[To close out this American holiday weekend, we welcome our own columnist Rhyd Wildermuth to share a review of the book This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein.Tomorrow we return to our regular Wild Hunt schedule. ]
Review: This Changes Everything–Capitalism vs. The Climate,by Naomi Klein (Simon &Schuster, 2014, 566 pages)
Journalist and author Naomi Klein may be known to some of you through her previous works, including her creedal call against corporate branding No Logo and her ponderous and depressing book, The Shock Doctrine, which discusses the political games played by corporations and governments in order to ram through neo-Liberal, anti-democratic policies.
In This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, Klein has done something very few journalists, policy makers, or even environmentalists have been willing to do for the last few decades. She reconnects environmental devastation and the warming planet back to capitalism itself.
The last 25 years have seen, what started out as a critique, all the logics of profit taking, extraction, and private property become untethered from their foundations, and instead become an attempt to treat symptoms caused by destructive human behaviors, rather than the cause itself. Instead of demanding an end to economies based on greed, oil, and the destruction of people and land, environmentalism, at least as far as both the public consciousness and the major environmental NGO’s portray, is now about composting, recycling, and buying the right sort of shoe, car or light bulb, rather than about anything that might actually inconvenience the wealthy.
But why does addressing capitalism even matter? And why have the last two-and-a-half decades seen a shift from cause-based solutions to a symptomatic approach?
According to Klein, the answer’s simple. Connecting capitalism to climate change unveils an awful consequence. She writes:
The only kind of contraction our current system can manage is a brutal crashing, in which the most vulnerable will suffer most of all.
So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.
…By posing climate change as a battle between capitalism and the planet, I am not saying anything that we don’t already know. The battle is already under way, but right now capitalism is winning hands down. It wins every time the need for economic growth is used as an excuse for putting off climate action yet again, or for breaking emission reduction commitments already made. (p 21-22)
More “inconvenient” than Al Gore ever let on, the only way to stop this is not just to change our habits, but to radically alter the very system by which we live.
Our Leaders Have Betrayed Us
If capitalism is responsible for the behaviors which cause climate change, than climate deniers and right-wing ‘think tanks’ are technically correct in some of their estimations. Many of them repeatedly warn about the consequences of the environmental movements’ attacks on Capitalist economies. In one of her first chapters, Klein posits that much of the vitriol lobbed at environmentalists as being out to ‘destroy the American way of life’ are quite correct, or would be if the “Big Green” groups were honest about the problem.
But why haven’t they been? Naomi Klein devotes several chapters to the treachery of modern environmental groups, such as the Nature Conservancy (which drills for oil on some of its land in Texas) or the Environmental Defense Fund (which financed and pushed studies to cast doubt on the dangers of Hydraulic Fracturing, or “Fracking”).
Reading Klein’s journalistic extractions of such assimilation and collusions, which began in the 1980’s is quite difficult, but not because of her writing. Rather, one wants to throw the book across the room repeatedly at these points; or, better yet, throw it at the ones who’ve taken so much money from the fossil fuel industry while telling individuals that they should switch their lights off more often.
Concurrent with the rise of neo-liberal, free-trade polices in the 1980’s and 90’s, particularly pushed by the Democratic Party in the United States (President Bill Clinton signed both NAFTA and the WTO treaty into law), major environmental groups shifted their tactics from urging less consumption and extraction to cheer-leading so-called “Green Capitalism.”
Green Capitalism, Klein notes, shifted the responsibility from large polluters and the systems which favored them to individuals, advocating for personal consumption changes over systemic changes. She writes:
It would be one thing if, while individuals were being asked to voluntarily “green” the minutiae of their lives, the Big Green NGO’s had simultaneously gone after the big polluters, demanding they they match our individual small cuts in carbon emissions with large-scale, industry-wide reductions. And some did. But many of the most influential green groups did precisely the opposite. Not only did they help develop complex financial mechanisms to allow these corporations to keep emitting, they also actively campaigned to expand the market for one of the three main fossil fuels. (p.213)
No Longer Playing By the Rules of the Rich
But a large question remains: Why did the “Big Green NGO’s” betray us?
Klein’s answer is pretty clear–capitalism, and specifically the massive-scale implications of capitalism’s connection to climate change. Besides those with the most money are doing the most polluting. and “Big Green” gets its money from them.
