‘hippy shit’!
Last Wednesday at the Sustainable Development Commission Breakthrough Ideas for the 21st Century meeting in London Tim Smit stood and complained that what he was hearing was “hippy shit”.
William Shaw asked him what he meant, and here is his reply, originally published at RSA Arts and Ecology Centre blog:
“The next forty years will see us needing to cut our carbon footprint by 80% and if that is what we believe now the lessons of the last few years would imply that even this timescale is conservative as humans seem to have no intrinsic understanding of exponential change, only linear change. This means that every child in school today will live through changes that will be as major as imagining a leap from pre-industrial society into the middle of it. These changes cannot be assimilated to even contemplated as the sum of billions of small individual events of a ‘lifestyle choice’ variety. While it is true that the cultural changes which will see us recycle, insulate, travel less embrace renewable energy solutions and so on, will make a difference, these are actions based on the individual and our self perception as individual actors with choice as our right and consumption as our economic driver. It is in building community resilience and awareness that the future lies and to succeed in this we need a new narrative, one that describes the sunny uplands our society is striving to reach and the reason why adopting a philosophy which sees us recognising out part in and responsibility to the natural world will see us working with the grain of nature and not against it. My comment about ‘hippy shit’ was in no way meant to decry the efforts of those who are encouraging the first steps in community action through various mediums such as growing your own and so on, merely that we have been here before many times and the danger of becoming over impressed with such steps is that it drowns out the scream from the future that a truly radical shift in philosophy and leadership is required – one that questions the fundamentals of the way we do business, measure growth and take on responsibilities as citizens as opposed to just being aware of our rights. I feel awkward because I do not wish to be anything but supportive to the committed, but I believe we are entering, or maybe have already entered a period that future generations may come to regard as important as the start of the renaissance. For this to be true we need to be collectively far angrier, intellectually more incisive and offer realistic alternative routes to the future which take on board the realities of the size and complexity of the global population and don’t retreat into intellectual masturbation about ideals that just are undeliverable.The tragedy of our generation could well be that our institutions, both private and public are based on military or mechanistic hierarchies which have many things to commend them but adaptability isn’t one of them. I have spoken frequently to top civil servants both here and in Europe and they voice private despair at the structural and decision making prisons they have built for themselves and an accountability that is more often based on ‘audit’ than human outcomes. Their outlook is bleak because of the almost total lack of real leadership. A revolution is necessary and it cannot be achieved by a simple democratic process – were it so the world would still be flat. I hold to the view that Mark Twain famously noted, ‘If it is true that reasonable men bend themselves to the ways of the world, then only the unreasonable can change it.’ This is very good and in our terms today should maybe be translated as ‘if it ain’t broke – smash it’ (as someone has obviously got a vested interest in it!).”
So… sorry for the long reply, but “Hippy Shit” can appear like a cheap shot from the sidelines and does disservice to “Hippies” as we both know that many ex-hippies run the monster organisations that have become household names – you had to be lateral and brave to be a real hippy, but hippy shit is the unthinking touchy feely language of togetherness and harmony without a roadmap or a narrative.
if it aint broke – smash it. dismantle this culture of heirarchies and vested interests.
Why climate change probably cannot be stopped.
Excellent article by Alder Stone Fuller.
Not only do we need to do our utmost to reduce CO2 emmissions, we must start to actively prepare for adaptation to a hotter climate. We would add that an end to civilisation as we know it is no bad thing, and that we should be actively working towards that end as a means to reducing CO2 and all the other damage that this culture is doing. Living in cities within heirarchical social structures is not the normal state for humanity, and if we are really serious about reducing our impact as a species, and adapting to a sustainanable culture, we need to leave the cities in large numbers (while greening those cities for those who remain living there, and building truly local food systems) – this will require the removal of heirarchies and the elites at the top of them, as presently they ‘own’ and control almost all the land, and are unlikely to happily give up their privilege (which requires a continuation of the status quo).
The large majority of people – from scientists to policy makers – addressing the issue of climate change still assert that we can stop global heating by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. But is that a fact or an unsupported assumption? Why is it reasonable to assume that we can still stop global heating & resultant climate changes – which some estimate could be the largest climate change event in 50 million years, and will end civilization as we’ve known it – even with a 100% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, let alone 50% by 2050?
To my knowledge, no one has justified that assumption with any argument based in science. It appears to be an article of faith, grounded, perhaps in view that humans are in control of “the environment”.
And a small, but increasingly vocal minority of scientists addressing the climate issue – most notably James Lovelock – argue using very solid scientific models backed by credible evidence that climate change can no longer be stopped.
