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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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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Here’s an interesting article from Micah White of adbusters:

Experts agree that we are experiencing perilous climate change that calls the fate of our experiment in civilization into question. As severe weather strikes one continent and mysterious die-offs occur in another, the death rattle of the natural environment grows louder. “Where have all the fireflies gone?” we wonder, and then the scientists confirm that they have noted their absence as well. Once the so-called experts step in and the media assures us that abnormal things are indeed happening, we suppress our alarm and resume sleepwalking through ironic consumption. Is this the only way we can experience climate change?

“Experience” is a word we use everyday so it should be easy to define what it means. Some would argue that to experience climate change is to acknowledge its existence. They see experience as living through an event, and they hope to weather what awaits by maintaining the lifestyle that brought us this historical, ecological moment. Those who treat an experience as something to be survived see climate change as something that can be dealt with using the tools of advanced technology, international diplomacy and public education campaigns. “We can get through this,” might be their admirable motto and most of our society could be counted as their supporters.

But “experience” has another meaning that we ought to consider. The words “experiment,” “expert” and “experience” are related: an expert is often someone who gains experience through experiments. The expert need not be a scientist; we also gain experience by submitting ourselves to life-experiments like outdoor adventures, risky activism or dangerous thinking. After one of these experiences, we’ve transformed ourselves and come closer to our full potential. Experience, it seems, has some connection to a test that puts our self into question.

It may not be a surprise to learn that the common root which “expert,” “experiment” and “experience” share is the Latin word experiri, which means “to put to the test.” In fact, we can go one step further and say that every experience is a dangerous test. I do not say this without cause but instead am referring back to the Latin root experiri, which comes from periculum meaning test, trial, risk, danger or, as it is commonly translated: peril. The other meaning of the word experience is thus to be in peril.

Those who understand experience in this second sense will grasp climate change as a perilous existential and civilizational trial. Nature, via climate change, is charging us with ecocide and we must respond if we want to avoid the death sentence. It is no defense to cling to life as it was before today in the hopes of surviving the weather of tomorrow – that is merely blind denial to the trial taking place.

Instead, we must put our selves, our minds, our souls and our way of life under review. We can respond to the charges brought against us only by renouncing the industrial, consumerist worldview that brought us to this catastrophic point. To experience climate change is to be called to take part in an experiment after which the world as we know it is forever changed.

Micah White is a contributing editor at Adbusters and an independent activist. He is writing a book on the future of activism. www.micahmwhite.com or micah (at) adbusters.org

We agree – it’s no use just acknowledging the crisis facing us and continuing with business as usual, we have to experience it by creating a new paradigm better than that of industrial civilisation.  We’re being given a warning to change our ways, but time is short and we can’t afford to remain passive spectators.

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Our obligation as activists, the first step, the essence, is to part the cultural veil at long last, and to tell the truth…… The root cause, the source of the symptoms, is 300 years of our relentlessly exploitative, extractive, and exponentially growing technoculture, against the background of ten millennia of hierarchical and colonial civilizations.

by Adam D. Sacks, at Grist.org.

In the 20 years since we climate activists began our work in earnest, the state of the climate has become dramatically worse, and the change is accelerating—this despite all of our best efforts. Clearly something is deeply wrong with this picture. What is it that we do not yet know? What do we have to think and do differently to arrive at urgently different outcomes?[1]

The answers lie not with science, but with culture.

Climate activists are obsessed with greenhouse-gas emissions and concentrations. Since global climate disruption is an effect of greenhouse gases, and a disastrous one, this is understandable. But it is also a mistake.

Such is the fallacy of climate activism[2]: We insist that global warming is merely a consequence of greenhouse-gas emissions. Since it is not, we fail to tell the truth to the public.

I think that there are two serious errors in our perspectives on greenhouse gases:

Global Warming as Symptom

The first error is our failure to understand that greenhouse gases are not a cause but a symptom, and addressing the symptom will do little but leave us with a devil’s sack full of many other symptoms, possibly somewhat less rapidly lethal but lethal nonetheless.

The root cause, the source of the symptoms, is 300 years of our relentlessly exploitative, extractive, and exponentially growing technoculture, against the background of ten millennia of hierarchical and colonial civilizations.[3] This should be no news flash, but the seductive promise of endless growth has grasped all of us civilized folk by the collective throat, led us to expand our population in numbers beyond all reason and to commit genocide of indigenous cultures and destruction of other life on Earth.

To be sure, global climate disruption is the No. 1 symptom. But if planetary warming were to vanish tomorrow, we would still be left with ample catastrophic potential to extinguish many life forms in fairly short order: deforestation; desertification; poisoning of soil, water, air; habitat destruction; overfishing and general decimation of oceans; nuclear waste, depleted uranium, and nuclear weaponry—to name just a few. (While these symptoms exist independently, many are intensified by global warming.)

We will not change course by addressing each of these as separate issues; we have to address root cultural cause.

Beyond Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The second error is our stubborn unwillingness to understand that the battle against greenhouse-gas emissions, as we have currently framed it, is over.

It is absolutely over and we have lost.

We have to say so.

There are three primary components of escalating greenhouse-gas concentrations that are out of our control:

Thirty-Year Lag

The first is that generally speaking the effects we are seeing today, as dire as they are, are the result of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide in the range of only 330 parts per million (ppm), not the result of today’s concentrations of almost 390 ppm. This is primarily a consequence of the vast inertial mass of the oceans, which absorb temperature and carbon dioxide and create a roughly 30-year lag between greenhouse-gas emissions and their effects. We are currently seeing the effects of greenhouse gases emitted before 1980.

Just as the scientific community hadn’t realized how rapidly and extensively geophysical and biological systems would respond to increases in atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations, we currently have only a rough idea of what that 60 ppm already emitted will mean, even if we stopped our emissions today. But we do know, with virtual certainty, that it will be full of unpleasant surprises.

