Deep Green Resistance runs aground on transphobia

I finished my academic "exegesis" of Deep Green Resistance last Spring. I didn't undertake to criticize DGR in order to justify inaction or to move away from its ideas. Nor did my investigation lead me to that conclusion. However, in taking a step back from the movement's rhetoric, I ended up taking time away from the frustration, stress, and self-flagellation that drove my commitment to DGR previously. In the liminal self-reflection of studying abroad last Fall, I internalized a lot of the realizations bound up in this process, and came to a position that is principally self-indulgent, because it wholly embraces what I want to do first and asks whether this is morally acceptable later. It's also the first step in a realistic appraisal of my own position and power, an essential palliative for my inherent predilection to the activist savior narrative, and one that helps me to stay centered in the realities of my own happiness and my own communities. My present plan is to stay put and work on urban farming and eventually start my own perennial polyculture farm in the vein of Mark Shepard's work, Restoration Agriculture, with the goal of supplying a nutritious year-round diet and rehabilitating some native organisms and ecosystems.

While I'd moved away from integrating DGR's unique strengths into my own life - I felt totally unwilling to spend my life as an underground militant - I still identify with their ideas more than any analysis and strategy I've come across. After I stopped feeling like I needed to personally defend the ideas (like I did in my Lawrentian columns last year) I stopped being too star-struck and invited Lierre Keith to speak at Lawrence. I had just read The Vegetarian Myth and was very excited about her in particular: her ideas fit in perfectly with my new ideas about perennial polyculture farming and its role in DGR's campaign, and she addresses a lot of the mistakes I've critiqued Derrick for on this blog (all of which I discuss in the review linked above).

I was very disappointed, then, when Lierre's planned appearance turned into a controversial clusterfuck. Her statements about trans people were brought to the attention of many people in activist circles at Lawrence. I was totally taken off guard. Since my interests ran heavily into environmental history, I never read any of the sources Derrick cited about feminism. This was an unfortunate lapse in my political self-education. The congruency of all forms of oppression, hierarchy, and violence is such a central principle of DGR that I took it for granted that "we" opposed all of them, even those that may be obscure, like that experienced by trans people. I was quite disappointed to learn that this was not the case, and honestly completely baffled. These two sentiments have only grown since.

After some deliberation, Greenfire decided to ask Lierre not to come a day before her flight was scheduled to leave. We decided that hosting her in our name, putting her in a position of authority, and inviting her into campus spaces would be a hurtful gesture to the trans members of our community, whom we love and respect.

I suppose it's understandable that DGR was upset by this decision. However, the vitriol and vigor of their response took me off guard. I was initially curious. I took it for granted that I'd made the right choice, since the support in Greenfire and other activist groups, people I love and trust, was essentially unanimous. I also knew that, as a person with cis privilege, I couldn't presume to know what Lierre's presence would have felt like for trans members of our community, and I had to listen to them when they told me. But I also trusted DGR's authors and members to be insightful thinkers and compassionate activists. The discrepancy and confusion inspired me to look further into the issue, and I read several books and articles recommended by a Gender Studies professor at Lawrence. This post is essentially the culmination of that investigation.

In discussions on the facebook post, DGR advocates made it immediately clear that they were neither interested in a reasonable dialogue with people they recently took for allies nor prepared to have a civil conversation about it. They made absurd illogical extensions by way of insult - saying that our decision was "silencing women," that we asked Lierre not to come because she was a feminist, that we were part of the "anti-feminist community" along with 'men's rights activists,' that we were interested in obscuring and perpetuating the violence done to women. They have also demonstrated a scary degree of ideological purism - the whole group has essentially closed ranks and stated that this is the official position of DGR, that there is no room for debate (or trans people interested in being treated respectfully) in DGR, and that anyone who disagrees on this particular issue (in their mind, who disagrees about their interpretation of the ontology of gender) is their enemy.

For a long time, this put me off from engaging any of them in a discussion. I have trepidations about posting this here, even though I'm not sure I'll do anything to make anyone know it's here, because I don't want to experience that whole shitstorm again. However, more recent articles make so many of the same points that I found in the trans literature that it suggests they're intellectually close enough to be reachable. Many of them have expressed a naive bafflement about how the radical feminist analysis is "transphobic" - "no one made comments calling for violence or used slurs against trans folk. No one said they should be denied human rights." The implied question there is a fair one, if you're interested in listening to the answer.

