human-animal contact grants adventuresome viruses access to human hosts.
At a wildlife market in a city with a population of millions in one of the world’s most polluted regions, a virus strays from a caged animal into a human body. Commercial air travel has made it possible for humans to cross oceans overnight.
They take with them whatever microbes their bodies harbor. A new viral disease emerges, within months it has spread across continents. The human death count steadily rises.
Covid-19 is one in a series of infectious diseases to unsettle the standard operating procedures of human societies. Disease has been civilization’s consort since our earliest history. Yet we are stunned by Covid-19, as if the concept of disease were alien—an “unprecedented event.” In a state of emergency, there is a forgetting, an attenuation of vision. Drifting out of focus goes the context of the emergency, the history, patterns, reoccurrences of emergencies. As ecofeminist philosopher Susan Griffin writes, “Whatever is in the background disappears in the focus of a gunsight.”
The mass media pandemic-panic and governments’ wartime rhetoric manipulate public perception. It amplifies anxiety, training that anxiety on an illusory “invisible enemy.” To exist in the state of emergency is torture for a public desperate for relief. So people are inclined to suspend reflection and accept the solutions handed down by those in power.
Fear disorients, distracts; it drives reactionary behavior dictated by the volatility of cortisol. Panic, once seeded, has a virality to rival any contagion. We materialize our imaginings into reality, by acting as if the worst-case scenarios have already arrived. Sirens scream. A stricken public rush to the supermarkets to prepare for imminent collapse. People panic buy toilet paper, creating a shortage. The emergency oozes through screens into everyday life as something palpable for all to experience, regardless of the facts of the outbreak. Panic intensifies, not helped by the authorities repeatedly blasting “This is an EMERGENCY”.
Responding to the emergency, politicians, intergovernmental organizations, and pundits have declared War on The Virus. The UN’s Department of Global Communications asserts, “The world faces a common enemy. We are at war with a virus.” In the United States, at the helm of “our big war,” President Trump leaps into action, militarizing the pandemic by activating the National Guard.
We are assured! We have the help of Biotech firms, hard at work on a vaccine. Billions of tax dollars paid out to prop up struggling corporations. We are assured, we will defeat this plasmid-coated adversary. The Virus will be vanquished. Crisis averted, emergency over, release the balloons, return to work, resume business as usual. Humanity has triumphed.
It is a habit of the Western mind to imagine that human existence is isolated from the natural world. That we can eat our way through the earth’s resources, laying waste to the environment without doing harm to ourselves. If the story of emerging viruses in the 20th-21st centuries has a moral, it is that human independence from the natural world is a delusion. Human health is contingent upon the health of the biosphere. When we brutalize the earth, we foreclose upon our own survival. Our actions enabled the spread of new pathogens. The structures and systems of our civilization have entrenched widespread susceptibility to infectious disease.
Anthropogenic environmental degradation is a precondition for disease susceptibility. This is evidenced by the high Covid-19 mortality rates in regions with poor air quality. Before Italy and Iran became coronavirus hotspots, they drew headlines for the deadly repercussions of unbreathable air. In China, ambient air pollution kills upwards of a million people annually.
As for the epicenters of Covid-19 mortality in the U.S, “Air Quality Health Advisory” ozone warnings are a summertime tradition in New York City. Louisiana boasts Cancer Alley. An 85-mile stretch of air-poisoning oil refineries and petrochemical plants along the Mississippi River. The same human systems that maximize vulnerability to disease make our societies unfit to respond effectively. In the U.S. the privatized, (for-profit) healthcare system has proven itself predictably useless under the pressure of a pandemic. There is no infrastructure in place for systematic testing. There are shortages of hospital beds, ventilators, nasal swabs and respirator masks. We are expected to be thankful that the biotech industry is highly motivated ( by money) to make a vaccine to save us.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government, in a bipartisan Disaster Capitalism trick lifted directly from Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, has made hay while the sun of chaos shines. A $2.2 trillion package of handouts and loans will be distributed to corporations (airlines, the Pentagon and weapons manufacturers, industrial agriculture). For $1,200 each (per average-earning citizen) we are happy to subsidize corporate profiteering, warfare, environmental devastation.
The EPA has announced it will besuspending enforcement of pollution monitoring and reporting laws for the duration of the pandemic. There is no end date in sight. There is little consideration for pollution causing respiratory illness, which exacerbates the risk posed by Covid-19 . The U.S. is not alone in this. China has indicated it will be “modifying” environmental laws to hasten economic recovery now that its own Covid-19 crisis is cooling. Rejecting the panic driven amnesia, we can understand the connections now. The patterns from the present crisis to its predecessors. We can see that disease pandemics trace back to human actions and human systems. With tuberculosis and the Flu of 1918, it was the domestication of animals that spawned viral emergence. With Covid-19, it was progressive ruination of ecosystems and the commodification of wild creatures. Where we unbalance the natural world, we create ecological distress and disease. And once we are sick, it is social factors – industrialization, war, global capitalism, that raise death tolls. It was as true with tuberculosis as it was with the Flu of 1918 as it is with Covid-19.
The gravest threat to humanity is not any pathogen, but the diseased state of human civilization. Vulnerability to Covid-19 is predicted by preexisting chronicillness: diabetes, COPD, heart disease, liver disease, obesity and asthma. People with immune systems suppressed by pharmaceuticals and environmental toxins are also at higher risk. These conditions are the “diseasesof civilization”. The upshot of human lifestyles disfigured by consumer capitalism.
Chronic disease is an off shoot of patterns of industrialised labor and consumption, the foods and intoxicants with which we overload our bodies chasing “fullness” and “pleasure”. We experience an accumulation of stress in toxic environments riddled with sexism, racism, poverty and the colonial mindset: the backdrop of industrial production. Although these conditions are endemic: it is indigenous people, people of colour, women and the poor who endure thehighestincidence of affliction. The dispossessed will suffer most when confronted with infectious diseases such as Covid-19. The virus will flourish in bodies undermined by societal cruelties.
Demonizing a microbe as humanity’s nemesis scapegoats the natural world. This nurtures blindness to Covid-19’s background; the social history of infectious disease. If we pause, breathe, attempt a calmer review of context and history, what is revealed is that it is not The Virus, nor any pathogen, that threatens our continued life on earth. Human action precipitated the emergence of Covid-19. Humans razed the forests. Humans captured wild animals to sell at market. Humans squired a formerly harmless virus out into the world as a virulent pathogen. Human societies decimate the environment to glut the coffers of transnational corporations. To meet the insatiable demands of First World consumers, we collided with microbes once held within the fortifications of wild nature. Robust ecosystems. The unviolated bodies of animals. Like the virus of the hour, Junin, Machupo, Lassa and Ebola all spilled from wildlife into humans as a byproduct of deforestationand development. Novel flu strains continuously arise out of Confined Animal Feeding Operations, where humans warehouse domesticated animals in increasingly careless industrial conditions.
The world is comprised of microorganisms. To ‘wage war’ against microbes is folly. Infection and illness are inevitabilities beyond human control. So too is death. The social, cultural, structural pathologies that provoke viral emergence and needless mass suffering are our own inventions . It is in our power to remedy them. Protection from future pandemics is possible, but it’s not an antiseptic wipe, a face mask, a million ventilators, a vaccine, Medicare-for-All. It is preventing the viruses from emerging, by ending our violence against the natural world. We all, humans and non-humans, thread together within the delicate, interlacing of connections that binds us to the living earth. If we were guided by our deep knowledge of interdependence, rather than by fantasies of human detachment, we would not plunder as we do now. We would not be so reckless. We would know in our bodies that the destruction of the earth is self-destruction.
Protection from catastrophes of our own making are possible, yes, but only with a radical transformation of human civilization; the totality of global systems and institutions, including how we live and how we think. The human species will survive Covid-19, but without change, alignment to the natural world, there will be another virus, another pandemic culling of an impaired population, and another after that. One day, the earth we have blighted will have done with us.
aurora linnea is a librarian and ecofeminist pariah living near the Atlantic Ocean.
