The woes of contemporary environmentalism

 June 10, 2022

I’m starting to consider that I have some responsibility to critique this great proliferation of popular culture that has been helped along by the internet, if only in a reasonable amount so that my writing and ideas I deem worthy are not buried in the shuffle of the the pop culture machine.

I began to watch this new Harry Potter spinoff movie about “fantastic beasts” that they are pushing out on several streaming platforms, and couldn’t get further than about the third scene, where Dumbledore talks about Grindelwald, who I know from reading is some allusion to Nazis, and how he is inextricably bound to him through a “blood troth” that prevents him from fighting Grindelwald.

At that point I had to stop to write this. My thoughts turned to more serious and real things. Maybe I’ll still watch the movie later on. But my thoughts were on the recent Bioneers Conference talks and Rights of Nature, and the environmental movement more broadly - and yes, I thought about its biggest problem. But that problem, theoretically, has already been elaborated on specifically, and even solved, nearly to my satisfaction, in a 2014 lecture by China Mieville, the author. Combined with some commentary from me on the Charter of Forests and the right of self-determination, I am already convinced that the critique this strangely ecological spinoff series alludes to, can be deflected on the part of any conscientious environmentalist.

What follows elaborates.

Implicit in this new-ish Harry Potter spin-off series about “fantastic beasts” is a contemplation of basal dread that also can be seen in all of the contemporary discourse revolving environmentalism and around the fate of the natural world vis-a-vis industrial capitalism and development. But this question, truly, has already been solved to my satisfaction, and only needs some additional commentary on alternative foundations for approaching the big theoretical questions about environmentalism, ecology, and the present reality we face.

It occurs to me that over the past few years, perhaps “Fantastic Beasts” has taken the whole genre on a weird turn into a disingenuous fallacy about environmentalism, but, it finally came out and stated its actual concern, and, finally, I can bust up this holier-than-thou narrative it’s been pushing.

It’s levied a pretty serious charge against the environmental movement.

Perhaps this charge is motivated by the curiosity of the ignorant, and perhaps that accounts for its meek tone and presentation. But it can’t be denied that for those of us who desire genuine progress on one of the most serious issues of our time, climate change; and want that progress to be democratic and humane, charging us with this level of wrong thinking and litigating it at the glacial pace of “the culture” can prompt no rational feelings in us but the likes of scorn and derision. I’m not the only one who can moderate those feelings for the sake of coalition, but to deny them is inhuman.

So, I first refer anyone confused or demoralized or even hypnotized by this weirdly intrusive movie and the concomitant talking points around this “problem” - (which is a practical problem still, but not a theoretical problem anymore) - to an older, more forthright explication on the subject: China Mieville, author, delivered a keynote lecture on Earth Day in 2014 highlighting this fundamental tension in the environmental reform movement.

The talk was republished but also “touched-up” a bit afterward, but the following is transcribed from video of his lecture. It’s a bit more raw and open than the published version.