Positive Feedback Loops

The second out-of-control component is positive (amplifying) feedback loops. The odd thing about positive feedbacks is that they are often ignored in assessing the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions. Our understanding of them is limited and our ability to insert them into an equation is rudimentary. Our inability to grasp them, however, in no way mitigates their effects, which are as real as worldwide violent weather.

It is now clear that several phenomena are self-sustaining, amplifying cycles; for example, melting ice and glaciers, melting tundra and other methane sources, and increasing ocean saturation with carbon dioxide, which leads to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. These feedbacks will continue even if we reduce our human emissions to zero—and all of our squiggly lightbulbs, Priuses, wind turbines, Waxman-Markeys, and Copenhagens won’t make one bit of difference. Not that we shouldn’t stop all greenhouse-gas emissions immediately—of course we should—but that’s only a necessity, not nearly a sufficient response.

We need to find the courage to say so.

Non-Linearity

The third component is non-linearity, which means that the effects of rising temperature and atmospheric carbon concentrations may change suddenly and unpredictably. While we may assume linearity for natural phenomena because linearity is much easier to assess and to predict, many changes in nature are non-linear, often abruptly so. A common example is the behavior of water. The changes of state of water—solid, liquid, gas—happen abruptly. It freezes suddenly at 0°C, not at 1°, and it turns to steam at 100°, not at 99°. If we were to limit our experience of water to the range of 1° to 99°, we would never know of the existence of ice or steam.

This is where we stand in relationship to many aspects of the global climate. We don’t know where the tipping points—effectively the changes of state—are for such events as the irreversible melting of glaciers, release of trapped methane from tundras and seabeds, carbon saturation of the oceans. Difficult to pin down, tipping points may be long past, or just around the corner. As leading climatologist Jim Hansen has written, “Present knowledge does not permit accurate specification of the dangerous level of human-made GHGs. However, it is much lower than has commonly been assumed. If we have not already passed the dangerous level, the energy infrastructure in place ensures that we will pass it within several decades.”[4]

Evidence of non-linearity is strong, not only from the stunning acceleration of climate change in just the past couple of years, but from the wild behavior of the climate over millions of years, which sometimes changed dramatically within periods as short as a decade.

The most expert scientific investigators have been blindsided by the velocity and extent of recent developments, and the climate models have likewise proved far more conservative than nature itself. Given that scientists have underestimated impacts of even small changes in global temperature, it is understandably difficult to elicit an appropriate public and governmental response.

Beyond the Box

We climate activists have to tread on uncertain ground and rapidly move beyond our current unpleasant but comfortable parts-per-million box. Here are some things we need to say, over and over again, everywhere, in a thousand different ways:

Bitter climate truths are fundamentally bitter cultural truths. Endless growth is an impossibility in the physical world, always—but always—ending in overshot and collapse. Collapse: with a bang or a whimper, most likely both. We are already witnessing it, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Because of this civilization’s obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable. We simply cannot go on living this way. Our version of life on earth has come to an end.

Moreover, there are no “free market” or “economic” solutions. And since corporations must have physically impossible endless growth in order to survive, corporate social responsibility is a myth. The only socially responsible act that corporations can take is to dissolve.

We can’t bargain with the forces of nature, trading slightly less harmful trinkets for a fantasied reprieve. Geophysical processes care not one whit for our politics, our economics, our evening meals, our theologies, our love for our children, our plaintive cries of innocence and error.

We can either try to plan the transition, even at this late hour, or the physical forces of the world will do it for us—indeed, they already are. As Alfred Crosby stated in his remarkable book, Ecological Imperialism, mother nature’s ministrations are never gentle.[5]

Telling the Truth

If we climate activists don’t tell the truth as well as we know it—which we have been loathe to do because we ourselves are frightened to speak the words—the public will not respond, notwithstanding all our protestations of urgency.

And contrary to current mainstream climate-activist opinion, contrary to all the pointless “focus groups,” contrary to the endless speculation on “correct framing,” the only way to tell the truth is to tell it. All of it, no matter how terrifying it may be.[6]

It is offensive and condescending for activists to assume that people can’t handle the truth without environmentalists finding a way to make it more palatable. The public is concerned, we vaguely know that something is desperately wrong, and we want to know more so we can try to figure out what to do. The response to An Inconvenient Truth, as tame as that film was in retrospect, should have made it clear that we want to know the truth.

And finally, denial requires a great deal of energy, is emotionally exhausting, fraught with conflict and confusion. Pretending we can save our current way of life derails us and sends us in directions that lead us astray. The sooner we embrace the truth, the sooner we can begin the real work.

Let’s just tell it.

Stating the Problem

After we tell the truth, then what can we do? Is it hopeless? Perhaps. But before we can have the slightest chance of meaningful action, having told the truth, we have to face the climate reality, fully and unflinchingly. If we base our planning on false premises—such as the oft-stated stutter that reducing our greenhouse-gas emissions will forestall “the worst effects of global warming”—we can only come up with false solutions. “Solutions” that will make us feel better as we tumble toward the end, but will make no ultimate difference whatsoever.

Furthermore, we can and must pose the problem without necessarily providing the “solutions.”[7] I can’t tell you how many climate activists have scolded me, “You can’t state a problem like that without providing some solutions.” If we accept that premise, all of scientific inquiry as well as many other kinds of problem-solving would come to a screeching halt. The whole point of stating a problem is to clarify questions, confusions, and unknowns, so that the problem statement can be mulled, chewed, and clarified to lead to some meaningful answers, even though the answers may seem to be out of reach.

Some of our most important thinking happens while developing the problem statement, and the better the problem statement the richer our responses. That’s why framing the global warming problem as greenhouse-gas concentrations has proved to be such a dead end.

