I’ve not watched this yet, but Chris, Derrick, Lierre are a pretty strong lineup. I watched the documentary Bright Green Lies a few months ago on Vimeo. It was powerful and pretty depressing. Basically what I expected…
Anyway. Hopefully there’s some interesting stuff in the interview.
On the show today, Chris Hedges discusses the lies and fantasies told by the mainstream environmental movement about how to solve the climate crisis with authors and activists Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith.
A new book shows how technology will not solve our environmental crisis. We will not extract ourselves from the death march towards extinction by recycling, building wind turbines, relying on solar panels or driving electric cars. This is a fantasy, sold to us by an environmental movement that promises we can continue to indulge in orgies of consumption and maintain the levels of waste and perpetual growth that define the industrial age. The fact is our time is up. The forests are dying. Water is polluted, and in many places poisoned. Industrial farming is depleting the soil. The coral reefs are crumbling under the acid assault of carbon. Species are going extinct. Temperatures are soaring. Each of the last four decades have been hotter than the last. Soaring temperature rises — we are already at a 1.2 °C (2.16 ° F) above preindustrial levels — are already baked into the system, meaning that even if we stopped all carbon emission today, we still face catastrophe. Anything above a temperature rise of 1.5 ° C will render the earth unhabitable. The Arctic ice along with the Greenland ice sheet are now expected to melt regardless of how much we reduce carbon emissions. A seven-meter (23-foot) rise in sea level, which is what will take place once the ice is gone, means every town and city on a coast at sea level will have to be evacuated. We must radically reconfigure how we live, and this means largely dismantling industrial society, or the human species, and most other species, will vanish, joining the long list of species that once roamed the earth and are no more.
Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert’s new book is Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost its Way and What we Can do About It.
“Anything above a temperature rise of 1.5 ° C will render the earth unhabitable.”
But it’s been well above that in the paleontological past, during which time life throve mightily. Such alarmist remarks, based on inadequate understanding of fundamentally unpredictable hyper-complex processes, are no help.
Haven’t seen the whole interview yet. I guess it will be very good stuff in the main, with those names in the discussion. Doesn’t do to blemish it, though, with alarmist predictions which, if we’re unbendingly honest, are simply gambler’s guesses. We just don’t know what’s going to pan out.
Shovelling mountains of GGs into the atmosphere, though, whilst undergoing a fatal population-overshoot episode, and a PROGRESSFOREVER!! delusion-fest don’t exactly help. The bottom line is that this is an unpredictable, but nasty, bugger of a situation. Probably no worse than the end-of-Permian extinction event, though. Quite probably not even that bad - which Gaia survived handily. I still see ground for - long-term - optimism (if viewed through constant-reincarnation spectacles! )
Yeah, I wondered about that too. One of the things that is different now, though, is the pace of change, which makes it hard for species to adapt to the new normal. That is enough of a nonlinear knock that we don’t really know what the effect will be. A significant period of turbulence as we reach for the new equilibrium might week be all that is needed to end the human experiment on the planet, given our current fragility.
But yes, total extinction remains unlikely (but not impossible, as Roger Hallam cogently argues). What is very likely, though, is the collapse of civilisation and the attendant die off that results from that.
Having watched about half the piece now, I’d wager the arguments are well understood by most folk here. They are not that different to those in the movie Planet of the Humans that we discussed last year.
I could boil it down to the following:
it doesn’t matter how we generate the power needed to fuel industrial civilisation. It’s industrial civilisation itself that is the problem.
Thanks for posting. I have a lot of catching up to do on this topic, so this (and the conversation(s) here) are an excellent starting point. Might get the book.
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