Earth at Risk

Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet

Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith

• Publisher: Flashpoint Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781604868197
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Plaidoyer politique

"In America, four hundred people own the wealth of more than half of the American population. We should not be saying tax the rich, but instead we should be saying take their money and redistribute it, take their property and redistribute it."
—Arundhati Roy

Industrial civilization is devouring the planet and the future. The oceans are acidifying, whole mountains have been laid to waste, and the climate is teetering into chaos. Every biome is approaching collapse. And fifty years of environmentalism hasn't even slowed the rate of destruction. Yet environmentalists are not considering strategies that might actually prevent the looming biocide we are facing.

Until Earth at Risk.

Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet is an annual conference featuring environmental thinkers and activists who are willing to ask the hardest questions about the seriousness of our situation. The conference is convened by Derrick Jensen, acclaimed author of Endgame, who has argued that we need a resistance movement against civilization itself.

The twelve people in this volume present an impassioned critique of the dominant culture from every angle: William Catton Jr. explains ecological overshoot; Thomas Linzey gives a fiery call for community sovereignty; Jane Caputi exposes patriarchy's mythic dismemberment of the Goddess; Aric McBay discusses historically effective resistance strategies; and Stephanie McMillan takes down capitalism. One by one, they build an unassailable case that we need to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. These speakers offer their ideas on what can be done to build a real resistance movement, one that includes all levels of direct action—action that can actually match the scale of the problem.

Earth at Risk includes:

• Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame, A Language Older than Words, and many others.
• Lierre Keith, author of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability; coauthor of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet.
• Nora Barrows-Friedman, journalist and photographer; correspondent for outlets such as The Electronic Intifada, Al Jazeera, and Truthout.org.
• Jane Caputi, author of The Age of Sex Crime; Gossips, Gorgons, and Crones: The Fates of the Earth; and Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power and Popular Culture.
• William Catton Jr., sociologist, author of Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, and Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse.
• Gail Dines, a founding member of Stop Porn Culture, author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality.
• Thomas Linzey, executive director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.
• Aric Mcbay, coauthor of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet.
• Stephanie Mcmillan, cartoonist; author of The Beginning of the American Fall; organizer for the anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist collective One Struggle.
• Riki Ott, marine biologist, author of Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill.
• Arundhati Roy, author of An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire; Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers; and many others.
• Waziyatawin, historian and anti-colonial activist, author of For Indigenous Eyes Only; What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland; and other books.

Lierre Keith

“The ruling religion of this planet is called patriarchy. We will not save life on earth until we dismantle masculinity.”

Derrick Jensen: Lierre Keith is a writer and radical feminist activist. She’s the author of two novels as well as The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, which has been called the most important ecological book of this generation. She is coauthor of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet.

Lierre, what is the problem with civilization?

Lierre Keith: Civilization depends on agriculture. So first, you have to understand what agriculture is. In very brute terms, you take a piece of land, you clear every living thing off it, and I mean down to the bacteria, and then you plant it to human use. So agriculture is biotic cleansing.

There are two problems with this. The first one is that it lets the human population grow to really big numbers, because instead of sharing that land with millions of other creatures, you’re only growing humans on it. The second problem is that it destroys the soil. And soil is the basis of life; well, land life anyway. We owe our entire existence to six inches of soil and the fact that it rains. So except for the last forty-six remaining tribes of hunter-gatherers, the human race has now made itself dependent on an activity that is destroying the planet. This is not a plan with a future. It’s drawdown. And what’s being drawn down is fossil soil, fossil water, and species. Entire ecosystems are being drawn down. But the soil is the point here.

In one season of planting a basic row crop—rice or corn or wheat—you can run through two thousand years of soil. On the first day of the Dust Bowl, there were farms that lost all of their topsoil in one day. So this is drawdown in a huge way. Think of Iraq—this is the very first place that agriculture started. I don’t think anyone in their right mind could call it the Fertile Crescent anymore. Or think of Iran: 94 percent of the land has been degraded. Or China: the dust storms from China are so bad now that they are creating asthma in children in Denver, Colorado. The dust comes across the Pacific, hits the mountains, and comes down. That’s how much dust.

Again, when you destroy soil, you’re destroying the basis of life. And Jared Diamond, who won a Pulitzer Prize, said that agriculture was the biggest mistake the human race has ever made. Toby Hemenway calls sustainable agriculture an oxymoron, and Richard Manning uses exactly the same sentence. Manning is worth quoting. He writes, “No biologist, or anyone else for that matter, could design a system of regulations that would make agriculture sustainable. Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron. It mostly relies on an unnatural system of annual grasses grown in a monoculture, a system that nature does not sustain or even recognize as a natural system. We sustain it with plows, petrochemicals, fences, and subsidies, because there is no other way to sustain it.”

Burn those four sentences into your brain.