This is NOT to argue that we should end efforts to minimize greenhouse emissions. Quite the contrary, we should minimize carbon emissions immediately – not by 2050, but now – even if we cannot stop a large climate change event. Why? Even if we can’t stop it, we might slow it, and we may decrease the time for recovery to a more “normal” climate. However, if we continue to emit gases when climate is already destabilizing, we will surely do more damage.
But if the assumption is not supportable by science, then the way we are addressing this issue needs to change. Specifically, we need to spend at least as much time, money and energy planning for adaptability* to a climate shift as trying to slow it.
Here are the facts that must be addressed to evaluate the assumption that we can stop global heating and climate destabilization even with 100% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. One must not focus on any single piece of evidence, but on the whole.
1. Complex systems – including climate – exist stably in only a limited number of states (e.g., ice ages or interglacial between ice ages, like now, and a hotter state that last existed 55 million years ago called the PETM). However, the climate system will not stabilize between states any more than a brick will stabilize between upright and laying flat, or a human can exist for long between waking and sleeping. You are either awake or asleep, not half way in between.
Systems transition rapidly from one state to another via positive feedback processes at critical thresholds or “tipping points”. Research in recent years has verified that climate can shift from ice age conditions to temperate, interglacial conditions in as little time as a decade. (Heating events happen fast.) Positive feedbacks can amplify even small changes in the system, preventing normal negative feedbacks from stabilizing the system in the current state, causing acceleration of change towards a tipping point. That is, if temperature is increasing, positive feedback will cause temperature to increase faster.2. CO2 levels are already significantly higher now – 390 ppm – than in the last 650,000 years. (Normal interglacial levels: 280 ppm; previous high: 300 ppm). Further, CO2 increase is accelerating. Past increases never exceeded 0.03 ppm/year. It is now increasing at 2 ppm/year. It is increasing now 100X faster than in the past.
3. Excess CO2 in the atmosphere now – and any added in the future – will remain there for at least a century, potentially much longer. This is referred to as residence time. This is because CO2 must be actively “pumped down” by biological processes – notably marine algae which transform CO2 into calcium carbonate shells, which become limestone on their death, removing CO2 from the atmosphere and oceans. Due to ocean heating and acidification, that natural pump down – healthiest in an ice age – is now extremely stressed. By adding more CO2, we are overwhelming the pump.
4. There is a 50-year lag between stabilization of atmospheric gases & cessation of heating because water heats more slowly than air. That means that even after we stop emissions, we will continue to heat for another 50 years.
5. The poles – Arctic and Antarctic – have heated more & faster than any other places on Earth. Summer Arctic ice has decreased more than 30% in less than 3 decades. A recent study demonstrates that the extent of sea ice at the end of the summer season 2010 was lower than at any time in the last few thousand years. Further, the winter ice is thinner, allowing faster melting the following year, and break up by storms. Greenland’s ice sheet melting is also accelerating. Loss of ice accelerates warming. Why? Because whereas ice reflects more than 80% of solar radiation, cooling a region, dark ocean water absorbs more than 80% of solar radiation, accelerating ice loss, a positive feedback.
6. Most of the heat trapped during the last few centuries is in the oceans, causing a decrease & poleward redistribution of marine algae (because they don’t like warm water). This is a HUGE problem because they play a MAJOR role in CO2 pump down and sequestration – far greater than terrestrial plants – and the production of clouds that reflect sunlight which cools the oceans by reflecting sunlight. Thus, loss of phytoplankton is another positive feedback.
7. Methane – an important greenhouse gas that threatens to become more important than CO2 – is also at a record levels: 2.5 times higher than “normal” interglacial levels. Vast regions of permafrost near the Arctic – 20% of Earth’s land area – are thawing, releasing huge quantities of methane, some of which has been stored there since the last ice age, some of which is now being produced by anaerobic bacteria that are decomposing organic matter previously frozen. This phenomenon has been called a “sleeping giant”. Vast quantities of methane are also stored on the ocean floor, but will destabilize and be released as gas as oceans warm. We are already seeing significant methane bubbling in the Artic ocean. Increasing methane will cause more heating, which will produce more methane: another positive feedback.
8. Forest ecosystems – especially rain forests in the Amazon – that have previously been carbon sinks are now becoming carbon sources as drought and heat waves cause forest die-off, releasing carbon via decomposition and burning. The sizes of forest fires across the Earth have increased notably in size in recent decades. For example, summer, 2010 saw massive wild land fires in Russia. As heating continues, this, too, will become a positive feedback.
