Book review: The Overstory by Richard Powers

“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

So states one of the nine protagonists of a story good enough to change minds, and perhaps the world as a result. The Overstory weaves the growing science and philosophy of biocentrism with traditional myth and with emerging legends of our digital creations, all illuminated and explored by multiple human narratives. The result offers us a desperately needed alternative path into the future, characterized by relationship rather than exploitation; satisfaction of actual needs rather than endless pursuit of ceaselessly manufactured wants.

Other reviewers (such as Barbara Kingsolver) have extolled the book’s literary merit. As expected from an author with a decades-long string of major awards, Powers’ writing is excellent and engrossing. The story builds slowly as Powers grows its roots one person at a time. The mini-biographies are engaging in and of themselves, but the real payoff comes once they intertwine. It’s difficult for us short-lived humans to understand a time perspective an order of magnitude larger than our own, but the patient arc encompassing multiple generations nudges the reader towards thinking on the scale of forests.

The rise to dominance of our culture has taken place within the lifetime of some trees, the merest blip in planetary history. Our fall will likely occur even faster, as our collective unwillingness to live in relationship with the rest of the world’s inhabitants will doom not only industrialism but hundreds of thousands of species to ruin, leaving the world impoverished for millions of years. Powers sees the insanity of our course clearly. He writes with passion, despair, and anger commensurate to the crisis (albeit leavened by awe for the wonders here now, the possibility of protecting them if we act, and solace in life’s eventual long long long term recovery.)

In many ways this is the antitheses of T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth. Both books revolve around the practical and moral questions of how to respond appropriately to environmental atrocity after atrocity, with one answer being ecosabotage for planetary self defense. But while Boyle’s book is nihilistic, with unconvincing characters motivated by often petty anthropocentric goals, Powers writes eight realistic journeys of people who come to respect, even love, trees. All make sacrifices for their nonhuman kin, some even risking freedom and their very lives. Several are fully biocentric, recognizing trees as intelligent, communal beings and rejecting the notion of human exceptionalism.

Powers sympathetically portrays the decisions to take underground action, making it easy to understand why the activists in his novel, like those in real life, escalate to illegal tactics. With the system designed to coopt or disempower dissidence, and well practiced at circumventing democratic processes and brutally suppressing protest, anyone wanting to make substantive change is forced outside the box of accepted and expected tactics. Unfortunately, as in A Friend of the Earth, the novel’s ecosabotage is ineffective because it’s limited to a strategy of attrition and doesn’t target critical infrastructure. The eco-fiction genre still needs a story of strategic activists instigating cascading failure by shutting down fossil fuels.

The pursuits of Powers’ protagonists include not just blockades and ecosabotage, but scientific research, art, land restoration, psychology, and harnessing artificial intelligence. Within this diverse tapestry, anyone can find strands which resonate and beckon, inviting the reader to join in the real life struggle with whatever skills and interests he or she can bring. The true measure of The Overstory will not be whether it makes best seller lists or wins critical acclaim and literary awards, but whether it motivates readers to action:

To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people. But Ray needs fiction now as much as anyone. The heroes, villains, and walk-ons his wife gives him this morning are better than truth. Though I am fake, they say, and nothing I do makes the least difference, still, I cross all distances to sit next to you, keep you company, and change your mind.

Perhaps it’s true that even the best arguments won’t change minds. If so, then what we all, human and non-human, need right now is fiction which can. The Overstory may be just that.

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Read a long, thoughtful and deep interview with Richard Powers: Here’s to Unsuicide

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Review originally published at Stop Fossil Fuels

Book review: A Friend of the Earth by T.C. Boyle

T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth could be a fun read for tree huggers and tree spikers alike. In a narrative split between the climate battered world of 2025 and life as a circa 1990 ecosaboteur, environmental doom meets righteously taking on the system. Supporters of Deep Green Resistance, Earth First!, the Earth Liberation Front, or Stop Fossil Fuels are reminded of the climate chaos and mass extinction we’re fighting to head off, and can vicariously (and safely) enjoy the thrill of underground, illegal tactics against a system immune to transformation from within.

The Annoying

The book falls short of its potential, reflecting real life limitations of early (and all too much contemporary) monkeywrencher culture: misogyny and an absence of strategy. This is understandable, since the book was published in 2000 before activist rape culture and toxic male behavior was being called out, and before serious analysis of how to bring down the industrial economy was readily available. If the reader can accept these historic limitations, she can probably still enjoy the book for what it is.

To get past those shortcomings, let’s discuss the negatives first. The protagonist, Ty Tierwater, is 40 and 75 years old in the two narrative time frames. At both ages, he heavily objectifies women, as do most of the other male characters, and he’s obsessed with sex. Maybe this is meant to be cute in a 75 year old man, but is in fact offensive, boring, and distracting in both time periods. Ty mentions many (many) times the large size of his wife Andrea’s breasts (and, oddly, her hands), but at least her personality is also fleshed out in some depth. None of the supporting characters are fully convincing as real people, but Andrea comes as close as anyone. Their daughter is less well developed, but adequately so, and at least she’s subject to less sexual objectification than most of the female characters.

At ages 40 and 75, Ty has the emotional maturity of someone half his ageimpulsive, reckless, alcoholic, bickering, self pitying, jealous, easily distracted by petty revengea case study of someone you don’t want in your underground affinity group. Presumably he’s meant to be an antihero, but his unnecessary misogyny on top of all this moves him to the very margins of being a sympathetic character. (Or perhaps beyond the margins; it’s easy for me as a male to find his woman-hating to be merely annoying, but others may, understandably, give up on the book entirely.)

