Winona LaDuke defined an activist as 'a responsible person.' (Mininginjustice, 2011) The world is so fraught with problems that anyone who pays attention has a responsibility to act against them. The path of activism is often complex and ambiguous, however. For instance, will consuming fewer resources actually mitigate the negative impacts of extractive industry, or will it just make us feel better? Does volunteering in the developing world help, or just perpetuate post-colonial dependency and resentment (as Ivan Illich suggested)? (Illich, 1968) Finally, is it really possible to address the root causes of social issues, or is our work as vain, and our accomplishments as fleeting, as those of Sisyphus?
As one answers these questions in the course of navigating an engaged and responsible life, it is helpful to read and question widely, to seek many perspectives, and to establish an understanding of historical, ecological, and social context. Further, an analysis that identifies the salient actors and their motivations, as well as the driving processes and their historical arcs, is also necessary. While such an analysis can be intellectually limiting and occasionally ideological, we act in the context of one regardless of whether it is explicit, crafted, and self-conscious.
It was through searching for such context and building such an analysis that Derrick Jensen arrived at his first premise: “Civilization is not and can never be sustainable.” (Jensen, 2006). Jensen's analysis has many strengths. It explains the continuity of both ecological and social violence throughout all of recorded history – practically as long as anyone can cite examples from – without precluding the possibility of better ways to live. By tying a diverse set of problems – from domestic abuse and genocide to deforestation and overfishing – to one root cause, he highlights their unfortunate synergies. Most gratifyingly (though perhaps with the least certainty), his analysis suggests a direct action approach that sidesteps political routes, which increasingly seem corrupt and ineffectual; technological fixes that fail to address underlying root causes; and popular movements, which seem weak and divided despite growing environmental awareness.
Jensen thus predicates his analysis on a dichotomy between the “civilized” and what he usually refers to as the “indigenous.” This categorization has precedent among students of social organization. Joseph Tainter supposed that among many suggested classification schemes, “[t]he distinction between state and non-state [for Jensen’s purposes identical to the (non)-civilized distinction] [. . .] is probably the one with which most anthropologists would feel comfortable.” (Tainter, 1988)
On the other hand, this schema is intellectually problematic. Tainter goes on to say that “[i]t begins to sound as if state formation is not such a Great Divide after all. There are apparently continuities in the transition from tribal to state societies, continuities even in those characteristics thought to be most peculiar to states. Cohen is correct in noting that state formation is a continuous phenomenon: there is no clear-cut state/non-state dividing line.” (Tainter, 1988) Further, he notes that “[t]he utility of a classification must be judged . . . by whether the quantity and quality of information gained outweighs that lost, and this depends largely on the purposes and needs of the analyst,” and that “[f]or many purposes, it may obscure more than it reveals.” (Tainter, 1988).
This particular distinction, especially using this particular terminology, has a sordid history. At an intellectual level, as Tainter again points out, “Anthropologists have long recognized that the very terms are value-laden; in popular thought civilized societies are superior. [. . .] civilized societies are those like us. [. . .] Such biases have no place in objective social science, and a concept that is so laden with this problem is better abandoned or rethought.” While Jensen’s values run opposite to those Tainter supposes, the point applies as well to him.
The particular use of the term civilization is inscrutably tied up with Western self-image. Its use, especially in contrast to the indigenous, has nearly always been to objectify and dehumanize. Indigenous peoples are either valued or vilified for the ways they are perceived to differ from the civilized, but never merely respected as unique and distinct cultures. The Huron oddly served as a foil for 18th-century French politics in Baron Lahontan’s Dialogues (Lahontan). The imagined values and lifestyle of Native Americans “living in harmony with nature” has been exploited for propaganda against environmentally destructive practices in the US in Keep America Beautiful Inc.’s famous “Crying Indian” ad (Krech, 2000 unpacks this particular example).
Jensen is clearly opposed to such an objectifying, cardboard use of the indigenous. He even prefers to call himself an “ally of the indigenous” or an “indigenist,” avoiding the racist connotations of the term “primitivist.” (Blunt, 2011). And of course it is easily imaginable that Jensen’s analysis is spot-on, no matter how much it may bear resemblance to the “Noble Savage” concept. As scholars, we can’t allow the backlash against such things to remove from consideration superficially similar intellectually responsible arguments. My point is merely that any attempt to use facts about indigenous cultures and lifestyles to prove what is essentially a political argument must be held to a very high standard. Such arguments must be replete with carefully qualified statements and specific ethnographic citations. In this sense, Jensen’s argument fails even when its claims are true.