As the world moves further into a state of climate crisis, it’s imperative that we study and critique the strategies being proposed to address greenhouse gas emissions, and develop our own strategies based on rigorous assessment of their effectiveness.
Many of the strategies currently being pursued by the mainstream environmental movement hinge on courts and on legislative change. This article will examine one these strategies—the “climate trust” lawsuits brought by the group Our Children’s Trust—in some detail. First, however, we must review a basic framework of how the court system, and more fundamentally, the legal system in general, serves ruling class interests within capitalism.
From early English laws like the Statutes of Merton and Westminster that authorized enclosure of the commons, to the Papal Bull “Inter Caetera” in 1493 which authorized the Doctrine of Discovery and the conquest and colonization of non-Christian lands west of the Azores, law within capitalism has always been an exercise in justifying systematic theft.
These ancient foundations continue to underlie law. For example, in the United States the Johnson v. M’Intosh Supreme Court case of 1823 is regarded as the foundation of modern property law and studied by nearly every law student. In the unanimous decision, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that “the whole theory of their titles to lands in America, rests upon the hypothesis, that the Indians had no right of soil as sovereign, independent states. Discovery is the foundation of title, in European nations, and this overlooks all proprietary rights in the natives.”[i]
What is the Purpose of Law within Capitalism?
French Liberal School economist and laissez faire advocate Frederic Bastiat provided one of the most concise definitions of law within capitalism. “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society,” he wrote in 1850, “over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”[ii]
With this statement, Bastiat was attempting to critique socialism and collectivist tendencies. Marx, a contemporary of Bastiat, called him “The shallowest and therefore the most successful representative of the apologists of vulgar economics.” But Bastiat has inadvertently provided a functional description of law within capitalism.
In a similar manner, the free-market advocate, New York Times columnist, and Iraq War crusader Thomas Friedman inadvertently described the link between imperialist warfare and free-market capitalism perfectly when he wrote in the New York Times Magazine in 1999 that “[t]he hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for silicon valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US army, air force, navy, and Marine Corps.”[iii]
Friedman’s piece argued for “sustainable globalization” which “cannot be maintained without the active [military] involvement of the United States,” and explicitly argued for increased cooperation between U.S. corporations and military.
The Institutionalization of Organized Theft
Critics of globalized capitalism agree with Friedman’s linkage of corporate power and military hegemony, but to borrow Bastiat’s term, see these entities as facilitating the plunder that defines modern capitalism, not ushering in Friedman’s neoliberal fantasy. Military aggression and economic colonization were the foundation of imperial power in Bastiat’s time, just as they are today. Today’s capitalist societies have evolved their methods. Instead of legalized chattel slavery,[iv] the United States now has a slave-like prison system and the global economy is fully dependent on systematic labor exploitation. Some of the most lasting impacts of globalization include the outsourcing of jobs to poor nations with artificially deflated labor costs, the outsourcing of pollution to what Lawrence Summers called “underpolluted” nations, and the explosion of international trade. All of this is facilitated by the IMF and World Bank, which leverage development loans to systematically privatize the wealth and dismantle social and environmental regulations within poor nations. Altogether, this organized theft leads to an average wealth transfer of roughly $2 trillion per year from poor countries to rich countries, not counting externalities.[v]
The accelerating extraction of wealth from the poor has been matched by similar growth in destructive theft from the planet. Extraction of primary resources—timber, foodstuffs, ore, fossil fuels, water, etc.—has tripled over the past 40 years to more than 70 billion tonnes annually.[vi] Greenhouse gas emissions have doubled since 1980, and more than 1 million species are threatened with extinction, threatening to unravel the ecological basis of life on this planet.[vii] Human disconnection from the natural world is at an all-time high as business privatizes even our most intimate private lives with pornography, dating apps, and ubiquitous data gathering.
By realistic economic measures, the owners of society are wealthier than ever and inequality is reaching record levels.[viii] And as Bastiat described, this arrangement of power is undergirded by a legal structure that authorizes and glorifies this exploitation.
The United States—still the epicenter of imperial power, despite a steady decline in influence since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001—provides illustrative examples. The extraction of profits from workers and the land is the bedrock principle of American law. The idea that workers should be in control of their own communities and benefit from the work they and their neighbors do is not even a topic of discussion in courtrooms and legislative halls. Nature is owned and managed as property. The idea that nature should be respected as the source of all human goods and life is, at best, commodified into the ideology of “natural capitalism”, while true deep ecology ideals—that nature exists and has value for it’s own sake, on it’s own terms—remain fringe positions.
The Legal System as an Arena of Political Change
Movements for justice have always used the legal system and the courts as arenas of political struggle. The Civil Rights movement, the Feminist movement, the Labor movement, and the Environmental movement have all won significant victories in courtrooms. The feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon, who is credited with the legal recognition of sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination, wrote in collaboration with Andrea Dworkin that “law organizes power.”[ix]
Given the current supremacy of the capitalist state, the courts are an important arena of political struggle. To concede this legal battleground to reactionaries could be suicidal. But to rely only on legal methods is also a flawed strategy. Legal reform has never proved able to do more than slow the progression of capital’s death march.
The Voting Rights Act has now been dismantled, reversing a key gain of the Civil Rights Movement.[x] Roe v. Wade, which established Federal legality of abortion, has been under incessant attack for decades. Countless state laws have closed abortion clinics, limited funding, and attacked the principle of female bodily autonomy via more than 400 laws in the last 9 years alone.[xi] With the new Supreme Court, it’s likely Roe will be completely overturned. The Clean Water Act is currently being gutted.[xii] Union membership is at an all-time low as “right-to-work” laws proliferate, undermining the effectiveness of even bourgeois workplace organizing efforts.[xiii] This reflects global efforts to undermine minimum wages and other basic labor protections.[xiv]
Recently, environmentalists in the United States and elsewhere are testing a set of innovative legal strategies. These include the group “Our Children’s Trust,” which is filing lawsuits against the federal government for failing to uphold the “public trust doctrine,” a legal principle that the government is responsible for managing public resources for the benefit of the public. Our Children’s Trust is attempting to expand the purview of the trust doctrine to include the climate, and thus potentially force the U.S. government to fight climate change.
But the flaw in this plan is obvious right away: the U.S. government, like all capitalist states, has never existed to wisely steward public resources, but rather to facilitate their exploitation for private gain. In truth, even most socialist states have fallen victim to industrial arms races with capitalist societies or to an industrial productivism that values development of industry as the highest good, and have thus fallen well short of this ideal.
Rights of Nature, the Trust Doctrine, and The Necessity Defense
The trust doctrine approach is just one of the innovative legal strategies being pursued by the environmental movement today. Two others are the Rights of Nature movement, and the push for the “climate necessity defense.” The rights of nature movement seeks to expand basic rights, such as personhood, to non-human ecosystems. The necessity defense is the legal principle that it is sometimes legal to break the law in order to prevent a greater harm; the classic example is breaking a window to save a child from a home that is on fire. It has been used to defend protestors in a few high-profile cases of civil disobedience.[xv]
These legal strategies aim to advance ecological struggles by providing protections for ecosystems, by forcing changes in U.S. and international law to curtail global warming, and by protecting political dissidents.
Can they succeed? And what would success look like?
I argue that these efforts, while laudable, will not lead to significant change because of structural barriers. For example, let’s imagine that the “Our Children’s Trust” lawsuit was successful, and U.S. courts recognized the obligation of the federal government to safeguard climate stability, and ordered emissions reductions of, for example, 80 percent by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050. And let’s suppose they choose to implement the methods proposed by Our Children’s Trust.
