Deep Green Resistance is for those who can’t wait anymore.
This is the question: Are you willing to accept the only strategy
left to us? Are you willing to set aside your last, fierce dream of that
brave uprising of millions strong? I know what I am asking. The human
heart needs hope as it needs air. But the existence of those brave
millions is the empty hope of the desperate, and they’re not coming to
our rescue.
If you care
about life on this planet, and if you believe this culture won’t
voluntarily cease to destroy it, how does that belief affect your
methods of resistance?
Most people don’t know, because most people don’t talk about it. Some
are too afraid of being called terrorists by those who are murdering
the planet. Some believe using the same tactics that have not worked for
the last forty years – whether it be protests or petitions,
collaboration with corporations, or window breaking will magically start
being effective. Some think a technological solution will appear to
make it all go away. Some have pinned their hopes on lifestyle changes,
and its corollary, personal change, as if individual behaviors can
dismantle systemic problems. And finally, some just have hope – the
groundless, amorphous belief that allows us to keep “living” these lives
while all around us and inside us the destruction grows exponentially.
The hard truth is none of this has or will work, ever. Yet these
represent the majority of our efforts to save the Earth.
Those who come after, who inherit whatever’s left of the world once
this culture has been stopped are going to judge us by the health of the
landbase, by what we leave behind.
They’re not going to care how we lived our lives. They’re not going
to care how hard we tried. They’re not going to care whether we were
nice people.
They’re not going to care whether we were nonviolent or violent.
They’re not going to care whether we grieved the murder of the planet.
They’re not going to care what sort of excuses we had to not act.
They’re not going to care how simply we lived.
They’re not going to care how pure we were in thought or action.
They’re not going to care if we became the change we wished to see.
They’re not going to care whether we voted Democrat, Republican,
Green, Libertarian, or not at all. They’re not going to care if we wrote
really big books about it. They’re not going to care whether we had
“compassion” for the CEOs and politicians running this deathly economy.
They’re going to care whether they can breathe the air and drink the water.
#
Environmentalists fight as hard as we can to protect the places we
love, using the tools of the system the best that we can. Yet we do not
do the most important thing of all:
we do not question the existence of this death culture.
We do not question the existence of an economic and social system that
is working the world to death, that is starving it to death, that is
imprisoning it, that is torturing it. We never question the logic that
leads inevitably to clearcuts, murdered oceans, loss of topsoil, dammed
rivers, poisoned aquifers.
When most people ask, “How can we stop global warming?” they aren’t
really asking what they pretend they’re asking. They are instead asking,
“How can we stop global warming without stopping the burning of oil and
gas, without stopping the industrial infrastructure, without stopping
this omnicidal system?” The answer: you can’t.
Ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans are already gone.
Where is your threshold for resistance? Is it 91 percent? 92? 93? 94?
Would you wait till they had killed off 95 percent? 96? 97? 98? 99? How
about 100 percent? Would you fight back then?
If salmon could take on human manifestation, what would they do?
What would we do if Nazis had invaded, and they were vacuuming the
oceans, scalping native forests, damming every river, changing the
climate, and putting carcinogens into every mother’s breast milk, and
into the flesh of your children, your lover, your mother, into your own
flesh? How much worse would the damage have to get? Would you resist? If
there existed a resistance movement, would you join it?
A Strategy
The strategy of Deep Green Resistance starts
by acknowledging the dire circumstances that industrial civilization
has created for life on this planet. And that these circumstances should
be met with solutions that match the scale of the problems.
This is a vast undertaking but it needs to be said: it can be done. Industrial civilization can be stopped.
Deep Green Resistance is a plan of action for anyone determined to fight for this planet—and win.
Decisive Ecological Warfare
by Aric McBay
Chapter 14 of the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet
Purchase book here and all proceeds go to support the Deep Green Resistance movement.
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so
odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t
even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the
gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and
you’ve got to make it stop!
—Mario Savio, Berkeley Free Speech Movement
To gain what is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else.
—Bernadette Devlin, Irish activist and politician
BRINGING IT DOWN: COLLAPSE SCENARIOS
At this point in history, there are no good short-term outcomes for
global human society. Some are better and some are worse, and in the
long term some are very good, but in the short term we’re in a bind. I’m
not going to lie to you—the hour is too late for cheermongering. The
only way to find the best outcome is to confront our dire situation head
on, and not to be diverted by false hopes.
Human society—because of civilization, specifically—has painted
itself into a corner. As a species we’re dependent on the draw down of
finite supplies of oil, soil, and water. Industrial agriculture (and
annual grain agriculture before that) has put us into a vicious pattern
of population growth and overshoot. We long ago exceeded carrying
capacity, and the workings of civilization are destroying that carrying
capacity by the second. This is largely the fault of those in power, the
wealthiest, the states and corporations. But the consequences—and the
responsibility for dealing with it—fall to the rest of us, including
nonhumans.
Physically, it’s not too late for a crash program to limit births to
reduce the population, cut fossil fuel consumption to nil, replace
agricultural monocrops with perennial polycultures, end overfishing, and
cease industrial encroachment on (or destruction of) remaining wild
areas. There’s no physical reason we couldn’t start all of these things
tomorrow, stop global warming in its tracks, reverse overshoot, reverse
erosion, reverse aquifer drawdown, and bring back all the species and
biomes currently on the brink. There’s no physical reason we couldn’t
get together and act like adults and fix these problems, in the sense
that it isn’t against the laws of physics.
