“Industrial collapse won’t be easy, but it’s better than a global ecological collapse. This culture is coming down anyway. If we engage with the process of collapse, we can guide it in a less destructive direction, rather than letting those in power have control.”
Derrick Jensen: Aric McBay is a writer, activist, and small-scale organic farmer. His first book was Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life After Gridcrash. He’s also the coauthor of What We Leave Behind and Deep Green Resistance.
Deep Green Resistance first came about when Aric, Lierre Keith, and I all happened to be in Maine, where I was doing an event. Before the event we were talking about the fact that as environmentalists we’re losing badly on all fronts. All biological indicators, if I can use mechanistic language I hate, are going in the wrong direction. All natural communities are being destroyed. So we asked each other, what would actually work? What strategy would actually work to stop this culture from killing the planet? We had already tried a lot of strategies. We distributed online petitions, but that didn’t work. So we graduated to electoral politics, and that didn’t work. So we graduated to signs saying “Save the Earth Now.” It didn’t work. So that evening, we talked about what strategy would actually have a chance.
Environmentalists, for the most part, don’t think strategically. What do we want? Do we want smaller clearcuts, kinder clearcuts? Part of the problem is that a lot of us don’t actually know what we want, so that’s the first step. I know what I want. I want to live in a world that has more wild salmon every year than the year before. And I want to live in a world that has more migratory songbirds every year than the year before. And I want to live in a world that has less dioxin in every mother’s breastmilk every year than the year before. So, first having figured out what I want, then the next step is to figure out, how do we get from point A to point B? Once again, this is something that we often forget.
One of the things that everybody has said today is that we need to fight back. We need defiance, and we need organized resistance. So Aric, the first question is, what if we don’t get that?
Aric McBay: Let’s get the doom and gloom out of the way. It’s critical that we have no false hopes, and that we have no illusions about the situation we’re in.
Near the end of our book Deep Green Resistance, we lay out four different scenarios for the future of the planet, based on whether or not people fight back effectively. In the first scenario, there is no effective ecological resistance. It’s just business as usual.
So, we start with peak oil. Conventional oil production has already peaked, and the effects will really take hold between about 2011 and 2015, resulting in a rapid decline in global energy availability. Some economists believe the recent economic downturn is just the first sign of peak oil. In any case, once peak oil truly sets in, the increasing cost and decreasing supply of energy will stall industrial manufacturing and transportation globally. This means that the markets will undergo economic turmoil and a self-perpetuating cycle of economic contraction.
And that part is the good news in this scenario. The bad news is that those in power will try to maintain their status by whatever means they can. With energy supplies in permanent decline, that means that they will intensify their exploitation of those on the bottom, especially for manufacturing, resource extraction, and agriculture. It will probably mean a resurrection or an intensification of institutions that many people think are basically defeated. Feudalism. Fascism. Slavery. Remember that two hundred years ago, before petroleum, 75 percent of the human population was in some form of serfdom or slavery. That’s the nature of civilizations. After petroleum has been exhausted, those in power will try to return to the same arrangement. Without organized resistance, they’ll be largely successful.
Of course, there will be a turn toward alternative energy, like solar panels and biofuels. But solar or wind power will not provide enough energy to run industrial society as it stands, and there won’t be enough energy left anyway to build that alternative infrastructure on a global scale. The finite supply of concentrated energy in petroleum will have already been squandered on big cars, big televisions, and big wars. Coal will be used in large quantities, but it’s not portable enough for most uses, and it emits even more carbon than petroleum.
As for biofuels, well, just because you have biofuels doesn’t mean that you have a just and sustainable society. For example, the Nazis used a biofuel-powered V2 rocket to bombard England during World War II. The fuel was made from fermenting potatoes. The cotton plantations of the antebellum South were technically organic. That doesn’t make slavery one iota less odious.
Now, the result of the decline in energy supplies will mean that agricultural production will be diverted into biofuels for the global rich. Without organized resistance to ensure that people’s basic needs for food are prioritized over the demands of the rich, there will be mass hunger.
As industrial society crumbles, the effects of global warming will finally take hold, although the worst effects won’t take place until decades after the oil is gone. There is a lag effect. The oceans, already emptied out by industrial fishing, will turn acidic and die. The Amazon rainforest, which currently produces its own climate by transpiring moisture, will turn into a desert, and other fragmented tropical forests will follow.
By then, there will be very little energy or industrial capacity left for humans to try to compensate for the effects of global warming. And as intense climate change takes over, ecological remediation through permaculture, perennial polycultures, and forest replanting will become impossible. The heat and drought will turn forests into net carbon emitters, as northern forests die from high temperatures, pests, and disease. Global warming will become self-sustaining and permanent.
