Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts

A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Contents

The Apocalypse Is Bigger than Justin Bieber

When I was at university, during the apogee of what the media had dubbed the anti-globalisation movement around the turn of the millennium, there was a group of campus activists that once a year celebrated something called 'Buy-Nothing Day'. The event took place on Black Friday, the first Friday after American Thanksgiving and the start of the Christmas shopping season. The idea was that everyone should protest our culture of overconsumption by boycotting everything for 24 hours. The activists aimed to 'raise awareness' of the environmental and social threat from unsustainable economic growth on the busiest shopping day of the year. 'We' should all consume less was the message.

It was first promoted in the late 90s by Adbusters, the Vancouver-based anti-consumerist magazine, and dovetailed perfectly with the publication of Naomi Klein's anti-branding and culture-jamming bestseller, No Logo, and the Black Bloc smashing of Starbucks and Niketown windows during the infamous Battle in Seattle mass protests against the World Trade Organisation.

But Buy-Nothing Day really irked me. I was one of those marching against the WTO ministerial meeting in the late November of 1999 and getting tear-gassed alongside the Teamsters and turtles. Together with a gaggle of eager young socialists, anarchists and environmentalists, faith community activists and trade unionists, I'd helped organize a series of coaches to come down to Washington state from British Columbia. Yet I was also a student maxing out on student loans and from a family that was really struggling at the time, having recently lost our home. So I was experiencing completely involuntary Buy-Nothing Days on a regular basis. I fervently wished for some 'Finally-Able-to-Buy-Lots-More Days'.

It was the assumption of equally grandiose levels of wealth in that little word 'we' in the demand that 'we all should consume less' that bothered me so much, the idea that 'we' in the West, every last one of us, were living a life of Riley, of carefree luxury and prosperity. I certainly didn't feel that I or many of my friends in similar situations were overconsuming at all. Instead, I felt like Tonto in that old Mad Magazine comic where he and the Lone Ranger are besieged by a throng of Indian braves, armed to the teeth. The Lone Ranger says to Tonto "What do we do, now?" And Tonto says back: "What you mean 'we,' kemosabe?"

The anti-consumerist, anti-growth argument has only extended itself since those heady street-fighting days. Great sections of the 'horizontalist' left have fallen under the sway of such deep-ecology thinkers as Derrick Jensen and Paul Kingsnorth who argue that industrial civilisation must be dismantled to varying degrees if we are to save the planet. The reality of climate change now requires that we overcome some of our most cherished ideas, says 'degrowth' guru Naomi Klein, writing in The Nation magazine: "These are profoundly challenging revelations for all of us raised on Enlightenment ideals of progress, unaccustomed to having our ambitions confined by natural boundaries."

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Writers with a jumble of doom-mongering-left and survivalist-right ideas can make a comfy living these days cranking out the Collapse Porn. In his peak-everything opus The Long Emergency and its anti-technology follow-up Too Much Magic, the Atlantic Monthly- and Rolling Stone-regular James Howard Kunstler seems to have a veritable hard-on for the end of the world, imagining with relish the coming Peak Oil collapse, a retreat from modernity and an embrace of the medieval. Just up the road from where I am writing this, the local toy store-cum-bookshop stocks Lego, Playmobil sets, Oprah-Winfrey-endorsed middlebrow fiction, Jamie Oliver cookbooks, and copies of Unlearn, Rewild: Earth Skills, Ideas and Inspiration for the Future Primitive by Miles Olson — a primitivist survival guide for the coming industrial apocalypse that teaches readers "radical self-reliance" skills such as animal hide-tanning, "feral food preparation," "natural methods of birth control" and how to shit in the woods. Above-ground poo-spot design requires no digging, Olson tells me. Covered with organic material such as leaves, moss and sticks, the poo pile can be used for quite a while, as it shrinks considerably as it decomposes. Dimitri Orlov, the Russian-American professional millenarian and author of Reinventing Collapse and The Five Stages of Collapse gives the book a hearty blurb endorsement: "It covers scavenging road kill, which grubs are good to eat and most everything else you need to know to go feral safely and in style." It's Scouting for Dystopians. I've only skimmed it, mind you, so I have no idea whether it also contains advice on how to deal with the sort of marauding gangs of hillbilly cannibals that you come across in Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

In the spring of 2014, Vice magazine — that ISIS of edgy, cross-platform media empires, built on a combination of fashion photography and hipster war-correspondency — dropped Apocalypse Man, a four-part documentary series profiling the former LAPD officer turned Peak-Oil-evangelist and author Michael Ruppert, who was already the subject of a critically regarded Armageddon-themed pop-documentary in 2009, Collapse. (Wrenching existential despair at the state of the world at least in part pushed Ruppert, also the host of The Lifeboat Hour radio programme, to shoot himself after recording his final broadcast of the show on 13 April, 2014.)