A Friend of the Earth also suffers from rampant nihilism. The opening torrential rains which will, we’re told, inevitably give way to punishing heat and drought, warn us from the start that the activists’ 1990 efforts to save the world are doomed. Given their absence of strategy, their failure makes sense, but Ty and the book as a whole relish hopelessness, martyrdom, and juvenile lashing out, rather than an adult approach to solving an (admittedly massive) problem. Even Ty’s motivation to protect the earth is more of a passionless “just cause” than the love of someone in relationship with his non-human community members. The book repeatedly depicts humans losing against nature when they stray from the role of subjugator, further undermining the gravity of Ty’s work.

Resignation to failure is understandably common for activists burned out by a failing strategy, but Boyle could choose a different emotional theme. The book hints early on at renewed struggle by the older-yet-wiser activists in the 2025 time frame, with Andrea declaring “Earth Forever! is going to fly again, in a big way.” But Boyle abandons this plot point, instead allowing the book to wallow in despair amidst a broken world. This may realistically depict many one-time activists, but it doesn’t make for a satisfying story. More damningly, it demoralizes rather than inspires readers, including potential activists needed to derail the future Boyle clearly recognizes as a real danger. With the world at stake, using his authorial gifts so perversely is irresponsible.

The Good

The plot moves forward quickly and keeps the reader engrossed. Ty’s irascible narration, though at times over-the-top, generally convincingly portrays a flawed man doing his best to protect the animals he (at least abstractly) loves.

The book excels in its realistic, if unflattering, baring of the failures of the environmental movement. An early nonviolent direct action illustrates the futility of such tactics in the absence of media coverage. The physical danger to the blockaders, unprotected in the absence of witnesses against the sadism of agents of the state, is frighteningly accurate. In the aftermath, Ty and his comrades ratchet up their struggle with tactics straight out of Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. (This escalation is appropriate for the environmental movement as a whole, but since Ty and his fellow arrestees are known to the state as aboveground environmentalists, taking up underground action seriously violates the firewall between above- and belowground actionistsa security error all too common among real life activists, even today.)

Ty has some success with his monkeywrenching campaign, wreaking havoc on many earth destroying machines. But as with most real life underground actors in the past decades, he chooses minor targets. Local battles are temporarily won, but the industrial economy at large is allowed to proceed unhindered, and the larger war is therefore lost. Ty exemplifies Lierre Keith’s critique of acting like a vandal rather than thinking like a field general, and the real life experience of busted ecosaboteur Michael Carter around 1990: “We had some vague ideas about tactics but no manual, no concrete theory. […] We had little strategy and the actions were impetuous. If we’d been robbing banks instead, we’d have been shot in the act.” (Carter’s full interview is a fascinating reflection on ecosabotage gone wrong.)

Ty and his comrades belong to Earth Forever!, a conflation (understandable as a simplifying literary device) of Earth First! and Big Green NGOs. Boyle captures well the tension between directly stopping destruction of the land through small scale illegal action, vs garnering donations and political clout by working within the system. (It’s easy to be cynical now about the latter approach, but in 1990 it probably wasn’t as obvious that obediently begging for the scraps of reform dispensed to the well behaved gives no hope of changing the system’s trajectory.)

Since, as in real life, neither Ty nor Earth Forever! act to materially challenge the industrial economy, it falls to an eccentric 2025 pop star, with Ty’s employed help, to play God in deciding which species live or die. As the biblical rains fall and the floodwaters rise, the reader wonders whether they’ll succeed with those animals deemed worthyor perhaps stops caring, with a shrug of “too little too late.”

The Verdict

If you can get past the misogyny, A Friend of the Earth is worth the read. Just be aware that unless your thing is doomer collapsism, you won’t find satisfaction and fulfillment here. A great tale could be spun of ecosaboteurs who bring down the electric grid, halting industrial destruction and proving themselves true friends of the earth. Until then, enjoy T.C. Boyle’s work for what it is.

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Originally posted at Stop Fossil Fuels

Permaculture: Revolution or Lifestylsm?

Covering two of my three blog themes—permaculture and resistance—Boris Forkel writes a piece I wanted to republish here:

Capitalism reaches fulfillment when it sells communism as a commodity. Communism as a commodity spells the end of revolution.

—Byung-Chul Han

I’m a permaculturalist. And I became a permie in the first place because I wanted to break free from this culture.

To me, permaculture was and still is highly political. “Permaculture is revolution disguised as gardening” is one of my favorite Bill Mollison quotes.

After all, what freedom can we have without subsistence, without having control over our most basic resources, our own food? “There is no sovereignty without food sovereignty,” said Native American activist John Mohawk.

I’ve been so ardent and naive. I thought that the permaculture-approach is so ingenious that it would become a mass-movement, indeed a quiet and peaceful revolution. It would free us from being dependent on the digital food they sell us in grocery stores nowadays, and from the wage economy at the same time, because we would build small, local food cooperatives that would all be sharing the surplus.

Unfortunately, time and experience shows that it’s not that easy.

One of my permaculture teachers, who taught me the concept of the food forest, often said: “I don’t understand what’s the problem for all these critical people. Nowadays, we have all the freedoms we want.” He also articulated a very strange notion about the future: “Once we have reached the number of 10 billion, human population growth will come to a halt. Thanks to Internet technology, humans will then all be connected and serve as the consciousness of planet earth.” Attendants hung on his lips when he said that, and while everybody else was amazed by this perspective of a golden future, I sat quietly, stunned.

I knew in my heart that he was wrong, but couldn’t articulate a sufficient answer to his statements back then.

It made me angry. How can one say that “we have all the freedoms we want,” while the air we need to breathe is being polluted, the greatest mass extinction in planetary history is happening, the climate is being destroyed, the oceans are vacuumed and filled with toxic garbage? In short: when the most basic functions of our planet to support life are being destroyed?