Jensen claims that “even for many of the warlike indigenous peoples--that is, those who are ahistorical, uncivilized--to kill noncombatants was unthinkable, and even killing combatants was a rarity, an event.” (Jensen, 2006) While the ambiguity of this sentence may allow it to slip through as technically “true” (only ‘many’ examples must meet his conditions, not all), it is a misleading overgeneralization that encourages the kind of “noble savage” conception that uses indigenous peoples as stand-ins for virtue, concealing their true nature and variety. In this case, while it is true that there is ethnographic evidence of non-civilized groups who fulfill Jensen’s criteria, this is the exception and not the rule.
Another quote is more affirmative: “Civilized wars are parodies of indigenous warfare, which is a relatively non-lethal and exhilarating form of play, meaning civilized warfare is a parody of play.” (Jensen, 2006) While there may be instances of non-lethal, formalized warfare, it is also true that bitter, bloody warfare in some form is common at nearly all levels of social integration. The Mantaro highlanders of Peru built fortified towns and fought to take and keep good land (Earle, 1997). Chiefdoms in Bronze Age Thy, Denmark warred for prestige and livestock (Earle, 1997). Hawaiian kingdoms fought over good irrigable land (Earle, 1997). The Yanomamo are famously warlike, often destroying whole communities, gang-raping captured women, and, again, taking land (Earle and Johnson, 1987). The Central Enga of Highland New Guinea engage in “frequent and vicious warfare,” (Earle and Johnson, 1987). While these societies are all more integrated than the family level society, few of them meet Jensen's definition of civilized: they do not depend on imported resources (Jensen, 2006).
This case shows that a more nuanced, cautious statement would have served Jensen's purpose much more effectively. Family-level societies (the presumed social organization of “99.8% of human history” – Tainter, 1988) rarely have the preconditions necessary for warfare (Earle and Johnson, 1987). The war of state and industrial societies differs qualitatively from the war of chiefdoms and corporate societies. A mere clarification, a caveat and specification, could have acknowledged all of this complexity. By failing to qualify his statement, Jensen reveals that he is, at least on some level and some of the time, using indigenous peoples as a counterweight to the excesses of civilization, a mere rhetorical device rather than a solid piece of evidence.
Another interesting specific falsehood appears in relationships with the land. Jensen clearly believes that indigenous peoples are “sane and intelligent” when it comes to land management – quite the opposite of civilized peoples, who by definition disembowel their homes and must take from their neighbors. While the stark contrasts between Alberta’s tar sands and literally any indigenous homeland make this a plausible argument, the situation is once again vastly more complicated than Jensen’s presentation lets on. For instance, the Enga of New Guinea have “greatly diminished the former diversity of plants and animals” in their valleys, and created a situation of circumscribed resources and lowered dietary quality1 (Earle and Johnson 1987). Non-civilized peoples have also been implicated in major extinction events in both North America and Australia (Krech, 2000). This does not mean that indigenous peoples are “just as bad” as Exxon-Mobil, nor does it justify their exploitation. Had he been honest, Jensen could have presented these ambiguities and outliers without harm to his argument. After all, indigenous communities don’t need to be perfect, and they don’t need to be uniformly sustainable, to provide many great examples of sustainable ways of living. As Jared Diamond pointed out, “[m]anaging environmental resources sustainably has always been difficult,” (Diamond, 2005) – and it’s neither fair nor realistic to hold indigenous peoples to a standard of land use for purely rhetorical purposes.
Thus Jensen’s analysis still unfortunately suffers from the legacy of the anachronistic, value-laden dichotomy between the civilized and the indigenous. He still “commit[s] the error of viewing past indigenous peoples as fundamentally different from [. . .] modern First World peoples.” (Diamond, 2005) The key distinction, to him, is that indigenous peoples lack “civilization.” Jensen’s intellectual influence Jack Forbes characterized civilization as “Wetiko disease, a contagious psychological malady that causes the afflicted to consume the lives of their neighbors.” (Forbes, 1992) This metaphor is telling, since it states explicitly that civilized people are fundamentally, psychologically different from the indigenous.