Surviving Progress, a 2011 eco-documentary executively produced by Martin Scorcese and featuring such figures as Stephen Hawking and Margaret Atwood, makes the argument that past civilisations were destroyed by "'progress traps' – alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future." Based on Canadian historian Ronald Wright's bestseller, A Short History of Progress, the film argues that today, once again, "progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse." Wright's pessimism in effect forecloses all possibility of ever improving humanity's lot: "Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes." A similar conclusion is drawn in ecological historian John Michael Greer's After Progress: Reason and Religion at the End of the Industrial Age, attacking the "lab-coated high priests" of modernity (Greer seems to suffer a fondness for near-identical straplines: he is also the author of The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age).

And the same argument is made by End:Civ — another of these insta-docs you can find tagged 'Controversial Documentaries' on Netflix sandwiched between Super-size Me and Zeitgeist and made by filmmakers filled to the brim with outrage but blithely indifferent to journalistic norms of evidence, fact-checking and careful, logical argumentation. Montages of household appliances, pig farms, instant popcorn and Caesar's Palace casino in Las Vegas are offered up as evidence of the wicked gluttony of civilisation, but without discussion; it is just assumed that the viewer will of course agree with the filmmaker, Franklin Lopez, that such phenomena are abominable, wasteful fripperies. Yet this documentary is laced with more radical conclusions than Wright's anti-humanist version of liberalism in Surviving Progress is willing to entertain, such as the need for eco-militants to blow up the Shasta hydroelectric dam in California; and indeed, End:Civ is based on deep ecologist Derrick Jensen's thesis in his own top-selling, two-volume call to arms, Endgame (Volume I: The Problem of Civilization; and Volume II: Resistance), that it is no less than the entirety of civilisation that is destroying life on the planet and so it all needs to come tumbling down. In the film, Jensen sermonizes:

If civilization lasts another one or two hundred years, will the people then say of us, "Why did they not take it down?" Will they be as furious with us as I am with those who came before and stood by? I could very well hear those people who come after saying, "If they had taken it down, we would still have earthworms to feed the soil. We would have redwoods, and we would have oaks in California. We would still have frogs. We would still have other amphibians. I am starving because there are no salmon in the river, and you allowed the salmon to be killed so rich people could have cheap electricity for aluminium smelters. God damn you. God damn you all."

The film also features interviews with Jensen's fellow primitivist author Lierre Keith, the marine conservation Sea Shepherd Society's alpha-male-in-chief Paul Watson, and the aforementioned Rolling Stone anti-modernist scribe James Howard Kunstler. The documentary is a campus green-group film-night favourite across North America, while Jensen's books seem as mandatory an undergraduate bookshelf requirement these days as textbooks for first-year calculus or English Composition & Rhetoric.

The anti-consumerist, back-to-the-land, small-is-beautiful, civilisation-hating, progress-questioning ideology of degrowth, limits and retreat is hegemonic not just on the green left, but across the political spectrum. Far from being central to progressive thought, this cauldron of seething, effervescing misanthropy is in fact utterly alien to the rich tradition of humanism on the left and must be thoroughly excised from our ranks.

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First, we must to ask these critics, if modern life is indeed rubbish, when was it exactly that humans enjoyed the 'correct' or sufficient standard of living? How much is okay and how much is now too much? When was it that we had it about right? Which was the period in the past when everything was copacetic?

Naomi Klein is perhaps the most high-profile of the de-growth, catastrophist and anti-consumerist thinkers. She is an award-winning author who has sold millions of books that have been translated into dozens of languages; regularly appears as a commentator in the media; frequently speaks at trade union conferences, environmentalist gatherings and left-wing teachins; has given talks at both TED and Occupy Wall Street; sits on the board of 350.org — one of the planet's most prominent climate change campaign groups; and was selected as the eleventh most influential public intellectual by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines in their 2005 annual ranking of the world's Top 100 pointy heads.

