Everyday Violence
by Jason GodeskySee also Curtis White’s two-part series in Orion:
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The violence of the particular relationship to the land that Mr. White discusses here is part of the violence that is necessary for all possible food in the world to be converted to human food and for all possible resources in the world sequestered for human use.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 27 April 2007 @ 12:17 PM
might be nice if you mentioned that this is Derrick Jensen and that more of the interview is available online at YouTube… but I guess I just did that
Comment by neighbor — 27 April 2007 @ 3:43 PM
There are people who don’t recognize Derrick?
Oh, yeah, I guess there are….
Well, yes, this is part 4 of a 6-part interview on YouTube (1, 2, 3, 5 & 6). Same fellow’s posted interviews with Kevin McCabe, Alfie Howard, Daniel Quinn, Tim Ream, David Room and quite a few others.
The other five videos had their high points, but usually had Derrick going off into his usual talk about “taking down the system.” As we’ve discussed elsewhere, it’s not that I don’t agree about the urgency, but blowing up a dam doesn’t take down the system, it strengthens it. We’ve got a fine example right in front of us in Iraq of how you can fight your way right into defeat. It’s not about fighting more violently; it’s about fighting smarter. And sometimes, that doesn’t feel like fighting at all.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 27 April 2007 @ 3:58 PM
Okay, one more time, from the top:
The violence of the particular relationship to the land that Mr. Jensen> discusses here is part of the violence that is necessary for all possible food in the world to be converted to human food and for all possible resources in the world sequestered for human use.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 27 April 2007 @ 7:25 PM
[quote]We’ve got a fine example right in front of us in Iraq of how you can fight your way right into defeat.[/quote]
That is not a fair comparison. It’s one thing to destroy a piece of infrastructure (such as a dam) and with it (at the very least temporarily) the possibility of a way of life based on that infrastructure, and it is quite another to try to actually establish control over a certain territory (which is what the US government is trying to achieve in Iraq).
Comment by Hasha — 27 April 2007 @ 8:20 PM
Actually, it’s a very sound comparison. The U.S. took the simplistic view that Iraq was simply a “nation-state” in the European model, being oppressed by a despot. They ignored the history of Iraq, the way Britain had rigged its borders to make the whole thing implode without a strong man in Baghdad like a pin in a grenade. So, they simply removed the despot—and the whole thing ended disastrously because they failed to take into consideration the full complexity of Iraq.
Likewise, civilization is more than just a physical infrastructure. Blow up a dam, and you’ve created further room to grow (by building a new dam). You’ve also alienated a much larger population that might otherwise begin opposing civilization in much more direct ways.
Want to fight terrorism? A real “War on Terrorism” would mean cutting off aid to Arab dictatorships and enormous humanitarian efforts. It wouldn’t feel like fighting at all, but it would actually be effective. What we’re doing now feels like fighting, but every day that goes on, the terrorist networks we’re supposedly fighting grow stronger.
Want to fight civilization? If you’re doing it effectively, it won’t feel like fighting at all.
Native cultures understand this. Take a look through their stories; direct confrontation always ends in failure. It’s the Trickster who prevails. Or, as Tim Boucher put it:
Comment by Jason Godesky — 27 April 2007 @ 11:15 PM
[quote] Blow up a dam, and you’ve created further room to grow (by building a new dam)[/quote]
Really? Even in the face of peak oil, peak natural gas, peak metal, peak etc.? Sure, you can build a dam to replace the old one; that means not building something else that you might badly need. Give a smallpox vaccine to a healthy person, and that person will develop immunity to smallpox. Give a smallpox vaccine to someone with pneumonia, and that person will die. Same with civilization and dams.
What appears to be true is that, civilization is still too strong, still capable of shrugging off with relative ease any attempts made by fringe groups to bring it to its knees by destroying the infrastructure on which it depends. But this won’t be true forever. How much longer until civ catches its pneumonia? I don’t know.
But anyway. I still don’t see how your analogy holds. The US went to Iraq and created chaos. Blowing up a dam might create some kind of chaos, too; but if your main goal is to ensure the survival of the salmon, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.
Comment by Hasha — 28 April 2007 @ 12:01 AM
Absolutely. One of the biggest “peaks” is the simple fact that there’s not much room left to grow into. Like the story of Alexander the Great weeping because there was nothing left for him to conquer.
Sure, the difference is if you can apply enough force to overwhelm the system.
Al-Qa’ida killed 3,000 people and, more importantly to the globalized civilization as a system, shut down Wall Street for four days. That fell far, far short of overwhelming the system.
Civilization is vast. It’s fragile compared to the earth’s systems, but blowing up a dam is nowhere near enough to overwhelm it. You could blow up a whole city, and you still would do nothing more than strengthen it.
In decades to come, it might well come to be that you’ll have latter-day bacaudae who will have to fight off civilized attempts to re-assert control. Tribes will have to defend themselves as the map opens up again. But that’s not the situation we’re in now. I’m no pacifist, but this is too important a fight to blow it on dumb tactics just because they feel good. We have to fight smarter than that.
Right now, if you want to fight civilization, the best methods available lie in showing as many people as possible what lies beyond civilization. Like Derrick says in the video, you can’t enslave people when the land provides what they need. Learn primitive skills, build tribes, encourage permaculture, these things free us from the system of civilization. They take away the violence the whole thing depends upon. It doesn’t feel like fighting, but whatever I might think of the whole “Grandfather” story, Tom Brown’s done far more to stop civilization than Tom Kazcinski ever did.
Both are strategies you pursue because they feel like you’re fighting something you hate. Both actually strengthen that thing you hate so much, and in both cases, it’s because you’re being naive about the system you’re trying to fight. In both cases, the straight-forward attack is self-defeating. In both cases, an effective fight doesn’t feel like fighting at all. It’s very emotionally unsatisfying, but if you’re really trying to stop this thing you hate, then that’s just something you need to get over.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 April 2007 @ 12:56 AM
[quote]One of the biggest “peaks” is the simple fact that there’s not much room left to grow into.[/quote]
That’s just silly. Civilization needs to grow into places that it can steal resources from; a new space into which to through resources that it’s already got isn’t going to do a thing for it. If what civilization really needed was something into which to throw the resources already secured, then one would have to wonder why the civilized haven’t yet colonized Mars.
[quote] Civilization is vast. It’s fragile compared to the earth’s systems, but blowing up a dam is nowhere near enough to overwhelm it. You could blow up a whole city, and you still would do nothing more than strengthen it. [/quote]
I don’t buy that blowing up a city would strengthen civilization. But of course, blowing up a dam (or a city) wouldn’t kill it. No, look, I was getting ahead of myself a little bit. I don’t actually believe in anyone’s ability to take down Civilization-capital C. (Though Derrick was speculating in Endgame about the potential of hacking. Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know anything about information systems.) I do however believe that, as the global economy starts to collapse, as things get increasingly decentralized (simply for lack of fuel), blowing up dams (for example) could speed up the process of civilization’s demise in a given area. Or at the very least, it could speed up the demise of the industrial civilization, and could help save the salmon (again, for example).
Comment by Hasha — 28 April 2007 @ 1:26 AM
Hey –
I dunno… even today, civilizations greatest resource is the people who live within. Blow up a city and like Americans right after 9/11, the citizens of that civilization will be willing to give up just about anything to respond…. even on the far down slope, this will still be the case……
Janene
Comment by janene — 28 April 2007 @ 9:13 AM
I think I’m beginning to see what exactly it is you think does fight civilization, but it still seems to me self contradictory.
There’s an example you’ve talked a lot about, which I can’t go look up for details right now because my computer is running too slowly, but it involves a civilized group newly inhabiting (I think) Iceland and dying out because they refused to eat fish, when all around them were traditional societies who did eat fish and flourished.
Analagously, if we teach primitive skills, then we will draw a certain number of individuals away from the lifepath of civilization (by lifepath I mean the mental construct which says that civilization is the only way to live) much like there were some european colonists who saw that the ways of native American living were inherently superior. However, those breakaways didn’t stop the growth of civilization in America, those who saw the natives eating fish didn’t save their colonial culture.
Both results came about because the majority of civilized individuals stuck to their civilized cultures, and the end result came about by way of material factors. Indeed, you often self-identify as a cultural materialist, so why wouldn’t the best attack against the culture of civilization be against civilization’s material base rather than its idealogical base? Granted, those who adapt to a primitive culture will be the ones who survive, but has such an idealogical shift ever actually brought down the civilized culture from which it came?
Comment by scruff — 28 April 2007 @ 12:26 PM
Resources are just one part of civilization’s need. Room to grow into is often a much needed resource itself, and often the constraining one. Look at the TVA, for instance. Rebuilding a dam brings in new jobs, contracts, and a whole mini-economy blooms for a brief season to provide supplemental goods and services for the construction crews. Why do you think rust belt cities jostle for new arenas and convention centers when they already have them? Just having room to grow into releases some of the pressure on the system. Blowing up a dam is like blowing the whistle on a train, helps keep the whole system going by relieving some of the pressure.
Getting to Mars costs a lot. May not even be possible at all. We don’t go there because as much as we need the room, we don’t have enough to pay for it.
Actually, that seems to be the plotline Heroes is falling, but even a city like New York only contributes a small fraction to civilization. China has something like 25 cities that are bigger. Wipe it off the map, and you’ve done very little to hurt civilization, but you have opened up a whole lot of room to grow into. You’ve let off a lot of the pressure, maybe as much as a century with something as big as that.
It could, but that’s still a ways down the road. In the present, civilization is still growing, so blowing up a dam just gives it more room to grow.
Collapse begins when people begin to realize that they can enjoy a better way of life, at less cost, at a lower level of complexity. Once enough people believe that (and it’s far less than half, it just needs to be enough to tip the balance), collapse begins to snowball. Teach people primitive skills, or tribal life, and that’s precisely what you’re helping along. It also helps make for more people who might survive—and if, somehow, there’s actually a chance for a gradual power-down like Heinberg hopes, then surely this is it, with primtiive skills, permaculture, and all the rest.
In the end, I don’t think it will change much on civilization’s destructive course, but it does start tipping civilization towards collapse, and it helps make collapse less disastrous, all at the same time.
We’re not talking about its material base, though. Oil fields and farmlands will still be there. We’re talking about basic infrastructure, which is fairly easy to replace. We’re not talking about anything that would change the energy flow through the system or anything really significant to the culture’s material base.
