[P2P-F] Fwd: Against Ecocide (GTN Discussion)

Mon Aug 1 18:23:37 CEST 2016

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Great Transition Network <gtnetwork at greattransition.org>
Date: Mon, Aug 1, 2016 at 11:15 PM
Subject: Against Ecocide (GTN Discussion)
To: michelsub2004 at gmail.com

>From Alan Zulch <azulch at kalliopeia.org>

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[Moderator's Note: The comment period is closed. The remaining comments
will be sent out over the course of today and tomorrow, and then Femke will
have the opportunity to respond.]

Sadly, I share Bill Rees’s conclusion that it is too late to avoid
accelerating ecocide, though I differ with his assumption that H. sapiens
is innately programmed to overexploit its environment. Countless Indigenous
cultures – based on their worldviews of oneness with nature – have lived in
dynamic and harmonious (if imperfect) reciprocity with their natural
environments for eons. It is from such cultures that I believe Western
culture can – must – learn.

Given the extraordinary power of Western culture’s giant homogenization
engine, and the tremendous global inertia behind the confluence of
business-as-usual factors – coupled with the dire and mounting effects on
the natural environment that are flowing from them – it appears all but
inevitable that modern civilization cannot avoid hitting an entropic wall
in relatively short order. Like all efforts to tweak the existing system,
codifying ecocide as a crime offers an incremental way to lessen the
impact, but as Bill Rees says, it is not enough to stop ecocide, for it
remains a technical fix arising and indirectly reinforcing an erroneous
Western belief in the separation of humans and nature.

What is an alternative approach that more directly points to the root of
our problem of obsolete worldview and identity? We have, I believe, a
better chance to mitigate the coming impact by remembering what we lost
long ago when we adopted a worldview of separation: the reality of our
intrinsic inner and outer connection to all life. If we care to listen to
what Indigenous Peoples are offering us, we soon realize that we – all of
us, together– are the beneficiaries if we make efforts to uplift Native
voices and to protect, preserve, and revitalize Indigenous cultures. But
it’s so hard to listen or care when we are so distracted – by technology,
by media, by the siren-like call of technological deliverance, by our own
gripping fear of losing all that we know.

Indigenous Peoples and cultures offer us lessons in simplicity. Not
romantic simplicity (see Wilbur’s pre/trans fallacy, which mistakes
pre-conscious simplicity for post-complexity simplicity), but conscious
simplicity as a survival imperative. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “I
wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I’d
give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Before
long, we will not have a choice, for we will consciously chose simplicity
or we will perish. As such, we ignore the accumulated wisdom of thousands
of years of Indigenous Peoples at our own peril. And “our own” necessarily
means our global peril, for there is nowhere to run or hide short of
further indulgences of distraction, fantasy, or insanity.

Going forward, if simply from a thermodynamic imperative, simplification
will occur because in a dissipative structure such as the Earth, entropy
can only be mitigated through simplicity. We are on a finite planet, facing
predicaments that Bill Rees well describes. Before long, simplifying won’t
be a lifestyle choice or political stance, but a condition. As ecologist
Jacopo Simonetta has pointed out, we’re not facing an energy crisis, we’re
in an entropy crisis. We have insufficient capacity to dissipate entropy in
our increasingly complex closed system. And this isn’t just physical
entropy, but, fascinatingly, cultural, too, as Simonetta points out (
www.cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-other-side-of-global-crisis-entropy.html
).

Flowing from this, it appears that failure to understand or manage entropy
is related to our culture’s inability to face limits, death, endings,
closure, the shadow. Rather than face such realities directly, we moderns
too often marginalize, banish, and deny them. And, as true for all shadow
material, what we refuse to face consciously re-emerges from the underworld
in distorted fashion, in the form of narcissism, cruelty, projection,
anxiety, and compulsive behavior (Think consumption habits: “You can never
get enough of what you don’t really need.”) Too, in its Western guise, this
rejection of limits and limitations is codified into an ideology reinforced
by assumptions of technological progress, endless growth economies, and the
like. Combined, these learned behaviors are different but no less
misanthropic than other profoundly narrow-minded reactionary worldviews we
are seeing blossom forth with bitterness across the globe. The end result
is ecocide, too powerful for any
legal framework to overcome.

How shall we proceed?

The Chinese finger trap toy models the paradoxical response called for in
these times: Faced with being trapped, our conditioned reaction is to
pullback, which only tightens our predicament. Ironically, the solution
involves a seemingly paradoxical behavior: to be released from our
predicament, we must stop reacting and instead respond from a larger
understanding of the inner and outer dynamics of our situation, which means
we must stop pulling and instead relax, and be – be with, witness – and
even move toward, our fear of entrapment. When we do, we discover that the
grip loosens, and we increasingly find liberation from the bondage of
preconceived ideas and beliefs that have kept us strapped to our sinking
ship of a worldview.

Natural farming pioneer, Masanobu Fukuoka, advocated the throwing of
seed-impregnated clay balls across the messy and unmanaged landscape on the
assumption that many seeds would not survive, but some – a sufficient
number for survival – would take root. I would like to think that while our
global society is too hard-charging on its ecocidal trajectory to change
course before hitting a thermodynamic wall and fragmenting, those of us who
can should continue to make efforts – legal and otherwise – to not only
mitigate the impact but to also seed the field for what might come next –
we are throwing seed balls into the future. May enough of them find fertile
ground in which to take root and thrive for future generations of all life.