Resource wars between nuclear states will break out. War between the U.S. and Russia is less likely than it was during the Cold War, but ascending superpowers like China will want their piece of the global resource pie. Nuclear powers such as India and Pakistan will be densely populated and ecologically precarious, as climate change will dry up major rivers previously fed by melting glaciers. With few resources to equip or field a mechanized army or air force, nuclear strikes will seem an increasingly effective action for desperate states.
Nuclear war or not, long-term prospects are dim. Global warming will continue to worsen long after fossil fuels are exhausted. The time to ecological recovery will be measured in tens of millions of years, if ever. As James Lovelock has pointed out, a major warming event could push the planet into a different equilibrium, one permanently hotter. It’s possible that large plants and animals might only be able to survive near the poles. All that is required for this to occur is for current trends to continue without substantive and effective resistance. All that’s required for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing. The bottom line: Without real action to stop industrial civilization, we’re doomed.
But this future is not inevitable. We have the basic tools and strategic ideas required to prevent this. What we need is organization, mobilization, and courage. The actual infrastructure that’s destroying the planet has to be targeted, and the political and economic systems responsible must be dismantled.
Derrick: Okay, so what would that kind of action or strategy look like?
Aric: Well, for me, the key idea is a two-pronged strategy. In Deep Green Resistance, this is laid out in the fourth scenario. We try to imagine what a plausible and victorious struggle might look like.
There are two goals. The first is to disrupt and dismantle industrial civilization; and thereby to remove the ability of the rich to steal from the poor and the powerful to destroy the planet. And the second is to defend and rebuild just, sustainable communities, autonomous human communities; and as part of that, to assist in the recovery of the land.
These are two halves of a complete movement. Neither of them will work alone. We need to foster just and sustainable communities, because they’re the only communities worth living in, and they are the only communities with a real future. We must help the natural world recover, because we need it to survive, and even more because the creatures of that world are our kin. Stopping industrial civilization is a prerequisite to achieving these things in the long term. We must stop it if there will be any real future.
On each half of this movement there is a whole spectrum of action. There is a place for everyone who wants to act. For those who choose to disrupt and dismantle civilization, resistance could look like tree sits or blockades. It could look like the shutting down of oil depots, as happened in France in 2010, or the shutting down of the port in Oakland in 2011. Or it could look like the direct attacks on infrastructure carried out by groups like MEND. For those who choose to rebuild and revitalize, resistance could look like growing food. It could look like rebuilding community. Or it could look like rebuilding cultures of resistance through protest and acts of defiance. Often, of course, these two sides overlap. Moreover, the two sides will proceed together, or they won’t proceed at all.
There’s an idea on the liberal Left that we can win simply by setting a good example. That won’t work. Those in power didn’t become powerful through some misunderstanding, but through conquest, exploitation, and genocide. No plan can succeed through attempting to persuade those in power. Any successful strategy will work through using some combination of political, economic, and physical force.
Successful strategies are also rarely based on abstractions. Few people will fight or take risks for abstract ideas. People will fight—and I don’t just mean violence, but all kinds of fighting—for things that are real to them, like their families, their communities, the land, their culture. The more concrete and the more immediate the goals—or the more imminent the harm—the more likely people are to fight for them.
What we need is a long-term strategy that proceeds in stages, and each of those stages must have concrete and attainable goals. We must have a spectrum of action that can mobilize as many people as possible. We must have tactics that can actually help us achieve the goals with the people we have or the people we can get in the time available. Above all, the strategy must dramatically cut the burning of fossil fuels, and it must do so very soon.
We describe such a strategy in the penultimate chapter of Deep Green Resistance, in a chapter called “Decisive Ecological Warfare.” In the book we look over many different potential plans and strategies to evaluate them strategically, but this is the overall trajectory.
Here is the scenario. A serious ecological resistance movement progresses through four different phases to bring about the two goals we talked about before: first, disrupting and dismantling industrial civilization, and second, defending and rebuilding just, sustainable communities. The movement includes both militant and moderate action, both aboveground and underground activists, and it encompasses a spectrum of tactics that range from low-risk community action like organizing and gardening to high-risk acts like mass sit-ins and sabotage. All of this happens globally. Let’s talk about the four phases of this resistance movement.
In the beginning of this scenario (as in the real world, now), resistance is mostly diffuse, and fragmented. The goal of the resisters in the first stage is to build up an organized resistance. In order to do this,
Networking and mobilization is facilitated by ensuring that people understand how to build movements that can exercise political force by studying historical resistance movements. Lowrisk actions such as holding movie nights and workshops and book clubs may help with this, but people have to relearn for themselves how to be effective, which will only be done through action.