Advancing the notion that gender is a social construct is not inherently offensive (which is to say, radical feminists could choose not to be offensive, and the fact that they don't is itself offensive). As long as you're prepared to acknowledge that these social constructions are deeply internalized and don't treat the internalized gender of cis people as more natural than that of trans people, there's no cause for complaint - if that were the case, then DGR would be right to claim that they "merely disagree" with trans ally feminists. There are a couple of clear ways that this isn't the case, however.

DGR's radical feminism is rooted in a historical tradition rich in active attacks and slander against trans people. Janice Raymond pegged transsexuals as metaphorical rapists:

"All transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves. However, the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist violates women's sexuality and spirit, as well. Rape, although it is usually done by force, can also be accomplished by deception"

Other radical feminists claim that "'trans' is a myth and cult", that trans women are "simply men, trying to steal our [lesbians'] identity and culture." The assertion that trans women are some sort of undercover agent of the patriarchy, trying to infiltrate the women's bathroom to take the last shred of safety from women is absurd, but it's also dangerous. The defensive reaction it provokes puts trans women between the bigotry and oppression of society at large and the rejection and vilification of the people they naturally turn to for help and support - feminist activists - into a place where they are accepted by no one. Filisa Vistima committed suicide in part because of the hatred of transsexuals expressed in her Lesbian community.

Radical feminists like the DGR activists arrogantly assume that their analysis of gender is the only way to understand, critique, and undermine patriarchal violence against women. Under that assumption, buying into their ideology is a prerequisite to effective action on behalf of women, so it is a moral imperative to defend and propagate it. The very existence of trans people throws a wrench into the ideology. As I pointed out above, trans and radical feminism are not fundamentally incompatible, but integrating trans perspectives into their belief system would require an intellectual adjustment and a slight disavowal of some beloved historical icons in their movement.

Instead of making those adjustments, radical feminists have chosen the road of "traditional" marriage advocates, climate change deniers, and creationists: carefully cultivated ignorance, science denial, and opposition to the extension of equal rights. Having read a few good trans books (Julia Serano's "Whipping Girl" is by far the best, I found) with an open and respectful mind, the blatant misrepresentations and misunderstandings of trans people's experiences throughout the radfem literature jump out like sore thumbs. Radfem writers consistently claim that trans feminists treat gender as a choice -

"Eliminating gender assignments, by allowing individuals to choose one of two pre-existing gender molds, while continuing to celebrate the existence and naturalism of “gender” itself, is not a progressive social goal that will advance women’s liberation"

 - while the trans literature I read makes quite the opposite claim. The gender-normative pressures of our culture (which radical feminists are quite familiar with) make tragically many trans youth wish they could just choose not to be trans.

Radfems claim late-transitioning trans people as evidence that gender is not an internal, unchanging element of a person's identity. It's a misinterpretation to claim this as evidence of choice, however. Subconscious sex could change over time without any conscious decision about the matter. More commonly, based on Serano's experience, it seems that some trans people struggle to find the gender expression and identity terminology that suits them best. In such cases, nothing about the subconscious sex has changed. As with many homosexuals, late transitioning trans people may simply have remained "in the closet" until they found a supportive community, financial security, and the personal courage to move forward.

In denying the existence of what Serano terms "subconscious sex," radical feminists prevent themselves from grasping what being transgender means. Watching them fumble with these concepts is sort of entertaining. In radfem analysis, man and woman gender and masculinity and femininity are essentially the same thing, so they conflate a female subconscious sex (ie, identifying as a woman) with "identifying with" (ie, feeling an affinity to) femininity. Trans writers like Feinberg and Serano make it eminently clear that masculinity and femininity are not the same as subconscious sex and they covary independently of each other. Trans women don't transition in order to "appropriate oppression," to be objectified by men, or to behave in stereotypically feminine ways. Most trans women don't appreciate objectification and sexualization, and many reject stereotypically feminine behaviors and appearances for many of the same reasons a radical feminist might. Men who are interested only in wearing makeup and high heels are cross dressers, not transsexuals.

