Do We Need a Militant Movement to Save the Planet (and Ourselves)?

[marmar]

AlterNet / By Tara Lohan

Do We Need a Militant Movement to Save the Planet (and Ourselves)?
Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Aric McBay call for new strategy to stave off environmental catastrophe.

August 6, 2011 |


Environmental groups are trying to build a critical mass around issues like global warming to inspire public action and encourage legislators to get their heads out of the sand. The Sierra Club is working to block new coal burning power plants, a new coalition is organizing actions against a tar sands pipeline, and folks in West Virginia are sitting in trees in an attempt to halt destructive strip mining. It's great work, but what if it's not enough? What if it's too little, too late? What if we never get enough mass for it to ever reach that critical point?

A new book called Deep Green Resistance, by Aric McBay, Lierre Keith, and Derrick Jensen, says that we likely won't have enough people interested in saving the planet before we run out of time. So, they're calling for a change in strategy. You may know Jensen from his many books, including Endgame. McBay is the author of Peak Oil Survival: Preparing for Life After Gridcrash, and Keith is the author of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability. The three long-time activists have teamed up to offer a more radical approach to our environmental crisis.

They use words like "militant" and "resistance," a lot. And they critique the Left, a lot. And they review the semantics of "violence." "I would urge the following distinctions," writes Keith, "the violence of hierarchy vs. the violence of self-defense, violence against actual people vs. violence against property, and the violence as self-actualization vs. the violence of political resistance."

And if you're firmly in the nonviolence-is-the-answer camp, don't get scared off (yet), because there is a ton of crucial information in this book. And just because they mention violence doesn't mean it's the best policy. You may not want to sign up to lead their underground army, but you should hear them out. Because the planet is being destroyed. Each day 200 species go extinct, Jensen writes in the preface. And if you can't wrap your head around that number, how about "90 percent of the large fish in the ocean are gone, there is ten times as much plastic as phytoplankton in the oceans, 97 percent of native forests are destroyed, 98 percent of native grasslands are destroyed ..." and Jensen continues with the bad news from there. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/environment/151918/do_we_need_a_militant_movement_to_save_the_planet_%28and_ourselves%29/

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[Altoid_Cyclist]

2. I'll have to read this book.

At this point, it should be obvious that our politicians (with some exceptions) are going to do whatever is in the best interests of developers, corporations and the US Chamber of Commerce.

When you see every day what is taking place in PA and realize that projects involving coal, natural gas, tar sands, seabed drilling, nuclear disasters, deforestation, MTR mining...etc are going on world wide, it might just be time to speed up remediation and conservation of the environment.

Hopefully, non-violent means will be able to persuade enough people that despite what the RW espouses, there is in fact only one planet Earth. We screw up this one past the tipping point, and we are all pretty much screwed. I hope that the next dominant species doesn't emulate us.

[Fantastic Anarchist]

3. All options must be **ON** the table. n/t

I'm tired of this pussy-footing around.

[snagglepuss]

4. Bkmrkd to read later. Thanks for posting. nt

[Pooka Fey]

5. The most important article that I have read since 2004. + 1 Trillion

Thanks for posting. This article is the real deal.

All our little perma-culture organic sustainable farms and transition town communities are not going to change jack fucking squat with the tar-sands pipeline coming on-line and mountaintop mining continuing, and fracking, new coal-fired energy plants being built. The Empire will continue until life on earth is dead. We have about a 12-20 year window, because the oceans are dying right now. At least ADMIT that! This author forces you to look at this truth and it hurts. And then they challenge the reader to consider what action he or she might be willing to undertake to influence this outcome.

[pscot]

6. Jensen is a prolific writer

Definitely worth a look. Good find.

[GliderGuider]

7. This gets a thoughtful rec from me as well

I don't think that resistance alone is going to bring down the global industrial empire that our civilization has become. Civilization has too much head start, too much power, and too much invested to "go gentle into that good night" without raging against any opposition with every means at hand. That said, there are growing signs of possibility. The industrial machine of empire is showing definite signs of strain and disintegration these days. If those stresses can be leveraged, perhaps we could hasten the process of disintegration enough to be useful. One of the obvious leverage points is oil. Now that Peak Oil has arrived, the oil infrastructure is a logical place to look for choke points.

Transition towns and permaculture won't stop the empire. Resistance won't do the job alone. Waiting for the whole teetering edifice to collapse under its own weight may take too long for much of the life on the planet, including the human beings who are already being crushed by its weight. Combining all three, though, holds interesting possibilities.