Ultimately, collapse is almost always an ideological shift. Of course, ideological shifts generally happen because of changes in the material reality. Not a road out or a damn blown up, those actually work to undo any such shift by radicalizing people in a conservative fashion, but rising fuel costs, changing climate, these things change the way people think. Primitive skills and tribal living would never be able to make this shift alone, but in a context where that shift is already starting, they can pull it along a little faster. Blowing up a dam pushes it back in the opposite direction, so it really only takes one ELF action to undo a year of my efforts, and give civilization back a year, a few months, however long it may be.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 April 2007 @ 2:39 PM
This reminds me of Jeff Vail’s post here: http://www.jeffvail.net/2005/04/logic-of-collapse.html
If I’m understanding it correctly, he’s suggesting that we explore precisely what Derrick is suggesting, that we bring civilization past the point of diminishing returns. That we begin injuring the infrastructure so that resources that would be diverted to expanding control are instead diverted to rebuilding and maintaining control. So for example, let’s say I have a house, and I’d like to build a new garage, or even just fortify my existing garage, but a vandal breaks my roof. Now if I want to continue living here, that garage work is going to get put on the back burner while I divert that money to repairing the roof. I can’t expand. If I want to continue living in this home, there are suddenly all these other investments I have to make, and my funds are running low. At a certain point, it becomes more viable to scrap the idea of continuing to live in this house, and to find another place to live.
Likewise, if vital infrastructure of civilization is damaged, infrastructure that civilization must have in working order just to exist, such as transportation infrastructure, perhaps, or mining infrastructure, then those resources must be diverted to maintaining them, lest civilization stop functioning.
That’s the whole idea of diminishing marginal returns. As complexity increases, the returns are smaller and smaller, and at a certain point, the cost exceeds the returns, and collapse ensues. I think what Jeff is considering in that article, and Derrick is suggesting in this video, is that it may be possible to make the cost of maintaining civilization greater than the return on its continuation. If we can damage vital portions of civilization, then its archons must invest more to maintain or rebuild, and those resources cannot go to expanding civilization’s grasp of control. And if civilization can’t expand, can’t grow, it dies, as you argue, Jason.
Jason wrote:
“Civilization is vast. It’s fragile compared to the earth’s systems, but blowing up a dam is nowhere near enough to overwhelm it. You could blow up a whole city, and you still would do nothing more than strengthen it.”
This seems to contradict something that you’ve mentioned earlier, Jason, in regard to New Orleans. In the podcast with John Michael Greer, he mentions, and as I recall, you did not object to the notion, that part of why New Orleans is not being rebuilt so aggressively is that the resources just aren’t there. You mention in the Slow Collapse that civilization may have already peaked about a century ago, and we’re slowing heading downhill. Would an event like the destruction of a city not place a further strain on dwindling resources, thus forcing a hard choice of ‘rebuild (and divert expansion resources) or allow to remain destroyed (and lessen one’s grip of control)?’
Perhaps, and I don’t mean this as a personal attack, Jason, you’re unwillingness to consider this possibility has to do with a sentiment you mentioned in that Jeff Vail post than an honest assessment of what tactics may work:
Normally, I follow wherever the facts lead me. They led me into heresy with the Roman Catholic Church, and I followed. They led me out of “the fold” of Quinn’s followers, and I followed. But this step, I find myself incapable of taking. I can’t refute the logic, and yet I can’t take part in actually making it happen. Preparing for it as an inevitable outcome, yes. Refraining from an attempt to stop it, yes. But actually making it happen … here is where “the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.”
I dunno- these are some thoughts. There may be things I’m missing that would encourage me to reconsider this line of thought.
Comment by Archangel — 28 April 2007 @ 3:19 PM
After reflecting for some time on what I wrote in “The Logic of Collapse,” I would later wrote another post along similar lines, but with different conclusions:
Derrick Jensen vs. the Dalai Lama
After more time to think, the combination of the (in my opinion) inevitability of collapse with the need to provide an alternative to hierarcy, not just to destroy it, leads me to think that our efforts are better spent (both from a personal and societal perspective) trying to collapse intelligently, to create lifeboat communities, to create reservoirs of knowledge that will be needed post-collapse, etc.
Comment by Jeff Vail — 28 April 2007 @ 5:58 PM
In addition to the points made in Jeff’s later article, I’d also like to point out that the same point remains as before: you’re underestimating the complexity of the system. If vandals destroy your roof, your monthly income doesn’t increase: you need to choose whether you’re going to fix the garage, or finish the driveway. Blow up a dam, and you have civilization rallying against the “terrorists,” so they actually get more energy—usually enough to not only rebuild the dam, but to pursue other projects besides.
New Orleans will probably never be rebuilt, but that’s because its geography makes the cost exorbitant. It’s fairly unusual in that regard.
Yes, civilization has peaked, and it will soon be contracting more seriously, but even now, when some major point of infrastructure is removed, the response strengthens civilization, rather than weakening it. If your logic held, 9/11 should have been the beginning of America’s end. It wasn’t, because you’re neglecting the rallying factor still in play, because people still believe in this insanity.
True, it may be my personal bias, but I rarely see any point in playing that game, since any of us could speculate on the hidden biases we each hold endlessly, and we could turn them literally any way we want. I could as easily suggest that the only reason you support such an idea is because it’s emotionally satisfying and fulfills our fantasies of “fighting evil.” Would that be true? Would it be any more or less true to suggest that this is simply my “cowardice”? It’s just not a fruitful line of inquiry. This is an important question, so I think the focus should always be on what’s most effective, rather than the people making the arguments.
To sum up, the key element that makes your case fail, I think, is that the energy available to civilization is not simply linear. A good amount of it is the will of the people caught up in it. For the most part, that’s static, but traumatic events can galvanize it. Look at U.S. industrial production in WW2, for example. Because of that, you have to look not just at the cost civilization incurs from such an attack, but the gains it makes in public galvanization. If you want to see it up close and personal, come visit my homeland in the Allegheny Forest, and you’ll see how dedicated a community can become to its own destruction once one misguided attack helps strengthen civilization. ELF’s arson put the cause of helping make the Allegheny Forest a viable ecology again back by decades, just in one night, because they failed to consider how the system defends itself.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 April 2007 @ 7:34 PM
Jason, your point seems to be that blowing up a dam (for instance) would give civilization a ‘psychic energy’ boost in the sense that people who were getting disillusioned with civilized life (though they wouldn’t necessarily put it that way themselves) would all of the sudden rally behind the ‘rebuilding’ initiative. Well, that depends on the circumstances, I suppose. But the main thing to consider is the following: does civilization (in a given area, at a given time - as I said, I don’t have much hope for a systematic taking down of Civilization-capital C) have a more acute need for ‘psychic energy’ or for fossil fuel etc. energy? The former is no replacement for the latter. If you are facing a serious shortage of oil, metal, concrete etc., no amount of ‘psychic energy’ will make a new dam go up. (Or, if a new dam does go up, then something else won’t go up that would have gone up otherwise.)
Second thing. Reading Jeff’s article (Derrick Jensen vs. the Dalai Lama) served as a reminder to me that there are really two related but separate issues here. The first has to do with taking down civilization in the sense of a complex hierarchical society. The second one has to do with taking down the industrial infrastructure that is ravaging the planet and that has been an indispensable tool for initiated the greatest mass extinction in the last 65 million years. If the salmon (for instance) are to be saved, the dams need to go down and stay down. That is far more urgent than getting rid of the hierarchical society. As soon as we hit the point where rebuilding a blown up dam becomes impossible (or alternatively: where rebuilding a dam means not building something else that would’ve been equally destructive), those dams need to go down. That point is at most a couple of decades away, I think.
Comment by Hasha — 28 April 2007 @ 9:05 PM
Energy is energy. A hundred people willing to work twice as hard with saws and axes can more than make up for the losses stemming from shorter mill hours because the price of oil jumps up $0.10 a gallon.
Sure it is, once you work out the conversion rate.
At the moment, though, there’s no real shortage of any of those things. They’re getting more expensive, and real shortages will come in the future, but right now, that’s just not the case.
And there’s the problem. Take down one dam, and you’ve given them the energy to build two in its place.
But the hierarchical society is also what makes it impossible to take down the industrial infrastructure the way you’re suggesting, and why pursuing that strategy leads to strengthening the infrastructure rather than weakening it. So they’re not really two seperate things at all.
But that point is largely a question of commitment. You can keep pumping peaked fields for years after, if you’re willing to pay the higher prices. When that point is reached, the dams will go down because people will want them to come down, because they’ll see how those dams are destroying their lives and the life of the landbase they depend upon. Rip it away before they understand that, and they’ll build two new ones just to spite you. Material reality sets a lot of the parameters for social beliefs, but it’s amazing how large a group of people can ignore their material poverty, even for decades at a time. That’s generally irrelevant to discussions about cultures over millennia, but we’re talking about the next few decades, and on that scale, it is relevant.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 April 2007 @ 10:04 PM
Just thought I’d drop a quick comment that there is no one right way to deal with this situation. While we can debate at the macro level, at the local level, the Trickster’s going to have to do a lot of work & deal with things in unique ways.
Want a solution? Look around where you live and do something. Don’t worry about its larger ramifications. Act.
Bottom Line: The Trickster would like to invite you to a Global Party. It starts now and ends when the check comes due. It’s theme is “How Do We Stiff the Big Guys?” and you’re expected to pull off at least a couple of serious tricks to get in
Serious members need not apply. :)P
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 28 April 2007 @ 10:31 PM
I’ve lived temporarily in the United States for the past few years, but I am actually from Eastern Europe (one of the non-EU countries). Earlier today, when I was taking a shower ;-), I started thinking what would be likely to happen if someone blew up a dam in my corner of the world. Let’s see… I imagine the President and/or the Prime Minister would hurry to the site, strongly condemn the act of terrorism, promise to apprehend and severely punish the perpetrators, and to rebuild the dam. As for apprehending and severely punishing the perpetrators, I don’t know, it might or might not happen. What we’re really interested in here, though, is in whether or not a new dam would go up. If it were a small dam: maybe. Though I personally think that, given our political elite, it’s more likely that the whole thing would be forgotten after a week or two. But suppose it were a medium-to-large sized dam. I can’t even begin to imagine the thing getting rebuilt from local funds - the country’s just too poor for any such large scale project. What would happen is that people would start looking for foreign investors. But what would this look like from a foreign investor’s perspective? A politically unstable country with highly unimpressive recent history, and a brand new (dam blowing) terrorism problem. An expensive project that would take a few years to bring to completion and that would take a couple of decades or so to compensate for the cost of construction. In, as I said, a politically volatile country. A very attractive prospect indeed. No, I claim that the dam would never get rebuilt (except, possibly, if it were a pretty small one, and even then, probably not).