Here is the problem statement as it is beginning to unfold for me. We are all a part of struggling to develop this thinking together:

We must leave behind 10,000 years of civilization; this may be the hardest collective task we’ve ever faced. It has given us the intoxicating power to create planetary changes in 200 years that under natural cycles require hundreds of thousands or millions of years—but none of the wisdom necessary to keep this Pandora’s Box tightly shut. We have to discover and re-discover other ways of living on earth.

We love our cars, our electricity, our iPods, our theme parks, our bananas, our Nikes, and our nukes, but we behave as if we understand nothing of the land and water and air that gives us life. It is past time to think and act differently.

If we live at all, we will have to figure out how to live locally and sustainably. Living locally means we are able get everything we need within walking (or animal riding) distance. We may eventually figure out sustainable ways of moving beyond those small circles to bring things home, but our track record isn’t good and we’d better think it through very carefully.

Likewise, any technology has to be locally based, using local resources and accessible tools, renewable and non-toxic. We have much re-thinking to do, and re-learning from our hunter-gatherer forebears who managed to survive for a couple of hundred thousand years in ways that we with our civilized blinders we can barely imagine or understand.[8]

Living sustainably means, in Derrick Jensen’s elegantly simple definition, that whatever we do, we can do it indefinitely.[9] We cannot use up anything more or faster than nature provides, we don’t poison the air, water, or soil, and we respect the web of life of which we are an intricate part. We are not separate from nature, or above it, or in any way qualified to supervise it.[10] The evidence is ample and overwhelming; all we have to do is be brave enough to look.

How do we survive in a world that will probably turn—is already turning, for many humans and non-humans alike—into a living hell? How do we even grow or gather food or find clean water or stay warm or cool while assaulted by biblical floods, storms, rising seas, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, snow, and hail?

It is crystal clear that we cannot leave it to the technophiliacs. It is human technology coupled with our inability to comprehend, predict, and prevent unintended consequences that have brought us global catastrophe, culminating in climate disruption, in the first place. Desperate hopes notwithstanding, there are no high-tech solutions here, only wishful thinking—the tools that got us into this mess are incapable of getting us out.[11]

All that being said, we needn’t discard all that we’ve learned, far from it.[12] But we must use our knowledge with great discretion, and lock much of it away as so much nuclear weaponry and waste.

Time is running very short, but the forgiveness of this little blue orb in a vast lonely universe will continue to astonish and nourish us—if we only give it the chance.

Our obligation as activists, the first step, the essence, is to part the cultural veil at long last, and to tell the truth.

—-

Endnotes:

[1] Many thanks to Richard Grossman, who posed that question fifteen years ago with respect to corporate domination of governance and culture when he founded the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD). He understood that we must take the time to stop and penetrate beyond the obvious if we are to think outside of the cultural prescriptions that constrain our ability to act differently. Many thanks as well to Ross Gelbspan, a courageous and ground-breaking journalist, who early on investigated the forces driving the fossil fuel machine and has been sounding the alarm for almost two decades. See his excellent article, “Beyond the Point of No Return,” December 2007, which inspired many of the ideas in this piece.

[2] I would like to express deep gratitude to John A. Livingston, pioneer environmentalist, preservationist, teacher and writer. In 1981 he wrote “The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation,” which inspired the title of this piece. The fallacy that Livingston was referring to is well-described in the foreword by Graeme Gibson: “The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, as a statement of belief, is one of the fiercest and most uncompromising of John Livingston’s convictions. Had he entitled it ‘The Failure of Wildlife Conservation,’ we might have tried again—without having to think too much about it. But he didn’t. … As a result of the word fallacy, we are confronted with an insistence that we rethink everything.” From The John A. Livingston Reader, McClelland & Stewart, 2007, pp. xiv-xv. So it is, with the fallacy of climate activism, that we must rethink everything.

[3] Endless (exponential) growth is an impossibility in a finite physical system (planet earth), and we have a wealth of examples of overshoot and collapse, non-human and human, all of which are fully predictable. Our cultural inability to grasp such an obvious reality is a primary obstacle to progress in addressing climate change and its root cause. Indigenous cultures tend to have much better understandings of these things. See Herman E. Daly and Kenneth N. Townsend, “Sustainable Growth: An Impossibility Theorem,” from Valuing The Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics, MIT Press, 1993, p. 267 ff. For a wide-ranging discussion of the demise of civilizations, see Jared Diamond, Collapse, Viking, 2005.

[4] James Hansen et al.(2007), “Climate change and trace gases,” Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. A 365: 1925–1954 (2007).

[5] Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900 – 1900, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 92. The actual quote, referring to population, is, “Mother nature always comes to the rescue of a society stricken with the problems of overpopulation, and her ministrations are never gentle.”

[6] A word here about the skeptics, with whom we are also obsessed: Forget about them. They may appear to have control of the public discussion, but they are babbling into the abyss. Our enemy is us. By our own unwillingness to face the profound implications of climate change—that we have to reject civilization as currently conceived and come up with something completely different—we are doing far more damage to the cause of preserving life on earth than the deniers could ever do.

[7] “One of the more peculiar traits of our society is its assumption—its insistence—on solutions. Just as there are reasons for all things, so there are solutions for all things. Always there are ultimate answers; there is no problem that is not amenable to logical reduction. This, as we have seen earlier, in spite of such bewildering enterprises as ecology. I have no ‘solution’ to the wildlife preservation problem [read ‘global warming problem’]. There may not be one. But given the somewhat shaky assumption that one exists, I sense that I can at least feel the direction.” John A. Livingston, The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, p. 151.

[8] Our culturally skewed and defensive view of pre-hierarchical societies, seeing only lives that were “nasty, brutish and short” struggling to survive in “nature, red in tooth and claw,” has distorted earlier human experience beyond recognition. See, for example, Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade, Harper & Rowe, 1987; and Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, Tavistock Publications, Ltd. (London), 1974.