Alan Zulch

**********************

Sunday, July 31, 2016

>From Bill Rees <wrees at mail.ubc.ca>

-----
[Moderator's Note: Today will be the last day for comments. I will be
spacing the comments that come in out over the next couple days if need be.]

Femke Wijdekop has provided an excellent summary of the ethical imperative
and even self-interested reasons for codifying ecocide “as a fifth crime
against peace, joining genocide, crimes of aggression, crimes against
humanity, and war crimes”. Nevertheless, even in the (unlikely?) event that
the world community succeeds in establishing the needed international legal
framework, subsequent enforcement and related efforts will be even less
successful than are existing sanctions against genocide, crimes of
aggression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. It is too late to
avoid accelerating ecocide.

The reasons have to do with both basic human nature and the particular
nature our ecological predicament, neither of which is adequately factored
into most discussions of ecocide. First, H. sapiens shares with all other
species innate propensities to expand into all accessible habitats and to
use up all available resources. The difference is that modern humans are
more successful in expressing these traits than are other organisms. H.
sapiens thus has the widest geographic range of any vertebrate
species—people have occupied all the habitable and not a few seemingly
uninhabitable landscapes on Earth. And, because human ingenuity
(technology) constantly redefines resource ‘availability’, we are uniquely
capable of scouring the bottom of our Earthly barrel for the last traces of
utility or value – which is, of course, exactly what we are doing (think
‘fracking’, deep-sea oil exploitation, fisheries collapses, etc., etc). The
United Nations reports that, driven by
relentless growth and facilitated by technological wizardry, the rate of
resource exploitation has tripled in the past 40 years alone. As a result,
the human enterprise is well into ecological overshoot, consuming even
self-producing ‘resources’ faster than they can regenerate and filling
nature’s waste sinks to over-flowing. (Climate change is actually an excess
waste problem).

Second, this is a finite planet. It should therefore be obvious that the
continuous expansion of the human enterprise must necessarily displace or
extinguish thousands of other species. The unavoidable fact is that habitat
and resources appropriated for use by humans are unavailable for use by
competing non-human species. Consider the tens of millions of bison, deer
and ‘antelope’ that once grazed the Great Plains of North America but
which, in less than two centuries, gave way to humans and their livestock.
This has been the story of human expansion everywhere since the dawn of
agriculture. One result: the sheer mass of humans and their domestic
animals now constitutes more than 98% of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass
on Earth! This crude indicator alone proves H. sapiens to be the most
(fatally?) successful carnivore and herbivore ever to walk the earth.

Bottom line? From the perspective of wild nature, virtually all ecosystems
dominated by people – and that means most terrestrial ecosystems – are
remnant ecosystems. Ecocide is the rule. And does anyone seriously think
any of this is going to change with formal recognition of ecocide as a
crime? As long as human populations continue to grow (three billion more
mouths are expected around the table in coming decades); as long as
material consumption increases with rising incomes; and as long as the
world community subscribes to the compound myth of continuous technological
progress and unconstrained economic growth, ecocide is an inevitable
consequence.

Ironically, the no-growth alternative is hardly more attractive. This is a
complex story for another forum—suffice it to say here that if the era of
dependable economic growth and abundant cheap energy is indeed over (as
some analysts suggest) we will have lost the world’s only politically
acceptable ‘solution’ to poverty and most of society’s productive capacity.
Increasing millions of desperate people will be forced to turn to the
direct exploitation of 'nature' for income or basic survival. In fact,
national parks and nature reserves are already under siege, poaching is
epidemic and there are growing underground markets for so-called ‘bush
meat’ in many parts of the world. The reality is that H. sapiens will eat
many other species to extinction, including our closest biological
relatives, before we succumb ourselves.

Of course, the whole dismal process will accelerate greatly if economic
collapse or climate change displaces large human populations or triggers
widespread conflict. Regrettably, we live in interesting times.

Bill Rees

************************

Friday, July 1, 2016

>From Paul Raskin

-----
Dear GTN:

Our JULY discussion will approach GTI’s overarching theme – shaping a
civilized planetary future – from a fresh angle: the legal effort now
gaining traction to criminalize the wanton destruction of nature.

Femke Wijdekop takes this on in a new Viewpoint, “Against Ecocide: Legal
Protection for Earth.” Femke introduces the idea of the “rights of nature”
and the history of the concept of “ecocide.” However, her primary focus is
on action, specifically, the movement to add ecocide as a crime against
peace under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

Expanding the juridical architecture for protecting rights will surely be a
vital prong in the systemic movement we so urgently need. But to what
degree can it succeed in isolation? And what is the larger role of law and
legal activism in a Great Transition?

Please read Femke’s short piece at
www.greattransition.org/publication/against-ecocide and weigh in with your
thoughts. It will be published in August, along with selected comments
drawn from the forthcoming discussion

Comments are welcome through JULY 31.

Looking forward,
Paul Raskin
GTI Director

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