Again, Phase I is about building networks, both aboveground and underground, that can resist political repression.
In the second phase, these networks begin to take more serious action. They begin to choose infrastructure targets to shut down based on good target selection criteria. This involves two steps:
Again, this all has to happen both underground and aboveground. Aboveground organizations can mobilize the large numbers of people needed for civil disobedience, blockades, and the like. The underground organizations, of course, will never have those numbers, but they can directly disable machinery again and again without getting caught.
Aboveground and underground groups are often most effective when they work together on a campaign. The work of Canadian militant group Direct Action is a good example of this. In one case, there was a struggle in the 1980s to stop Litton Industries, near Toronto, from manufacturing components for cruise missiles. The direct aboveground protests were flagging, so Direct Action blew up a part of the plant. It didn’t entirely go as planned—you can read about it in Ann Hansen’s memoir, Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla—but the action revitalized the aboveground movement, and huge protests and civil disobedience followed. Because of this combination of aboveground and underground action, the U.S. government pulled the manufacturing contract.
Other Phase II goals include exposing weak points in the system, demonstrating the feasibility of material resistance, and inspiring other resisters. That’s very important, because without a culture of resistance, most people think that it’s impossible. It’s important for resistance networks to establish the rationale for taking action and to establish and grow parallel institutions. People need practice, they need to build their organizations, and they need to show people that it is actually possible to resist.
In the next phase, resistance networks start to reach a critical mass. They are experienced enough to go after entire systems. So they might decide to shut down a specific corporation, like the group “Stop Huntingdon’s Animal Cruelty” aimed to do.
In terms of runaway global warming, the major problems are fossil fuel industries, so resistance networks decide to shut down entire distribution systems for oil, coal, or gas. This means, again, aboveground and underground organizations taking action and looking for bottlenecks. So they wouldn’t just try to shut down one coal-burning plant. They would shut down an entire coal-carrying rail network. Aboveground groups might do that with physical blockades. Underground groups might sabotage rail lines. Both are careful to target infrastructure in a way that avoids harming humans.
The point of this stage is to accelerate the industrial collapse that will already be underway. It works in concert with the fact that oil is already in shorter and shorter supply, and that the capitalist economy, a pyramid scheme, is in deep trouble.
It’s at this stage that things like local food and the transition town movement really start to get popular. Most people will be interested in the convenience that comes from industrial capitalism as long as it is functioning smoothly—as long as it’s still exploiting the poor and the planet effectively. Only when it starts to break down do real alternatives become possible.
While those on the front lines are shutting down the infrastructure that’s killing the planet, there is another, much larger group of people working to rebuild local, democratic political structures. They are growing local food. They are rebuilding sustainable communities with all that entails. They are building the strong social movements and organizations that will be able to thrive after industrial capitalism is gone.
In the last phase, resisters continue to escalate. They don’t just disrupt systems or impair their functioning. They actually start to dismantle the infrastructure that’s destroying the planet—mountaintop removal, coalmines, fracking rigs, dams, everything.
The main reason I am describing this is to try to get people thinking in a concrete and serious way about what kind of strategy will actually save the planet. This is not some kind of edict, and even the best strategic ideas are not easy to translate; they don’t directly translate into the real world.
Moreover, I’m sure that some people will balk at the language of “decisive ecological warfare” and accuse us of being warmongers or something like that. But I know of no other word that expresses the life-and-death situation that we’re in, the daily violence carried out by industrial civilization. Pretending that we’re at peace won’t help us, any more than it would have helped the people of Czechoslovakia, or Poland, or Russia in World War II.
It’s not our fault that we’re in this situation, and I don’t think anyone here wanted this. But it’s our responsibility to deal with it. The dominant culture is already at war with Indigenous people, and the poorest of the planet, with the land itself. And it wages this war daily.
It’s important to remember that almost every raw resource this culture uses—from petroleum to metal ores to agricultural land—has been taken by force from traditional and Indigenous cultures. That’s not just historical. That’s current, that’s right now. If you could shut down every site where raw materials are being pillaged from Indigenous land, the industrial economy would grind to a screeching halt tomorrow.
Derrick: You’re talking about destroying infrastructure, but the thing we hear all the time is that if you burn it down, they’re just going to rebuild. So what’s the point?
Aric: They may or may not rebuild or repair an individual target, but the reality is that economic disruption is extremely effective. I’ll give you some examples.
We know that the environmental movement has been largely unsuccessful at stopping, or even slowing, the destruction of the planet. So let’s compare that to the effects of the major economic downturn that began in 2008, which had many beneficial effects for the planet. Electricity consumption dropped by several percent, which is the first time that global electricity use has declined since World War II. And this decline was because of a reduction in heavy manufacturing. If that electricity were from coal-fired plants, which of course much electricity is, then that decrease in electricity consumption would save so much coal that you could shut down half of all coal mining in India.
