The edges of a dying system start crumbling first. (The word “dying” is relative. We are all “dying” as each day we move along time’s arrow in the only direction we can. No going back.) But there is a point where the word “dying” takes on real significance. Using words like “cancer” is an indication of this
Chris Hedges’ article The Cancer in Occupy captured my attention when he quoted Derrick Jensen about the “Black Bloc” (which, it seems he didn’t really understand very well; mainly, confusing an adjective for a noun in referring to “the Black Bloc” when he was really referring to unaffiliated and alienated punks who just like to break things for no good reason.)
Derrick Jensen is someone that needs paying attention to - not as a model, but as a warning; as an inhabitant and instigator of one of those crumbling edges of our dying system. And Chris Hedges, occupying a prominent position in the public eye, has the power to expand the sphere of influence of those who are instigating the crumbling. Derrick Jensen is a danger to OWS; perhaps, even a greater danger than those stupid punks dressed in black which Hedges consider to be a “cancer.”
If you were young and idealistic, watched the Inauguration with tears in your eyes, truly believed in “Hope” and “Change” and, especially, were deeply concerned with the state of the ecosystems of the planet, and then experienced the political reality that you had merely exchanged a Democratic method for enriching the already wealthy for the more extreme Republican one, you might have become deeply disillusioned. Perhaps even feeling an overwhelming sense of powerlessness, hopelessness and despair.
This is where Derrick Jensen comes in. He offers an outlet for this despair, powerlessness and hopelessness, called “Deep Green Resistance.” It’s the politics of green despair. To be honest, I agree with a lot of what Jensen says about the evils of civilization. And I count myself as one of those disempowered, isolated people who are tempted by apocalyptic fantasies, so I understand the danger Jensen represents. But I am unable to follow his cult into the deep green promised fantasy-land he preaches.
He claims that everything about civilization - and I mean everything about civilization: electricity, plumbing, medicine, music, books and, especially, science and the scientific method and the “objectification” science inculcates into all its victims (yes, we are “victims” of scientific objectification) – is “irredeemable.”
Premise Six: Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.
Premise Seven: The longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after.
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I would like to say that science is the worst, second worst, or third worst thing ever to happen to the planet, with monotheism and agriculture being the other two, but actually all three are different aspects of the same thing.
– Derrick Jensen
These days the most prominent statistic that particularly lights up my feelings of powerlessness and despair is the present population of my species – 7 billion and growing rapidly. From 1999 to 2012 there were an additional one billion humans added to the planet:
I challenge the environmentalists all the time, and I say, look every 13 years there's another billion people. Add up all the environmental--all that conservation, that environmentalists have ever done, all the restoration, add that up and compare that to a footprint of a billion people in 13 years. It's not in the same--you're just not in the same ballpark and yet that message doesn't get through. - Dr. Robert Wyman
So, in my nightmares, I see a hellish place of heat, deserts and feral animosity among starving billions while the top few million, in their estates on the shores of the Arctic Ocean guarded by the best military technology money can buy, hunker down and wait for all the rabble to die. And I feel powerless to stop this nightmare from taking place. And I become revolted by the prancing and pandering electoral kabuki being performed on the deck of this Titanic.
So what am I to do with these feelings of despair, isolation and powerlessness? Do I enlist in Derrick Jensen’s army of Deep Green Resistance and throw my vital energies against the wall of an anarcho-primitivist return to a Golden Stone Age of romantic idealistic fantasy and spend my meager cash on workshops and “trainings” aimed at “bringing down civilization.”
I readily admit I don’t like what civilized humans have become on a global scale. I don’t like Wall Street greed. I don’t like the self-important manipulations engaging in by those who are supposed to be our leaders. I don’t like the $30,000, $60,000, … a plate fund-raising dinners to finance mass market ad campaigns to win election to do-nothing bodies of rhetoricians who claim to represent us but only pretend to do so while actually representing the interests of their big, wealthy donors – the famous 1%.
We cannot predict where the massive stupidity of the economic and political assumptions we operate under at present will leave us in the coming decades. But civilization, our minds, the echoing magnificence of Bach’s B-minor mass, Michaelangelo’s David, the works of Aristotle, the equations of Einstein’s relativity – these are worthy of consideration and, in my opinion, make civilization eminently redeemable.
It is hard to argue with those who say, with the present population of 7 billion and climbing, bringing about a quick and abrupt end to civilization would cause the deaths of billions of people. They go on to say that actively advocating this and taking actions to make it happen is advocating and taking action to cause mass murder on an unprecedented scale.
These deep green eco-warriors would have us "take down civilization" and inhabit the planet in a Stone Age hunter-gatherer utopia. Total human population in the Stone Age was never more than 100 million - probably more like 10 million. With today's degraded ecosystems and without the infrastructures of civilization; like industrial agriculture (or agriculture itself - since they want to return to pre-agricultural times), sanitation systems, modern medicine, and all other civilized infrastructure it is doubtful the earth could support more than 10 million hunter-gatherers.
What do these eco-warriors propose to do with the other 6,990,000,000 people on the planet? And do they really think that if they succeeded in their goal (which is physically and practically impossible) that those lucky 10 million inhabiting their utopia would be hunter-gatherer eco-warriors who blew up dams? If they succeeded and those 6,990,000,000 people "disappeared" the 10 million left would certainly not be eco-warrior hippies. They would be the last remnants of the wealthy elite who had invested their billions into surviving the apocalypse.
It is massively hypocritical for Derrick Jensen and other Deep Green primitivists to go around training eco-warriors to destroy the infrastructure of civilization without first, and intensely and heavily, pushing birth control. Every piece of material they hand out should contain condoms and every training should start with ways of empowering and educating women and girls in ways to avoid pregnancy. In fact, they should all turn their warrior energies into volunteering for Planned Parenthood. But this doesn’t fit into the sentimentalist, nihilistic war they would like to wage on patriarchal civilization by doing heroic things like blowing shit up.
I'm not sure what kind of disease this would represent for OWS, but I'd say it's a pretty serious one.