Dismantle Civilisation

by Chuck Burr, on his blog Culture Quake.

Wealth is a system of concentration

Wealth is not what we are taught. Wealth is a verb, not a noun. Wealth is not stuff; it is a fiercely protected system of concentration. It is the act of the hoarding, and is a pillar of our culture.

The Agricultural Revolution, The “Dominion Revolution”

This system was invented by one tribe in the fertile crescent 10,000 years ago during an event called the Agricultural Revolution.

This historical event has been grossly misnamed. It should be called the Dominion Revolution. The change had nothing to do with farming. People were farming and eating way before then. It had everything to do with a complete reversal of the story we live by from, “we belong to the earth,” to “the world belongs to man.”

This is the point where our modern Taker culture was born. Until the Agricultural Revolution all of humanity were indigenous Leaver peoples. We were just one of thirty million species — we were simply part of the fire of life. One universal shared animist spirituality shared across thousands of cultures.

Once we saw the world as our own, and that we can take from and apart regardless of the consequences, a whole new set of possibilities opened up. It started with denying our competitors access to food and privatizing the land. If the world belonged to man, not only things but all life including people can be possessed or at least exploited. Every social justice problem directly stems the dominion story that perpetuates our modern mono-culture or civilization.

War, Privatization, and Fear—The End of Nature’s Peace Keeping Law of Limited Competition

Once you extended the logic of dominion all the way out, you were now allowed to wage war. A lion only takes one gazelle, and the rest of the gazelles go back to grazing because they know the lion follows the peace keeping law of nature or law of limited competition: only take what you need to survive, no more. However, since the world belongs to man, he may take all of the gazelles, or trees; he may wage war on the forest or even his fellow man. He may start to accumulate beyond his needs.

Since it is too disruptive to wage war all of the time to get what you want, a lower level system of violence needed to be invented to get what you wanted. The solution was privatization and locking up the food so everyone had to work within the hierarchical, consumptive, Taker system to survive. If you did not work or at least behave within the system you did not get fed.

Forcing everyone to work within the system and enabling concentration of wealth yields a system of incentives to create a desired social behavior that self-perpetuates the system itself. From top to bottom, everyone has the incentive to work to merely survive or accumulate wealth. Once you crawl your way to the top, you ignore all of the people, places, and species that you stepped on the way, and actually believe you deserve to be there and then start fiercely defending your position.

The incentives are the chance that you will get security and even promoted in our culture if you play by the rules. The other incentive is fear; fear is the fuel of our culture or civilization. This includes the obvious fear of not being fed or given a place to live, and down to the fear of enforcement upon you of rules we have written called laws.

Economics is the science of rationalizing the wrong moves for the wrong reasons. Fear is the universal enforcer of narrow vision and blind momentum. — Tom Ward

These incentives are ingrained in us since the moment we are born by almost everyone, every process, story, and cultural item we see. We become attached to things and also become fearful that we could lose our things. By living in this culture, we live in a constant state of subliminal fear and are motivated almost solely by it.

We live in a world without limits. Not limits of what we can achieve, progress is actually not necessarily good. We live in a world without limits of what we will do to keep our place, and our things. Our Taker culture has suspended nature’s peace keeping law of limited competition.

Culture is not our food, clothing, or language. Culture is what system we use to make a living. In our culture you do not need a conspiracy theory planning how to maintain the hierarchy. You just need a uniform set of incentives motivating everyone’s behavior to self perpetuate the system of consumption, accumulation, or wealth.

Hierarchies Accentuate Concentration

By having everyone living within the hierarchy, you can have dozens or — with technology — thousands of people doing the concentrating for you. The way to get rich is to direct your way part of the concentrating flow from as large a network as possible.

That is why our system embraces large corporations — they enable the largest concentration network possible. We don’t need a transnational corporation to flip hamburgers, but with 31,000 restaurants, you can concentrate $23.5 billion a year. Wealth is not the $23.5 billion, it is the system that allows something that does not really exist, a corporation, to operate a chain of 31,000 restaurants exploiting 1.5 million employees world wide.

Protection of Hierarchies

Our modern Taker system is fiercely protected. You can’t end private property by taking the property of the wealthy. Hierarchies maintain great defenses from attacks from below. McDonald’s grows where McDonald-Douglas goes, now Boeing.

Government especially exists to enforce the system of private property and wealth, along with the infrastructure and markets that enable concentration. Make no mistake about it: government is not here to feed you, as most naively believe. The regulations, laws, zoning, finances, markets, inspectors, police, and military are here to make sure no one messes with private property or the market.

Markets are especially important to keep running because they are the levers used to extract and concentrate resources as fast as possible. Markets and money also useful to filter out externalities such as pollution or social injustices. Money and markets are blind.

Further, if we want another country’s natural resources, first we send in the corporations, then the jackals if necessary, and, if they didn’t succeed, the military. No ifs, ands, or buts. They system will try to continue and expand at any cost. This meme is taught to us since childhood by “father culture” that civilization is the end of history and must progress at any cost.

This system of protection of the hierarchy is far more than overt force. It includes deep stratification of education, social cliques, and access to capital. Before my awakening I had all three and played within the system. I interned for President Reagan and had seen the inside of several Fortune 100 companies all by the time I was 35. With a little luck, it worked.

Now I am trying to give it all back through one of the country’s few really sustainable models and education. Restoration Farm builds topsoil, biodiversity, community, and offers permaculture education. Show me a list of companies that do that.