The thing that's really offensive and harmful about the DGR analysis, however, is that they in fact do advocate against trans rights. In a turn of phrase eerily similar to Christian bigots claiming that allowing gays to marry will destroy marriage, Elizabeth Hungerford claimed that "the legal reforms being enacted on behalf of trans* people are anything but respectful of women's needs - they deliberately override and disregard them." This echoes a familiar refrain: trans activists are anti-feminists, their rights are in opposition to women's rights, and violence against women grows in proportion to the respect and quality of life trans people receive. The trans rights movement is essentially advocating for full legal protection of the human rights of everyone, regardless of gender expression. Insofar as DGR doesn't fully support that agenda, they are saying trans people should be denied their human rights. Hungerford actually went so far as to write a letter to the UN Commission on the Status of Women asking them not to recognize trans people as such.

Because they see their particular interpretation of gender as the crux of feminist activism, radical feminists create a false dichotomy between liberal trans feminists and radical "trans-critical" feminists (in this paragraph I'm using radical in the sense Lierre explains in her liberal v. radical discussion, as opposed to the use tied to radical feminism itself). Delilah Campbell explores this dichotomy at length. She focuses on the liberal "identity politics" aspect of the trans movement, and the arrogance of the radfem position leads her to conflate trans feminism and liberalism:

Radical feminists, then, would actually agree with the trans activists who say that gender is not just a superficial veneer which is easily stripped away. But they don’t agree that if something is ‘deep’ then it cannot be socially constructed, but must instead be attributed to innate biological characteristics. For feminists, the effects of lived social experience are not trivial, and you cannot transcend them by an individual act of will. Rather you have to change the nature of social experience through collective political action to change society.

As a radical largely trained in political thought by Derrick Jensen, I'm all for radical critiques of liberal action and analysis. Insofar as trans activists have made such tactical and analytical mistakes, it may be helpful to offer a radical critique. But Campbell errs in assuming that trans inclusivity is incompatible with such an analysis. The appropriate alternative to liberal trans feminism is radical trans feminism, not radical trans-critical feminism.

It baffles me that DGR's otherwise intelligent and insightful thinkers can believe trans feminism and radical feminism are inherently incompatible. I can only see this as an example of intellectual inertia, rigidity, and ideological groupthink. To me, the solutions are several and obvious.

Humans are born expressing huge variability on a number of traits associated with sex and grow to express hugely varied and evolving combinations of personality inclinations. Our culture imposes gender norms and forces body and mind to conform with its standardized gender binary. As radical feminists rightly point out, this is a hierarchical model in our deeply misogynistic culture. Our culture takes individuals with various combinations of traits and forces them to embody, internalize, and reenact one of two specific combinations of traits: boys with boy parts, boy hormones, boy gender performance, and male privilege, and the opposite for girls. Women suffer in this system by design - they are its intended lower class. Women's place on the bottom end of the hierarchy is embodied in numerous material institutions - gendered division of labor, rape culture, and economic discrimination, among many others.

As the system uses violence to impose its gender norms, it targets most those who are least normative - trans people. (As Hungerford rightly points out, society oppresses transsexuals and other strongly non-normative individuals in the same ways, insofar as it can't tell them apart). Trans people are a sort of underclass, the "untouchables" of the gender hierarchy. They are so severely discriminated against that many can't even find their way into the bottom rung occupied by women. Trans women are particularly oppressed, since they face both the violence that enforces gender normativity and the violence directed systemically at women. The solution proposed by radical feminists still applies: dismantle the gender hierarchy. Stop it from cookie-cuttering away individual variation and stop it from creating material oppression based on gender class.

There! Not so hard, is it? It's radical, it's materialist, it treats gender as a social construct (though I find this answer simplistic personally and prefer Fausto-Sterling's body-culture interactive model), it is "a politically [useful] analysis [. . . that] illuminates the mechanics of gendered oppression," and it respects trans people and the oppression they experience.

(Parenthetically, the discussion of neuroscience brought in by Campbell is a red herring. It makes no difference whether the inclinations to different social constructs of gender are born hardwired into our brains or whether they develop over time through habitual repetition in a complex interaction with environmental cues we can't hope to understand. In both cases, the process of gender internalization happens to cis and transgender individuals in fundamentally the same way, and the gender identity produced in each case has the same ontology and the same validity.)