-This is environmentalism as dispossession, what the Indigenous Environmental Network calls carbon colonialism.
And stocks of heavy industry go up; the recent IPCC report left the financial markets wholly unmoved. The value that they grant oil, and coal, and gas reserves ignores the international targets according to which those reserves not only are still in the earth but must remain so.
So this carbon bubble says that the choice is climate catastrophe or another financial catastrophe. Or both. So let's forget any spurious human totality. There is a real and a dangerous modern totality with which unfortunately too much environmentalism has failed to wrestle. As Jason Moore puts it, "Wall Street is a way of organizing nature." The very term Anthropocene, which gives with one hand insisting on human drivers of massive ecological shifts still misleads with its implied we.
Whether it's the deforestation of what's now Britain or the extinction of the North American megafauna, Homo sapiens has always fed back into the ecology of which it's constituent, changing the world. What has altered to make relatively local effects planetary, and epochal, isn't even the growth of industry as if by some miracle, but a shift in the political economy by which we and it are organized; an accelerating cycle of profit and accumulation, and concomitant kinds of production. Which is why Moore terms this epoch of potential catastrophe - potential - not Anthropocene, but Capitalocene. And utopias are necessary, but not only are they insufficient, they can in some iterations be part of the ideology of the system; the bad totality that organizes us and warms the skies and condemns millions to peonage on garbage scree.
The utopia of togetherness is a lie. Environmental justice means acknowledging that there is no whole earth, no "we" without a them. With apologies to Paul, we are not all in this together. Which means fighting the fact that fines for toxic spills in predominantly white areas are five times what they are in minority areas, it means not only providing livings for people who pick their livings currently in toxic dumps but squaring up against the imperialism of garbage that put them there, and against trash neoliberalism by which poor countries rush to compete to become repositories of filth. And it means standing against military power and violence. Three times as many land rights and environmental activists were murdered in 2012 than a decade before. Environmental justice is facing down Shell, not only for turning Nigeria's Ogoniland into a hallucinatory sump, a landscape of petrochemical Ragnarok, but for arming the Nigerian state for years, during and after the reign of Sani Abacha. Arms trading, dictatorships, and murder are environmental politics. Those pushing down rely not on the quiescence but on the weakness of those against whom they fight. The Cerrell Report in LA is perfectly clear. "All socioeconomic groupings tend to resent the nearby sitings of major facilities, but the middle and upper socioeconomic strata possess better resources to effectuate their opposition". The poor should be targeted, not because they will not fight, but because, being poor, they will not win. And the struggle for environmental justice is the struggle to prove that wrong.
So we start with the non-totality of the weak. And from there, not only can we see the task, but we can return to our utopias, to better honor the best of them. For a start, those rivers of milk and wine, stop being surplus. There's nothing foolish about them, those yearnings. They set their eyes on human freedom. A leap from necessity. Far from being merely outlandish, these become abruptly aspects of a grounded utopia incorporating political economy: a dream of those who strive and work without power. In the midieval peasant utopia Cockaigne it rains cheese. Charles Fourier imagined the seas turned to lemonade. The Big Rock Candy Mountain. These are dreams of sustenance out of easy reach of the dreamers. Of the reduction of labor. Of a world which will let exhausted people rest.
And we can dispense with the most banal critiques of utopia; that it is unconvincing as a blueprint, as if that is what it should ever be. That it is drab and boring and faceless and colorless and always the same. The smear that the visionary aspiration for better things always makes things worse. Those are canards that serve stasis, they serve power.
There are though, much sharper criticisms to be made, for the sake of our utopias themselves, and of the day to day politics without which they risk becoming - and this in itself is one of those criticisms - valves to release pressure.
For one, utopia has never been the preserve of progressives, of those who cleave to liberation. There are plenty of other forces who have argued for a new, clean, green earth. Settlers and expropriators have for centuries asserted their good environmental sense against the laziness of feckless natives or to realize the potential of land spuriously designated empty or of making so called deserts so called bloom.
Ecotopia has justified settlement and empire since long before the UN's Redd schemes. And it’s justified more direct, more outright murder much more recently.