In Michigan, at the same time, twenty counties decided to depave their roads because it was too expensive to maintain them. Landfills across the United States reported a 30 percent decline in incoming garbage. Amazon rainforest deforestation was down almost 50 percent in 2009. It was the best year for the Amazon rainforest since they started keeping records. And I believe that a coordinated resistance movement can do an even better job than a random economic glitch.
In any case, of course some people will always say that there’s no point in resistance, and that those in power will just rebuild. So our job, and the job of any serious resistance movement, is to turn that on its head, to make those in power say, “Well, there’s no use in rebuilding it—they’ll just shut it down again.”
Derrick: Could you discuss Sobibor?
Aric: Sure. Sobibor was a concentration camp in Poland in World War II. Almost half a million people were killed there during the time that it operated. Eventually people decided that it was time to organize a resistance, and as they were trying to do this, a group of Russian Jewish POWs were brought in. They hatched a secret plan where they would have a spontaneous uprising with a small group of trained, prepared people. The resisters found a way to get Nazi officers separated off in one place, and they killed them—almost all of them, simultaneously. Something like six hundred people broke out of the camp, and many of them ended up surviving until the end of the war. Hitler was so embarrassed that he had the whole camp shut down, dismantled, and replanted with forest.
They don’t always rebuild. And this is yet another example of how the people who fought back have a higher survival rate than the people who don’t.
Derrick: So for resistance groups today, what’s going to stop everybody from just getting arrested?
Aric: Well, we have very powerful tools and practices that we can use to protect ourselves and our movements from arrest and disruption. And we do need to be able to protect ourselves. We know that since the 1960s, operations like the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO, have deliberately infiltrated and disrupted all kinds of leftist political groups, from social justice organizations to groups like the Black Panthers. COINTELPRO successfully destroyed many of them.
Now, we need multiple layers of protection. The first layer of protection is activist security culture. That means there are certain things that you should generally not ask other people about, like whether they are part of an underground group, or whether they’ve participated in illegal actions. Don’t talk about illegal actions in a place where you might be bugged. Everyone should read “Security Culture: A Handbook for Activists,” which is short, straightforward, and available online. You can also read a summary of another talk I gave about security culture, and watch the video, at deepgreenresistance.org.
Part of security culture is refusing to talk to police about activist groups or activities when they come around asking questions. So here’s another piece of recommended viewing: “Don’t Talk to Cops,” which is a two-part video online (viewable on youtube.com) in which a lawyer and a police officer both argue that you should never answer police questions. This is not just for activists, this is for everybody. They are very convincing.
It’s important to understand that these rules are not just for “illegal” or underground groups. Any effective program will be targeted—the FBI was just as afraid of the Black Panther meal programs as they were of armed militants. But the bottom line is that by following certain basic rules, we can increase our safety and decrease our paranoia. It’s all based on need to know, and once you understand the basics, it becomes common sense.
The second layer of protection is a division between aboveground and underground. Aboveground and underground groups are fundamentally different kinds of organizations with fundamentally different rules.
We all know aboveground groups, which are organizations that work transparently and publicly. In contrast, underground groups work secretly and follow very tight security rules. So aboveground groups maximize their effectiveness through the use of wide communications and networking; they mobilize large numbers. Underground groups maximize their effectiveness by working secretly, by taking on work that can only be done in a clandestine fashion.
So why do people work underground? Well, the word will make many of us think, of course, of groups like the Weather Underground, the Animal Liberation Front, or the Earth Liberation Front. But people through history have formed underground groups for many different reasons. The Underground Railroad. Escape lines for persecuted people in Nazi-occupied Europe. Samizdat, the dissident literature network in the Soviet Union. Underground groups have a long, honorable, and extremely important history in the broader struggle for social justice.
Now, underground organizations have different rules that we may not be familiar with. The most fundamental rule is the firewall between aboveground and underground activity. That means that no one should be active in both underground and aboveground political organizations.
Let’s take an example. When the French Resistance first formed after Germany invaded, resisters created all kinds of different groups with different rules and different structures. But they soon coalesced into two basic kinds of organizations: movements and networks. So movements had large numbers, they were relatively easy to join, and they were based mostly around underground newspapers. Networks were small, more selective, and organized around a specific objective like gathering intelligence or sabotaging rail lines. These are roughly analogous to aboveground and underground groups. So the French developed a rule that you couldn’t belong in a movement and a network at the same time, because it put everyone at risk. That’s the essential tenet of a firewall.