The Consumption of Population

The ultimate expression of dominion is expansion of your population. The story that Adam chose Eve is misunderstood because the word Eve is mistranslated. Eve means life, it does not mean a person or a woman. Adam, choosing unrestrained life, means he is choosing abandoning Nature’s peacekeeping law of limited competition, and accepting unlimited procreating supported by totalitarian agriculture.

Taker peoples have always been able to overwhelm Leaver peoples because they had more people from a greater food supply. Again, we return to the misunderstanding of the Agricultural Revolution: Because the Takers decided to take all of the land for human food production and uses, they simultaneously denied their fellow species’ access to food, and so built their human population. They made the choice to consume the world, start the food-population race, and literally convert the natural world to human flesh.

This all stems from the choice of dominion or taking, which birthed our system of concentration and wealth. When you see wealth of any level, see it for what it is, our culture’s fiercely protected system of concentration through domination.

We Need a New Story

After being on the inside, and through traveling, I know how it works for the very few, and does not work for everyone else — human and our non-human relations. I also know now that you cannot reverse the system from within the system. You have to get far enough from it to develop a new story. There in lies the solution.

More and more of us want a new story, a new way to live. We want to make a living that does not end in insecurity, a life of bad food, not thinking for oneself, poor health, wage slavery, no retirement, and a death detached from your family. What are those things but civilization?

Tribal Solution to Making a Living

A tribe or a smaller band is a group of people who want to make a living together. A “community” today may be no more than a grouping of Yuppies in close proximity. These are two very different things. More tribe-like or band-like is a circus — literally. In a small circus, everyone has decided to throw in their lot, and make a living together. No one is higher or lower. Being the “boss” is still just a job that someone may have to do, but comes with no privileges. Decisions are made by consensus.

A tribe is group of people who are land locked and combine what they have, be it land, tools, or skills, and then make a living together. A tribe also has a sense of place in their watershed or bioregion. That is important, but is not the focus of this discussion.

The trick is to carve out enough space to be able to detach ourselves from the modern Taker world. The Amish call this avoiding entanglements with our culture. That is why the old order of Amish drive wagons with wood-steel wheels that they can build and maintain instead of rubber wheels they can’t. The point of creating some level of autonomy as a group is to gain the freedom to live your own culture and stories such as, “humanity belongs to the earth.” If you are married to modern culture you can’t live a new story or imagine a new vision.

Now, the Amish do and do not live tribally. They live in a grey area in between. Each family still owns its own land, but work together cooperatively in another sense.

We have to end private property and hierarchical government, and replace the failed story of dominion. Concentration, wealth, poverty, every global crisis, and social injustice are the end result of the story we tell ourselves about the nature of the world we live in, “the world belongs to man.”

We will lose a lot of cool stuff in this new world or “earth culture” as I call it, but peak oil is going to do that for us anyway.

Natural Wealth and Permaculture

Real wealth is the resilience of nature and her ecosystems measured by biodiversity, topsoil, and cooperative connections. Ecosystems cooperate and have synergies that are not about competition.

Going back to the lion, the lion is most secure when the ecosystem is most healthy, diverse, and intact allowing for the most food to eat. This can only happen when the lion’s population and rate of consumption follow nature’s peace keeping law of limited competition.

Real human wealth is your community, education, and the cradle-to-grave security that results. Real wealth results from giving security to get security; it does not come from making things to get things.

If you are not taught to think outside the box, it’s hard to think outside of our culture. At Restoration Farm we teach people in my local community, students, and interns from around he world to see with whole-system eyes. I am finding a huge divide in the education level between lay people and those who have studied permaculture. Permaculture helps you see holistically, something we are not taught in school. In in our educational system, each department is separated, very little is taught as a whole system. Your typical economics course does not tell you that for every dollar made, the planet is trashed somewhere, and people and species are exploited along the way. It is far more important to learn how a whole ecosystem works, than it is to split atoms.

The point is, recognize wealth, and our Taker culture for what it really is.

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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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by Keith Farnish for Culture Change

How important do you think humans are?

For millennia we have been taught that human beings have a vital almost divine role in the Great Chain of Being, and to look around the cities where most of us now live you could indeed be forgiven for thinking that we are ecologically dominant, if not vital to the functioning of life on Earth: I think it’s about time this was put into some kind of perspective.

Modern human beings, or homo sapiens sapiens, are but one species within the large order of animals known as mammalia. Enveloping the mammals is the far larger phylum known as chordata, or animals with stiff spinal rods; but even the chordata, which also includes all the fish, reptiles and birds pales into insignificance compared to the rest of the Animal Kingdom, which is largely ruled by the exoskeletal insects and the writhing omnipresent worms. A great Kingdom of animals, which just happen to occupy a tiny niche in the tree of life, alongside the plants and the fungi, not to mention the slime molds – our surprisingly close relatives.

But, of course, most of life on Earth consists of bacteria and, if you consider them to be living, viruses. Countless trillions of single-celled organisms in every spoonful of soil. It seems to make the 6.8 billion human beings little more than a smudge in the global Petri dish; it just happens that in our civilized manifestation that relatively small number have become capable of a huge amount of damage. Insignificant, but so very dangerous.

The Psychosis Of Civilization

Civilized humans are global predators occupying not only the top of the food chain, but at the very pinnacle of the global energy pyramid. We have become a ferocious but delicate flower waiting to be blown away in the next breeze of extinction; yet what do we see as the most important factor in our role as human beings?

Money.