9. There are no known negative feedback processes operating to stop these positive feedbacks from slinging Earth’s climate into a new, hotter state.
10. In reality, we are already hotter than we think we are. Why? We are being cooled by sulfur aerosols in the atmosphere, mostly resulting from burning fuels. Under proper conditions – an economic decline or – paradoxically – a reduction of fossil fuel use – aerosols would wash out of the atmosphere in weeks, increasing the global average temperature by as much as we heated in the entire 20th century.
In summary, because: 1) climate shifts rapidly from one state to another; 2) CO2 residence time in the atmosphere insures that we will continue to heat for at least a century, probably much longer; and 3) multiple positive feedbacks are accelerating heating towards a new state of the climate, so that, even if humans entirely stop producing CO2 today – a highly unlikely event given economic and political realities – Earths’ climate system will transition to a new hotter state, reminiscent of the state that existed 55 million years ago.
The argument supports the assertion that it is too late to stop global heating. We might be able to slow it by huge reductions in gas emissions, but we can’t stop it. Heating can only be stopped by stopping the multiple, global scale positive feedback processes described above, but no one has yet explained how that can occur.
The scale, speed and severity of this climate change will threaten civilization as we know it by turning most continents into deserts, preventing agriculture as we know it. Therefore, we should spend equal time, money and effort planning how to adapt to a hotter state with a radically different climate regime that hasn’t existed on Earth for 55 million years that will likely turn oceans and continents outside of the polar regions into deserts.
Why? Simple physics: once ocean surfaces exceed 10C, they stratify, preventing upwelling of nutrients to feed algae. This has already occurred in tropical zones, which is why tropical oceans are so clear. Once soil temperatures exceed 79F, they require daily rainfall (or irrigation) for any but desert-adapted plants.)
Our preparations to increase adaptability should include personal & community planning to facilitate a transition to a new kind of civilization that promotes planetary healing (but not geoengineering) as well as planning for water, food, shelter, health care, energy, transportation and security in a world with a climate that humans have never experienced in our million year history characterized by the words extreme, chaotic, unpredictable and violent.
(Think I’m being too extreme in my views about climate change? Please read my comment about this on my FAQ page.)
Diet: A Short History
By Todd Caldecott.
Human evolution has been a gradual process over millions of years, from our earliest ancestors that diverged from other primates over four to seven million years ago, to the modern Homo sapiens of today. We first begin to bear some semblance to the modern human as Homo habilis and H. erectus 2-3 million years ago, with rudimentary practices that characterize distinctly human behaviours such hunting and gathering, using spears and stone tools, and according to anthropologist Richard Wrangham, the control and use of fire.
The first anatomically modern humans known as Homo sapiens make their appearance as far back as 400,000 years ago in Africa, and over this time gradually develop simple technologies until we begin to undergo a radical transformation about 10,000 years ago. Collectively this period of time in archaeology, from the advent of Homo habilis to the agricultural revolution is called the Paleolithic period, and represents more than 99.9% of our human evolution.
As our primate ancestors evolved the nature of our diet gradually shifted, from eating plants and insects as tree-dwellers, to becoming the fur-wearing big game hunters that come to mind when we think of the ‘cave men’ represented in popular culture. Out of necessity our diet was as diverse as possible, and our ancestors needed to maintain a vast knowledge of local foods including plants, animals, fungi, and minerals just to survive. Depending on factors such as geography and climate, how much of each type of food we might eat at any given time varied considerably. Research conducted at the University of Colorado suggests however that whenever possible our early ancestors preferred animal foods as their primary source of nutrition, comprising between 45-65% of their total energy intake, supplementing the remaining percentage from plant foods (Cordain et al 2000). These findings corroborate evidence that suggests early humans preferred animal foods for its high calorie impact, facilitating the development of our relatively large human brain. Carbohydrate foods of course remained an essential part of the diet, including wild roots, stems, leaves, fruit, bark and tree sap – but all these have markedly different properties when compared to the carbohydrate-rich foods we eat nowadays.
There are a few remaining places where examples of the Paleolithic diet can still be found, such as in the !Kung peoples of Africa, the Inuit peoples of the Arctic, and Yanomamo and Aché peoples of South America. Historians tell us that when the first European explorers came to North America, they consistently remarked on the health and vigor of the native populations, who seemed to be free of the chronic maladies and illnesses that plagued their more “advanced” cultures. Research on modern hunter-gatherer peoples such as the Yanomamo indicates that following traditional Paleolithic dietary practices protects against the diseases that are the hallmark not just of Western culture, but perhaps of civilization itself (Truswell 1977, Neel 1977, Salzano and Callegari-Jacques 1988).