There is a vision that the world is a garden under threat, choked with toxic growth. That gardening is war, and the task is "ruthlessly to eliminate the weeds that would deprive the better plants of nutrition; the air, light and sun." Here, these better plants are Aryans, and the weeds are Jews. SS Obergruppenfuhrer and Reichminister of Agriculture Walther Darre coagulated soil science, nostalgia, pagan kitsch, imperialism, agrarian mystique and race hate in a vision of green renewal and earth stewardship predicated on genocide. He was the most powerful theorist of blood and soil, a Nazi ecotopia of organic farmlands and restocked Nordic forests protected by the pure-blooded peasant soldier. And that tree may not have grown as he hoped, but its roots did not die. A whole variety of fascist groups - not just in Germany, across the world - proclaim their fidelity to ecological renewal, to the green world. They ostentatiously agitate against climate change and pollution, despoliation; declaring against those poisons, in the service of another: the logic of race.
Of course reactionary apologists for Big Pollute typically smear ecological activists as fascists, but that does not mean that those commited to such activism shouldn't be ruthless in ferreting out any real overlaps - very much the opposite.
And aspects of eliminationist, bad utopia can be seen much more widely than in the self-conscious far right. Swaths of ecological thinking are caught up with a nebulous sentimentalized spiritualist utopia, what the eco feminist Chaia Heller calls "Eco-la-la". Cross-bred with a kind of crude Malthusianism in a combative variant sometimes called deep ecology, the twee-ness of that vision can morph into brutality, for which the problem is overpopulation - very directly, humanity itself.
At its most cheerfully eccentric you have the voluntary human extinction movement advocating an end to breeding.
At the most vicious are the pronouncements of David Forman of Earth First, faced with the Ethiopian famine of 1984. "The worst thing we could do in Ethiopia is to give aid - the best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance, to let the people there just starve."
This is an ecological utopia of mass death. Which we could also call an apocalypse.
Apocalypse and utopia. The end of everything and the horizon of hope. Far from antipodes, these two have always been inextricable from each other. Sometimes, as in Lactantius, the imagined relationship was chronological - maybe even of cause and effect. The one, the apocalypse, the end times rending of the veil, paves the way for the other, the time beyond, the new beginning.
Perhaps the two have always been more intimately imbricated. Something has certainly happened, and today they certainly are.
"Today," in the words of the bleak and sinister philosopher, Emil Cioran, "reconciled with the terrible, we are seeing a contamination of utopia by apocalypse. The two genres which once seemed so dissimilar to us, interpenetrate, rub off on each other, to form a third."
Reconciled with the terrible. This inter-penetration is vivid in those deep ecological hankerings for a world slashed and burned of humans. The scourging has become the dream. This is not quite a dystopia. It's the third form. Apocatopia; utopalypse. And it's all around us. It's in movies, it's in books, it's in video games, it's in everything. We are surrounded by a culture of ruination. Dreams of falling cities; a world without people walked through by animals. We know the cliches. Vines reclaim Wall Street as if it belongs to them rather than the other way around. Trash vastness. Dunes of garbage. The remains of some great recognizable bridge now broken to jut; a portentous diving board into the void. Etc., etc..
It's as if we still hanker to see something better and beyond but we lack the strength. Or, perhaps, more, as if there's a concerted effort to assert the we again: we are the problem, and this "we"-less-ness, a sublime solution. The melancholy is disingenuous. There is an enthusiasm, a disavowed investment in these supposed warnings, these catastrophes. The apocalypse-mongers fool no one. Since long before Shelley imagined the day when "Westminster abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh," these have been scenes of beauty.
Now, when it's so hard to imagine a future, they're everywhere. No matter how banalized they are, none of us is immune to them. We've all scrolled, slack-mouthed, through images of the Chernobyl zone, of Japan's deserted Gunkanjima Island, of the ruins of Detroit. Clickbait lists of Top Ten Most Awesomely Creepy Abandoned Places.
This shouldn't occasion guilt. Our horror at the tragedies and crimes behind some of these images is real, and it coexists with, rather than effaces, our gasps of awe. We don't choose what catches our breath. And nor do our images read off reductively as particular politics.
But the amoral beauty of our utopalypses can dovetail with something more brutal and malefic. We can't not read our cultural matter diagnostically when they are so camp and symptomatic. What else can we do with the deluge of films about deluge? The piling up like debris on the "Benjamin's Angel" of texts about the piling up of debris.
