Yesterday, a friend sent me over this graph, which shows the levels of carbon dioxide emitted by the USA over the last twenty years. As the accompanying report explains, it shows that 2009 was an ‘exceptional’ year – exceptional in that emissions levels fell by more than they had fallen in a single year since 1949. The reason? The economic crash.
It’s not news, of course, that greenhouse gas emissions are intimately linked with economic success. To a degree, it’s basic common sense. Industrial economies run largely on fossil fuels. To understand just how dependent on those fuels we are, and how ‘renewables’ and even nuclear are currently nowhere very significant on a global level, have a look at this breakdown of global energy use:
Source: Edro
The global economy, in other words, is fossil fuels. To put it another way, it is climate change. Economic growth equals more emissions. Economic collapse equals fewer. The most famous example of this was the collapse of the Soviet empire after 1990. Its economic apocalypse caused a huge drop in greenhouse gas emissions. To this day, the former USSR still doesn’t pollute as much as it did at the height of its economic pomp.
Source: Chris Vernon
What to make of this? Well, if you’re Derrick Jensen, say, the conclusion you draw is that industrial society itself is inherently toxic and must be destroyed, in order to save the biosphere. From the point of view of global ecological health, as opposed to human happiness, there’s clear merit in this argument. It’s clear that the global human economy is an engine of ecocide. The trouble is, of course, that even if you can make yourself comfortable with the massive human costs of bringing down industrial society, there’s no conceivable way of actually doing it. When we interviewed Jensen for issue 1 of Dark Mountain, I thought he did a good job of unintentionally demonstrating this. It seems to me that most people in industrial societies, and perhaps outside of them too, will always choose human comfort and safety above what they see as some vague concept of ‘ecological health’. If we are asked to choose between giving up our cars today and giving up the existence of coral reefs in two decades, I think I know what we’d choose. I think we have already chosen.
What to do then? Another approach – far more fashionable and on the surface more ‘realistic’ – is that of ‘eco-pragmatism.’ Eco-pragmatism is very much the in thing right now. Assuming that some grand shift in human consciousness is unlikely, that most people on Earth seem to aspire to Western levels of affluence and over-development and that this is hard or impossible to stop, especially in democracies (and even in dictatorships – look at China), its proponents therefore put their faith in two things: techno-fixes and ‘decoupling’.
The techno-fixes are easy enough to understand: they’re everywhere, and the mainstream green movement has abandoned most of its other aims in order to shill for them. Whether they be giant windfarms or solar arrays in Cornwall, the idea here is to get enough renewable energy sources up and running quickly enough to replace fossil fuels as a significant energy source, and thereby prevent the worst impacts of climate change. I find this narrative utterly unconvincing for a number of reasons we’ve covered here before, and of course I’m not the only one. But questioning it right now is almost impossible; we may have to wait until its proponents hit the brick wall of their own over-excitement before we can have a proper discussion about it.
The second part of the eco-pragmatist equation is the idea of ‘decoupling’ economic development from both emissions and, more broadly, from the material intensity of the economy. As the human economy grows it consumes more stuff. It consumes more fish, wood, ore, fossil fuels, animals, plants, metals and the rest. Some of these are replaceable, some are not, but all of them, taken from the Earth and consumed by us at current rates, has a knock-on effect on the health of the biosphere, of which climate change is only the most all-encompassing example. And it will get worse, for sure. If the projected global population, by 2100, was to live the same kind of lives we currently live in countries like the UK, the global economy would need to be 40 times bigger than it currently is. That’s right: 40 times bigger. It has been calculated that if the world economy grows at a rate of 3% between now and 2040, we will consume in that period resources equivalent to all those we have consumed since humans first evolved. Think about that. Sit back and really think about it.
So – runs the eco-pragmatist argument – this being the case, we need to work out how to develop without doing all this bad stuff. Obviously we need to develop, because it’s everyone’s right to have a telly and a dentist. So we need to work out how to run an economy that doesn’t constantly need to grow, and therefore strip-mine the world.