A second organizational rule, related to the first, is compartmentalization. An underground organization is made up of compartmentalized affinity groups or cells. People in a given group know people in their immediate group, but they don’t know many people in the rest of the organization. That means if an affinity group is infiltrated, or if someone in that group is captured and tortured or turns, then the problem is contained to that cell, it doesn’t take down the whole organization.
As an example, the African National Congress in apartheid South Africa had a rule that you were only allowed to know ten other people in the underground organization. And in stronger security states, stronger surveillance states, that number has been lower.
Also as part of their general security practice, underground groups are very careful about who they recruit and how. They have all kinds of screening practices, and many of them are discussed in the chapter on recruitment in Deep Green Resistance.
Now, the idea of people being arrested is obviously not a hypothetical one for radical environmentalists. Many people have been arrested in the Green Scare. The largest group of people were arrested in what the FBI called “Operation Backfire.” Dozens of people were accused of dozens of different underground environmental actions.
They made mistakes. They didn’t use compartmentalization, and they had too many people for a single cell. They didn’t follow some of these basic rules, I think in part, because they thought of themselves as working informally, and not as a part of a proper organization.
Most people involved in “Operation Backfire” are now in jail because one member—Jake Ferguson, a heroin addict—became an informer for the FBI after the fact. He went around with a wire and talked to people, some of whom had been long “retired,” and he got them to reminisce about the good old days. This reveals that the network had some breaches of security culture and proper screening, since Jake should probably never have been part of the group. In general, the arrests in the Green Scare, in this group and more generally, have not been a result of forensics or any fancy CSI crime scene investigation. They have all been because an informer or infiltrator talked to police when they shouldn’t have.
Almost every new resistance movement starts with a wave of people who are arrested or killed. And the success of that movement is determined by whether that movement can a) support those casualties and then their families, and b) learn from those mistakes and move on.
We can all use the best security culture in the world, and we can learn from every mistake of the past, and some people are still going to end up in jail as soon as any movement starts to actually be effective, as soon as that movement starts to threaten the entitlement of those in power. Any resistance involves risk. So the question is: do we want to be as safe as possible, in the short term anyway, or do we want to be as effective as possible?
In What We Leave Behind, another work that you and I wrote together, Derrick, we said, “The question of how those in power respond to different actions is certainly strategically valid. But in a culture of resistance, it’s not a reason to not resist by whatever means are most appropriate and effective. Of course those in power will try to inflict reprisals on those who resist them. Of course they will try to frighten and terrorize dissidents into accepting their authority. Of course they will try to harm even those who do not directly participate in actions against power. That’s not a reason to hold back—that is why we fight them.”
As we also said in that book, the dominant culture, the enemy, is already committing genocide. They’re already skinning the planet alive. If we make them really mad, what are they going to do, destroy the planet twice?
Derrick: The question about what’s going to stop everyone from getting arrested reminds me of one of my favorite lines from a resister ever. It was spoken by Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. I don’t know if I’ll be able to say this without crying. She was a Russian partisan in World War II, and was caught by the Germans and tortured and mutilated. She didn’t give up any information except her name, and she gave them the wrong name. And when they went to execute her, to murder her, the next day, the last thing she said was, “You can’t hang all two hundred million of us.” There’s power in that. No matter how repressive they are, they can’t kill all of us.
Having said that, they can sure try. Having said that, it’s really scary to fight back. We hear a lot about lifeboats. Frankly, with the system collapsing, wouldn’t it be better to just sort of batten down the hatches, protect you and your family, and hope that the storm doesn’t actually kill you?
Aric: Well, the problem with just heading to the lifeboats is that this is not a temporary crisis or conflict. If we fail to stop this culture, then much of the planet may be uninhabitable for many thousands of years. And if we want to stop runaway global warming, we need to see decisive action in the next decade or so. If we don’t act, there will be nothing left.
I’m not saying this to criticize people who are doing work like building local food systems and working with local energy—transition-type things. I’m an organic farmer, and I do plenty of these things myself. It’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. Because if we can’t stop the destruction of the biosphere and the climate, then all of that work will be wiped out.
If that isn’t enough to convince you that lifeboats aren’t sufficient, consider this: a little more than five centuries ago, this continent was filled with tens of thousands of sustainable, and often very democratic, Indigenous communities. Any five-year-old child among them was better at identifying wild edible plants than I will ever be. This continent abounded with warriors who were skilled and courageous beyond my conception. And yet they were all but wiped out by the insane civilized using tools and weapons that are hopelessly crude by modern standards. Do civilized people, many of whom are essentially novices both to living in healthy communities and living sustainably, think that they can survive so much better than Indigenous nations with countless millennia of uninterrupted experience?
