Civilization is Doomed
…and it always was
If you are lucky and open-minded, you’ve probably read a book that changed your life, or at least changed your mind. I recently read a pair of books that, together, changed mine. Here is the lede: I was a huge believer in electric vehicles (I drive one) and solar and wind power to solve the climate crisis. And, in what may seem like a completely unrelated subject, I thought those animal rights activists who believe that animals should have the same rights as people were nutsy crazy. After reading these two books, I’ve flipped: I now believe that there is no solution to the climate crisis, and I have become one of those animal rights nutsy crazies. These two ideas are related through this conclusion: Civilization—even agriculture—were mistakes that led inevitably toward where we are, which is falling off the climate change cliff. Humanity needs to get back to nature.
These are the two books. They have my highest recommendation.
- Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It (Politics of the Living) by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert
- The Myth of Human Supremacy by Derrick Jensen
Here is a crummy picture of two of the co-authors:
You will note that both books are authored in full or in part by Derrick Jensen. Jensen is an environmental activist and ecophilosopher of about my own age, which is verging on old, depending on where you are coming from. (“Old” is always fiveyears older than me. Oh sh*t, I must be old to Jensen!) He is an environmentalist of the old school. Bright Green Lies starts out by decrying how, in the olden days, environmentalists were concerned with preserving nature; but today, so-called environmentalists seem to be concerned only with preserving our “way of life,” which is far isolated from nature.
The titular bright green lie is that our technology will save us from the crises that our technology has caused, where “technology” includes agriculture and civilization itself. (Both are human technologies and not natural phenomena.) For left-brain folk like myself, Bright Green Lies presents extensive analysis of how environmentally costly EVs, solar panels, and windmills are. Even if they deliver fully on their promises, the processes of manufacturing, deploying, servicing, and disposing of their physical infrastructure is costly and far from “green”. Beside the quantifiable (and, in the book, quantified) amounts of energy and pollution generated by these processes, you have to grant that all of their constituent materials are originally mined from the earth. What I learned from this book is that mining itself is one of our most environmentally destructive activities, not to mention their often being human rights disasters as well. Of course I know of mountain-top removal coal mining, but that will go away when we are switched to renewable energy sources. I hadn’t realized that mining for metal ores and all sorts of other materials is just as bad.
…in a mere 10,000 years, we’ve ruined it all
For right-brained folk like me (we’ve all go both sides of the brain, right?), we know that we come from nature, and that physiologically modern man thrived for 100,000 years before the invention of agriculture and civilization. But do we really think about the fact that in a mere 10,000 years, we’ve ruined it all? The secrets to thriving for 100,000 years, or millions of years like the dinosaurs, are to (1) be lucky and not have a large asteroid drop on your head, and (2) live in a way that leaves nature healthier for us having been there, rather than consuming nature as the basis of our society’s organization. As Jensen et. al. put it, the activity of modern industrial society, ultimately, is turning living things into dead things. Even agriculture does this: It takes a thriving, self-sustaining, diverse ecology and turns it into a soil-depleting monoculture that requires “farming” activity to be sustained in its unnatural state. Animals and indigenous peoples, contrariwise, live in harmony with nature, and their environments are better off for having them in it. Kumba-ya, my dudes and dudettes.
You see, the climate change crisis is not the real crisis, it is only a symptom. The real crisis is population overshoot: the fact that, every year, humanity consumes much more of the earth’s resources than the planet can regenerate. Oil and coal, our non-renewable energy sources, take millions of years to regenerate. We’ve decimated our forests and whale populations, so there go the “renewable” energy sources we depended on before coal. We’ve depleted so much of our arable soil, and so much more every year. It is the inevitable result of our modern civilization.
We so smart, we humans! We’ve built rockets to the moon and sent robots to Mars. We (sort of) understand quantum entanglement. We’ve eradicated so many terrible diseases. We invented lanuage, writing, and printing. And mathematics. We tamed fire and invented the wheel. Hooray for us! Animals so dumb, they ain’t done any of that.
But we so smart, we built a civilization that cannot last twenty thousand years. Dinosaurs lived for hundreds of millions of years. Humans live in cities, isolated from nature—except that they depend on having food and energy pumped in from the outside, ultimately from nature. Animals (and some humans) live in nature, and leave their habitat as strong when they die as it was when they were born. Who is really so smart, after all? This theme is introduced in Bright Green Lies and examined in detail in The Myth of Human Supremacy. I had to read it just because the title is so intriguing, but I found the argument absolutely convincing.
I don’t think there is any way through this
Bright Green Lies is subtitled, “How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It (Politics of the Living).” What We Can Do About It is form communities, source local, care for the environment where you live, blah blah blah. But really, I don’t think there is any way through this. The best we can do is try to soften the blow as civilization quickly collapses. Even if, by some miracle, we get past the worst of the climate crisis with civilization more or less intact, we’re still growing the population like crazy and way overshooting the earth’s carrying capacity for humans. It would only delay the inevitable.
Of course, there are solutions like let’s reduce population growth below replacement level. Let’s re-orient our businesses to prioritise sustainability rather than growth, let’s convert our farms to permaculture… But in a society where people will not even take a vaccine or wear stupid masks to control a deadly pandemic, there isn’t a chance in hell of any of that happening.
I’ve come to believe that our leaders in government and industry understand this doomsday scenario perfectly well, and that is why they are not taking effective action against climate change. They know the darkness is coming, so they might as well make hay while the sun shines. Sorry, poor metaphor, because we are getting way too much sun melting our glaciers, warming our oceans, and so on.
In researching (haha) this column, I checked out some of the professional and reader reviews of the books on Amazon. Turns out they are written much better (and more succinctly) than this article. So, if I haven’t convinced you to read one of these books or any other of their ilk, you might care to at least peruse some of those reviews. These books were mind-changing for me, and perhaps they will be for you as well.
