Dismantle Civilisation

The Copenhagen Climate Talks – the 15^th conference of all the parties of the UNFCC – have now come to a close.  The hope was that the gathered world leaders and politicians would have created a legally binding deal that would see global emissions of greenhouse gas fall drastically as the science demanded, limiting the extent of climate change already upon us.

But that’s what it was – a hope.  The Copenhagen Accord merely expresses that the leaders of the world accept that climate change should be limited to below 2 degrees Celsius, but provides no action or commitment to do so.  20 years of presenting the science to politicians, 2 years working towards this conference, 2 weeks negotiating the text, and all that has been achieved is a disputed piece of paper claiming that our leaders would like to see climate chaos limited, but not enough to actually put anything on the line.  Meanwhile, apathy grips the majority of those not lobbying the leaders for change, and consumerist society and industrial civilisation continue to wreak their path of destruction unabated.  Despite the best efforts of the environmental and social justice movements, we seem to be the closest we’ve ever been to the brink of defeat.  Why?

For years the strategy of those in the movement has been that if we can convince the public, sceptics and politicians of the great destruction being wrought on people and planet, then they’ll automatically support action to stop it. But even with the majority believing that global warming is anthropogenic, knowing about the suffering and poverty of the third world and all the injustices present in our society, this has not happened.  After years of campaigning, of laying out the facts and science, of presenting the unfolding tragedy of climate change, we’ve finally reached the core of the crisis.  Most people now know and accept the science.  They know what the future holds if they don’t act.  They know the suffering that grips and will tighten its grip on humanity.  And they don’t care.  It can be shrugged off, ignored and forgotten about.  All they really care about is themselves, and they reckon they’ll be fine.  Compassion for those suffering and being destroyed in their name is suppressed.  They simply don’t care.

And that’s the problem.  This is why the emerging crisis has occurred, this is why the environment has continually been trashed, this is why injustice continues and grows at an ever increasing pace.  It’s because society as a whole doesn’t care.  The environmental and social crises enveloping humanity is a crisis of compassion, not of some specific technologies, countries or policies.  There is no doubt these are factors in the crisis, contributing to and accelerating it, but the true source is psychological.  Climate chaos, social injustice, tyranny and oppression are merely symptoms of a deeper psychological crisis at the heart of civilisation.

That is not to say that each individual is inherently heartless or a monster, and that it is their fault they are like that.  Many people are capable of great acts of compassion, selflessness and generosity.  But each and every one of us has been taught and imbued with the collective values of society and civilisation, and that collective story is one based on fear, selfishness and greed.  Consumerism marks the perfection of this social ideal, but it has existed as long as civilisation itself, indeed it was the necessary conditions that allowed the first empires to grow in the first place.  Each of us has been indirectly taught and indoctrinated to accept that the happiness of our self is prime, that we are all separate and different from each other and everything else, and that to show compassion and kindness is to be weak.  But it is this selfishness and this lack of compassion that drives our collective ability to be able to allow the perpetuation of environmental and social injustice, and led to their creation in the first the place.  It is no understatement to say that this central story of our society and civilisation will ultimately lead to the destruction of humanity and its home, consigning billions to chronic suffering in the process.

Once we can see and grasp this, it is imperative to act.  There is no use in blaming ourselves for holding this unspoken agreement – it was not our fault or our parents fault to accept the only version of reality presented and taught to us.  Forgive yourself of the past.  But once we realise what is happening we bear responsibility for the consequences of our implicit support of this agreement.  And if we see those consequences as unacceptable, we must decide to act as a result.  But what to do?  We seek the big, effective and seemingly magical solutions and silver-bullets.  But there is no way to somehow make everyone adopt a now societal foundation and make everyone spontaneously more compassionate, breaking millennia of civilised dogma in the short time available to us.  The only thing we can definitely change is ourselves and how we interact with those around us.  We must act with compassion and cultivate selflessness in our own lives, using the ancient practice of mindfulness for example, in order to help change the default setting of fear and selfishness and effect all who we interact with in our lives with this new story.  We must create a new central story for our society that holds up selflessness, compassion and harmony over our differences.

But many will say this is not nearly enough, that this is such a small action as to be insignificant and that we don’t have enough time to change the established dogma.  And to them I say – what else can we do?  Do we only fight for and do what is right if we can be sure of winning?  Do we not do it anyway even if our doom seems assured?  Or do we do it anyway as the only responsible, noble and compassionate path available, even if defeat stares us in the face?  I choose to fight for justice anyway, armed with the seeds of compassion and justice.