Theoretically, DGR is defined by its commitment to effective action against environmental destruction and oppression. It is a rapid response to an emergency, willing to make some sacrifices if necessary to achieve its overall goals. Practically, DGR occupies a place on the ideas market where extremism, ideological purity, and stubbornness for their own sake win converts and sell books. As this controversy has evolved, it's become clear that the two are at odds in a way that's tearing the movement apart, derailing its momentum, and severing ties with most of its plausible allies. Aric McBay reports leaving DGR after Lierre, Derrick, and other members refused to adopt a trans inclusive policy. Many others, including a large portion of DGR Portland's membership, have followed his lead. Lawrence is not the only venue to cancel DGR speakers - several anarchist libraries have done the same, including the Flying Brick and Bluestockings - and there is currently an active campaign trying to get every venue on Rachel Ivey's (one of DGR's most aggressive on the topic) speaking tour to cancel her event - so far they're up to 3 of 6.

For the sake of this one irrelevant, anachronistic, and uninformed belief, the DGR leaders are preparing to sacrifice the only radical environmental campaign with a commitment to effective militant action. That they aren't willing to make the intellectual leap that so many of the allies they presumably respect (like Aric) have made raises the question: how much do they really care?


Sources:

Campbell, Delilah. "Who owns gender?"
http://dgrnewsservice.org/2013/05/12/delilah-campbell-who-owns-gender/

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. (2000). Sexing the body, gender politics and the construction of sexuality. Basic Books.

Hungerford, Elizabeth. "A feminist critique of 'cisgender'"
http://liberationcollective.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/a-feminist-critique-of-cisgender/

Hungerford, Elizabeth. "2012 Letter to the UN on the Status of Women"
http://sexnotgender.com/gender-identity-legislation-and-the-erosion-of-sex-based-legal-protections-for-females/2012-submission-to-the-un-commission-on-the-status-of-women-the-legal-category-of-sex-and-understanding-the-status-of-women/

Keith, L. (2009). The vegetarian myth, food, justice, and sustainability. PM Press.

Kranz, Adam. "Why Lierre Keith is not speaking at Lawrence" https://www.facebook.com/notes/greenfire/why-lierre-keith-is-not-speaking-at-lawrence/10151564752024605

McBay, Aric. "DGR and Transphobia"
http://www.aricmcbay.org/2013/05/14/dgr-and-transphobia/

Scofield, Be. "How Derrick Jensen's Deep Green Resistance supports transphobia"
http://www.decolonizingyoga.com/how-derrick-jensens-deep-green-resistance-supports-transphobia/

Serano, Julia. (2007). Whipping girl, a transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity. Berkeley: Seal Pr.


Stanford Encylcopedia of Philosophy, Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-trans/


Stryker, Susan. "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage"
http://www.annelawrence.com/mywords.html


"Vanillaxlight." "Lierre Keith is blatantly transphobic"
http://vanillaxlight.tumblr.com/post/3748949864/lierre-keith-is-blatantly-transphobic

Final Paper

I never posted my final paper; it covers a lot of the same ground I covered in the blog posts, but it has some unique ideas and may be more polished and concise. Here it is, for the sake of completeness.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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)

Falsehoods and ambiguities

There are several easy critiques that Jensen leaves himself open to in the course of his writings. While I don't suggest that these are really problematic to his overall argument, I've come across them and want to point them out for the sake of completeness.

Jensen, in his nature-loving bias, occasionally misunderstands basic scientific understandings of the world. For instance, his concept of evolution is particularly flawed:

Endgame, p. 36: “Another way to put this is that any group of beings (human or nonhuman, plant or anmial) who take more from their surroundings than they give back will, obviously, deplete their surroundings, after which they will either have to move, or their population will crash (which, by the way, is a one sentence disproof of the notion that competition drives natural selection: if you hyper-exploit your surroundings you will deplete them and die; the only way to survive in the long run is to give back more than you take. Duh).”

The problem with this is that, even if cooperation and giving back to your environment is the thing that allows you to survive in the long run, it's still competition that's selecting for the individuals who do that the best. Jensen seems to have conflated the social-striving, rat-race connotations of the word 'competition' with the ecological one, which is nearly tautological - those individuals that survive best, for whatever reasons are most relevant to their situation, are the best competitors and therefore the fittest, the survivors.

Specific claims regarding indigenous peoples are misleading or entirely false.

Endgame: “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.”

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).