This argument – that we can ‘develop’ in much the way we are now developing without economic growth – has become a kind of last redoubt for the rhetoric of ’sustainable development.’ Those who push it are well aware of how destructive the human economy is, how democracy colludes in it, and how rising population growth and rising human wants are combining to eat the world. But they see no real way out of the capitalist, materialist society we have built, and they see discussion of alternative systems as ‘unrealistic’ – which often they are. So they alight instead on attempting to maintain the garden of earthly delights that we call modern civilisation without the engine of its creation – economic growth.
It sounds tempting, but I’m not really convinced. For starters, though I’m no economist, I know that the modern economy can’t currently function without growth. Amongst other things, growth is needed in a capitalist economy to offset labour productivity – in other words, to provide new jobs for people made jobless by the economy’s relentless drive towards increasing labour efficiency, which itself is stimulated by the need to grow in order to outcompete others. How you get around this, I don’t know, though various learned people who know a lot more about economics than me think it could be done.
But I think they’re missing something. I think our current societal worship of economic growth, while posing as a piece of economic rationalism, is nothing of the kind. For some reason, this thought crystallised in me this morning when, reading the John Fowles novel The Magus, I came across this short passage, spoken by the central character to his young, idealistic, egalitarian protege:
But are we never to have palaces, never to have refined tastes, complex pleasures, never to let the imagination fulfil itself? Even a Marxist world must have some destination, must develop into some higher state, which can only mean a high pleasure and richer happiness for the human beings in it.
This, I think, is what we believe growth will give us; it’s why we cling to it as to a liferaft. Far from being simply a boring but necessary component of a capitalist economy, growth has become the defining purpose of our political leaders. Nobody sensible questions it, and anyone who does is immediately dismissed as a ‘Luddite’ who wants to ‘have everyone living in caves.’ I see growth as an offshoot of progress, or perhaps a new, more contemporary version of it. Progress – the idea that the future is always better than the past, that everything always improves and will continue to do so, that we have ’some destination’ which will take us to ‘a higher state’ – is the defining myth of the modern world. It is beneath all our skins, and without it we are lost. We have nothing to believe in; nothing to strive for.
Our pursuit of growth is not rational – it is atavistic. I don’t think this is just a dry-as-dust debate about how to decouple energy intensity from job creation. I think it is the potential toppling of one of our founding myths, and I think it will take more than pragmatism to knock it off its pedestal.
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It’s striking to think that the USA doesn’t produce that much either compared to days of old, so much now being ‘outsourced’ to other countries. But then, that itself is tied up with the issues you raise. What a tangled web …
Curtis White expores the nature of our fearful obsession with growth in his latest book, The Barbaric Heart; good reading for any dark mountaineer. His prescriptions suggest a reappraisal of our notions of happiness, calling for a society that finds it’s meaning in art and beauty, it’s pleasures in a kind of dionysian renewal.
But there’s the notion (Maslov’s hierarchy of needs)that we first require a civilized infrastructure to meet our “more basic” needs to be able to appreciate these finer delights. But is that really true?
Is our argument with economists or is it with organizied religion, which still preaches confinement of our sensual energies? This energy has to go somewhere. How much of it is ending up in motor boats, mega homes and home entertainment centers?
There may, in fact, be a way out of our predicament. Population growth in most of the advanced industrial countries is lower than what is needed to maintain current populations. In countries like Italy and Japan, the native populations are actually shrinking, and the big question is how will they be able to support all the retired folks when there are not enough young workers to pay into the social security systems.
It appears that high standards of living lead to lower birth rates. If you don’t need to have a dozen kids to help work on the farm, you don’t need to have a dozen kids. So, we have been seeing that world population growth is leveling off, which means that we will not need to have as much economic growth in the future as we have had in the past.
I’m not sure what the best way would be to manage the coming changes that need to be made, but we are a clever species. At the very least we will be able to gradually improve the energy efficiency of our machines, thus enabling us to maintain some semblance of a quality of life without trashing the environment too badly.
This is my first comment here… First I think, your reasoning, is accurate and worth listening to and discussing and much as I like to philosophise over the future, there are practical view points that support your argument.