And we do not only just create this new story for society and act accordingly; we also create the practical foundations for this new more responsible society too.  There are already many activists creating and helping local community groups, building community gardens informed by the principles of Permaculture, starting urban allotments, supporting community supported agriculture projects in the country, creating their own renewable (and thus independent) energy supplies, using local wild food and foraging, building local stable-state economies and currencies, working in workers co-ops, buying food through food co-ops, encouraging local and freely accessible culture and improving their neighbourhoods, for example.  Once enough of these local projects exist and begin to overlap, a network of alternatives to mainstream society can be created, building local resilience and allowing people to live more independently of civilisation and thus lay the foundations of this new society.  Combined with the new societal story, this network of local activism can become a phoenix to emerge from the decaying edifice of the old society.  This is nothing less than mass cultural civil disobedience, a cultural insurrection against consumerism, globalisation and industrial civilisation.  There are no leaders of this movement, no governing bodies or organisations to guide it; disorganisation is our strength, preventing the corruption and inaction that all bureaucracies breed.

I do not wish to issue a list of ‘things you should do’ or a specific prescription for your own actions, but I find a simple collection of ideas can help to confirm that I’m heading in the right direction:

• Reconnect with nature and our local landscape
• Reconnect with our skills and practical potential
• Reconnect with our selves, our true values and our compassion
• Reconnect with our local community
• Help others Reconnect by undermining the tools of disconnection that keep us disconnected (see Keith Farnish’s excellent work on this)

Under these titles the actions needed to create this new society and dismantle civilisation can be found.  Occasionally when I despair at the state of the world and how little I feel I can do in response, I often return to this list and see what I’m doing that work towards these goals, and this can help reconfirm the power and potential of what we’re doing.

And what will we be working against?  With the failure of efforts to curb climate change, the nation-states of the world will begin to put themselves first, begin to fortify their borders and increase internal policing to cope with the chaos from food shortages, refugees and disasters.  Tensions will grow between countries over ever scarcer resources such as water, leading to inevitable armed strife.  At home, governments will become more oppressive in order to cope, racism and nationalism will surge and extremists will begin to agitate.  Eventually, the traditional nation-state itself will break down, but in the meantime it will fight on to the death.  So we’re not just moving against the selfishness and greed that created the crises facing us, we’re also up against the trashing death throes of civilisation and the fascism and chaos it will spawn.  We must be the torchbearers of a better way of doing things through dark times.

So the call is simple.  You’ve seen the politicians fail.  You’ve seen the campaigners fail.  You’ve seen industrial civilisation fail.  So now it’s up to us.  Reconnect with nature, your practical potential, your self, your community and help others reconnect; practice compassion and mindfulness, assist or start in any project that can help achieve these aims, and do it now.  The time for hope in the existing system is over – it and its flawed story has proved itself to be broken.  The severity of the crisis demands we act now, and that we abandon the politicians and leaders who promised so much yet delivered so little.  Together we can create the compassionate, responsible and just society we’ve been seeking for so long.  The call is simple – do it yourself – it’s the only sane and compassionate thing left to do.

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If you’re in love with the world, fall in love with trying to save it

by Derrick Jensen, reprinted from Orion Magazine.

Years ago I was interviewed by a dogmatic pacifist (note to self: bad idea), who in his (grossly inaccurate) write-up said he thought I wanted all activists to think like assassins. That’s not true. What I want is for us to think like members of a serious resistance movement.

What does that look like? Well, to start, it doesn’t have to mean handling guns. Even when the IRA was at its strongest, only 2 percent of its members ever picked up weapons. The same is true for the Underground Railroad; Harriet Tubman and others carried guns, but Quakers and other pacifists who ran safe houses were also crucial to that work. What they all held in common was a commitment to their cause, and a willingness to work together in the resistance.

A serious resistance movement also means a commitment to winning, which means figuring out what “winning” means to you. For me, winning means living in a world with more wild salmon every year than the year before, more migratory songbirds, more amphibians, more large fish in the oceans, and for that matter oceans not being murdered. It means less dioxin in every mother’s breast milk. It means living in a world where there are fewer dams each year than the year before. More native forests. More wild wetlands. It means living in a world not being ravaged by the industrial economy. And I’ll do whatever it takes to get there (and if, by the way, you believe that “whatever it takes” is code language for violence, you’re revealing nothing more than your own belief that nonviolence is ineffective).