The point of this exercise? First of all, to remind us all that civilization is by no means a monolithic structure. Blowing up infrastructure might be quite effective (from an ecological point of view) in one part of the world, and completely counter-productive in another part of the world. And second of all, in the United States context: the US is virtually bankrupt, the dollar is about to crash. Though I obviously can’t know for sure, I find it quite possible, even likely, that the US will soon find itself in a situation where rebuilding a medium-to-large sized dam becomes impossible. And if you fast forward a couple of decades or so from today: I imagine there will be virtually no large-scale building projects going on anywhere in the world. The existing infrastructure will be maintained to the extent possible, but building a large dam (or a large anything) will be virtually impossible. If something goes down, it’ll stay down.
Comment by Hasha — 29 April 2007 @ 6:14 PM
The plans for the “Freedom Tower” are even bigger than the WTC. You could blow up Hoover Dam and they’d build something bigger.
I rather think it would be beaten like a drum to remind everyone who might question them how the world has changed and anything they want or need is now justified. That’s the track record, anyway.
And a third of a million people with the most voracious appetites on the planet. Our government and economy is largely foreign-financed now anyway. With so many customers here, of course they’d be willing to make some more money by owning a new dam here.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 29 April 2007 @ 9:21 PM
Jason, were you trying to dispute what I was trying to say about my own country, or were you saying that the same thing wouldn’t apply to the US? It seems to be the latter but I’m not entirely sure…
Comment by Hasha — 29 April 2007 @ 10:19 PM
[quote]And a third of a million people with the most voracious appetites on the planet.[/quote]
Presuming you were talking about the US, that should be a third of a billion people.
Comment by Hasha — 29 April 2007 @ 10:24 PM
Oh, I misread. I thought you said how it would unfold in the U.S.
In eastern Europe, from what I know of it, I think you might be correct. Much of eastern Europe is already in full collapse right now, has been for some time.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 29 April 2007 @ 10:24 PM
That’s the second time in as many days I made that mistake….
Comment by Jason Godesky — 29 April 2007 @ 10:24 PM
Thanks so much for this conversation. I’ve really enjoyed reading it.
I’d like to add a few pennies. The first is that, while Derrick has used blowing up a dam as one example of dismantling infrastructure, the whole point of Endgame was to spur conversations just like this. To ask these questions; what forms of violence could take down civilization? What/where are the fulcrums we can use, and what can we use to leverage such an act?
What I got from Endgame was not “violence will work in any form against civilization,” but, “let’s start a conversation about how we may use violence effectively.”
Taking out dams would not take down civilization, but would help the salmon, if not temporarily. I think another question to ask ourselves is about protecting our own bioregions. I live in the Pacific Northwest. Right now we are having a salmon crisis. They may go extinct in the next 5 years. They have practically outlawed fishing here. While an act like taking out a dam will not stop civilization, and perhaps strengthen it, the Salmon don’t really have time. If taking out a dam (or 10) could save them long enough to live beyond civilizations collapse… is it not worth asking ourselves?
I agree with Hasha, that Dams would not get rebuilt. Especially here in the Northwest, where people have been trying to get them removed (through legal means) for quite some time.
I also want to say that the ELF does not do things in a way to bring down civilization. I agree that their actions strengthen the civil resolve to take down terrorists. But what if these people made it look like an accident? What if they stopped sending communiques to the press and started planning better, invisible actions? You could do things like this, without causing an ideological back-lash like the Green Scare.
What if a Dam just fell apart? Or was percieved to? Who would they blame? The Army Corp of Engineers right? Look at New Orleans. What if we found out the terrorists blew up the levies? More people would probably send aid to New Orleans, right? But nature fucked new orleans over. And the Army Corp fucked them over. Americans sent millions more in aid to tsunami relief than to New Orleans.
Derrick points out in Endgame that most dams don’t even generate electricity anymore. What if one of those just fell apart. Oops. “Well, it wasn’t even generating electricity anyway. So, why rebuild it?”
Also, you make a good point in suggesting that attacking civilization will build its defenses. Again, might that be a strategy to bring it down? Attack it in the face, so you can trip it? Of course, where would the face of civilization be, and how would could trip it are questions I will probably never know the answer to. But there are freaks out there who get off on this shit and know where the weak/strong points are.
Again, I think the main point of Endgame was not to convince people to blow up dams or attack any of the infrastructure of civilization, but to spark these kinds of conversations. How could it work?
While I personally I agree ideologically with the “we must take down civilization now” mind set, I do not feel inspired to search for these fulcrums and/or levers. Rather I find inspiration from writing blogs, rewilding, having discussions like these, etc. So that’s my choice of resistance. I believe we need it all.
In the end I think as Civilization collapses, those in power will try to control who lives and dies as our artificial population declines. I think this will cause the most friction, and I believe that in the long-run, violent resistance is inevitable, unless you want to end up at one of their death camps (oops, I mean “immigration camps”) or unless you are in their military.
blah blah blah.
Comment by Urban Scout — 1 May 2007 @ 4:34 PM
I agree, I don’t have much of an issue with what Derrick’s said. I am kind of disappointed at what he doesn’t say, though. He doesn’t take a very long look at the situation to see if this kind of violence would work, while his words are being used by people who are approaching the situation with a lot less nuance than he did and ignoring his caveats. This is a pretty dumb strategy, at least in this time and place, and by not addressing it directly, Derrick’s words end up becoming slogans for people who aren’t thinking things through nearly as much. I’d like to see something like that from him—no, not some pacifist crap about never fighting back, just a look at whether blowing up a dam, right now, would really be a good idea, if that would actually help bring civilization down, or if it would just make it last longer.
Until they come back and build a new dam, and round up everyone who cared about them and would otherwise be working towards things like dam decomissioning which might take the dam down and keep it down. That’s a lot worse for the salmon.
Perhaps, but again, there’s more at stake than just the salmon. How many species are you thus sacrificing for salmon’s sake, by making civilization live longer in order to save them? Assuming they don’t just rebuild the dams, in which case you’ve done nothing for the salmon, and sacrificed so many other species for naught.
There’s 200 gut-wrenching tragedies every day—200 species wiped out, never to be seen again, every single day. More than saving the salmon, the question has to be, how do we stop that from happening?
The answer has to be local, like you said. But it’s also important to remember to think of your whole local ecology, not just one species in it, as vital and crucial as each and every one of them are.
That’s why I mention dam decommissioning, because that would keep them down. When you force that choice on a group of people by just blowing it up, even the people who used to agree with you recoil, and the first reaction is to rebuild it, maybe even bigger, just to spite you. Terrorism has a wildly disproportionate reaction to the actual damage it does.
That’s kind of the “best case scenario” I talked about in “On Violence,” or that John Robb outlined in “Green Guerrillas.” Even in those cases, the balance is very tricky, and I think even under the very best circumstances, you’re still going to end up doing more harm than good.
Making it look like an accident could change some things, but how much can you really succeed in that? They’re very good at figuring these things out these days. It could work, but it would have to be perfect. Any slip-up, and we’re back to the beginning again, where it’s doing more harm than good.
We’ve got other options on the table, and with a little ingenuity, you can wage a war of ideas with all the ferocity and effectiveness of a physical conflict. A Trickster war. The possibilities for success down that road are far greater, I think, with much less chance of catastrophic backfire.
This is actually something Derrick himself suggests—keep it all on the table, and use whatever it takes. I’m not disagreeing with that. I’m saying that blowing things up doesn’t get us closer to that goal, it moves us farther away, and things as desperate as they are, that’s not something we can really afford right now. So, let’s use what really works, what’s so rarely been deployed inside civilization, but is idealized in tribal mythologies the world over: the Trickster war.
An example: Jesus waged a pretty good Trickster war. Made Ghandi and MLK look like hacks by comparison. We need to make them look like hacks, too, because nothing less than that will do.
Another example, though much less impressive: the plans I’ve begun to work out for a Trickster war to save my own homeland, the forests of the Allegheny. There, you’d call it a Hare war; out in your parts, I imagine it’d be a Raven war. Anyway, there’s some allies we can help, like the Friends of Allegheny Wilderness. But the reason these people keep destroying these forests is that they have no other way to live. This isn’t a wealthy area, and they make their living from logging and drilling and otherwise raping the forest. More than anything, they need an alternative. Permaculture can help put food on their tables in the short term, and provide for them in the long term. It means that ecological wealth is the same as human wealth, and that suddenly makes the loggers and the oil companies despoilers come to steal the source of their livelihood and destroy everything they hold dear. Right now, it sure does feel like their covenant is with their employer and the supermarket. That’s the part that needs to change. They need to see that their covenant is with their landbase. That’s when they’ll start protecting it. When that happens, just try to log that forest. See what happens.
It’s like social judo, a memetic martial art that makes friends out of your enemies, exploits the systemic weaknesses of the machine, and draws people out. The longer you do it, the stronger you become, and the weaker the machine gets. Eventually, that may lead to a conventional war, but if we’re lucky, maybe we can slow it down in the short term, tear it down in the long term, and save as much as possible—humans no less (and no more) than any other species—in the end.
This is why I spend the time writing and thinking about things like roleplaying games and the Wii and what not. I’m trying to develop the arsenal of a Trickster war. It’s nowhere near there, but my hope is that this can lead somewhere. It has to start somewhere, doesn’t it?
If the opportunity opens up, absolutely. But I would suggest that this is very much part of a Trickster war. Terrorist attacks and even guerrilla warfare are places where civilization is strong. Trying to match them there is not a good idea. Their weaknesses lie in the poverty of its society: alienated, isolated people. That’s the biggest Achilles heel I know of in the system. Hitting civilization where they’re strong sets that back; a Trickster war exploits that.
Well, do we need it all? Do we need more dams, and more carbon in the air, and maybe a new coal-mining initiative? We need all the things that weaken civilization. Does blowing up a dam weaken civilization? I think, at least in the near future, it makes it stronger, so I think we don’t need it. We don’t need it just like we don’t need some grand nuclear power initiative.
I’m not sure. If you look at Rome, they were generally too busy trying to keep their own capital cities together to worry much about eradicating the bacaudae. Of course, at an earlier point, when they were still in a position to try to claim those territories, there were plenty of battles. Fighting to defend your family and land against an invasion is a very different question than blowing up a dam. When it comes to that point, it’s time to melt into the forest and rain down arrows. Never let them see you coming, but you might want to let one run home screaming, just to start a rumor that those woods are haunted, and anyone who violates them will suffer terribly. In defense of family and land, nothing’s too extreme.