You don’t need complex socio-political arguments (even though they are interesting in themselves) to prove that our civilisation as we know it, will end. You only need a pocket calculator to prove that what we as a civilisation are doing or trying to do, cannot continue. Simple arithmetic tells us that.
You quote figures such as twice the resources required in 30 years for 3% growth (the result of compounding the growth) but even from your realistic stance you fail to actually do the attendant calculation and point out, the resource depletion calculation that goes with it. For instance Oil/Fossil Fuel energy availability just for starters! Assuming we have 100% today, if this resource is depleted by 2% per year (as forecast in many articles) for 30 years (compounded) then you will only have available 55% of the resource you started with. So in the 31st year you now need a 3% increase on twice the output using 45% less resources… This is what is demanded by the growth at all costs scenario proposed by our current politicians. To be honest I can’t remember the current figures for planetary resource over use but it is way above 2%, try putting say, 10% in your calculator and compound that loss over 30 years. Hmmm… not pretty is it! The take a look at this estimate:
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/world_footprint/
So that argument is over, done & dusted, it can’t be done.
Personally I believe we won’t get that far before the financial system implodes. If you look around the economics blogs you will find very few/none giving the current situation the thumbs up. Such is the complexity and inter-connectivity of the global money and trading systems we have created. Add the exponential nature of our debt money system and you have another recipe for disaster, and worse it is one that can be moved/realigned at the whim of the owners of the fastest computers (witness the 1000 point plunge on the Dow Jones last week).
To pick a niggle: “growth is needed in a capitalist economy to offset labour productivity”. It’s more accurate to say growth is needed to pay the interest on the debt-money created by banks. If there is no growth we and governments can’t pay for our loans because there is no “real money” left to pay with.
So to end, in my view the first steps to ending the growth spiral would be to campaign for a “world debt jubilee” or global debt default to stop the monetary transfers from countries and people to banks and so allow countries to grow food to feed themselves, rather than grow food for profit to pay their debts. This would cause nearly all banks to collapse and there would be a period of complete and utter chaos while governments took over the banks’ day to day electronic payments systems while simultaneously issuing “free” as in debt free money to tide every one over the gap left by the disappearance of everyone’s “money in the bank”. The collective governments would soon realise that this is actually cheaper than paying the bank interest. There would be horrible side effects too. But as global finance is going to bad anyway why not choose the timing and be prepared.
Your review of the issues is spot on but I feel that leads us to the arguments of people like Jensen and Zerzan being the only realistic answer.
When I first read Zerzan it scared me how extreme it was compared to mainstream greens. But the more I reflect the more refreshing the ideas seem.
I don’t want to become a fundamentalist to primitivism, but surely it is an essential strand of the ‘new’ narrative (along with other ideas).
An interesting series of lectures
http://www.youtube.com/user/councilonsper?feature=mhw5#p/u/5/irmcAecUJLM
[...] The economy is fossil fuels. [...]
Excuse me being pernickety, but is there any way in which I can log on to this blog site without hearing two blokes having a conversation?
How about scrolling straight to that sound clip and clicking pause, Tendryakov ?
Found some welcome intellectual stimulation in the comments and quotations here :
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/05/schama-are-the-guillotines-being-sharpened.html
What happens when folks who understand the dire situation we are in, attempt to find a positive, sustainable and ethical lifestyle ?
http://www.brithdirmawr.co.uk/
and then collide with the power of the ( unsustainable, destructive, exploitative ) dairy industry, their agricultural lobby, the NFU and FUW, backed by the State and the police…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUJA8u18Gmg
I’m still having trouble identifying the message here.
Is it basically “we are headed for collapse but there is no way to stop it?”
I’m not sure it’s “we’re headed for a collapse and there’s no way to stop it,” but that the forces propelling us toward collapse are deeper than can be addressed with economics and green technology. The same subterranean ideas and assumptions undergird every “environmental” issue. Ideas about a separate monolithic God, about human specialness, about the earth being a “resource” provided for our benefit.
It’s easier to sell technical fixes than change deeply ingrained cultural beliefs, but the latter is where we need to go. That’s my take, at least.