Our values have become outrageously skewed in favor of whatever most benefits the onward march of the global economy. We do not see the rise and fall of habitat viability on the television news, instead we see the rise and fall of the markets in the capital economy; we do not count species extinctions in newspaper bar charts, but we urgently count companies going bust; we do not map the catastrophic breaks in the energy flows between different parts of an ecosystem, but we do acknowledge every time a budget airline discontinues a route, or whenever a main road has “severe” delays. As if it matters.

The psychosis of Industrial Civilization is endemic: every person that places his or her trust in the system of hierarchies, politics, markets and mass consumption undergoes a fundamental readjustment in priorities. No longer does the fate of our species rest upon our increasingly precipitous position within the global ecology; we can all hold hands, actually or virtually, and celebrate the majesty of the global economic miracle, safe in the knowledge that it will take us forward into a glittering future of jobs, money and all the other civilized things we have been taught to desire.

How we have become so determined to destroy the continuum of life in search of something so utterly trivial, has its roots in the history of civilization. Every civilization has had its own goals, but ultimately they have all come down to one thing: the insatiable desire to progress in whatever way is dictated by the elite members at the very top. Such “progress” takes many forms, but whether it be exploration, scientific discovery, technological prowess, imperial power or simply the idea of being “the best,” civilizations have to feel they are progressing in some way; and so its subjects -– the civilians -– become part of that collective desire. For what are we if we don’t keep progressing? Failures. From our fear of failure, others above us draw their strength -– just at the moment we seem to be reaching the end, and as we stretch out our fingertips, another line is drawn even further away. So we note the new goals and conform to the wishes of the system; continuing to do as we are told.

Through this psychotic behavior, civilizations thrive… for a short while.

What Is Really Important

How do you feel about your place in the world now? Do you feel small, insignificant, worthless, just a tiny part of something far greater than yourself? This natural feeling of inferiority when you realize you are just a tiny part of a greater whole is the reason why medieval religious leaders were so resolute about our exulted position in the aforementioned Great Chain of Being, just below the angels, but above all other forms of life -– so long as you accepted that monarchs, priests and landowners were considerably more perfect than the rest of us.

It’s the same in the industrial economy: there is this global system that has enormous, if transient, power over the whole of existence; that governs every aspect of the lives of the civilized, but you don’t have to feel small, so long as you are told how important it is to go to school, get a job, go to the shopping mall or buy something online, follow the latest fashions, and cast your vote. You are empowered by your participation in these activities. It’s just that some people are more empowered than others.

But why on Earth do you need to be told how important you are? It speaks volumes about our state of mind when in order to feel worthwhile we have to, for instance, achieve good grades at school. We are all human beings, for goodness sake! Even more than that, we are what we are: our consciousness is bound up in our physical being, and everything we know and feel -– everything we will ever be -– is determined by our personal interaction with what is around us. We are at the center of our personal universe; not in any selfish way, but simply because we can never truly perceive anything outside of our point of view.

Thomas Nagel, the American philosopher, summed this up beautifully in his essay, “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?”:
After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat?
Substitute “human” for “bat” and it is obvious that human experience has to be a unique thing for humans and, by extension, for each individual human. Like all life, we are carriers of our DNA -– survival machines that have an innate desire to reproduce and continue our species -– but we are also uniquely ourselves. That is why we are important; not because humans are essential to the global ecology or even because we are essential to the absurd construct we call Civilization, but because what matters, is what matters to us.

How could it be any other way?

Think about this for a short while and it becomes obvious that the civilized world’s destruction of the natural environment cannot under any circumstances be acceptable, for it will endanger the one thing which matters above all else: ourselves.

Decision Time

You have to make a choice. Are you going to continue supporting and extending the global reign of Industrial Civilization; or are you going to once again learn to value yourself as the center of your universe, and the thing that matters above all else?

To me that choice is remarkably easy, but you might take some persuading, not only because of the insidious hold that the civilized world has upon everything we do, but because there are other things that also matter dearly to you. They matter to me as well, which is why I wrote the following in Time’s Up!:
More than just our natural tendency to survive, though, is the manifestation of that survival instinct in the way we think. Consider the question: What would you risk your life to save? My initial instinct is to say ‘my family’, then ‘me’, then, with a little more thought, ‘the Earth in general’ and ‘my friends’. Remove the Earth from the equation and you have the kind of answer that most people give.

In fact, all three typical responses are directly related to the natural instinct for survival. We instinctively want to protect our families in order to secure the continuation of our DNA through blood relatives and the people they depend upon to survive. We want to protect ourselves in order to protect our own DNA, and the opportunity for that to be further replicated. We want to protect our friends because they too are human beings, but not only that, we have consciously chosen our closest friends because of what they have in common with us – they are almost like family.
I think you will agree that, based on the argument earlier, we can all be justified in wanting to vigorously protect ourselves. It is clear that means not just us as individuals, but also our families and those other people we really care about and need: our community.

Community is the antithesis of civilization for civilization thrives on the division of humanity into tiny, atomized, competing parts; but community is the form in which humans have always survived best. The choice is simple now: Civilization or Community; Progress or Humanity; Death or Life.

Keith’s new book, Time’s Up – an uncivilised solution to a global crisis, has recently been published.

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Reprinted from Nature Bats Last
By Guy R McPherson.

I’m driving from Tucson to the mud hut, taking a circuitous route that currently finds me staying in my wife’s childhood home in western Nebraska. Along with my spouse and dog, I’m covering 4,300 miles while crisscrossing 11 states and all 4 time zones in the continental U.S. We’ll circumambulate Kansas, and at one point we drove close enough to spit on the state. But it didn’t seem worth the time or the saliva.