Derrick Jensen and more pronouncedly David Abram often suggest that indigenous communities, who spend so much of their cultural and intellectual life paying attention to their landbases, are much less likely to do things that will hurt those landbases; they are "sane and intelligent" inhabitants of the land. The stark contrasts between Alberta’s tar sands and literally any indigenous homeland make this a plausible argument. However, the situation is once again vastly more complicated than Jensen’s presentation lets on. While it's certainly true that native cultures understood/understand their environments intimately, there are plenty of counterexamples in which non-civilized groups have drastically altered their environments in ways they would likely not have done by choice. 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 quality (Earle and Johnson 1987).

Native Americans did respect and understand their relationship with animals like deer and beavers, but were influenced by the attractive offers made by European traders. The autonomous decision made by Native groups to trade possibly over-harvested native plants and animals in exchange for trade goods of real value to them should not be slighted. While disease, imperialism, and alcohol were exogenous negative influences on native land ethics, they do not mean that native communities couldn't and didn't make decisions that hurt their landbases - the introduction of Europeans did not remove all agency from Native communities. One might also ask: what good is a strict conservation policy and culture if it cannot withstand a rigorous test like this.

This does not mean that indigenous peoples are “just as bad” as Exxon-Mobil, nor does it justify their exploitation. Had he been more 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.

Premising his argument on the ecological wisdom of natives hurts Jensen's argument - it doesn't matter if all native peoples behaved the way he's advocating we act - just having some examples gives us the proof that it's possible and provides the light to guide us; making such blanket statements makes his argument superficially vulnerable to being undermined by counterexamples, even though his core argument remains valid.
Further, the usage histories of the terms civilized and indigenous are full of exploitative, misrepresentative, and out-right malicious arguments. As scholars, we can’t allow the backlash against such things to remove from consideration superficially similar intellectually responsible arguments. 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.

"Other Plans"

While Derrick, Aric, and Lierre are the activist authors nearest and dearest to my heart, they are by no means the only point of view on the issues they discuss.  In "Other Plans," Lierre addresses many of the writers she perceives as her counterparts, many of them identified with the "Peak Oil Community."  Our tutorial read a number of these authors - Ted Trainer, Lester Brown, John Michael Greer, Pat Murphy, etc.  I was unprepared for the degree of repetition among these authors.  They all seemed to be saying the same things: industrial civilization isn't that great (due to inequality, materialism, violence, etc) and it's also about to collapse (due to peak oil) and we should do something about that.

What we should do, in a mixture of preparation for post-collapse life and in order to prevent/soften the collapse, is prepare self-sufficient local food systems, sustainable local energy systems, local economies, control population growth, reduce inequality, spread democracy, etc.  The authors differ primarily in their emphases and predilections: Brown favors policy solutions, since he's a policy adviser, while Trainer, Murphy and Jensen see government as part of the problem.  Brown favors technological solutions like solar panels, while Jensen sees these as perpetuating the industrial system causing the problem.  Brown favors market mechanisms, while Jensen and Trainer are firmly anti-capitalist.

While there are subtle differences in approach, none of these really matter: no author can control what activists do with the degree of specificity that would be required to prevent both high-tech and low-tech solutions from being implemented.  The diverse group of activists has their own predilections and essentially everything will happen whether the authors like it or not.  DGR is the exception to this: they are the only people pushing for violent direct action against the industrial system.  It seems quite likely that their advocacy will have a strong effect on whether this kind of activism is carried out. 


However, without evidence-based future projections, these authors differ more in the ideological predispositions or their readers (as well as their relative pessimism) than in their factually falsifiable hypotheses and arguments.  While it could be a matter of academic debate whether or not we should engage in monkey-wrenching (though it's a complex question), the arguments, e.g. Lierre makes are more about ideology than about reality: if you believe capitalism is bunk, then her argument pleases you; if not, she never presents any evidence to sway you to her side.  This is perhaps because she sees this debate as too large and complex to adequately address here, as well as too polarized and overdone to be worth rehashing.  But this illustrates the problem in premising her argument on anti-capitalism: activists don't and won't agree on this question, and it is not as crucial to Lierre's point as she seems to think it is (presumably because anti-capitalism is both very important to her personally and because it was a key influence in bringing her to the position she advocates in DGR).