And on the question of when precisely it was that humans lived in Edenic harmony with the Earth, Klein is all over the map. At one point, she is extraordinarily specific and the answer is surprisingly recent: it's the disco era. "The truth is that if we want to live within ecological limits, we would need to return to a lifestyle similar to the one we had in the 1970s, before consumption levels went crazy in the 1980s," she writes in her 2014 bestseller This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate. At another point in the book, she says it was 1776 where we made the wrong turn, moving away from the natural rhythms of water wheels, which were suitably constrained by geography and "the flow and levels of rivers," to Watt's coal-fired steam engine, which radically released us from such limits, being deployable anywhere and at any time. But in an earlier essay in The Nation, Klein identifies the Scientific Revolution as being our original sin:

Europeans — like indigenous people the world over — believed the planet to be a living organism, full of life-giving powers but also wrathful tempers. There were, for this reason, strong taboos against actions that would deform and desecrate "the mother," including mining. The metaphor changed with the unlocking of some (but by no means all) of nature's mysteries during the Scientific Revolution of the 1600s. With nature now cast as a machine, devoid of mystery or divinity, its component parts could be dammed, extracted and remade with impunity. Nature still sometimes appeared as a woman, but one easily dominated and subdued. In 1623 Sir Francis Bacon best encapsulated the new ethos when he wrote in De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum that nature is to be "put in constraint, molded, and made as it were new by art and the hand of man."

Elsewhere in This Changes Everything, Klein pushes the correct standard of living even further back to some indefinite but ancient Arcadia, prior to the advent of the Judeo-Christian ideology of dominion over nature when we were more in touch with the land and less alienated from each other.

"The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally," Klein says. "We have pushed nature beyond its limits," she continues in her essay in The Nation, adding that the solution to not just climate change but all environmental problems is "a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal — and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence."

James Howard Kunstler wants to hold down the civilisational rewind button longer than Klein, or at least when she's arguing that the 1970s was the optimum period after which everything went pear-shaped. In The Long Emergency, he proposes the Amish community as a model. Elsewhere he seems to favour a retreat to essentially a medieval level of development. "I'd propose that the whole world is apt to be going medieval," he writes in a piece decrying the popularity of French economist Thomas Picketty's book describing capitalism's inherent tendency toward inequality. Kunstler says Picketty deludes people into thinking we can still politically organise our way out of the civilisational predicament "as we contend with our energy predicament and its effects on wealth generation, banking, and all the other operations of modern capital. That is, they'll become a lot less modern." It is not merely that Kunstler believes a second Middle Ages is just another oil-shock away, but that he welcomes its arrival.

As does Paul Kingsnorth, the author of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto and organizer of a series of similarly named festivals in the English or Scottish countryside celebrating his anti-modernist vision. The New York Times recently offered up a lengthy and largely flattering profile of Cumbria's high priest of primitivism and his neo-druidic eco-jamborees:

In the clearing, above a pyre, someone had erected a tall wicker sculpture in the shape of a tree, with dense gnarls and hanging hoops. Four men in masks knelt at the sculpture's base, at cardinal compass points. When midnight struck, a fifth man, his head shaved smooth and wearing a kimono, began to walk slowly around them. As he passed the masked figures, each ignited a yellow flare, until finally, his circuit complete, the bald man set the sculpture on fire. For a couple of minutes, it was quiet. Then as the wicker blazed, a soft chant passed through the crowd, the words only gradually becoming clear: "We are gathered. We are gathered. We are gathered."

... The hut was cramped and eerie, decorated with the bones of small animals in illuminated glass cases. Haunting music was piped in from an iPod. You walked through a curtain, sat down and put on a heavy papier-mâché mask — a badger surrogate. Directly across from you, seated behind a window in the back wall, was another person — a volunteer — also wearing a badger mask. He or she sat silently, except when mirroring whatever movements you made, until, driven by emotion, fatigue, satisfaction or plain discomfort, you left.

Let's ignore for the moment the contradictions of opposing industrial civilisation while taking your iPod into the woods to provide a soundtrack to 'getting your feral on' and consider the key elements of Kingsnorth's anti-civilisational thesis. He is perhaps the most nihilistic of the current wave of popular writers aghast at what man has wrought, arguing that our current environmental problems are not even solvable. Rather, all that is left for us to do as collapse presents itself is to stoically endure (revel in?) our grief, despair and dread. For Kingsnorth, working through his eco-grieving appears to primarily involve giving workshops on the meditative benefits of using a traditional hand-wielded scythe as a low-carbon way to cut fields of hay, grain, grass and weeds.