[9] Jensen is one of our most passionate and incisive cultural critics and environmental writers. His words are, “For an action to be sustainable, you must be able to perform it indefinitely. This means that the action must either help or at the very least not materially harm the landbase. If an action materially harms the landbase, it cannot be performed indefinitely …” From Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay, What We Leave Behind, p. 56.

[10] Although, as I indicate in footnote 12 in a brief discussion of holistic management of grasslands, we can and must repair enough of the damage so that the infinitely complex self-organizing systems of nature—the systems that gave life to all living creatures—can begin anew.

[11] For example, consider hare-brained schemes from very smart scientists, some of whom know that the schemes are hare-brained but in their desperation see no other way. A recent article in Rolling Stone, “Can Dr. Evil Save The World?,” has an interesting overview of the geo-engineering debate. The bottom line seems to be that we currently are able to do and think anything except changing the way we live, and risking the existence of life on earth is simply a chance we have to take (although 100 percent odds of failure is hardly a bet one should want to take, assuming there are any rational moments left). See also Ross Gelbspan’s article, “Beyond the Point of No Return,” footnote 1.

[12] Glimmers of hope lie in the remarkable restorative powers of the earth. One such phenomenon is ancient pre-history but new to us. That is the relationship between grazers and grasslands. Whereas conventional grasslands management destroys soils and diversity, nature’s way sequesters vast amounts of carbon in soils, with photosynthesizing plants as intermediators along with fungi, micro-organisms, insects, animals and birds—and creates productive and healthy land that, unlike forests, can bind carbon for thousands of years. We have the potential to remove gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere, reducing greenhouse gas concentrations by many parts per million with proper land management. Beyond grasslands, the planet’s power of regeneration, despite our assaults, remains extraordinary. See the Holistic Management International website.

Another example is the dramatic restoration of denuded rainforest in Borneo after only six years: “Planting finishes this year [2008], but already [Willie] Smits [the Indonesian forestry expert who led the replanting] and his team from the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation charity claim the forest is ‘mature’, with trees up to 35 metres high. Cloud cover has increased by 12 per cent, rainfall by a quarter, and temperatures have dropped 3-5°C, helping people and wildlife to thrive, says Smits. Nine species of primate have also returned, including the threatened orangutans. ‘If you walk there now, 116 bird species have found a place to live, there are more than 30 types of mammal, insects are there. The whole system is coming to life. I knew what I was trying to do, but the force of nature has totally surprised me. … The place became the scene of an ecological miracle, a fairytale come true,’ says Smits, who has written a book about the project.”

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Reprinted from Reality Sandwich.

If you want to go fast, walk alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Whilst, like you, I’ve read many a tale of imminent ecological collapse, impending disaster, and fervent fear mongering within the pages of some of our more dubious dailies, I could never say I’d been “shaken to the core” in terms of impact to my everyday life. Obviously I’d had a certain appreciation for the gravitas of the climate and resource situation — just enough to become involved in the UK transition town movement, founding Transition Town Wandsworth in SW London, and even persuading our local council to give us “waste” land to turn around into community gardens. And of course, I’ve seen all those documentaries, from Chris Martenson’s excellent Crash Course, through to the ultra bleak End of Suburbia, and onto the more hopeful Power of Community, yet the ingrained inertia of routine remained.

“What’s it going to take to wake you up?,” you may ask. Indeed, my — and almost everyone else’s — determined denial of the coming tsunami of change seems to be a very interesting (but not very helpful) by-product of our information saturated media existence. Perhaps the picture is too big for one mind to get a handle on, or maybe we’re overly skeptical, because of a saturation of conflicting data, and wary of misinformation — throwing out the baby of facts with the bathwater of sensationalist dross? My personal opinion is that most may only make the necessary maneuvers when their direct interests are perceived to be under threat — sad but true.

Or maybe the situation will just change in time (although I don’t think we have too much more of that) as different perspectives dawn. It certainly did for me.

It was only two more straws that finally broke this particular camel’s back. Rob Stewart’s excellent Shark Water, a film that pulls no punches documenting the hellish worldwide decline of 90% of shark species as a result of a needless finning orgy to fill the stomachs of the Eastern rich, directly followed by a reading of a particularly unsettling Friends of the Earth report, Climate Code Red. I finally internalised the idea that yes, we are actually all screwed. Now, today, this generation, in our own backyard, your life and the life of everyone you know RIGHT NOW. There is no room for any more complacency — THIS. IS. IT. Needless to add, for me, all the dots have very much joined.

“Well now,” you might say from behind your hastily Googled climate models, government reports and caseloads of petroleum dollar funded refutations,”‘there’s no need to worry, as it is a fact that the whole solar system is warming.” Well friend,”so what?,” is my response to that particular short cut to thinking. Even if it’s true that it’s all a cunning ruse orchestrated by the PTB to raise revenue or put a clamp on your “way of life,” what about all the other data? What about the disappearing rain forests, species extinction, increasing seawater acidification, depleted fish stocks, GM contamination of the biosphere? Is it all an exaggeration? Are you prepared to bet thousands of carefully balanced eco-systems, the future of our descendents, the future of hundreds of thousands of species and everything that nature has attained so far (including us) on your own opinion? As the Climate Code Red report states, you probably wouldn’t travel by airline if the risk of crashing was 1 in 1000, yet we’re prepared to bet EVERYTHING on lesser odds. A risk only the insane would take (no offence if you are crazy, you are absolved, but please turn out the lights when you leave the room).