What about the freedom of having breathable air? What about the freedom of having a livable planet? What about the freedom of having a future?

I’ve given a lot of thought to his statements ever since, because they seem so appealing to many people. The Earth never supported more than 2 billion humans until Fritz Haber and Robert Bosch indeed broke the planetary boundaries with the invention of the Haber-Bosch process. Nowadays, we are hopelessly overpopulated. So the number of 10 billion is purely random and nothing but magical thinking. The notion of Internet technology and humans as the consciousness of the planet is nothing more than a new fashion of the good old ideology of humans as the crown of creation. What about nature in this fantasy? With 10 billion (industrial) humans, there will hardly be anything left.

Everybody with a sane mind and a little understanding—especially a permie—should know that the trees, the fungi, the soil, the air, the water, the animals and so on, in short what we call nature, indeed is the consciousness of planet earth. Apparently, the manifest destiny of the technocrats is to eradicate what they perceive as primitive, raw, red in tooth and claw, wild and uncontrollable, and to replace nature with a “better” system of human technology.

Deconstructing that was the easy part. The hard part is his statement about freedom. With all this in mind, the primary question is: what does freedom mean for someone like him?

A friend of mine, who was lucky enough to hear Noam Chomsky speak live, told me that in the discussion after somebody asked the usual question: “What can we do about it?” Chomsky responded that he thinks this is a strange question. People from so-called developing countries would never ask such a question, only westerners, he stated. Apparently, third-world-people still have a clearer sense for suppression and cultures of resistance. “We should rather ask what we can’t do,” Chomsky said.

When I attended a talk by Rainer Mausfeld, of course someone asked the very same question. Mausfeld stated that this question shows how well the soft power techniques he’d been describing work. We can’t even imagine any form of resistance.

For more than a century, the political left’s analysis has been very clear: The suppression and exploitation of the poor (working class) by the rich (owning class), that is the very basis of capitalism, can only be solved by organized class struggle to come from the working class. This concept isn’t hard to understand. It is classic Marxism. But somehow, the ruling class has managed to completely eradicate it from the proletarian minds.

I’ve come across a lot more of what I like to call liberal lifestyle-activists. I understood that most permies chose permaculture not because they want a revolution (like I did), but because they want a more sustainable lifestyle for themselves. They believe that they are free, because they perceive their individualism and their freedom of choice as the greatest freedom, the greatest achievement of modernity. Being part of any group, class or movement is perceived as regressive. The notion of class struggle is so yesterday.

At the same time, they’re usually educated people, and they know that a lot of things are going badly wrong. But as liberals who are taking power out of the equation, and individualists lacking any concept of social group our class, they must take it all on themselves. “It is all of us who are causing the destruction,” they’d say.

As a result, the only thinkable form of political action are personal consumer choices. Buy organic soap and feel better.

A great example of this are vegans. No doubt that factory farming is horrible and has to stop. But as a lifestyle-activist, all you can do about it is to stop consuming meat. In your worldview, the problem can only be solved by everybody stopping eating meat.

For liberal lifestyle-activists, “having all the freedoms we want” can only mean the freedom to consume (or not consume) whatever we want, whenever we want, in any quality and quantity we want. This is the kind of “freedom” with which capitalism has hijacked us. If we can afford it, of course. But within neoliberal capitalist ideology, there is no such thing as a suppressed class. The poor are poor because they don’t work hard enough, or they are simply to stupid to sell themselves well enough.

“Neoliberalism turns the oppressed worker into a free contractor, an entrepreneur of the self. Today, everyone is a self-exploiting worker in their own enterprise. Every individual is master and slave in one. This also means that class struggle has become an internal struggle with oneself. Today, anyone who fails to succeed blames themselves and feels ashamed. People see themselves, not society, as the problem.”

Byung-Chul Han

For radicals, the question remains: Without the possibility of mass movements, how do we stop the destruction of the planet that is our only home?

For a new generation of serious activists who are tired of all that shit and ready to take action, DGR has the Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy.

Charlottesville and violence of aggression vs self-defense

As some of my readers know, I was born and raised in Charlottesville, VA. I moved away at age 21 (almost half a lifetime ago, wow...) I've followed the reports from last weekend with shock, correlating sites which are now major flashpoints to my naive childhood memories of these places. But I don't feel any more knowledgeable about current events there than anyone else who can read the news, and I wouldn't normally spend the time to write about current events anyway. But a relative still living in Charlottesville sent a group of us a vile piece by David Horowitz which I couldn't let pass without a reply. So I may as well post the reply here.

My relative commented on the piece:

Right on!
I am sick of the lawlessness condoned in our country.

I replied:

Dear [relative],

I'm really confused. From what I've read, the neo-Nazis and their supporters were posting copiously in advance of the gathering about their plans for violence, showed up armed and defended as if for rioting, and then carried out their violent threats to the point of murder. (And committed dozens of incidents of vandalism, harassment, and physical assaults, which would be shocking were they not overshadowed by the vehicular homicide.) Trump's statements implicitly condone this lawlessness, and the piece you sent is in support of doing so. Why do you say "Right on!"?

The piece also greatly misrepresents the facts:

No one believes the racists came to "defend a historic monument" (Lee's statue is not under threat; it's simply being moved from a place where it has no historical relevance except in its use to enforce institutional racism, to somewhere more appropriate/relevant.) (See also: National Review perspective.)

Trump's politics have been racist from the start. He's deliberately appealed to a white working class base who've been screwed over by the capitalist system (as you taught us, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer -- and this has only gotten more extreme over the decades.) White working class economic interests would be best served through unification with the working class of all backgrounds, but Trump (not the first politician, surely not the last) has successfully used this wedge issue to divert their energies away from economic inequities and against people of color as scapegoats. It's incredibly disingenuous to claim that "the anti-Trump left [is using] race to divide America."