P.S. - Scout, your interview with Derrick was the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen/done/eaten! Unfortunately, I saw it about two hours after posting this one, and I try ot to have two videos on the frontpage at the same time, so I’m really looking forward to posting yours after two more posts!
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 May 2007 @ 5:03 PM
Since my previous post here, I’ve actually been thinking along similar lines as Scout. Take down a small dam that was originally built illegally and that is no longer being used to generate electricity. Don’t send a statement to the press to tell them why you’re doing it. You can try to make it look like an accident, but even if it merely looks like vandalism, it should be good enough. If nobody’s money’s been lost, nobody will care if some kid decided to play with explosives a little bit. (If you demolished an old, abandoned house that nobody was living in, that was already largely falling apart, that was worth squat to its owner - it’s unlikely that the police would look very hard for the perpetrator. Same thing with these dams.) Everything changes of course once anyone suspects that this is an organized campaign fought by people with strong ideological interests inimical to the status quo. But as long as you can keep the cops from suspecting that, you’re home free. And if by some chance the person who blew up the dam got caught, s/he ought to be prepared to say ‘I was just fooling around, I like playing with explosives, I know it’s bad, but I can’t help it… I chose that old abandoned dam in order to make sure I didn’t do any real harm, blah, blah, blah’. Would get the person a far more lenient sentence than the ‘I wanted to protect the salmon’ approach.
Comment by Hasha — 1 May 2007 @ 8:53 PM
Jason,
Thanks for the props on the video!
I agree that attacking civilization, in general, would cause it to build up a defense. But I don’t think this is true across the board. I do believe there are weak points that could be exploited that could cause a crash. I think that Derrick did a good job of eluding to some of these points in Endgame, but even so a whole chapter was devoted to “thinking things through” before you run out to blow something up, and even then, you may not have to blow anything up. Like your trickster metaphor.
I think no one can say, “violence against civilization will only strengthen it.” Most of the time I think so, but when does it not?
Earlier you mentioned that the base would be farming. Do you think that an attack on farming could somehow weaken or send the civilized into a fury?
I don’t buy into the idea that somehow ELF actions set back an environmental movement any more than say, “An Inconvenient Truth” did. Could you explain why you think this, or point me to one of your posts where you explain this position?
I know that most of their actions are largely symbolic, and in a sense cause a memetic backlash against the “green movement.” Is it the memetic backlash you see hurting your actions, if so, how?
What do you think of the old addage, “no press is bad press?”
I agree that we need to look at our whole landbase. While salmon may seem to appear as just one species, they are a keystone to the whole community. If you want to get technical or “meatspacey,” the bring in the minerals from the ocean that make a forest rich. They carry nitrogen and then die and create nitrogen rich soil. Not to mention food for all predators, scavengers, and bugs. Aside from the fungi, I can’t think of a greater loss to the ecological structure, aside from the old growth, which are also already mostly gone. In that sense, it would behoove us to risk anything to keep those salmon alive.
Again, I agree with you, in a general sense. But to a particular landbase, the destruction of something may not weaken civilization on a large scale, but could prove to save a keystone species long enough for them to survive through the crash.
Most people don’t know about this, but here in the NW there was a little windstorm a few months back that blew apart miles of phone poles. Thousands of people went without power for weeks. Why? Because they didn’t have enough phone poles to put up. Yeah, a phone poll shortage. WTF? If this was an act of terrorism, you bet they’d log yellowstone to get these people their power back. Yet, when nature does it they’re like, “Hey man, shit happens. Fend for yourselves.” Haha. People are fucking crazy.
Everyday I ask myself, do we need it all? Do we have time to fuck around blogging and discussing tactics? Or will the salmon be extinct tomorrow, and who’s next after them? What will bring down civilization quicker? I don’t know. But I don’t judge other peoples tactics, and I support them, even if think it may worsen the state of things… because I don’t really know if what I’m doing is really effecting anything at all. My blogging and “cultural creating” could amount to nothing but apathetic cowardice in the end. Maybe blowing up a dam or a more planned out act of violence against civilization would have much greater effectiveness that I think it can. I just don’t know. You know? No way of knowing what exactly is happening in such a complex system with particular tactics in particular places of the world, with particular outcomes. Like Hasha was saying about blowing up a dam in Europe or wherever.
I think the point is to look at your particular place in the world, and what tactics you think will work. But you don’t know what will work in other places, in other groups of people, with other networks and particular knowledge, etc.
I’m rambling again. Oh yeah, one thing… you said,
“Right now, it sure does feel like their covenant is with their employer and the supermarket. That’s the part that needs to change. They need to see that their covenant is with their landbase. That’s when they’ll start protecting it. When that happens, just try to log that forest. See what happens.”
But isn’t that what’s happening? Isn’t Jensen someone who has decided to make that stand? I feel that what you suggest is exactly whats happening. There are people who do identify with the land, and they are the first ones putting their feet down. That’s what I got from Endgame. Do you think that a majority of people will at some point defend their landbase? What happens if theres no landbase left to protect?
Okay. Enough questions.
Comment by Urban Scout — 1 May 2007 @ 9:44 PM
Hasha—I think that’s true, there’s a lot of essentially abandoned infrastructure that wouldn’t raise much attention at all, yet its removal could still really help things.
Depends on the kind of attack. They’re already working themselves into a tizzy about “agroterrorism.” But an alternative—showing small-scale farmers how they can get better yields with permaculture, and starting a grassroots rural backlash against the Green Revolution—that’s something that sweeps in without seeming like an attack, and does its damage before you can really defend yourself.
I’m unique here in that I have first-hand experience with this. The situation in the Allegheny National Forest is awful, and their many other faults aside, the Allegheny Defense Project (ADP) had met with some significant success in holding back logging through a series of litigation. They were eroding local support in the process, but they were buying time. Friends of Allegheny Wilderness probably have a much better long-term prospect, but the ADP were slowing them down in the present. Then, on 11 August 2002, ELF burned down the U.S. Forest Service’s forestry sciences lab near Buckaloons. No one was hurt, but ELF sent an email in September to the Warren Times-Observer claiming responsibility and saying, “While innocent life will never be harmed in any action we undertake, where it is necessary, we will no longer hesitate to pick up the gun to implement justice.”
Western PA went nuts. Since then, the ADP’s lost almost every case. All support there used to be evaporated overnight. The lab was rebuilt in short order, and people trying to save the forest are now considered the very worst type of scum. They don’t even want to hear what we have to say anymore. Logging is back with a vengeance, there are 8,000 oil wells in the ANF (more than in all other national forests combined), and the new forest plan looks to double that, and no one is in a position to stop them now, because even five years later, ELF’s action is still suppressing any kind of action.
We’ve discussed this episode before, in my review of Samuel MacDonald’s Agony of an American Wilderness, and “The Battle for Our Home.” I said basically the same thing there. This is no idle theoretical discourse; my own homeland has seen the destruction acutely accelerated by a very mild act of “terrorism.”
I know what you mean, but really, most species are something of a keystone—depending on how you look at the system. The loss of any of them is tragic, but we’re losing 200 a day. As a rallying cry, “What about the salmon?” is great. So long as we remember it’s not just the salmon, it’s the whole other-than-human world.
This is true. Of course, they’re very good at determining such things, so if you’re going to make it look like an accident, you’re going to have to be very careful in how you go about it.
Maybe it says more about my personality, but I have little tolerance for half-baked plans. Not considering the full ramifications of our actions is how we ended up here in the first place, after all. I think if we’re going to get out, it’s going to take a lot more careful attention to those kinds of details and systems than we showed getting in. Going about things the way we have been will just get us in deeper.
I agree, it’s starting to happen. It’s not nearly far enough. We need a lot more of it, but we can take some comfort knowing that it’s starting.
Yes; even if it only comes about because everyone else is dead.
I don’t see how that’s possible. Humans live off their landbase, and humans are the ones causing this damage. Before the landbase dies, it will be too weak to support humans, and the humans die, at which point the land immediately begins to heal itself. Worst case scenario is that it really comes down to the wire, but I don’t see much opportunity for humans to ever “win” such a fight. It’s like fighting your own jugular.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 2 May 2007 @ 11:07 AM
Interesting link about “agroterrorism.” Haha. How many forms of “terrorism” will they make up?
That’s really too bad about the situation in Allehgeny.
“So long as we remember it’s not just the salmon, it’s the whole other-than-human world.”
Totally.
“Maybe it says more about my personality, but I have little tolerance for half-baked plans.”
I understand. However, I do think that some people have a deeper sense of urgency and feel the need to “act fast.” I don’t necessarily think that… but I don’t know. Again, if the salmon have five years… and right now no one cares except old fishermen. I agree though, about half-baked plans.
“Yes; even if it only comes about because everyone else is dead.”
Haha. That’s a great line.
“Before the landbase dies, it will be too weak to support humans, and the humans die, at which point the land immediately begins to heal itself.”
I totally agree.
My concern would be if all the greater fauna has died off… what will people eat? If civilization kills all the big protein sources, hunting and gathering will become much more difficult. What if the major fauna doesn’t bounce back, because it has become extinct?
While I have obviously taken the same choice in trickster tatics as you, I’m not convinced that violence will always strengthen civilization. I think you agree with me there? I like what Bill Posted above:
“While we can debate at the macro level, at the local level, the Trickster’s going to have to do a lot of work & deal with things in unique ways.”
Comment by Urban Scout — 2 May 2007 @ 1:01 PM
Considering that there hasn’t even been an incident of “agroterrorism” yet…
“Too bad” doesn’t even begin to cover it. Only now are we beginning to get past that, and get back to doing something about the situation. Things are finally starting to turn around, but in the meantime, we’ve suffered five more years of damage. So, my hesitation comes from experience.
I definitely feel the urgency, but that doesn’t change the effect. If an action makes an urgent situation even worse, then what good has been accomplished? It’s precisely because the situation is so urgent that I caution against acting too impulsively. Blowing something up feels like it’s accomplishing something. It fits in with our mythology of what it means to “fight the battle.” But we’ve got plenty of good examples right in front of us that what’s emotionally fulfilling and what’s effective are very often at odds, and this is a situation that’s far too urgent to just go with what feels good.
Things could get bad, but hunter-gatherers can live off of grubs, too. Not the nicest way of life, but it’s possible. But even that scenario seems unlikely. In some places, yes, but everywhere? Some large mammals are very adaptive. If nothing else, we breed lots of pigs, and they go feral with incredible ease. An escaped pig after two weeks has a bristly mane and full-blown tusks. Here in my woods, one of our biggest problems is actually deer overpopulation.