Relocalization/permaculture/alt.energy intiatives get people thinking about the situation, and how devastating the industrial empire is to both people and the planet. That always makes people more sympathetic to the idea of resistance, while the initiatives themselves plant the seeds of post-collapse sustainability. Growing local active resistance movements should find growing support in the awakened alternative culture communities. They would target vulnerable points in the local imperial infrastructure on an opportunistic basis. These opportunities will increase as the empire begins to disintegrate under its own weight.

The problem faced by all asymmetric resistance is the power of the entrenched opposition - which in this case will include a lot of ordinary people who prefer the benefits of empire. However, there will be increasing disaffection as circumstances deteriorate, and more of the general population will come over if they can see advantages in doing so. It's going to be a process of growth, education, mobilization and spreading action.

We need to start now. It's already to late for many people and much other life. There is no point waiting any longer.

[Lorien]

8. K & R! nt

[Lorien]

9. It's amazing to me how environmentalism has become a non-issue in this country

People just shrug their shoulders as old growth forests and entire mountains are completely wiped off the face of the earth. And the majority of Americans say that they "believe in God"? How can anyone who says that they revere a Deity also have complete contempt for what could be viewed as that Deity's creation? And on the flip-side, how can people who say that they believe in science NOT be doing everything that they can to halt the destruction of the planet? We get caught up in the news items du jour and completely ignore the fact that we are swiftly killing ourselves-it's insane.

[stuntcat]

12. the shrugs

Some of my closest relatives (only by marriage) are those people who can't even bother themselves to shrug when they're told about extinctions, mountains blown up, etc.

They're the "not even fish!?" people when I have to eat with them and they're making an example of my diet. And they're boaters.. people blow my mind.

The deaths will go up. 2050, the year I'll probably live to, will be a mess. All these people who consider themselves humanitarians and "pro-life" are busy making sure that the suffering then will be much much worse. blows my mind..

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. Ending not just industrial civilization, but all agriculture too, is a major revolution

TL: I hear a lot of talk about sustainable agriculture. In your view, is there any kind of agriculture that is sustainable?

LK: No, and I'm going to quote both Toby Hemenway, the permaculture guy, and Richard Manning, who is a wonderful scholar of prairies.Both use the same sentence, which is: Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron.

TL: So then we would be going back to a hunting/gathering system for food?

LK: You could have hunter/gatherer, you can have horticulturism, you could have pastoralism. In some way those are all variations on a theme. It's based on perennial polycultures. But the moment that you clear away those biotic communities, you destroy those perennial plants. Then, you are talking about agriculture, and that is inherently destructive.

I'd like to know what they define 'horticulturism' as; Google is not helpful in providing any definition. I suspect they would need a radically reduced population before they can get rid of agriculture, though the article doesn't mention population levels at all.

[GliderGuider]

11. "Horticulturism" in the primitivist lexicon just means gardening.

It's basically the end-point of the relocalization of the food supply, with the majority of our calories coming from gardens maintained by the eaters and their kin-groups. It's analogous to the relocalization of goods production back towards the owner-operator craft model.

Primitivist philosophers like Derrick Jensen and John Zerzan present a critique of the origins of "The Problem of Civilization" along with a proposal for what a sustainable end-state might look like, without worrying overmuch about how we get from here to there. I think we're going to be heading back in that direction once we get past the inflection point we are now entering. The inflection will be marked by a shift from expansion to contraction in most of the markers we use now to define "progress": industrial production, GDP and personal incomes, social complexity and the rule of law, energy consumption, the global food supply, and ultimately global population levels.

This change in the curve of social progress from a positive slope to a negative slope isn't going to be driven by top-down policy. Rather than driving change, policy shifts will generally be undertaken in response to changes that have already occurred. Local policies may be more proactive in some places, and may help to ease the transition, but I expect that most attempts to institute effective proactive policies - especially at national levels - will be strongly resisted by both the power elite and the grass roots because they will be seen as defeatist.

Ultimately I think that the world population has to settle at a level below (possible much below) one billion for it to be sustainable over the long term. How long it will take to get there depends on how much we have already damaged the planet. That tally is by no means complete yet, so we really don't know how bad the damage is, but the current signals are not encouraging. The more damage we have inflicted, the steeper the post-inflection decline will be and the lower our final population level. This is standard for species that are correcting from an overshoot condition.