And, of course, some people say, “Well, they’ll see how great the Indigenous way of life is and they’ll be converted.” But do you really think that such communities will be perceived as a good example by those in power? I mean, look to history, look what happened whenever an empire met Indigenous people. Here is what Christopher Columbus wrote when he first encountered the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, his impression: “They are very gentle without knowing what evil is, without killing, without stealing.” What did he conclude from this? “They will make excellent servants.”
The dominant culture is voracious, and it’s insane. All of these things emphasize the importance of a two-pronged approach of building up communities on one hand, and building up the land and defending them on the other.
I understand that not everyone wants to be on the front lines. But it’s important to remember that only a small percentage of any resistance movement is actually on the front lines of the conflict. Not everyone has to risk their freedom or their lives to save the planet. But we all have to give support to front-line resisters, be it moral or material. (That includes writing to prisoners, for example.) It’s fine and good for people to focus on growing food or healing people if that’s where their skill or passion is. But, for both moral and strategic reasons, I think that we each have to take on the most radical action we can. Because right now we’re still very outnumbered, and still sorely lacking in militancy.
A few minutes ago I talked about the Indigenous peoples of this continent during the European invasion. Though they won many battles though bravery, skill, and their knowledge of the land, it was extremely difficult—and is extremely difficult—to win prolonged military conflicts while an empire is still expanding. In fact, it’s almost impossible to win as long as an empire still has a large supply of raw resources to consume.
But now we have some advantages they didn’t have at the time, including examples of resistance over the past several centuries from which we can learn. And those empires are on the decline now; they are coming to the end of their supply of raw resources, and we can accelerate that process. The concentration of industrial infrastructure makes those empires vulnerable in a way they weren’t only a few hundred years ago. There are opportunities here for decisive resistance. But if we just bury our heads in the sand, then we give up those few slim advantages we do have now.
Derrick: Going back to the example of resistance during World War II, there were many plots, of course, to attempt to kill Hitler and stop the Nazi atrocities. When the Allies invaded France, many of the plotters thought that they should just call it off, because the war was basically over they didn’t want to take the risk. They thought, the Nazis are going to lose, so let’s just take care of ourselves. But Henning Von Tresckow said, “No, the Nazis are killing twelve thousand people every day. So every day sooner that we can bring down the Nazi regime saves twelve thousand innocent lives.” So even though it seemed inevitable that the Nazis were going to lose, they still proceeded and risked their own lives, and many of these people were tortured and killed because they wanted to stop those twelve thousand innocent murders every day. Now, two hundred species are being driven extinct every day. And every day sooner that we can stop it is a day sooner that we can save two hundred species.
Having said that, a lot of people understand that the industrial economy is really bad. But what about the fact that disrupting it could mean hunger, bands of looters, that sort of thing? And frankly, isn’t resisting civilization the same as committing genocide?
Aric: Well, first of all, there will be no instantaneous collapse. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it didn’t fall in one either. Collapse will proceed in stages. How we intervene won’t change that—it will only affect how those stages play out and what’s left when it’s all over.
That said, let’s start with hunger. How much oil does farming actually use right now, and will cutting oil use impact that? The reality, of course, is that the vast majority of oil used in North America goes to industry and the military. In fact, in the United States, the agricultural sector accounts for less than 2 percent of all energy use, including both direct consumption (like tractor fuel) and indirect consumption (like synthetic fertilizers and pesticides)—2 percent! That’s true even though industrial agriculture is incredibly inefficient and uses something like ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. And right now, half of all food is simply wasted. So you could reduce energy consumption dramatically without affecting that small amount of energy that’s being spent on agriculture right now.
Of course, the benefit of living in a society that’s incredibly wasteful is that you can trim a lot of excess before you start to get down to the actual necessities. And even then, there are, of course, fundamental changes that need to be made in the things, in the way that we get food and shelter.
Derrick: So if you cut back on energy use, maybe you’re not going to kill a lot of people, but you’re going to make it so you can’t have retractable stadium roofs. Did you ever think about that?
Aric: I think about that every day. That’s why I do this.
Here’s another example for discussion: In Haiti, more than 99 percent of the trees have been cut down, currently mostly to make charcoal, because people have very limited supplies of other energy. They use it for fuel. People talk about that fact, but they rarely talk about the decades-long U.S. military dictatorship of Haiti in the beginning of the twentieth century, when Haiti was forced to export resources to pay debt. Think about this for a moment: you could supply one-quarter of all the energy Haiti uses with the gasoline Americans spill every year filling their lawnmowers. Hunger or deprivation is almost never about an actual shortage of supplies. It is almost always about inequality and exploitation.