Agriculture is the most destructive thing that people have done to the planet. I’m going to repeat that: agriculture is the single most destructive human activity.

Remember what agriculture is. You pull down the forest, you plow up the prairie, you drain the wetland, you destroy the living communities that our planet would naturally create. And what used to be habitat for millions of creatures, doing that basic work of life, turns into salt and dust. Agriculture is carnivorous; it eats entire ecosystems. And that is what it has done around the globe.

To state the obvious, no culture that is destroying the basis of life itself can be called sustainable. Really, it can only be called insane.

Agriculture has run through every continent. Well, all of them except Antarctica. But that’s okay, we’ll get that one with global warming. Actually, agriculture marks the beginning of global warming. It’s also the beginning of militarism, and it depends upon slavery. In the seven centers where agriculture began, human societies follow the same pattern, and it’s called civilization. To use a really basic definition, that just means “life in cities.” But when I say civilization, it is not a good thing. It’s people living in settlements big enough that they require the importation of resources. They have used up what the land upon which they live can give them. They need more. So they have to go out and get whatever it is they need—food, water, energy—because they’ve used up their own. By definition, they have overshot their landbase. This is the pattern of civilization everywhere. There’s a bloated power center surrounded by conquered colonies, from which the power center takes what it wants.

Agricultural societies end up militarized—and they always do—for three reasons. The first is that agriculture creates a surplus, and if it can be stored, it can be stolen. Somebody has to guard it. Those people are called soldiers.

The second problem is imperialism. Agriculture is essentially a war against the natural world. It’s inherently destructive, and eventually the agriculturalists use up what they have—their soil, their trees, and their water. They’ve got to go out and get those from somewhere else, but people do not willingly give up their land, their water, their trees. Since the power center needs those things, there’s an entire class of people whose job is to go out and get them. Agriculture makes that possible. It also makes it inevitable.

Problem number three, of course, is slavery. Agriculture is backbreaking labor. For anyone in an agricultural society to have leisure, there need to be slaves. We’ve lost the cultural memory of this because we’ve been using fossil fuel to do that labor for the last hundred and fifty years. But by the year 1800, fully three-quarters of people on the planet were in some form of indenture, slavery, or serfdom. Three-quarters. That’s how much labor it takes to do this. The only reason we’ve forgotten that is because we’re using machines now. But I guarantee you, when the fossil fuel runs out, we’re going to remember exactly how much labor is involved.

Once huge numbers of the population are in slavery, someone has to keep them there, and that would be the soldiers. This is a cycle we’ve been in for ten thousand years.

Here is why the agriculturalists will always win, at least in the short term. It takes six hundred old growth trees to make a tall ship. If you are willing to destroy your forests, you’re going to win against the people who aren’t willing to destroy theirs. Eventually you’re going to have to conquer the people who aren’t willing to destroy their trees, so you can take them. That’s the last ten thousand years in two sentences.

By the year 1950, this planet was out of topsoil. What happened next was the Green Revolution, and that was based on fossil fuel. At this point, if you’re eating grain, you’re eating oil on a stalk. You’re not just eating fossil soil, you’re eating fossil fuel. It takes somewhere in the neighborhood of three to four tons of TNT per acre to keep the average American farm running. Iowa alone uses the energy equivalent of four thousand Nagasaki bombs every year. That’s how much energy goes into this.

The very creation myth of Western civilization tells men to dominate, to conquer, to go forth and multiply. No hunter-gatherer is told by god to willfully overshoot the landbase, and no marginally rational person would listen to such a god. But that is what we are up against. This is a culture of profound entitlement, based on a masculine violation imperative. That imperative includes violating the sexual boundaries of women and children; the biological boundaries of rivers and forests; the genetic boundaries of other species; and ultimately, the physical boundaries of the atom itself.

The ruling religion of this planet is called patriarchy. We will not save life on earth until we dismantle masculinity. You will be punished for saying that out loud. But we have got to gather up our courage and do it anyway, because our planet really is at stake.

Derrick: When you talk about the masculine “imperative to violate,” you’re not talking about biology.

Lierre: No, patriarchy takes a group of people who are biologically male and turns them into a social class of people called “men.” Masculinity has nothing to do with biologically what you are or aren’t. This is a political arrangement. It’s not natural, it was not created by god. It’s a corrupt and brutal arrangement of power.

Derrick: So what do we need?

Lierre: Well, if this is a war, we need a resistance movement. One of my favorite people from history is Christabel Pankhurst, the strategic genius behind the British Suffragist movement who said, “We know that relying solely on argument, we wandered for forty years politically in the wilderness. We know that arguments are not enough and that political force is necessary.” My other favorite is Frederick Douglass, who said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Again, if this is a war, we need a resistance movement. Ask yourself this question: do you think this war is a metaphor, or is it real?

Now, there are a substantial number of people on the Left who would say, well, not only is this war a metaphor, but I’m using the wrong metaphor. There’s no enemy, there’s no us and them, there are only well-meaning, if wounded, people.