Characterizing BLM and Antifa as "violent groups" is equally disingenuous. (As you know, corporate media is heavily biased towards maintaining the status quo, so independent research is required if you want to understand these groups.) Most crucially, there's a clear legal and moral difference between the violence of aggression and the violence of self-defense. Trump and Horowitz are deliberately conflating the two to obscure how deeply racism is embedded in our society, how we (whites, especially white males) benefit, and the struggle necessary to obtain social justice.

"Who started the fight is really immaterial." <--- Classic line of abusers.

Of course you're in an ideal situation to talk with people who were on the ground, so I highly recommend you do so if you want to understand what happened over the weekend. That would give you a much more accurate picture than the opinion of an author trying to capitalize on events to sell his political agenda, or any other distant observer such as myself.

If you can't take advantage of your opportunities to talk directly with locals who were there, you can also read r/Charlottesville for eyewitness accounts.

Love,
Norris

The limits of gardening as the world burns

If every homeowner in Seattle ripped up their lawn and replaced it with edible plants, the resulting crop production would be enough to feed just one percent of the city’s residents, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Washington.

Researchers in Seattle performed a rigorous analysis of the potential to grow the city's own food. Their conclusions are very similar to my own, based on our experiments in Portland: if everyone in Portland converted their yards and rooftops and driveways to food production, and planted all the public areas, and did a better job than we did...the city could still only feed half its population.

The Seattle study estimates the city could grow 21% of a balanced diet for the city's inhabitants, assuming conversion of all possible surfaces (permeable and impermeable) to food production. Seattle, like Portland, and like all other cities with dense populations, can never be sustainable.

What are the implications for those of us working towards local food systems? It doesn't mean we shouldn't continue our work. But we shouldn't delude ourselves or others into denying cities' dependence on massive importation of resources, almost always extracted violently from the land, and often from humans. It's good and noble work to establish a community garden, or to convert our lawns to perennial polycultures to support humans and non-humans alike. But these individual actions, even if adopted by everyone, will never add up to the systematic transformation we need. To leverage their impact, this localization must be integrated into a culture of resistance, supporting direct dismantling of the industrial infrastructure wreaking large-scale havoc.

It's enjoyable and satisfying, but it's not a real solution to just putter around in our backyards while the world burns. We have to think about, and get involved with, the big picture.

Read the full article about the study: This is why cities can't grow all their own food

The article has also sparked a discussion between myself and another person on Reddit, with more of my thoughts on cities, sustainability, the value of individual action, and more

Open Letter to Reclaim Environmentalism

Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith wrote a powerful letter challenging modern mainstream environmentalism, pointing out that it has wandered down a dead-end trail of trying to preserve our industrial comforts and way of life rather than trying to preserve the natural world. Environmentalism has been so co-opted that members of the "conservation-industrial complex" advocate for nuclear power in its name, with straight faces.

Jensen and Keith decry the insanity of prioritizing the needs of our murderous culture over the needs of the earth which actually sustains us. If you agree with their conclusion, please read their full Open Letter to Reclaim Environmentalism and join nearly 1,000 others as a signatory:

Environmentalism is not about insulating this culture from the effects of its world-destroying activities. Nor is it about trying to perpetuate these world-destroying activities. We are reclaiming environmentalism to mean protecting the natural world from this culture.

And more importantly, we are reclaiming this earth that is our only home, reclaiming it from this extractive culture. We love this earth, and we will defend our beloved.

Resistance review: The Effectiveness of Sabotage

I just had a short essay published on a 1987 thesis by Captain Howard Douthit III of the US Air Force: “The Use and Effectiveness of Sabotage As a Means of Unconventional Warfare.” The thesis is a great review of the historical use of sabotage and its impressive success, especially in asymmetric conflicts. This helps validate the wisdom of the Deep Green Resistance Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy for achieving environmental and social justice. From the thesis:

The only countermeasure that stopped sabotage was the manpower-prohibitive act of exterminating the saboteurs. Committing the number of forces necessary for effective counter-sabotage also produced too much of a drain on the front line. Indeed, as this fact became known, sabotage efforts increased in a deliberate move to force the enemy to guard against sabotage in the rear area. Thus, this research indicated there were no effective countermeasures to sabotage.

[...]

[H]istory supported the thesis that sabotage is an effective means of warfare. Sabotage was used against both strategic and tactical targets. It was proven capable of being used near the front line, in the rear areas, and even in support areas out of the theater.

[...]

Sabotage can be used against both tactical and strategic targets.

Any nation, rich or poor, large or small can effect sabotage against an aggressor.

Sabotage is an economical form of warfare, requiring only a mode of transportation (possibly walking), a properly trained individual, and an applicable sabotage device.

Read my entire essay, with links to the DGR strategy and to Captain Douthit's paper, at Time Is Short: The Effectiveness of Sabotage.

Direct action land reclamation

A Deep Green Resistance supporter sent a link to a photo essay he compiled about Occupy the Farm in Albany, CA. A group of local residents, activists, and university students blockaded destruction of the last prime soil in the city, destined to be wiped out for, ironically, a Whole Foods Market.

This is a great example of direct action to preserve land from development and to spotlight the need for growing food locally in urban areas. Read the whole article: These People Faced Down Riot Cops to Grow Food: Here's How They Won.

Business As Usual: The False Solutions of Green Tech

My readers in the Portland area may be interested in attending one of the upcoming presentations by Deep Green Resistance Lower Columbia in Hood River, Albany, and Vancouver WA, on "Business As Usual: The False Solutions of Green Tech." Make it if you can; DGR has some unique and valuable insights to offer in the fight for a livable planet.