But socially and politically, we know this is a pipe dream. There are
material systems of power that make this impossible as long as those
systems are still intact. Those in power get too much money and
privilege from destroying the planet. We aren’t going to save the
planet—or our own future as a species—without a fight.
What’s realistic? What options are actually available to us, and what
are the consequences? What follows are three broad and illustrative
scenarios: one in which there is no substantive or decisive resistance,
one in which there is limited resistance and a relatively prolonged
collapse, and one in which all-out resistance leads to the immediate
collapse of civilization and global industrial infrastructure.
NO RESISTANCE
If there is no substantive resistance, likely there will be a few
more years of business as usual, though with increasing economic
disruption and upset. According to the best available data, the impacts
of peak oil start to hit somewhere between 2011 and 2015, resulting in a
rapid decline in global energy availability.1 It’s possible that this
may happen slightly later if all-out attempts are made to extract
remaining fossil fuels, but that would only prolong the inevitable,
worsen global warming, and make the eventual decline that much steeper
and more severe. Once peak oil sets in, the increasing cost and
decreasing supply of energy undermines manufacturing and transportation,
especially on a global scale.
The energy slide will cause economic turmoil, and a self-perpetuating
cycle of economic contraction will take place. Businesses will be
unable to pay their workers, workers will be unable to buy things, and
more companies will shrink or go out of business (and will be unable to
pay their workers). Unable to pay their debts and mortgages, homeowners,
companies, and even states will go bankrupt. (It’s possible that this
process has already begun.) International trade will nosedive because of
a global depression and increasing transportation and manufacturing
costs. Though it’s likely that the price of oil will increase over time,
there will be times when the contracting economy causes falling demand
for oil, thus suppressing the price. The lower cost of oil may,
ironically but beneficially, limit investment in new oil infrastructure.
At first the collapse will resemble a traditional recession or
depression, with the poor being hit especially hard by the increasing
costs of basic goods, particularly of electricity and heating in cold
areas. After a few years, the financial limits will become physical
ones; large-scale energy-intensive manufacturing will become not only
uneconomical, but impossible.
A direct result of this will be the collapse of industrial
agriculture. Dependent on vast amounts of energy for tractor fuel,
synthesized pesticides and fertilizers, irrigation, greenhouse heating,
packaging, and transportation, global industrial agriculture will run up
against hard limits to production (driven at first by intense
competition for energy from other sectors). This will be worsened by the
depletion of groundwater and aquifers, a long history of soil erosion,
and the early stages of climate change. At first this will cause a food
and economic crisis mostly felt by the poor. Over time, the situation
will worsen and industrial food production will fall below that required
to sustain the population.
There will be three main responses to this global food shortage. In
some areas people will return to growing their own food and build
sustainable local food initiatives. This will be a positive sign, but
public involvement will be belated and inadequate, as most people still
won’t have caught on to the permanency of collapse and won’t want to
have to grow their own food. It will also be made far more difficult by
the massive urbanization that has occurred in the last century, by the
destruction of the land, and by climate change. Furthermore, most
subsistence cultures will have been destroyed or uprooted from their
land—land inequalities will hamper people from growing their own food
(just as they do now in the majority of the world). Without
well-organized resisters, land reform will not happen, and displaced
people will not be able to access land. As a result, widespread hunger
and starvation (worsening to famine in bad agricultural years) will
become endemic in many parts of the world. The lack of energy for
industrial agriculture will cause a resurgence in the institutions of
slavery and serfdom.
Slavery does not occur in a political vacuum. Threatened by economic
and energy collapse, some governments will fall entirely, turning into
failed states. With no one to stop them, warlords will set up shop in
the rubble. Others, desperate to maintain power against emboldened
secessionists and civil unrest, will turn to authoritarian forms of
government. In a world of diminishing but critical resources,
governments will get leaner and meaner. We will see a resurgence of
authoritarianism in modern forms: technofascism and corporation
feudalism. The rich will increasingly move to private and well-defended
enclaves. Their country estates will not look apocalyptic—they will look
like eco-Edens, with well-tended organic gardens, clean private lakes,
and wildlife refuges. In some cases these enclaves will be tiny, and in
others they could fill entire countries.
Meanwhile, the poor will see their own condition worsen. The millions
of refugees created by economic and energy collapse will be on the
move, but no one will want them. In some brittle areas the influx of
refugees will overwhelm basic services and cause a local collapse,
resulting in cascading waves of refugees radiating from collapse and
disaster epicenters. In some areas refugees will be turned back by force
of arms. In other areas, racism and discrimination will come to the
fore as an excuse for authoritarians to put marginalized people and
dissidents in “special settlements,” leaving more resources for the
privileged.2 Desperate people will be the only candidates for the
dangerous and dirty manual labor required to keep industrial
manufacturing going once the energy supply dwindles. Hence, those in
power will consider autonomous and self-sustaining communities a threat
to their labor supply, and suppress or destroy them.
Despite all of this, technological “progress” will not yet stop. For a
time it will continue in fits and starts, although humanity will be
split into increasingly divergent groups. Those on the bottom will be
unable to meet their basic subsistence needs, while those on the top
will attempt to live lives of privilege as they had in the past, even
seeing some technological advancements, many of which will be intended
to cement the superiority of those in power in an increasingly crowded
and hostile world.
