Written by Derryl Hermanutz
Editor’s note: This essay was written in reaction to “Bright Green Lies And Deep Green Deceptions” by Craig Collins, Resilience. The article was posted here 16 August 2021.
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I haven’t read the book but from what Craig Collins writes I agree with the Bright Green Lies authors and disagree with the critic. Bright Green liars want it to be the case that industrial mass civilization and city life can be maintained without destroying the natural world. This is fantasy, clean green delusion.
Industrial mass civilization vs environmentalism is either/or, not both. Either humans live within nature and with nature, or humans bulldoze nature and replace it with industrial agriculture, mines, power grids, and cities. One way of life is “environmental”, natural. The other way of life is anti-environmental, man-made, artificial. Humans can either live as part of the natural environment or we can replace nature with a human-made environment.
“Greens” cannot have it both ways. There is nothing natural or sustainable about cities, which can only be supported by industrial mass civilization that funnels work and resources produced in the countryside into the cities to be consumed. Cities consume stuff and produce garbage, which is hauled into the countryside to be piled up out of sight of city-dwellers. Some cities still dump their raw sewage into rivers and oceans. There is nothing “clean” about packing millions of people into small areas where they are utterly dependent on industrial civilization to provide them with all of their daily necessities of life and dispose of their waste.
“Industrial mass civilization vs environmentalism is either/or, not both.”
There are 2 ways of living on this planet: small scale communities with technologically primitive and self-sufficient local economies, or globalized industrial mass civilization. Each is of a piece. Each is a package deal.
You cannot have local economies and also have technologies like electrical grids and cellphones and complex machines. Those technologies are made of materials that are not available locally but are sourced from all over the planet, so to have any of them requires having large scale transnational industrial enterprises with access to global supply chains and centralized refineries and factories and global distribution networks.
Leonard Reed’s 1951 essay, I, Pencil, demonstrated how even such an apparently technologically simple thing as a lead pencil with eraser is made of materials that are literally sourced from all over the planet, then refined and processed and assembled by machines in large scale centralized industrial plants. No person or local community could make a pencil. It takes mechanized global industrial civilization to make pencils.
“To have large amounts of electricity and massive machines powered by electricity requires having all of the pieces of industrial mass civilization”
In his 1967 book, The New Industrial State, John K Galbraith observed that only very large scale heavily capitalized corporations are able to assemble the wherewithal that is required to participate in the global industrial economy. As Friedrich List observed in his 1841 book series, The National System of Political Economy, in every historical case of a nation that has industrialized its economy, it has done so by an explicit policy of State-corporate cooperation that builds up the central industrial and financial-commercial base by exploiting cheap resources from the regions. A system of preferential tariffs blocks regional producers from exporting for higher prices, and compels them to buy overpriced machinery from the newly industrializing center. Galbraith re-states this case in 1967. In 1870, 29 years after List published his books, Canada’s first Prime Minister John A Macdonald implemented his National Policies – exactly as List had laid out, and successfully industrialized Central Canada (Ontario and Quebec) at the expense of the regional provinces.
To have large amounts of electricity and massive machines powered by electricity requires having all of the pieces of industrial mass civilization, including government-enforced exploitation of resource producing regions to build up centralized power and wealth structures, and including the destruction and pollution of the natural world by fossil-fueled and electric-powered machines. “Inequality” and environmental destruction are baked into the industrial structure.
Industrial civilization replaces nature with a human-made environment. It replaces food-fueled human labor with fossil-fueled machine labor. It makes no difference if the machines are converted to electric power. The Earth must still be ravaged by large scale industrial enterprises using heavy machinery to build and operate and maintain the non-human artificially-powered machine infrastructure.
The idea that artificially-fueled mechanized industrial civilization can be “cleaned up” is a Bright Green Lie. The environmentally sustainable alternative is to abandon machines and cities, move into the countryside, and learn to live by muscle-powered peasant agriculture. There is no politically, economically or technologically feasible “transition” from machine-powered mass civilization in cities to muscle-powered local economies. Almost nobody will do this voluntarily, abandon civilization and adopt self-sufficient peasant life. But after industrial mass civilization stops working and its billions of dependents die, the survivors are going to do it by necessity.
“Industrial civilization replaces nature with a human-made environment.”
All it would take is a modern Carrington Event – the 1859 solar flaring that hit the Earth’s magnetosphere and generated an electromagnetic pulse that took out the telegraph system. Today it would take out the global electric grid. Everything would stop working, all at once, including every form of electronic communication.
The electrical transformers and circuitry would be fried, not fixable. It would take a decade or more to even begin to get electricity working again in selected areas, if it was possible at all. How do you organize survival efforts without electronic communications? Almost nobody who lives in “civilization” would survive 10 years without electric powered communications, water pumping systems and without trucks delivering food to local stores in city neighborhoods.
Money – most of which is electronic digits in banking system accounting software – would simply cease to exist when the power goes off. Mass society cannot function without money. But rural peasants whose lives don’t depend on money and electric powered technologies would survive, if they live more than one tank of gas away from “civilized” predators escaping from the dying cities.
Civilization is rich, comfortable and convenient but fragile. Locally self-sufficient rural life is poor, uncomfortable, hard, but resilient. “Rustic” people who live in local economies are individually competent to provide for their own physical needs. They don’t depend on complex technological systems. “Civilized” people who live in cities cannot produce any of their daily needs. They are totally dependent on the ongoing functioning of all of the complex technological systems.
Civilization cannot be made resilient, and rural life cannot be made physically easy. It’s a clear choice between one way of life (fragile) and a very different way of life (resilient).
Ancient history and archaeology are rife with the ruins of mighty civilizations that were wiped off the face of the Earth never to rise again. But “humanity” survived, at least those humans who learned how to live as self-sufficient peasants in local communities. Until some murderous illustrious tyrant came along again and organized them all into his mighty “civilization” that enslaves and exploits the productive workers for the benefit of the parasitic rulers and their courtesans and administrative bureaucrats.
“Civilization is rich, comfortable and convenient but fragile.”
You can’t just move into the countryside and “become a peasant farmer”. It is a knowledge intensive way of life that requires extensive local knowledge and resources and hand tools. If you’re not already doing it when civilization collapses, you will not survive long enough to learn how to do it.
I think Linh Dinh nailed it, in an essay he wrote about a year ago while living among the peasants in the Vietnamese highlands. The survivors of the collapse of industrial mass civilization will be these people “who are already ankle deep in mud”.
Caption graphic photo credit: Clip form image by Bishnu Sarangi from Pixabay. Full image:
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