Jensen’s own opinion seems to be in line with what anthropologists call the “conflict theory” of societal evolution. The conflict theory, in short, states that greedy and power-hungry individuals found a way to dominate their communities, forcing them to betray their own interests to serve the usurpers. It is frustratingly difficult to find a citation demonstrating Jensen’s belief in this theory, however, which illustrates how little emphasis Jensen gives to the question. Suffice it to say that, for Jensen, the conflict theory best explains civilization’s origins because civilization is, by definition, theft from the poor by the rich. Civilization is conflict theory played out in every patriarchical and every capitalist relationship. It is the same force that started civilization because it is the force that sustains it today; the obvious benefits of “saving the planet” will be eschewed for no better reason than because “those in power get too much money and privilege from destroying the planet.” (McBay, 2011)
This theory has many elements of truth. Tim Earle’s book “How Chiefs Come to Power” is premised on the assumption that there are always individuals in any society prepared to become more socially dominant. (Earle, 1998). However, greed and power-hunger are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the origin of complexity and civilization. Joseph Tainter deftly outlines why: “Conflict theory suffers from a problem of psychological reductionism. That is, the emergence of the state is explained by reference to the wishes, intentions, needs, and/or desires of a small, privileged segment of society. How this segment comes to hold these needs and desires is not specified, but presumably arises from some universal human tendency toward ambition and self-aggrandizement. To the extent that these are universal, social variation is unexplained.” (Tainter, 1988) Since Jensen’s answer does not actually explain why civilization emerged where and when and how it did, as well as why it did not in other times and places, it is an extremely imprecise understanding on which to base a discussion of collapse. It is ideologically concordant with the larger themes of Jensen’s work, which consistently name the one-way violence of social elites, but it is not pragmatically useful.
It is problematic that Jensen’s explanation for civilization is so underdeveloped. This question becomes highly relevant when Jensen, and especially McBay and Keith in Deep Green Resistance, come to consider the trajectory of modern civilization and what we as activists ought to do about it. This is the punchline of Jensen’s work – it is not idle, academic scholarship, but rather an aggressive attempt to propagate his viewpoint and convince readers to act in accordance with that viewpoint. Specifically, Jensen believes that “[i]f we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses.” Further, “[t]he longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after.” (Jensen, 2006) Thus, the role Jensen proposes for activists is to accelerate and shape the course of collapse. Deep Green Resistance lays out a broad-brush plan and organizing strategy for that operation (McBay, Keith, and Jensen, 2011).
In designing a plan to accelerate and shape collapse, the first step must necessarily be to understand collapse – what it is, how it has worked in the past, and how it might happen in the future. And as Joseph Tainter puts it, “[c]ollapse may not be understood except in the context of how complex societies function and operate, and that cannot be divorced from the question of how they have come into being.” (Tainter, 1998) Since Jensen et al. fail to adequately understand how civilization emerged in the first place, their ideas about its collapse are sometimes strange and misguided. They seem to believe that the implicit and explicit dominating force wielded by those in power is the only reason people don’t rise up and create a just society. That is, they ignore the functioning social contract that is civilization, the reciprocal relationship in which, no matter how bad a deal it is, those who work and pay taxes to support civilization do so because they still perceive this as a better deal than failing to do so –their alternative still seems worse.2
However, in this case, the flaw may be purely intellectual. When discussing specific narratives of collapse and making his plans, McBay cites Joseph Tainter’s work on collapse and uses its insights to frame the tasks of a Deep Green Resistance. Tainter’s thesis is that collapse represents an often rapid change in the cost-benefit ratio of civilization (caused by diminishing marginal returns on complexity itself), particularly as experienced by those who support the civilization in their day to day lives. McBay translates this into a simple recipe for DGR: “[p]art of the job of the resistance movement is to increase the costs and decrease the benefits of empire-scale complexity. . . . aboveground activists facilitate . . . collapse by developing alternatives that will ease the pressure and encourage people to leave industrial capitalism by choice.”
If Tainter’s analysis is correct, then this is a positive case in which DGR writers used the anthropological literature to hone their strategy. On the other hand, Tainter’s thesis is not well tested (it is difficult to find case studies with sufficient data to track marginal returns over time) nor is it uncontested. The historical record of collapse is fraught with complications that seem to increase at every turn, and there is certainly no case analogous to that of DGR, in which a group of individuals within a society deliberated sets out to accelerate its collapse. Thus, there is not necessarily any reason to think that it will be possible for activists to affect the cost-benefit balance of civilization. That, however, is not of itself a sufficient reason that we shouldn’t try.