Technofascists will develop and perfect social control technologies
(already currently in their early stages): autonomous drones for
surveillance and assassination; microwave crowd-control devices;
MRI-assisted brain scans that will allow for infallible lie detection,
even mind reading and torture. There will be no substantive organized
resistance in this scenario, but in each year that passes the
technofascists will make themselves more and more able to destroy
resistance even in its smallest expression. As time slips by, the window
of opportunity for resistance will swiftly close. Technofascists of the
early to mid-twenty-first century will have technology for coercion and
surveillance that will make the most practiced of the Stasi or the SS
look like rank amateurs. Their ability to debase humanity will make
their predecessors appear saintly by comparison.
Not all governments will take this turn, of course. But the
authoritarian governments—those that will continue ruthlessly exploiting
people and resources regardless of the consequences—will have more sway
and more muscle, and will take resources from their neighbors and
failed states as they please. There will be no one to stop them. It
won’t matter if you are the most sustainable eco-village on the planet
if you live next door to an eternally resource-hungry fascist state.
Meanwhile, with industrial powers increasingly desperate for energy,
the tenuous remaining environmental and social regulations will be cast
aside. The worst of the worst, practices like drilling offshore and in
wildlife refuges, and mountaintop removal for coal will become
commonplace. These will be merely the dregs of prehistoric energy
reserves. The drilling will only prolong the endurance of industrial
civilization for a matter of months or years, but ecological damage will
be long-term or permanent (as is happening in the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge). Because in our scenario there is no substantive
resistance, this will all proceed unobstructed.
Investment in renewable industrial energy will also take place,
although it will be belated and hampered by economic challenges,
government bankruptcies, and budget cuts.3 Furthermore, long-distance
power transmission lines will be insufficient and crumbling from age.
Replacing and upgrading them will prove difficult and expensive. As a
result, even once in place, electric renewables will only produce a tiny
fraction of the energy produced by petroleum. That electric energy will
not be suitable to run the vast majority of tractors, trucks, and other
vehicles or similar infrastructure.
As a consequence, renewable energy will have only a minimal
moderating affect on the energy cliff. In fact, the energy invested in
the new infrastructure will take years to pay itself back with
electricity generated. Massive infrastructure upgrades will actually
steepen the energy cliff by decreasing the amount of energy available
for daily activities. There will be a constant struggle to allocate
limited supplies of energy under successive crises. There will be some
rationing to prevent riots, but most energy (regardless of the source)
will go to governments, the military, corporations, and the rich.
Energy constraints will make it impossible to even attempt any
full-scale infrastructure overhauls like hydrogen economies (which
wouldn’t solve the problem anyway). Biofuels will take off in many
areas, despite the fact that they mostly have a poor ratio of energy
returned on energy invested (EROEI). The EROEI will be better in
tropical countries, so remaining tropical forests will be massively
logged to clear land for biofuel production. (Often, forests will be
logged en masse simply to burn for fuel.) Heavy machinery will be too
expensive for most plantations, so their labor will come from slavery
and serfdom under authoritarian governments and corporate feudalism.
(Slavery is currently used in Brazil to log forests and produce charcoal
by hand for the steel industry, after all.)4 The global effects of
biofuel production will be increases in the cost of food, increases in
water and irrigation drawdown for agriculture, and worsening soil
erosion. Regardless, its production will amount to only a small fraction
of the liquid hydrocarbons available at the peak of civilization.
All of this will have immediate ecological consequences. The oceans,
wracked by increased fishing (to compensate for food shortages) and
warming-induced acidity and coral die-offs, will be mostly dead. The
expansion of biofuels will destroy many remaining wild areas and global
biodiversity will plummet. Tropical forests like the Amazon produce the
moist climate they require through their own vast transpiration, but
expanded logging and agriculture will cut transpiration and tip the
balance toward permanent drought. Even where the forest is not actually
cut, the drying local climate will be enough to kill it. The Amazon will
turn into a desert, and other tropical forests will follow suit.
Projections vary, but it’s almost certain that if the majority of the
remaining fossil fuels are extracted and burned, global warming would
become self-perpetuating and catastrophic. However, the worst effects
will not be felt until decades into the future, once most fossil fuels
have already been exhausted. By then, there will be very little energy
or industrial capacity left for humans to try to compensate for the
effects of global warming.
Furthermore, as intense climate change takes over, ecological
remediation through perennial polycultures and forest replanting will
become impossible. The heat and drought will turn forests into net
carbon emitters, as northern forests die from heat, pests, and disease,
and then burn in continent-wide fires that will make early twenty-first
century conflagrations look minor.5 Even intact pastures won’t survive
the temperature extremes as carbon is literally baked out of remaining
agricultural soils.
Resource wars between nuclear states will break out. War between the
US and Russia is less likely than it was in the Cold War, but ascending
superpowers like China will want their piece of the global resource pie.
Nuclear powers such as India and Pakistan will be densely populated and
ecologically precarious; climate change will dry up major rivers
previously fed by melting glaciers, and hundreds of millions of people
in South Asia will live bare meters above sea level. With few resources
to equip and field a mechanized army or air force, nuclear strikes will
seem an increasingly effective action for desperate states.