Book Review: Assata Shakur: an Autobiography

I greatly enjoyed this book and Assata Shakur's writing, and have great respect for what Shakur has gone through and the lessons she's learned and shared. I posted a review at the DGR Hawaii site, comparing her life as a poor black woman to my own as a middle class white male, and drawing parallels between her political analysis and that of Deep Green Resistance. Read my review of Assata: An Autobiography.

Video review: Sophie Scholl - The Final Days

I've started a blog for Deep Green Resistance Hawaii, and will probably post most resistance-oriented stuff there, and continue to use this blog for permaculture related and personal posts. But I'll also post here when I think I've made posts of interest over at DGR Hawaii.

I just posted a short review of Sophie Scholl - The Final Days. I watched it last night, and found it educational for those interested in building a culture of resistance, and think it will appeal to a more general audience as well. The acting is excellent, and it's well done overall. Check out my review and the movie if you have any interest in historical documentaries and/or Nazi Germany.

Demand Crash! — A response to Holmgren's "Crash on Demand"

The situation in many third world countries could actually improve because of the global economic collapse. First world countries would no longer enforce crushing debt repayment and structural adjustment programs, nor would CIA goons be able to prop up “friendly” dictatorships. The decline of export-based economies would have serious consequences, yes, but it would also allow land now used for cash crops to return to subsistence farms.
–from the Deep Green Resistance Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy

Introduction

David Holmgren, co-originator of permaculture, has a long history of thoughtful and thought-provoking publications, including design books from the original Permaculture One to his 2002 Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability. He's written numerous essays over 35 years, ranging from the specifics of agricultural vs forestry biomass for fuel, to the future of energy decline.

I've long admired and respected Holmgren's thinking, so I looked forward to reading his new "Crash on Demand" (PDF), an update of his 2007 "Future Scenarios" projections for global developments. I felt especially intrigued that he's arrived at conclusions similar to my own, regarding not just the inevitability, but the desirability of a crash of the financial system as soon as possible. But the article disappointed me; I think Holmgren is soft-selling his realizations to make them palatable to a hoped-for mass movement. Interestingly, even this soft-sell is being rejected by the permaculture blogging community.

Holmgren argues:

"For many decades I have felt that a collapse of the global economic system might save humanity and many of our fellow species great suffering by happening sooner rather than later because the stakes keep rising and scale of the impacts are always worse by being postponed." (p 9)

"It seems obvious to me that it is easier to convince a minority that they will be better off disengaging from the system than any efforts to build mass movements demanding impossible outcomes or convincing elites to turn off the system that is currently keeping them in power." (p 14)

"Mass movements to get governments to institute change have been losing efficacy for decades, while a mass movement calling for less seems like a hopeless case. Similarly boycotts of particular goverments, companies and products simply change the consumption problems into new forms." (p 22)

Holmgren proposes a possible solution:

"Given the current fragilities of global finance, I believe a radical change in the behaviour of a relatively small proportion of the global middle class could precipitate such a crash. For example a 50% reduction of consumption and 50% conversion of assets into building household and local community resilience by say 10% of the population in affluent countries would show up as 5% reduction in demand in a system built on perpetual growth and a 5% reduction in savings capital available for banks to lend." (p 13)

Where I agree

Holmgren couches his proposal almost rhetorically, apologetically, as if proactively halting the ecocidal system is crazy talk. He need not be so shy about advocating for collapsing the system! It follows very logically if you agree that:

1. Industrial civilization is degrading our landbases every day it continues, far faster than we're healing them
2. Industrial civilization will collapse sooner or later regardless of what we do
3. Industrial civilization will not divert its resources into healing our landbases before it collapses

The facts back up Holmgren's assessment of our dire situation, including imminent climate catastrophe if we continue with anything like business as usual. Industrial civilization is driving 200 species extinct each day and threatening humans with extinction or at best a very miserable future on a burning planet. It is deforesting, desertifying, polluting, and acidifying forests, croplands, landbases, and oceans orders of magnitude faster than nature and all the hard-working permacultarists can heal the damage. The industrial economy consists of turning living ecosystems into dead commodities, and it won't stop voluntarily. It's headed for an endgame of total planetary destruction before itself collapsing.

So I fully agree with crashing the system as soon as possible, and I fully agree with getting as many people as possible to withdraw their dependence on and allegience to the systems and structures of industrial civilization. We desperately need people preparing for crash and building resiliency, in human and in broader ecological communities.

Where I disagree

We also need a viable strategy to stop the dominant culture in its tracks. We are, and will remain, a tiny minority fighting a system of massive power. Individual lifestyle changes do not affect the larger political systems. People "dropping out" is not enough, is not a solution, is not an effective, leveraged way to crash the system.

I worry about Holmgren's speculative numbers. I assume the elite, who control a hugely disproportionate percentage of income and wealth, will be even harder to convince of voluntary simplicity than the average citizen. The poor generally don't have the option to cut spending by 50%, and have few or no assets to divest from global corporate investments. My rough calculations (based on data here) suggest that in the US, 15% of earners between the 40th and 80th percentile (more or less the middle class) must adopt this economic boycott to slow consumption by 5%, and nearly 50% of the middle class must divest their savings to reduce nationwide investment in the global financial system by 5%.

Even hoping for just 15% of the US middle class, 18 million people would have to embrace substantial short-term sacrifice. (While decreasing consumption 50% and building gardens and other resiliency infrastructure, people must still work the same hours at their jobs. Otherwise they'll simply be replaced by those who want to live the consumptive dream.) This lofty goal seems inconsistent with Holmgren's recognition of the infeasibility of a mass movement.