In page after brutal page, Klein unknots each connection between climate change and our economic activities. While Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, did much to raise awareness of the issues of human-caused climate change, it did little to address precisely how much of our human activities would need to change in order to stop the damage those activities have caused. The actual “inconvenience” of that truth is staggering, but only if one is heavily invested in keeping Capitalism around. Klein says:
Climate change pits what the planet needs to maintain stability against what our economic model needs to sustain itself. But since that economic model is failing the vast majority of the people on the planet on multiple fronts, that might not be such a bad thing. (p. 155)
Climate justice and social justice are related, and she devotes an entire chapter to “exclusion zones,” or places of great poverty with little political power to resist, and the particularly heavy burden rising seas, droughts, floods, and stronger storms will have on the people who have contributed almost none of the carbon pollution which has caused this. Addressing climate change also means addressing the capitalist system which favors small groups of rich people over the teeming masses of poor throughout the world. In essence, it’s a revolutionary moment and one for which even the U.S. government is preparing.
This is particularly where Klein’s book is most hopeful. She devotes 157 pages of the book to tracing what she, and others, have named Blockadia, defined as the distributed network of protests bringing together disparate groups to fight fossil fuel companies, developers, and corporate interests who are intent on pillaging the land under our feet. While it’s not immediately apparent that protests against austerity and the destruction of a sacred ancestral forest in Greece are related to, let’s say, blockades against the Keystone XL pipeline by the Cowboy Indian alliance in America, Klein threads those events together seamlessly.
For her, these interconnected resistance movements are linked not just by their shared enemy, but also by a determination to revive the spirit of direct democracy. Klein writes:
The process of taking on the corporate-state power nexus that underpins the extractive economy is leading a great many people to face up to the underlying democratic crisis that has allowed multinationals to be the authors of the laws under which they operate….It is this corroded state of our political systems–as fossilized as as the fuel at the center of these battles–that is fast turning Blockadia into a grassroots pro-democracy movement.
…And yet the most jarring part of the grassroots anti-extraction uprising has been the rude realization that most communities do appear to lack this power; that outside forces–a far-off central government, working hand-in-glove with transnational companies–are simply imposing enormous health and safety risks on residents, even when that means overturning local laws. (p. 361)
This loss of faith in inherited leadership structures, and the betrayal of the movement by Big Green and those political parties claiming to be on the side of the planet provides fertile soil for a radical populist movement – one that unites both “left” and “right” as well as a myriad of peoples across ethnic, cultural, and national borders.
Nature’s Revolt
But another loss of faith is necessary before such a movement can be effective and affective: the notion that technological fixes can be found to patch up past damage so that we can keep on polluting. Even as a Luddite myself, I was not prepared for some of this, particularly the horrific problems with geo-engineering, which is adding sulfur into the atmosphere to mimic a volcanic eruption, or seeding the ocean with chemicals to reflect light or bacteria to reduce acidification, as a way to cool the planet.
Cyril Mann, “Dark Satanic Mills” 1925 [Public Domain]
She builds a narrative of human technology any Pagan familiar with “disenchantment” will find quite familiar. Men in the enlightenment, bloated with the certainty they could transcend natural limits, developed theories and technologies which would help them do just that. Francis Bacon, the founder of Empiricism, spoke of conquering the Earth as if by rape; James Watts, the inventor of the coal-fired steam engine, spoke of humanity’s final liberation from Nature. These fathers of Modernity get particular attention. Klein writes:
..these are the tools and the logic that created the crisis geoengineering is attempting to solve–not just the coal-burning factories and colonial steam ships, but Bacon’s twisted vision of the Earth as a prone woman and Watt’s triumphalism at having found her “weak side.” Given this, does it really make sense to behave as if, with big enough brains and powerful enough computers, humans can master and control the climate crisis just as humans have been imagining they could master the natural world since the dawn of industrialization–digging, damming, drilling, dyking? (p. 266)
Modern Myths and Ancient Struggles
In reading this book I was struck with the strange irony of attempting to explain to Pagans why they should read a book linking capitalism to the destruction of the Earth, as if this were a new theory.
But it wasn’t always like this. Both environmentalism and the peculiar forms of modern Paganism birthed in the 1700’s always made links between the destruction of the earth and the industrialization that comes along with capitalist arrangements of society. Early Naturalists, the European Romantics, and early modern-Druid societies could physically see the link between coal-powered factories, the soot and smog choking the town and cities, and the poisoning of their rivers. When one considers Willam Blake’s assessment of the new industrialization of the British countryside (“those dark satanic mills”) and the Luddite rebellion (with their mysterious patron god/leader “King Ludd”), it’s easy to find a Pagan, anti-capitalist environmentalism.