If resource wars escalate to nuclear wars, the effects will be
severe, even in the case of a “minor” nuclear war between countries like
India and Pakistan. Even if each country uses only fifty
Hiroshima-sized bombs as air bursts above urban centers, a nuclear
winter will result.6 Although lethal levels of fallout last only a
matter of weeks, the ecological effects will be far more severe. The
five megatons of smoke produced will darken the sky around the world.
Stratospheric heating will destroy most of what remains of the ozone
layer.7 In contrast to the overall warming trend, a “little ice age”
will begin immediately and last for several years. During that period,
temperatures in major agricultural regions will routinely drop below
freezing in summer. Massive and immediate starvation will occur around
the world.
That’s in the case of a small war. The explosive power of one hundred
Hiroshima-sized bombs accounts for only 0.03 percent of the global
arsenal. If a larger number of more powerful bombs are used—or if cobalt
bombs are used to produce long-term irradiation and wipe out surface
life—the effects will be even worse.8 There will be few human survivors.
The nuclear winter effect will be temporary, but the bombing and
subsequent fires will put large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere,
kill plants, and impair photosynthesis. As a result, after the ash
settles, global warming will be even more rapid and worse than before.
Nuclear war or not, the long-term prospects are dim. Global warming
will continue to worsen long after fossil fuels are exhausted. For the
planet, the time to ecological recovery is measured in tens of millions
of years, if ever.9 As James Lovelock has pointed out, a major warming
event could push the planet into a different equilibrium, one much
warmer than the current one.10 It’s possible that large plants and
animals might only be able to survive near the poles.11 It’s also
possible that the entire planet could become essentially uninhabitable
to large plants and animals, with a climate more like Venus than Earth.
All that is required for this to occur is for current trends to
continue without substantive and effective resistance. All that is
required for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing. But this
future is not inevitable.
LIMITED RESISTANCE
What if some forms of limited resistance were undertaken? What if
there was a serious aboveground resistance movement combined with a
small group of underground networks working in tandem? (This still would
not be a majority movement—this is extrapolation, not fantasy.) What if
those movements combined their grand strategy? The abovegrounders would
work to build sustainable and just communities wherever they were, and
would use both direct and indirect action to try to curb the worst
excesses of those in power, to reduce the burning of fossil fuels, to
struggle for social and ecological justice. Meanwhile, the
undergrounders would engage in limited attacks on infrastructure (often
in tandem with aboveground struggles), especially energy infrastructure,
to try to reduce fossil fuel consumption and overall industrial
activity. The overall thrust of this plan would be to use selective
attacks to accelerate collapse in a deliberate way, like shoving a
rickety building.
If this scenario occurred, the first years would play out similarly.
It would take time to build up resistance and to ally existing
resistance groups into a larger strategy. Furthermore, civilization at
the peak of its power would be too strong to bring down with only
partial resistance. The years around 2011 to 2015 would still see the
impact of peak oil and the beginning of an economic tailspin, but in
this case there would be surgical attacks on energy infrastructure that
limited new fossil fuel extraction (with a focus on the nastier
practices like mountain-top removal and tar sands). Some of these
attacks would be conducted by existing resistance groups (like MEND) and
some by newer groups, including groups in the minority world of the
rich and powerful. The increasing shortage of oil would make pipeline
and infrastructure attacks more popular with militant groups of all
stripes. During this period, militant groups would organize, practice,
and learn.
These attacks would not be symbolic attacks. They would be serious
attacks designed to be effective but timed and targeted to minimize the
amount of “collateral damage” on humans. They would mostly constitute
forms of sabotage. They would be intended to cut fossil fuel consumption
by some 30 percent within the first few years, and more after that.
There would be similar attacks on energy infrastructure like power
transmission lines. Because these attacks would cause a significant but
incomplete reduction in the availability of energy in many places, a
massive investment in local renewable energy (and other measures like
passive solar heating or better insulation in some areas) would be
provoked. This would set in motion a process of political and
infrastructural decentralization. It would also result in political
repression and real violence targeting those resisters.
Meanwhile, aboveground groups would be making the most of the
economic turmoil. There would be a growth in class-consciousness and
organization. Labor and poverty activists would increasingly turn to
community sufficiency. Local food and self-sufficiency activists would
reach out to people who have been pushed out of capitalism. The
unemployed and underemployed—rapidly growing in number—would start to
organize a subsistence and trade economy outside of capitalism. Mutual
aid and skill sharing would be promoted. In the previous scenario, the
development of these skills was hampered in part by a lack of access to
land. In this scenario, however, aboveground organizers would learn from
groups like the Landless Workers Movement in Latin America. Mass
organization and occupation of lands would force governments to cede
unused land for “victory garden”–style allotments, massive community
gardens, and cooperative subsistence farms.
The situation in many third world countries could actually improve
because of the global economic collapse. Minority 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.
Industrial agriculture would falter and begin to collapse. Synthetic
fertilizers would become increasingly expensive and would be carefully
conserved where they are used, limiting nutrient runoff and allowing
oceanic dead zones to recover. Hunger would be reduced by subsistence
farming and by the shift of small farms toward more traditional work by
hand and by draft horse, but food would be more valuable and in shorter
supply.