That’s fine, Derrick, but what do you want me to do?

Part of me wants to tell you to bring down the industrial infrastructure, the engine driving the destruction of the planet, converting so-called raw materials-read: living beings, biomes, and indeed the world-into products for sale. But there’s also a part of me that doesn’t want to suggest that, because I’m guessing you wouldn’t do it anyway. And besides, I don’t know you, and no one who doesn’t know you should ever tell you what to do (and if they do, you shouldn’t listen). In any case, ignoring what I have to say may not be such a bad idea, since what I really want is for people to think for themselves-not to bring down the industrial infrastructure because I tell them it’s killing the world, but rather for them to deeply attend to our current crises and come to their own conclusions about what we must or must not do, what we must unmake and what we must make anew.

But, Derrick, what do you want me to do right now?

Okay, here’s a list:

A lot of the indigenous people with whom I’ve worked have said to me that the first and most important thing any of us needs to do is decolonize our hearts and minds. Decolonization is the process of breaking your identity with and loyalty to this culture-industrial capitalism specifically, and more broadly civilization-and remembering your identification with and loyalty to the real physical world, including the land where you live. It means re-examining premises and stories this culture handed down to you. It means seeing the harm this culture does to other cultures, and to the planet. It means recognizing that we are living on stolen land. It means recognizing that the luxuries of this way of life do not come free, but rather are paid for by other humans, by nonhumans, by the whole world. It means recognizing that we do not live in a functioning democracy, but rather in a corporate plutocracy, a government by, for, and of corporations. Decolonization means recognizing that neither technological progress nor increased GNP is good for the planet. It means recognizing that this culture is not good for the planet. Decolonization means internalizing the implications of the fact that this culture is killing the planet. It means determining that we will stop this culture from doing that. It means determining that we will not fail.

And this is just the absolute beginning of decolonizing. It is internal work that doesn’t accomplish anything in the real world, but it makes all further steps more likely, more feasible, and in many ways more strictly technical.

Next, ask yourself what are the largest, most pressing problems you can help to solve using the gifts that are unique to you in all the universe. People sometimes ask why I write instead of blowing up dams, to which I reply that my only D in college was in quantitative analysis chemistry lab, meaning you don’t want me anywhere near explosives. Some people have said I should be an organizer instead of a writer. These people have never seen my work space; if I can’t keep track of my pens, how would I possibly keep track of anything more complex? Likewise, I’ve filed dozens of timber sale appeals, but it was a very laborious process for me; it took me twelve hours to do what others could do in two. And I write terrible press releases. I can, however, write books. Harness your gifts, and put them in the service of your landbase.

My third suggestion is to ask yourself: what do I get off on? One reason I don’t burn out as an activist is that I love what I’m doing. I was out one day with a wetlands specialist. We were trying to stop a developer from ruining a forest. The specialist dug into the soil, rubbed some between his fingers, and compared the color to a chart, which would help him determine if these were wetlands. I asked, “Do you get off on this?” He laughed and said digging in dirt was his second favorite thing to do after playing with his dogs. I laughed too and said I wouldn’t like to do that work. I, on the other hand, have condemned myself to a life of homework: I get off on trying to figure out, for example, the relationship between perceived entitlement, exploitation, and atrocity.

My next suggestion is to make protecting the land where you live-and by extension the rest of the natural world, since protecting the land where you live will be insufficient to protect anadromous fish, migratory songbirds, or anyone in a world being burned alive by global climate change-the most important thing in your life. That may sound drastic, but we’re talking about life on the planet here. There can be nothing more important than this.

So, Derrick, what exactly do you want us to do?

I want you to make the time to find what or whom you love-whether it’s salmon, sturgeon, a patch of forest, survivors of domestic violence, your own indigenous tradition, migratory songbirds, coral reefs, or Appalachian mountaintops-and I want you to dig in and defend your beloved with your life, and, if necessary, with your death. I want for your actions to positively contribute to the health and defense of the planet. I want for you to figure out how to make it so the world-the real, physical world-is a better place because you were born, and because you lived here.

