Ecosocialism blog
EVEN THE GLOBAL WARMING ACCEPTERS ARE IN DENIAL
“Now, wait a minute,” I imagine you readers objecting, “aren’t the people who accept the theory of abrupt climate change the good guys?” But they’re in denial too; they’re just in denial about a different set of propositions, social propositions rather than climatological ones. There’s so much denial about that maybe there’s a super-thin chance that world society will be able to survive abrupt climate change.
First off, there’s the denial that abrupt climate change is happening. That’s the denial you hear from the…
DeAnander:
More from the same blogger — writing as Cassiodorus on DailyKos, on the collapse of capitalist discipline and the necessity of *ecological discipline*.
For me the most telling phrase is here:
This is the opposite of liquidationist or extractive praxis. The essence of extractionist praxis is looting, i.e. realising in one easy grab the value stored up over months or years, decades or (in the case of old growth forest) centuries of biotic effort and solar input. Looting, predation, call it what you like: the idea is to consume in a few slavering gulps something that took 10, 100, 1000, a million times as much time to produce. (Think of 85bn barrels of oil being burnt per annum and the millions of years it took to make the crude from which they are refined — burning the “last hours of ancient sunlight” as Thom Hartmann memorably put it).
Predation or looting however requires a ratio of very few predators to a large area of very robust ecosystem, so that the replenishment rate of prey is adequate to withstand the predators’ appetite. Criminals need honest people to prey upon, in larger numbers than the criminals; rapacious aristocrats need a huge mob of peasants to expropriate and exploit; a few wolves need a lot of deer. Human beings want to be very numerous *and* to practise an unprecedented ferocity of liquidation/predation. The math doesn’t work. Which is why the California coastal salmon fishery is now permanently closed; the species has collapsed under liquidationist extraction. If we drain ecosystem resources at a rate faster than they take to grow, and there are enough of us doing it (or enough of us living extravagantly enough) then the ecosystem becomes impoverished — sometimes so rapidly that it can be called a collapse.
The idea that we can mine (mining is a primary metaphor and mindset here, central to early *and* late industrialism) an ecosystem for one preferred resource — extracting a “commodity” from it at will — is ignorant BS. It is like gutting human beings to steal their livers, and expecting them to go on walking around and providing us with more livers. People without their livers tend to collapse, and ecosystems from which key species have been stripmined do likewise. We can either have thriving ecosystems that produce all sorts of things, among them some that we value more highly than others — or we can strip out the highly-valued items for short-term profit, and by so doing kill or cripple the ecosystems so that no more of the highly-valued items will be available to us. Ever.
As I recently ranted over at ET, unfortunately capitalism finds this scarcity threshold stimulating and positive rather than scary, because the scarcity enhances money-value. The closer a species is to extinction, or what is coyly called “commercial extinction”, the higher the dollar value of each surviving individual and the stronger the incentive to slaughter and sell those last few individuals. What will the wealthiest consumer pay for the very last steak from the very last whale? For the very last fur from the very last wolf? Enough to make “a fortune” for the liquidator who supplies the rarity. Do incentives get any more perverse?
Capitalism with its mechanistic requirement for exponential growth (to pay back compound interest debt) and its valorisation of scarcity, is inevitably an engine of extinction, undermining its own foundation, tearing planks off the hull of the ship to feed the steam engine.
In a ecologically disciplined society… we would be nurturing fisheries, not mining fish; we would be building topsoil, not depleting it. Extractionism or liquidationism would be a crime, just as bank-robbing or murder are crimes today. We would be tending forests, not clearcutting them; tending rivers and not damming them. Actions that cripple, vandalise, or kill an ecosystem would be accurately perceived as both murderous and stupidly suicidal. We would measure our wealth by the biotic productivity *and robustness* of our territory, by the paucity of inputs needed to produce our food and water and the sufficiency of our regional resources to our regional population. (Moving large amounts of resource around would be a last option, an emergency measure to cope with misfortune or disaster: a surplus from here and there would be moved to the site of a flood, drought, hurricane, etc. to relieve want; but we would pride ourselves on the relative infrequency of such measures and the shortness of the distances that our resources travel.)