McBay seems to understand this when he points out that "even if you want humans to be able to use factories to build windmills and use tractors to help grow food over the next fifty years, forcing an immediate cut in fossil fuel consumption should be at the top of your to-do list."  He is pointing out that it's not necessary for someone to accept his narrative in order to agree on the task at hand.  That's not to say he doesn't fall into the same fallacy just as much as Lierre, however - he just seems to see past it for a moment of clarity here.

Thus, DGR's analysis does little to establish why it is more relevant and correct than any of its peers.  Lierre attempts to do this in "Other Plans," but her critiques are often superficial and appeal to the emotional and ideological predilections of her readers rather than presenting some compelling facts.  I happen to agree with her, but for that reason I think that her position needs to be defended and advocated with some better evidence, in order to distinguish it from competitors and defend the legitimacy of her plan in a more mainstream community.  The evidence may not exist or may not have been organized and interpreted yet, but it seems clear that this must happen before DGR becomes something more than a fringe group motivated by eclectic emotional and ideological backgrounds.

Edit 5/24/2013:  I've recently come across articles about psychological studies on worldview and ideology. It seems to be the case that, through whatever means, people have personalities and worldviews (like, deep worldviews) that differ fundamentally and make them predisposed to certain interpretations over others, and to certain responses over others. That is, you could say that there is a "moderate brain" and a "radical brain," (as Chris Mooney dichotomizes in his article on the Keystone XL fight - he poses Bill McKibben as his "radical" which is kind of funny here, where McKibben is juxtaposed against DGR's militancy) or even a "conspiracy theorist brain."  The research shows only the faintest suggestions about what might make a person have one of these brain types, but once they have them, it's tough to get out. If the research is correct, then DGR readers like DGR because it tells them a narrative congruent with their worldview. The contrast between DGR and its competitors in the apocalypse activism arena is simply a matter of this, the predilection of their readers. While there is some sort of "objective" difference between the arguments, the intellect is not the force driving readers from one to the other.

There is a very well-defined narrative here, and I literally have read dozens of books that make my brain light up in the reading of it. It may hold lots of elements of truth - and indeed, a major part of what I like about the narrative is that it must be presented with copious peer reviewed evidence, to "prove" the story is correct and make me feel intelligent for following.

Narratives

In the process of investigating Derrick Jensen's intellectual forebears, our tutorial read a few classic anarchist texts from the turn of the century - Voltairine de Cleyre's "Direct Action" and Petr Kropotkin's "The Conquest of Bread." These works are of course spiritually and often literally in line with Derrick's analysis and his feelings - though they just as often seem anachronistic and irrelevant. However, the most striking relationship between the two was their reliance on narrative. They seemed to agree that no activist plan could be established without a clear schematic idea of what caused the relevant problems. The analyses provided, especially that of Kropotkin, offer a sort of cautionary tale about relying on such narratives, since they are based on anachronistic ideas about progress, history, class relationships, among other things. They gave a narrative of the history of the world in simple, moralistic terms. Technical progress and hard work developed raw materials into riches but the greedy powerful people monopolized the riches and stole what rightfully belongs to all. They move on to a solution that seems obvious and easy in the light of their narrative: take the stuff back from the rich. The narratives ignore the vast complexity of the world and impose an artificial simplicity that precludes practical work.

In DGR, Lierre critiques millenarian cultists who believe "the end is near." But is DGR not just another one of those groups, believing, without substantial scientific evidence, that civilization will collapse within a century or two? Jensen's analysis lines up uncannily with the archetypal story of Christianity, as John Michael Greer points out in "The Long Descent." To illustrate: before the Original Sin of civilization, there was an indigenous Eden. Civilization emerged, nigh-miraculously, through the hubris of greedy men, 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.

Of course, Jensen's claims and the things he advocates don't become false simply by fitting the criteria Greer lays out. However, Jensen's overly simplistic historical narrative and understanding of anthropology reveal at least that part of his narrative is flawed, which calls into question the other claims he makes. What consequences does the narrative have for Jensen's factuality?

In general, there is a substantial amount of ambiguity about collapse in DGR writings. It is never specified just what politic system is going to collapse and how, and there are many possible paths provided that apparently all lead to the same end. 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. McBay’s imprecision is both understandable and necessary (criticism would 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. In our tutorial, we imagined an "Intergovernmental Panel on Global Collapse," to parallel the IPCC in collecting and interpreting data about the possible routes to collapse and which systems were most vulnerable, as well as how we might go about preventing and/or guiding and encouraging such processes.