The 1960’s saw these connections converge again. Environmentalism again became a critique of capitalism, rather than the conservationist hobby of rich white men in the American west. At the same time, Paganism seemed to arise into public consciousness with the embrace of Wicca and other forms of Witchcraft, all oriented towards a reverence for the earth and distrust of those who would destroy it.
Profit-motive was destroying the forests and killing the birds through chemicals like DDT. This much was a given to an environmentalist. And because Paganism revered the earth, it was against the profit-taking that destroyed the earth. That is, Paganism was largely Environmentalist and critical of Capitalism.
So what happened? Klein has written a near perfect call to war from a deeply Pagan perspective. Her last chapter, particularly, reads like the poetic musings of a Druid or Shaman, and yet she is not a Pagan.
How came we to the position we’re in now, where I’m a writer trying to explain to Pagans why they should care about capitalism? Or why I’m reviewing a book written by a non-Pagan journalist whose words are soaked in the very Pagan understanding that we’ve abandoned?
I can’t help but wonder if Paganism has undergone the same shifts as the major environmental movements, abandoning its innate critique of capitalism’s divorce from nature in favor of begging for recognition from the powerful. Perhaps at some point we understood the awful, world-changing implications of our thoughts and practices, and opted instead of the nicer, more polite, and toothless manner of creating the world we see is possible.
I’m glad that in Naomi Klein’s book, a non-Pagan journalist has called us back to our beliefs.
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I can’t help but wonder if Paganism has undergone the same shifts as the major environmental movements, abandoning its innate critique of capitalism’s divorce from nature in favor of begging for recognition from the powerful
This !
It’s exactly what happened to most Green parties in Europe. They stopped focusing on the environment years ago and now occupy nothing but a tiny niche in the so-called left which has been long abandoned by Liberal/Social-Democrats.
A derogatory term I have heard applied to the “Greens” in the UK is “Watermelons” – green on the outside, but red on the inside.
Problem is, a true “Green” party is never going to get significant amounts of votes as they have to put human interests second, in favour of the environment/ecosystem.
Green on the outside, but red on the inside
This !
Totally agree with you on that one. I might just change it to “Pink on the Inside” because as far as I’ve experienced it, Greens don’t tend to be really leftist when it comes to most issues.
I find the left/right dichotomy tedious and irrelevant, personally.
All they argue about is how to spend money.
It agree. Leftist and Rightist parties only disagree on minor details nowadays. This division is as irrelevant as their continued existence.
Great book review! I agree there has been abandonment of an environmental focus recently in some Pagan and Wiccan groups. I’m cheered to see it returning!
This is going straight to the top of my book queue. Thank you for such a thorough review.
And…if you’re taking requests, once you’re back from your pilgrimage, I’d love to see an Economics for Pagans 201 reading list. Is that something you’d fancy putting together?
I’d like to see Rhyd’s take on that, as well. One book you might want to check out is John Michael Greer’s The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered.
I love JMG’s writings in general, and I had somehow missed this! Thanks for the recommendation.
See above. 🙂
Here’s a really short list. The bibliography for the Pagan Anti-Capitalism book I’m writing will be more extensive. 🙂
Ellen Meiksins Wood: The Origin of Capitalism
One of the most concise (and short!) books on how Capitalism came about. Particularly good at explaining imperative (that is, how we in essence have no choice but to sell our labor and purchase from the market) and improvement (particularly how it relates to the logics defending stealing of First Nations’ Land)
Crimethinc Collective: Work
A brutal but very concise book. Examines every aspect of modern Capitalist exchange and labor, as well as a very good explanation of the recent housing-financing problem (I finally understand derivatives!).
Sylvia Federici: Caliban and The Witch
So utterly good. Feminist-Marxist-Anarchist history/sociology on the creation of the proletariat and how this specifically required the witch- and heretic- trials to separate women from political and economic power, and why it replicates again now in Africa and South America.
Oscar Wilde: The Soul of Man Under Socialism
The first 3/4’s of this essay pretty much nail a brilliant vision of how Capitalism stifles individuality. Also, it’s Oscar Wilde, so it’s delightful.
Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine
An even more brutal read than This Changes Everything. Vital to understanding the last 20 years of “crises” and how they relate to Capitalism.