Even a 50 percent cut in fossil fuel consumption wouldn’t stave off
widespread hunger and die-off. As we have discussed, the vast majority
of all energy used goes to nonessentials. In the US, the agricultural
sector accounts for less than 2 percent of all energy use, including
both direct consumption (like tractor fuel and electricity for barns and
pumps) and indirect consumption (like synthetic fertilizers and
pesticides).12 That’s true even though industrial agriculture is
incredibly inefficient and spends something like ten calories of fossil
fuel energy for every food calorie produced. Residential energy
consumption accounts for only 20 percent of US total usage, with
industrial, commercial, and transportation consumption making up the
majority of all consumption.13 And most of that residential energy goes
into household appliances like dryers, air conditioning, and water
heating for inefficiently used water. The energy used for lighting and
space heating could be itself drastically reduced through trivial
measures like lowering thermostats and heating the spaces people
actually live in. (Most don’t bother to do these now, but in a collapse
situation they will do that and more.)
Only a small fraction of fossil fuel energy actually goes into basic
subsistence, and even that is used inefficiently. A 50 percent decline
in fossil fuel energy could be readily adapted to form a subsistence
perspective (if not financial one). Remember that in North America, 40
percent of all food is simply wasted. Of course, poverty and hunger have
much more to do with power over people than with the kind of power
measured in watts. Even now at the peak of energy consumption, a billion
people go hungry. So if people are hungry or cold because of selective
militant attacks on infrastructure, that will be a direct result of the
actions of those in power, not of the resisters.
In fact, even if you want humans to be able to use factories to build
windmills and use tractors to help grow food over the next fifty years,
forcing an immediate cut in fossil fuel consumption should be at the
top of your to-do list. Right now most of the energy is being wasted on
plastic junk, too-big houses for rich people, bunker buster bombs, and
predator drones. The only way to ensure there is some oil left for basic
survival transitions in twenty years is to ensure that it isn’t being
squandered now. The US military is the single biggest oil user in the
world. Do you want to have to tell kids twenty years from now that they
don’t have enough to eat because all the energy was spent on pointless
neocolonial wars?
Back to the scenario. In some areas, increasingly abandoned suburbs
(unlivable without cheap gas) would be taken over, as empty houses would
become farmhouses, community centers, and clinics, or would be simply
dismantled and salvaged for material. Garages would be turned into
barns—most people couldn’t afford gasoline anyway—and goats would be
grazed in parks. Many roads would be torn up and returned to pasture or
forest. These reclaimed settlements would not be high-tech. The wealthy
enclaves may have their solar panels and electric windmills, but most
unemployed people wouldn’t be able to afford such things. In some cases
these communities would become relatively autonomous. Their social
practices and equality would vary based on the presence of people
willing to assert human rights and social justice. People would have to
resist vigorously whenever racism and xenophobia are used as excuses for
injustice and authoritarianism.
Attacks on energy infrastructure would become more common as oil
supplies diminish. In some cases, these attacks would be politically
motivated, and in others they would be intended to tap electricity or
pipelines for poor people. These attacks would steepen the energy slide
initially. This would have significant economic impacts, but it would
also turn the tide on population growth. The world population would peak
sooner, and peak population would be smaller (by perhaps a billion)
than it was in the “no resistance” scenario. Because a sharp collapse
would happen earlier than it otherwise would have, there would be more
intact land in the world per person, and more people who still know how
to do subsistence farming.
The presence of an organized militant resistance movement would provoke a
reaction from those in power. Some of them would use resistance as an
excuse to seize more power to institute martial law or overt fascism.
Some of them would make use of the economic and social crises rippling
across the globe. Others wouldn’t need an excuse.
Authoritarians would seize power where they could, and try to in
almost every country. However, they would be hampered by aboveground and
underground resistance, and by decentralization and the emergence of
autonomous communities. In some countries, mass mobilizations would stop
potential dictators. In others, the upsurge in resistance would
dissolve centralized state rule, resulting in the emergence of regional
confederations in some places and in warlords in others. In unlucky
countries, authoritarianism would take power. The good news is that
people would have resistance infrastructure in place to fight and limit
the spread of authoritarians, and authoritarians would have not
developed as much technology of control as they did in the “no
resistance” scenario.
There would still be refugees flooding out of many areas (including
urban areas). The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions caused by
attacks on industrial infrastructures would reduce or delay climate
catastrophe. Networks of autonomous subsistence communities would be
able to accept and integrate some of these people. In the same way that
rooted plants can prevent a landslide on a steep slope, the cascades of
refugees would be reduced in some areas by willing communities. In other
areas, the numbers of refugees would be too much to cope with
effectively.14
The development of biofuels (and the fate of tropical forests) is
uncertain. Remaining centralized states—though they may be smaller and
less powerful—would still want to squeeze out energy from wherever they
could. Serious militant resistance—in many cases insurgency and guerilla
warfare—would be required to stop industrialists from turning tropical
forests into plantations or extracting coal at any cost. In this
scenario, resistance would still be limited, and it is questionable
whether that level of militancy would be effectively mustered.
This means that the long-term impacts of the greenhouse effect would
be uncertain. Fossil fuel burning would have to be kept to an absolute
minimum to avoid a runaway greenhouse effect. That could prove very
difficult.