Our Children’s Trust proposes a three-pronged strategy for halting global warming.[xvi] First, they call for 100 gigatons of carbon sequestration via reforestation, perennial agriculture, and soil conservation. Second, they call for reducing emissions by “designing our cities for walking and biking, investing in mass transit, constructing high-performance energy efficient buildings, transitioning to 100% clean energy, shifting to green manufacturing and durable products, and adopting restorative forestry and farming practices.” Finally, they propose fees on carbon pollution and ending subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.
Their first category of solutions is admirable, as long as “reforestation” is not twisted to mean expanding the monocrop plantations of industrial forestry. But as I exhaustively detail in my forthcoming book Bright Green Lies, their second category, technological solutions, is woefully insufficient for addressing global climate destabilization.
The Failure of Green Technology
According to the work of sociologist Richard York, renewable energy today rarely actually displaces fossil fuels. Instead, predictably, these energy sources are typically added on top of existing sources, helping to grow the capitalist economy. York writes that “Non-hydro renewable [energy] sources have a positive coefficient, indicating the opposite of displacement, but this coefficient is not significantly different from 0, indicating that renewables tend to simply be added to the energy mix without displacing fossil fuels.”[xvii] Another study in China had similar results, finding that “Non-hydro alternative energy did not show statistically significant displacement effect in any of the six regional grids.”[xviii]At a global level (which is ultimately the only significant scope for global warming), the burning of coal, oil, and gas has grown significantly even as wind and solar have boomed.[xix]
After five years of research, one climate solutions lab found that even “a wholesale adoption of renewable energy… would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions” and concluded that “Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work.”[xx]
Socialists have long argued that centralized planning and the lack of a growth imperative would allow non-capitalist societies to adopt new technologies cautiously and rationally. This remains a largely untested hypothesis in our era of global ecological crisis, but regardless, this is not what Our Children’s Trust is promoting. Instead, they chose to promote unproven and extremely expensive carbon capture technology (as one recent headline reads, “Best Carbon Capture Facility In World Emits 25 Times More CO2 Than Sequestered”[xxi]), electric cars, and energy efficiency which hasn’t made a dent in growth in consumption. In truth, efficiency within capitalism is almost certain to lead to Jevon’s Paradox: more profit, more investment, and more growth in resource use.[xxii]
“Green Cities” and Market Failures
Even dense, walkable cities—a favorite of “green growth” and de-growth advocates alike probably represent an illusory solution. As urban planning professor Michael Neuman succinctly explains, “Since 1960, while human population has doubled [and the majority of the world’s population has moved to cities], the global economy has quadrupled, and resource consumption quintupled,” he says. “Thus, we are getting less efficient and less sustainable as we move to cities, not more, contrary to popular belief and professional dogma.”[xxiii] Study after study from locations as widely spaced as Iran, Taiwan, and the Netherlands have shown little or no reduction in energy consumption resulting from increased urban density.
As with other market-based measures for environmental protection, carbon tax schemes have been almost completely ineffective in lowering emissions. For example, the European market is flooded with allowances, and has at best reduced emissions by 2 or 3 percent across the continent.[xxiv] At worst, it has simply incentivized pollution outsourcing and “carbon laundering” as seen most prominently in the Volkswagen emissions case.
Given these realities, even a positive ruling in the Our Children’s Trust case wouldn’t significantly slow or stop global climate destabilization. Direct approaches, like stopping fossil fuel extraction, are not discussed in their strategy, and there is no critique of capitalism apparent either.
Some proponents argue that major policy proposals like The Green New Deal or lawsuits like the Our Children’s Trust cases represent organizing focal points which expand the scope of acceptable debate.[xxv] This is certainly true. But while false solutions to the problems of capitalism are always acceptable to ruling class, they will never solve the problems they purport to address. It is past time to build explicitly anti-capitalist organizations to address the ecological crisis, and to arm them with effective (read: revolutionary) methods.
The Necessity of Dismantling Industrial Capitalism
The reason Our Children’s Trust isn’t tackling this issue is likely the same reason The Green New Deal didn’t include a proposal to shut down the fossil fuel industry. As Brad Hornick writes in Resilience, “[Stopping anthropogenic climate disruption] implies a radical retrenchment or collapse of the dominant industries and infrastructure based upon fossil fuel production, including automobiles, aircraft, shipping, petrochemical, synthetic fabrics, construction, agribusiness, industrial agriculture, packaging, plastic production (disposables economy), and the war industries.”
In other words, stopping climate chaos requires an end to capitalism, to much of the global economy, and to U.S. hegemony. This is not popular in society, nor is it politically acceptable—even thinkable—in courtrooms. The U.S. court system will never order the dismantling of the global economy and of U.S. empire. In the 19th century, Mikhail Bakunin wrote that “The supreme law of the State is self-preservation at any cost.” This remains true today.
Legally speaking, judges can rule anything they want, as long as they can justify it using legal precedent. But there are also specific legal and doctrinal barriers that confine all judges who sincerely believe in the structure of American law. Namely, as mentioned earlier, the notion that nature is property, that property can be rightfully destroyed or consumed by its owner, and the principles of corporate rights all stand in the way in the significant legal change. Further, even favorable court rulings would depend on the Executive and Legislative branches of the U.S. government, as well as on police, military, and other Federal employees, to enforce such a legal shift.
To rely on the law alone is to concede to a never-ending tug of war—an endless battle which the ruling class wages using billions in lobbying dollars. But institutions are not monolithic. Ideological power struggles within them can change the material conditions for resistance taking place within the broader culture. And there is some promise in all of these legal strategies. For example, the Rights of Nature approach has the possibility to instill a new, fundamental respect for the integrity of the natural world throughout certain populations. The climate necessity defense approach has promise for protecting activists who engage in non-violent direct action (which we should note has been thus far entirely ineffective in stopping the murder of the planet). Therefore, the promise these new legal approaches represent is primarily cultural. In military terminology, these are shaping actions, not decisive ones.[xxvi]
Reform Will Not Halt The Crisis
These legal strategies may change the framing conditions and lead to reform. But as the last 50 years can attest, reforms will not be enough to halt the ecological crisis. At worst, ill-fated movements can divert valuable resources and energy into dead-end efforts. Left historians do not look kindly on Nelson Mandela’s pro-capitalist turn late in life, but he articulated an important consideration when he justified his decision to create the Unkhonte We Sizwe, an armed underground insurgency, writing that “There is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.”[xxvii]
Modern movements would do well to consider this.
David Brower, the founder of Earth Island Institute and Friends of the Earth, and former director of the Sierra Club once said, “All I have done in my career is to slow the rate at which things get worse.” In this historical moment, we don’t have time to merely slow the destruction. We need to rapidly halt it and to reverse it. This means choosing effective methods, and at a minimum, dismantling capitalism.
The struggle to halt the ecological crisis will not be primarily fought in courtrooms, legislated by policymakers, sold by corporations, or decided by foundation-funded NGOs. It will be fought by people’s movements and by revolutionaries who are willing to fight for the survival of the human species and the global community of biotic life. That’s something that the courts will never do.
Max Wilbert is an organizer, writer, and wilderness guide who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. He been involved in campaigns against sexual violence, destruction of the planet, and racism for 18 years.
[iii] Thomas L. Friedman. “A Manifesto for the Fast World.” New York Times Magazine (March 28, 1999).
[iv] Although it should be noted there are an estimated 40 million literal slaves in the world today, mostly in forced manual labor, service industries, and sexual slavery.
[v] Intan Suwandi, R. Jamil Jonna, and John Bellamy Foster. “Global Commodity Chains and the New Imperialism.” Monthly Review 70, no. 10 (March 2019): 1-24.
[vi] “Worldwide Extraction of Materials Triples in Four Decades, Intensifying Climate Change and Air Pollution.” International Resource Panel, U.N. Environmental Programme (20 July 2016).
[vii] “Media Release: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating.’” Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (May 6, 2019).
[viii] Jason Hickel. “Global inequality may be much worse than we think.” The Guardian (April 8, 2016).
[ix] Andrea Dworkin and Catherine A. MacKinnon. Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality (Minneapolis: Organizing Against Pornography, 1988).