About 10,000 years ago something revolutionary began to happen to humanity. Quite suddenly we began to experiment with the domestication of animals and plants, gathering together in settled communities to forgo our hunter-gather ways. The first wave of this happened in Africa and the Middle East, soon after in India and China, and then much later in Meso-America and Northern Europe. Whether caused by climate change or population pressures, humans began to leverage local resources to their advantage. Although animals such as the dog, pig and cow were among the first species to be domesticated, humans experimented with a diverse array of plant species, selecting and planting only the choicest specimens generation and after generation, weeding out undesirable characteristics such as bitterness and fiber. While vegetables were cultivated, the most outstanding feature of the agrarian revolution was the production of grains, cereals and legumes. Gathering, crushing, soaking, fermenting and cooking the seeds of various grasses including emmer, barley and flax yielded a surprisingly energy-rich food, while dried and boiled pulses provided a good source of protein. In the relatively stable climate of this period, peoples that had already settled found that the reliable seasonal cycle of crop production yielded greater food security than the luck of the hunt, and slowly the foundations of human culture, for good or for ill, began to change. Gradually the diversity of foods in the diet began to decline as our Neolithic ancestors labored from dawn until dusk, sowing, planting, growing, harvesting, drying and preparing their food, with little time or energy for anything else. Stored food became a valuable commodity in early human society, and used by advantage by certain people, helped to produce the social stratification we still see in society to this day, with an underclass of laborers and an elite that directs society by controlling food and the means of its production. Since this time, although empires rose and fell, the diet of this toiling underclass changed very little, at least up until very recently.
Although not entirely unhealthy, the grain and pulse based diet of the peasant is far from optimal and archeological evidence suggests that it contributed to both physical weakness and chronic disease. To counter this, traditional peoples continued to emphasize animal products in the diet, but because animal slaughter was a costly investment there was a greater reliance on more sustainable outcomes for animal domestication such as dairy and eggs. Unlike today, there was no distinction between whole and refined foods because the technology either didn’t exist to refine whole foods. Throughout Asia for example, rice and all its different varietals became the most important staple, and was almost always eaten with the bran intact, i.e. brown rice – unless of course, you could afford to pay someone to meticulously to remove the bran by grinding the rice in sand – and even then, it was only partially milled and very much unlike the milled fluffy white rice most of Asia eats nowadays.
For your average peasant poor hygiene and a lifetime of hard physical labor certainly took its toll, but in general their overall health was much better than in the elite overclass, who suffered from many of the chronic disease we see nowadays, simply because they good afford the finest and most luxurious foods. This strict stratification between diseases of the rich and diseases of the poor continued more or less up until what is called the Green Revolution of the 20th century, and the advent of industrial farming practices that dramatically increased food production, as well as the development of technologies to enhance the shelf life, flavor and preservation of food. Within a few generations, previously humble communities that at one time survived on subsistence diets were now eating the refined foods formerly the preserve of kings and nobles. In this way, a developing country like India now has the highest rates of diabetes in the world – all from eating a highly refined, industrial diet that substitutes for the simple, earthy diet eaten only a couple generations ago.
Todd Caldecotts website contains many interesting articles about diet, lifestyle, health.
A deeper understanding of carrying capacity
Original: John Feeney’s blog.
Have we exceeded the earth’s carrying capacity for humans? Many observers conclude there is no way to answer the question with any confidence. I believe their view stems from an assumption which fails to hold up to analysis. It is the common notion that, through human ingenuity, we’ve been able, through the course of history, to increase carrying capacity.
This idea stems from the correct observation that the advent of agriculture and our later use of fossil fuels were central among those developments which allowed us to grow the human population as enormously as we have. It does not follow, however, that these developments increased carrying capacity.
The error here is in failing to account properly for overshoot. It is well established that animal populations sometimes overshoot or grow beyond carrying capacity. It is simple enough to demonstrate this has happened with the human population. Agriculture and fossil fuels have not increased carrying capacity; they have merely led to our overshooting it, supported by what William Catton calls “phantom carrying capacity.” It is not carrying capacity at all, and is only temporary. [1]
This is especially easy to see with regard to oil depletion. Oil is a finite resource. Relying on it, therefore, to support global food production can only be temporary.