Bob-
Rob has a very good take. My response to you would be to ask: collapse of what? Collapse of the global ecosystem? Doubtful. Collapse of certain ecosystems? Quite possible. Collapse of human life? no. Collapse of our current lifestyle in the affluent West? Quite likely, I’d say, but probably over a timescale of decades rather than weeks or months.
Rob is right about ’subterranean assumptions.’ This is about the cultural myths that underpin what we have done and are doing. If we leave those unquestioned, wave machines and windfarms will get us nowhere. Probably they will get us nowhere in any case. But it rather depends on where we’re looking to get to.
“we are headed for collapse but there is no way to stop it?”
I think that, from an ecological perspective, we have exceeded the carrying capacity of our environment ( Earth ) and that is well understood, and typically, over-shoot is followed by die-off, when a population crashes, sometimes to zero.
Historically, we were able to do this because of two centuries of mineing fossil sunshine, i.e coal and oil, which has given us the Industrial revolution, 6.5 billion humans and Global Warming and Peak Oil, and another 3 billion mouths to feed by 2050…
So, IMO, the science and arithmetic makes collapse look inevitable, and when you add on neo-classical economics, which requires constant growth on a finite planet, plus loss of biodiversity, ( which means collapse of the ecosystems which we all depend on for air, water, food, death of the oceans, loss of topsoil ), and the mendacity of politicians, and nuclear, biological, and chemical weaponry… the prospect becomes even bleaker.
Some people ( e.g. Monbiot, Ventnor ) think that some novel technofix, as yet unknown, will appear, like a fairy godmother, and… ?
My take is, that the folks who started this site, are not primarily looking at the scientific picture, but more the arts, and how culture might be altered in a positive way, to find original ways of understanding what is happening and how to cope with it.
My personal opinion is, it might, theoretically, be possible to avoid collapse, but that would require a radical and fundamental cultural change, globally, which is, IMO, highly unlikely to occur. So yes. We’re doomed, and there’s nothing we can do about it, because the forces involved are so vast, the tides of history, which sweep individual humans along willy nilly…
I mean, isn’t this National Biodiversity year ? and we can’t even get a sensible policy towards badgers and bovine TB, the science gets eclipsed by the socio-political vested interests, where anthropocentrism trumps all, and native wildlife loses out once again to the short term financial interests of a tiny fraction of the population, the dairy farmers….very rarely I find myself agreeing with anything in the Mail, but….
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1280598/LIZ-JONES-A-new-touchy-feely-democracy-Try-telling-badgers-.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
What if the badgers were felt as sacred? What if they were considered to hold secrets? What if their harm were announced by the church of England to be an everlasting sin?
@Paul
I don’t think it is possible to predict the future with precision. Projections and probabilities and informed guesses. Remember when there were no mobile phones, no internet, no motor cars ? Techno innovation can make dramatic changes, as can super volcanoes and asteroid impacts, some things are beyond control, but
” Humans have destroyed more than 30 per cent of the natural world since 1970 with serious depletion of the forest, freshwater and marine systems on which life depends.” [Guardian, 10/2/98]
That’s not a natural catastrophe, that’s a manmade, self-inflicted catastrophe, and if that trend is projected into the future, what’s the likely result ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAQtLrNBsbc&feature=related
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” Aldo Leopold.
@Rob
“What if the badgers were felt as sacred? What if they were considered to hold secrets? What if their harm were announced by the church of England to be an everlasting sin?”
What if ? what if ? what if ??
“The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.” Aldo Leopold, again.
( I’d suggest substitute the word ‘badgers’ for ‘wolves’ ; although, not a bad idea, the re-introduction of wolves to Wales would certainly solve the problems caused by too many sheep and cows… and control the foxes and badgers as well )
Personally, I’d say that badgers ARE sacred, ( and return the question by asking, what ISN’T sacred ? ) But it doesn’t matter what I believe, does it, what matters is what the 6.5 billions out there believe, that’s what will decide our children’s future and the fate of the biosphere.