[x] “Voting Rights Act Dismantled by Supreme Court.” Democracy Chronicles (June 25, 2013)..
[xi] “Roe v. Wade: The Constitutional Right to Access Safe, Legal Abortion.” Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
[xii] Michelle Chen. “Trump Moves to Gut the Clean Water Act.” The Nation (December 13, 2018).
[xiii] Gordon Lafer. “The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011–2012.” Economic Policy Institute (October 31, 2013).
[xiv] Subodh Varma. “World Bank: abolish minimum wage, other labour laws.” Monthly Review Online (April 24, 2018).
[xv] Andrew Buncombe. “Anti-pipeline campaigners found not guilty by judge because ‘protest against climate change crisis’ was legal ‘necessity.’” The Independent (March 27, 2018).
[xvi] “Pathway to Climate Recovery.” Our Children’s Trust.
[xvii] Richard York. “Do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels?” Nature Climate Change 2 (2012): 441-443.
[xviii] Yuanan Hu and Hefa Cheng. “Displacement efficiency of alternative energy and trans-provincial imported electricity in China.” Nature Communications 8 (2017): 14590.
[xix] Barry Saxifrage. “Fossil fuel expansion crushes renewables.” National Observer (September 20, 2017).
[xx] Ross Koningstein and David Fork. “What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change.” IEEE Spectrum (November 18, 2014).
[xxi] Michael Barnard. “Best Carbon Capture Facility In World Emits 25 Times More CO2 Than Sequestered.” CleanTechnica (June 12, 2019).
[xxii] John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York. “Capitalism and the Curse of Energy Efficiency.” Monthly Review 62, no. 6 (November 1, 2010).
[xxiii] Alan Oakes. “Revisiting Neuman’s ‘Compact City Fallacy.’” Green Building and Design Magazine (2013).
[xxiv] “The EU Emissions Trading System.” European Commission Climate Action (July 22, 2016).
[xxv] Carol Dansereau, John Foran, Ted Franklin, Brad Hornick, Sandra Lindberg, Jennifer Scarlott. “One, Two, … Many Green New Deals: An Ecosocialist Roundtable.” Resilience (February 26, 2019).
[xxvi] “ADP 3-0. Unified Land Operations.” Department of the Army (2011).
[xxvii] Nelson Mandela. Long Walk to Freedom (Little Brown & Co., 1994).
On the heels of Iowa and Ohio, Wyoming has become the third state to introduce a bill criminalizing the type of activities undertaken by past oil and gas pipeline protesters.
One of the Wyoming bill’s co-sponsors even says it was inspired by the protests led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe against the Dakota Access pipeline, and a sheriff involved in policing those protests testified in support of the bill at a recent hearing. Wyoming’s bill is essentially a copy-paste version of template legislation produced by the conservative, corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
Like the ALEC version, Wyoming’s Senate File 74 makes “impeding critical infrastructure … a felony punishable by imprisonment for not more than ten (10) years, a fine of not more than one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000.00), or both.” Two of the bill sponsors of SF 74, Republican Sens. Eli Bebout and Nathan Winters, are ALEC members. SF 74 has passed unanimously out of its Senate Judiciary Committee and now moves onto the full floor.
ALEC‘s model bill, in turn, was based on two Oklahoma bills, HB 1123 and HB 2128. The Sooner State bills, now official state law, likewise impose felony sentencing, 10 years in prison, and/or a $100,000 fine on individuals who “willfully damage, destroy, vandalize, deface, or tamper with equipment in a critical infrastructure facility.” As DeSmog has reported, the Iowa bill has the lobbying support of Energy Transfer Partners — the owner of the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) which runs through the state — as well as that of the American Petroleum Institute and other oil and gas industry companies.
ALEC brings together primarily Republican Party state legislators and lobbyists to enact and vote on “model” legislation at its meetings, which take place several times a year. Within different task forces at these meetings, corporate lobbyists can voice their support or critiques of bills, while also getting a vote. Those bills often then are introduced as legislation in statehouses nationwide, as in this latest example in Wyoming.
Hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in Wyoming has helped the state vastly increase its natural gas production and spurred pipeline build-out. However, multiple studies in recent years have also linked fracking-related activities around the small town of Pavilion to groundwater contamination.
Image: Center for Media and Democracy
Targeting ‘Ecoterrorism’
Wyoming’s bill, like the ALEC model bill and one of the Oklahoma bills, includes language implicating any organization “found to be a conspirator” and lobbing a $1 million fine on any group which “aids, abets, solicits, encourages, hires, conspires, commands, or procures a person to commit the crime of impeding critical infrastructure.”
State Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Leland Christensen, a Republican and one of the bill’s co-sponsors, said when he introduced the bill that legislative language was needed to hold accountable those “organizations that sponsor this kind of ecoterrorism.”
The fiscal note for the Wyoming bill says that the “fiscal impact to the judicial system is indeterminable,” while also discussing the prospective costs of incarcerating people under the auspices of the legislation.
“The Department of Corrections states that the impact of the bill is indeterminable as there is currently no way to accurately estimate the number of offenders that will be sentenced pursuant to the bill,” reads the fiscal note. “Each year of incarceration currently costs the state approximately $41,537 per inmate, including medical costs. Each year of community supervision costs the state approximately $2,000 per inmate.”
ALEC Model Confirmed
One co-sponsor of the Wyoming bill, its sole Democratic supporter, Rep. Stan Black, told WyoFile.com that the bill was inspired by what took place at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and that SF 74 was based on the ALEC model bill.
One of the state legislative officials sitting on CSG‘s Committee on Shared State Legislation, North Dakota’s Republican Rep. Kim Koppelman, has a long history of involvement with ALEC, and throughout 2017 he spoke critically of the Indigenous-led movement against the Dakota Access pipeline.
ND Rep. Kim Koppelman; Photo Credit: North Dakota Legislature
“One of the major issues we dealt with was several bills introduced in response to the violent protests at the site of the Dakota Access pipeline,” Koppelman wrote in a February 2017 article halfway through the North Dakota Legislature’s session. “As you may know, peaceful protests led by Native American tribes began this summer but they attracted others from throughout the nation and deteriorated into illegal occupation of sites on federal land, trespassing on private land, blocking of roadways and some incidents of violence.”
At the beginning of 2017, Koppelman co-sponsored threepieces of North Dakota legislation, which crack down on pipeline protests. Two of them passed and are now state law.
The bills “struck a good balance to ensure everyone’s constitutional right to peacefully protest, which we cherish, but to provide for appropriate consequences when anyone crosses the line into anarchy, terrorizing or destruction of property,” wrote Koppelman in his article. “These bills have been fast tracked to give law enforcement the tools they need.”
After DeSmog filed an open records request pertaining to Koppelman’s ALEC and CSG efforts in this area, he told DeSmog, “I have no documents or records concerning the subject of your request but, even if I did, you should be aware that, under North Dakota Century Code Section 44-04-18.6, communications and records of a member of the North Dakota Legislative Assembly are not subject to disclosure.”
In a follow-up email exchange, Koppelman told DeSmog that he “had no role in bringing the bill” to CSG and does not know who did so.
“Frankly, I don’t even specifically recall the bill you’ve inquired about, without going back to review it,” Koppelman told DeSmog. “I also don’t recall who may have supported or opposed it at that meeting, either on the Committee or among the members of the public in the audience.”
For the ALEC bill, Koppelman also said he could not speak to its origins as a model or who has pushed it at the state-level since becoming a model. When asked by DeSmog if CSG records the Shared State Legislation meetings or keeps minutes, Koppelman said that he does not believe so “because the result of meetings and the committee’s work is in the published volume” of Shared State Legislation which CSG disseminates annually.
CSG has in the past, though, kept meeting minutes of its SSL voting sessions, doing so as recently as 2014. Those minutes included an attendance list, which listed nearly three times the number of lobbyists present as state legislators and showed industry attendees representing both the American Gas Association and the Consumer Energy Alliance.