Always, everywhere? Those words are practically the red flags of an incorrect statement. There will be times and places, but right now, those are very few and far between, generally falling into the smaller range of petty sabotage and vandalism. The things you see from ELF or the Unabomber, though, I can’t imagine anything like that accomplishing anything positive for at least the foreseeable future.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 2 May 2007 @ 1:59 PM
“‘Too bad’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
Haha. Yeah, “too bad” was not the best choice of words.
Thanks for the dialogue here. It will be more fun to chat in person this summer!
Comment by Urban Scout — 2 May 2007 @ 2:27 PM
No problem, I knew what you meant.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 2 May 2007 @ 2:30 PM
I’m going to engage full geek mode here and take a look at Jensen’s Death Star metaphor in light of this conversation.
For those of you who are not familiar, in Endgame, Jensen presents a description of a precursor script to Star Wars: A New Hope that was written by environmentalists. In this script, the Rebel forces try to take down the Death Star and weaken the Empire by various means such as writing letters to Darth Vader (but making sure not to alienate him in the letters), selling hand-made hemp fiber hackey sacks to the inhabitants of the Death Star in the hopes of opening their minds to the possibilities of the various home worlds that will come to an end when the Death Star is used to destroy those worlds.
The analogy is very stirring and eye-opening. You come away from it feeling the futility of a lot of the methods being employed in the environmental movement as opposed to the success of the Rebel Alliance in their attack against the Death Star.
But the Empire did exactly what Jason is saying civilization would do. They built another fucking Death Star. And they were building it bigger and badder. The Emperor even used it to try to lure the rebels into a death trap, pulling some Trickster tricks of his own.
Now, here’s where the analogy starts breaking down. Civilization is more complex, more spread out that the Death Star. There is no flag ship entity for civilization that we can destroy to the same effect as blowing up the Death Star. It doesn’t matter how good you are at bulls-eyeing wamp rats in your T-16 back home if the thermal exhaust port doesn’t exist.
I wish it were as easy as blowing up a couple of moon-sized space stations. Unfortunately, it ain’t. As the civ starts breaking down, maybe we’ll be able to find local Death Stars that we can destroy. But I think the success of a lot of ecoterrorism can be summed up with the quote: “Negative, negative. It didn’t go in. Just impacted on the surface”
Comment by Rix — 3 May 2007 @ 12:28 PM
Word, Rix.
Extra points for the geeksquake.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 May 2007 @ 12:31 PM
Well,
The main problem with the Deathstar analogy….Plus…the reason it is never destroyed is that WE are not the environmentalists….or the rebels….WE LIVE off the Deathstar…we keep it running; we’re the stormtroopers, the engineers, technicians, scientists…..janitors that keep the thing running and ‘benefit’ from it. Now when you look at the Empire’s minions, remember they have no more choice in serving the Emperor than the rebels have in opposing. SO, IMO, the rebels never brouht down the Deathstar alone…Luke had help from the inside….we just don’t see that story in the movie, heh, ’cause the hero blew up with the ship
So if we’re told our peon work supports this ‘Deathstar’ we live on, and this Deathstar is on it’s way to blow up an entire planet of ‘Rebels’……where does that leave our strategy and tactics? Rumor also has it that the Rebels will try to destroy this structure we cannot survive without…..
You’re ON the Deathstar…it’s the only life you’ve ever known…your family, and everyone you’ve ever known is on the Deathstar. You’ve mentioned a few things to family and friends, but they just want to do what they are told….get by…they can’t do anything, anyway……
You’re IN the Deathstar….best anyone can do is use some abandoned sections of the ship to hide out in..they have hydroponics set up…they tap into solar winds for power, they trap the rats and other ‘infesting animals’ for protein. They live pretty well in their hideouts, but in the end, when the Deathstar blows up, they blow up with it.
Uh oh……
Comment by Tree — 6 May 2007 @ 12:19 PM
That’s precisely what Curtis White was getting at in his two articles in the original post above. We’re part of the system, so trying to blow it up doesn’t help much unless we can create an alternative for ourselves and others. Or, as my mother always put it, you can’t kick out a man’s crutch unless you’re ready to stick around and teach him to walk.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 May 2007 @ 8:07 PM
I’d like to chime in with this quote if I may. Oddly enough, from an astrologer
Referring to what happened after the near revolution of the ’60s, Bill Herbst wrote:
So that was the backlash, not against a violent revolution, but only a threatening counter-culture. Violence at this point would only provoke a far worse reaction.
I’m pretty sure that anything we do openly will only make matters worse until we’re sure we’re barreling full speed down the slope of collapse. It’s best to keep things underground.
Jason described Jesus as one of the greatest tricksters in history, but even he didn’t succeed in bringing down the Roman empire.
Comment by Locke — 7 May 2007 @ 2:53 AM
Man, that’s an ugly cut and paste job. =(
Comment by Locke — 7 May 2007 @ 3:00 AM
I’ve never really thought much of astrology, but Bill Herbst’s website is pretty interesting. In one of his newsletters he claims that our society’s faith and fascination with technology peaked in the ’90s. Nothing says technology has reached the point of diminishing returns than a society that has lost interest in it.
Comment by Locke — 7 May 2007 @ 3:22 AM
On the subject of ‘making civilization stronger’: I think we would do good to distinguish between making civilization stronger and not provoking it to commit certain egregious abuses. For instance, if you somehow managed to provoke a large scale nuclear war, that would presumably bring civilization to its knees, but at a price that we (i.e. just about every living being on this planer) can ill afford. I tend to think of civilization as a 300 pound bully who’s getting weaker by the day and is acting in increasingly chaotic ways, causing damage to himself and everyone around him. Now what do you do about this? If you kick him in the face, that’s not going to ‘make him stronger’, on the contrary, but it might enrage him and result in his causing otherwise avoidable damage. Of course, at some point, he will get so weak that when you punch him in the face, he’ll black out, and if you’re lucky, drop dead. Until then… You have to be careful. You should probably avoid punching him, but you might try putting tranquilizers (or poison) in his food. Now how exactly this translates into the civilization context… That’s the million salmon question, isn’t it?
As for the Death Star analogy… Yeah, we are on the Death Star, but let us all keep in mind that the Death Star is this culture not this planet. And whether or not we can survive without the Death Star depends on who ‘we’ are and what exactly we mean by ‘survive’. As for
[quote] you can’t kick out a man’s crutch unless you’re ready to stick around and teach him to walk. [/quote]
Oh yes you can. And depending on what he’s doing with it besides walking (hitting little children with it, perhaps?), kicking it out might be the only right thing to do, whether or not you have the time and energy to teach him how to walk without it first. It’s just that, if you kick the thing out without going through the trouble of teaching him how to walk (and of course, there are people who can’t be taught how to walk no matter how much time and energy you’re willing to spend), he will no longer be able to move around at all.
Comment by Hasha — 7 May 2007 @ 5:21 AM
I’m not so sure about that. The biggest problem of the ’60’s was that the timing was off; civilization was still growing, so the laws of accelerating growth still applied. The other part was that it was just too predictable. Agrarian communes talking about peace and love—such utopian schemes have a long history in the U.S., all the way back to Plymouth Rock, really. It also goes to show how silly it is to try to change the way people act and think and feel while keeping the systemic causes of their behavior in place.
Would’ve if Paul hadn’t been such a little bitch.
Not chaotic. Civilizations in collapse do not suddenly become random; instead, they remain predictable, even as the rules of the game begin to run in reverse. Look at past collapses: civilizations die as predictably as they live.
Well, that’s the limit of the analogy. A 300 lb. bully doesn’t get stronger when you kick him in the face, but a society that can rally its populace and increase production can.
Well, yes, but that’s what would make you the villain.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 May 2007 @ 9:44 AM
Villain?!? A person acts to slow this culture that will destroy an entire planet….acts against this culture that is causing the extinction of other human cultures and species at an accelerating pace and you call the actor a villain?!? Wow, disconnect. How about ‘this guy’s’ crutch being Heroin, AND ‘he’ is dealing to all the neighborhood kids….you think intervention is is order, or what?
On the 60’s:
“Many people alive today remember what happened when large numbers of white, middle-class young people left the urban centers where the counterculture had its roots and tried to build a new society in communes scattered across rural America.
It was a grand experiment but, on the whole, a failed one, and the root cause of its failure is instructive. Of the many thousands of young communards who headed back to the land, vanishingly few of them had the least idea how much sheer hard work it takes to grow one’s own food and provide the other necessities of life by one’s own efforts, and not many more had even the most basic skills needed to tackle that technically complex and demanding task. A little pottering around in garden beds with a copy of a half-read book in one hand won’t do the trick. Idyllic fantasies of living the good life in the lap of nature thus collided head on with the hard reality that life in a fossil-fueled industrial economy really is much easier than subsistence farming in Third World conditions. Caught in this collision, most of the communes of the Sixties either figured out how to batten off the larger society through welfare, drug dealing, or some other sideline, or simply let out a few bubbles and sank once the first bright rush of idealistic enthusiasm wore off.
The same challenge faces potential lifeboat communities in a world perched unsteadily on the brink of peak oil. Anyone who wants to pursue rural self-sufficiency needs to check their desire for a modern American lifestyle at the door, and embrace a standard of living fairly close to that of a Third World peasant. Given competent training, rigorous practice, and a high tolerance for hard physical labor day in and day out, a group of healthy adults can keep themselves and their dependents adequately fed, clothed, housed, and equipped with necessary tools, with a little left over for barter or sale; for thousands of years this has been the standard human lifestyle over most of the world, and once the brief era of fossil-fueled extravagance we call modern industrial civilization is over, it will likely be the standard human lifestyle once again. Compared to the relative ease, comfort, opportunity and abundance of a modern middle-class lifestyle, though, the lot of a subsistence farmer is fairly hard going. ”
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
Comment by Tree — 7 May 2007 @ 10:00 AM
Absolutely. If you go about kicking out the means people have of supporting themselves without giving them any alternative, you’re a villain.
No, not at all: someone who kicks out people’s means of supporting themselves without giving them any alternatives is a villain. Doing that doesn’t slow down our culture, it accelerates it, because now it has the anger and resentment of whatever community you impoverished to run on. You’re not acting against civilization then, you’re reinforcing it, you’re accelerating it. It gets stronger when you do that.
Notice, I didn’t say to just leave them with their crutches. I said you’d better damn well be ready to stand by and help them learn to walk again. If you want to use this extension, what happens when you just take his heroin away, and don’t stick around to help him through the withdrawal? What happens then?