And symptoms morph with the world. One swallow, of however high a budget, does not a summer make. But one does not have to be a cultural critic to detect a shift when, in Guillermo del Toral's recent Pacific Rim, Idris Elba bellows, magnificently I might add: "Today we are canceling the apocalypse." Perhaps we have had our fill of The End, and with this line we usher in a different kind of aftermath: apocalypse that fails: when pugnacious heroes unsnarl Cioran's tangled utopalyptic third thing. We're back, with muscular new hope.
The same shift is visible with few fewer robots and monsters, in the rise of geoengineering - ideas once pulp fiction and the ruminations of eccentrics have come center stage, lagging only a little behind cataclismism. Now planet-wide plans to spray acid into the stratosphere to become mirrored molecules to reflect away radiation, to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere, to bring up benthic waters to cool the oceans, are written up by Nobel laureates, ruminated in the New Yorker and the MIT Technology Review. A new can-do. The return of human agency. Sleeves rolled up, to fix the problem. With Science.
This planet-hacking, however, is utterly speculative, controversial, and - I say this incidentally as someone who thinks these are cool ideas - and according to recent work at Germany's Helmholtz Center, according to the most generous possible interpretations, these techniques are inadequate, quite inadequate, to halt climate chaos. It is by any reasonable standards utterly absurd that it seems more rational to push these plans rather than to enact the social measures to slash emissions which are entirely possible right now, but that would necessitate a political transformation.
It's been regularly pointed out that these days it's easier to imagine the ends of the world than the end of capitalism. Now, Andreas Maum has pointed out that in geoengineering it's become easier to imagine the deliberate transformation of the entire planet than of our political economy. What looks like Promethianism is in fact surrender. Utopia here is exoneration of entrenched power, the red lines of which cannot be crossed. What prize hope indeed.
Seventy percent of the staff at the mothballed Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India, had been docked pay for refusing to break safety routines. Staffing levels were inadequate. Readings taken half as often as intended. None of the six safety systems worked as it should, if at all. Trade unions had protested and had been ignored. And on December the third, 1984, 27 tons methyl isocyanate spewed from that plant and between 8 and 10 thousand people died straight away that night, and 25 thousand have died since, and half a million were injured, 70,000 permantly and hideously. Births defects are sky-high. The groundwater still shows toxins vastly above safe levels. The Indian government demanded 3.3 billion compensation, which Union Carbide spent 50 million dollars fighting. In 1989, it settled out of court for 470 million, which is 15% of the initial required sum. The survivors received as lifetime compensation between 300 and 500 dollars each. Pressed on this, Kathy Hunt, Dow Carbide's public relations - public affairs officer said in 2002, "$500 is plenty good for an Indian."
Why rehearse these terrible facts, these well-known facts. Not only because, as is also well-known, Warren Anderson, Carbide's ex-CEO has never been extradited to face Indian justice, despite an arrest warrant. Nor because Carbide and Dow, which bought Carbide in 2001, deny responsibility and refuse to clean the area or to respond to Indian court summonses. There is another reason for going back to this.
In 1989 the Wall Street journal reported that US executives were extremely anxious about this: the first major test of a US corporation's liability for an accident in the developing world. Then, in October 1991, came the key moment for this particular whole discussion. The Indian Supreme Court upheld Carbide's offer, dismissing all outstanding petitions against it, thereby offering the company legal protection. And its share price immediately spiked. Because Wall Street knew its priorities had prevailed; that it was "safe".
A real-world interpenetration of apocalypse and utopia. Apocalypse for those thousands who drowned on their own lungs; and for the corporations now reassured that the poor were indeed dispensable and that profit would be protected, an everyday utopia.
This is another of the limitations of utopia. We live in a utopia. It just isn't ours. So we live in an apocalypse too. A slow, ongoing one.
“Earth, to be determined.”
An outstanding title for a conference, I think. Utopia, apocalypse. The question that faces us is, is it worse to hope or to despair? And there can only be one answer. Yes. It is worse to hope or to despair. Bad hope and bad despair are mutually constitutive. This system gets you coming or going. We can fix the problem we made, and when we fail, we can live through the results - whisper our survivalist bad consciences, the preppers hoarding cans of beans.
So is there a better optimism, or angle - a right way to lose hope? Well it depends on who's hoping, and for what, and for whom, and against whom.