According to a follow-up story by WyoFile.com, the Wyoming Senate Judiciary Committee had Wyoming Business Alliance lobbyist Cindy DeLancey, rather than the lead sponsor, Sen. Christensen, introduce the bill in front of the committee.
Before taking over as head of the Wyoming Business Alliance, DeLancey worked as a director of government and public affairs for BP, where she did “government and public affairs support for the Leadership Team of the Lower 48 North Business Unit,” according to her LinkedIn profile. DeLancey’s Wyoming Business Alliance biography also shows that she formerly served as the chair of the Petroleum Association of Wyoming’s Government and Public Relations Committee. She did not respond to a request for comment.
Wyoming Business Alliance steering committee members include representatives from the Petroleum Association of Wyoming, Chesapeake Energy, Devon Energy, and Jonah Energy. Petroleum Association of Wyoming leadership committees consist of representatives from companies such as Devon Energy, Chesapeake Energy, BP, Anadarko Petroleum, and other companies, while its board of directors lists officials from those companies, plus ExxonMobil, EOG Resources, Halliburton, Williams Companies, and others.
WyoFile.com has reported that, according to a document received from Sen. Christensen, the Petroleum Association and other oil and gas companies have also come out as official supporters of the bill, along with law enforcement representatives. The Wyoming bill’s official backers include the Wyoming Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police, the Wyoming Business Alliance, the Petroleum Association of Wyoming, the Wyoming Petroleum Marketers Association, American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), Holly Frontier Corporation, Anadarko Petroleum, and ONEOK.
According to a special events calendar obtained by DeSmog, the Wyoming Business Alliance hosted a reception at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens on February 12, just days after Wyoming bill SF 74 was introduced on February 9.
On March 1, ALEC will also host a reception at the Nagle-Warren Mansion Cheyenne, according to that calendar, with invited guests asked to RSVP to Wendy Lowe or David Picard. Picard currently has no oil and gas industry lobbying clients, according to his lobbying disclosures, but his lobbying firm’s website says he formerly did so for companies such as Shell, BP, and Marathon. He did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
According to lobbying disclosure forms, Lowe works as a lobbyist for Williams Companies, a major pipeline company with over 3,700 miles of pipeline laid in Wyoming. Lowe also formerly served as associate director of the Petroleum Association of Wyoming, according to her LinkedIn Profile.
Credit: Wyoming State Legislature
Lowe, the private sector chairwoman for ALEC in Wyoming as of 2014, won the state chair of the year award from ALEC in 2012. She has also previously received corporate-funded “scholarship” gifts to attend ALEC meetings as an official Wyoming representative, according to a 2013 report published by the nonprofit watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy.
An ALEC newsletter from May 2011 shows that, at an ALEC event Lowe co-hosted in 2011 in Wyoming, she praised the organization for “creating a unique environment in which state legislators and private sector leaders can come together, share ideas, and cooperate in developing effective policy solutions.”
At a state Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Wyoming bill, Laramie County Sheriff Danny Glick also came out in support of the legislation, warning that a situation similar to Standing Rock could happen in Wyoming.
“One of our Niobrara county commissioners already has graffiti going up — ‘No DAPL’ — in that area up there,” Glick said at the hearing, referring to the shorthand for the Dakota Access pipeline. Glick, an Executive Committee member and Immediate Past President of the National Sheriffs’ Association, was one of the most supportive sheriffs pushing what has been characterized as a heavy-handed and militaristic reaction by law enforcement to the activism at Standing Rock.
Under the direction of Glick, Laramie County sent officers to the Dakota Access protests under the auspices of the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC), triggered after North Dakota’s Republican Governor Jack Dalrymple issued an emergency order on August 19, 2016. Glick too, spent time at Standing Rock and spoke at a press conferencealongside Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier on October 6, 2016.
Laramie County Sheriff Glick. Credit: National Sheriffs’ Association Facebook Page
Glick, who attended a roundtable meeting at the White House in February 2017 with President Donald Trump and other sheriffs, was also previously CC‘d on a set of emails obtained by DeSmog and Muckrock in which the National Sheriffs’ Association and public relations firms it had hired wrote talking points in an attempt to discredit those who participated at Standing Rock. Those talking points said to describe the anti-pipeline movement as rife with “anarchists” and “Palestinian activists” who used violence and possessed “guns, knives, etc.”
‘Worst Instincts of Power’
Critics say the Wyoming bill could have far-reaching and negative impacts, if it becomes law, both in terms of criminal sentencing and for First Amendment rights. The American Civil Liberties Union of Wyoming, for example, has come out against the bill on both grounds.
The Sierra Club in Wyoming agreed, saying in an email blast that the bill is “explicitly designed to crush public opposition to projects like the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines, by preventing the kind of protests that occurred at Standing Rock.”
Even people representing industry interests and within the Republican Party have come out against the bill as it currently reads.
“This bill appeals to the absolute worst instincts of power,” Larry Wolfe, a Wyoming attorney who represents the oil and gas industry, said at a hearing about the bill, according to WyoFile.com. “We the powerful must protect things that are already protected under existing law.”
Republican Senator Cale Case largely echoed the concerns put forward by Wolfe.
“This country has been through WWII, civil unrest in the 1960s and a heck of a lot more, but we didn’t need legislation like this,” Case conveyed in an email to WyoFile.com. “Good laws already exist to protect property without this chilling impact on free speech.”
According to an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July, the planet is in the midst of the 6th mass extinction event. Strikingly, the scientists who wrote the article call this a “biological annihilation.”
This isn’t a random sequence outcome of a natural societal development. The dominant global culture (industrial civilization) is a culture of imperialism. We can define that as a culture that colonizes and extracts resources as a standard way of operating.
Industrial civilization has become the dominant culture by violence, and violence maintains it.
Timber is ripped from forests and shredded for sale. Rivers are enslaved to irrigate fields and power cities. Oil is burned to propel commerce. Fracking injects poisons into the planet in order to extract even more petrochemicals. Traditional ways of life and sustainable relationships with the land are destroyed, so the only alternative is the toxic (and profitable) cycle of wage labor, debt, and poverty. Patriarchy teaches men to objectify and dominate women, and women to acquiesce. The result is a loss of bodily autonomy to the point that half of all children are unwanted by the mother, and a culture in which eating disorders are a leading cause of death among young women and teenage girls. The legacy of slavery underlies the modern prison system, where vast profits are made by locking up the powerless and oppressed.
As a friend put it, “oppression is always in service of resource extraction.”
The shiny gadgets used to enthrall us are made possible by child miners in the Congo, by workers toiling to the point of mass suicide in Foxconn factories in China, and by the exportation of e-waste to conveniently isolated locations.
And of course, the military, police, and private security (mercenaries) are ready to beat, imprison, or kill anyone who stands in the way of this system. Finally, this culture’s atomized families and recent trends like the rise of neo-liberalism help ensure we remain isolated physically and emotionally, without the strength that comes from being part of a community.
Between the threat of violence, bribery, and the sense of helplessness that comes from isolation, most people aren’t willing to resist. American culture has been built on genocide for 500 years; at this point, most settlers can’t even imagine a society not based on violence.
For those who can, we need to get serious about our strategies.
MYTHICAL STRATEGIES
In the west, and especially in the United States, most activists operate within a mythic framework of non-violent resistance that’s far different than the liberation politics of the 1960’s and 70’s. In this mythology, violence doesn’t solve anything, and non-violence has a magical ability to win conflicts—even if those victories only occur in hearts and minds.
“We win through losing,” a friend says (sarcastically) of this mindset.
Don’t get me wrong. Non-violence can be a supremely elegant and effective technique for social change. Applied correctly—forcefully—non-violence can immobilize a repressive regime or corporate power, making it impossible to move in any direction. Violence should, of course, be avoided anytime it can be.