As for the quote from Greer, he makes some great points in that article, and homesteading is hard work. But that’s a different thing from hunting and gathering, innit?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 May 2007 @ 10:36 AM
WTF? hunting and gathering is a different thing from homesteading, yes.
Are you assuming I somehow osmose your point, there?
WE are villians to the rest of the world Right NOW…..you’re all worried about becoming a villian to people of Your culture….the Deathstar culture….so don’t act- in case someone is put in a bit of discomfort here-and pretty much stand by while the southern hemisphere and entire ecosystem suffers…..oh…i’ll assume you are goin to school, or in some way preparing yourself to be some kind of ‘Empire Culture Addiction Counselor’….for the poor little emperors who find themselves suddenly without their drugs….so how long does this preparation take? How many must die in the rest of the world while we make safety-nets for fat Americans (and who the hell is doing this preparing? I don’t see this happening on any scale)?And…..how many counselors do we need before we can act? I mean….what’s your plan, then? Politics and ‘programs’?!?
I DO know those outside this culture-indigenous people etc, aren’t worried about causing a little discomfort to petty emperors- the indigenous are fighting for their very lives and lifestyles. ‘I’ relate to these people more than the petty elites of Empire culture, now
Just bringing up peak oil has made me seem the villian in the past, btw….damn party-pooper, LOL. I can handle the label….I’ve had plenty of labels pasted on me…
Comment by Tree — 7 May 2007 @ 11:44 AM
We advocate hunting & gathering. Homesteading doesn’t help; it’s agriculture that’s the root of the problem.
Have you read the thread up to this point at all? We’re interested in what’s effective, rather than simply what feels good. If you take away the means a human community has for supporting itself, but you do nothing to change the systemic reasons that made that way of life necessary, you do nothing to open up alternatives for them, you do nothing to give them some other way to live and be, then all you’ve accomplished is to create more suffering. Why do you think our system is so murderous? It’s not because the people in it are out to destroy the world. They just want to live, but they already lack for so many of the things that people really and truly need that they have no other options. You want to wreck their lives even further, all you do is make the problem worse. Humanity is killing the world beacuse of its own suffering. You’re not going to stop that by making it suffer more.
If all you do is take away the means people have of supporting themselves, you haven’t slowed civilization down one bit, because those people are still there, and they still need a way to support themselves, and since you haven’t given them any alternatives, then all the anger and resentment you’ve cultivated gets thrown into rebuilding their means of support, only bigger and stronger than before. Enough with “Death stars” and other careless metaphors, we’ve chased analogies already to the brink of the ridiculous. There is a system that is destroying the world; it’s not “like” anything but itself. It takes away people’s options, it’s a system predicated on violence and fear, it strips people of the things the really, truly need, and pits them at war with the very landbase they depend upon. Try to rip away their infrastructure by force and you’ll make them your enemies, and they will rededicate themselves to repairing that infrastructure and more just to spite you. Liberate them from that system, give them an alternative that provides for the things they really need, and they’ll become your allies, and the system becomes impotent.
However many it is, it’s far less than in your plan, where you try to blow things up in some flashy moment of glory where you get to stick it to the man. Then everyone rallies around, and they rebuild whatever dam you blew up twice as big, and it brings in jobs and wealth, and you give civilization a few more years it otherwise would’ve never had. You fight it in precisely the ways it’s outlined that battles should be fought, and it feels great, because it fits the image of resistance that civilization has taught you to value. It feels like you’re really fighting it, because this is what civilization has trained you to think fighting looks like and feels like. All the while, you’re feeding the system more than any CEO could ever hope to. If we were to follow that road, civilization could make it through the next century with people like you to keep it going. So however many species die while we develop a real alternative, it will be nothing compared to the species that will die in all the extra time your “fighting” will give to civilization, all the extra decades you’ll tack onto its life.
Hardly. We need a real alternative. A way to live other than destroying the world. We’re working out a permaculture design that works in our ecology, we’re rewilding and creating a template of tribal life. We’re trying to lead by example, blaze some trails, not just say it can be done, but prove it by doing it. Show, don’t tell. That’s what will change things. You want to take the easy way out, be a good little civilized guerrilla and blow up a dam? That doesn’t stop civilization, that helps it along. That sabotages those of us who really are doing something to stop it, who are striking at the one real vulnerability it has: its support. Blow up a dam and it will build a new one. Resources are not a problem for it. Infrastructure can be rebuilt. In fact, an excuse to rebuild takes the pressure off as they run out of places to expand into. You do them a favor. But when you provide an alternative, you undercut the violence that the system relies on, you take the teeth out of the bite, you strike where civilization is genuinely vulnerable.
Unless, of course, some idiot goes ahead and blows up a dam and erases five years of work.
Great. Defending a land civilization hasn’t eaten yet is a very different thing than liberating a place it already controls. The same tactics do not apply at all. I’m not interested in preserving the American way of life. That’s my main target. What I’m interested in is stopping civilization from destroying the planet, and you’re not going to accomplish that by making 6.5 billion enemies. You accomplish that by making friends, by giving them an alternative.
Me too, but I’m not talking about labels. I’m talking about the consequences of actions. They’re not always what civilization trained you to expect.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 May 2007 @ 12:06 PM
“it’s agriculture that’s the root of the problem.”
I don’t agree- It’s ATTITUDES that are the root of the problem. Permaculture IS agriculture. INDUSTRIAL, monocrop, petroleum-based agriculture is a problem, but there are many types of agriculture.
” in your plan, where you try to blow things up in some flashy moment of glory where you get to stick it to the man. ” “You want to wreck their lives even further”"You fight it in precisely the ways it’s outlined that battles should be fought, and it feels great, because it fits the image of resistance that civilization has taught you to value. It feels like you’re really fighting it, because this is what civilization has trained you to think fighting looks like and feels like”"You want to take the easy way out, be a good little civilized guerrilla and blow up a dam? ” “people like you to keep it going”
ALL ASSUMPTIONS on your part. I never said anything about blowing up dams or anything like that, LOL. Quite the attack based on a ton of assumptions…..
“Humanity is killing the world beacuse of its own suffering” HUMANITY is not killing the world, Empire culture is killing the world.
I don’t know who you are referring to when you write: ‘we’; as in: “We’re working out a permaculture design that works in our ecology, we’re rewilding and creating a template of tribal life.”
The permaculture design should be pretty set for your area….depending on microclimate, soils, water tables and existing overstory. Give me details…etc, etc….. Actually implementing the design is quite a bit of work, lol…and sometimes money-and do you ‘own’ the land or is this a ’seedball’; stealth project?
(I don’t consider permaculture hunting/gathering, but more as a special type of agriculture) Ayway, what are the sticking points with your permaculture design? I can probably help, LOL, since it’s what I do. Surprise coming from: “people like you”????
I think you have me confused with someone else….or do you always attack allies against Empire when they don’t agree with your methods completely? I’d hardly consider that ‘effective’.
Well, it’s Your site….far be it for me to offer alternative opinions…I wasn’t even writing to ‘you’ originally…I was responding to the Deathstar analogy you applauded when someone else posted it because I simply can’t relate to seeing the problem as arising outside ourselves as a culture-like some damn aliens are causing the planet’s destruction instead of taking responsibility for it as a culture.
So…let me know what you need for your permaculture or other ‘homesteading’ type project…I have years of experience.
otherwise pardon me for having the gall to begin to share my perspective, LOL
Comment by Tree — 7 May 2007 @ 1:16 PM
There are many types of cultivation, but agriculture is just one of them, a catastrophic form of cultivation based on constantly wounding the earth back to the base levels of succession to encourage cereal grains like wheat, corn or rice. Permaculture tries to help succession along, and uses intercropping to create a healthy ecosystem. Both are cultivation, but agriculture is very different. There’s a reason no one mistakes a forest garden for a farm.
But saying it’s attitudes doesn’t make any sesne. Why did attitudes suddenly change, in several places around the world, 10,000 years ago, for no apparent reason? Attitudes are shaped by lived reality. It’s impossible for a farmer to have respect for the living world and keep on farming; likewise, a tracker cannot long maintain a farmer’s war. Attitudes are fickle. They win out, die out, and change to adapt material circumstances. They’re an epiphenomenon that arises from the risks and rewards of the system they’re born in.
If not, then what are scolding me for?
Which right now claims nearly all of humanity.
The Tribe of Anthropik.
Much of that’s already been stated. We’re experimenting right now, trying ot figure out what works and what doesn’t. Some of that involves books and planning, and some of that involves planting and growing, and we’re doing both right now. We don’t have any solid results yet, so there’s not much to say yet.
Of course not, it’s a type of cultivation, as is agriculture. It’s not hunting and gathering, but it can help heal some of the damage we’ve done, and in our case, it’s a good stepping stone to create some of the places that we’ll migrate between as hunter-gatherers. Once you’ve set up a food forest, you can hunt and gather it forevermore.
There’s a lot. There’s oil in the ground everywhere. The last trees are starting to get old. Right now, it’s mostly grass, and my family’s been going up to mow an acre of forest for months now, and though we’ve long appreciated the absurdity of it, we’re finally in a position to do something about it. We want to create a food forest, something that will help the succession of the Allegheny, provide food and materials, and largely maintain itself. In the long run, I’m looking at permaculture as a way of helping restore damage we’ve done, and to create comfortable base camps for hunter-gatherers.
You came out attacking me, scolding me for the suggestion that we do what’s effective rather than what feels good. You got the same treatment you gave me, no more and no less. It was a nice discussion until you decided to give me the third degree, so don’t try to make it out like I’ve wronged you somehow by defending myself.
That would be most appreciated.
Your perspective is appreciated; your attacks are not. Hasha sounds like she has much of the same perspective as you, and you’ll notice that this didn’t happen. I enjoy a spirited discussion with people who disagree with me. I do not enjoy being attacked, as you attacked me.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 May 2007 @ 1:46 PM
Good luck to you
Comment by Tree — 7 May 2007 @ 2:41 PM
Jason,
First, on the subject of ‘making civilization stronger’: I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree. At any rate, I don’t think it’s possible to conclusively establish it one way or another, since after all, you can never have a rerun and see what a different course of action leads to. Certainly, you can speculate, and you can support your speculations with various kinds of evidence, but ultimately, you can’t prove it one way or another. (None of this, by the way, is to suggest that it makes no difference what your perspective is: it makes all the difference! Because a certain perspective leads to certain kinds of actions, and support of certain actions committed by others, and those actions have consequences, even though those consequences might be difficult to evaluate ‘objectively’.)