Slavoj Zizek:
probably “401” level…he’s quite difficult to follow at first, but learning to understand him is worth the effort. He’s a psychoanalyst as well as a philosopher, and somehow manages to tie the most seemingly random things together brilliantly (Diet Coke, The Land Before Time 3, Kinder Surprise). Best start with this short and very, very good video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g
Wow, that was quick, thank you!
You’re welcome!
“How came we to the position we’re in now, where I’m a writer trying to explain to Pagans why they should care about capitalism?”
One reason is that through most of the twentieth century, Marxists have been the most organized and influential anti-capitalist political movement. Marxism has little or no interest in the environment apart from providing some city parks and campgrounds. The dominant view within Marxist circles has been that poverty can be solved by promoting rapid industrialization, if only the means of production are controlled by the workers instead of by capitalist investors. Classical Marxism also has contempt for the idea that human beings can find any source of value outside human society; it’s no friendlier to paganism than any other kind of religion.
There have been dissenting views within the Left but those factions have not, until now, been able to acquire much influence or power. Maybe that’s beginning to change.
When I was in my twenties and thirties, I chose to make witchcraft the center of my life because I saw civilization marching toward a cliff and I thought radical religious change had a better prospect of redirecting the marchers than radical politics. However, we are clearly at a point where we have to have better political theory too in order to cope with what’s facing us.
Marx really explained the nature of capitalism, but not how to create something different. His 20th Century followers really screwed up, at least the big ones: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc. I do think its time to put socialism back on the menu, and maybe nature reverence can help.
Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Le Duan, Enver Hoxha, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Kil Il-Sung, Ceausescu…
yeah, those were the etc.’s. 🙂
I know, but many people don’t really think about them unless they are named, so I just selected a few more.
I forget who said it, but I’ve always agreed that just because Communism wasn’t the right answer didn’t mean that Marx wasn’t asking the right questions. Maybe not about the environment, but about how we distribute wealth.
Agreed !
Except, is it really an issue of how “we distribute wealth?” After all, those people who are wealthy have reached that state because they created a product or service that people decided they wanted to spend their money on. It’s not the government or some other group that is going in and taking one man’s money away to give to another (well, there is, but it goes to the poor for example) that is taking from the poor and giving to the wealthy. Those with money spend that money as they please, and that money flows into the hands of those who have something people want to spend their money on. Robert Downey Jr has not taken my money from me, the government has not forced cash from my pocket to him, i have willingly given that money to him for his movies, as an example. Is it then unjust that RDJ has made millions because millions have made that same choice as I have? Is this an unfair distribution of wealth? Is this truly an unjust action?
Marx had some valid questions, but his valid questions were based on a industrial based economy. We now exist in a service based economy which requires new questions because the situation doesn’t fit Marx’s situation when he was asking.
perthose people who are wealthy have reached that state because they created a product or service that people decided they wanted to spend their money on
Or, likelier, they were born rich, inherited riches or were brought up in an environment full of riches.
We now exist in a service based economy
Nope.
All the economy is still based upon the production of basic goods, because we can simply not live without clothes, food, houses, tools or cutlery. Everything else that is sold, traded or such is just another layer of varnish applied on the top of that ice-cold fact: No food = Death. No Iron Man III = No Death.
One must really be a completely disconnected Westerner not to see that it’s the way things work. Sure, the West might not be producing basic items like it used too but that’s because it’s all made in East-Asia. Our service-based economy is 99 per-cent dependent on these industrial-based economies. Try going to the movies with no clothes and no shoes on. T’would not work all that well I’d guess.
Thank you for this. Bill Moyers recently interviewed Ms. Klein on her new book: http://billmoyers.com/segment/naomi-klein-on-capitalism-and-climate-change/
Easy to be toothless when you don’t have any teeth to begin with.
If I recall, there wasn’t a whole lot of critique of capitalism in much of Paganism to begin with. There was a great deal of Earth reverence, which sometimes manifested as ecological activism, but no critique of the system outside of Starhawk. She was largely dismissed as just another California radical.
Most people who came to Paganism brought their over-culture preconceptions with them, which meant that Capitalism was seen as just the way things are, or as the “good” choice compared to Communism/Socialism.
Funny thing is in California Starhawk seemed like the center of Paganism back in the ’80s.
Sure, and that makes perfect sense. I was in Iowa in the 1980s and 1990s, and there was a lot of dismissal of the political aspects of Starhawk’s writing as out-of-touch with what “real, everyday” people felt. And it’s not like there weren’t environmentalists, feminists, small-farm farmers, and the kinds of folks you think would be into a Pagan/feminist/ecological vision. The combinations were just wrong, culturally.