But non-violent resistance doesn’t always work. As another friend writes in his excellent multi-part series, “The destruction of our world isn’t an ‘environmental crisis,’ nor a ‘climate crisis.’ It’s a war waged by industrial civilisaton and capitalism against life on earth–all life–and we need a resistance movement with that analysis to respond…the decision about what strategy and tactics to use depends on the circumstances, rather than being wedded to one approach out of a vague ethical dogma…the choice between using non-violence or force is a tactical decision. Those who advocate for the use of force are not arguing for blind unthinking violence, but against blind unthinking nonviolence.”
So what’s next? What happens when non-violence doesn’t work? What should you do when you have voted, petitioned, demanded, protested, raised awareness, locked down, blockaded, and it hasn’t worked?
Do you keep using the same tactics that have failed again and again, hoping they’ll work this time?
Do you give up?
This is not a theoretical question.
It’s a situation that has been faced by many resistance movements throughout history. Lately I’ve been reflecting on one in particular; the Oka Crisis that went down near Montreal in 1990.
After 400 years of gradual land theft, the Kahnesetake band of the Mohawk Nation was left with a fraction of a fraction of its traditional territory. With land “development” encroaching continuously, tensions came to a head in 1990 when plans began moving forward to expand a golf course into an extremely important site: a pine forest next to the tribal cemetery.
Members of the Kahnesetake community went through various channels to fight the expansion, including petitioning local government and the federal Indian Bureau. Nothing worked, so they began a non-violent occupation of the golf course. After a gradual escalation—police beatings, threats from masked assailants—many of the Mohawks began carrying weapons. Special police forces were called in to raid the camp, and women stood them down. Someone began shooting—from which side is impossible to say—and a policeman was killed. After a weeks-long standoff during which many more shots were exchanged, the Mohawks were eventually evicted—but the land was protected from development.
Are we committed to winning as much as those Mohawk warriors?
Species extinction, fascist and Nazi extremism, global warming, police violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, resource extraction, industrial expansion, the prison industrial system. Are we committed to stopping these injustices?
If so, we must consider all means, including the use of force and violence.
This is an emergency.
HOW A REVOLUTION MIGHT BEGIN: THE CUBAN PRECEDENT
Perhaps one of the more important lessons of revolutionary history comes from Cuba, where in 1956, a small group of revolutionaries landed near the Sierra Maestra mountains. Almost immediately, the rebels were attacked and routed. Of the original group of 80, only about 20 regrouped in the mountains.
Nonetheless, over the next several years, their movement grew. They recruited locals, coordinated with underground cells in Havana and other urban areas, and built support networks elsewhere in Latin America. By January 1959, the revolutionaries had overthrown the rule of the Batista government.
Marx informs any revolutionary, but I am not a Marxist. Like China and the Soviet Union, Cuba followed a highly centralized, industrialized development path that contains much to criticize (while still representing an inspiring alternative to the capitalist model). The events that took place after the Cuban revolution are, to me, less interesting than the methods used to carry out the revolution itself. Che’s guerilla warfare techniques were well suited to the rural countryside and have influenced every revolutionary group since. And there is much to learn from how the Cuban underground organized.
The most important lesson, I think, is that the revolutionaries just got started. They didn’t wait for the perfect conditions, which they knew would never appear. They suffered major setbacks, but they persisted, and they had unshakeable confidence that they would prevail. Despite their lack of numbers, they had a good foundational strategy. By playing to their strengths, avoiding unwise confrontations, and by gradually building strength, they defeated a force that was initially much superior and initiated a tectonic political shift from capitalist vassal state to socialist nation-building experiment.
DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE SABOTAGE
On July 24th, two women—Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek—publicly admitted to sabotaging the Dakota Access Pipeline in an attempt to stop the desecration of native territory, the ongoing destruction of the climate, and threats to major rivers.
In an interview with them shortly after, they explained their motivations. Ruby, who was a kindergarten teacher before quitting her job to fight the pipeline, was in tears as she explained that those kids would have no future without action.
Jessica and Ruby have repeatedly called for others to take similar actions of eco-sabotage.
“Small forces of ecological commandos that could target the fundamental sources of power that are destroying the planet. We have seen examples of this. In Nigeria, commando forces have been fighting a guerrilla war of sabotage against Shell Oil Corporation for decades. At times, they have reduced oil output by more than 60%.”
As we noted, “no environmental group has ever had that level of success. Not even close. In the U.S., clandestine ecological resistance has been relatively minimal. However, isolated incidents have taken place. A 2013 attack on an electrical station in central California inflicted millions of dollars in damage to difficult-to-replace components used simple hunting rifles. The action took a total of 19 minutes, displaying the sort of discipline, speed, and tactical acumen required for special forces operations.
“Our situation is desperate. Things continue to get worse. False solutions, greenwashing, corporate co-optation, and rollbacks of previous victories are relentless. Resistance communities are fractured, isolated, and disempowered. However, the centralized, industrialized, and computerized nature of global empire means that the system is vulnerable. Power is mostly concentrated and projected via a few systems that are vulnerable.
“Even powerful empires can be defeated. But those victories won’t happen if we engage on their terms. Ecological special forces provide a method and means for decisive operations that deal significant damage to the functioning of global capitalism and industrialism. With enough coordination, these sorts of attacks could deal death blows to entire industrial economies, and perhaps (with the help of aboveground movements, ecological limits, and so on) to industrialism as a whole.
“Implementation of this strategy will require highly motivated, dedicated, and skilled individuals. Serious consideration of security, anonymity, and tactics will be required. But this system was built by human beings; we can take it apart as well.”
That strategy, while not sufficient on its own, would help us move towards a more effective, forceful movement. Read that article here.
This may sound drastic to you. But consider: the planet is being destroyed. We’re living through the sixth great mass extinction event. The most powerful nation in the world just elected Donald Trump. There is no sign of a looming political shift, and alternative parties and movements are largely sidelined or co-opted.
CHARLOTTESVILLE COMES HOME
As I write this, I’m at my sister’s house; she’s just given birth to my (first) nephew, who has beautiful brown skin and is what’s called “mixed race.” Before long, he will emerge into the world, and he will be perceived as a black child, and then as he grows, a black man.
White supremacy is experiencing a resurgence. Days before I write this, at a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, hundreds of virulent racists marched, chanting “blood and soil” and “white lives matter.” In front of studiously inactive police, they severely injured more than two dozen anti-racist protestors and one fascist plowed his car into a crowd of anti-racist protestors, killing a woman and severely injuring others.
The day after, as my sister lay in bed nursing her new beautiful baby boy, more white supremacists were gathering in downtown Seattle, about two miles away. Later, the Amerikkkan president defended the supremacists, saying there were “great people” involved in the white supremacist protests.
To anyone who is paying attention, this isn’t a surprise. Our nation has been built on foundation of systematic white supremacy in service of the extraction of resources. Those are the roots of this society, and the trend continues today. The everyday violence of this culture fuels its operation. The system is functioning perfectly, exploiting every possible method for economic, social, and political gain while funneling wealth to the top.
How can I make a better world for my nephew? How can I make a survivable world? My answer—at least one part of it—is by halting that everyday violence.
It’s time that we organized and carried out a revolution.
—
Max Wilbert is a writer, activist, and organizer with the group Deep Green Resistance. He lives on occupied Kalapuya Territory in Oregon.
Editor’s note: This is an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s December 8, 2013 Resistance Radio interview with Lierre Keith. You can read Part 1 here.
Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:
Jensen: Let’s just use an example of the local Tolowa Indians, who lived here for at least 12,500 years. Their lifestyle was based—their food, a lot of their caloric input, came from salmon. If they ate all the salmon, if they killed off the salmon somehow, then that means they would have to conquer someone else, or starve to death, right? Is that basically what you’re saying?
