Heaven or Las Vegas?
We are not alone in this global, fragmented and incomplete sense of being.
For a while now, our ability to make the ‘necessary and important’ decisions (and choices) have been clearly undermined by mass centralization - of economic, technological, cultural and political power. Now that the whole world is ‘modern’ we find that humanity in general is stripped of ‘control’ or sometimes totally ‘out of control’. While the dominant culture has given us all sorts of mantras, from ‘Free Trade’ to ‘Eco Conscious’ to ‘Just Economics’ to ‘Gaia’s Revenge’ to ‘Fossil Fuel Treaty’ to ‘Stop-Burning-Stuff’ etc etc it is serving the forces which downsize social power, democracy and individual agency. Which was handed over to transnational institutions, private corporations and the elites with huge amounts of capital as well as messianic dreams. Virtually making way for a free rein to continue exploiting people, natural habitats and extraction (destruction) at a planetary scale. Yes, we know all that right?!
No surprise then, the above transition (1990 till now) lead to a range of problems, provoking conflicts, outbreak of wars, economic shocks and popular protests across the world, all pointing towards a timeline ‘destructive development’. History and evolution can be boring, yet those are the places to identify radical ideas and insights, cast aside by populism, techno-fix and liberal mantras.
For me, professionally and personally invested in ecology and environmental activism, ranging from the prosaic to the radical, has lead to a conflicted state of mind. To not be able to intelligently respond and contribute to the crisis. At an individual level ‘re-harmonize’ my relationship, in society and more importantly within nature. Yet I am not alone in this global, fragmented and incomplete sense of being. People have been struggling forever it seems. Digging deeper, here are three possible, rational, futures. Anarchist in nature, based on ecological ethics, above all else.
Grow or Die, or better just let it go?
”based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems” (Murray Bookchin 2006). Dealing with scientists, academics, climate activists, energy experts and an overall hard reductionist mindset, can be exhaustive, because the current crisis cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful “understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it”. In this aspect, mainstream science and solutionism become dangerous prospects, in terms of loyalty and accountability. Social theorist and Anarco-ecologist Murray Bookchin warned us decades ago, about the ongoing fragmentation by saying “To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today – apart, to be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes.”
A vast number of environmental organizations fail to understand or identify that hierarchy and power has permeated deep within every society, way deeper than science, rationalism and knowledge, which as a consequence has given rise to the very idea of dominating the natural world. Greenpeace.Org does not serve ecology anymore, instead it is about energy and economics. Yet the same is happening across institutions and policies.
Dare I say that saving wildlife, saving pandas and turtles, eco-spiritualism, mindfulness, organic products, just economics, returning to Gaia’s lap etc also equates to forms of domination, but appear cool and benevolent. What we ignore through all such mind consuming effort, is the brutal competitive imperative of ‘grow or die’ embedded deep within the very society we live in. “Thoroughly impersonal, self-operating mechanism”(Murray Bookchin 1996).
While a set of people blame technology and capitalism, others blame fossil fuels and climate change or the “combined overshoot” or some people even raise an imaginary ‘deity above the natural world’. But it does not make us any more capable, nor worthy of shaping the future. That has been given up to external forces which are anti-ecological by construct. Not any more, can such spiritual and technological redemption help us keep the natural world, the host planet in it’s current state. So really f*** these oxymoron labels like “green growth” “green opportunity” and “green energy”. A set of transitions, fronting the ‘global green scare’.
Without “new potentiality” ?
Perhaps it’s a ‘vast planetary drama’ sponsored by nature that we are witnessing, as climate change, global warming, mass extinction and the polycrisis together bash a troubled civilization, which is about energy and economics, practically divorced from ecology. In every respect, the so called “Gaia’s revenge” is stunning, shocking, gigantic and wondrous. A chaotic surge of events, which humans cannot control but at best roughly predict. It’s evolution is marked by increasing subjectivity and flexibility to survive, and perhaps re-adapt on an impoverished planet, instead of depending on technology and data-driven policies. Worth the underlying message about us as a species, about our complete ecological disregard, for centuries, is made clear in a recent essay by Prof. William Rees. “Overshoot is overshoot. Once your civilization starts to consume more than what naturally gets regenerated in its folly to pursue infinite growth on a finite planet, collapse is only a matter of time…”
Forever we have heard terms like “struggle for existence” or the “survival of the fittest”. Perhaps it explains why increasingly certain groups (human and nonhuman) have adapted to environmental change, more effectively than those who are less adaptive and flexible beings. Like “evolutionary dramas” that occurred millions of years ago, the evidence of which is carved in stone, in fossil record, a new unraveling has started yet again. The ‘fossilized juice’ of the planet that we extracted and burned for more than 150 years, accelerating civilization and many contra-evolutionary projects that are also beginning to unravel their real costs.