We’re driving slowly and stopping often, primarily because the Obama administration’s Keynesian approach to saving the industrial economy necessitates throwing money at the highway departments of every state in the country. The attendant “shovel-ready projects” are clear examples of the lengths to which industrial humans will go to sustain the unsustainable, maintain the immaterial, and generally restore the irredeemable for a few more months.

The many miles and frequent pauses reveal to any sentient animal the sheer lunacy of the living arrangements we’ve built for ourselves. Within the span of a couple generations, we abandoned a durable, finely textured, life-affirming set of living arrangements characterized by self-sufficient family farms intermixed with small towns that provided commerce, services, and culture. Worse yet, we traded that model for a coarse-scaled arrangement wholly dependent on ready access to cheap fossil fuels. Then we ratcheted up the madness to rely on businesses that use, almost exclusively, a warehouse-on-wheels approach to just-in-time delivery of unnecessary devices designed for rapid obsolescence and disposal.

Simply ingenious, wouldn’t you say?

The entire region, formerly abundant with a multitude of edible crops, currently is brimming with a single commodity: #2 corn. It’s Roundup-ready, at that, just to throw a bucket of insulting acid into the face of reason. Roundup-resistant weeds are popping up throughout the region as we bring Farmageddon to the heartland and eventually to the world. Most of the corn, which is essentially inedible until it is processed (i.e., pummeled with inordinate quantities of fossil fuels), is watered with the last remaining drops of the Ogallala aquifer, brought to the surface with the same finite fluid used to power our trucks and cars. Verdant fields of ethanol dreams are interrupted occasionally by a field of soybeans; without rotations of legumes, the soil would be so depleted of nitrogen by king corn, it wouldn’t support even the great corn desert. The corn fills our bellies with death-inducing faux sugar. But we willingly trade some of that “food” for fuel because the associated dependence on automobiles allows us to burn off the final inches of life-giving topsoil to promote our culture of death in rapid-transit, individualized death-traps. Who could pass up a deal like that?

Obnoxiously ubiquitous cell-phone towers line the edges of the cornfields adjacent to the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System (“Celebrating 50 Years, 1956-2006″). Each of these completely unnecessary towers of mortality — which serve only to duplicate extant infrastructure — kills 5,000 to 15,000 birds each year. Yet every imperialist has a cell phone, regardless of the death to songbirds. Don’t even get me started on the col-tan in the cell-phone batteries mined from the Congo, because I’d rather not think about the brutal lives and tortuous deaths of the Congolese women and children we treat as collateral damage along our imperial path.

Seemingly every tenth cell-phone tower marks a casino, yet another ubiquitous structure we’d be far better off without. These businesses extract money from the poor as they pursue the something-for-nothing goal upon which our culture has become based during the last few decades.

If it’s not a casino, it’s a distribution center for this country’s rapidly waning commercial sector. We no longer make much of anything in this country, but we move around ton after ton of cheap plastic crap to the Targets and Wal-Marts that have displaced family owned businesses in every town and city in the country while exporting disaster capitalism throughout the world.

Finally, then, we come to the most ludicrous part of the entire endeavor: suburbia, filled with McMansions. This not-quite-country, not-quite-city living arrangement requires people to buy one of everything for every house — except cars, of which we need at least two — to live far from work, far from play, and far from the things we “need” to buy. Hundreds of acres of shoddily constructed, castle-like symbols of self-indulgence are separated from equally coarse-scaled places we use to grow “food,” conduct “commerce” in our “service” economy, and otherwise live civilized lives. As has often been the case, today’s symbols of gluttony are tomorrow’s death traps.

As usual, I’m quick to point out the silver lining in this otherwise disastrous narrative: Better days lie ahead. How could they not?

In the near future, we’ll return to a durable set of living arrangements. Since we need about 50 million additional gardeners to support the 300 million people in this nation, and because nearly everybody in the industrialized world would rather push electrons in a cube farm than push a shovel in a garden, I don’t foresee us voluntarily returning to the agrarian age. Not only are a majority of people unaware of the predicament we face — thanks to the media, every level of government, and our own self-absorbed preference for the bliss of ignorance — but there’s simply no leadership in the industrialized world as we face an inevitable but unprecedented economic contraction. As a result, I suspect we’ll bypass agricultural pursuits and plunge right back to the post-industrial stone age. Once again, daily life will be characterized by a finely textured, life-affirming, durable set of arrangements characterized by respect for each other and reverence for the land, and accompanied by a solid dose of self-sufficiency.

The point of my circuitous route to the mud hut: a wedding on the in-law side of the family. The newlyweds are twenty-something Army officers, and the event fittingly provided the perfect example of the malevolence needed to maintain civilization. Held in a venue designed and constructed to celebrate American military prowess, the reception allowed the guests to enjoy flight simulators between bouts of gorging on meat, fat, sugar, and alcohol. Each of us was allowed to “fly” a fighter jet and blast the enemy. I was a tad disappointed, though: I didn’t get to bomb a children’s hospital in the name of bringing democracy to a poverty-stricken, oil-rich country.

For those readers who would like to impress upon me that I’m an imperialist, too, or that “freedom isn’t free,” don’t bother. In a heartbeat, I’d give up every aspect of the industrial economy, even if it cost me my life, to know western civilization was dead and gone. And for those who believe we’re really free, take a look around. See the security cameras. Notice the listening devices. Pay attention to the monitoring devices that record and report every transaction you complete. These tyrannies are among the thousands of minor costs we pay for “freedom” from terrorists. The larger costs are borne by non-human species and people in non-industrial cultures every minute of every day.