Keith: Yes. Or take the example of, it doesn’t even matter, any civilization. They’re generally going to be based on one of seven or eight crops—corn or wheat or barley or whatever. Every year there’s less and less of it because every year the soil is more and more degraded, there’s more salinization taking place, more salt, literally, in the soil. You will see this throughout history where both the archaeological record of things like the strata that they can just dig through, and then what’s actually in the cooking pots, and then if there are written records of history, you can see how one crop shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, so they try another one that’s more salt-hardy, and eventually that will collapse too. You even have written descriptions of how the surface of the land is glistening white with salt, and “What are we going to do?” They destroyed their land, doing agriculture.
You can pick your power center, but it’s always the same process. You’re using up what you’ve got, and in this process you’re also destroying the rivers and you’re pulling down more trees, and of course you need all those things to survive. Your population is too high to survive on what’s there.
That’s the problem with cities. Eight million people cannot live sustainably on the island called Manhattan. It just can’t be done. Resources have to come from somewhere else, the food, the water, the energy. And the problem is that nobody willingly gives up those things.
The people who live in the watershed next to you, they don’t want to give you what they need. Why would they willingly just die so you can have their trees, their water and their fish? They’re not going to do that. So you’re going to come into conflict. This is why agricultural societies end up militarized. And they do, always.
It doesn’t matter what beautiful, peaceful values those people might hold in their hearts. It doesn’t matter—their lovely art, their music, their paintings, their frescoes, what religion they might be—it doesn’t matter, materially speaking. They have used up their resources. They will starve to death without food. They’re going to have to go out and get it from somewhere else.
J: It’s a functional problem.
K: That’s why it always ends up militarized. That’s one big reason. Another reason is, as you mentioned, human slavery. This is backbreaking labor. Hunter-gatherers tend to work maybe 15 or 20 hours a week to provide for their basic resources, and the rest of the time they do spiritual activities, art, naps apparently are very important, and also gossip. So that’s what they love to do, and they’ve got a lot of free time to do it.
You can contrast that with farmers: it’s just neverending, from dawn to dusk. For anyone to have leisure time in an agricultural society, they have to have slaves. To put a real number on it, by the year 1800—a lot of people demarcate that as the beginning of the fossil fuel age—fully three-quarters of the human beings alive on this planet, three-quarters of them, were living in some form of slavery, indenture, or serfdom. That’s what it requires.
J: It was mainly agricultural, right?
K: Yes. We’ve forgotten how much work is involved because we’ve been using machines now to do that work. I can guarantee that when the fossil fuel runs out, we’re going to remember exactly what kind of work this is.
Once you have that number of the population living in slavery, you need someone to keep them there, and those people are called soldiers. When they go out into the hinterlands, into the colonies, to get those resources that everybody now needs, one of those resources is always going to be other human beings.
We talk about Athens, the great birthplace of modern democracy. Ninety percent of the population of Athens were slaves. That carries through until the year 1800. So that’s number two, slavery.
The other problem with agriculture is it creates a surplus. That’s how the whole thing keeps going. You have to make enough so that you have some surplus. Hunter-gatherers can just move on a little bit and there’s more food to eat, but with the agriculturalists, of course, starvation is always one season away, so there’s always this surplus. The thing is, if you can store it, you can steal it, so you always have to have somebody to guard the food stores. And again, those people are called soldiers.
J: In the first cities—I learned this from Lewis Mumford—the first cities did not have walls around the outside to protect them from so-called raiders. They actually had walls around the granary to make sure that the king was able to keep control of the food supplies because it was only through keeping control of the food supplies that he was able to keep control of the labor force.
K: Yes, so you see this makes a really vicious little circle. Another point to keep in mind is if you can picture one of those great big naval ships that the British Navy or whoever used to conquer various colonies, it can take 600 old-growth trees just to make one of those ships.
War is really resource-intensive. And it ends. A lot of things you might produce create value in this society, and the value can keep either building or at least transferring, but with things that revolve around war, it just dead-ends right there because it’s only got one purpose. And when it’s over, everybody’s dead and that’s sort of the end of it.
Those ships—entire forests of the world were pulled down to make ships just for war. And this is true everywhere. It’s not just the British Navy. It’s all of them. That’s what was required to build those great big fighting vessels.
So you’ve destroyed your forest to live in this energy-intensive way, and you’ve poured a whole bunch of resources particularly into your military, not in defeating people but into the military, and now around again in the vicious circle, you have to go out and conquer the people living in the region next to you so you can take their forest to make more ships to conquer more people.
This is the temporary advantage that agricultural societies have. Because they’re willing to destroy their forests, they can build these great big ships. They can do all this smelting of iron and make these incredible weapons, which are a lot harder than just wooden spears. So they’ve got this superior military force because it’s all draw-down.
Then you’re stuck in this position where you then have to conquer. You have to use that military to go out and get more resources because you’ve used up yours. But it gives you that temporary advantage over the people who aren’t willing to destroy their forests.
If you’re the people who aren’t willing, now you’re really stuck between a rock and a hard place. You either become militaristic and devote your forest to making an army—you kill your land—or you stand on principle and you’re killed and they take it. This is why war spreads. The gentle, peaceful matrilineal people that we all love to romanticize, and in our dreams that’s where we go, this is what happens. This is what they’re up against every time.
It’s a double bind. There’s not really any way out, and that’s why we’re in the state we’re in.
J: Since the problems are functional, as opposed to just something we can change by being nicer people, why are you telling us this? That’s one question. Another question is what do you want people to do with this information?
K: The reason I’m telling everybody is because I want to be hated. [Pause.] That’s supposed to be a joke.
The reason I’m telling everybody is because I feel like the people who care the most—and by that I mean radical environmentalists, radical feminists, people who are profoundly committed to the planet, to justice, to a better way—by and large do not understand the depth of the problem. And if we don’t address the actual problem, we’re never going to come up with solutions. That seems kind of obvious.
Even people who’ve dedicated their lives to these issues don’t understand that it all goes back to agriculture, that that’s the original activity that started us down this path of destruction. That’s the primary destruction. Eventually, global warming will outweigh that, but to date, it’s still the most destructive thing that people have done to the planet. Because that’s what it is. It’s not like agriculture on a bad day, agriculture done really badly. No, this is what it is. You pull down the forest. You rip up the prairie. You destroy those biotic communities, and you replace them with this monocrop for humans, for as long as it will last. That’s the problem.
Then once you start doing that, you’re stuck with this militaristic cycle because you’ve got to keep doing it again and again. When you’ve destroyed your own, you have to go out and get someone else’s. Militarism isn’t just, “Oh gosh, we happen to be warlike. We have a bad story in a book we consider holy. We’d better tell new stories.” I’m a writer. I’m all for new stories, but that’s not going to change this.
The problem is we have a way of life based on draw-down. Materially speaking, we’ve used it all up. And we need to face that. That’s why I’m trying to get people to understand this. It’s not because I actually want them to hate me although a lot of them end up hating me. I guess that’s just the way it goes when you go up against people’s beliefs.
We really have to get the basic wound that’s been done, the basic damage. This has got to be at the forefront of our consciousness as activists and environmentalists and feminists. We’re never going to be able to face it otherwise.
J: I want to comment on the whole hating you thing. What you’re saying is not actually new. Basically, every generation, there have been a number of people who say agriculture is destructive—can you just list a few of the people who have talked about this? There’s Jared Diamond and Richard Manning with Against the Grain, and how about Edward Hyams? Talk about a few of those precedents.
K: What you’re saying is absolutely right. Every generation there’s somebody who says the same thing, and you can go all the way back to ancient Greece to some of the earliest written texts that we have anywhere in the world, and you’ve got Plato, Socrates and Aristotle all mentioning the fact that the world was being destroyed, that the rivers were being flooded with this mud and silt, and so there were no more fish, and all the soil was washing down off the mountains.
In fact, some of the ports of the ancient Roman Empire had to be moved ten kilometers—ten kilometers—because so much silt ran off the mountains and clogged the harbors that they kept having to move, just literally move the cities, to a new spot where the ships could actually dock. This was all commented on. They knew what they were doing. It’s just that nobody knew how to stop it.