Humans are (supposed to be) intelligent, very self-conscious primates, who emerged, (and not diverged) from a long evolution of vertebrate life-forms. So if we as a species are one of the many outcomes of nature, part of life on earth, which is a continuous self-organizing process, once that sequence of evolutionary changes have crossed their potential, so are we as a species perhaps. We will always meet our needs and desires by altering the world around us. Without “new potentiality” and re-harmonizing with nature, we are done with in the long term.
Beavers build dams altering the landscape to make safer homes, and not excess energy. Birds migrate thousands of miles to reproduce and survive, and not overshoot. Certain sub-alpine Larch can live for more than 1500 years. The May-Fly has a life of just 24 hours to do everything it can. We must accept that every organism is rich, in terms of knowledge, experience, potential and cooperation. Almost every animal species is socialist.
Hence, how long are we here to dominate the planet? That question points to how we spell and meet our needs and desires. As of now well past all limits, showing no signs of control. Perhaps no one is in control anymore. Which may be good news after all. “New potentiality” simply means that every life is “self maintaining” and capable of inventing and changing, given the need and opportunity.
Absence of heart
“including the extractions, the exterminations, the migrations, the medicines, the systems of governance, systems of communication… I think truly no one on earth, no human being, and I would really argue, no organism, no living being on this earth is untouched by what emerged from the mid 20th century and beyond, that I call a kind of cyborg worlding. So it's ongoing but doesn't remain the same. It's dynamic, it’s protean, it’s contestable. Knowing something's origins does not determine what happens next…” (Donna Haraway and Ayana Young ‘Staying With The Trouble’ 2022). Virtually impossible to argue that impact of technology and human proliferation on the earth, except maybe the last standing non-modern people living in Andaman and Nicobar (India) or the Yanomami (Brazil) or the Pacific islanders of Tikopia. Point being, this form of cyborg-civilization, of men worshiping technology like their ancestors did so with sky gods, is in deep trouble, perhaps because it lacks imagination, ecological values and shows ‘absence of heart’.
For someone not so convinced by the given set of promises and practices, what becomes necessary is to open up imagination and “to invent new practices for a world which can yet be but is not yet…” (Donna Haraway). Divesting from the Anthropocene, with a kind of urgency, moving towards ecological limits, next to the critters and not on top of them! Ecology is about our relations to plants, to animals, to creatures invisible and the entire ecosystem. Find pleasure and bonding, as what Haraway calls “making kin” - enriching both humans and non-human, animals and their technologies, world making, extending to all critters and organisms. Also evicting man from the top of the evolutionary pyramid. Start by thinking that the established order is not necessary. Men who dominate nature, also dominate people.
Depending on our strategic location in a struggle, we have to adopt different methods, interventions, languages and imagination. That itself begins to expose new possibilities, in order to divest from and possibly dismantle a given system, policies based on expansion, growth and technology.
Heaven or Las Vegas? Like Energy or Economics? None. Panic or Profit? While sitting inside an ivory tower or a global climate summit or zoom conference it’s easy to panic or live it like a lifestyle. What we can’t do any further, is use our biological and survival skills, and address our needs, at a personal and social level. Their “change or die” imperative is anthropocentric and techno-centric, which is clearly contra ecology. We are missing “evolutionary development” (Bookchin 1998) that involves thought, questioning, discovery, choice, defense, decision making, kinship and many organic processes. Things which are vital for each of us, and cannot be outsourced to the “climate frenzy” backed by big and small institutions.
For a long while, in the march of a not-so-great-civilization, men and women behaved preposterously as the “dominant species”. Lacking ecological sense and knowledge while serving economics, energy and empire. And as a consequence the current and future generations face the possibility of collapse. To believe one idea and attack the opposing ones appears shallow if not regressive. Solutionism is a mask, for the damage ‘they’ inflict on the planet as a whole, is at the very heart of the ecological crisis. It is not going anywhere and getting worse.
Of the thousands of scientific articles published on a daily basis which speak of new energy and new transitions based on that premise, totally disregard ecological impact. The word “ecology” itself shows up less and less in international discourses, instead technological fixes, power and arrogance, all the while embracing all sorts of “we are all gonna die now…” fantasies. Mainstream environmentalism, in it’s current form is totally anti-ecological.
Energy, new or old still equates to tearing down ecosystems, hollowing out ocean floors, further polluting the entire biosphere and carrying on with domination (business as usual). To serve energy and economics in their current form, equates to being essentially anti-ecological and anti-planetary.
Love your graphics! Insightful AND funny!