Second, on the subject of the 300 pound bully’s/civilization’s chaotic behavior… Maybe I was using the term ‘chaotic’ improperly. I didn’t mean to say that an observer couldn’t find any pattern in this behavior, but rather that the bully himself doesn’t know why he’s doing what he’s doing, he’s confused, frightened, irrational, etc. etc.
Finally, as for:
[quote] If you go about kicking out the means people have of supporting themselves without giving them any alternative, you’re a villain. [/quote]
Well, from those people’s perspective, certainly. The salmon’s, sharks’, polar bears’, indigenous people’s perspective might just be very different. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing whatsoever against giving people the skills to live differently, quite on the contrary, I think it’s extraordinarily important. (I personally badly need those skills!) What I am saying is that your inability to give people alternatives does not, in my book at least, count as a sufficient reason to refrain from stopping them, if you are at all able to do so, from living the way that’s killing the planet. Again, it might just be that we’ll have to agree to disagree here…
Comment by Hasha — 7 May 2007 @ 8:19 PM
It’s not as if there’s a lack of evidence here. We know that collapse is always a process of abandonment; it happens when people see that the system is fundamentally failing to meet their needs. With mass support, the system cannot be stopped. Without it, it cannot stand. While infrastructure failures provide the primary means for eroding that support, when the infrastructure failures are intentional—or can even be attributed to personal incompetence, as in the wake of Katrina—support remains intact, because people attribute the failures to passing problems, rather than systemic crises. We have the beginning of a realization that the problems are systemic, but no shortage of forces that try to obfuscate the issue, such as the war in Iraq, or the incompetence of the Bush administration. Eco-terrorism further obfuscates the issue, by providing further passing influences to which systemic failures can be attributed, maintaining faith in and support for the system.
Historically, we can see how terrorist attacks have led to economic and political expansions of civilized complexity.
So, it’s hardly a matter on which we need to resort to opinions or metaphors. We have evidence, and it clearly illustrates that “fighting” civilization in such a civilized manner leads to more civilization.
I see this as the kind of thinking that Daniel Quinn defined “Takers” with: it didn’t work last year, or the year before that, or the year before that, or the year before that, or the year before that, but that just means we should try it again. After all, no one knows the future, and just because it’s never worked before doesn’t mean it won’t work this time! Or, to quote Pakistan’s U.N. envoy, Munir Akram, “One of the definitions of madness is you keep doing the same thing but you expect different results.”
Well, by that definition, he’s always chaotic. No society really understands why they do what they do; that’s why emic and etic perspectives both have value.
Not so much, considering that all that happens is that development comes back fiercer than before. You don’t just hurt the local people, you hurt the local salmon and the local sharks and the local polar bears and the local indigenous people because they’re the ones who have to suffer the consequences when a stronger civilization comes back at them. I’ve seen this first-hand, as I mentioned before, in my own homeland. When ELF burned down the ski resort expansion in Vail, CO, they rebuilt it in no time, but the crackdown silenced the opposition that had once been able to counter Vail. With the opposition eliminated, the resort’s grown even more since then. I’m sure the lynx are thrilled.
But that’s precisely what keeps it from being an effective tool. These people will still be there when whatever glorious action you’ve planned is flawlessly executed, and this will still be the only way they know how to live, so they’ll continue living that way—all the moreso now that you’ve pissed them off. You’re not helping anyone or anything; you make the system stronger, you hurt some innocent people, you eviscerate all real resistance, and you accelerate the destruction of the living world. That’s all it accomplishes.
Now, show those same people how to get the things they really want and really need by living with their landbase, and you’ll have made a lasting accomplishment. You’ll have truly broken part of the system there, and converted it into a new system that will defend that landbase with its very life—because they’ll have finally remembered that that’s exactly what it is.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 May 2007 @ 10:53 PM
I’m really busy now, and will be for the next few days at least, so I’m posting just a short reply here.
Keep in mind that collapse is not linear! You can have an attack on infrastructure leading up to ‘national unity’, consolidation of power, etc. etc.; essentially, you get an adrenaline boost. But then at some point, having been bleeding over a period of time, and on many different fronts, the established order can suddenly and unexpectedly collapse. So the apparent ‘strengthening’ can in fact be a shortcut to collapse. Of course, during the adrenaline rush, our bully might just commit some otherwise avoidable egregious abuses that might or might not be worth the potential time gain.
Comment by Hasha — 8 May 2007 @ 3:11 AM
That only happens when you have isolated eco-terrorist attacks really building up into a guerrilla war, like in Iraq. That requires vast support. Look at bandits throughout history: they were able to keep up that kind of constant level of attack only because they had broad support. We don’t have broad support, and we never will if we approach it like this, so all we’ll have are isolated attacks.
That’s not what the evidence shows. It’s not a short-term strengthening and a long-term weakening, but exactly the opposite, a short-term weakening and a long-term strengthening. The infrastructure is rebuilt, and normally expanded. It’s only in the very short term that terrorist attacks really have a negative effect on civilization.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 8 May 2007 @ 9:32 AM
Yeah, I think I brought up a similar point (tho’ far less eloquently) on a prior entry. Guerilla warfare [b]requires[/b] a great deal of support from locals. At this point, I may or may not even be able to mention Peak Oil (which is utterly defensible) without being thought a nutball. You think I can get broad support for blowing up a dam? Think again….
Comment by jhereg — 8 May 2007 @ 11:54 AM
Absolutely. And again, this could change in the future—when we’re defending our homes from invasion, that’s a different story altogether. But right now and for the foreseeable future, blowing up a dam does a lot more harm than good.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 8 May 2007 @ 11:59 AM
“Do you think that an attack on farming could somehow weaken or send the civilized into a fury?”
The anti-GM movement, one of the Direct Action Movement’s most unqualified successes (although admittedly there aren’t many), was a good illustration of the point that broad popular support is essential if resistance is to be even slightly effective. Perhaps what is really meant by ‘agroterrorism’ is something along these lines:
“As the above ground campaign intensified with banner demos and meetings to raise public awareness, more and more test sites were getting trashed. Some opted for the route of accountability, donning white bio-hazard suits and getting nicked. Others crept around the hedgerows in the dead of night pouncing on unsuspecting plants. Some test sites were so small that they were ‘de-contaminated’ by a handful of anonymous people. At the other end of the (farm) scale, the largest was in 1999 at Watlington, Oxfordshire where over 600 people held a rally then marched into a field of Monsanto oil-seed rape. Police were powerless to stop them.”
from: http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news583.htm
Remember, these days a ‘terrorist’ is anyone who doesn’t agree with the dominant ideology. “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” wasn’t a joke, however much it may have seemed like one at the time.
Comment by Ian M — 8 May 2007 @ 1:33 PM
First of all, I’m not saying that blowing up a dam or two or ten right now in the United States would do much good. (The exception, as mentioned before, being those dams that are no longer being used to produce electricity, but are killing salmon and others anyway.) I am saying that it is an option to be kept in mind for the near future. How near? Well, I don’t know. But, Jason, if you’re right that the tipping point will be 2012-15, then we’re talking about less than a decade here. There are, however, many places around the globe where blowing up infrastructure would be immediately effective (for protecting habitat), whether or not you’ve got popular support. Basically, any place that cannot afford to easily rebuild whatever you happened to blow up.
Second, it’s not as though ‘eco-terrorists’ are supposed to bring the Empire to its knees alone. Guerillas in Iraq and elsewhere are more than welcome to help (via assuring that the Empire spreads itself too thin).
Third, your average person is, in my opinion, very unlikely to abandon the industrial system until abandoning it becomes completely and utterly unavoidable, that is, until the industrial infrastructure breaks down. This will inevitably happen over the next few decades, but it is possible to speed up the process, and in the interest of preserving as many species as possible that are currently in danger of becoming extinct, it ought to be sped up. Alternatives to the industrial lifestyle, for the masses, will be found as the collapse progresses, not before it begins; the point: it isn’t necessary to have ready-made alternatives before starting to dismantle the industrial infrastructure on which we’ve come to depend for our livelihood.
Fourth, while I do, in principle, agree that we’re ‘taking out our misery on the world’, let us keep in mind that the most powerful tool for this is the industrial infrastructure. Healing is a long, long process that’s going to take centuries (provided, that is, that we don’t go extinct in the near future). The industrial infrastructure, or at least the best part of it, has to go much sooner, otherwise there will be nothing left to sustain human life on this planet. The ‘passing’ of the industrial infrastructure is going to be painful, is going to enrage people, no matter how it happens. It doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t speed it up.
In short: as soon as a piece of infrastructure in a given place becomes impossible (or at least quite difficult) to rebuild, blowing it up becomes effective, no matter whom it enrages, and whether or not you’ve got wide popular support.
Comment by Hasha — 8 May 2007 @ 10:37 PM
Hell, for that matter, I’m reasonably sure there are a few places where you’d find wide popular support.
And if you’re really talking about local dams that aren’t truly useful anymore, you’d probably be best served by a local “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach, ie. you get everyone in the area to agree to help you dismantle it, then you “don’t tell” the authorities who “don’t ask” because they don’t care…
Oh, I, personally, have no doubt. But then I’m of the opinion that we’re currently in collapse. In areas where collapse is most imminent, proven alternatives would be accepted today, as long as the people in question understood the alternatives and how to duplicate the results.
Ah, but who is your “average person”? Your “average person” in LA is going to respond differently than your “average person” in Montana. There are good reasons for that. Montana is considerably farther along in collapsing than LA.
I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, but it seems like you’re both talking about the same quarter, just emphasizing different faces.
Comment by jhereg — 9 May 2007 @ 9:26 AM
As well as a time when things will be very different. No one’s saying that violence is never applicable, but eco-terrorism as we know it definitely does more harm than good. So that means that this is really just idle speculation, and given how sensitive this issue is, and how many people take discussions like this to actually commit some kind of petty eco-vandalism, I can’t help but think that such idle speculation on this issue is downright irresponsible.
No way. The contempt for the act itself weights down the incentive to rebuild it. It’s the regular profit of the infrastructure itself, plus the profit of the “rallying effect.” They will rebuild dams they were planning on decommissioning if they’re blown up instead—it’s happened before, when people have followed this advice.
That’s probably true. Permaculture, primitive skills, tribal ideals, these things can help the process along, but you’re right, they’ll have a difficult time entering the mainstream while things are going “well.”