History throws up more red flags. Again and again, when growth economies have encountered sustainable cultures, people from the growth economies have forced the others off their land, requiring them to integrate into the cash economy. The dominant culture will not gently relinquish access to resources or to consumer markets. It will retaliate with weapons honed over centuries, from taxes and outlawing sustainability to displacement and blatant conquest. On a less dramatic scale, banks can, if divestments sufficiently diminish the cash they've been hoarding for years, adjust fractional reserve rates to compensate. (Though precipitating a fast "run" on the banks could work very nicely to crash the financial system and wipe out faith in fiat money.)

Permaculture activists and thousands of other individuals and groups have for years urged people to consume less. Many good people have adopted voluntary simplicity, dropped out of the global economy, and built regenerative local systems. While this has immense value for the adopting individuals, and often ripples out to benefit the wider community, it hasn't put a dent in the destruction by the larger financial system. New people are born or assimilated into the culture of consumption faster than people are dropping out.

Holmgren advocates more of the same permaculture activism, with little explanation of why it would now convince people in numbers thousands of times greater than in the past. He hopes the ever-more-obvious signs of imminent collapse will prompt a more rapid shift, but given our fleeting window of opportunity to act, we can't bank on that hope.

Another Approach

Deep Green Resistance is a design book of what makes a good resistance movement, a permaculture analysis of influencing power and political systems.¹ It arrives at the same conclusion as does Holmgren: we need to prepare for crash by building local resiliency, but the sooner industrial civilization comes down, the better. Its crash will leave the majority of humans better off short-term, as their landbases will no longer be plundered by the rich for resources. Crashing the sytem now will benefit all humans long-term, giving future generations better odds of enjoying liveable landbases on a liveable planet. And crashing the system now will obviously benefit the vast majority of non-humans, currently being poisoned, displaced, and exterminated.

If we truly hold as our goals halting ecocide and slashing greenhouse gas emissions as dramatically as Holmgren suggests, we must devise a realistic plan, based on a realistic assessment of our numbers and strengths, the vulnerabilities of industrial civilization, and how much longer the planet can absorb its blows. Recognizing our tiny numbers and relative weakness compared to the global system, and limited time before our planet is beaten into full ecosystem collapse, we must apply the permaculture principle of making the least change to achieve maximum effect.

The Deep Green Resistance book, as part of its strategy of Decisive Ecological Warfare, examines more than a dozen historic and contemporary militant resistance movements. It concludes that "a small group of intelligent, dedicated, and daring people can be extremely effective, even if they only number one in 1,000, or one in 10,000, or even one in 100,000. But they are effective in large part through an ability to mobilize larger forces, whether those forces are social movements [...] or industrial bottlenecks."

Holmgren notes that it's easier to convince a minority to disengage from the system than to spark a majority mass movement for true sustainability, but his plan relies on 10% of the population making dramatic change. DGR's analysis suggests it's easier yet to convince a tiny minority to take strategic direct action. The rest of the sympathetic population, whether 10% or just 1% of the general public, can provide material support and loyalty with much less immediate sacrifice than in Holmgren's proposal.

The Movement to Emancipate the Niger Delta (MEND), with small numbers of people and meager resources, has used militant tactics against oil companies to routinely reduce oil output in Nigeria by 10-30%.

In April 2013, saboteurs in San Jose CA shot out transformers in an electrical substation, causing damage that took weeks to repair. The New York Times explains some of the difficulties involved in replacing transformers, especially if many were to fail in a short period of time.

We have more promising strategies available than hoping we can persuade 10% of the population to adopt voluntary simplicity, and hoping that will crash the financial system.

Conclusion

While I wholeheartedly agree with Holmgren's analysis of our global predictament, and the desirability of crashing the system, his proposal for doing so seems ineffective. Certainly, we should work to disengage ourselves and neighbors from the global system, but we must combine building alternative structures with actively resisting and strategically sabotaging the dominant system.

Many people will disagree with the necessity of crashing the system, because they don't think conditions are that bad, because they hold vague hopes that God or technology or permaculture will save us, because they fear that fighting back will increase the anger of our abusers, or because they value their own comfort more than the life of the planet. That's fine; we can agree to disagree, though I encourage those people to further explore these ideas with their minds and with their hearts.

Many people do see the destructiveness of this culture, the inevitability of its crash, and the desirability of it crashing sooner than later; but won't want to participate directly in bringing it down for any of many perfectly legimitate reasons. That's fine, too. There's lots of work to do, and a role for everyone. You can work on restoration of your landbase or crash preparation for your community while providing material and ideological support to those on the front lines. We can join together as "terra-ists", with our hands not just in the soil as Holmgren defines the term, but also working with wrenches upon the wheels, the levers, and all the apparatus of industrial civilization.

Suggested Resources

• Endgame by Derrick Jensen, two volume analysis of the problems of civilization and the solution. Several excerpts available at the website.
• Deep Green Resistance - a book, an organization, and a strategy to save the planet
• Liberal vs Radical video presentation by Lierre Keith, explaining the different approaches of these two different frameworks for perceiving the world.
• For my readers in Portland, check out the DGR Lower Columbia chapter, and consider helping with their riparian habitat restoration on the Washougal River this Sunday, January 26th.

[1] Thanks to Stella Strega of Integral Permaculture for this observation

*** This article was reposted at Deep Green Resistance Great Basin and the Deep Green Resistance News Service

Crisis: Personal & Planetary

I just experienced the worst, and weirdest, illness of my life. I went from fully healthy to not breathing in a week and a half. It began with some headaches, double vision, acute hearing sensitivity, and fatigue, which prompted me (with Jasmine's insistent and wise encouragement) to check in to the emergency room in Hilo. As my condition deteriorated, they decided to fly me to a Honolulu hospital on the island of Oahu, where they found encaphalitis (brain swelling) and brain lesions. The next day, I stopped breathing so they intubated me, sticking a tube down my throat to keep the air flowing.