All of this leads to the point, which is, put simply, to do something. Several years ago I was giving a talk to several hundred people about bringing down civilization. The audience was excited. The atmosphere was like a rock concert. I suddenly stopped and asked, “How many of you have ever filed a timber-sale appeal?” Four or five. “How many have worked on a rape crisis hotline?” Ten women. “How many have done indigenous support work?” Three or four. And so on. It’s all well and good to talk about the Great Glorious Revolution, but what are you doing right now?

The big dividing line is not and has never been between those who advocate more or less militant forms of resistance, or between mainstream and grassroots activists. The dividing line is between those who do something and those who do nothing.

Do something.

That’s what I want you to do. That’s what the anadromous fish and the Appalachian mountaintops want you to do too.

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Here’s an interesting article about hope and Copenhagen (it was written at the start of the conference, so doesn’t cover anything that’s happened since), by Paul from The Dark Mountain Project:

Writing about the Copenhagen summit – indeed, writing about climate change in general – is starting to make me feel like the Grinch who stole Christmas. Or, if I wanted to be more of a cultural nationalist (even one who finds Dickens annoying), like Scrooge. I’ve been watching the buildup to the summit with a kind of cranky, disinterested fascination.

Watching the endless plugging of the Guardian’s earnest ‘10:10′ campaign, for example, whose launch at Tate Modern told you everything you needed to know about the class makeup of its worthy and doomed attempt to push the nation out of its collective rut, made me feel that ‘bah humbug’ is the only appropriate response. Similarly, when tens of thousands of nice people took to the streets of London on Saturday dressed like Smurfs (or whatever) in order to – you guessed it – ’send a message to our leaders’, ‘humbug’ seemed inappropriate only because it was far too mild a response.

Now we’re going to have to read, and watch, and listen to, acres of drivel as Copenhagen builds up (’liveblog from the summit venue!’ etc) to a conclusion which will sell itself as a great leap forward in order to make the various world leaders who have turned up look like they’re doing something, and will then quickly unravel. It’s the season of goodwill, and maybe I should really be making more of an effort to connect with that all-important ‘hope’ we are all supposed to be feeling. But I can’t. Humbug, I say, to it all.

Why do I say this? I’ve spelled it out before, and we spelled it out in more detail in the Dark Mountain manifesto – but for now, the world ‘hope’ is worth focusing on. Since beginning the Dark Mountain Project I have been regularly accused by some green friends of ‘giving up’, or of not having adequate reservoirs of ‘hope’, and the use of this word has been, I think, telling. Forty years or more of green politics has come down to – what? Hope. Desire. Belief. Faith. And not a faith in anything likely or even realistically possible. A faith like any other: blind, desperate, resting ultimately on despair.

‘Hope’ on its own is a meaningless driver of any kind of change. Worse than that – it is pernicious. It is blind faith in the impossible. It is a lie. Remember the crazy ‘hope’ encouraged by Obama and his followers prior to his election? It wasn’t long ago. They’re a bit quiet now, those excitable young hopers. As quiet as those New Labour voters were from about 1998 onwards, I seem to remember. And I remember because I was one of them. I remember that hope we placed in young, fresh-faced Tony and his team. I remember its audacity turning very quickly into inadequacy. I remember the comedown.

Therefore we should all despair, right? After all, despair is the opposite of hope, and if we don’t feel one, we must feel the other. This is the accusation thrown at those of us who can’t abide this Diana-like fervour, but it’s nonsense. Hope itself is not a bad thing; but it has to be a hope built on a firm foundation.

I might plant some beans in my garden, for example, and hope they come up. If I plant them at the right time of year, if the seed is good quality, and if I water and feed them at the right times, they will probably germinate. They might not, of course; something could go wrong – blight, an unusually rainy spring, wily rats or pigeons – but the chances are that I’ll get lucky with at least some of them. That’s a pretty sound thing, in other words, to be hoping for. It’s good hope.

On the other hand, I might go into the newsagent and buy a scratchcard and hope to win a million pounds. Strictly speaking, I might do; it’s a faint possibility. But it’s so faint – the odds are stacked so high against me – that it’s effectively a false hope. It might be worth doing for fun, but it’s not something I’d want to stake my future on, unless I was very dumb indeed. It’s bad hope.