What we did have were folks who had come up in Brit Trads, usually outer court/non initiate students, Blue Star, and folks who learned from one of the two books available and maybe usenet. Reverence for the Earth was less about environmental politics and mostly about getting in tune with the seasons and local cycles of life.
Well, of course “most people who came to Paganism brought their over-culture preconceptions with them,” as everyone brings their preconceptions with them everywhere.
But I think you must be engaging in a very different Pagan community than mine if you don’t see any critics of the system outside of Starhawk. To begin with, Starhawk is hardly the entirety of the Reclaiming movement, just as Reclaiming is hardly the entirety of the Feri movement… and that’s just Left Coast stuff. Here on the Right Coast, I have lost count of the number of “red-diaper babies” I’ve encountered in the Pagan movement, and there’s a reason there was a sizable Pagan contingent in the Climate March in New York this fall. (Hint: it is not a delight in the status quo.)
If anything, I think that Pagans who are politically conservative would argue that our movement is needlessly left-leaning. (I would disagree, but then, I’m hardly politically conservative.)
It’s true that there has also been a conservative streak present in the DNA of American Paganism from very early days–the “seeding” of Wiccan groups in the 1960s and 1970s by members of the Air Force and other branches of the military ensured that. But I think you’ve mischaracterized the movement here… possibly from frustration. I know I’d like to see us more engaged and more activist, so to that degree I share your frustration, Lon. But I think your history is hinky.
Reclaiming is part of Feri? I thought that Feri was, like a little independent group. Was I mistaken?
Feri and Reclaiming are distinct traditions, thought it’s common (in the San Francisco Bay Area at least) for folks to be cross-trained in both.
Many independent groups, with lots of offshoots, is my understanding… and some lines that work primarily solitary. They share a root, however.
Feri predates Reclaiming by roughly a decade and is one of its sources. The late Victor Anderson, along with his wife Cora, was the founder of what is now called (to distinguish it from other spiritual traditions with some version of “fairy” in their name) the Anderson Feri Tradition. In the mid-1960s, he was teaching students in the San Francisco Bay Area. At that time, the Andersons were at least a decade older than any other local witch; he was the only elder in both senses of the word that we had.
In the early 1970s, Miriam Simos (she wasn’t calling herself Starhawk yet) became one of his students. She later incorporated some of Victor’s teachings into what became the Reclaiming Tradition. Anyone in Reclaiming will tell you that it is an independent tradition. It’s different enough from Feri that IMO it wouldn’t be fair to either tradition to call it merely an offshoot.
In case you don’t want to take my word for any of this, there are at least two books that include some information about early Feri Trad history. Late in life, Cora Anderson wrote a book about Victor and the Feri Tradition. For an account of First Contact between the Feri witches and the New, Reformed, Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn (a different Craft tradition which arose independently in 1967), read Aidan Kelly’s history Hippie, Commie, Beatnik Witches (Second Edition). HCBW II also mentions Starhawk briefly.
I was active in the SFBA Pagan/Craft community early enough to remember when the Feri practitioners were a major part of the local scene and Starhawk was passing around drafts of The Spiral Dance for comments. The Feri tradition is still quite active in Northern California, but the senior leaders of it have each developed a variant version of it, some with new names, so it is hard for outsiders to estimate how many people are involved now. “Little” is relative. Reclaiming, the Gardnerian tradition and some of its cousins are international but the majority of independent Craft traditions are regional and have fewer adherents in total.
My history isn’t hinky so much as regionally specific. From 1989-1999, I was active in Pagan communities in eastern Iowa and the midwest generally, and my remarks reflect that area at that time. Sorry if I wasn’t specific enough about that.
My larger point, with reference to Rhys’ point, is that part of what looks like a turning away from critique of capitalism is that it wasn’t there to begin with, in all cases, and pitching a call to arms in terms of getting back to Paganism’s anti-capitalist roots isn’t going to make sense in some of the areas it’s needed most.
OK, that makes more sense to me. If we’re talking about a critique of capitalism specifically, and in specific regions or as something universally present, I’d have to agree with you.
But leave that region-specific history behind, or widen your scope to questioning the system in other dimensions than a critique of capitalism, and your case gets a lot weaker… Rebels and gadflies aren’t all we have been, but we have been those for a long time.