In Deep Green Resistance, Aric asserts that "the history of civilizations is defined by collapse . . . collapse is the typical, not exceptional, outcome for a civilization." (McBay, Keith, and Jensen, 2011) There is a substantial literature that explores the putative environmental root causes of this syndrome. In "Topsoil and Civilization," Vernon Gill Carter asserts that only the alluvially-recharged soils of the major floodplain civilizations have managed to stave off death by soil erosion for more than a thousand years. (Carter, 1975) David Montgomery's "Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations" is an excellent modern update of that story. (Montgomery, 2007) John Perlin's "A Forest Journey" tracks erosion's partner-in-crime, deforestation, through the rise and fall of the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Europe. (Perlin, 2005) Diamond's "Collapse" is an incomparable grand survey of historical collapses. (Diamond, 2005)
All these sources use historical and archaeological evidence to make their point. However, anthropologists are not undivided on these issues, and it's possible that the authors here are overemphasizing the ecological component of collapse and decline, to the exclusion of important alternative factors, and more importantly to the exclusion of exceptions that might disprove the rule3. Insofar as collapse is the inverse of increasing complexity, it has as many explanations and shows as much local, case-by-case variation as that process (documented in Earle and Johnson's “The Evolution of Human Societies”). Thus while collapse always occurs in the context of environmental conditions, and these conditions often add to the hardship causing collapse even when environmental degradation is not the primary cause, it is not the only explanation for historical collapses and declines.
Much of this discussion is a question of definitions: anthropologists recoil at McBay's use of the term collapse for such a wide array of very different social changes that are not always negative (a qualification McBay would of course not hesitate to agree with, and vociferously at that). For instance, new evidence reinterprets the collapses of the Mayan and Angkor Wat civilizations as bureaucracies that had outlived their usefulness, and which were abandoned without substantial demographic suffering. Anthropologists point out that collapse is easy to find at the scale of individual cities, but is much more ambiguous when applied to larger cultural groups and political systems. This is perhaps relevant to academics, but in this case McBay's area of interest is importantly different: if a city is buried in silt, its environmental management efforts failed. To anthropologists, the culture and often the state can move to another city without any relevant discontinuities. Of course, this process, added up over regions and larger timescales, can perhaps (partially) explain, for instance, the gradual shift in power away from Mesopotamia and into Europe. And it allows collapse to be both a defining trait of civilization, as McBay would have it, and a process that is truly relevant only in isolated, marginal cases, as some anthropologists argue.
Thus, the archaeological record makes it clear that collapse is an important process in history, one that is not necessarily inevitable but that certainly happens more often than not to complex, state-level societies. However, the implications for modern global system are ambiguous. It seems hard to argue that collapse isn't coming, but it is an open question what precisely will collapse (the UN, the global food market, the American empire, etc) and how. It is even more uncertain what we can and should do about it.
On this question, DGR’s analysis seems again to be tainted by inherited cultural baggage. The historic process of collapse is inextricably tied to the idea of the Apocalypse. And as John Greer points out, Jensen’s narrative does bear an uncanny resemblance to the archetypal story of Christianity. (Greer, 2008) To illustrate: ‘before the Original Sin of civilization, there was an indigenous Eden. Civilization emerged, nigh-miraculously, and has caused all human suffering ever since. One day civilization will Collapse, those in power will be deposed and brought to justice. An indigenous lifestyle will again prevail and all the wounds of civilization will be healed.’
While there are substantial ambiguities inherent in prognosticating the potential futures of a very complex system, it seems important to discuss specific possibilities. Instead, McBay merely offers a list of possible avenues to what one infers must be essentially the same collapse. This is possible due to the latitude built into McBay’s definition of collapse, cited from Tainter: “collapse is a rapid loss of complexity.” (McBay, Keith, and Jensen, 2011) This definition is ambiguous enough to encompass all the possibilities, but it is also too ambiguous to adequately prepare for them. Collapse must be the collapse of some specific cultural and political system, one which people are actively constructing every day. The cause of the cessation or decline of this construction matters a great deal to which system collapses. Thus, each possible route offers at least its own possible targeted system, with vastly different consequences for the planet. McBay’s imprecision is both understandable and necessary (criticism would rightly be much harsher had he claimed to know the fate of industrial civilization in detail!), but it should be clarified with a caveat: collapse is not an apocalypse. Further, a more realistic and less mythological approach to collapse would inform an effort to constrain the specifics of possible collapses. This would in turn aid efforts from all sides to influence the course of collapse.
The only acute oversight introduced by this apocalyptic scenario regards time: McBay's scenarios play out suddenly – the collapse could be dated at least to a year, if not a day, and its consequences involve an immediate shift to a new stable state. The changes are drastic and very much noticeable to people in their everyday lives. Yet this is by no means the only possibility, and it is certainly rare in the historical record. Most of the examples used by, for instance Tainter, take place over the course of centuries. (Tainter, 1985) John Greer uses this evidence to assert that collapse is already occurring (perhaps beginning with the global peak in per capita energy usage in the 1970's) and that the process will take centuries, so long that the changes will be imperceptible to any given individual. (Greer, 2008) This possibility is never even entertained by the DGR authors. If collapse is in fact already occurring, then the role of activists may change in ways they don't account for. It should also be perceptible in many social metrics for which there exists reliable data, so the same program of information gathering suggested above would theoretically also investigate this question and its implications.