Because we have to learn to hope with teeth. We can start by refusing to be browbeaten by the demand "well what do you propose instead." In fact, contrary to the slurs, plenty of activists do come up with grounded suggestions; there’s no dearth of models to consider. But let's be very clear. The radical critique of the everyday is undermined not one iota if we choose not to append an alternative. That's simply bad logic apart from anything else. And we can go further. If we take utopia seriously, in the sheer scale of that fundamental reshaping, definitionally, we cannot think it from this side. It's the process of making it that will allow us to do so, and it is therefore fidelity to the utopia that might underpin our refusal to try to turn it into a roadmap, or to expound it thus.
We should utopia as hard as we can. As well as a fulfilled humanity we should imagine flying islands, and self-constituting coralline neighborhoods, and photosynthesizing flying cars bred from biospliced bone marrow - Big Rock Candy Mountains. Because we will never mistake those dreams for blueprints nor for mere fanciful absurdities.
Utopias are Rorschachs. We call our concerns and our ideas out, and then in dreaming, we fold the paper and open it again and reveal startling patterns. And we may paw with a degree of intent, but what we make is beyond any such planning.
Our utopias are to be enjoyed and admired. They are made of our concerns and they tell us about our now, pre-utopian, selves. They are to be interpreted - and so are those of our opponents.
To understand what we are up against means to respect it. The Earth is not being blistered because despoilers are stupid or irrational or making a mistake or have insufficient data. We should fight our cases urgently as we can and win arguments, but we shouldn't kid ourselves.
Whatever sometimes the self-delusion or guilt or occasional tears of a CEO, in a profit-maximizing world it is rational for the institutions of our status quo to do what they do.
Individuals and even sometimes organizations may resist that, in specific cases, but they do so by refusing that system's logic, which en masse cannot happen, and which the system itself, of course - not in these circumstances - and which the system itself of course, cannot do.
The fight for ecological justice means a fight against that system. Because there is profit in injustice. This battle won't always be over catastrophic climate change, or land expropriation. In a system of neoliberalism, even local struggles for the most fleeting moments of green municipal life are ultimately linked to struggles against that power.
The protest that shook the Turkish state last year started with an official plan to build over Gezi park, one of the last green spaces in the city. Rather than touting togetherness, we fight best by embracing our not-togetherness; the fact that there are sides.
Famously, if controversially, we are supposed to be approaching a tipping point. Rather than hoping for cohesion, our best hope might lie in conflict. Our aim and aspect of our very utopianism should be this strategy of tension.
There's bad pessimism as well as bad optimism. Against the curmudgeonly surrender of someone like James Lovegrove, basically saying its over, we missed it, let's just, you know, enjoy the last days if you can, there are sound scientific reasons that say we are not yet quite at a point of no return. To head it off, we need a different tipping point: toward irrevocable social change. And that requires a different kind of pessimism: an unflinching look at how bad things are.
Pessimism has a very bad rap among activists. Understandably they are terrified of encouraging surrender. But activism, without the pessimism that rigor should provoke, is just sentimentality. There is hope, but for it to be real and barbed and tempered into a weapon, we cannot just default to it. We have to test it, subject it to the strain of appropriate near despair.
We need utopia, yes, for all these things. We do. But to try to think utopia in this world, without rage, without fury, is an indulgence we can't afford.
Even our ends of the world are too Whiggish. No more one nation apocalypse. Instead, here is to an antinomian utopia, a kind of hope that abjures the hope of those in power.
Utopia is often deployed as an epithet. Propose any fundamental shift, a real alteration in the dynamic of the social world, and someone will slap your conceptual wrist and say "that is completely utopian." Utopia as "no place", as a place that can’t be. And some things are indeed impossible, but others are just very difficult.
Humans have overcome oppressive systems before. There is no reason we cannot do so again. And to fail to do so means ongoing planetary as well as social degradation.
We are rubber, they are glue. It is in fact the supposedly sensible critics who are the most profoundly unrealistic. One activist, Joel Kovel, says we can have accumulation of capital, and we can have ecological integrity, but we can’t have them both together. And to believe otherwise would be quaint if it were not so dangerous.
In 2003, William Stavropolous, the CEO of Dow, who has, recall, no responsibility to the chemically maimed of Bhopal, said in a press release, "Being environmentally responsible makes good business sense." And that, in the pejorative sense, is the most absurd utopia of all.