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. 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.

Greer's alternative to Jensen's simplistic narrative is, if nothing else, a bit more humble. He doesn't claim that we as activists can change the course of civilization - he believes it is collapsing, and will do so over hundreds of years in a complex way as fossil fuels gradually run out. He sees it is a predicament we need to deal with, like death, rather than a problem we are capable of solving - in any direction. This makes sense, since the whole process is big and complex and we are small and don't understand very much - the IPGC does not exist, after all. His alternative is appealing in its calm demeanor - yes, everything's going hell in handbasket and we're killing the planet &tc, but there's no reason to freak out about it because there's nothing we can do about it. This is true for many of the same reasons Jensen and co. so often bring up to discredit the exclusive use of traditional routes of activism. To Greer, they just fail to mention that their model won't work either, for a variety of reasons - no one will actually do it, it would be too little too late, and the system is too large, complex, and full of inertia to be swayed by such a program.

While Greer's analysis has appealing aspects, Jensen's of course does as well, and the point I'm trying to make is that, without more specific information, we can't know which makes more sense - they are really more appeals to variations in personality and ideology. This is a problem throughout writing on collapse, as I'll detail in a later post.

Collapse?

The first volume of Jensen's magnum opus, Endgame, is dedicated primarily to documenting, metaphorically characterizing, and linking the manifold ills of civilization.  Civilization is so bad, we are told, that Jensen wishes it gone at nearly any cost.  Yet even he acknowledges that it would be infinitely preferable if the process of decivilizing were slow, occurring over generations, without abrupt disruptions in food supply, healthcare, education, etc.  A philosophy so driven by love of life as Jensen's does not easily condone what may amount to the (relatively) swift and gruesome deaths of potentially millions of people if not billions as civilization collapses and famine and disease become prevalent.

Jensen presents compelling arguments that show that this question is a red herring - that this is not the choice we face.  He asserts that "Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living." This is more or less obvious depending on what you think that transformation must look like, but it is clear that the rising prominence of "green" values is somewhat superficial and is certainly not yet on track to bring down civilization. The UN can't even agree on a decent framework to combat climate change, despite the massive purely financial intelligence of a mitigation strategy.  

Jensen goes further, to assert that a collapse of some sort is inevitable given expanding destruction and pollution coupled with growing affluence and population on a finite earth. This proposition is intuitive and widely accepted in some form, including by thinkers as seemingly mainstream as Lester Brown. It is defended very well by Huesemann and Huesemann here, who further point out that collapse is only avoidable through a reversal or stabilization of both affluence and population, and a contemporaneous increase in technological efficiency. This is essentially the "voluntary transformation" Jensen refers to above, and again, it seems increasingly unlikely. Again, Jensen seems to be well within at least one portion of the mainstream environmental movement with this prediction, hearkening back to such mainstays as the Club of Rome.

Integrating these two assumptions, Jensen reaches the reasonable conclusion that "the 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." Thus, the best thing we could do for everyone who will be negatively impacted by collapse is the same thing as the best thing we could do for everyone presently negatively impacted by civilization. Accelerating collapse is a win-win! While I don't mean to imply that this is some intentional rhetorical ploy, it is clear that thus clearing the moral hurdle of collapse's consequences makes it far, far easier for readers to buy into Deep Green Resistance. It certainly made the idea much more ethically palatable to me, and I suspect I'm not unusual in that respect. Without the "stick" of impending doom, anti-civilization activism would attract a far smaller audience than it has. It has bitter carrots.  

While I agree with Jensen insofar as accelerating ecological destruction must have drastic consequences for civilization, and insofar as no political path is likely to avert them, in my investigation, I came to have some qualms with the narrative DGR presents. These are focused on the historical precedents and anthropological basis for arguments about collapse, and about the substantial uncertainties and lurking apocalypse-style thinking that haunt them.

I'll begin with the anthropological and historical questions. I mentioned in my "Civilization?" post that Jensen's failure to consider the origins and causes of civilization is an unfortunate oversight with negative consequences for his analysis of the present situation.  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 address 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.