I don’t think that an authentic sense of sanctity can be produced by edict or intellectual explanation or pronouncement by a religious authority, I’d suggest it’s more like a personal psychological and emotional awakening, insight, epiphany, something like apprehending one’s personal existence as a state of grace.
If you sit motionless in the dusk and watch badgers emerge from a sett, almost close enough to touch, that can be a thrilling, sublime experience, you’re glimpsing something so far removed from what’s ‘normal’ everyday life for most urban people, it’s an opening into another realm, as you said, a secret domain, which could be described as a mystical experience. I have seen badgers that glowed, surrounded by a slight aura, I wonder if it’s because their hair has some unknown reflective or optical quality that does something peculiar to light ?
An announcement from the Church of England ? Hmm, well, the history of Christianity is so riddled with hypocrisy and endorsement of wars and environmental destruction that I don’t think it can be taken seriously as any kind of authoritative voice, can it ? Perhaps it still has influence upon a small fraction of the British population, but really, what we’re facing is a global problem, we’re all in this thing together, the planet as lifeboat, the conflict between selfish short-term human advantage and the broader well-being of the biosphere and wildlife, is universal.
IMO, where the Christians went wrong, way back in the depths of their history, was to invent a division between Creator and Creation, so that ‘religion’ and ‘holiness’ or ’sanctity’ can be devoted to some invisible, unexplainable, domain of God, or Heaven, whilst, down here, where we all actually exist, on Earth, it’s just ‘material stuff’, to be exploited in any way we choose, because somewhere in the Old Testament, some clown said we are superior and have a right to hold dominion over all things… a small minority of greenish Christians have extended the idea into their ‘Stewardship’ model, ( which I will admit is an advance over the typical historical rape and pillage of nature ), however, to be a Good Steward, you’d have to know what you’re doing, and fitting agriculture, industry, cities, into sustainable global ecological management is a highly complex ( almost impossibly so ) technical subject which requires specialist knowledge, otherwise you’re just going to screw things up even more.
Anyway, seems to me the Anglican Church is obsessed with sex and gender, and preoccupied with figuring out how many gay priests and female bishops can be balanced on the head of a pin, rather than the common heritage of wild animals, plants and birds and maintaining ecological integrity.
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/hambler.html
You could argue that it’s the Judaeo-Christian ideology that got us into this mess in the first place, the Protestant fostering of Capitalism, the Quakers who began the Industrial Revolution, etc, see, for example, writings by Lynn White
http://www.zbi.ee/~kalevi/lwhite.htm
Here’s a some more or less related links if anyone is interested
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/may/26/featuresreviews.guardianreview11
http://www.jonathanbalcombe.com/
http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2258
http://www.edgeofgrace.net/the-journey-from-primitive-to-civilized-living/
http://geoflop.uchicago.edu/forecast/docs/lectures.html
http://www.studiesinanti-capitalism.net/Studies_in_Anti-Capitalism.html
http://www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/ParadigmConspiracy.html
http://pantheon.cis.yale.edu/%7Ethomast/names.html
http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/agriculture.htm
http://www.mythinglinks.org/LorenzWatkins.html
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-5267640865741878159#
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/02/the_unabomber_w.php
http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2008/10/13/filming-the-world-laboratory/
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/AoS/theSun.html
and if those aren’t enough for anyone whose feeling bored, here’s a few more
http://www.dieoff.org/
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/other.html#cons
Industrial ‘civilisation’ is impossible to stop, Paul? The evidence seems to suggest that actually it’s impossible to keep it going.
Industrialism as a Single Giant Pulse event in the history of life on Earth seems a much more persuasive interpretation of the long-scale evidence; accompanied by a human population bloom and crash, of course.
Strictly one-time events, both of them: the Pulse has exhausted, or is exhausting, whole global endowments of one-time resources; things like workable metal ores, for example, that don’t regenerate, even on geological timescales. Once they’re drawn down and dispersed, hitech industrial ‘civilisation’, at least on any pattern that we’d recognise, becomes physically impossible.