Now I’m not going to deny that little red devils routinely prod at my best intentions or slam the door to my optimism, but these facts even out-do the worst my sometimes-Sunday-night pessimism can conjure up. In short, it is time for action. But I’m not advocating anarchy, stepping out with the sandwich board, or even escaping into some new-age wishful group-think. We know the risk, so the time for business-as-usual navel gazing has now passed; we need to take action; it’s not easy, but you’d be surprised what could be achieved. For example, I live and work in London, around people who most of the time seem as indifferent to what’s coming as they are to each other. Yet plunge them into an emergency situation, the Blitz, IRA, or bombs on the tube, and time and again they step up and act together. So regardless of the drag of the day-to-day chains of obligation typical of the western lifestyle, I think we’re capable of making ready for the fast approaching day when they break irrevocably; clear the decks on our own terms, as we don’t want to merely react.

But it can only happen if we act together.

Whenever there’s a catastrophe under way, it helps to start by creating a bit of space — not only for the casualty (the environment), but also for those on the scene (us). It allows a proper evaluation of what needs to be done. As the repetitive riffs from the media become ever more conflicted and frantic, now’s the time to create just enough space for your own story to grow. As I’m sure you’re already aware, fixations on incessant fear mongering, blind chattering from the “celebrity” circus, and the monotonous arm lock of pop culture can play havoc with your ability to actually think for, and be, yourself. How about you stop absorbing other people’s junk (even mine) and make your own with your own (community/ family) — it’s what you’re here for. It will also prevent you from panicking.

What I’m suggesting here is, aside from the somewhat run of the mill act of distancing yourself from all the crazes and cravings of consumerism (giving all the stuff you don’t need away, giving up on the pre-packed lifestyle), is some kind of commitment to the consequences of your lifestyle. It might sound like an easy deal, until you realise that I am definitely NOT talking about your own desires to take more than you need, follow your personal ambitions and appetites, or ignore the realities of where you live. Given the way the future is shaping up these things have probably become a liability anyway — they certainly are to the planet.

No, the best thing you can do is to wake up to the precarious situation you’ve found yourself in. When it all goes down, on whom are you going to call? Where’s your next meal coming from? What are the origins of the resources you depend on and are you capable of emulating them if/ when the plug is pulled? Did you think we could carry on doing what we’re doing in this way forever? (Well, speaking personally, I did actually.) Finally, do you think that any authority actually gives a damn about you?

Maybe what we should all be doing is getting out from the shadow of all those screens and becoming well acquainted with the people and possibilities of where we live. After all, pretty soon we may have to find allies in the former who can help you fully make use of the latter. If we strengthen our ties to our locality, we’re all the more likely to ride out any big waves of change headed our way. I’m talking community gardens, knitting circles, brewing collectives, sports teams, musical associations, recycling and composting committees, swap shops, social events, and children’s herb patches. Do whatever suits you and your particular neck of the woods, but try and be inclusive of everyone — you don’t just want the”‘usual suspects” (white, educated, left leaning folk) involved. The best way is to appeal to everyone through their interests, not through your own dogma.

So is binding to your immediate surroundings what you call an effective response to species extinction and ecological collapse? Can getting to know your neighbours make a jot of difference now that so many of our bridges are already burned? I believe it can. The authoritarian ideal of keeping us separated and ideologically strangled (it takes several thousand hours of airtime to keep that up), has only served to disempower us into accepting a life we’re not really into anymore. As you can’t break it all by yourself, force of numbers is the finest option. Besides, I believe that creating space for reflection, space for the story of others, and space for personal creativity (we’re going to need lots of that) is actually a better way to live than blind acceptance of the way things are, especially as that way leads to a dead end.

We’re in a time of massive challenges which some predict will really put a squeeze on everything we are used to now. Even though I find it somewhat surreal to even write these words, it’s impossible to overstate the responsibility that we now have. Afraid as I was of thinking for myself, so accustomed to the really big choices being out of my hands, and so insulated from the consequences of my actions, I’ve found creating space for my community to be my best response so far to a systemic inertia that is keeping us all strapped to this careening car crash. I want to put the wheel back in my hands and quit just being the passenger.

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It has become obvious from recent press releases, campaigns and actions that the environmental movement has started to focus on the upcoming Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009 (COP15).  The rallying cry is that this is the last opportunity world governments will have to agree to start reducing greenhouse gas emissions and cut these massively over the next few decades – beyond this, they say, governments and nations have little chance of accomplishing the cuts necessary to avoid disastrous tipping points in the earth’s warming climate system.  So all hopes have been pinned on politicians and governments at this conference for saving the earth on our behalf.  But there are several dangers in pursuing this logic that could ultimately lead to the very thing the movement is trying to prevent.

The first danger is that despite the outcome of the talks, whether positive, neutral or negative, it is likely there will be a ‘demobilisation’ across the environmental movement.  An article at The Change Agency elaborates on the results of an apparent failure:

If the second or third post COP ‘Outcome’ outlined above come to pass, the Australian (this article focuses on the Australian movement, but is applicable globally) climate movement’s may find itself in what could be called a ‘Perception of Failure’ stage. This is often cited as a ‘Stage 5’ following a movement ‘take-off’ period’ and often seen to be preceding a period of mainstream acceptance of movement goals.[4]

According to Moyer, the characteristics inherent in this stage include: the widely held belief amongst movement activists that its goals remain un-achieved and power-holders remain unchallenged. Numbers are down at demonstrations as people feel that repetitive and formulaic actions are ineffective. Despair, hopelessness, burnout, dropout are common, membership, particularity active membership of groups declines. Numbers of ‘negative rebels’, those activists willing to take high risk actions without movement support emerge and garner negative public attention, which further alienates concerned people.

Paradoxically, the results of an apparent ‘success’ are also undesirable:

Deliberate movement co-option and demobilisation may not be the intention of the Copenhagen Conference of Parties and the climate negotiations process in itself. But the dynamic is what the movement needs to be aware of and respond to. Elites are practised in providing outwardly impressive policy statements with little substance or which hide covert practises. Elite groups also have the advantage of influence over powerful communication channels. Many, if not all, national delegations at Copenhagen will be seeking the most politically profitable outcome at the conference and the appeasement of their domestic climate movements will be a part of their considerations. Whilst it is likely that experienced climate activists and lobbyists, already well versed in climate negotiation politics will be able to perceive duplicity in the COP outcomes, less engaged activists and the concerned public will be more likely to adopt the predominate messaging received via mainstream media.