Then you have people like George Hill in the nineteenth century, then Edward Hyams in 1930, 1940, and more recently, you have David Montgomery and his book Soil, which is absolutely fabulous. Jared Diamond basically won a Pulitzer Prize for saying more or less the same thing. Richard Manning has this great quote that I love. I’d like to read this. It’s just a few sentences:
“No biologist or anyone else for that matter could design a system of regulations that would make agriculture sustainable. Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron. It mostly relies on an unnatural system of annual grasses grown in a monoculture, a system that nature does not sustain or even recognize as a natural system. We sustain it with plows, petrochemicals, fences, and subsidies because there is no other way to sustain it.”
That’s it right there. It’s a war against the natural world.
No, I have nothing to say that’s particularly original. I think I put it together in my own way, but none of this is new information. It’s not getting to the people who care the most, and that’s why I feel impassioned about this.
J: So what do you want people to do on two levels, both the personal level and the social level?
K: I think that the social level is heads and shoulders, far and way above, way more important than anything that anybody can do in their personal lives. And I really want to emphasize that, because there are no personal solutions to political problems, and we should know that.
The problem is that a lot of the environmental movement—we’ve kind of been sold this idea that if we just make different consumer choices, we can somehow buy our way out of these massive, global political problems. We can’t. There’s no set of things you can buy that’s going to make a damn bit of difference on any of this. This is not a problem that you can address in your personal life and really have that make anything but a nano-difference. These are really just horrendous systems of power that we are going to have to challenge.
J: Can you say what you were going to say, but in addition can you give a three-minute liberal/radical distinction? Is that possible?
K: There are two main differences between liberals and radicals. The first is that liberals are idealist, and what that means is that liberals tend to think that social reality is an idea. It’s a mental event. And therefore, the way to make social change is education. You change people’s minds. And social change happens because people have some kind of consciousness transformation, or a personal epiphany, or even a spiritual revelation, but that’s how social change happens. It’s one by one and it’s through education or rational argument because it’s a rational problem, right? It’s just a mental event.
J: If we recognize that agriculture is destructive, then we’ll stop it.
K: Yes. Somehow if we just get the information to people, it will somehow just happen. It’s very different on the radical side because radicals think that material conditions are primary, that society is not made up of ideas, it’s made up of material conditions and material institutions that create those conditions. The way you change things is by taking power away from the powerful and redistributing that to the dispossessed. That involves struggle.
Down the line, you have to make decisions how you’re going to wage such struggle, whether it’s violent or nonviolent. All that is really important, and often very ethically grueling to come to grips with, but that’s a much later discussion.
The thing to recognize is this requires force. It’s not a misunderstanding. It’s not a mistake. The powerful aren’t there because the rest of us aren’t educated. They’re there because they have power, and they’re not going to give it up willingly.
You need to use some level of force, whether that’s nonviolent, whether it’s boycotts, whether it’s sit-ins—there are plenty of nonviolent ways that have worked, so it’s not about violence and nonviolence.
It’s simply to recognize that this is not a mistake or a misunderstanding because it’s not a mental event. It’s about material systems of power that have got to be changed, that have to be confronted and brought down. That’s idealism versus materialism.
The other big difference between liberals and radicals is the basic social unit. For liberals it’s always the individual. The individual is sacrosanct. It’s always the individual against society. And again, this leaves you with a strategy of sort of one on one. You’re going to change people one by one, and that’s how you change society.
For radicals, again, this is totally different. We understand that society is actually made of groups of people—so it’s always a class condition, whether it’s economic class, whether it’s a sex caste system of gender, whether it’s a racial caste system. These are groups of people, and some of those groups have power over other groups.
So it’s not about you as an individual. The bad things that happen to me aren’t because my name is Lierre and I have blue eyes and I like reading. The bad things that happen to me are because I’m a woman, because of the different class positions that I hold. Those are the things that happen to people who are in my position. Nothing to do with me as an individual.
Social change happens when the dispossessed come together and make common cause. The solution is really written into the problem. Groups of people have power, but the dispossessed can come together and fight for themselves to change that. There’s always hope in that condition.
That’s the difference between liberals and radicals, and the problem with a lot of the environmentalists of course is that they’ve completely taken up this liberalism. So it’s only going to change by education, and you’re only going to do it one on one. What has dropped out completely from of the conversation is that there are people in power, they’re making money, they control armies, and they’re in control of things like Exxon/Mobil. They are gutting the planet for their personal profit. They’ve got names and addresses, as Utah Phillips very famously said. We know where they live, and we can see how their power is organized.
Our job is to take that apart. It’s to take down those institutions in whatever way we can and redistribute the power so that we all have some say in the material conditions of our lives.
What do I want people to do? In really broad strokes I actually think that there’s still a lot of hope because the things that we need to do to solve these problems are actually things that we should be doing anyway if we care about justice. To get justice for people is also the only way we’re going to save this planet. It’s not human race vs. planet. I think it gets set up that way in people’s minds. It’s not. It’s actually quite the opposite.
So, to get down to brass tacks, the number one thing you can do to drop the birth rate is teach a girl to read. That’s a really profound statement. When women have even that much more power over their lives, it means they have a little more control over the uses to which men put our bodies, and that’s sexually, reproductively, economically. The number one thing that drops the birth rate across the globe is teaching a girl to read. And we should care about that because we care about girls.
As it turns out, it’s one of the main things we’re going to have to do to save the planet. Right now somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of all children that are born are either unplanned or unwanted. All we have to do is give women control over their bodies and the birth rate drops. That’s happened in 32 countries. We now have negative or zero population growth in 32 countries. This is not the human rights horrors of China or places like that where they’ve instituted these draconian and misogynist laws. This is simply giving women power over their lives. And that’s what happens when women have a little education and a little bit of power, over and over.
The number one thing that we have to do is empower girls, and that means confronting a system of power that’s called patriarchy. We’re all going to have to be feminists. Gosh, what a shame.
The other thing that drops the birth rate is when you increase people’s standard of living. People end up having lots of children when they’re very, very poor. So if you raise the standard of living, the birth rate drops, very quickly in fact. Often in a generation you can see this happen.
The reason that people are poor is not because they’re stupid. It’s because the rich are stealing from them. And that is a global system called capitalism. So we’re going to have to be against capitalism, and we’re going to have to do something about patriarchy. That is the only way that we’re going to save this planet.
Again, it’s not humans vs. planet earth. If you care about human rights, that is the only thing that’s really going to save this situation.
My goal is, over the next two or three generations, we could very easily, by simply caring about women and girls and giving them some rights over their lives, some decision-making power, we could drop the birth rate dramatically and then we could let the planet repair. We could be part of that repair. It’s actually not that hard, because the grasses and the forests want to come back. If we simply get out of the way, they will.
I’ll end with one final bit of information, and that’s really about grasslands. If we were to take 80 percent of the trashed out grasslands around the planet, which have been destroyed by agriculture and return them to the grasslands that they would like to be, within 15 years we could sequester all of the carbon that’s been released since the beginning of the Industrial Age. We could stop global warming in its tracks.
Because it’s not us doing it. It’s the plants that are doing it. It’s those incredible grasses that would do it for us. Because life wants to live. And they will do that. The one thing they are really good at is building soil. That’s what prairies do. The basic component of soil is carbon, so they’ll suck it out of the air and they’ll store it once more in the ground, and that could be the end of global warming.
But we’ve got to stop being these monsters and destroyers. A lot of times people make this argument that this is human nature. My response is that it’s not. We were on this planet for over two million years and we didn’t destroy anything. In fact, you can look at the first art that we ever made, and to me it’s a celebration. You have the mega-fauna and the mega-females. Those were our first art projects, these giant animals and these giant women. To me that says that in our bodies, in our brains, in our bones, we have that awe and that thanksgiving, that we were trying to say thank you for our lives and for our homes, and so that was what we celebrated.
I don’t think it’s that far from us still. I think we could repair this planet and remember how to participate rather than dominate.