The doctors sent out more than 70 tests, but everything came back negative, so the cause of all this remains a mystery. They hit me with antibiotics, antivirals, and steroids to carry out a broad-spectrum attack against the mystery, and something seems to have worked. My brain swelling and lesions have decreased, and after a little over a week in the hospital followed by a week of rehab I can walk and do most tasks well enough to feel confident about my release today back to the jungle.

As I understand it, times of personal crisis are supposed to prompt deep self-reflection and reevaluation of life. Interestingly, my experience leaves me thinking I'm more or less right where I want to be, doing what I want to do. As I wondered whether I would die or be left permanently incapacitated in some manner, my biggest concerns revolved around the effect on my resistance work. My own human life doesn't matter much in the big picture, but the earth sure as hell needs every one of us fighting for her with as much commitment and energy as we can bring. I've positioned myself in a wonderfully low-maintenance and healthy lifestyle, requiring less than 20 hours a week to meet my basic needs in an environment I enjoy. This leaves me a lot of free time to devote to activism, mostly tech work for Deep Green Resistance, and possibly some local campaigns as well.

Time is short, so I'd better make the most of whatever time I have.   Will you join me?

From Subsistence to Resistance

I cried today. Not once, not twice. Maybe I cried eight times. I'm not even sure how to separate one cry from the next, when my heart carries sadness and anger in waves from peak to ebb, ebb to peak.

The exact number doesn't matter.

I'm not used to crying. As a male, socialized into masculinity, I learned to suppress grief and most other strong emotions at an early age. I remember the last time I cried in front of my mother, at perhaps 12 or 13 years old. I don't remember why I cried, but I do remember (and this is why I remember) my guilt and shame around breaking down in such a way, mixed into my sadness and into the comfort I received from her. I haven't cried much since then.

I can give an easy proximate cause for today's release: two heart-wrenching movies. But I need to explore some background for it to really make sense.

 

Portland

Many of you already know about my years living in Portland, where, after an initial period of frustrating and ineffective involvement in national and local politics, my then-partner and I embarked on a path of "disconnecting from civilization." We aimed to develop the practical skills necessary to eventually move to land, create a "tribe" of close-knit community members, and establish self-sufficient subsistence via homesteading and hunting & gathering. I learned how to integrate some of my "waste" products of humanure, greywater, and kitchen scraps into my food system. I learned enough basic construction to build simple shelters. I planted food forests and a perennial vegetable garden to learn how to feed myself efficiently while creating wildlife habitat and sequestering carbon. I learned about those other cohabitants of our landbase, and even learned to listen to them in my attempts to understand the non-civilized world. I played with "rewilding" crafts skills. I talked with three successive groups of potential tribe-mates, and learned some of the difficulties of communication, of connection, of finding shared purpose, of resolving conflict.

At the same time, I engaged with the larger community, trying to share what I was learning and inspire others to disconnect, in part or whole, from the destructive systems of industrial civilization. I offered free tours and presentations and classes, blogged more (or less!) frequently to document my experiments and findings, and provided edible and useful plants and seeds at low cost. I was something of a "food activist", specializing in advocacy of perennial polycultures.

And at the same time, I knew it wasn't enough: neither my own personal withdrawal, nor sharing my skills and encouraging others to move towards true sustainability. I couldn't escape the reality and the challenge presented most eloquently by Derrick Jensen: the culture of civilization is insane and intent on destroying everything on this planet, and it will not voluntarily stop. Withdrawal and teaching are both legitimate responses to the threats of social, economic, and environmental instability, but are inadequate without forming a serious resistance movement to halt civilization.

Although I knew at some point I would need to take part in some form of resistance, I tucked that goal away. I rationalized that I needed to focus on getting myself and a tribe into a stable position on land of our own before I could put energy into addressing the big picture, long-term struggle.

 

Hawaii

After years of preparing to jump from city to rural living, I finally moved to Hawaii last August. But not only had our third hope at pulling together a like-minded community dissolved, but I had broken up with my partner of all those years. I did have a new girlfriend, an acquaintance and then friend of several years, but we were new to each other as romantic partners.

We moved here with the idea of buying land in 6-12 months, developing a homestead, and building a community, which I assumed would keep me busy for several years. I had vague visions of sharing my knowledge and skills as in Portland, but not until I'd learned enough about this new tropical environment to have something worth sharing. I imagined us creating low-tech, truly sustainable lifestyles (or rather, recreating - Hawaiians had all this figured out before western invasion 200 years ago.) We would demonstrate to people the satisfaction, enjoyability, and practicality of living car-free, growing your own food in perennial polycultures, and paring down to perhaps one computer, one cell phone, and a solar panel without toxic batteries


But something funny happened about five months in. I felt increasingly dissatisfied with my priority of pursuing radical simplicity as quickly as possible. We'd achieved food self sufficiency (more or less) within a month of arriving, learned most of the basics we'd need to design a functional homestead, gone car-free, lived on a fairly small solar electricity budget, done 90% of our cooking over fire for a few weeks, done laundry by hand, taken cold showers, lived without refrigeration, and all in all gotten within spitting distance of sustainability. It turns out to take a lot of time and sometimes gets downright boring!

For a couple of years I've had the lesson of Scott Middlekauf's "A Word of Caution for the Permaculture Enthusiast" in the back of my mind: that after years of developing his homestead he realized that his goal in life is not to develop a homestead; rather, he'd been developing his homestead to support him in whatever he really wants to do with his life. Arriving as close as we did to self sufficiency, as quickly and relatively easily as we did, forced me to confront my own weighting of values: "lifestyle purity" vs using "good enough" as a support base to carry out my actual life goals. I now felt confident enough that we can adopt the necessary lifestyle changes down the line when we have to adapt to changing world circumstances. In the meantime, the use of compromising technologies and conveniences in the present would allow me to move ahead with my higher priority goals.

