Deindustrial Revolution
Derrick Jensen asks why we tolerate a way of life that requires empire, and harms the planet. The short answer, he says, is that we’ve been bought off.
Words Derrick Jensen
Illustration Rick Berkelmans
One day, maybe 25 years ago, I was riding in a car with my friend George. We got stuck in traffic. To pass the time, I asked, “If you could live at any level of technology, what would it be?” George was not in a good mood. He responded, “That’s a stupid question. We can fantasise whatever we want, but the truth is there’s only one level of technology that’s sustainable, and that’s the Stone Age.”
He’s right. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that any way of life based on the use of nonrenewable resources won’t last. If there are one hundred units of something — or a million units of something — and you base your way of life on using them up, your way of life won’t last. Likewise, any way of life based on the hyper-exploitation of renewable resources won’t last either. If there are uncountable salmon, and then you can count them, and then there are millions, then thousands, eventually there will be none.
“How we perceive the world affects how we behave in the world.”
I’m going to take this a step further and say that any way of life based on the use of resources isn’t going to last. This is because trees don’t consider themselves timber resources, and salmon don’t consider themselves fisheries resources. They’re just trees and just fish, whose lives are as valuable to them as yours is to you and mine is to me.
The fundamental difference between western and indigenous ways of being is that westerners generally perceive the world as consisting of resources to be exploited, not other beings with whom to enter into a relationship. How we perceive the world affects how we behave in the world.
There’s a great quote by a Canadian lumberman: “When I look at trees, I see dollar bills.” If when you look at trees you see dollar bills, you’ll treat them one way. If when you look at trees you see trees, you’ll treat them another. And if, when you look at this particular tree you see this particular tree, you’ll treat it differently still. The same is true for salmon. The same is true for everyone. The way this culture both perceives and treats the planet is killing it. It’s also making democratic governance and local autonomy impossible.
A few years ago, I got into a disagreement with a journalist who interviewed me for the online version of Nature [sic]. He insisted it’s possible to have an industrial city-based economy that’s not exploitative of any human beings, but rather based completely on purely voluntary exchanges. I asked where the metals come from for use in his theoretical city. He said a mine owned and run by workers, who receive such high wages they choose to spend their lives underground. I said we’d leave aside the difficulties raised by that proposition — mining is such a horrid existence that it was one of the first forms of human slavery — and merely discuss the harmful effects of mines on rivers. I got him to agree that mines are inherently toxic to rivers and groundwater.
I then asked what happens to people who live along this river that is now going to be polluted. He said they would be paid to move. “What if they’ve lived on this river for fifty generations, and they love this river, and they love their way of life, and will not move?”
“Pay them more.”
“Their ancestors are buried in this soil, and they will not move.”
“How many are there?”
“Let’s say 400.”
“They have to move. We as a society would vote on what is best for society.”
“So, the million people in the city would vote to dispossess the 400 people on the river, and because the decision was made by majority rule the exploitation doesn’t count? You’ve moved in just a few sentences from purely voluntary exchanges to reproducing democratic empire, conquest, genocide, and land theft.” That’s inherent and functional to this way of life.
“Without colonies no security regarding the acquisition of raw materials, without raw materials no industry, without industry no adequate standard of living and wealth. Therefore, Germans, do we need colonies?”
The German President Paul von Hindenburg put this precise point another way: “Without colonies no security regarding the acquisition of raw materials, without raw materials no industry, without industry no adequate standard of living and wealth. Therefore, Germans, do we need colonies?”
So why do we put up with a way of life that requires empire, and is killing the planet? Well, the short answer is that we’ve been bought off. For most of us, “an adequate standard of living and wealth” is more important than the continuation of life on this planet; more important than local governance or autonomy. After Fukushima an official with the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency said that Japan must continue with its nuclear power program because he didn’t think “anyone could imagine life without electricity.”
“Break your identification with the dominant culture, remember your loyalty to the planet that gave you life, and then act from there.”
And that’s the point. Most exploiters can’t imagine life without the benefits they derive from their exploitation, even when it’s killing the planet. Humans did perfectly fine on Earth without industrial electricity, and even though it is functionally unsustainable, for most of us in the global elite it is unimaginable, unthinkable, and absurd to talk about getting rid of industrial electricity — but not to think about extirpating giraffes, elephants, tigers, cod, Amani flatwings, Pacific lampreys, seagrass communities, entire oceans.
Do we see a problem?
What, then, do we do? The first and most important thing we must do is decolonise our hearts and minds. One part of this is shifting how we perceive the world. Another is shifting our loyalty away from this omnicidal culture and toward the natural world.
I often think about how our resistance to this culture would look if we truly wanted to save the planet, not the culture. Here’s how I look at it. Imagine if aliens arrived and began a campaign of systematically killing the planet. They were vacuuming the oceans, changing the climate, putting dioxins in every human and nonhuman mother’s breast milk. They were causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet. And in exchange they gave the most loyal of us strawberries and tomatoes in January, computers, space heaters, and lots of cheap clothes, all in exchange for allowing them to destroy our only home.
If it were aliens doing this, and not the culture with which we have been inculcated to identify, we would know exactly what we needed to do. But because we identify more with this culture than with the planet, we get very confused.
Break your identification with the dominant culture, remember your loyalty to the planet that gave you life, and then act from there.
This is article is from Weapons of Reason’s fourth issue: Power.
Weapons of Reason is a publishing project to understand and articulate the global challenges shaping our world by Human After All design agency.