Now, it’s understandable to be concerned about how the disruption of industrial society will affect people living here, but the effects of a properly functioning industrial society are ghastly around the world. Look at the destruction of the Niger Delta. Or think about the fact that in the Democratic Republic of Congo, millions of people have been killed, and millions more women raped, in a war fueled by the looting and export of minerals like coltan. Coltan is an ore used to make capacitors for computers and cell phones. So we’re the ones paying for that war.
Or think about the fact that there are parts of India where half of all hand-dug wells are now dry. Industrial drilling based on oil technology has drawn down the water table so much that people just can’t dig deep enough to get it. Every day this culture continues, it closes off more options for long-term subsistence and survival.
There is also a compelling argument to be made that the disruption of the industrial economy in the privileged world is vital to help people prepare for its inevitable and eventual collapse. Dmitry Orlov, who’s an expert on the collapse of the Soviet Union, wrote, “After collapse, you regret not having an unreliable retail segment, with shortages and long bread lines, because then people would have been forced to learn to shift for themselves instead of standing around waiting for someone to come and feed them.” So, by the time Soviet Union actually collapsed, plenty of people were already growing their own food out of necessity. So they were better able to cope.
Even if you don’t think we should stop burning all oil, think about what that last big gush of oil is being spent on. Big-screen TVs and international tourism for the globally rich (which is most of us, by the way). Pointless wars. The construction of buildings and suburbs that won’t even be inhabitable after the oil is gone. And it will be gone very fast in historical terms. So isn’t it better to try to reduce oil production and transport now, with a simultaneous movement for social justice? That way, if the oil supply is disrupted, there will be a push to spend what remains on actual necessities instead of luxuries for the globally rich. That would extend the period in which at least a little oil is available to cope. Of course, I’m just talking about humans. I think it’s clear that the daily existence of industrial society is bad news for just about every nonhuman species on the planet.
Look, we know what the endpoint of this culture is. Industrial collapse won’t be easy, but it’s better than a global ecological collapse. This culture is coming down anyway. If we engage with the process of collapse, we can guide it in a less destructive direction, rather than letting those in power have control.
For me the ultimate question isn’t whether people will be hungry if there is some hiccup in global capitalism. The question is, how do we stop the hunger and deprivation this culture is already causing, and the far worse deprivation and conflict it will create as it tries to continue in the face of all ecological limitations?
As for looters, frankly, I’m not as worried about hypothetical looters twenty years in the future as I am about the team of professional looters running the government and the economy.
Derrick: When things get really bad for the planet, will there be a mass movement that will rise up in the United States to do something?
Aric: I don’t think so. Part of the problem, of course, is that once global warming, and many other problems, get really bad for the privileged people of the world, it will be too late.
I study resistance movements, and so I’ve spent a lot of time studying resistance to the Nazi occupation in Europe. There was vigorous resistance in many countries, but very little within Germany itself. When I have asked people about that, some of them have told me it’s because people were afraid of the SS and the Gestapo. But, of course, the SS and the Gestapo killed people in the occupied countries as well.
And then I came across a public opinion survey that was taken in Berlin in 1952. People were asked whether, had the crimes of the Nazis been known, resistance against the Nazis would have been justified. And keep in mind this survey was conducted after the Nuremberg trials; everyone knew about the concentration camps and the medical experiments. They weren’t asked whether they would participate in resistance—because obviously, for almost all of them, the answer was “no”—they were only asked whether it was justifiable. Only 41 percent of them said “yes.” When the question was modified to ask whether resistance would have been justifiable in wartime—which in any empire is constant—the number of people who said “yes” dropped by half.
The majority of people identified so strongly with those in power in Germany that they were unable to oppose the Nazis, even theoretically, even after the fact, and even after the Nazis had committed unimaginable crimes against humanity. Sometimes a revolution is a prerequisite to a mass movement. Sometimes changing consciousness takes too long—especially when the bulk of people are somehow benefitting from the status quo.
Perhaps the majority of Germans didn’t agree with resistance, but what about people who actually saw the worst of it? What about average people who went to the concentration camps? Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, a survivor of both Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps, gives us the answer. He wrote, “Non-political middle class prisoners (a minority group in the concentration camps) were those least able to withstand the initial shock. They were utterly unable to understand what had happened to them and why. More than ever they clung to what had given them self-respect up to that moment. Even while being abused, they would assure the SS that they had never opposed Nazism. They could not understand why they, who had always obeyed the law without question, were being persecuted. Even now, though unjustly imprisoned, they dared not oppose their oppressors even in thought, though it would have given them a self-respect they were badly in need of.” And he goes on to talk about how many of those nonpolitical, middle-class prisoners betrayed those who were trying to organize resistance in the camps to the SS in hopes that they would get some kind of favors.
