The Future is Wild, Not Green
Shortly after Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore released their documentary Planet of the Humans, Dave Borlace, creator of videos on ‘sustainable solutions’ to climate change in his series ‘Just Have A Think’ posted a critique. Borlace effectively pokes holes into Gibbs & Moore’s look behind the veil of ‘green technology.’
Borlace reveals how Gibbs & Moore portrayed old stories based on old data, neglecting to recognize improvements in tech updates. He turns to the criticized industries themselves to give them the opportunity to defend themselves, to refute the claims with their updated pitch. He cites neoliberal, pro-capitalism news outlets, such as Bloomberg, to support his refutations. He points out that human overpopulation shouldn’t focus on developing countries – though Gibbs & Moore didn’t – shifting blame to developed countries’ overconsumption. But don’t people worldwide strive for lifeways of increased consumption? Do upward mobility consumption and overpopulation both have Earth degrading impacts? What makes humans entitled to spread into and dominate all habitats of all others? How would we feel if there were 8 billion Great Apes of another species encroaching worldwide? Are we excluded from principles of ecology? How is Homo sapiens not a destructive invasive species, and why would that really be acceptable in light of the ecological degradation and desertification?
In his assessing weaknesses of a rather weak target documentary, Borlace reveals more than his optimism bias, but his human supremacy bias in his longings to locate hope in our species’ domesticated, techno lifeway. His calling is to soothe the mainstream consciousness with the lull of ‘progress’. Don’t worry about those percentages of species we’re killing off at exponentially rapid rates, or our replacing old growth forest with farmland, or our fouling air, land & water, even to the detriment of our own ‘intelligent’ species. There’s always a magic solution right around the corner, so relax & keep taking that leap of faith in the environmental nonprofit-industrial-political complex that cowers to Earth harming power player plunderers.
Borlace condemns Gibbs for portraying ‘regenerative’ energy as expensive, for exaggerating greenhouse emissions and inefficiencies. But civilization’s energy choices, including solar & wind, rely on extraction from Earth, discordant with thriving, biodiverse life on Earth. Borace has a problem with palm oil, but every ‘resource’ extraction industry, indeed all agriculture, negatively impacts wild Earth and wild life. He did mention rewilding as a solution, which is altogether contradictory with the ‘lesser evil’ technologies of civilization he endorses. The way toward true sustainability cannot include wildness and mechanisms sustaining civilization, for they are oppositional forces. Perhaps civilization can transition while exploiting less and less, but the end goal needs to be humans re-embedding in wildness to achieve the only truly sustainable lifeway.
Limiting the only options to those acceptable to economics and lesser harm neglects to seriously consider the only truly sustainable option, fully rewilding Earth and rewilding ourselves. If restoring and returning indigenous is off the table, there is no true hope, as anything less is grounded in the human ape’s domination, retaining its position on the false pedestal of Earth’s apex predator, which is the underlying ethos driving and justifying humans harming and killing minimally sustainable, much less flourishing ecosystem homeostasis. Borlace speaks in human supremacist terms of ‘our’ energy ‘resources’ producing ‘less harm’ giving hope, which is scientifically and philosophically akin to the progress trap of a ‘climate mitigation’ device, as opposed to ending our oppressive colonizer lifeway via earth and animal liberation.
While hope in technology is still speeding toward the end on a dead end road, there is hope, but it lies elsewhere. If hope is a precursor to serious change, at least let the hope be based in reality. We can be part of an Earth thriving future, if we reject this harmful lifeway. For perspectives anti-hope hype rooted in human supremacy, with real not easy comfortable solutions, read Daniel Quinn, watch END:CIV – Resist or Die on youtube, read John Zerzan or listen to the show he hosts on Anarchy Radio http://www.johnzerzan.net/radio/ , or read Layla AbdelRahim, watch her youtube talks or check out essays on her page http://layla.miltsov.org/.
For Rewilding,
Ria