Hoping for world leaders to sort out climate change is bad hope. It’s foolish and naive and hugely unlikely. When we look at what we ‘hope’ for from a summit like Copenhagen, we can start to see why.

We hope that vast and deeply entrenched vested interests – fossil-fuel conglomerates; loggers; automobile corporations; the ‘military-industrial complex’; political parties; unions; all the wide and winding alleys of a global economy built on cheap fossil energy – can be somehow overcome in a very short time. We hope that an economy built on the need for constant growth can somehow be reattuned, also in a very short time, into some kind of fluffy, harmless, ’steady state’ system. We hope that this is possible in a world with a rapidly-expanding human population with rapidly-expanding appetites; appetites which need to keep expanding in order to keep that economy on the rails.

We hope that the ‘consumers’ of the rich world – that’s us – will be prepared to make radical changes to their lifestyles; either through personal choice (see 10:10 and a billion other such attempts) or because their governments will force them to. This requires us also to hope that democracies, which are predicated on giving their voters what they want, and promising more of it, will suddenly be able to turn around and tell them they must have less of everything without democracy itself shuddering into serious trouble.

Failing all of this, we turn to the ’supply side’: we hope, in the best tradition of post-Enlightenment Rational Man, that our technology will save us. We hope we can build enough windfarms quickly enough and that they will work. We hope we can invent a ‘carbon capture’ system to allow us to keep burning coal. We hope we can cover the Sahara with mirrors and get a ’supergrid’ up and running. We hope that electric cars will work, or hydrogen fuel cells or decentralised energy systems. We hope we can stop the Canadians digging up and selling their tar sands and persuade the Saudis to keep the rest of their oil in the ground. We hope that we can get all of this done against the interests of those who run the fossil-fuel economy and the inert and inadequate political systems that supposedly govern it, and against the competitive nature of people and nations. Failing that, we hope we can work out some way to start pumping carbon out of the atmosphere and under the sea, or to send it into space or to create cloud cover that blocks the sun’s rays, or to whack space mirrors up into the blackness to reflect the light back again.

Hope hope hope. It could be you. You might get lucky. It’s worth a flutter. After all, the alternative is global apocalypse, right? So let’s paint ourselves blue and get hoping.

We are set up to fail at this, and hoping otherwise will not lead to joy; it will lead to despair. Better, surely, to get real. Better to be honest with ‘the public’ instead of lying to them (they know you’re lying anyway). Better to look the future in the face and understand what it is likely to bring. This is not, please note, the same as ‘giving up’. Stopping the burning of fossil fuels, for example, is hugely important: however far we’ve gone, we could go further, so we should row back as quickly as we can. Living lightly is good too. All such things are good; but they are not going to keep our show on the road and if that’s why you’re doing them, you are going to end up feeling very let down. To say this is not to give up: it is to face up.

We have overshot, and like any civilisation that overshoots, we are starting to pay the price. We need to be honest about this. We also need to be honest about our own role in it as individuals. I like the laptop on which I am writing this. It’s a great machine. It is also part of the problem, and so am I. We are all part of the problem, and there is not going to be a ’solution’ of the kind presented at Copenhagen: simple, top-down, focused, technological, everything-will-be-OK, nothing-to-do-with-us.

Dealing with the fallout of this comes down to us and our kids and theirs too. I strongly believe that the first stage in coping with that reality is accepting that it is a reality. The first stage of kicking the bottle, for an alcoholic, is admitting that he has a problem. We have a problem, it is not going away, and Mr Obama is not going to solve it for us. We are going to have to live with it for a long, long time. We could get something good out of it, at least, by asking ourselves how it came about, and what lies we told ourselves to make to possible. Telling ourselves more of them instead will not make us feel better, at least when the morning comes.

We agree – the hope being touted by the environmental movement and cynical advertising campaigns such as ‘Hopenhagen’ is not going to help solve anything, it is more likely in fact to inhibit action and understanding of what needs to be done.  As tempting as it is to ask and hope for our powerful leaders to do something, as hopeless as it seems to work independently of them and start small and local, we must move beyond these ‘hopeful’ actions and start really acting effectively.  We need to disconnect from civilisation, and instead build the alternative within the wreckage of the old society to which to reconnect to.  So stop hoping that our leaders will solve the crisis, stop hoping the current system will reform, stop hoping industrial civilisation can become sustainable, and instead start acting yourself to dismantle it and create the alternative instead.

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