But here are two less widely recognized observations which also support my point: First, agriculture as we know it has always been unsustainable. It has brought with it soil erosion and an inevitable depletion of soil nutrients at rates far faster than their natural rates of renewal. This is comparable to our depletion of finite resources such as oil. It may have taken ten thousand years for us to see this, but that is barely an eye blink in human history. [2]
Second, consider that none of the processes which have allowed our numbers to explode has come without cost to the web of life. We know well enough about the environmental impacts of extracting and burning fossil fuels. Less discussed is the cost of agriculture to other species. Cultivation agriculture means the elimination of all life from a piece of land, turning it then exclusively to human use. [3] [4] Multiply this by over a billion hectares and we see clearly how agriculture has been the primary driver of the Sixth Mass Extinction of species in Earth’s history, the direct destruction of Earth’s life support systems.
Third, in all species population follows food supply. Natural limits on food supply hold population sizes within appropriate limits. (Under normal circumstances, this works, by the way, with no particular suffering.) But by adopting agriculture we circumvent this normal process, thereby inevitably growing our numbers far beyond carrying capacity.
This point is often misunderstood, perhaps because it has seldom been thoroughly explained. Additionally, many people have trouble accepting (a) that humans are subject to the same natural processes as other species, and (b) that those processes worked perfectly well for us for nearly all of human history prior to civilization’s stepping in and interfering. [5]
Not only have we not increased carrying capacity, we have decreased it. It’s simple ecology. We depend on the web of life for our own survival. When a species consumes resources faster than they are renewed, degrading the habitat on which it depends, it erodes carrying capacity.
The damage we have done to the biosphere and the web of life has temporarily allowed us to grow our numbers but has reduced carrying capacity. This may be hard to believe when we consider that for nearly all of human history, prior to exploding into the billions, our numbers never exceeded more than a few million. It underscores the shocking degree by which we’ve overshot carrying capacity.
No, there is no evidence we have increased carrying capacity. Rather, basic principles of ecology reveal we have managed only to overshoot it by an incredible margin.
_______
For some underlying fundamentals of carrying capacity please see the article Six Steps to “Getting” the Global Ecological Crisis.
[1] For much more see Catton’s classic text, Overshoot.
[2] For more detail see Agriculture: Unsustainable Resource Depletion Began 10,000 Years Ago by soil scientist Peter Salonius.
[3] For an illuminating description of this process see Lierre Kieth’s The Vegetarian Myth.
[4] On any large scale, even a major improvement such as permaculture appears to suffer from a similar problem of turning the land excessively to human consumption. As I understand it, however, it is structured to be practiced on a scale small enough — and with constraints against large populations — that it might prove sustainable under conditions of a much smaller human population. This is not to suggest it as an “alternative” to agriculture, without which humans did quite well for most of our history. As an approach to small-scale gardening — something practiced by many hunter-gatherers — it makes good sense. Once we begin to depend, though, on growing food for our subsistence, uping the scale by clearing the land and creating food surpluses, the problems start.
[5] Essential references include Daniel Quinn’s books Ishmael and The Story of B, this slide presentation and the articles available on Russ Hopfenberg’s site, and this video featuring Quinn and conservation biologist Alan Thornhill fielding questions on the issue.
A Reality Check From the Brink of Extinction
By Chris Hedges, reprinted from Truthdig (from last year but worth a reprint).
We can join Bill McKibben on Oct. 24 in nationwide protests over rising carbon emissions. We can cut our consumption of fossil fuels. We can use less water. We can banish plastic bags. We can install compact fluorescent light bulbs. We can compost in our backyard. But unless we dismantle the corporate state, all those actions will be just as ineffective as the Ghost Dance shirts donned by native American warriors to protect themselves from the bullets of white soldiers at Wounded Knee.
“If we all wait for the great, glorious revolution there won’t be anything left,” author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen told me when I interviewed him in a phone call to his home in California. “If all we do is reform work, this culture will grind away. This work is necessary, but not sufficient. We need to use whatever means are necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet. We need to target and take down the industrial infrastructure that is systematically dismembering the planet. Industrial civilization is functionally incompatible with life on the planet, and is murdering the planet. We need to do whatever is necessary to stop this.”
The oil and natural gas industry, the coal industry, arms and weapons manufacturers, industrial farms, deforestation industries, the automotive industry and chemical plants will not willingly accept their own extinction. They are indifferent to the looming human catastrophe. We will not significantly reduce carbon emissions by drying our laundry in the backyard and naively trusting the power elite. The corporations will continue to cannibalize the planet for the sake of money. They must be halted by organized and militant forms of resistance. The crisis of global heating is a social problem. It requires a social response.