But if a runaway greenhouse effect could be avoided, many areas could
be able to recover rapidly. A return to perennial polycultures,
implemented by autonomous communities, could help reverse the greenhouse
effect. The oceans would look better quickly, aided by a reduction in
industrial fishing and the end of the synthetic fertilizer runoff that
creates so many dead zones now.
The likelihood of nuclear war would be much lower than in the “no
resistance” scenario. Refugee cascades in South Asia would be
diminished. Overall resource consumption would be lower, so resource
wars would be less likely to occur. And militaristic states would be
weaker and fewer in number. Nuclear war wouldn’t be impossible, but if
it did happen, it could be less severe.
There are many ways in which this scenario is appealing. But it has
problems as well, both in implementation and in plausibility. One
problem is with the integration of aboveground and underground action.
Most aboveground environmental organizations are currently opposed to
any kind of militancy. This could hamper the possibility of strategic
cooperation between underground militants and aboveground groups that
could mobilize greater numbers. (It would also doom our aboveground
groups to failure as their record so far demonstrates.)
It’s also questionable whether the cut in fossil fuel consumption
described here would be sufficient to avoid runaway global warming. If
runaway global warming does take place, all of the beneficial work of
the abovegrounders would be wiped out. The converse problem is that a
steeper decline in fossil fuel consumption would very possibly result in
significant human casualties and deprivation. It’s also possible that
the mobilization of large numbers of people to subsistence farming in a
short time is unrealistic. By the time most people are willing to take
that step, it could be too late.
So while in some ways this scenario represents an ideal compromise—a
win-win situation for humans and the planet—it could just as easily be a
lose-lose situation without serious and timely action. That brings us
to our last scenario, one of all-out resistance and attacks on
infrastructure intended to guarantee the survival of a livable planet.
ALL-OUT ATTACKS ON INFRASTRUCTURE
In this final scenario, militant resistance would have one primary
goal: to reduce fossil fuel consumption (and hence, all ecological
damage) as immediately and rapidly as possible. A 90 percent reduction
would be the ballpark target. For militants in this scenario, impacts on
civilized humans would be secondary.
Here’s their rationale in a nutshell: Humans aren’t going to do
anything in time to prevent the planet from being destroyed wholesale.
Poor people are too preoccupied by primary emergencies, rich people
benefit from the status quo, and the middle class (rich people by global
standards) are too obsessed with their own entitlement and the
technological spectacle to do anything. The risk of runaway global
warming is immediate. A drop in the human population is inevitable, and
fewer people will die if collapse happens sooner.
Think of it like this. We know we are in overshoot as a species. That
means that a significant portion of the people now alive may have to
die before we are back under carrying capacity. And that disparity is
growing by the day. Every day carrying capacity is driven down by
hundreds of thousands of humans, and every day the human population
increases by more than 200,000.15 The people added to the overshoot each
day are needless, pointless deaths. Delaying collapse, they argue, is
itself a form of mass murder.
Furthermore, they would argue, humans are only one species of
millions. To kill millions of species for the benefit of one is insane,
just as killing millions of people for the benefit of one person would
be insane. And since unimpeded ecological collapse would kill off humans
anyway, those species will ultimately have died for nothing, and the
planet will take millions of years to recover. Therefore, those of us
who care about the future of the planet have to dismantle the industrial
energy infrastructure as rapidly as possible. We’ll all have to deal
with the social consequences as best we can. Besides, rapid collapse is
ultimately good for humans—even if there is a partial die-off—because at
least some people survive. And remember, the people who need the system
to come down the most are the rural poor in the majority of the world:
the faster the actionists can bring down industrial civilization, the
better the prospects for those people and their landbases. Regardless,
without immediate action, everyone dies.
In this scenario, well-organized underground militants would make
coordinated attacks on energy infrastructure around the world. These
would take whatever tactical form militants could muster—actions against
pipelines, power lines, tankers, and refineries, perhaps using
electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) to do damage. Unlike in the previous
scenario, no attempt would be made to keep pace with aboveground
activists. The attacks would be as persistent as the militants could
manage. Fossil fuel energy availability would decline by 90 percent.
Greenhouse gas emissions would plummet.
The industrial economy would come apart. Manufacturing and
transportation would halt because of frequent blackouts and tremendously
high prices for fossil fuels. Some, perhaps most, governments would
institute martial law and rationing. Governments that took an
authoritarian route would be especially targeted by militant resisters.
Other states would simply fail and fall apart.
In theory, with a 90 percent reduction in fossil fuel availability,
there would still be enough to aid basic survival activities like
growing food, heating, and cooking. Governments and civil institutions
could still attempt a rapid shift to subsistence activities for their
populations, but instead, militaries and the very wealthy would attempt
to suck up virtually all remaining supplies of energy. In some places,
they would succeed in doing so and widespread hunger would result. In
others, people would refuse the authority of those in power. Most
existing large-scale institutions would simply collapse, and it would be
up to local people to either make a stand for human rights and a better
way of life or give in to authoritarian power. The death rate would
increase, but as we have seen in examples from Cuba and Russia, civic
order can still hold despite the hardships.
What happens next would depend on a number of factors. If the attacks
could persist and oil extraction were kept minimal for a prolonged
period, industrial civilization would be unlikely to reorganize itself.