I started reading the latest projections of climate change, which terrified me; everything is spinning out of control faster than almost anyone expected. I got up to date on the actions those in power are taking to deal with the crisis, which all boil down to finding new ways to profit. I reread Deep Green Resistance by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Aric McBay, and was struck again by their well thought out and feasible plan - the only realistic response I've seen to stopping the destruction. They recognize that begging those in power to change their ways has never succeeded, and that far from being transformed by people "being the change they wish to see", the dominant culture has brutally crushed every sustainable culture it's encountered - we're talking about cultures extant for thousands of years and waaay groovier than even the most spiritual hippie permaculture commune you can imagine.

They lay out a strategy of simultaneously dismantling industrial civilization (primarily through underground activists sabotaging and disrupting critical industrial infrastructure), while networking aboveground activists to rebuild local alternative systems to take over as the global systems collapse (which will occur, sooner or later, whether or not an underground accelerates that collapse.)  I began checking the Deep Green Resistance News Service page almost daily, reading all the linked stories and absorbing the ongoing expansion of global domination and the courageous pockets of resistance fighting back here and there.

Finally, in April, I joined Deep Green Resistance to actively engage in this struggle as a member of the aboveground, and am feeling simultaneously excited, proud, in love, scared, and uncertain. Excited and proud because I'm directing my energy to something so important. In love because even though I barely know them, I feel so much love for my fellow members in DGR, and for its allies, putting their time and energy and passion and money into this shared struggle for Beautiful Justice and thousands of new, sustainable cultures emerging from thousands of landbases (or just being left alone where they already exist). Scared because of the consequences if we fail. (Time Is Short.) And uncertain because I'm new to resistance and don't know how best to apply myself.

In part to address that uncertainty, I've been educating myself - about radical feminism, about racism, about indigenous struggle, about historical and contemporary resistance. Which brings me back to my crying.

So much of what I'm reading and hearing and watching is heartbreaking. I remember crying many years ago as I read Dee Brown's classic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, one of the only such memories until I go all the way back to that childhood moment with my mother. I cried several times in more recent years reading Derrick Jensen's books. I cried three months ago when I read about the Russian prisoner of war "Sasha" who helped lead a successful mass escape from the German death camp at Sobibor, only to be thrown later into a gulag by Stalin. I cried two months ago watching Escape From Sobibor, the dramatization of that breakout. I cried three weeks ago listening to a Feminist Current podcast of Jackie Lynn's account of abusive grooming for eventual prostitution. I cried two weeks ago reading Patrizia Romito's A Deafening Silence and its analytic yet human exposure of the denial around male violence against women. I cried yesterday hearing about the extinctions of Hawaii birds that have occurred within my short lifetime, and the likely forced death march of several more before my own life is through.

Po'ouli, extinct as of 2004

 

Today

And of course, I cried today. I watched two movies: Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, and If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front. I didn't expect either one to affect me as it did. Perhaps I primed myself to be ripped apart by Kanehsatake by reading Vine Deloria Jr's Custer Died for Your Sins and watching American Holocaust over the past week. More likely it would have happened anyway. The film, comprised almost entirely of on-the-ground footage in the thick of the action, shows the 1990 resistance of the Mohawk people of the Kanehsatake village to a planned seizure of their traditional land, disturbance of their cemetary, and the destruction of ancient pines to build new luxury housing and expand a golf course.

With amazing clarity and starkness, the film depicts the brute application of force against an already oppressed people; outright disregard for human rights; the repression of journalistic freedom; and soldiers and commanders and mayors "only following orders" and displacing responsibility for their roles in the violent violations. But it also depicts the strong spirit of the Mohawks and their allies, a resistance culture formed from longtime bonds of family and tribe, an integration of women and warriors and chiefs and children and spiritual leaders, unbridled expressions of anger and grief and love, a sense of humor, and an ironclad will to stand up to and fight back against injustice that I've never experienced in my white middle class life.

If a Tree Falls felt less intense. It's a more distanced documentary of interviews and vignettes centered around former Earth Liberation Front member Daniel McGowan as he awaits trial in 2007 for his role in multiple arsons of the property of environmentally destructive corporations (the original ecoterrorists.) I'd heard bits and pieces about his case, and those of the other defendants in the Operation Backfire roundup, but this filled in a lot of important detail, and made it all very human and real. The film drew me in and had me anxiously awaiting, with Daniel, the results of his trial. I'd already idealogically supported him and other ELFers, but I gained specific respect for this man who not only put his life on the front line, desperately trying to stop the ongoing horrors of industrial civilization after the approved political routes had failed, but stuck to his commitment not to turn state evidence against his comrades (even as most of them turned on each other and on him.) I broke down a couple more times watching his vilification and harsh sentencing.

I don't know what's happening to me, exactly. I've never reacted much to traditional tear-jerker emotion-manipulating films (usually about when I notice that I'm feeling something, I also notice the new musical score deliberately orchestrated to make me feel that something.) But the films I saw today are real. I guess I've opened myself up more and more to reality, to looking directly at the ongoing atrocities committed by the dominant culture. It's not as bad as one might expect; the grief hasn't led to despair, the anger hasn't led to some all-consuming directionless and distracting rage. To effectively resist, I need to operate from a realistic assessment of the situation - how others have resisted and succeeded or failed and why, how those in power have struck back against resistance and how they have succeeded or failed and why. I can handle the grief and anger; they're releasing and healing and authentic.

To misquote Steve Forbert: it feels good to feel again. I plan to continue.