The United States, after rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, went on to increase its carbon emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels. The European Union countries during the same period reduced their emissions by 2 percent. But the recent climate negotiations in Bangkok, designed to lead to a deal in Copenhagen in December, have scuttled even the tepid response of Kyoto. Kyoto is dead. The EU, like the United States, will no longer abide by binding targets for emission reductions. Countries will unilaterally decide how much to cut. They will submit their plans to international monitoring. And while Kyoto put the burden of responsibility on the industrialized nations that created the climate crisis, the new plan treats all countries the same. It is a huge step backward.
“All of the so-called solutions to global warming take industrial capitalism as a given,” said Jensen, who wrote “Endgame” and “The Culture of Make Believe.” “The natural world is supposed to conform to industrial capitalism. This is insane. It is out of touch with physical reality. What’s real is real. Any social system—it does not matter if we are talking about industrial capitalism or an indigenous Tolowa people—their way of life, is dependent upon a real, physical world. Without a real, physical world you don’t have anything. When you separate yourself from the real world you start to hallucinate. You believe the machines are more real than real life. How many machines are within 10 feet of you and how many wild animals are within a hundred yards? How many machines do you have a daily relationship with? We have forgotten what is real.”
The latest studies show polar ice caps are melting at a record rate and that within a decade the Arctic will be an open sea during summers. This does not give us much time. White ice and snow reflect 80 percent of sunlight back to space, while dark water reflects only 20 percent, absorbing a much larger heat load. Scientists warn that the loss of the ice will dramatically change winds and sea currents around the world. And the rapidly melting permafrost is unleashing methane chimneys from the ocean floor along the Russian coastline. Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more toxic than carbon dioxide, and some scientists have speculated that the release of huge quantities of methane into the atmosphere could asphyxiate the human species. The rising sea levels, which will swallow countries such as Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands and turn cities like New Orleans into a new Atlantis, will combine with severe droughts, horrific storms and flooding to eventually dislocate over a billion people. The effects will be suffering, disease and death on a scale unseen in human history.
We can save groves of trees, protect endangered species and clean up rivers, all of which is good, but to leave the corporations unchallenged would mean our efforts would be wasted. These personal adjustments and environmental crusades can too easily become a badge of moral purity, an excuse for inaction. They can absolve us from the harder task of confronting the power of corporations.
The damage to the environment by human households is minuscule next to the damage done by corporations. Municipalities and individuals use 10 percent of the nation’s water while the other 90 percent is consumed by agriculture and industry. Individual consumption of energy accounts for about a quarter of all energy consumption; the other 75 percent is consumed by corporations. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States. We can, and should, live more simply, but it will not be enough if we do not radically transform the economic structure of the industrial world.
“If your food comes from the grocery store and your water from a tap you will defend to the death the system that brings these to you because your life depends on it,” said Jensen, who is holding workshops around the country called Deep Green Resistance to build a militant resistance movement. “If your food comes from a land base and if your water comes from a river you will defend to the death these systems. In any abusive system, whether we are talking about an abusive man against his partner or the larger abusive system, you force your victims to become dependent upon you. We believe that industrial capitalism is more important than life.”
Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental regulation as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are responsible for our personal impoverishment as well as the impoverishment of our ecosystem. We remain addicted, courtesy of the oil, gas and automobile industries and a corporate-controlled government, to fossil fuels. Species are vanishing. Fish stocks are depleted. The great human migration from coastlines and deserts has begun. And as temperatures continue to rise, huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. NASA climate scientist James Hansen has demonstrated that any concentration of carbon dioxide greater than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere is not compatible with maintenance of the biosphere on the “planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” He has determined that the world must stop burning coal by 2030—and the industrialized world well before that—if we are to have any hope of ever getting the planet back down below that 350 number. Coal supplies half of our electricity in the United States.
“We need to separate ourselves from the corporate government that is killing the planet,” Jensen said. “We need to get really serious. We are talking about life on the planet. We need to shut down the oil infrastructure. I don’t care, and the trees don’t care, if we do this through lawsuits, mass boycotts or sabotage. I asked Dahr Jamail how long a bridge would last in Iraq that was not defended. He said probably six to 12 hours. We need to make the economic system, which is the engine for so much destruction, unmanageable. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta has been able to reduce Nigerian oil output by 20 percent. We need to stop the oil economy.”