…
If COP results in something like Outcome 1 described above, even dedicated climate activists who already regularly attend movement events may find themselves wondering if all the effort is worth it now that the US, alongside the rest of the world have come on board and started to turn things around. Surely the thing now is to sit back and see how the international targets are met? Those people, who are looking for a reason not to come to the next rally, may well find one after COP.

The result either way, whether or not serious cuts are agreed on a sensible time scale, will likely results in large-scale demobilisation of the environmental movements.  By setting such a definitive deadline, either they will feel so successful that they’ve done the job and need do no more for the earth, or so defeated and depressed that further action seems pointless.  Either way, the total focus on the results of this conference could torpedo future efforts in preventing climate chaos.

The second danger of the Copenhagen logic is the growing reliance on high-up elites to solve the climate crisis for us.  As  the timings of these talks has been identified as so crucial by the various organisations and groups of the environmental movement, there has been a massive shift to the line of thinking that only #they# can make the difference needed – the politicians, leaders and elites.  However, as it is these people’s jobs to maintain the status quo, to keep our modern industrial economies running as smoothly and profitably as possible and to facilitate the liquidation of the earth’s natural capital to finance these economies, it is inevitable that even with a ‘positive’ outcome of serious cuts that these promises will contain extensive loopholes, flexibility and wriggle room covered up by dense greenwash language.  I have no doubt that communiques from the gathered politicians, that have been pored over by PR reps in order to maximise greenwash, will claim a victory nonetheless, whether or not their promised cuts will make a difference or not.  Indeed, to expect anything more from these talks is naive.  Minor progress may well be made, but enough to finally turn around the battle against impending climate chaos?  Unlikely.

This potential ‘perception of success’ poses differing challenges to the current climate movement. In a similar way to the movement’s downturn in the months following the election of the Rudd government and the symbolic signing of the Kyoto Pact, people, lobbyists and NGO leadership groups, can be deceived by an apparent successful political compromise. The belief that politicians hold the strings of capital and can make the structural shifts actually necessary to halt runaway climate change is mainstream and ubiquitous. This feeds directly into the commonly held belief that elites are essentially powerful and popular movements (and their activities) are not.

What will happen is that the cultural concept of dependence on the leaders, politicians and elites to take action for us and look after us for our best good will become further entrenched.  The existing system will fail to be challenged by those who run it and depend on it for wealth and power, and so will continue to wreak havoc and create climate chaos.  The push for changing our destructive western lifestyles will fall by the wayside, and attempts to overthrow the destructive culture behind it will falter.

As long as we believe it’s their job to fix this, all will be lost.  But as soon as we accept that our leaders and elites are incapable of doing enough to stop climate chaos, then there is a chance.  If we instead focus on overthrowing the destructive culture they and we are embedded into, abandoning consumerist lifestyles and stopping infinite economic growth, we have a hugely better chance of stopping the juggernaught of industrial economy before it breaks the 2C tipping point.  Through local economies, local currencies, local food production, extensive permaculture, stronger communities and cultural subversion we can make a difference.  We have to see beyond Copenhagen and its result either way – it’s time to focus on the real action each of us can achieve that’s infinitely more valuable than the greenwashed communiques of Copenhagen.

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Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.

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The time of the G20 summit in London approaches, where the leaders of the 22 nations that make up the vast majority of world GDP are meeting to discuss the economic crisis as well as free trade, climate change and other current crucial issues. As per usual, a series of counter-protests have been organised by various groupings, from liberal to anarchist. One of these groups calling itself ‘Put People First’ is a joint collaboration between many high profile charities, unions and environmental organisations, and is marching through London this Saturday to put their message of putting people and planet first in this crisis across. Sounds promising, but let’s take a look at their policy platform in more detail.

The global financial and economic system is in crisis.

Existing economic policies and institutions have overseen an economic system scarred by high levels of poverty and inequality, which is contributing to an environmental catastrophe.

…

There can be no return to business as usual. Fundamental change is needed.

We call on the UK government to show its commitment to putting people first by signalling an historic break with the failed policies of the past, and the start of a new system that seeks to make the economy work for people and the planet.

A good start – we agree that the current economic system is driving the environmental catastrophe and leads to unjust distributions of wealth. Business as usual must be eliminated and a new system built. But this is where we part ways – this grouping has unfortunately fallen prey to the Green Growth mantra which is now gaining currency in the mainstream environmental movement, which I’ve written about previously. Here are some of their specific demands:

Ensure a massive investment in a green new deal to build a green economy based on decent work and fair pay.

…

In addition to the green new deal (recommendation 4), introduce the robust regulatory requirements and financial incentives needed to deliver a green economy.

Nowhere do they mention the problems created by growth – a green economy is simply seen as one with some more investment in renewables and other green technologies with a nod to fair pay and greater equality. Out of the long list of groups supporting this manifesto, apparently not one has considered looking even slightly deeper at the links between the economy and environmental destruction. How can a finite planet support the infinite growth demanded by civilisation? Unless environmentalists can answer this satisfactorily, their support of green growth and a green new deal based on it is misplaced.

Push for a deal at Copenhagen to agree substantial, verifiable cuts in greenhouse gases, which will limit temperature increases to well below 2°C.

How do they think we can keep temperature increases below 2°C if they’re implicitly supporting continued economic growth that will inevitably produce more greenhouse gases? The claims that efficiency and technology will keep emissions down, and even reach zero-carbon levels, are hopelessly naïve – unless these receive massive investment (which looks unlikely in the status-quo) and ultimately break the laws of physics to keep up with the exponentially increasing rate of growth. As a result, if you want to keep temperature rises below 2°C, supporting the growth system is not tenable. Have these groups considered this? Unlikely.