Derrick Jensen’s argument is satisfying and robust in many ways. He develops a theory that explains oppression and exploitation across a wide swath of historical and social variation. His analysis finds a route that would address the root cause of many problems, cutting through the often ineffective, easily subverted, and piecemeal reforms tried at by many less ambitious social movements. His argument is also ill-served by vestigial cultural baggage that obscures his analysis of indigenous cultures and his predictions about collapse. This introduces unfortunate intellectual flaws into his works: he is often too imprecise, he makes unwarranted, misleading, or false over-generalizations, and he routinely fails to ground his claims in reliable literature, even when such literature is readily available. These flaws cast doubt on Jensen’s claims and unfortunately hurt their respectability in academic and policy circles.
Jensen’s claims are not without merit, however. The relevant anthropological and historical literature supports Jensen’s most important conclusions. While there is a grey zone of ambiguity at the margins between the previously dominant social mode, the family level society, and the present all-consuming industrial one, the transition seems to have been a series of undesirable tradeoffs, made with great sacrifices. Anthropologist Tim Earle, who attempted to document and analyze this process, asserted that he “[sees] tremendous losses in centrally directed systems.” (Earle 1997)
Most critically of all Jensen’s conclusions is the immediacy and inescapable nature of collapse. While the future is always nebulous, ecological destruction continues accelerate every year, and there are clearly tipping points that we have already doomed ourselves to reach in the global climate system. Unfortunately, there seems to be little reason to believe civilization will change course in time to prevent a collapse. (Huesemann and Huesemann, 2008) Thus, Jensen’s most pessimistic and crucial conclusion hits frighteningly close to home, and it seems imperative that his message not be lost. The flaws in Jensen’s portrayal are unfortunate but don’t discredit his major insights, and mustn’t distract from their urgent social relevance.
References
Blunt, Zoe (2011). "Uncivilized". Canadian Dimension. Retrieved 19 May 2012.
Thus Jensen’s analysis still unfortunately suffers from the legacy of the anachronistic, value-laden dichotomy between the civilized and the indigenous. He still “commit[s] the error of viewing past indigenous peoples as fundamentally different from [. . .] modern First World peoples.” (Diamond, 2005) The key distinction, to him, is that indigenous peoples lack “civilization.” Jensen’s intellectual influence Jack Forbes characterized civilization as “Wetiko disease, a contagious psychological malady that causes the afflicted to consume the lives of their neighbors.” (Forbes, 1992) This metaphor is telling, since it states explicitly that civilized people are fundamentally, psychologically different from the indigenous.
Jensen’s own opinion seems to be in line with what anthropologists call the “conflict theory” of societal evolution. The conflict theory, in short, states that greedy and power-hungry individuals found a way to dominate their communities, forcing them to betray their own interests to serve the usurpers. It is frustratingly difficult to find a citation demonstrating Jensen’s belief in this theory, however, which illustrates how little emphasis Jensen gives to the question. Suffice it to say that, for Jensen, the conflict theory best explains civilization’s origins because civilization is, by definition, theft from the poor by the rich. Civilization is conflict theory played out in every patriarchical and every capitalist relationship. It is the same force that started civilization because it is the force that sustains it today; the obvious benefits of “saving the planet” will be eschewed for no better reason than because “those in power get too much money and privilege from destroying the planet.” (McBay, 2011)
This theory has many elements of truth. Tim Earle’s book “How Chiefs Come to Power” is premised on the assumption that there are always individuals in any society prepared to become more socially dominant. (Earle, 1998). However, greed and power-hunger are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the origin of complexity and civilization. Joseph Tainter deftly outlines why: “Conflict theory suffers from a problem of psychological reductionism. That is, the emergence of the state is explained by reference to the wishes, intentions, needs, and/or desires of a small, privileged segment of society. How this segment comes to hold these needs and desires is not specified, but presumably arises from some universal human tendency toward ambition and self-aggrandizement. To the extent that these are universal, social variation is unexplained.” (Tainter, 1988) Since Jensen’s answer does not actually explain why civilization emerged where and when and how it did, as well as why it did not in other times and places, it is an extremely imprecise understanding on which to base a discussion of collapse. It is ideologically concordant with the larger themes of Jensen’s work, which consistently name the one-way violence of social elites, but it is not pragmatically useful.