After that, it something like gatherer-hunting again, for the survivors. Not such a bad option. Surviving practitioners of that life-style in our own era have had some pretty impressive intellectual and spiritual civilisations, until wrecked by the Koyaanisqatsi juggernaut. Anyway, we’d better learn to live with it again, because our options after industrialism are limited.
Rhisiart – my point was that ‘anti-civ’ activism as advocated by Jensen and his ilk, whether it be blowing up dams or trying to hack into financial systems, is not going to destroy industrialism. You seem to be making a slightly different point; that industrialism, or at least industrial capitalism, will likely destroy itself. I quite agree with this; it’s pretty much the starting point for the Dark Mountain journey
I’m not sure that I understand: Where in this
“But are we never to have palaces, never to have refined tastes, complex pleasures, never to let the imagination fulfil itself? Even a Marxist world must have some destination, must develop into some higher state, which can only mean a high pleasure and richer happiness for the human beings in it.”
does one see the equivalence with ‘growth’ in the way that you envisage it, that is to say, growth in consumerist society with attendant trappings (more TVs, more cars, more stuff)?
“Pollution and work are both unnecessary results of an incompletely designed or unnatural system” – Bill Mollison, ‘Permaculture A Designers Manual’
Capitalism, greed and even population growth are not the problems, and in any case can’t be fixed. It’s the ad hoc, myopic and non-holistic design systems that have been employed. The goal should not be full employment but free time. If you feel secure, all of your needs are easily met, and you have a strong community supporting you, there is not much incentive to have a large family and consume prolific amounts of resources. This effect is approximated in the observed low birth rates and low energy consumption in countries that have developed social networks (e.g. Italy). Full time commuted work reduces social interaction and increases isolation, exacerbated by modern suburban design. People look for solutions to their unhappiness by buying toys.
So the strategy of people who want to make a difference (concluding prematurely that you can’t is putting the cart before the horse), is to learn, promote and employ these holistic design systems in order to develop business and lifestyle models that are attractive and profitable. Such systems I have found are permaculture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture) and the work of Christopher Alexander (A Pattern Language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language).
Capitalism can be used for positive ends, and there are alternative financing models (banks can be bypassed: we all have resources to pool, sharing in the various benefits):
http://nmag.soton.ac.uk/mollison/html/15-millionaires.html
http://www.permaculture.com/node/141
The solution is pretty obvious and it will work automatically without any effort: COLLAPSE.
Dear Sir
Industrial civilisation doesn’t have to go anywhere. It just needs to be made sustainable. You could argue that Hemp should have been the primary material for industry since the 30’s but it was ignored in favour of crude oil. If you can get 1000 gallons of methanol from an acre of Hemp, i calculate that about 1/6th of the UK land area could provide around 360 million barrels of fuel a year. With some efficiency, that means we can carry on. Not to mention the seeds from hemp yields that could be used for food at a local and national level.
Industrial civilisation just needs to evolve, not reinvent itself. Hemp can fill the void left by declining crude.
Our society in its current form has been created from a pack of monetary promisory notes masquerading as something of real value, while they diminish in worth as we breathe
Our society is a fiction that has been created out of thin air on the financial promise that you will get your real value in the future even though there are more promisory notes than real value that has ever existed
Our financial system has no clothes and can now be seen for the parasite that it is
We need a real society, not one created out of thin air
Paul,
A good read, and I’m glad to see the increasing awareness around the destructiveness and inevitable collapse of civilisation. Things like this help increase that awareness.
You wrote:
“Rhisiart – my point was that ‘anti-civ’ activism as advocated by Jensen and his ilk, whether it be blowing up dams or trying to hack into financial systems, is not going to destroy industrialism. You seem to be making a slightly different point; that industrialism, or at least industrial capitalism, will likely destroy itself. I quite agree with this; it’s pretty much the starting point for the Dark Mountain journey”
I agree that industrial capitalism will destroy itself. But what do you suggest we do in the meantime?
I’ve read Endgame by Derrick Jensen, and another of his books, and am absolutely behind the actions he advocates.
You say that blowing up dams will not stop industrialism. But the point is, it could save the salmon.
