Greenwashing

An interview with a comrade from the Deep Green Resistance organization, co-author (with Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen) of the forthcoming book, Bright Green Lies. Nicolas Casaux: The latest fad, in the public sphere of mainstream ecology in French speaking Quebec, is this “ pact for the transition.” To me it stands for much of mainstream ecology. It is a plea for shorter showers (as Derrick Jensen would call it), based on a naïve belief in the possibility for industrial civilization to become “green”, notably through “sustainable development”, and also a naïve belief in that our leaders, and the State, can and will someday save us all. What do you think? ...

by Kris De Decker / Local Futures The circular economy has become, for many governments, institutions, companies, and environmental organizations, one of the main components of a plan to lower carbon emissions. In the circular economy, resources would be continually re-used, meaning that there would be no more mining activity or waste production. The stress is on recycling, made possible by designing products so that they can easily be taken apart. ...

by Suzanna Jones / Counterpunch Walden, Vermont– In his 2008 book Deep Economy, Bill McKibben concludes that economic growth is the source of the ecological crises we face today. He explains that when the economy grows larger than necessary to meet our basic needs – when it grows for the sake of growth, automatically striving for “more” – its social and environmental costs greatly outweigh any benefits it may provide. Unfortunately, McKibben seems to have forgotten what he so passionately argued just five years ago. Today he is an advocate of industrial wind turbines on our ridgelines: he wants to industrialize our last wild spaces to feed the very economy he fingered as the source of our environmental problems. ...

Editor’s note: This is the second part of an edited transcript of a talk given at the 2017 Public Interest Environmental Law Conference. Read Part One here. Watch the video here. by Erin Moberg, Ph.D., and Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance Eugene A question that a lot of radical environmentalists ask ourselves is, “where is your threshold for resistance?” Particularly given the recent U.S. presidential election, people in so many communities with a lot at stake, with a lot to lose, and not a lot of choice, have been doing much of the harder and riskier work as front-line activists.Latinos are taking action in courts, schools, and town halls. Women of color are taking action, black and brown people are taking action, and indigenous people are taking action. Since the U.S Presidential election it has been good to see other people with less to lose take steps, and sometimes leaps, out of the spaces of privilege they occupy in order to stand up and speak up against injustice–against violations of people of color, of women and girls, of Spanish-speakers, of immigrants, of undocumented people, and so many others. In Eugene, Oregon, I’ve also seen many people new to activism come out to learn about direct action and community organizing, because they want to defend the land they love, but a lot of times don’t know how.This gives me brief moments of hope and yet I’m still terrified, and still very certain that nothing short of a unified global movement of all kinds of people ready to resist and fight back, to protect the land they love, the air we breathe, the water we need, and all of the animals on the planet, will be enough to give us any say at all in how and when this culture collapses.Some of the ramifications of environmental activists and movements dedicating themselves to promoting energy efficiency include strengthening the existing culture, i.e., industrial civilization, by correcting contradictions that stand out between ideals and practices, or policy and practices, within the dominant culture.This also provides an unproductive outlet for activist revolutionary anger that only serves to pacify us and detract us from more materially impactful work that we could be doing as activists. Thinking about the global crises that we are currently facing, including deforestation, peak oil, water drawdown, soil loss, food crises, overfishing, desertification are often framed in the media and in popular and academic discourse as disparate or coincidental issues.We know, however, that all of these crises are interrelated. These are some of the ways in which we can collectively characterize these crises: ...

Featured image: Tesla gigafactory construction near Reno, Nevada Editor’s note: This is the first part of an edited transcript of a talk given at the 2017 Public Interest Environmental Law Conference. Read the second part here. Watch the video here. by Erin Moberg, Ph.D., and Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance Eugene In this culture, and in the environmental movement in particular, there is an increasing emphasis placed on promoting and implementing so-called “energy efficiency,” or “green energy practices” into all areas of human life on the planet; from commerce to agriculture, from corporations to individual homes, from the economy to the legislative arena, and from academia to activism.In many cases, striving toward efficiency is viewed and proposed as the only solution from the outset, mainly because it effectively serves as a means to perpetuate this culture as we know and live it. In some of these contexts our current obsession with efficiency is motivated by a genuine desire to halt climate change and the destruction of the planet. Yet at best, the proponents and practices of energy efficiency as a solution to the planet crisis conflate efficiency and sustainability. At worst, the pro-efficiency movement helps to obfuscate the real causes and impacts of human-caused climate change, towards the end of maintaining capitalism and the socio-political hierarchies on which capitalism depends. From a corporate and economic standpoint, efficiency is generally proposed as the only viable solution to increasingly scarce resources, population explosion, and health issues. In most articulations of the merits of efficiency, the focus and incentive are anthropocentric, explicitly grounded in preserving and furthering civilization, the global economy, and everyday human comforts.As activists, and also as people concerned with the health of the planet, we find significant ideological and material disconnects between the realities of climate change and the oft-accepted approach of energy-efficiency measures as a means to a more sustainable world and planet.Economic efficiency as a means to saving the planet is a myth. Instead, that efficiency promotes and perpetuates capitalism because it aims to make more energy available for other uses. Energy efficiency measures ultimately increase the amount of energy being used overall, thereby causing more harm to the planet. As a foundational premise, the health of the planet is primary rather than just the health and lives of human beings.Depending on the dictionary, the word “efficient” is defined in multiple ways, but we will focus on the two that are relevant to this discussion: ...