I think you may be reading more into what I said than I intended. I was trying to be specific to the critique of capitalism and specific regional histories..
I moved to the Bay Area in 1999, been here since. I’ve been a queer feminist socialist Pagan since before that, though. Don’t mistake the historical attitudes I’m describing for my own history or politics.
In the first edition of Drawing Down the Moon, published in 1979 IIRC (maybe in the subsequent editions, too; I haven’t read them), Margot Adler noted that when she was doing the research for the book, it took her by surprise that pagans in the inland parts of the U.S. did not take for granted that there were ties between their religion and progressive/liberal political and social movements, as most pagans and witches on the East and West Coasts did. I also recall some push back on calling witchcraft an “earth religion” from people who became witches before the mid-Sixties.
Although your description of Iowa attitudes comes from a more recent time, people in rural areas don’t change their ideas as quickly as people in cities.
Look further back and you find a very, very rich but quite buried past of leftism, radicalism, and environmentalism. One quick example? One of the founders of OBOD was an anarcho-socialist who did labor organizing.
It’s the same with most of our historical memory–the radical parts are minimized in favor of a narrative which favors the powerful.
Like I tried to clarify below, I was speaking of what was current where and when I came up, not generally. Sorry for the confusion.
It would be fascinating to see a history of Modern Paganism that dug all those minimized threads out and examined them. I think a lot of us who feel like we’re struggling alone could use the perspective.
That’s the topic that Alley Valkyrie and I are presenting on at Pantheacon in February. 🙂
I’ll be there, then, even though it’s happening at an hour when my language skills are reduced to a grunting demand for coffee. 😉 Fortunately, it doesn’t conflict with the Dionysia I’m running.
Oh, yes. I think I’m bringing 2 pots of tea with me.
If I record, I’ll get you a copy so we can both remember what it was you said once we really wake up.
Interesting timing, this… I spent my holiday, in part, beginning a second reading of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain, the first book in his Science in the Capital trilogy precisely on the intersection of capitalism, democracy, and climate change.
Robinson is, as you’d expect from the man whose Red Mars trilogy gave us the terraforming of that planet, an optimist on the subject of our ability to respond to climate change–but he’s an unusual sort of optimist: one who actually grasps the science around just how destructive unbridled, capitalism-fueled climate change is likely to be. His description of Washington D.C. after a cataclysmic flood is vivid, and his climate change deniers are every bit as pig-headed and short-sighted as those encountered in the real world.
For those more inclined toward fiction than non-fiction, and toward science fiction and fantasy than toward journalism on the topic, I do recommend it. As I say, the man is an optimist when it comes to our ability to respond in a meaningful way to this threat… but he’s not soft-pedaling what we’re up against, and he has an unusually strong grasp of the hard science around climate change.
Not to mention some really engaging characters. (The Kembali monks, and Frank, the would be paleolithic modern man, are two great examples.)
(People who haven’t read any of Robinson’s books may wish to skip this.) Robinson published a short story collection as a sort of coda to the Mars trilogy. In one or two of the stories, the terraforming eventually fails and the atmosphere goes back to where it was before human interference.
The Mars trilogy is an expansion of a novella in which someone who remembers Mars before it was terraformed laments all the wilderness that was destroyed. The novella probes the meaning of deep ecology and wilderness: does wilderness deserve protection if it is so hostile to biology that even microbes cannot survive in it?
To anyone who has read his books, it’s clear that KSM has done a lot of wilderness camping. Passages in the Mars trilogy and a short story that takes place in the interior of an asteroid are wilderness adventure travel narratives that happen to take place off planet Earth, and I infer from the amount of detail that Robinson is also a mountain climber.
The Mars trilogy is a subtle piece of nature writing in a different way. Robinson recaps Western Civ’s changing attitudes toward the natural world by changes in writing tone from volume to volume. In Red Mars, the human beings see the landscape they are traveling through as alien, sublime, dangerous, awful. By the end of the third volume, the less modified parts of the landscape haven’t changed much, but the settlers have; they feel at home in it.
With all due respect, the book isn’t describing capitalism, it’s describing an unholy fusion between government and selected corporations. This mercantilism calls itself capitalism, but is anything but.
We could talk about the price of water and electricity being so highly subsidized that massive cities were built in the desert and that “cheap” Western agriculture moved great hunks of American farming out of the very places that could support it.