Absolutely. You can speed it up by developing permaculture designs in poor, rural areas that will encourage less need to engage the wider market among those who get the least from it, promoting abandonment. You can speed it up by learning and teaching primitive skills, which proves the essential freedom of the human condition. You can speed it up by promoting animism and tribal ideals, which cause a cognitive dissonance with lifestyle. Usually this is reconciled by rejecting animism, but every so often you see people reconcile it by changing their lifestyles. All these things will speed up the process of civilization’s breakdown, and make its breakdown more gradual and less catastrophic. It is simultaneously the best hope for the human and the non-human communities.
If you blow up infrastructure, you slow it down. If you blow up a dam, you slow it down by producing a rallying effect. You give civilization room to expand, and thus relieve some of the pressure. So yes, it can be sped up, but the means of speeding it up are not what you think, and they only speed it up so much. That’s precisely my point.
Simply not true. If there is no alternative, then you’re trying to dismantle an infrastructure that the majority of humans depend upon to live. They have no alternatives, so you will be stopped before you get very far at all, and any damage you do will not only be repaired quickly, they’ll be so energized by their contempt for you and your actions that they’ll build even more. If you try to remove that infrastructure by force, then the ultimate result of your action will be more infrastructure, not less.
Agreed; but what you’re talking about will result in a larger industrial infrastructure, that will last longer than it would otherwise. We’re not disagreed in goals; rather, I’m saying that you’re not considering the long-term consequences of the actions you’re suggesting.
There’s a critical variable you’re overlooking: how much do you “sweeten the deal” so to speak of rebuilding? It will be rebuilt only if P > C, where P is the profit the infrastructure brings in, and C is the cost it entails. Included in P should be things like new jobs, government contracts, and so forth. But if it’s something that was blown up in an eco-terrorist action, you have to remember that P = P1 + M, where P1 is all the normal profit it would bring in, and M is the energy profit of the rallying effect you created by blowing it up the way you did. C may well be greater than P1, but is it greater than P1 + M? In many, many cases, dams and other infrastructure that were going to be retired found themselves rebuilt only because it was an eco-terrorist action that destroyed them. They forgot about M.
Now that could be a lot more effective, precisely because you have local support. Even in cases where the dam is truly not doing anything any more, you could have a local furor because it was something forced on them (even if they wanted it), rather than something they had a voice in.
But also bear in mind that even dams that don’t produce electricity can cause flooding and other problems downstream, problems they might not have expected for a while—since there’s always been that dam.
Exactly.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 9 May 2007 @ 10:05 AM
And that distinction is going to have a lot to do with which communities succeed and which flounder during collapse. This is why encouraging local action and local community is so important.
Permaculture seems to be a good step in the right direction, and it looks to me that it’ll be a crucial step in getting through the next 20-30 years.
Comment by jhereg — 9 May 2007 @ 11:18 AM
In developing a permaculture design that works for the Allegheny, I said I wanted to help the locals—even if I were cold and dead inside and completely unmoved by another person’s needs, there’s still the fact that these will be my neighbors, and I’d much rather they have a strong, tight-knit, well-fed community next door, than see them turn into a bunch of desperate marauders. If nothing else, they make better neighbors!
Comment by Jason Godesky — 9 May 2007 @ 11:30 AM
First of all, Jason, you said earlier that my Eastern Europe scenario looked plausible. Have you since changed your mind? Say you blew up a mid-to-large sized dam somewhere in various places around the globe. Does it get rebuild? In Africa? Almost certainly not. Much of Asia (think Bangladesh)? Same answer. Latin America? I guess it depends. Essentially, unless you’re talking about the First World or the booming economies (China, India,…), I don’t imagine it would get rebuilt, no matter what the locals wanted.
Second, while it is, without a shadow of a doubt, far better to blow up infrastructure with the consent of the locals than without it, the question is, what do you do when support isn’t there and it doesn’t look like it’ll be there any time soon?
Also, as for your P1+M > C analysis, well sure, but M can only do so much. The Egyptians and the Romans made a mess of their local habitat, but not to the extent that we have, and this is due to the fact that they lacked industrial infrastructure. Their lack of industrial infrastructure had to do with P1 (which was sky-high without the fossil fuels etc.), far more than it did with M. So… How does this affect your denial that dams would stay down in many places around the globe (Africa etc.) and with your projected 2012-15 tipping point?
Finally, jhereg, of course, you’re absolutely right that a person in Montana would react very differently than a person in L.A. And a person in Bangladesh would, of course, react very differently from a person anywhere in America. Good reminder for both me and everyone else.
Comment by Hasha — 9 May 2007 @ 7:24 PM
I can’t really speak to the situation in Eastern Europe; I’m not too familiar with it. If your analysis is accurate, there might be a possibility there. But I think you’ve consistently underestimated the level of investment, so I’m not sure how accurate your analysis is for other areas that I’m not familiar with.
Really? That’s how the World Bank makes its money, after all.
You take an honest assessment of the damage it’s causing, and weigh it against the damage you’ll cause by blowing it up.
M can be more than P1, particularly in the contemporary First World.
Actually, they did about as bad as we did, they just did it on a more localized scale. The Romans absolutely denuded the Mediterranean, and as bad as Monsanto is, it has not yet turned the Great Plains into the Sahara, as the first farmers did. So I can’t say I entirely agree with the assessment that industrial infrastructure makes that much of a difference.
But remember, we’re not really at odds over the destruction industrial infrastructure entails. The question is, if you blow up part of it, will it be gone in five years, or will there be twice as much as what you destroyed? I’m saying that tactics like this result in more industrial infrastructure. Which is precisely what makes them so bad.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 9 May 2007 @ 9:11 PM
Well, Jason, whether you wind up with more or with less industrial infrastructure depends on the local circumstances. I won’t say you can’t generalize at all, but I will say that you can generalize only up to a point. In some places you’ll end up with more infrastructure, in some places you’ll end up with less to the wrath of the locals, and in some places you’ll end up with less to the satisfaction of the locals. (Which is, by the way, one of the reasons why I would not advocate people going into areas that they are not intimately familiar with and blowing up infrastructure in these areas: it’s too difficult to accurately predict the response of the locals. Get familiar with your own landbase, figure out what it needs, get familiar with the local culture, and then see.)
Still, concerning the World Bank and Africa… I think that the World Bank would look at P1 and C only; as far as the World Bank and similar institutions are concerned, I very much doubt that M would count for much. And I don’t think that, in Africa, you’d wind up with P1 > C.
[quote]Actually, they did about as bad as we did, they just did it on a more localized scale. The Romans absolutely denuded the Mediterranean, and as bad as Monsanto is, it has not yet turned the Great Plains into the Sahara, as the first farmers did. So I can’t say I entirely agree with the assessment that industrial infrastructure makes that much of a difference. [/quote]
Industrial waste. Plastics. Toxic chemicals. Radiation (nuclear waste plus nuclear weapons of the depleted uranium sort). Oil spills. Global warming. Etc. etc.
Comment by Hasha — 9 May 2007 @ 9:28 PM
Oh, and, although Monsanto has not yet turned the Great Plains into Sahara, if you give it a few more centuries… Nah. It wouldn’t need a few more centuries. A few more decades should do the trick.
Comment by Hasha — 9 May 2007 @ 9:39 PM
I’m sure this is true, but while I can think of many examples where you’ll end up with more, I’m hard-pressed to think of situations where you’ll have less, so I think if there are such opportunities, they’re exceedingly rare, and will almost exclusively be smaller targets that no one cares about, so they’d really be a lot closer to vandalism.
That’s true, but the infrastructure being built is of very little interest to the World Bank or the IMF. They’ll build dams over dry riverbeds and all manner of other, spectacularly useless infrastructure—whatever it takes to get Third World governments to take their loans and sink them in debt. So if an actually useful piece of infrastructure is destroyed, that’s a great opportunity to coerce a government into taking on another massive loan to rebuild it twice as big.
Oh, they were up to global warming, too (see Ruddiman). Their mining operations and tanneries produced a good bit of toxins even before any of our radioactive waste or oil spills. They did pretty well on that number al the same. Most of the Allegheny Forest was wiped out with such technologies.
Most likely. We are grading the arch-demons here, so I’m hardly suggesting that Monsanto is benevolent, or even that things have gotten much better, only that pre-industrial agriculture was hardly benign.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 May 2007 @ 9:56 AM
Jason, first of all, though I don’t claim to know, I do suspect that the M factor wouldn’t be nearly as strong in countries that are not super-powers and do not see themselves as potential super-powers. I very much doubt that 9/11 (for example) would’ve resonated as strongly in any other county (other than the United States, that is,) in the world. Same with dams.
As for pre-industrial agriculture vs. our current industrial system… While I would certainly not deny that pre-industrial agriculture caused some pretty appalling damage, I don’t see how one could seriously defend the claim that the industry is no worse. The kind of damage might not be all that different, but the scale (especially if you take into account how brief the industrial blip has been) has gone off the charts.
But anyway. I think it’s time for me to withdraw from this discussion. I think I’ve both contributed as much to it and gotten as much out of it as is reasonable to expect. So, barring unexpectedly interesting responses from others (Jason included, of course), I won’t be posting here anymore.
Comment by Hasha — 10 May 2007 @ 4:53 PM
It’s certainly not just the United States; the 7 July 2005 bus bombings in London had an enormous effect on England, and the Japanese subway sarin incident has been compared in its social effect to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You may be right about the Second and Third Worlds, but it’s definitely bigger than just the U.S.—such a reaction would be common to the entire First World.
Of course, the failed states index probably provides the best proxy map of global collapse:
It’s the First World that’s propping up the Second and Third. Blowing up infrastructure there provides an opportunity for a new World Bank or IMF loan. Blowing up infrastructure in the First World mobilizes civilization against you. If any opportuities for an effective attack on physical infrastructure exist, they are few and far between, on very specific targets in very specific circumstances.
I’m not so sure. It’s a common claim, but it usually neglects the scale of agricultural damage before that. Really—look at pictures of Iraq’s landscape. That used to be a forest.
I hope you only mean the thread, because I very much value your contributions to the site in general. This has been a very good discussion on a very important topic, but of course, I don’t think either one of us will really be changing the other’s viewpoint any time soon, so it may well be time to move on to greener pastures, if you will.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 May 2007 @ 5:16 PM
[quote]I hope you only mean the thread, because I very much value your contributions to the site in general.[/quote]
Yes, I meant just this particular thread.
Comment by Hasha — 11 May 2007 @ 4:17 PM
Oh good
Anyway, just read this on Ran, and wanted to post it here for posterity:
Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 May 2007 @ 11:51 AM