Featured image: Maasai from the village of Naiyobi courtesy of the Oakland Institute by John C. Cannon / Mongabay An investigation by the Oakland Institute, a policy think tank, has turned up allegations that the government of Tanzania is sidelining the country’s Maasai population in favor of tourism. The government and some foreign investors worry that the Maasai, semi-nomadic herders who have lived in the Rift Valley for centuries, are degrading parts of the Serengeti ecosystem. The authors of the Oakland Institute’s report argue that approaches aimed at conservation should focus on the participation and engagement of Maasai communities rather than their removal from lands to be set aside for high-end tourism. The government of Tanzania is casting aside Maasai communities to make way for lucrative high-end safari tourism and hunting, says the Oakland Institute, a policy think tank, in a report published May 10. ...

Featured image: Richard Walker. A techno-green future of limitless abundance sounds great, writes Aaron Vansintjan, but it’s totally unsustainable. by Aaron Vansintjan / Red Pepper If you hadn’t heard, despair is old hat. Rather than retreat into the woods, now is the time to think big, to propose visionary policies and platforms. So enter grand proposals like basic income, universal healthcare, and the end of work. Slap big polluters with carbon tax, eradicate tax havens for the rich, and switch to a 100% renewable energy system. ...

by Francis Thicke, introduction by Steven Gorelick / Local Futures The organic food movement suffered a major setback recently, when the US National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) voted in favor of allowing hydroponically-grown products to receive the “organic” label. This decision should not have come as a surprise to those who have watched the organic movement steadily taken over by big agribusiness – a process that began in 1990 when Congress required the USDA to create a single set of national standards that would define the meaning of “organic”. Previously, “organic” meant striving for a healthy relationship among farmers, farm animals, consumers, and the natural world – with soil-building seen as central to the long-term health of agriculture. Organic farms were certified by statewide or regional organizations using locally-defined standards, with the understanding that food production was necessarily diverse – reflecting local climates, soils, wildlife, pests, and so on. A one-size-fits-all national standard wasn’t needed to protect consumers who purchased food from local or regional organic farms, but it was required if global trade in organic products was to expand. The all-but-inevitable result has been a takeover of the organic market by corporate agribusinesses, along with a steady watering down of the standards – which have been largely reduced to a list of proscribed chemicals and required practices meant to apply everywhere. (At Local Futures we continue to believe that localizing food production offers the best way for consumers to know how their food was produced.) After the decision to allow hydroponics under the “organic” label, National Organics Standards Board member Francis Thicke delivered the following farewell message to the Board: ...

by Suzanna Jones Editor’s note: Suzanna Jones is an off-the-grid farmer who lives in Walden, Vermont. She was among those arrested protesting the Lowell wind project in 2011. This originally appeared in VTDigger; republished with permission of the author. There is a painful rift among self-described environmentalists in Vermont, a divide that is particularly evident in the debate on industrial wind. In the past, battle lines were usually drawn between business interests wanting to “develop” the land, and environmentalists seeking to protect it. Today, however, the most ardent advocates of industrial buildout in Vermont’s most fragile ecosystems are environmental organizations. So what is happening? ...

Featured image: Bonanza Flats Editor’s note: This is the second installment in a multi-part series. Browse the New Park City Witness index to read more. by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance Before murdering millions during the Holocaust, the Nazis referred to Jews as rats. After murdering 17 people and lobotomizing some of his victims in an attempt to preserve them, alive but in a catatonic state, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer explained, “…I tried to create living zombies…I just wanted to have the person under my complete control, not having to consider their wishes, being able to keep them there as long as I wanted.” In vivisection labs, scientists commonly cut animals’ vocal cords, so the scientists don’t have to listen to the animals scream. ...