It is problematic that Jensen’s explanation for civilization is so underdeveloped. This question becomes highly relevant when Jensen, and especially McBay and Keith in Deep Green Resistance, come to consider the trajectory of modern civilization and what we as activists ought to do about it. This is the punchline of Jensen’s work – it is not idle, academic scholarship, but rather an aggressive attempt to propagate his viewpoint and convince readers to act in accordance with that viewpoint. Specifically, Jensen believes that “[i]f we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses.” Further, “[t]he longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after.” (Jensen, 2006) Thus, the role Jensen proposes for activists is to accelerate and shape the course of collapse. Deep Green Resistance lays out a broad-brush plan and organizing strategy for that operation (McBay, Keith, and Jensen, 2011).
In designing a plan to accelerate and shape collapse, the first step must necessarily be to understand collapse – what it is, how it has worked in the past, and how it might happen in the future. And as Joseph Tainter puts it, “[c]ollapse may not be understood except in the context of how complex societies function and operate, and that cannot be divorced from the question of how they have come into being.” (Tainter, 1998) Since Jensen et al. fail to adequately understand how civilization emerged in the first place, their ideas about its collapse are sometimes strange and misguided. They seem to believe that the implicit and explicit dominating force wielded by those in power is the only reason people don’t rise up and create a just society. That is, they ignore the functioning social contract that is civilization, the reciprocal relationship in which, no matter how bad a deal it is, those who work and pay taxes to support civilization do so because they still perceive this as a better deal than failing to do so –their alternative still seems worse.2
However, in this case, the flaw may be purely intellectual. When discussing specific narratives of collapse and making his plans, McBay cites Joseph Tainter’s work on collapse and uses its insights to frame the tasks of a Deep Green Resistance. Tainter’s thesis is that collapse represents an often rapid change in the cost-benefit ratio of civilization (caused by diminishing marginal returns on complexity itself), particularly as experienced by those who support the civilization in their day to day lives. McBay translates this into a simple recipe for DGR: “[p]art of the job of the resistance movement is to increase the costs and decrease the benefits of empire-scale complexity. . . . aboveground activists facilitate . . . collapse by developing alternatives that will ease the pressure and encourage people to leave industrial capitalism by choice.”
If Tainter’s analysis is correct, then this is a positive case in which DGR writers used the anthropological literature to hone their strategy. On the other hand, Tainter’s thesis is not well tested (it is difficult to find case studies with sufficient data to track marginal returns over time) nor is it uncontested. The historical record of collapse is fraught with complications that seem to increase at every turn, and there is certainly no case analogous to that of DGR, in which a group of individuals within a society deliberated sets out to accelerate its collapse. Thus, there is not necessarily any reason to think that it will be possible for activists to affect the cost-benefit balance of civilization. That, however, is not of itself a sufficient reason that we shouldn’t try.
In Deep Green Resistance, Aric asserts that "the history of civilizations is defined by collapse . . . collapse is the typical, not exceptional, outcome for a civilization." (McBay, Keith, and Jensen, 2011) There is a substantial literature that explores the putative environmental root causes of this syndrome. In "Topsoil and Civilization," Vernon Gill Carter asserts that only the alluvially-recharged soils of the major floodplain civilizations have managed to stave off death by soil erosion for more than a thousand years. (Carter, 1975) David Montgomery's "Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations" is an excellent modern update of that story. (Montgomery, 2007) John Perlin's "A Forest Journey" tracks erosion's partner-in-crime, deforestation, through the rise and fall of the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Europe. (Perlin, 2005) Diamond's "Collapse" is an incomparable grand survey of historical collapses. (Diamond, 2005)
All these sources use historical and archaeological evidence to make their point. However, anthropologists are not undivided on these issues, and it's possible that the authors here are overemphasizing the ecological component of collapse and decline, to the exclusion of important alternative factors, and more importantly to the exclusion of exceptions that might disprove the rule3. Insofar as collapse is the inverse of increasing complexity, it has as many explanations and shows as much local, case-by-case variation as that process (documented in Earle and Johnson's “The Evolution of Human Societies”). Thus while collapse always occurs in the context of environmental conditions, and these conditions often add to the hardship causing collapse even when environmental degradation is not the primary cause, it is not the only explanation for historical collapses and declines.