The reason the ecosystem is dying is not because we still have a dryer in our basement. It is because corporations look at everything, from human beings to the natural environment, as exploitable commodities. It is because consumption is the engine of corporate profits. We have allowed the corporate state to sell the environmental crisis as a matter of personal choice when actually there is a need for profound social and economic reform. We are left powerless.
Alexander Herzen, speaking a century ago to a group of Russian anarchists working to topple the czar, reminded his followers that they were not there to rescue the system.
“We think we are the doctors,” Herzen said. “We are the disease.”
High on Progress
Derrick Jensen article, reprinted from Orion magazine.
What will be left when we finally come down?
WHY HAVE WE come to assume that “progress” is always good? The Nazis’ treatment of Jews progressed toward their final solution. And many individual Jews followed a line of progress: get an ID card, move to a ghetto, get on a cattle car, arrive at a camp, work at the camp, go to a gas chamber, get put in an oven, rise as smoke, fall as ashes.
A stalker can progress from one stage to another, beginning with e-mails, then phone calls, then moving to the victim’s community, then haunting places the victim might go, then showing up at the
victim’s home. Cancer can and usually does progress. Addictions, including cultural addictions, can and often do progress.That’s not to say that progress can’t be good. A friendship or romantic relationship can progress as surely as can an abusive relationship—the affection you feel growing with time, leading to a deep familiarity and comfort as the relationship matures.
In a lot of cases, progress is good for some and bad for others. For the perpetrators of the Nazi Holocaust, the technological progress that made possible more efficient ways to kill large numbers of human beings was “good,” or “useful,” or “helpful.” From the perspective of the victims, not so good. For the perpetrators of the United States Holocaust, the development of railroads to move men and machines was “good” and “useful” and “helpful.” From the perspective of the Dakota, Navajo, Hopi, Modoc, Squamish, and others, not so good. From the perspective of bison, prairie dogs, timber wolves, redwoods, Douglas firs, and others, not so good.
In 1970 Lewis Mumford wrote, “The chief premise common to both technology and science is the notion that there are no desirable limits to the increase of knowledge, of material goods, of environmental control; that quantitative productivity is an end in itself, and that every means should be used to further expansion.” Mumford asked the same question that so many of us ask, which is, Why on earth would a culture do so many crazy, stupid, destructive things? His answer cuts through the typical cornucopian garbage: “The desired reward of this magic is not just abundance but absolute control.” Mumford knew—as we all do—that there was no hope in proceeding “on the terms imposed by technocratic society.” He didn’t think change would be easy, saying that it might take “an all-out fatal shock treatment, close to catastrophe, to break the hold of civilized man’s chronic psychosis.” He was not optimistic: “Even such a belated awakening would be a miracle.”
Most people today have not awakened from the Cult of Progress. Even with the world being dismembered before their eyes, nearly all public figures continue to be members of this cult. The same is true for many nonpublic figures—for most of us—as we seem unquestioningly to presume that tomorrow’s progress will bring more good things to life, and will simultaneously solve the problems created by yesterday’s and today’s progress (without then creating yet more problems, as “progress” always seems to do).
For those who benefit from it, progress is about improving their material lifestyle at the expense of those they enslave, steal from, or otherwise exploit. For everyone else, it is about loss.
Progress. In vast stretches of the Pacific Ocean, there is forty-eight times as much plastic as phytoplankton.
Progress. One million migratory songbirds die every day because of skyscrapers, cell-phone towers, domesticated cats, and other trappings of modern civilized life.
Progress. A half million human children die every year as a direct result of so-called debt repayment from so-called third-world countries (the colonies) to so-called first-world countries (the nations that have undergone progress).
Progress is polar bears swimming hundreds of miles to ice floes that have melted away, till finally they can swim no more. Progress is nuclear weapons, depleted uranium, and “drones” piloted from an office in Florida to kill people in Pakistan. Progress is the ability of fewer and fewer people to control more and more people, and to destroy more and more of the world. Progress is a god. Progress is God. Progress is killing the world.
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins said that science’s claim to truth is based on its “spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command.” Anthropologist Leslie White stated that “the primary function of culture” is to “harness and control energy.” Quite simply, this culture is about enslaving everyone and everything its members can get their hands (or machines) on. What is another word for making someone jump through hoops? Enslavement. In this culture, progress is measured by the ability to enslave, to control, and to do so with ever-increasing efficiency. The ultimate goal is to control everyone and everything.