However, in this case, the flaw may be purely intellectual. When discussing specific narratives of collapse and making his plans, McBay cites Tainter’s "The Collapse of Complex Societies" 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), particularly as experienced by those who support civilization in their day to day lives. McBay translates this into a simple recipe for DGR: “part 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 (see, for instance, the befuddlement surrounding Chaco Canyon and new evidence emerging at Easter Island that challenges the neat and tidy deforestation story told by Jared Diamond). There is certainly no case analogous to the plan of Deep Green Resistance, in which a group of individuals within a society deliberately 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 probably not of itself a sufficient reason that we shouldn’t try.

I've read several good arguments that left me convinced that Aric's assertion that "the history of civilizations is defined by collapse . . . collapse is the typical, not exceptional, outcome for a civilization."  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.  David Montgomery's "Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations" is an excellent modern update of that story.  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.  Diamond's "Collapse" is an incomparable grand survey of historical collapses.  

All these sources use historical and archaeological evidence to make their point.  However, it's clear that 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 rule.

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.  I'll explore these questions further in a future post.

References

            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.

            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.

            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.

McBay, A, Keith, L, and Jensen, D. Deep Green Resistance. Seven Stories Press, 2011. Print.   

            Meadows, Donella H. Limits To Growth. Signet, 1972. Print.

            Montgomery, D. Dirt : the erosion of civilizations. 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.

Progress Report

I have started to see many of the conclusions I drew earlier in the term as unfair to DGR authors.  For instance, it's true that Jensen's schema works when you ignore the margins, it's true that McBay understands the implications of anthro (Tainter specifically) for collapse activism, and it's true that the civilization anthro arguments are irrelevant to determining whether to do collapse activism.  On an intellectual level, they are still unpleasant, but they are not really mistakes so much as (potentially poor) choices.  To some extent, I acknowledge that they just aren't emphasizing the things I'd like to see emphasized - they are simply different people with different perspectives on what's important.  To some extent there's also some legit intellectual faux pas's going on.  So gotta parse those out.

However, I am, atm, convinced that the collapse analysis (conclusions I drew more recently) is not evidence-based and is deeply flawed by its reliance on unfalsifiable opinions of the DGR authors.  This is a flaw bought into by all the other Peak Oil authors too.  While I'd still tend to agree with DGR, that's not necessarily because they have any better reason to be right - just that their prejudices and dispositions align with mine.  So this makes me less comfortable doing what they so or even advocating it.

summary:

Jensen does a bad job using evidence about indigenous peoples in his arguments:
- land use claims not necessarily true, misleading, unnecessary
- warfare and child/spouse abuse claims overgeneralized, misleading, insufficiently specific and caveated
- because his sources are this eclectic bunch of old kooky iconoclasts, not mainstream anthropologists who are studying this shit
BUT that's not so much a problem for his argument, because his civ/indigenous division broadly matches the anthropological consensus between the 99.8% of human history family level society and the dominant social mode over the last ~6000 years, which is his point

Jensen's argument about collapse is uncomfortably Apocalyptic
- the specifics of the 'collapse' narratives in DGR are still too vague - they don't lay out what collapse actually is in sufficient detail to overcome the legacy of 'the world is ending' bullshit
- Jensen/McBay/Keith don't sufficiently investigate how civilization emerged, which is supposed to hamper their understanding of how it could collapse
BUT McBay does take into account Tainter's understanding of collapse and apply it to activism (increase costs of civilization and create an attractive alternative)
 - though Tainter is not necessarily the modern anthropological point of view, and a single-minded acceptance of his view of history may be overconfident and/or cherry-picking on the part of DGR

- while I buy a lot of the claims DGR makes about what is and is not plausible for the future (as opposed to claims made by other peak oil authors like Lester Brown, Trainer, etc), I see that this is based more on ideology and personality than on evidence and reality
- failing to include evidence for their claims makes DGR no different from the rest of the peak oil books - they're just selling the same idea in a different style to a more radically minded audience; as long as their argument hinges on things like an acceptance of anti-capitalism, rather than a realistic constrainment of the possible/plausible future paths of capitalism, they will never convince anyone outside their ideological bubble and it will remain an ideological claim, not a serious social wake-up call

All that said, DGR still poses some major questions to the activist community overall that have not been addressed and responded to sufficiently, regardless of how "right" they are.