Much of this discussion is a question of definitions: anthropologists recoil at McBay's use of the term collapse for such a wide array of very different social changes that are not always negative (a qualification McBay would of course not hesitate to agree with, and vociferously at that). For instance, new evidence reinterprets the collapses of the Mayan and Angkor Wat civilizations as bureaucracies that had outlived their usefulness, and which were abandoned without substantial demographic suffering. Anthropologists point out that collapse is easy to find at the scale of individual cities, but is much more ambiguous when applied to larger cultural groups and political systems. This is perhaps relevant to academics, but in this case McBay's area of interest is importantly different: if a city is buried in silt, its environmental management efforts failed. To anthropologists, the culture and often the state can move to another city without any relevant discontinuities. Of course, this process, added up over regions and larger timescales, can perhaps (partially) explain, for instance, the gradual shift in power away from Mesopotamia and into Europe. And it allows collapse to be both a defining trait of civilization, as McBay would have it, and a process that is truly relevant only in isolated, marginal cases, as some anthropologists argue.
Thus, the archaeological record makes it clear that collapse is an important process in history, one that is not necessarily inevitable but that certainly happens more often than not to complex, state-level societies. However, the implications for modern global system are ambiguous. It seems hard to argue that collapse isn't coming, but it is an open question what precisely will collapse (the UN, the global food market, the American empire, etc) and how. It is even more uncertain what we can and should do about it.
On this question, DGR’s analysis seems again to be tainted by inherited cultural baggage. The historic process of collapse is inextricably tied to the idea of the Apocalypse. And as John Greer points out, Jensen’s narrative does bear an uncanny resemblance to the archetypal story of Christianity. (Greer, 2008) To illustrate: ‘before the Original Sin of civilization, there was an indigenous Eden. Civilization emerged, nigh-miraculously, and has caused all human suffering ever since. One day civilization will Collapse, those in power will be deposed and brought to justice. An indigenous lifestyle will again prevail and all the wounds of civilization will be healed.’
While there are substantial ambiguities inherent in prognosticating the potential futures of a very complex system, it seems important to discuss specific possibilities. Instead, McBay merely offers a list of possible avenues to what one infers must be essentially the same collapse. This is possible due to the latitude built into McBay’s definition of collapse, cited from Tainter: “collapse is a rapid loss of complexity.” (McBay, Keith, and Jensen, 2011) This definition is ambiguous enough to encompass all the possibilities, but it is also too ambiguous to adequately prepare for them. Collapse must be the collapse of some specific cultural and political system, one which people are actively constructing every day. The cause of the cessation or decline of this construction matters a great deal to which system collapses. Thus, each possible route offers at least its own possible targeted system, with vastly different consequences for the planet. McBay’s imprecision is both understandable and necessary (criticism would rightly be much harsher had he claimed to know the fate of industrial civilization in detail!), but it should be clarified with a caveat: collapse is not an apocalypse. Further, a more realistic and less mythological approach to collapse would inform an effort to constrain the specifics of possible collapses. This would in turn aid efforts from all sides to influence the course of collapse.
The only acute oversight introduced by this apocalyptic scenario regards time: McBay's scenarios play out suddenly – the collapse could be dated at least to a year, if not a day, and its consequences involve an immediate shift to a new stable state. The changes are drastic and very much noticeable to people in their everyday lives. Yet this is by no means the only possibility, and it is certainly rare in the historical record. Most of the examples used by, for instance Tainter, take place over the course of centuries. (Tainter, 1985) John Greer uses this evidence to assert that collapse is already occurring (perhaps beginning with the global peak in per capita energy usage in the 1970's) and that the process will take centuries, so long that the changes will be imperceptible to any given individual. (Greer, 2008) This possibility is never even entertained by the DGR authors. If collapse is in fact already occurring, then the role of activists may change in ways they don't account for. It should also be perceptible in many social metrics for which there exists reliable data, so the same program of information gathering suggested above would theoretically also investigate this question and its implications.
Derrick Jensen’s argument is satisfying and robust in many ways. He develops a theory that explains oppression and exploitation across a wide swath of historical and social variation. His analysis finds a route that would address the root cause of many problems, cutting through the often ineffective, easily subverted, and piecemeal reforms tried at by many less ambitious social movements. His argument is also ill-served by vestigial cultural baggage that obscures his analysis of indigenous cultures and his predictions about collapse. This introduces unfortunate intellectual flaws into his works: he is often too imprecise, he makes unwarranted, misleading, or false over-generalizations, and he routinely fails to ground his claims in reliable literature, even when such literature is readily available. These flaws cast doubt on Jensen’s claims and unfortunately hurt their respectability in academic and policy circles.