For the last few forests, the last few members of an endangered species, the last few people of a displaced or exterminated indigenous culture, this shit has to stop as soon as possible. And no, that doesn’t mean an immediate global shutdown of industrial civilisation (if only). For those survivors, it means stopping the single accountable force attacking them. It’s a matter of simply fighting back.
Of course industrial civilisation will collapse with our help or without it. The question is: what’s left of the earth when we get there?
For those few who put themselves between this destructive culture and what remains of the earth and humanity, the least they deserve is our support.
Cheers,
Chris
@Chris
One of the groups that inspired me to get involved with what was then a genuinely radical form of environmentalism was the UK arm of Earth First!, which sprang into life here in the early 90s. I cut my teeth, sometimes literally, in direct action to prevent roads being built through the English countryside. This kind of action has a powerful impact, and sometimes it even stops the things it intends to stop. I’m right behind it. Not so much physically these days due to having a young family, but certainly in principle and I don’t doubt, in the future, in practice also.
So don’t get me wrong – direct action to prevent the destruction of wild places and the non-human world, whether it be in England, the Amazon or Canada or anywhere, has my full support. I was simply pointing out that it is not any kind of ’solution’ to the wider problems caused by industrial capitalism. It is fire-fighting. Fire-fighting is very useful – indeed, vital – but it does not eliminate the existence of fire.
As to blowing up dams to protect salmon and watercourses – well, I’m not sure this has ever actually been done, has it? We hear a lot of wild talk about it on the fringes of the US radical eco movement, but I’ve not seen any takers for the punishment that would ensue, which I think shows the limitations of advocating it.
Inspiration, John Zerzan, Paul Watson…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/18/sea-shepherd-release-bluefin-tuna-libya
scroll down to Zerzan
http://essentialdissent.blogspot.com/search/label/Anarchism
wolfbird writes:
“IMO, where the Christians went wrong, way back in the depths of their history, was to invent a division between Creator and Creation, so that ‘religion’ and ‘holiness’ or ’sanctity’ can be devoted to some invisible, unexplainable, domain of God, or Heaven, whilst, down here, where we all actually exist, on Earth, it’s just ‘material stuff’”
I think that is a very important observation, and I had come to the same conclusion myself. Modern consumer society is very much a Judeo-Christian phenomenon. Contrary to popular belief, the Christian church did not oppose scientific inquiry, but supported it, despite friction cause by the new theories. Science underpins technology, and among other factors led to the industrial revolution.
It is notable that other cultures which hold that humans are spiritually bound to the Earth (reflecting physical reality) tend to have a more harmonious relationship with Nature. For whatever reason though, the modern materialist culture has broken that link.
A low growth culture can work, where it is recognised that there are a finite amount of resources to go round, and they should be shared fairly. Humans have a remarkable capacity for cooperation (when it suits them). The problem is that modern technology promises increasing wealth, and materialist culture tells us it is ok to go get it. This aligns with our evolutionary instinct.
So the question is, can the genie be put back in the bottle? I.e. make badgers sacred? My view is no, it is too late for that. Cultures are competitive, and any new religion which promises salvation but appears to adopt austerity is not likely to get a foothold.
A new culture is only likely to take over if the current civilisation collapses, which is an area I fundamentally disagree. I don’t think there is sufficient evidence to suggest that collapse is imminent, or even inevitable. Tainter says that complexity is a problem solving response, and we now have the most complex society ever. That implies we are also capable of solving very difficult problems. Only huge natural disasters like super volcanoes may present insurmountable obstacles. Either way, it is currently impossible to predict the future course of civilisation.
My worry is that the industrial machine will continue unabated, with eventually every available hectare of the planet under some form of human management, a “standing room only” scenario.
So faced with the twin problems of technological progress providing increasing wealth, and an evolutionary instinct to improve relative fitness, I say these are the vast forces that will sweep us along. But I don’t see collapse of industrial civilisation as inevitable. Possible maybe, but not inevitable. I also don’t see a pre-emptive attempt to instil a new culture has any chance of success against the vast forces. But I guess there is no harm in trying.