I took a break from the festivities to spend a little time outdoors as darkness was falling. In a few minutes, I was able to observe far more beauty than marked the cultural ceremony or the route along the way (so far): the cry of a red-tailed hawk drew my eye to two hawks flying low over the treetops. Shortly afterward, a brilliant harvest moon scaled the eastern horizon.

Hope springs eternal in, and from, the natural world: There’s still something worth saving from the ravages of civilization. But is there world enough, and time? And, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, are there enough of us who actually care about saving the living planet?

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While an awful lot of people are talking about Adam Sacks’ admittedly brilliant and Grist-breaking article, called “The Fallacy of Climate Activism“, quietly and without fanfare Dave Pollard has been undergoing his own seismic shift. Dave runs the grandly titled blog “How to Save the World“, and up till recently he has used his expertise in behavioural analysis to build up a workbook containing all sorts of important and useful ideas for creating global change.

It seems that, after more than five years of diligent blogging, Dave finally snapped, and produced something which on the surface looks harmless enough, but which is in fact highly subversive and very refreshing. He calls it “Creative Activism” — I call it “Personal Revolution”:

Today I joined the Applied Improv Network, in part to signal my move from passive writer and idea-ist and story-teller to activist. One of the things I like about Improv is that it is focused completely on the Now. It’s active and attentive. In an earlier article on Improv I defined it as “minimally structured play”:

It includes conversation, group stand-up, jazz improv, dancing, cooperative games (frisbee etc.), flirtation, play (with those who have not forgotten how), and perhaps even sex…

The competencies to do it well include: active listening, paying full attention, inventing, self-expression, reacting quickly, remembering, teaching/helping quickly, learning quickly, letting go and letting come. There is a zen-like state that you can get into if you have, and practice using, these competencies: It’s a combination of extreme alertness and extreme relaxation. That’s only a paradox to the incompetent. Arguably, it is our natural state.

In my most recent article on the subject I argued that what we must do, as individuals, and as members of communities and organizations, is to become more adaptive and improvisational, because the important challenges we will face in this century do not lend themselves to political or economic or planned solutions, and they will introduce permanent shifts, not the temporary and cyclical ones we’ve been accustomed to. We are long past the stage of controlling our own destiny — nature has come to bat, and we are about to see our ephemeral ‘victory’ over her disappear quickly and utterly. But she has never been our opponent. She is just here to clean up the mess we couldn’t clean up ourselves. We’re on her team, and it’s time we helped her get the job done.

So what do we do? How do we, as activists, creatively and humanely obstruct, disrupt, sabotage and stop these and other organizations that are killing us and ruining our world, now?:

the big carbon polluters: mining, mountain-top removal and burning coal, the tar sands, offshore shale, the auto and road-building industry, the oil exploration companies (especially in the arctic), the aircraft and airline industry, the military, the cement industry, the air conditioning industry

the nuclear industry

the toxic industrial agriculture industry (especially factory farm operators and other huge users of water and oil-based chemicals)

the building industry (making cheap crappy houses and energy-wasting shopping malls)

the politicians who wage unwinnable and devastating wars (including fucking Obama in Afghanistan)

the forest industry, especially clear-cutters, tropical and old-growth forest destroyers

the industrial fishing industry

the multinational corporations, arms dealers and other gangsters in affluent nations who mindlessly exploit and desolate struggling nations for the profit of a tiny elite

the politicians and other corrupt corporatists who systematically exploit and brutalize the weak, the poor, the sick, the disenfranchised and the vulnerable (manifested by our prison system, our treatment of the mentally ill and the uninsured, and a ‘justice’ system that punishes victims and rewards perpetrators)

the financial industry that funds all of the above, and which plays brinksmanship with our economy by incurring grotesque and unrepayable debts that will be left, along with the other toxic products of our industrial growth economy, to be dealt with my future generations

the mainstream media whose propaganda machine absurdly oversimplifies what it reports, and fails to report what is really important

the education industry which dumbs us down, beats individuality, creativity and autonomy out of us and pounds us into believing that the way we live is the only way we can live

the pharma and insurance industries which exploit illness and ignorance and fear and obstruct the delivery of needed health products and services to those who really need them because they aren’t profitable

We have tried the demonstrations and the petitions and the blockades and the gentle forms of sabotage, and all they accomplish is to get us killed, jailed, tasered, blacklisted, brutalized and labeled as terrorists, using their political cronies, thuggish police and security agencies, and compliant media to paint us as the criminals.

We need to organize and get more creative. We need to use technology to organize in virtual ways, networked and collaborative not orchestrated, so we cannot easily be infiltrated and rounded up. We need to use imagination and ingenuity to disrupt and dismantle the operations of the corporatist criminals in ways that don’t get caught until they’re too late, and in ways that don’t get us caught. We need to hit them from a million points at once, coordinated but independent, so they are so busy trying to deflect us and deal with our successes that they simply never get operational again. Understand, they’re massively centralized, and hence enormously vulnerable. It’s a hugely fragile system they’re maintaining at enormous cost, one which is falling apart by dint of its sheer massive and unwieldy size. If we’re smart, we can stop them. We need to find and exploit their points of weakness — they are utterly dependent on cheap reliable power, oil, water and telecommunications for example. We make make them so frustrated that they give up, take their enormous nest-eggs of money and just quit.