Jensen’s claims are not without merit, however. The relevant anthropological and historical literature supports Jensen’s most important conclusions. While there is a grey zone of ambiguity at the margins between the previously dominant social mode, the family level society, and the present all-consuming industrial one, the transition seems to have been a series of undesirable tradeoffs, made with great sacrifices. Anthropologist Tim Earle, who attempted to document and analyze this process, asserted that he “[sees] tremendous losses in centrally directed systems.” (Earle 1997)
Most critically of all Jensen’s conclusions is the immediacy and inescapable nature of collapse. While the future is always nebulous, ecological destruction continues accelerate every year, and there are clearly tipping points that we have already doomed ourselves to reach in the global climate system. Unfortunately, there seems to be little reason to believe civilization will change course in time to prevent a collapse. (Huesemann and Huesemann, 2008) Thus, Jensen’s most pessimistic and crucial conclusion hits frighteningly close to home, and it seems imperative that his message not be lost. The flaws in Jensen’s portrayal are unfortunate but don’t discredit his major insights, and mustn’t distract from their urgent social relevance.
References
Blunt, Zoe (2011). "Uncivilized". Canadian Dimension. Retrieved 19 May 2012.
Carter, Vernon G. Topsoil and Civilization. University of Oklahoma Press, 1975, Print.
Diamond, Jared. Collapse, How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed. New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2005. Print.
Earle, Timothy. How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. Stanford University Press, 1997. Print.
Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe. Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature. New York, NY: Touchstone, 2001, Print.
Forbes, Jack. Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism. Seven Stories Press, 2008. Print.
Greer, John. The Long Descent. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2008. Print.
Huesemann, M, and Huesemann, J, 2008. Will progress in science and technology avert or accelerate global collapse? A critical analysis and policy recommendations. Environmental Development and Sustainability, Vol. 10, pp. 787-825.
Illich, Ivan, 1968. “To Hell with Good Intentions.” Web. 30 May 2012. http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/haas/files/Illich.pdf
Illich, Ivan, 1968. “To Hell with Good Intentions.” Web. 30 May 2012. http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/haas/files/Illich.pdf
Jensen, Derrick. Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization. Seven Stories Press, 2006. Print.
Johnson, A. W., and T. Earle. The evolution of human societies. California: Stanford University Press, 1987. Print.
Krech, Shepard. The Ecological Indian, Myth And History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. Print.
Lahontan, Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce. Suplément aux Voyages du Baron de Lahontan, Oúl’on trouve des dialogues curieux entrel’Auteur et Un Sauvage de bon sens qui a voyagé [Curious Dialogues Between the Author and a Savage of Good Sense who has Travelled]. Eds. Réal Ouellet and Alain Beaulieu. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1990.
Krech, Shepard. The Ecological Indian, Myth And History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. Print.
Lahontan, Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce. Suplément aux Voyages du Baron de Lahontan, Oúl’on trouve des dialogues curieux entrel’Auteur et Un Sauvage de bon sens qui a voyagé [Curious Dialogues Between the Author and a Savage of Good Sense who has Travelled]. Eds. Réal Ouellet and Alain Beaulieu. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1990.
McBay, A, Keith, L, and Jensen, D. Deep Green Resistance. Seven Stories Press, 2011. Print.
Meadows, Donella H. Limits To Growth. Signet, 1972. Print.
MiningInjustice. “Winona Laduke (1/6) - Mining Injustice Conference 2011 - PART1” Youtube. Web. 5 May 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydq_qFGt8j8&feature=relmfu
MiningInjustice. “Winona Laduke (1/6) - Mining Injustice Conference 2011 - PART1” Youtube. Web. 5 May 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydq_qFGt8j8&feature=relmfu
Montgomery, D. Dirt : the erosion of civilazations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. Print.
Perlin, John. A Forest Journey: The Story of Wood and Civilization. Countryman Press, 2005, Print.
Tainter, Joseph A. The Collapse Of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Print.
Tainter, Joseph A. The Collapse Of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Print.
1
Though Highland New Guinea peoples in general have adapted to high
population densities in a remarkable and admirable way, with
perennial polyculture, crop rotations, and silviculture management
of Casuarina trees (Diamond, 2005).
2
Precisely why this is the case is ambiguous. It may be primarily
material – for many people even in less developed and economically
integrated parts of the world, the food, water, and medicine
associated with the state and capitalist apparatuses is worth some
amount of oppression, and this is even truer in rich nations.
Jensen argues that the reason is psychological – the oppressed
have a sort of Stockholm syndrome, in which they are trained to
believe themselves dependent on the oppressors.
3Of
these, the most obvious example is China – as Felipe
Fernandez-Armesto puts it, “China is still there, still growing,
still exporting influence, whereas all the other civilizations which
originated in a similar environment have vanished.”
(Fernandez-Armesto, 2001)
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