Environmentalists call for end of industrialized civilization
August 8, 2011
In their book Deep Green Resistance, Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Aric McBay, say the only way to save the planet is to eliminate all vestige of industrial civilization, even if it means the deaths of millions.
Their answer - humanity must return to the primitive lifestyles found in indigenous cultures.
In an article at AlterNet, Tara Lohan writes:
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."Lohan, accepting the premise that the "planet is being destroyed," and "200 species go extinct" every day (based on nothing other than the preface of the book), she claims all life on earth may be gone in 20 years.
According to the writers of the latest anti-human environmentalist manifesto, industrial civilization is the culprit - and it must be destroyed by any means necessary.
But how can an environmental activist go about doing that?
Lohan writes:
"Their 500-plus page book attempts to map out a strategy for their vision and also provide a critique of historical resistance movements — what works, what doesn't work."Lierre Keith told Lohan in a telephone interview:
So what we have right now is the alternative culture, but what we need is a culture of resistance — we need a culture that is self-consciously oppositional to things like corporate power, capitalism, industrialization and ultimately civilization, because that is the arrangement of power on this planet right now.Reading Keith's response, one might be tempted to say there's already a movement in place actively pursuing these very goals - and they currently hold a majority in the Senate and own the Oval Office.
Co-author Derrick Jensen called for active resistance with the ultimate goal being the total breakdown of capitalism. Again, one can argue there are organizations already in place pursuing those very goals. We know them better as public sector unions, and they have already made their presence felt in places like Wisconsin.
When asked how people would survive in a world without technology, industry or capitalism, the environmentalists' answers also varied.
According to Aric McBay:
If we are talking about a post-industrial society, then I think we have to draw on the examples of traditional, indigenous societies, so I think the answer will look very different, depending on where you live and what your landbase is. So, if I'm here on an island in the St. Lawrence River, where I am now, then my answer to that question will be very different than if I live where Lierre and Derrick are on the coast of California, or if I live in the Amazon rainforest. I think one of the problems with industrial society in general is that it tries to come up with some answer that it can impose everywhere on the planet, and that just doesn't work. But in general, I think that the kind of society we would envision is based on democratic, small communities that can obtain their food locally and use energy that the land around them can provide.What about growing one's own food? Forget it, they say.
According to Keith, "Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron."
"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," Keith said
"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," he added.
To accomplish their goal, the three said they would fight for dispossession of property - in essence, do exactly what the communists did in Russia when they first took over.
They also discussed "direct attacks on infrastructure," and said "that's the strategy we are proposing."
"If you can show me a million people who are willing to blockade oil depots day after day and willing to block roads into West Virginia to stop mountaintop removal day after day after day, we can talk about using nonviolence, because I think it's a very elegant political technique," Keith said.
Jensen was asked about his position that "all the people associated with the Gulf Spill should be executed."
He responded:
If I were to write that now, I would take out the word "all" and put in the word "many." A couple of jokes I used to tell that aren't that funny: What do you get when you cross a long drug habit, a quick temper and a gun? The answer is two life terms for murder, earliest release date 2026. On the other hand, what do you get when you cross two nation states, a large corporation, three tons of poison and 8,000 dead human beings? The answer is, retirement with full pay and benefits.The overall strategy they envision is a two-pronged one - and again, the argument could be made that some are already using these strategies, but for a far different reason. McBay explained:
I think the strategy is two-pronged. On one hand, we need to build up egalitarian communities, movements for democracy, local self-sufficiency, a lot of the things that progressives are trying to do right now, things like the Transition Town movements. But then, at the same time, we actually need to have another prong, and their job is to break things down, to break down the structures that are destroying the planet. You can't just have one. You can't just have people building their own alternative communities. You know, I live on an organic farm, we grow most of our own food, and we build soil with perennial polycultures and all of that sort of thing, but if we don't stop runaway global warming, then none of this is going to work. We just had several weeks without rain, and that is without severe climate change. The grass was all yellow, and the cows were very thirsty. So we can't just have one side of the prong, because the communities that we're trying to build won't survive.Paul Wilson writes at Newsbusters:
Their goal is the grandiose mission of saving the world from humans who are destroying the planet. They declare that that "industrial civilization is incompatible with life" - ignoring the fact that civilization protects and sustains human life. But in their vision, humanity is no more worthwhile from any other form of life. In the famous words of PETA president Ingrid Newkirk, "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy."One should also remember these are the type of people who once signed a petition banning water at a U.N. conference on climate change.
Yet rantings of people like Keith, Jensen, and McBay are taken seriously by the radical left, since Alternet proved willing to interview them sympathetically. Environmentalists such as Paul Watson, who infamously declared that humanity was the "AIDS of the earth," are among the heroes in the pantheon of the radical left.
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