So no, I don’t think that we’ll see a mass movement in time to save the planet, even if things get really bad. At least, not in the wealthier parts of the world. And I think that’s very important for us to understand. Most people will not break their identification with the dominant culture in time. We can’t afford to wait around for a mass movement that isn’t coming. We have to use tactics that will be effective with the number of people we already have or that we can reasonably expect to get.
Derrick: Right now, it doesn’t look like a lot of people in the United States or among the global elite are fighting back. What will it take?
Aric: Some people are fighting back, and they’re mostly Indigenous people, poor people, and others who’ve been pushed to the margins, who have little left to lose. In this country, there is a new movement called Deep Green Resistance that hopes to carry out the aboveground work that we’re talking about here, the aboveground of this movement. You can get more information at deepgreenresistance. org. These people are committed, and I think that anyone who cares about the future of the planet should think about joining up or supporting them.
No resistance movement starts fully formed. They develop over time, and sometimes they do so very slowly or they must overcome major setbacks. Take the Abolition movement prior to the Civil War in the United States. Early white opposition to slavery focused on “moral suasion.” Abolitionists would actually visit slaveholders and try to convince them to free their slaves. They would argue that slavery was immoral, or that it was an affront to God, and they actually convinced some people. Of course, their success was limited, especially in the South.
At the same time, the Underground Railroad continued to grow and develop. There’s a misapprehension that the Underground Railroad was mostly run by well-meaning white people. But, of course, it was run mostly by black people, like Harriet Tubman. In a good year, the Underground Railroad might rescue hundreds or even thousands of people. The problem was that despite this, the population of enslaved people continued to grow through birth. Some people decided that success would only come by attacking the institution of slavery directly. And one of those people was John Brown. Brown would go to Abolitionist meetings and then complain afterward about how much people talked. He said, “What we need is action! Action.”
Brown created a plan, and it was a plan that many historians believed could have worked very well, if it weren’t for some obstacles he came up against. His plan was to take a group of fighters to seize the government armory at Harper’s Ferry, in Virginia (now West Virginia). They would seize the armory and the weapons it contained, and then they would disappear into the South. From the hills and the backwoods they would wage a kind of defensive guerrilla warfare, moving from plantation to plantation, and liberating the slaves, some of whom would join the fight. Soon, the plantations would be emptied out, and the slave economy would collapse.
It was a good plan, but obstacles arose from the very beginning. Brown had hoped to have a thousand fighters to start with. On the day of the raid, only twenty showed up. But Brown decided they had to do what they could with who they had, and they went ahead with the raid. They did capture the armory, but instead of maintaining the mobility that guerrillas need, they stayed there. When some of the townspeople tried to recapture the armory, they took those people prisoner and let them order out for breakfast and visit their families under escort. This delay gave the army enough time to march over from the next town. So they defeated John Brown’s fighters, most of whom were hanged.
Most white people didn’t support Brown. Even a lot of Abolitionists were opposed to what he tried to do. But Brown had been trying to avoid violence. He saw the writing on the wall. He knew that the growth of slave power meant that a bloody civil war was inevitable if slavery wasn’t stopped.
And, of course, he was right. Within a year of him being hanged, civil war did break out. And it was the bloodiest single war in American history, with more American soldiers killed than in all other wars, before or since, combined. Even many Abolitionists had failed to understand what a fundamentally violent system slavery was, and thought that it could be resolved without using force. But they were wrong. And millions of people died because of it.
I think there are clear parallels to our own situation. We want to be nice. We want to avoid conflict, and maybe avoid causing trouble. But if we fail to stop this culture, the results for humans and for the planet will be far more violent than the conflicts we are trying to avoid.
I’ll end with some thoughts on the French Resistance. When France was invaded in 1940, people were deeply shocked and disoriented. A few years earlier it had been hard to imagine that the Nazis could so quickly conquer Europe, so resistance developed slowly. Early ideas of resistance privileged spiritual resistance, and even fashion. Underground newspapers published articles about how the “elegance of Parisian women” constituted a form of resistance; they looked just so damn elegant, won’t that spite the Nazis?
Around 1943, the situation changed suddenly. There was a dramatic rise in the number of resistance sabotage actions and assassinations. Underground newspapers that had been writing about spiritual resistance started printing editorials saying that it was the duty of every French person to assassinate Nazi officers and paramilitaries. So what changed? The difference was that by 1943, it started to look as though the Nazis might lose the war. When the Nazis stopped looking invincible, people started to fight back.
Again, the parallels to our own situation are clear. With peak oil, food crises, economic collapse, and so on, the cracks in the façade are starting to show. Industrial capitalism is not invincible. It is not going to last forever. As in France, it’s time for a shift to a more serious organized resistance. And I think we can win.