Collapse

This is an excerpt from the book Bright Green Lies, P. 20 ff By Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert What this adds up to should be clear enough, yet many people who should know better choose not to see it. This is business-as- usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed, ambition-addled destruction of the wild, the unpolluted, and the nonhuman. It is the mass destruction of the world’s remaining wild places in order to feed the human economy. And without any sense of irony, people are calling this “environmentalism.” 1 —PAUL KINGSNORTH ...

This article originally appeared in Common Dreams. “This is the time to unite together to build the healthy and just future we know is possible for each other and the Earth.” By JULIA CONLEY As world leaders gathered in New York for the United Nations General Assembly Thursday and amid preparations for a global climate conference coming up in November, women leading more than 120 international organizations delivered a call to action demanding “a transformation of how we relate to the natural world and to one another”—one that will enable far-reaching action to save the planet. ...

This piece, by Paul Feather, explores what it means to be a citizen of system ruled by the machine, placing it in context of the recent elections that offers no real choice to the voters. By Paul Feather / November 3, 2020 I voted today, even though I think it’s a crock of shit. It’s easy enough and doesn’t hurt anything. At least not as far as I can tell. I took the sticker that proclaims, “I secured my vote,” from the smiling lady by the exit, but I didn’t post a selfie with the sticker to let everyone else know how easy that was, or how civic minded I am, or to remind them of their duty to democracy. Don’t get me wrong. I hope all y’all vote. Go team. ...

As the book Deep Green Resistance reminds us, there are certain aspects of collapse that are positive (declining oil demand, for example) and others that are negative (e.g., rising patriarchal, racist elements). This piece from Vince Emanuele argues that individualist survivalism is often an anti-social response to the social problems we are facing, and that we must organize as communities to survive. Guns, Land, and Chickens Won’t Save You by Vincent Emanuele / Counterpunch ...

This is the second in a series of articles reflecting on a recent study which predicts collapse of industrial society within a few decades. In the first essay, Max Wilbert discusses how in the long-run, collapse will benefit both humans and nature alike. This second essay in the series explores a “solution” proposed by the original authors of the study—a “Dyson sphere”—and why it will not save us from a collapse. By Salonika / DGR Asia-Pacific ...

This is the first in a series of articles reflecting on a recent study which predicts collapse of industrial society within a few decades. By destroying the ecological foundation on which all life depends, civilization makes collapse inevitable. Max Wilbert describes the destruction caused by the industrial civilization, and what we can do for a just transition to a more sustainable way of life. by Max Wilbert A new study published in Scientific Reports finds that there is a 90% chance of civilization collapsing irreversibly within the next 20 to 40 years. ...

Today we share an excerpt of the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. This selection comes from Chapter 2: Civilization and other Hazards. In the preceding pages, various ecological crises were presented. The media report on these crises as though they [ecological crises] are all separate issues. They are not. They are inextricably entangled with each other and with the culture that causes them. As such, all of these problems have important commonalities, with major implications for our strategy to resist them. ...

An unsustainable way of life is bound to end in collapse. Numerous civilizations and empires have met the same end. In this piece, Kara Huntermoon discusses patterns of civilization collapse. For further reading, check out John Michael Greer on the onset of collapse, Jared Diamond’s book " Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," the collapse scenarios in the book " Deep Green Resistance," and Max Wilbert’s recent piece about the collapse of the American empire. ...

Whether by war, famine, resource depletion, socioeconomic failure, or destruction of the natural environment, all empires eventually crumble. What will happen when the collapse of the American empire culminates? By Max Wilbert History is a graveyard of civilizations: the Western Chou, the Mayan, the Harappan, the Mesopotamian, the Olmec, the Chacoans, the Hohokam, the Mississippian, the Tiahuanaco, the Mycenean, the Roman, and countless others. These societies were overrun by disease, or war, or famine. In most cases, they undermined their own ecological foundations—a situation that may sound familiar. ...

This excerpt comes from the Introduction to Dahr Jamail’s book, The End of Ice. Dahr Jamail is an award winning journalist and author who is a full-time staff reporter for Truthout.org. His work is currently focusing on Anthropogenic Climate Disruption. Featured image: a rapidly melting glacier on Tahoma (Mt. Rainier), by Max Wilbert. By Dahr Jamail Our planet is rapidly changing, and what we are witnessing is unlike anything that has occurred in human, or even geologic, history. The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, both greenhouse gases, has been scientific fact for decades, and according to NASA, “There is no question that increased levels of greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response.” Evidence shows that greenhouse gas emissions are causing the Earth to warm ten times faster than it should, and the ramifications of this are being felt, quite literally, throughout the entire biosphere. Oceans are warming at unprecedented rates, droughts and wildfires of increasing severity and frequency are altering forests around the globe, and the Earth’s cryosphere—the parts of the Earth so cold that water is frozen into ice or snow—is melting at an ever-accelerating rate. The subsea permafrost in the Arctic is thawing, and we could experience a methane “burp” of previously trapped gas at any moment, causing the equivalent of several times the total amount of CO2 humans have emitted to be released into the atmosphere. The results would be catastrophic. ...