That cuts right to the main division between liberals and radicals. The liberals believe that society is made up of individuals. In this view, individualism is so sacrosanct that being identified as a member of a group or class is insulting. On the radical side, it’s totally different. And we owe this debt to Karl Marx, whether we’re Marxist or not. He’s the one who figured out that society is not made up of individuals, it’s made up of classes of people. His insight was about economic class, but this includes any group or caste. And some of those groups have power over other groups. So this is not an individual condition. Being a member of a group is not any kind of an affront. Far from it. Identifying with a group of people is the first step toward political consciousness, and ultimately, effective action. You make common cause with the people who share your condition.

The other big division is in the nature of social reality. Liberalism is idealist. In this view, social reality is made up of ideas, of attitudes, and therefore social change happens through rational argument and education.

But on the radical side, society is organized by concrete systems of power. Not thoughts and ideas, but material conditions, material institutions. So for radicals, the solution to oppression is to take those systems apart brick by brick. The liberals say we have to educate, educate, educate, and the radicals say, “No, actually we have to stop them.” When power is removed from the equation—as it is in the liberal view—oppression looks voluntary, which erases the fact that it’s social subordination. I think often of Harriet Tubman, who said, “I’ve freed hundreds of slaves and I could have freed hundreds more, if they had but known they were slaves.” That is a very poignant way to say the same thing.

People withstand oppression using three psychological methods: denial, accommodation, and consent. Anyone on the receiving end of domination learns early in life to stay in line or risk the consequences. And those consequences only have to be applied once in a while to be effective. From that point forward, the traumatized psyche will police itself. So, if they had but known they were slaves. Any show of resistance is met with a continuum that starts with derision, and ends with out and out violence.

But resistance does happen somehow. Once some understanding of oppression is gained, most people are called to action. And I think that’s our hardest job as radicals: breaking through that denial, accommodation, and consent.

There are four broad categories of response to injustice: legal remedies, direct action, withdrawal, and spirituality. These categories can overlap in ways that are crucial to resistance movements; all of them can also be diversions that dead-end. None of them are definitively liberal or radical in themselves. If you walk away with nothing else from this, that’s what I want you to remember. All four of these categories have key strengths for resistance movements, but we have to understand them strategically.

Before I describe the four responses to injustice, I want to reiterate this: social change requires force. Why? Because it’s not a mistake out of which the powerful can be educated.

Don’t misunderstand me, please. When I say force, it does not have to mean violence. This is not about violence versus nonviolence. Whether to wage your struggle using violent or nonviolent tactics is a decision that comes much later. Nonviolence is a very elegant political tactic when understood and used correctly. This is only to recognize that power is not a mistake, it’s not a misunderstanding, it’s not a disagreement. Justice is not won by rational argument, by personal transformation, or by spiritual epiphany. It’s won by taking power away from the powerful and then dismantling their institutions.

So, the four categories of response. The first category of response is the legal one. Most activist groups naturally are drawn to the legal arena, and that’s for a very good reason. As Catharine MacKinnon says, “Law organizes power.” The trick is, we need to do this as radicals, and that means asking the questions: Does this initiative redefine power, not just who is at the top of the pyramid? Does it take away the rights of the oppressors and reestablish the rights of the dispossessed? Does it let people control the material conditions of their lives?

Number two is direct action. Other activists will bypass that legal arena altogether and go for other ways to apply pressure. A great example from history is the Montgomery bus boycott. People used their economic power. They boycotted the bus for eighteen months and brought the bus company to its knees. But as with legal remedies, direct action can be anywhere from liberal to downright revolutionary.

The third category is withdrawal. The main difference between withdrawal as a successful strategy and withdrawal as a failed strategy is whether the withdrawal is seen as adequate in itself or whether it’s linked to political resistance. This difference hinges exactly on that distinction between the liberal and the radical. Issues of identification and loyalty are crucial to resistance movements. It’s important to build class consciousness. But this alone is not enough. Withdrawal has got to go beyond the intellectual, the emotional, the spiritual. It has to include a goal of actually bringing about justice. Withdrawal may give solace, but ultimately, it will change nothing. Living in a rarified bubble-world of the converted is a very poor substitute for freedom—and it will not save our planet.

Here’s a quote by Gene Sharp, the foremost theorist on nonviolent direct action. He’s been responsible for revolutions all over the world. The people that I call “withdrawalists,” he calls “utopians.” “Utopians are often especially sensitive to the evils of the world, and, craving certainty, purity, and completeness, they firmly reject the evil as totally as possible, wishing to avoid any compromises with them. They await a ‘new world’ which is to come into being by an act of God, a change in the human spirit, by autonomous changes in economic conditions, or by a deep spontaneous social upheaval—all beyond deliberate human control. The most serious weakness of this response to the problem of this world is not the ...