I know, I know, I can hear the cry of the cult members now: “If progress is so bad, why does everyone want it?” Well, they don’t. Nonhumans certainly don’t. But they don’t count. They’re only there for you to use. Many humans don’t want progress, either. Or at least they didn’t, when they still had intact social structures. That’s why so many indigenous peoples have taken up arms in defense of their ways of life. I often think of a line by Samuel Huntington: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.”
Part of the problem is that progress can be not merely seductive, but addictive. My compact OED defines the verb addict as “to bind, devote, or attach oneself as a servant, disciple, or adherent.” In Roman law, an addiction was “a formal giving over or delivery by sentence of court. Hence, a surrender, or dedication, of any one to a master.” To be addicted is to be a slave. To be a slave is to be addicted. The heroin ceases to serve the addict, and the addict begins to serve the heroin. We can say the same for progress: it does not serve us, but rather we serve it.
Every addiction has its allure. I recently had some extended conversations with people who’d used a lot of crack. Their descriptions of the drug’s effects were consistent with what I’d heard from students when I taught at a supermaximum-security prison. The people who’ve used crack uniformly say that crack makes them feel extremely good, and powerful, and invincible. Their descriptions of the high make crack seem pretty damn appealing. Unfortunately the high doesn’t last all that long, and when you come down you not only feel wretched, but you immediately start looking for another hit.
Severe addicts may give up everything else for their addiction. My students had lost their freedom, in some cases for the rest of their lives. Their addictions had cost many of them their families. Yet even after that, a fair number said that if you put that rock in front of them, they’d still find a way to smoke it. This culture’s addiction to progress runs far deeper than any individual’s chemical addiction. It is more powerful than many people’s desire for a living planet.
Progress is hot showers (which require mining, manufacturing, and energy infrastructures). Progress is computers (which require mining, manufacturing, and energy infrastructures, and are used far more effectively by those in power than by us). Progress is the internet, which allows for instantaneous communication with distant loved ones (and which requires mining, manufacturing, and energy infrastructures, and is used far more effectively by those in power than by us). Progress is supermarkets, which require industrial food production (which in turn requires mining, manufacturing, and agricultural, chemical, and energy infrastructures, and is controlled by ever fewer giant corporations).
All other things being equal, I’d rather have a nice space heater to keep my toes toasty warm. But all other things aren’t equal, and I’d rather have a living planet.
BP and the ‘Little Eichmanns’
by Chris Hedges, reprinted from Truthdig.com
Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.
Those who carry out this global genocide—men like BP’s Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume’’—are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, “little Eichmanns.” They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.
The corporations, and those who run them, consume, pollute, oppress and kill. The little Eichmanns who manage them reside in a parallel universe of staggering wealth, luxury and splendid isolation that rivals that of the closed court of Versailles. The elite, sheltered and enriched, continue to prosper even as the rest of us and the natural world start to die. They are numb. They will drain the last drop of profit from us until there is nothing left. And our business schools and elite universities churn out tens of thousands of these deaf, dumb and blind systems managers who are endowed with sophisticated skills of management and the incapacity for common sense, compassion or remorse. These technocrats mistake the art of manipulation with knowledge.
“The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” Hannah Arendt wrote of “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” “No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”
Our ruling class of technocrats, as John Ralston Saul points out, is effectively illiterate. “One of the reasons that he is unable to recognize the necessary relationship between power and morality is that moral traditions are the product of civilization and he has little knowledge of his own civilization,” Saul writes of the technocrat. Saul calls these technocrats “hedonists of power,” and warns that their “obsession with structures and their inability or unwillingness to link these to the public good make this power an abstract force—a force that works, more often than not, at cross-purposes to the real needs of a painfully real world.”
BP, which made $6.1 billion in profits in the first quarter of this year, never obtained permits from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The protection of the ecosystem did not matter. But BP is hardly alone. Drilling with utter disregard to the ecosystem is common practice among oil companies, according to a report in The New York Times. Our corporate state has gutted environmental regulation as tenaciously as it has gutted financial regulation and habeas corpus. Corporations make no distinction between our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And the abuse, of us and the natural world, is as rampant under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The branded figure who sits in the White House is a puppet, a face used to mask an insidious system under which we as citizens have been disempowered and under which we become, along with the natural world, collateral damage. As Karl Marx understood, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force. And this force is consuming us.
Karl Polanyi in his book “The Great Transformation,” written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences—the depressions, wars and totalitarianism—that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that “fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism—and a Mafia political system—which is a good description of our corporate government. Polanyi warned that when nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market, then human beings and nature are destroyed. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always dynamite the foundation for a continued prosperity and ensure “the demolition of society.”