We have to stop fighting them on their terms, and stop grandstanding for the media, which gets us nowhere. The measures of our success will be a consistent drop in GDP and a commensurate rise in more relevant indexes of genuine well-being, and in equitable distribution of wealth. And, of course, a dramatic drop in greenhouse gas emissions.

To get this all started, we need to talk. One-on-one, in small groups, in unofficial meetups and conferences. We will need a name that says what we’re for, not what we’re against. Our product will be practical ideas and actions on how to stop the worst aspects and abuses of the industrial growth economy, relentlessly.

We must put the corporatist criminals out of business. Just as the people of some neighbourhoods have taken their neighbourhoods back from street gangs by collective action, by standing up to them, it is time for us to develop collective strategies that will take our beleaguered planet back from the corporatist criminals who are brutalizing and terrorizing us and our world.

This will be a raw movement, an improvisational one, one where we say and act on what we care about, what we feel. We’ll get terrible PR, because the corporatists run the media and have all the money, but we’ll have to put up with that, and keep working to get the job done. We have to keep asking: What kind of a world do we want, and want to leave as a legacy for future generations, and what do we have to do to achieve it? That will guide us, tell us, without need for central direction, exactly what we need to do.

This is just a seed I’m planting. It feels right. It feels like it’s time for it.

I feel I am finally ready to break free of what has been holding me back, what has had me sitting on the ledge for two years, urging myself to act but not acting. I think the breakthrough was when I realized that in order to really change, to really move, you have to let your heart be broken. You have to stop living in your head, inside those stories, thinking yourself to death, and ask yourself: What do you feel? What do you really care about? And then you let those feelings pour out: The anger. The rage. The loathing of those who keep fucking up this world. The self-loathing of realizing we’re doing nothing to stop them, that we’re actually part of the problem. The grief over the sixth great extinction, Gaia’s suffering.

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By Chris Hedges, reprinted from truthdig.com

Our most potent political weapon is food. If we take back our agriculture, if we buy and raise produce locally, we can begin to break the grip of corporations that control a food system as fragile, unsafe and destined for collapse as our financial system. If we continue to allow corporations to determine what we eat, as well as how food is harvested and distributed, then we will become captive to rising prices and shortages and increasingly dependent on cheap, mass-produced food filled with sugar and fat. Food, along with energy, will be the most pressing issue of our age. And if we do not build alternative food networks soon, the social and political ramifications of shortages and hunger will be devastating.

The effects of climate change, especially with widespread droughts in Australia, Africa, California and the Midwest, coupled with the rising cost of fossil fuels, have already blighted the environments of millions. The poor can often no longer afford a balanced diet. Global food prices increased an average of 43 percent since 2007, according to the International Monetary Fund. These increases have been horrific for the approximately 1 billion people—one-sixth of the world’s population—who subsist on less than $1 per day. And 162 million of these people survive on less than 50 cents per day. The global poor spend as much as 60 percent of their income on food, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.

There have been food riots in many parts of the world, including Austria, Hungary, Mexico, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Yemen, Mauritania, Senegal and Uzbekistan. Russia and Pakistan have introduced food rationing. Pakistani troops guard imported wheat. India has banned the export of rice, except for high-end basmati. And the shortages and price increases are being felt in the industrialized world as we continue to shed hundreds of thousands of jobs and food prices climb. There are 33.2 million Americans, or one in nine, who depend on food stamps. And in 20 states as many as one in eight are on the food stamp program, according to the Food Research Center. The average monthly benefit was $113.87 per person, leaving many, even with government assistance, without adequate food. The USDA says 36.2 million Americans, or 11 percent of households, struggle to get enough food, and one-third of them have to sometimes skip or cut back on meals. Congress allocated some $54 billion for food stamps this fiscal year, up from $39 billion last year. In the new fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, costs will be $60 billion, according to estimates.

Food shortages have been tinder for social upheaval throughout history. But this time around, because we have lost the skills to feed and clothe ourselves, it will be much harder for most of us to become self-sustaining. The large agro-businesses have largely wiped out small farmers. They have poisoned our soil with pesticides and contaminated animals in filthy and overcrowded stockyards with high doses of antibiotics and steroids. They have pumped nutrients and phosphorus into water systems, causing algae bloom and fish die-off in our rivers and streams. Crop yields, under the onslaught of changing weather patterns and chemical pollution, are declining in the Northeast, where a blight has nearly wiped out the tomato crop. The draconian Food Modernization Safety Act, another gift from our governing elite to corporations, means small farms will only continue to dwindle in number. Sites such as La Via Campesina do a good job of tracking these disturbing global trends.

“The entire economy built around food is unsafe and unethical,” activist Henry Harris of the Food Security Roundtable told me. The group builds distribution systems between independent farmers and city residents.

“Food is the greatest place for communities to start taking back power,” he said. “The national food system is collapsing by degrees. More than 50 percent of what we eat comes from the Central Valley of California. What happens when gasoline becomes $5 a gallon or drought sweeps across the cropland? The monolithic system of food production is highly unstable. It has to be replaced very soon with small, diverse sources that provide greater food security.”

Cornell University recently did a study to determine whether New York state could feed itself. The research is described in two articles published in 2006 and 2008 by the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems. If all agricultural land were in use, and food distribution were optimized to minimize the total distance that food travels, New York state could, the researchers found, have 34 percent of its food needs met from within its boundaries. This is not encouraging news to those who live in New York City. New York once relied on New Jersey, still known as the Garden State, instead of having food shipped from across the country. But New Jersey farms have largely given way to soulless housing developments. Farming communities upstate, their downtowns boarded up and desolate, have been gutted by industrial farming.