Well-guarded industrial enclaves would remain, escorting fuel and
resources under arms. If martial law succeeded in stopping attacks after
the first few waves (something it has been unable to do in, for
example, Nigeria), the effects would be uncertain. In the twentieth
century, industrial societies have recovered from disasters, as Europe
did after World War II. But this would be a different situation. For
most areas, there would be no outside aid. Populations would no longer
be able to outrun the overshoot currently concealed by fossil fuels.
That does not mean the effects would be the same everywhere; rural and
traditional populations would be better placed to cope.
In most areas, reorganizing an energy-intense industrial civilization
would be impossible. Even where existing political organizations
persist, consumption would drop. Those in power would be unable to
project force over long distances, and would have to mostly limit their
activities to nearby areas. This means that, for example, tropical
biofuel plantations would not be feasible. The same goes for tar sands
and mountain-top removal coal mining. The construction of new
large-scale infrastructure would simply not be possible.
Though the human population would decline, things would look good for
virtually every other species. The oceans would begin to recover
rapidly. The same goes for damaged wilderness areas. Because greenhouse
emissions would have been reduced to a tiny fraction of their previous
levels, runaway global warming would likely be averted. In fact,
returning forests and grasslands would sequester carbon, helping to
maintain a livable climate.
Nuclear war would be unlikely. Diminished populations and industrial
activities would reduce competition between remaining states. Resource
limitations would be largely logistical in nature, so escalating
resource wars over supplies and resource-rich areas would be pointless.
This scenario, too, has its implementation and plausibility caveats.
It guarantees a future for both the planet and the human species. This
scenario would save trillions upon trillions upon trillions of living
creatures. Yes, it would create hardship for the urban wealthy and poor,
though most others would be better off immediately. It would be an
understatement to call such a concept unpopular (although the militants
in this scenario would argue that fewer people will die than in the case
of runaway global warming or business as usual).
There is also the question of plausibility. Could enough ecologically
motivated militants mobilize to enact this scenario? No doubt for many
people the second, more moderate scenario seems both more appealing and
more likely.
There is of course an infinitude of possible futures we could
describe. We will describe one more possible future, a combination of
the previous two, in which a resistance movement embarks on a strategy
of Decisive Ecological Warfare.
DECISIVE ECOLOGICAL WARFARE STRATEGY
Goals
The ultimate goal of the primary resistance movement in this scenario is
simply a living planet—a planet not just living, but in recovery,
growing more alive and more diverse year after year. A planet on which
humans live in equitable and sustainable communities without exploiting
the planet or each other.
Given our current state of emergency, this translates into a more
immediate goal, which is at the heart of this movement’s grand strategy
:
Goal 1: To
disrupt and dismantle industrial civilization; to thereby remove the
ability of the powerful to exploit the marginalized and destroy the
planet.
This movement’s second goal both depends on and assists the first:
Goal 2: To defend
and rebuild just, sustainable, and autonomous human communities, and, as
part of that, to assist in the recovery of the land.
To accomplish these goals requires several broad strategies involving
large numbers of people in many different organizations, both
aboveground and underground. The primary strategies needed in this
theoretical scenario include the following:
Strategy A: Engage in direct militant actions against industrial infrastructure, especially energy infrastructure.
Strategy B: Aid
and participate in ongoing social and ecological justice struggles;
promote equality and undermine exploitation by those in power.
Strategy C: Defend
the land and prevent the expansion of industrial logging, mining,
construction, and so on, such that more intact land and species will
remain when civilization does collapse.
Strategy D: Build
and mobilize resistance organizations that will support the above
activities, including decentralized training, recruitment, logistical
support, and so on.
Strategy E:
Rebuild a sustainable subsistence base for human societies (including
perennial polycultures for food) and localized, democratic communities
that uphold human rights.
In describing this alternate future scenario, we should be clear
about some shorthand phrases like “actions against industrial
infrastructure.” Not all infrastructure is created equal, and not all
actions against infrastructure are of equal priority, efficacy, or moral
acceptability to the resistance movements in this scenario. As Derrick
wrote in Endgame, you can’t make a moral argument for blowing up a
children’s hospital. On the other hand, you can’t make a moral argument
against taking out cell phone towers. Some infrastructure is easy, some
is hard, and some is harder.
On the same theme, there are many different mechanisms driving
collapse, and they are not all equal or equally desirable. In the
Decisive Ecological Warfare scenario, some of the mechanisms are
intentionally accelerated and encouraged, while others are slowed or
reduced. For example, energy decline by decreasing consumption of fossil
fuels is a mechanism of collapse highly beneficial to the planet and
(especially in the medium to long term) humans, and that mechanism is
encouraged. On the other hand, ecological collapse through habitat
destruction and biodiversity crash is also a mechanism of collapse
(albeit one that takes longer to affect humans), and that kind of
collapse is slowed or stopped whenever and wherever possible.
Collapse, in the most general terms, is a rapid loss of complexity.16
It is a shift toward smaller and more decentralized structures—social,
political, economic—with less social stratification, regulation,
behavioral control and regimentation, and so on.17 Major mechanisms of
collapse include (in no particular order):
• Energy decline as fossil fuel extraction peaks, and a growing, industrializing population drives down per capita availability.
• Industrial collapse as global economies of scale are ruined by
increasing transport and manufacturing costs, and by economic decline.
• Economic collapse as global corporate capitalism is unable to maintain growth and basic operations.
• Climate change causing ecological collapse, agricultural failure, hunger, refugees, disease, and so on.