We could talk about the huge push behind ethanol, despite the fact that without subsidies it could never compete, is so incredibly unstable that it can’t be stored or transported without immense added costs and danger to the environment, takes nearly a gallon of gasoline to produce a gallon of ethanol, and after thirty years STILL takes food crops to produce instead of cellulose waste.
Or we could talk about the number of “green” loans and grants given to companies in the last ten years who never produced a product and went under leaving taxpayers on the hook for billions.
It’s not capitalism that is the villain here. It’s corporatism being sold as capitalism.
This is a common and very, very new argument, one which arose right about the time that the Green movement became too cozy with the Democratic party. In fact, it’s primarily pushed by Democrats in America.
It’s a mild (and very hackneyed) re-formulation of Green Capitalism, that we just need “nicer” or “less corporate” or “smarter” formulations of the very thing causing the problem, like switching from “full-flavored” to “ultra-light” cigarettes, or doing just “a little less” heroin.
It’s not a new argument unless you regard Ayn Rand as new.
I gave three obvious examples of how a union of government with corporations creates environmental damage. Yet that isn’t enough to show that the problem may be more than “capitalism.”
There are other examples. It’s not very hard to find them. The fact that I could find any should encourage you to look beyond the argument presented by the book.
Please don’t tell me what my arguments are. Just look at my reasoning and check my results.
If I seem dismissive, it’s entirely due to having heard this too often lately. Sorry for being brusque.
Now, governments have quite a bit of interest in maintaining Capitalism if that’s where they derive their political leaders and funding from. Not just corporations–the mom and pop business is often more exploitative than the corporation (with an HR compliance department!)–stolen wages, denying worker’s comp claims, fighting unemployment applications, paying less than minimum wage, having workers DEPORTED, racist hiring practices, and banding together to blacklist employees who report them…these are just a few of the things I’ve personally witnessed, both in my 24 years of work and my entire life existing in the underclass. If I ever have to go back to working in a restaurant, I’d beg to work for a corporate one and never again for a small “local” one.
Collusion between business and government is very bad on all fronts, certainly. Collusion between Capitalists and government? Mortifying. Corporations have more influence, certainly, but they’re really only small capitalists who went big. The local coffee chain, the small grocery store, the clothing designer–all sorts of groups are eager to become the next big corporation. We can’t just cut off the heads of the hydra any longer.
Obviously we’re going to disagree on this one. I’ve no idea of what you’ve lived with or through, I’ve only known what I’ve done.
I don’t think that government is any better than business, I’m against big government too. Most small government as well.
I still think you’re mixed up on the definition of capitalist. We’ve not had a purely capitalist system in some time. Government keeps intruding more and more.
Odd how government is never to blame.
You missed the part where I’m an Anarchist? 🙂
No, I didn’t miss it.
I just don’t think that capitalism deserves the rap it’s getting here. And I certainly think that government deserves much of the blame.
It’s the thing that Starhawk used to quote “power with instead of power over.”
aNaRchIsts caN cApitaLise whIcHever leTTers theY like.
Kidding.
It’s been a formal philosophy for almost as long as the birth of Capitalism a couple of centuries ago.
While I agree that small businesses can be as selfish and lawbreaking as big ones, there are two important differences. Large corporations wield more power than small businesses; some multinationals have bigger operating budgets than most nation states.
Also, American law _requires_ corporations to put the financial interests of their stockholders above all social and environmental considerations, while small business owners can chose their own priorities, including deliberately running the business at a loss or just to break even. There are historical examples of corporation law that did not have this requirement, and recently some states have amended their corporation law to permit a type of corporation called the B corporation, which is allowed to consider public benefit on an equal basis with stockholder returns.
Radical changes would be needed to stop, much less reverse “man made” global climate change. This is true.
What would be required is, as stated above, the near complete establishment of modern society. No more large scale farming, no more mass transit/car/plane/boat use. No more mining or industrial production, or at least, only in such a microscopic scale as to leave no environmental or social impact.
Many say “man would have to give up his comforts in order to save the planet.”
What they in fact, are asking, is for billions of people to die.
For what has our industry given us if not the food needed to feed all the peoples of this world? What has it given us, if not the medical devices, medical treatments, potions, pills, shots, all of which cure people or keep them alive. Do away with manufacturing? then let all with diabetes die slow, agonizing deaths because we can no longer make them. Let their families watch as loved ones die from treatable, curable diseases, starvation, and war.