Deliver 0.7% of national income as aid by 2013, deliver aid more effectively and push for the cancellation of all illegitimate and unpayable developing country debts.

Although the cancellation of debts is a must, this statement implicitly supports the status-quo of aid dependency, rather than changing the entire system in which developing countries have their natural resources extracted for the benefit of western nations. Aid for natural disasters is justified, but keeping nations dependent on aid allows this plunder to continue. The globalised economy has shackled these countries into poverty, and so must be destroyed to free them.

‘Put People First’, despite their promising message that the current economic system is flawed, are in fact promoting the same system repackaged with a big green stamp on the box. The message their putting out does not match their rhetoric on putting people and planet first in this crisis – they are in fact peddling the rhetoric of the growing movement to create a ‘Green Growth economy’, they’re helping to greenwash civilisation. This blog has and will continue to make clear how Green Growth is a nonsensical farce, and how the mainstream environmental movement in pursuing it will not help either people or planet.

We would very much advise against marching for this manifesto, and instead take some positive actual action this Saturday – start a vegetable garden, join local groups, form a co-op, subvertise the media, or anything else regularly suggested here. If you still have the protest bug, the climate campers are taking on the carbon trading scam and the growth system at the European Climate Exchange on Wednesday, whilst others are marching on the Bank of England. The symbolic nature and utility of these protests can be debated, but they’re closer to the mark than the misnamed ‘Put People First’ marchers. We propose that ultimately the only way to put people first is to stop the growth system and dismantle civilisation, and the best place to start is in your own life and backyard.

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Keith Farnish points out, at the Seitch, that James Lovelock’s belief that it is ‘too late’ only relates to industrial civilisation or the Culture of Maximum Harm. The world has already passed the climatic point of no return, we can not save industrial civilisation – why would we want to?

From memory, Gaia: A New Look At Life On Earth came out on 1978. I didn’t read it until 1990, when I was studying for a Geography degree, then it hit home how little I knew about the world, and how little I was likely to ever know. James Lovelock has always been there at the back of my mind as a dominant figure, an intellectual giant who was responsible not only for bringing to wider humanity the concept of a self-regulating global system that would be able to take care of itself during even the darkest of times (and yes, Daisyworld was just symbolic, but a bloody good symbol at that), but also alerting us to the terrible dangers of CFCs, and the horrible potential of positive feedback loops in taking us towards climatic catastrophe. He is the public face of environmental scientific radicalism.

No wonder then, that when he speaks, we take note: even when he makes life difficult for himself in avowedly supporting nuclear power, or just making statements that are plain wrong. No one is perfect, and some people can be forgiven the odd quirk more than others.

Proposing a series of heavily-defended climate refuges, in which Industrial Civilization can remain, locking out the billions who failed to live in the “right” parts of the globe, is not a quirk.

In his latest book “The Vanishing Face Of Gaia”, Lovelock sees the world as already having passed the climatic point of no return – he may be right; in fact he is most definitely right, but only in the context of Industrial Civilization remaining as the dominant cultural influence on Earth. Whether we will definitely see the predicted loss of billions of humans, and the desertification of half of the Earth’s landmass, whatever we do, is another question entirely, but one that Lovelock is seemingly unable to contemplate.

I posed a difficult question to him (via an interviewer) on BBC Radio 5Live last week:

“I have been a follower of your work for a long time, and watched your views harden and become more apocalyptic in recent years. In many ways this is welcome, especially to warn people of the likelihood of catastrophic change, and also to ridicule the ideas of the mainstream environmental movement, who still think we can tinker around with civilization to make things better. I was wondering, though, whether you welcome the views of people like myself and Derrick Jensen, who see Industrial Civilization as the cause, and the removal of Industrial Civilization as the solution to our current predicament?”

The key point was the last one, which would reveal whether Lovelock could see beyond civilization into a world in which humans lost all pretence of domination over the Earth, and instead accepted that only true sustainability would allow humanity to continue as a going concern.

His response can be heard by clicking on this link.

His response is factually wrong: Industrial Civilization is an extreme way of living, and other ways of living are not “stone age” they are just non-industrial; whether hunter-gatherer, kitchen garden, permaculture or a hybrid of these, or any other way of life that is fundamentally sustainable. These ways of life can easily support as many people as are currently on the Earth, but with far less impact.

It’s difficult to explain to someone who is so cast in a civilized mould, that everything they believe about civilization may be wrong: even more difficult to convince them of this. After all, when you are civilized, surely that makes you the epitomy of what it means to be a fully developed human being – Homo sapiens sapiens civitas – and so anything else is a step down from your current position. Step down or not, it is surely not a morally defensible position to suggest that you can carry on living in much the same manner as you have become accustomed to – providing you have been lucky enough to have been born in the right place, at the right time, to the right people (you don’t really think everyone living in a Lovelock “Life-Raft” will be allowed to stay, do you?).

But we continue to defend this way of life, and this Culture of Maximum Harm, because it is all we have ever known: we are blinded by our lack of perspective, and are thus prepared to support this behemoth, even though we probably know it will end up killing most of us; just as it has started killing so much life already. No other way of life is more destructive than Industrial Civilization.

Your choice: do you follow Lovelock and the rest of the civilized world into a future where we live in city states, ringed by gun turrets, thronged by the bodies of the unlucky millions; or do you make the leap into a way of thinking that may be alien to you now, but which – when you have a chance to contemplate it – is really the only logical conclusion.

