I have been listening to Bright Green Lies by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert for the last days. I am listening, you understand, as the missiles dropping on Ukraine have turned the city of Mariupol and much of Ukraine into, as President Zelensky said on March 23, 2022, “Armageddon.” So many of the powerful nation states are obsessed with creating weaponry of destruction while claiming to be concerned with preserving life on this planet. It is difficult to have faith in our species’ assertion that we wish to persevere when the evidence indicates a dominant passion for killing and death. This is the backdrop for examining attempts to undo global warming that is a consequence of a beloved lifestyle which should rightly be named a deathstyle.
I listened in short segments, careful to stay focused, unwilling to become numb as I absorbed the exact listing of all the processes and resources needed to build, electrify and energize a global industrial society and the dire consequences of the multiple excavations, constructions and ultimate destructions. This meticulous recitation of seemingly every operation, procedure and item required to create, transport, establish, deliver, maintain, replace and recycle green energy and electricity to run the world, leads to the unavoidable conclusion that renewable energy is not feasible, and the pursuit of the dream and hope is damaging to the environment.
Simply speaking, renewable energy is also dependent upon fossil fuels, and a range of extraction activities which absolutely devastate the environment. The consequences of proceeding with our current plans for wind, solar, and biomass, if even possible, as we only have this planet to pillage for the resources needed, are terrifying. Included as a resource for providing energy is an inordinate need for water to service the many different complex programs that are far beyond the ability of this planet to provide, even if we, humans, and us, animals, didn’t require a single drop. The beings who will survive what turns out to be a hopeless transition will be condemned to live among mountains reduced to open mine pits, forests leveled for biomass and replaced by metal windmills, deserts erased and created to house solar, in communities ravaged by the increasing need for titanium, lithium and the like for storage batteries, all for this process of “saving the planet.” In addition, the writers catalogue a seemingly endless list of toxic chemicals which increasingly saturate the soil, air, water, and our bodies because so much of what we do poisons.
Very few thinkers have been willing to accept that the transition to renewables is impossible; rather they insist it is possible. As an example of such thinking, the writers quote environmentalist, David Suzuki, saying he “would not be unhappy to look out of one of his vacation houses at a valley which had once been forested, filled with windmills.”
I suppose such will become our new vision of beauty. So, I go to the edge of the land where I live, bordering Topanga State Park and try to imagine a forest of windmills standing on the broken bodies of the trees, mountain lions, rabbits, coyotes, squirrels, blue jays, quail, towhees, sparrows, hawks, golden eagles and more, those who lived here before a metal jungle replaces all life. No! I am unable and unwilling to imagine this as a solution to the desperate conditions created by our ways of life.
I won’t dissemble—I am stunned, and my heart and mind are broken by what Jensen, Keith and Wilbert are asserting. I knew some of this but in pieces; electric cars needing lithium and rare earth minerals was in one part of my mind, while the clear dangers of the biomass industry in another, and the unbearable sound storms afflicting those who live near wind farms as well as the current impossibility of recycling windmills in another, as so on. But awareness of particulars leads one to assume that each specific situation can be, will be solved or eased. What emerges when we connect the dots, however, is staggering. The perils of our way of life are systemic. They are based in our belief that our lifestyles must continue, are even a given, and, consequently, their bounty must be made available to all. Rather than imagining reduction, we are committed to expansion, to ever additional products and to increasing sustainable energy to support growing worldwide desire and need. Such increases will not diminish our carbon footprint, will not as E.O. Wilson advises in “Half Earth”,[i] restore 50% of the Earth to the wild, will not reverse extinction, will not slow the headlong speed toward climate collapse and the decimation of the natural world.
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We must understand that the young people of this world know all this. The rampant incidences of depression, suicide attempts, violence, cynicism, confusion about the future, disenchantment with work and education, increasing inability to earn a sustainable living, escalating reluctance to bringing children into the world are evidence of this. When I asked a circle of the 19 Ways, (see below) what questions regarding these times they were carrying, the youngest member of our group, a woman under thirty said, “Do I have a future?”
It is essential that those of us who are older, face what they are facing without pretending we can solve it, or that current technology will save us. Without any solution looming at the horizon, we must still become exquisitely aware of the details of our global situation. We must know the whole of it. We must see all the inter-connections, inter-relationships, and interactions that are implicit in this way of life upon which we are so dependent and to which, therefore, we are devoted.
So I take a breath…and continue listening, absorbing, integrating, pausing and then listening again.
There are no forms, no individual or combined energy sources that will no shortly exhaust our resources, intensify global warming and destroy our planet. It is terribly clear: we must give up our current ways of life.
Here is a simple conclusion from Bright Green Lies which I offer you, the reader: The Earth cannot survive industrial society. Jensen et al. demonstrate that the future we are imagining is impossible. Let us stop here and take a breath while we can still breathe. Our current lifestyle in its essence cannot continue. Life continuing demands a shift so extreme, it is currently unimaginable. Nevertheless, life demands it. And life demands that we be loyal to life.