The ties most Americans had to rural communities during the Great Depression kept many alive. A barter economy replaced the formal economy. Families could grow food or had relatives to feed them. But in a world where we do not know where our food comes from, or how to produce it, we have become vulnerable. And many will be forced, as food prices continue to rise, to shift to a diet of cheap, fatty, mass-produced foods, already a staple of the nation’s poor. Junk food, a major factor in obesity, diabetes and heart disease, is often the only food those in the inner city can buy because supermarkets and nutritious food are geographically and financially beyond reach. As the economy continues to deteriorate, the middle class will soon join them.

“It is clear to anyone who looks carefully at any crowd that we are wasting our bodies exactly as we are wasting our land,” Wendell Berry observed in “The Unsettling of America.” “Our bodies are fat, weak, joyless, sickly, ugly, the virtual prey of the manufacturers of medicine and cosmetics. Our bodies have become marginal; they are growing useless like our ‘marginal land’ because we have less and less use for them. After the games and idle flourishes of modern youth, we use them only as shipping cartons to transport our brains and our few employable muscles back and forth to work.”

Berry, who lives on a farm in Kentucky where his family has farmed for generations, argues that local farming is fundamental to sustaining communities. Industrial farming, he says, has estranged us from the land. It has rendered us powerless to provide for ourselves. It has left us complicit in the corporate destruction of the ecosystem. Its moral cost, Berry argues, has been as devastating as its physical cost.

“The people will eat what the corporations decide for them to eat,” writes Berry. “They will be detached and remote from the sources of their life, joined to them only by corporate tolerance. They will have become consumers purely—consumptive machines—which is to say, the slaves of producers. What … model farms very powerfully suggest, then, is that the concept of total control may be impossible to confine within the boundaries of the specialist enterprise—that it is impossible to mechanize production without mechanizing consumption, impossible to make machines of soil, plants, and animals without making machines also of people.”

The nascent effort by communities to reclaim local food production is the first step toward reclaiming lives severed and fragmented by corporate culture. It is more than a return to local food production. It is a return to community. It brings us back to the values that sustain community. It is a return to the recognition of the fragility, interconnectedness and sacredness of all living systems and our dependence on each other. It turns back to an ethic that can save us.

“[The commercial] revolution … , ” writes Berry, “did not stop with the subjugation of the Indians, but went on to impose substantially the same catastrophe upon the small farms and the farm communities, upon the shops of small local tradesmen of all sorts, upon the workshops of independent craftsmen, and upon the households of citizens. It is a revolution that is still going on. The economy is still substantially that of the fur trade, still based on the same general kinds of commercial items: technology, weapons, ornaments, novelties, and drugs. The one great difference is that by now the revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water. Air remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution has imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.

“The inevitable result of such an economy,” Berry adds, “is that no farm or any other usable property can safely be regarded by anyone as a home, no home is ultimately worthy of our loyalty, nothing is ultimately worth doing, and no place or task or person is worth a lifetime’s devotion. ‘Waste,’ in such an economy, must eventually include several categories of humans—the unborn, the old, ‘disinvested’ farmers, the unemployed, the ‘unemployable.’ Indeed, once our homeland, our source, is regarded as a resource, we are all sliding downward toward the ash heap or the dump.”

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A short article, sent by one of our readers, Brant Evans.

I once told a friend that knowledge of our current situation without appropriate action is the same as complete denial, but now I’m not so sure. I’d been working on my friend over the past couple months trying to open his eyes to the reality of our culture and lifestyle, just as my eyes had been opened by another friend. Some people seem right on the verge, and if you can find the right nugget of information or analogy, the puzzle pieces fall into place for them and they start to see the bigger picture. This particular friend knew enough to be pissed off, and he knew enough to start contemplating the changes that need to happen. He could see a vague image of the picture, but he was still not ready to act on his own.
To be sure, knowledge without action is a symptom of insanity, plain and simple. In a culture where this type of denial is the norm, most of us have learned to accept it, unfortunately. I recently broached the subject of peak oil with my dad. After introducing him to the standard argument (I like peak oil as an introduction for people unfamiliar with the anti-civ movement because it’s very practical), he furrowed his brow, and admitted that a lot of the conclusions I offered seemed pretty inevitable. The next day, he gave me a lecture about the importance of starting to save money while I’m young. Clearly, the gravity and reality of our discussion had not hit home. In a world where our government just dropped a trillion dollars of imaginary money into our “economy” to keep it churning, I can’t imagine that saving up little pieces of green paper will be all that important for the future. Good riddance.
After we’ve dealt with stubborn people hell-bent on remaining in a shell of denial more than a few times, many of us stop trying to forcing the issue on these types of people. This could be a mistake.
As I mentioned, I once told a friend that knowledge without action is the same as complete denial. You’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem. That was my position, but I can see another angle now.
My friend has one foot on the grass and one foot on the fence. He might not initiate a mission to blow up Monsanto. But guess what? He sure as hell isn’t going to call the cops if someone else does. Revolutions may require guerilla warriors, to be sure, but equally frustrating for those in power are those silent villagers who might know a little more than they let on.
We need to spread this message, because right now, most of the “villagers” are enamored with the system that is making them so miserable. We need to be a little rude and force the issue. Not talking about these things because they are socially awkward is another example of surrender. Just remember to choose your battles.

