Derrick Jensen: World at Gunpoint

[GliderGuider]

I blow hot and cold on Derrick Jensen, but when he's right, he's right.

World at Gunpoint

A FEW MONTHS AGO at a gathering of activist friends someone asked, “If our world is really looking down the barrel of environmental catastrophe, how do I live my life right now?” The question stuck with me for a few reasons. The first is that it’s the world, not our world. The notion that the world belongs to us—instead of us belonging to the world—is a good part of the problem.

The ... most important reason the question stuck with me is that it’s precisely the wrong question. By looking at how it’s the wrong question, we can start looking for some of the right questions. This is terribly important, because coming up with right answers to wrong questions isn’t particularly helpful.

So, part of the problem is that “looking down the barrel of environmental catastrophe” makes it seem as though environmental catastrophe is the problem. But it’s not. It’s a symptom—an effect, not a cause. Think about global warming and attempts to “solve” or “stop” or “mitigate” it. Global warming (or global climate catastrophe, as some rightly call it), as terrifying as it is, isn’t first and foremost a threat. It’s a consequence. I’m not saying pikas aren’t going extinct, or the ice caps aren’t melting, or weather patterns aren’t changing, but to blame global warming for those disasters is like blaming the lead projectile for the death of someone who got shot. I’m also not saying we shouldn’t work to solve, stop, or mitigate global climate catastrophe; I’m merely saying we’ll have a better chance of succeeding if we recognize it as a predictable (at this point) result of burning oil and gas, of deforestation, of dam construction, of industrial agriculture, and so on. The real threat is all of these.

Finally we get to the point. Those who come after, who inherit whatever’s left of the world once this culture has been stopped—whether through peak oil, economic collapse, ecological collapse, or the efforts of brave women and men fighting in alliance with the natural world—are not going to care how you or I lived our lives.

They’re not going to care whether we voted Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, or not at all. They’re not going to care if we wrote really big books about it. They’re not going to care whether we had “compassion” for the CEOs and politicians running this deathly economy. They’re going to care whether they can breathe the air and drink the water. They’re going to care whether the land is healthy enough to support them.

What question would I ask instead? What if, instead of asking “How shall I live my life?” people were to ask the land where they live, the land that supports them, “What can and must I do to become your ally, to help protect you from this culture? What can we do together to stop this culture from killing you?” If you ask that question, and you listen, the land will tell you what it needs. And then the only real question is: are you willing to do it?

more at the link

Listen to the world around you. It will tell you what you need to do.

[joshcryer]

1. George Carlin has it right...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw

For me environmentalism is about saving people, saving our species, not about saving some abstract idea of what we should be. By saving ourselves we allow the natural ecosystem to exist essentially irrespective of our actions.

Jensen wants us to be a certain way and he creates a defacto standard of the future that cannot be changed (through his own ignorance of science and ecology).

Generally abstract non-sense that calls for direct action against civilization (and long jail terms if you get caught). All over an idea that is extraoridinarily insignificant.

[IrateCitizen]

2. Personally, I prefer Orlov's entropic destruction to Jensen's

Jensen presupposes that the status quo will remain a stable system into the near-to-intermediate future. I don't think it will.

We're already seeing the first steps in this direction, and not from the standpoint of any government mandate or program. Rather, the first steps come from the collective and individual decisions among the American populace to stop borrowing (well, maybe that's not always a choice anymore), stop spending and start saving. Considering that our economy is something like 70% dependent upon consumer spending, it doesn't seem that consumers are going to help the economy rebound anytime soon. Still, the economic orthodoxy in Washington, personified in Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke, announces that we have to "unlock the credit markets" and "get the real estate market stabilized" and the like. The point is that none of this matters now that the binge on credit and debt of the past 25 years has come due, and households are hunkering down and saving for a rainy day rather than spending now.

Dimitry Orlov summarizes the self-reinforcing loop of orthodox thought in the face of crisis in this article: Boondoggles to the Rescue!. What Orlov correctly recognizes -- and it is likely his training as an engineer that forms the basis of this -- is that complex, streamlined systems are extremely vulnerable to the introduction of entropy, because their lack of redundancy makes any single shock gum up the gears (i.e. the run-up in oil prices last year and the consequent economic meltdown). Jensen seems to think that smashing the edifice of the system will bring it crashing down. I disagree -- it's showing serious signs of collapsing under its own weight. I think that it's much more productive for me to spend time working in my vegetable gardens and listening to the birds sing than to smash the looms, whatever my own personal Luddite tendencies may be.

[GliderGuider]

3. What appeals to me most about this article

is Jensen's explicit recognition that what we tend to see as a series of threats is actually a series of consequences. And IMO the source of those consequences lies much deeper in the human biocultural matrix than spending patterns or who we elect/appoint to oversee us (those are after all simply consequences as well).

Over the medium or longer term it doesn't matter whether the coming changes are driven by JM Greer's catabolic collapse, or Jensen's monkeywrenching, or failure cascades brought on by the intrinsic brittleness of complex systems, or a relatively benign descent into dissolution brought on by a mix of myopia and complacency, or an outburst of self-destructive social insanity triggered by the subliminal perception of the walls closing in. We will experience each of all of these in different places at different times as we transition to a new equilibrium point in our fitness landscape. What is inevitable is that a new equilibrium will be achieved, which will of course last only until conditions change yet again.

What is productive for each of us will vary, depending on our individual circumstances, resources, skills and psychology. Some will garden, some will become teachers, some will become policy analysts, some will work on Polywell reactors, some will smash the looms. Most will just keep on driving the kids to their piano lessons, and that's OK too.

[joshcryer]

4. oops replied to the wrong person

sorry

[joshcryer]

6. I don't think we see these things as threats as much as consequences. See the modern green movement.

What we see is that we have consequences for our actions and what we believe is that they are mitigatable. Jensen, and presumbably you and the other poster, believe that we cannot mitigate these problems that we have caused. That a billion or more people are destined to die, and that civilization cannot be sustainable. This is a pretty absolutist position, which, for better or worse, will eventually be proven out (right or wrong).

[joshcryer]

5. How does this apply to industrial civilization?

At least Jensen is correct that the status quo will fight for the resources in the event of collapse. And they will likely maintain their existance for quite some time (at least until alternatives are created). In the end I don't see how industrialism applies to ancient societies without higher knowledge of their world, who maintained a conservative approach to progress in order to concentrate their power.

Industrial civilization is constantly progressing and changing, it can't fall apart as easily as those ancient civilizations.