It is essentially the difference between mining and farming — though “farming” has now been rendered industrial and extractive so that the word no longer carries the connotations of stewardship, patience, and responsibility that it once did…. we now look down on all that pre-technological know-how as so primitive and infra dig. (Whereas burning 10 calories of fossil fuel to produce 1 calorie of inedible industrial maize — while disturbing the climate, wasting water by the millions of gallons, exterminating pollinator and insectivore species and depleting topsoil — is so very clever and modern.)
As Veblen pointed out at length and with mordant if ponderous wit, those who steal by force and fraud (looters, bandits, aristocrats) have nothing but contempt for the slow and patient labour of those who try to build topsoil and tend ecosystems (peasants, farmers, yokels, serfs, dirty-handed nobodies). This contempt, uttered or tacit, is one of the engines driving capitalism on to its date with doom… if a majority of our people would rather die than get their hands dirty, then it’s pretty likely that a majority of our people will die. Unfortunately they will be taking most of the larger terrestrial and marine fauna and flora with them.
A culture of ecological discipline makes so much simple, survival-oriented common sense. Nothing could be more indicative of how mad and bad our human condition has become, than to meditate on how distant, fictional, and “unrealistic” it seems.
19 March 2010, 1:43 amm.c.:
Homo Sapiens may already be cooked. Even if Humans stopped putting CO2 & Methane into the upper atmosphere right now, it would take hundreds of years for the remaining compounds above to either desintigrate or return to ground level.
I hope I’m proven wrong, because if I’m correct, or mostly correct, we go the way of the dinosaurs….
19 March 2010, 12:24 pmCurt:
This is another reason why we have to rebel against the Gods. Where in the hell were they when we humans started down this path of industrialization? The fact that they did not warn us can only be taken as proof that either they do not exist, or they are psychopathic sadists, or incompetent drunks. Maybe they are the souls of Americans Civil War Union Generals.
19 March 2010, 2:51 pmMy initial impression is that this problem is too big for humans to handle and we can choose between two completly unacceptable courses of action. One would be just to continue are present course and expect the Gods to save us. The other would be to impose a world wide military government that would shut the current system down and make sure that a subsistance level of food and water and clothing and shelter was distributed to everyone on the planet and eliminate any challenges to thier authority one way or the other. That would of course mean dealing with the very large group of people who think that global warming itself is a capitalist scam to make billions if not trillions off of the conversion to a diiferent type of economy.
If there is an effective way to balance between these two extremes I do not know what it is. I susspect that no one else wants to share their thoughts on how this could be done in a democratic manner.
lurker:
Cassiodorus has posted here as Legume Sam. He also posts at FDL and Docudharma. Excellent, provocative writing.
http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2008/09/22/the-calamity-or-kassandra-vindicated/#comment-254058
links to
http://www.docudharma.com/showComment.do;jsessionid=4AC65974096D5CA95737706CAC611F9C?commentId=167701
19 March 2010, 3:28 pmm.c.:
Nitrous Oxide(N2O) & Ozone(O3) are also major Greenhouse gasses we are putting into the upper atmosphere.
5 April 2010, 2:37 pmLorne:
Re: “This is another reason why we have to rebel against the Gods. Where in the hell were they when we humans started down this path of industrialization? The fact that they did not warn us can only be taken as proof that either they do not exist, or they are psychopathic sadists, or incompetent drunks. Maybe they are the souls of Americans Civil War Union Generals.”
Possibly the silliest and most childish item I’ve ever read on this blog. Lots of people warned against this at the time–even by the time of William Blake. Not that this answer will suffice for this nincompoop’s “cosmic whining.” At any rate, “if the gods don’t exist,” why is he whining? And if they do exist, what sort of manifestation would have pleased people that “think” as he does?
5 April 2010, 3:25 pm