The implicit doctrine of nature being held separate from men, women, and children among the poor, but belonging to and accessible only by those who in turn also hold dominion over the poor, is aptly pointed out by Mr. Mieville here. Any environmentalism that aspires to be fair must cleave more closely to the concept of the natural world as a commons, as presented in the Charter of Forests, for example, than in the racist concept of an “untouched”, “pristine” “wilderness”.

Mr. Mieville's main argument here is implicitly difficult to discuss in an American context because it glosses history that the American mind, even the progressive one, sometimes puts into an entire category called “England”. The history of England includes a barbarous story of the entrapment, and enslavement, or oppression and exploitation, of various local peoples by the ruling monarchs.

This includes not only the Picts and so on, but also various of the common people who had their entire identities entirely subsumed in the person of the king, and were kept there under the complete fiction that their socioeconomic status and personal identity were one and the same. The Charter of Forests, which was, like the Magna Carta that preceded it, forced on the king by a social reform movement, began the documented process of revealing and alleviating this oppression, by addressing for the first time the rights held by the common folk in English history.

Nowadays, we hold the ideal that no king, no bishop or Pope, no general nor military officer, no aristocrat, no boss, no teacher, and no author can tell you who you are, but you should have the right to listen and make the choice for yourself about your own identity. The obfuscation of oppressors and the hidden mechanisms of their oppression are limits on the particulars and practice of that fundamental freedom but that is no disproof of the realization and truth of that ideal that should be called the right of self-determination.

The fortunes of the incipient Rights of Nature theory, which I got to hear discussed at this year’s Bioneers Conference, run up against this tension expressed by Mr. Mieville - (the separatist and exclusionary definition of the natural world; the evils of blood and soil and the English monarchy) - but are liberated from that problematic place by the latent right of self-determination, which we can trace, with its connection to the environmental movement, from at least the Charter of Forests to the present day.

In the future, we must cleave to a principle of liberation and follow the right of self-determination wherever it might lead. The old saw of “every thing in its right place” has been shown to turn on subjective and not upon truthful measures - whose idea of what is the “right place” prevails, and for whom is it the “right place”? Are questions that after long experience always revealed strength and power, not reason nor rational government, have been behind the propagation of such a saying. The “right place of everything” comes from an ancient time when the mechanism for discovering the truth was still mistaken for the truth itself. It is assuredly not the case that if every “thing” has a “right place” it isn’t constituted in some transparent organizational scheme; and, although the evolution of knowledge may not be at its bitter end, it seems more likely that the proper “place” for every thing will fill space like the thousand points of light in the night sky of the visible universe.

Although the hardship of discovery still necessitates disciplined inquiry, the truth is messy. And it cannot be reduced, quashed down and harnessed to labor as a fix for the problems of the rich and well-off, lest we ourselves take a turn towards the darkness that collapsed the system of the ancients - a fate we would all best avoid.

I have been at a place in my political thinking where the only arguments against me from the regressive point of view has been “tradition”: they say that an idea sounds great, but we have a tradition under which that idea doesn’t work as long as we cleave to tradition. And I have spend long amounts of time grappling with that tradition on its own terms. I don’t want to only say that new ideas are better than tradition simply because they are new, but rather to show that that tradition, evaluated on its own, is itself problematic.

We are talking about traditions in these cases that were devised millennia ago. And I’m not saying that they didn’t do a good job in their own time of solving the problems they thought that they had. Under their own system of barbarity, hiding the evidence of their failure probably constituted a “fix”.

But the fact remains and is indisputable that in this system of monarchy, there are little specks of problematic points, like dust covering the gears of their machine, that the proponents of “tradition” have hidden from view - lest they prove the imperfection of their deeply flawed system. In the English monarchy, for example, they wanted to say that a piece of land was just a box on a map and could belong to someone entire. But there are different degrees of belonging. Could someone gather sticks for a fire in a wood adjacent to his home? Who owned some “thing” or entity that passed through a wood that was owned - and how long would a deer passing into a wood have to stay in the wood before it became “owned” by the owner of the wood? These were the exact kinds of problematic points that the monarchy tried to keep suppressed by brute force in feudal England, but nonetheless float over the outlines of their still-carried-along traditions, marring the credibility of their claims to perfection under that traditional system. These were the type of failures that began to be addressed in the charter of forests. This subject also incorporates the modern notion of human rights, and it should be remembered that these are also political consideration involving real people. Human rights and rights of nature are these problems to the traditional system - these thousand points of liberty that, dust-like, gum up the works of the system of monarchy and oppression. It is that system that is the problem, not the points that dismantle it.

It stands to mention here that the “enclosure laws” that removed property from the commons in Victorian England, only made it possible to remove the land held in common to a private owner, and changed nothing explicitly about the underlying rights of self-determination discussed in the Charter of Forests. I’m not an expert in British law. But the Magna Carta still holds a central place in our discourse about rights in the Anglo system of law, as should it’s companion document, which is perhaps all the more important 

In beginning to explore this subject, perhaps I have communicated the expression of it, and perhaps I have communicated the substance of it. I hope that I have managed one or the other. In times of beginning, new beginning, often the best we can do is to do, and do honestly. If your aim is true, I am told, any beginning is better than no beginning at all.