To save the planet is noble, it is our home, our mother, and we should keep her. But if you wish to speak of the price of saving her, if you wish to speak of all these comforts we need to give up in order to save her, realize the devastation to life you would create. Devastation so great, indeed, it might even do worse damage. Because suddenly people would not be able to travel, resources could not be brought to them, and they would turn. Man is an amazing, beautiful, holy animal which is as savage as any War God. Billions would die, and those that are left would rape the rest of the world in order to get the resources they need to live, to take from others so they could survive. And there would be none to say “Save the planet” because those who tried would be slaughtered for their resources, or would turn against such a belief so they didn’t have to watch their loved ones die horrible deaths.
The scenario you present becomes more likely every day, equally if we continue on or if we try to stop immediately.
I work with people addicted to heroin and alcohol, folks who’ve been addicted for decades. You’re likely aware of this–the symptoms of withdrawal will kill the victim in very violent, viscerally frightening ways. On the other hand, death by liver failure is an atrocious death, one where all the toxic unprocessed poisons in the victim’s body spew out through the skin at once. The smell is as horrific as the imagery.
So. The question must occur–death by addiction or potential death by withdrawal? Tapering off is long and has less of a chance of saving the addict in the long run than a shorter, but potentially chaotic and deadly change.
This is what we face, yes. We rely so much on the system now, and have failed to “do for ourselves” for centuries, passively giving over our power to systems in which we have little say. We’ve become addicted and are at quite an advanced stage in our addiction. It may not go well. It definitely won’t end well if we don’t stop.
I would think you would have a little more courage than that. 🙂
Too much alcohol consumption will certainly do in your liver but I thought most deaths of heroin addicts were caused by adulterants or misjudging the potency of street drugs. I’m under the impression that opiates are relatively easy on the body and that many heroin addicts would live to a ripe old age if they could get a clean supply of consistent strength and they could afford to smoke it or eat it instead of injecting.
Apart from that, I agree with the point of your analogy.
Mostly intestinal issues, but certainly most die from overdose.
Of course, we could extend the metaphor that direction and talk about all the things one does to maintain a steady supply of fossil fuels, huh? Fracking and tar-sands…and funny (or not very funny, I guess), “black tar.”
Sigh.
Courage is not something I need, at least not in terms of death. I am Hela’s Son, after all. Billions of deaths only make my Goddess stronger. 😉
I just have this thing about informed consent. I once told off one of those “america f*ck yeah!” revolutionaries by informing him that it was fine if he wanted to do that, just realize that until he won he is basically going to be a terrorist until he wins and enforces his view as law. It’s merely the same thing here.
It is easy to say “we need to do X and stop doing Y so that we can accomplish Z.” It’s a lot harder to face, and accept, that by doing XYZ means you’re literally responsable for the deaths of millions, maybe billions of people, many of whom said person claims to respect. Everyone has this bias that “oh, it will be bad, but me and mine will make it through.” As one of Helheim, I can say, “no, you won’t.” Most people also have this thing about not being monsters and commiting mass murder…even when their lofty goals will either be obtained by either mass murder, or result in mass murder.
But hey, if that’s okay, more power to you. I just need your informed consent. 😉
Ye’ forget I’m devoted to gods of death, too.
That why we tolerate each other, yeah? 😛
John Michael Greer agrees with a lot of what you are saying. He thinks fossil-fuel based industrial civilization is doomed and an orderly transition to a civilization relying on modest amounts of renewable energy is no longer attainable because we burned up too many resources and years without making a serious start on it. One of his slogans is, “There is no brighter future.”
If you are interested, check out his blog The Archdruid Report. But I warn you, he’s building an argument from entry to entry and you would be wise to read at least a year’s worth of archived posts before you argue with him in the comments section.
sounds like my kind of guy. you kinda have to pull archive panic on my blog to debate as well XD
IMO we should go back to a XVIIIth century-style society. Mostly rural, with local forms of governments. The only thing from the Industrial era that are really worthy of being retained are modern Medicine and Electric Guitars.
For all the madness and paranoia about it, a New World Order Takeover is probably the best way to achieve this change; with the right group of people in charge, a global shift could be effected moving into a sustainable way of life. without a single ordering force – no change will ever be made.
You just need the right kind of global dictator 🙂
Hum…sounds rather disturbing…Are you fishing for trolls or what?
I know, its disturbing, but..
We need to radically shift how we live as a civilisation and short of a natural catastrophe or an NWO benevolent dictator, we certainly aint going to get a radical shift; too many vested interest with all the power.