Mainstream Environmental Movement Lies

The environmental movement has lost its way. At one point environmentalism was about protecting wild places and wild beings. Now environmentalists themselves are trying to sustain this destructive way of life instead of trying to protect wild nature and wild beings.

Chris Hedges discusses the lies and fantasies told by the mainstream environmental movement about how to solve the climate crisis with authors and activists Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith.

A new book shows how technology will not solve our environmental crisis. We will not extract ourselves from the death march towards extinction by recycling, building wind turbines, relying on solar panels or driving electric cars.

This is a fantasy, sold to us by an environmental movement that promises we can continue to indulge in orgies of consumption and maintain the levels of waste and perpetual growth that define the industrial age. The fact is our time is up. The forests are dying. Water is polluted, and in many places poisoned. Industrial farming is depleting the soil. The coral reefs are crumbling under the acid assault of carbon. Species are going extinct. Temperatures are soaring. Each of the last four decades have been hotter than the last. Soaring temperature rises — we are already at a 1.2 °C (2.16 ° F) above preindustrial levels — are already baked into the system, meaning that even if we stopped all carbon emission today, we still face catastrophe. Anything above a temperature rise of 1.5 ° C will render the earth uninhabitable. The Arctic ice along with the Greenland ice sheet are now expected to melt regardless of how much we reduce carbon emissions. A seven-meter (23-foot) rise in sea level, which is what will take place once the ice is gone, means every town and city on a coast at sea level will have to be evacuated. We must radically reconfigure how we live, and this means largely dismantling industrial society, or the human species, and most other species, will vanish, joining the long list of species that once roamed the earth and are no more. —Chris Hedges

This should not be surprising given that environmental movements have been co-opted by big oil and big capitalism for decades. See Why Big Oil Conquered the World and Planet of the Humans.

“Like the Pharoahs of the Pyramid Age, these servants of the system identify its goods with their own kind of well-being: as with the divine king, their praise of the system is an act of self-worship; and again like the king, they are in the grip of an irrational compulsion to extend their means of control and expand the scope of their authority. In this new systems-centered collective, this Pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike job’s God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.” —Louis Mumford