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Always one to find ways of speeding the demise of industrial civilization, I was really taken by this article in New Scientist about the remarkably destructive effect of roads in the Amazon rainforest. For many years ELF (Earth Liberation Front) has resorted to blocking logging roads as one of a range of methods to slow the advance of industrial logging; and it works, for if the machinery that depends on the roads cannot reach the intended location then the ecocide cannot take place. Simple.

What is less understood are the myriad other negative effects that roads have, from spreading disease to indigenous tribes, to encouraging further planned and ad hoc “development” (destruction), and even raising the share price of a company that is planning to exploit resources in the newly opened up area. From the article below, it appears that by preventing new roads, new damage can also be prevented and — by extension — by blocking, flooding, digging up and otherwise making impassible, existing roads, destruction that is already taking place can also be halted.

This should undoubtedly be one of the key activities of those people currently fighting to protect forest ecosystems and cultures. Fuck “right of access”; it’s time to close down what should never have been opened up in the first place.

“THE best thing you could do for the Amazon is to bomb all the roads.” That might sound like an eco-terrorist’s threat, but they’re actually the words of Eneas Salati, one of Brazil’s most respected scientists. Thomas Lovejoy, a leading American biologist, is equally emphatic: “Roads are the seeds of tropical forest destruction.”

They are quite right. Roads are rainforest killers. Without rampant road expansion, tropical forests around the world would not be vanishing at a rate of 50 football fields a minute, an assault that imperils myriad species and spews billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year. We will never devise effective strategies to slow rainforest destruction unless we confront this reality.

In our increasingly globalised world, roads are running riot. Brazil has just punched a 1200-kilometre highway (the BR-163) into the heart of the Amazon and is in the process of building another 900-kilometre road (the BR-319) through largely pristine forest. Three new highways are slicing across the Andes, from the Amazon to the Pacific. Road networks in Sumatra are opening up some of the island’s last forests to loggers and hunters. A study published in Science found that 52,000 kilometres of logging roads had appeared in the Congo basin between 1976 and 2003 (vol 316, p 1451).

As my colleagues and I reveal in a forthcoming article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, these are just a small sample of the many new road projects slicing through tropical frontiers.

Why are roads so bad for rainforests? Tropical forests have a uniquely complex structure and humid, dark microclimate that sustain a huge number of endemic species. Many of these avoid altered habitats near roads and cannot traverse even narrow road clearings. Others run the risk of being hit by vehicles or killed by people hunting near roads. This can result in diminished or fragmented wildlife populations, and can lead to local extinctions.

In remote frontier areas, where law enforcement is often weak, new roads can open a Pandora’s box of other problems, such as illegal logging, colonisation and land speculation. In Brazilian Amazonia, 95 per cent of deforestation and fires occur within 50 kilometres of roads. In Suriname, most illegal gold mines are located near roads. In tropical Africa, hunting is significantly more intensive near roads.

Environmental disasters often begin as a narrow slice into the forest. Rainforests are found mostly in developing nations where there are strong economic incentives to provide access to logging, oil and mineral operations and agribusiness. Once the way is open, waves of legal and illegal road expansion follow. For instance, the Belém-Brasília highway, completed in the 1970s, has developed into a 400-kilometre-wide swathe of forest destruction across the eastern Amazon.

Beyond the forest itself, frontier roads imperil many indigenous peoples, especially those trying to live with limited contact with outsiders. As I write, indigenous groups in the Peruvian Amazon are stridently protesting the proliferation of new oil, gas and logging roads into their traditional territories. The roads bring loggers, gold miners and ranchers who often subjugate the indigenous people. Even worse, the invaders can bring in deadly new diseases.

Throughout the tropics, infections such as malaria, dengue fever, enteric pathogens and HIV have all been shown to rise sharply after new roads are built. Some indigenous groups, such as the Surui tribe of Brazilian Amazonia, have been driven to the edge of extinction by roads and the invading loggers, colonists and diseases they bring.

What can we do to slow the onslaught? First, we must vastly improve environmental impact assessments for planned roads. In many developing nations, EIAs focus solely on the roads themselves, completely ignoring the knock-on effects. In Brazil, for instance, EIAs for Amazonian highways focus only on a narrow swathe along the route, often recommending only paltry mitigation measures, such as helping animals to relocate before building begins. EIAs for certain mines, hydroelectric dams and other large developments focus only on the project itself while ignoring the impact of the roads it will invariably spawn. New roads will continue to drive rainforest destruction so long as the EIA process is so fundamentally flawed.

The second thing we have to do is fight to keep the most destructive roads from being built – the ones that penetrate pristine frontier areas. There is no shortage of battles to wage. A proposed highway between Colombia and Panama, for example, would expose one of the world’s most biologically important areas, the Chocó-Darién wilderness, to rampant destruction. Likewise, Brazil’s BR-319 highway is threatening to open up the central Amazon like a zipper.

Finally, we need to pressure those promoting these frontier roads. These include timber corporations like Asia Pulp & Paper and Rimbunan Hijau, international lenders such as the Asian, African and Inter-American Development Banks, and massive infrastructure schemes such as Brazil’s Programme to Accelerate Growth. In their scramble for tropical timber, minerals, oil and agricultural products, China and its corporations have become perhaps the biggest drivers of destructive road expansion.

Restricting frontier roads is by far the most realistic and cost-effective approach to conserving rainforests and their amazing biodiversity and climate-stabilising capacity. As Pandora quickly learned, it is far harder to thrust the evils of the world back into the box than to simply keep it closed in the first place.

(By William Laurance, taken from http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327236.700-roads-to-rainforest-ruin.html)

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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.

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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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