• Ecological collapse of many different kinds driven by resource
extraction, destruction of habitat, crashing biodiversity, and climate
change.
• Disease, including epidemics and pandemics, caused by crowded living
conditions and poverty, along with bacteria diseases increasingly
resistant to antibiotics.
• Food crises caused by the displacement of subsistence farmers and
destruction of local food systems, competition for grains by factory
farms and biofuels, poverty, and physical limits to food production
because of drawdown.
• Drawdown as the accelerating consumption of finite supplies of water,
soil, and oil leads to rapid exhaustion of accessible supplies.
• Political collapse as large political entities break into smaller
groups, secessionists break away from larger states, and some states go
bankrupt or simply fail.
• Social collapse as resource shortages and political upheaval break
large, artificial group identities into smaller ones (sometimes based
along class, ethnic, or regional affinities), often with competition
between those groups.
• War and armed conflict, especially resource wars over remaining
supplies of finite resources and internal conflicts between warlords and
rival factions.
• Crime and exploitation caused by poverty and inequality, especially in crowded urban areas.
• Refugee displacement resulting from spontaneous disasters like
earthquakes and hurricanes, but worsened by climate change, food
shortages, and so on.
In this scenario, each negative aspect of the collapse of
civilization has a reciprocal trend that the resistance movement
encourages. The collapse of large authoritarian political structures has
a countertrend of emerging small-scale participatory political
structures. The collapse of global industrial capitalism has a
countertrend of local systems of exchange, cooperation, and mutual aid.
And so on. Generally speaking, in this alternate future, a small number
of underground people bring down the big bad structures, and a large
number of aboveground people cultivate the little good structures.
In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter argues
that a major mechanism for collapse has to do with societal complexity.
Complexity is a general term that includes the number of different jobs
or roles in society (e.g., not just healers but epidemiologists, trauma
surgeons, gerontologists, etc.), the size and complexity of political
structures (e.g., not just popular assemblies but vast sprawling
bureaucracies), the number and complexity of manufactured items and
technology (e.g., not just spears, but many different calibers and types
of bullets), and so on. Civilizations tend to try to use complexity to
address problems, and as a result their complexity increases over time.
But complexity has a cost. The decline of a civilization begins when
the costs of complexity begin to exceed the benefits—in other words,
when increased complexity begins to offer declining returns. At that
point, individual people, families, communities, and political and
social subunits have a disincentive to participate in that civilization.
The complexity keeps increasing, yes, but it keeps getting more
expensive. Eventually the ballooning costs force that civilization to
collapse, and people fall back on smaller and more local political
organizations and social groups.
Part of the job of the resistance movement is to increase the cost
and decrease the returns of empire-scale complexity. This doesn’t
require instantaneous collapse or global dramatic actions. Even small
actions can increase the cost of complexity and accelerate the good
parts of collapse while tempering the bad.
Part of Tainter’s argument is that modern society won’t collapse in
the same way as old societies, because complexity (through, for example,
large-scale agriculture and fossil fuel extraction) has become the
physical underpinning of human life rather than a side benefit. Many
historical societies collapsed when people returned to villages and less
complex traditional life. They chose to do this. Modern people won’t do
that, at least not on a large scale, in part because the villages are
gone, and traditional ways of life are no longer directly accessible to
them. This means that people in modern civilization are in a bind, and
many will continue to struggle for industrial civilization even when
continuing it is obviously counterproductive. Under a Decisive
Ecological Warfare scenario, aboveground activists facilitate this
aspect of collapse by developing alternatives that will ease the
pressure and encourage people to leave industrial capitalism by choice.
***
There’s something admirable about the concept of protracted popular
warfare that was used in China and Vietnam. It’s an elegant idea, if war
can ever be described in such terms; the core idea is adaptable and
applicable even in the face of major setbacks and twists of fate.
But protracted popular warfare as such doesn’t apply to the
particular future we are discussing. The people in that scenario will
never have the numbers that protracted popular warfare requires. But
they will also face a different kind of adversary, for which different
tactics are applicable. So they will take the essential idea of
protracted popular warfare and apply it to their own situation—that of
needing to save their planet, to bring down industrial civilization and
keep it down. And they will devise a new grand strategy based on a
simple continuum of steps that flow logically one after the other.
In this alternate future scenario, Decisive Ecological Warfare has
four phases that progress from the near future through the fall of
industrial civilization. The first phase is
Networking & Mobilization. The second phase is
Sabotage & Asymmetric Action. The third phase is
Systems Disruption. And the fourth and final phase is
Decisive Dismantling of Infrastructure.
Each phase has its own objectives, operational approaches, and
organizational requirements. There’s no distinct dividing line between
the phases, and different regions progress through the phases at
different times. These phases emphasize the role of militant resistance
networks. The aboveground building of alternatives and revitalization of
human communities happen at the same time. But this does not require
the same strategic rigor; rebuilding healthy human communities with a
subsistence base must simply happen as fast as possible, everywhere,
with timetables and methods suited to the region. This scenario’s
militant resisters, on the other hand, need to share some grand strategy
to succeed.
Phase I: Networking & Mobilization
Phase II: Sabotage & Asymmetric Action
Phase III: Systems Disruption
Phase IV: Decisive Dismantling of Infrastructure
Implementing Decisive Ecological Warfare