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If you ever needed proof of how far the majority of the environmental movement is from figuring out the core truths of the ecological and social catastrophe facing this planet, it can be found in this article written by former US Vice-President Al Gore and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Indeed, the very title of this article gives away its central flaw: “Green growth is essential to any stimulus”. The concept of ‘Green Growth’ is so far removed from what this planet needs right now, and ranks as one of the greatest oxymorons ever created, that anyone familiar with this and other rewilding sites would find it laughable. Yet this concept is gaining currency within the environmental movement, with many promoting a ‘Green New Deal’ which they promise will sort out the economy, environment, social and any other problems you care to mention. We, however, challenge this growing acceptance that growth and capitalism have a future on this planet – to survive, we must tear down and dismantle the old ways, not just apply an extra-thick coating of greenwash onto them. Let’s analyse this article and show it for what it really is.

Economic stimulus is the order of the day. This is as it must be, as governments around the world struggle to jump-start the global economy. But even as leaders address the immediate need to stimulate the economy, so too must they act jointly to ensure that the new de facto economic model being developed is sustainable for the planet and our future on it.

It immediately begins with a dichotomy – they say the new economic model must be sustainable, yet they also encourage the ‘immediate’ stimulation of the old unsustainable economy. No questions are asked as to what governments are attempting to stimulate or jump-start, just the suggestion that whatever it is it better be more sustainable. What if the very thing they’re jump-starting is the definition of unsustainable? Shouldn’t it be left to die in that case?

What we need is both stimulus and long-term investments that accomplish two objectives simultaneously with one global economic policy response – a policy that addresses our urgent and immediate economic and social needs and that launches a new green global economy. In short, we need to make “growing green” our mantra

So as long as the old way – growth – is made to be ‘green’, apparently we can solve all our economic, social and environmental woes. No questioning of that old concept, just the tacking on of an environmentally friendly adjective. “Growing green” may be their mantra, but the first word is by far the most important and unquestionable, joined only in a forced marriage with ‘green’ in order to let growth continue that little bit longer.

In Washington last November, G20 leaders expressed their determination “to enhance co-operation and work together to restore global growth and achieve needed reforms in the world’s financial systems”. This needs to happen urgently.

Within a paragraph the principal focus on growth is clearly illustrated. As I have explained in the article ‘The Fallacy of Growth’, and is repeatedly plugged at this and other similar sites, the concept of growth is NOT compatible with anything remotely ‘green’. As the economy/civilisation grows, it must consume more resources and ultimately more energy. The power of Compound Interest ensures that this increases exponentially over time, putting an ever increasing pressure on the planet at an ever increasing rate. Making efficiency cuts and conserving energy does produce a lesser burden, but as long as we maintain a system of growth this saving will be overtaken and lost within a matter of years at this point in history. They can promote efficiency and conservation as much as they like, but as long as they maintain growth it will all be in vain – the only way to conclusively reduce our impact on the earth’s ecosystem is to remove growth. The old economic system of civilisation needs to be dismantled and replaced with stable, local and sustainable economies pioneered by the people they are meant to benefit.

This stimulus, along with new initiatives by other countries, must help catapult the world economy into the 21st century, not perpetuate the dying industries and bad habits of yesteryear. Indeed, continuing to pour trillions of dollars into carbon-based infrastructure and fossil-fuel subsidies would be like investing in subprime real estate all over again.

We agree, the dying industries and bad habits of yesteryear should not be perpetuated! It’s a shame that despite this logical statement, they undermine it by their support for the vast majority of those bad habits.

Therefore, governments in industrialised countries must reach beyond their borders and invest immediately in those cost-effective programmes that boost the productivity of the poorest. Last year, food riots and unrest swept more than 30 countries. Ominously, this was even before September’s financial implosion, which sparked the global recession that has driven a further 100m people deeper into poverty. We must act now to prevent further suffering and potential widespread political instability.

Note how they propose helping the poor by boosting their productivity, rather than questioning and dismantling the system that ensures their continued poverty and enslaves them to scour the earth’s remaining wealth to end up in the pockets of the few. These people won’t benefit from growth, their extra productivity will be funnelled up the pyramid scheme of our economy. To prevent further suffering their economic cage needs to be broken, not remade. Instead, a minute increase in living standards in the cage is proposed to stave off political instability – which one might translate as uprisings against this enslavement. Ban Ki-moon and Al Gore are not as concerned by the welfare of the poor – although I’m sure they do feel concern – as they would be by a revolution against the system.

It means investing in agriculture in developing countries by getting seeds, tools, sustainable agricultural practices and credit to smallholder farmers so they can produce more food and get it to local and regional markets.

A token of sustainability and a nod to smallholders is somewhat undermined by their support for the economic order which has seen agriculture ever further industrialised, made unsustainable to dangerous levels and destroyed the small farmer in favour of the large agribusinesses.

Third, we need a robust climate deal in Copenhagen in December. Not next year. This year. The climate negotiations must be dramatically accelerated and given attention at the highest levels, starting today. A successful deal in Copenhagen offers the most potent global stimulus package possible. With a new climate framework in hand, business and governments will finally have the carbon price signal businesses have been clamouring for, one that can unleash a wave of innovation and investment in clean energy. Copenhagen will provide the green light for green growth. This is the basis for a truly sustainable economic recovery that will benefit us and our children’s children for decades to come.

A truly sustainable economic recovery via the medium of growth is ultimately impossible. Copenhagen has become a poster-boy for green capitalism and its neat solutions like carbon trading (a growth market!), and will hardly be a robust climate deal. More a deal between members of the elite to create new exploitative markets but with the words ‘climate’ and ‘carbon’ tacked on and some conservation measures to let the party continue that little bit longer. Copenhagen will be a farce, the little advances that may be made with deforestation cuts for example will be overshadowed by the unquestioned commitment to growth. Copenhagen will be a landmark moment not for the climate or saving the earth, but for human stupidity. And Al Gore and Ban Ki-moon will be there to lead the cheerleading squad.

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