Let’s stop trying to save industrial civilisation, cross-posted by Eris Remblance and Max Wilbert

“Reading the book Bright Green Lies had a profound impact on me. It changed my perspective on industrial civilisation, the living world, the various deliberately inadequate interpretations of the term ‘sustainability’ and most of the climate movement. Here, with the authors’ permission, I share some excerpts from the book that I found particularly powerful, in most cases because we hear these kinds of statements very little, and the ‘bright green lies’ the authors make a case against, much more frequently. These excerpts are in full, with the only alteration being the endnote references, to keep them in numerical order. A word of warning: some people may find these excerpts confronting and/or upsetting.

“Bright Green Lies decentres industry, which is so often at the heart of climate ‘solutions’ and asks “what is best for the planet and ALL its inhabitants? What is true sustainability?” What becomes clear is that we cannot simply continue with business as usual. We must degrow our energy use and start defining “the good life” by less material and consumerist wants and more by connection, nature, joy, culture, art, music and conviviality.

“Bright Green Lies is nearly 500 pages long, and so these few excerpts do not do justice to the huge amount of work and information the authors, Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert, have brilliantly pulled together to make the case that industrial civilisation is the root cause of our ecological crises and therefore the solution lies in its dissolution, and not in technologies that attempt to continue it for as long as possible, causing more harm along the way. Nevertheless, I hope you find these excerpts as thought-provoking and as galvanising as I did, and that we can focus our energies on working towards what comes next, so that the inevitable transition causes the least amount of harm and protects as many human and nonhuman lives as possible. – Erin Remblance, Sydney-based co-creator of (re)Biz, writer and activist.

“The spectrum of environmentalism (p. xi):

Deep greens

The living planet and nonhumans both have the right to exist. Human flourishing depends on healthy ecology. To save the planet, humans must live within the limits of the natural world; therefore, drastic transformations need to occur at social, cultural, economic, political, and personal levels.

Bright greens

Environmental problems exist and are serious, but green technology and design, along with ethical consumerism, will allow a modern, high-energy lifestyle to continue indefinitely. The bright greens’ attitude amounts to: “It’s less about nature, and more about us.”

“Chapter 1: The problem (pp. 2-3)

We have a lot of numbers. They keep us sane, providing a kind of gallows’ comfort against the intransigent sadism of power: We know the world is being murdered, despite the mass denial. The numbers are real. The numbers don’t lie. The species shrink, their extinctions swell, and all their names are other words for kin: bison, wolves, black-footed ferrets.

Before me (Lierre) is the text of a talk I’ve given. The original version contains this sentence: “Another 120 species went extinct today.” The 120 is crossed clean through, with 150 written above it. But the 150 is also struck out, with 180 written above. The 180 in its turn has given way to 200. I stare at this progression with a sick sort of awe. How does my small, neat handwriting hold this horror? The numbers keep stacking up, I’m out of space in the margin, and life is running out of time.

(p. 18)

This way of living cannot last. And when it is over it would be far better that there be more of the world left rather than less. This is why our actions now are so important. What we do now determines what life is like—or, indeed, whether it exists at all—for those humans and nonhumans who come after us.

“Chapter 2: Solving for the wrong variable (pp. 20-23)

Once upon a time, environmentalism was about saving wild beings and wild places from destruction. “The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind,” Rachel Carson wrote to a friend as she finished the manuscript that would become Silent Spring. “That, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done.”[1] She wrote with unapologetic reverence of “the oak and maple and birch” in autumn, the foxes in the morning mist, the cool streams and the shady ponds, and, of course, the birds: “In the mornings, which had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, and wrens, and scores of other bird voices, there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marshes.”[2] Her editor noted that Silent Spring required a “sense of almost religious dedication” as well as “extraordinary courage.”[3] Carson knew the chemical industry would come after her, and come it did, in attacks as “bitter and unscrupulous as anything of the sort since the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species a century before.”[4] Seriously ill with the cancer that would kill her, Carson fought back in defense of the living world, testifying with calm fortitude before President John F. Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee and the U.S. Senate. She did these things because she had to. “There would be no peace for me,” she wrote to a friend, “if I kept silent.”[5]

Carson’s work inspired the grassroots environmental movement; the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); and the passage of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. Silent Spring was more than a critique of pesticides—it was a clarion call against “the basic irresponsibility of an industrialized, technological society toward the natural world.”[6]

Today’s environmental movement stands upon the shoulders of giants, but something has gone terribly wrong. Carson didn’t save the birds from DDT so that her legatees could blithely offer them up to wind turbines. We are writing this book because we want our environmental movement back.