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That this trio managed to write such a book, documenting every terrifying detail and not losing their minds in despair or rage, is a testimony to their profound love of the Earth and all the beings. They wrote it out of love. An impossible and formidable task, but love demanded it and they, yielded. They do not say it in so many words, love is a fair assumption and important because, ultimately, it is such love that carries each of us who will read the book through to the end. Because it is such love that carries each of us as we meet what we must on behalf of the Earth.
Responding ethically to these crises means returning to the natural world, its essential forms and laws. It means becoming animal and living within the natural world and in right relationship to all the beings in it. How we do this, what it asks of us, we don’t know, but why not put as much effort into researching and visioning this as we do into our technological discoveries? As I write this, my mind quickens and I see that fear and despair are useless and inappropriate—let me, rather, regard this as a sacred opportunity. And so from my heart, I begin to imagine how we can approach the situation that challenges all our assumptions and beliefs.
Who then shall we become? How will we survive? Will we survive? We, the humans and our kin who are the non-human beings on this planet. Are these not worthy concerns?
Ten years ago, in 2012, that year of transformation, I began to understand that we had to “change our minds.” A set of principles, 19 Ways to the 5th World, began to formulate which studied and integrated together, led to new (and very old), ways of thinking and being. I understand that to survive as a species, we have to leave Western and Imperial mind. I have studied and taught these Ways since. Reading, Bright Green Lies, after having struggled with the need to transform radically on behalf of the survival of the species on behalf of a future, I am able to meet the three writers’ assertion of the need for drastic, unprecedented actions on behalf of life and the natural world.
There is a hexagram in Stephen Karcher’s brilliant and most relevant version of the I Ching, the oldest augury in the world, that has come to me time and again in the last ten years or more, whenever I have asked, desperately, how do I/we meet these times?
The answer has most often been, as if to assert that the augury was indeed speaking and answering the question: GE Hexagram 49, Skinning, Revolution.
Yes, we are in the time of Skinning Revolution:
Skinning shows a time of Revolution. ‘… Change Heaven’s Mandate.’ It includes animal transformation, such as a snake changing its skin, or the annual changes of forms it was thought all animals had to undergo, symbolized as the change from bird to fish. It focuses on ritual transformations that occur as the wu, the technicians of the sacred, put on the animal mask and call the spirits and change the time.[i]
Call the spirits and change the time. There comes a time when the ordinary and familiar no longer serve, that one is called to listen very intently to what comes to us from another realm. And when such advice seems to confront the difficulties for which there are no other solutions, it is wise to attempt, carefully, to realize the instructions given. This seems to be such a time. A time that calls us to challenge and disengage; to change the time.
With such books and data informing us, we may be able, carefully, and collectively, to imagine our way, vision our way, love our way to another life, resonant with the natural world, the one for which we were, as a species, intended. It won’t be easy. We haven’t imagined it yet or committed ourselves. The challenges are daunting. We don’t know what it will look like. We will have to go very slowly, with much thought and heart and great respect for the inhabitants of this world, of the natural world. They know the way. We must do everything we can to preserve them and their habitats, their ways, connections, deep understanding and adamant interconnection and inter-relationships. And so we will proceed, skinning ourselves of our dangerous ways, and treading slowly in respectful alignment with the natural forms that have developed here over millennia. If the natural world survives and thrives, so can we. If it fails or is destroyed, we will suffer the same.
[i] When 90% of habitat is removed, the number of species that can persist sustainably will descend to about a half. Such is the actual condition of many of the most species-rich localities around the world. In these places, if 10% of the remaining natural habitat were then also removed, most or all of the surviving resident species would disappear. If, on the other hand, we protect half the global surface, the fraction of species protected will be 85%, or more. At one-half and above, life on Earth enters the safe zone.
[ii] Stephen Karcher, Total I Ching, Myths For Change, 2003. P. 351.
I wept reading this. I wept reading Bright Green Lies. I seem to weep more often as I see more and more madness as we blindly shop our way into extinction. I feel that as only one person, all I can do is rewild my own land and make it habitable to the largest number of species I can. My hope comes from seeing my neighbors doing the same, little by little. My hope comes from meeting others who do not let their despair shut them out from continuing to read and listen and learn how the death economy is roaring forward. My hope comes from reading writers like you, who have spread the message of connection for decades. I continue to share "Speaking with Elephants" to hundreds of people along the way, as I consider it to be one of the greatest stories of these times. So thank you.
Thank you again, Deena for this wonderful piece! Reading this reminds me, of course, of all the voices in We Are The Middle of Forever, and the obligations of love, the depth and nature of love, and the fact that we are products of the love given us by Earth, animals, and all those forms of life that hold us in place, that carry us each moment. In the face of this love, your opening words take me to the news shows now, the people celebrating war while condemning it with their words. The hypocrisy is astounding. I see the auto-erotic nature of it all on the faces of the "experts," suppressing their excitement as they talk about the war crimes. It's a mockery of what we're here for, an insult to the human nature that is part of Nature herself. It's a long cultural, "civilizational" twisting of our hearts and minds, and your words are the work needed to take it apart. They take it apart and reveal the fresh grass underneath all the great lies. Thank you again!