Mainstream environmentalists now overwhelmingly prioritize saving industrial civilization over saving life on the planet. The how and the why of this institutional capture is the subject for another book, but the capture is near total. For example, Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute and Earth Policy Institute—someone who has been labeled as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers” and “the guru of the environmental movement”[7]—routinely makes comments like, “We talk about saving the planet.… But the planet’s going to be around for a while. The question is, can we save civilization? That’s what’s at stake now, and I don’t think we’ve yet realized it.” Brown wrote this in an article entitled “The Race to Save Civilization.”[8]

The world is being killed because of civilization, yet what Brown says is at stake, and what he’s racing to save, is precisely the social structure causing the harm: civilization. Not saving salmon. Not monarch butterflies. Not oceans. Not the planet. Saving civilization.

Brown is not alone. Peter Kareiva, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, more or less constantly pushes the line that “Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of people…. Conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to people.”[9]

Bill McKibben, who works tirelessly and selflessly to raise awareness about global warming, and who has been called “probably America’s most important environmentalist,” constantly stresses his work is about saving civilization, with articles like “Civilization’s Last Chance,”[10] or with quotes like, “We’re losing the fight, badly and quickly—losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.”[11]

We’ll bet you that polar bears, walruses, and glaciers would have preferred that sentence ended a different way.

In 2014 the Environmental Laureates’ Declaration on Climate Change was signed by “160 leading environmentalists from 44 countries” who were “calling on the world’s foundations and philanthropies to take a stand against global warming.” Why did they take this stand? Because global warming “threatens to cause the very fabric of civilization to crash.” The declaration concludes: “We, 160 winners of the world’s environmental prizes, call on foundations and philanthropists everywhere to deploy their endowments urgently in the effort to save civilization.”[12] Coral reefs, emperor penguins, and Joshua trees probably wish that sentence would have ended differently. The entire declaration, signed by “160 winners of the world’s environmental prizes,” never once mentions harm to the natural world. In fact, it never mentions the natural world at all…

“Afterword by Derrick Jensen (pp. 472-3)

This way of living will not and cannot last. What we do now determines how much of the planet remains later. We can voluntarily reduce the harm caused by this culture now, and work to create spaces where nature can regenerate, or we can continue to allow—indeed, to subsidize— further destruction of the planet’s ecological infrastructure. And while that may allow the economy to limp along a few more years, I guarantee that none of us—salmon, right whales, piscine life in the oceans, humans—are going to like where that takes us.

Here’s one final image, though, to carry us forward through these difficult times. As I write this, I see, across a small open space in this dense redwood forest, a mother bear lying on her back, head resting comfortably against the base of a tree. The tree—maybe 120 feet tall—is one of many resprouted after an old-growth redwood was cut here about 100 years ago. On the bear’s belly sprawl two cubs, suckling eagerly, stopping now and then, as children are wont to do, to squabble until she calms them with a soft sound. These bears, these trees, the flying squirrels who sometimes descend from the trees to check for scraps of food—and the magnificent dance between all of these beings and the thimbleberries, huckleberries, grasses, arthropods, fungi, and unseen bacteria—are here for now. And it is for them that I work, it is to them and not to the system destroying them that I give my loyalty to, it is to them and for them that I dedicate my life to.

That is the least I or any of us can do for the planet that—who— gave us our own lives, that—who—feeds us, clothes us, sings us awake in the mornings and to sleep at night—the planet who welcomes us at our beginnings and to whom we all return at our ends. And as Aldo Leopold, the father of wildlife ecology, made clear so many years ago, this is the right—and beautiful—thing to do.”