Deep Green Pipe Dream

Once upon a time, our world was a garden of Eden. Humanity existed in harmony with Nature, lived as She had intended. But then, out of our selfishness and greed, we began prising the planet apart for its secrets, squeezing and exploiting it like a filthy harlot. Thus we fell from grace, from paradise to empty lives full of stress and frustration. Our lungs are filled with pollution, our blood poisoned by toxins and our minds cluttered with useless information. Yet it has been Nature which has suffered the most. We have cut down the forests, soiled the seas with oil spills, even wrecked the natural balance of climate with our CO2-belching industries of torment. So many innocent animals have been perished in this unprecedented Holocaust. But the time of reckoning is near! One way or another, the end of this wicked world of ours is approaching, for in its unsustainability it has always carried in itself the embryo of its own destruction. The choice is ours. Either we go down in flames, dragging the world with us in vast ecological collapse, or we come back to arms of our Mother, let go of our rationalist hubris and tear down these cages of plastic and steel it has erected around our souls. Destroy the wicked industry and technology, go back to living as we are meant to live, and the paradise shall be ours again.

So, with varying degrees of passion and sophistication, argues the "back to nature" brigade of Greens. It shouldn't surprise anyone that such ideology has arisen in Western societies. Our way of life faces profound ecological challenges, and as city-dwellers we're for the most part as alienated from nature as we're ignorant of it. With the gradual disintegration of both Christianity and the Enlightment ideal of better world through material progress, an ideological vacuum has opened up in our culture. It was only to be expected that many have sought meaning beyond subjective human sentiments, and found it in this semi-religious nature worship, formed around old Christian concepts. Age of innocence in paradise garden, fall from grace giving rise to inherently tainted world, rigid human/nature divide and eventual return to grace of divinity after an age of apocalypse... it's all there. This uncanny resemblance should be a reason enough to perceive Deep Green ideology as a way for its adherents to arrange the dizzying complexities of modern world into simple framework, with easily recognizable good and evil, a stamp of approval for their chosen way of living from a source far above human reasoning, and refuge from the uncertainty inherent in our worldviews. Still, as it portrays itself as relevant to world we all live in, something that we actually should do, I will for moment treat it as such. And as such, it faces a series of increasingly insurmountable obstacles. Anyone actually trying to climb over them will inevitably fall and smash his foolish little face on the hard ground of unyielding reality. Questions of morality and personal preferences need not even be addressed -- there's no need to deliberate whether we should do something we cannot do.

The first and the most obvious is, of course, bringing down the industrial society. Its benefits are too great and many for us to easily relinquish. When so many of us are practically addicted to basically irrelevant consumer gadgets and luxuries, it is ludicrous to assume that in addition to abandoning them, people could be convinced to let go of that which is everything but irrelevant. To mention two most important: Industrial agriculture has eliminated the food shortages, making famines a distant bad dream. Modern medicine has tamed epidemic diseases to the point where they, though still remaining real scourges, cannot hold a candle to the pestilences of past millenia in any respect. In any contemporary Western society, the average citizen will consider the idea of returning to standard of living beneath that of Third World a sick, disgusting joke. Even amongst the Greens, the support is at best ambiguous and theoretical, no more than something to chat about while smoking a joint. Most remain dedicated to toning down and restraining technology and industry, in pursuit of some vague utopia where solar panels provide just enough power for their latte coffee makers and cruelty-free herbal medicines with a touch of yoga keep them in great shape to cavort in the balmy evening air of naturally balanced climate. Deep Greens themselves, if they're even aware of its existence, may in theory be ready to pay the price, but I have some serious suspicions on just how long that conviction would last while listening their children cry themselves to sleep with painfully empty stomachs or helplessly witnessing them die in agony of silly little diseases like diptheria. Then again, by the time the realization hit them, it'd be too late to do anything about it.

All things considered, it might still be possible in Western world. We cannot truly appreciate our freedom from hunger and plague. We have no personal experience of either, and not knowing deep down what our historical tormentors are like, any happiness this freedom gives us is at best a lukewarm, intellectualized scrap of emotion, rather than a deeply resonating feeling of relief. Avian flu may give us a taste, should H5N1 mutate into a form as dangerous as Spanish Flu. It'd be a brief, mild and not very disruptive to society compared to most pestilences of last millennia, but nonetheless, a very real taste of past. Yet even that can and propably will be seen as a painful failure of modern medicine, rather than an example of what it has cut down to a fraction. I can imagine Deep Green cadres growing with the passing of years, transforming from an irrelevant fringe phenomenon into a small, but ruthless and dedicated minority. I can imagine environmentalist ideology gripping mainstream thinking even tighter, crippling the faith of people in the industrial society's right to exist. And I know that whenever a fanatical minority bent upon imposing its will upon others confronts a lethargic, passive majority, the minority wins.

Yet, while it might be theoretically possible to seize West from within and tear down the machinery of demonik destruktion here, I very much suspect that it'd be impossible in China or any other developing nation that is genuinely developing. There, people have both relatively fresh memories of the thoroughly unromantic grind of poverty, taste of the fruits of material progress, and a realistic hope that future will bring even more of the same. There, the ideology of returning to nature will not find such a fertile soil in which to grow, and the majority will not stand passively mute while a bunch of fanatics wreck what they truly appreciate. Lecturing to Chinese that China should abandon its project of modernisation and superpower aspirations in favor of "natural life" is propably one of the few things that would make them laugh openly at your face. Any cells that could be founded out of bitter losers and drop-outs would be kicked into labour camps by secret police the moment they tried something. After all developing societies in the world would have enjoyed a few decades of prosperity, the Western-style jaded attitude to it may well have spread to all of them, but any incoming eco-catastrophe will arrive long before that happens. It's not possible to wait for so long. Neither can such societies be forced to relinquish industry from without. Anti-technology West dismantling its industries cannot wage war upon any industrialized cultures with high-tech weapons. On the contrary, West would be at mercy of their every whim. Perhaps Deep Greens could retain modern society for a while, wage a total war upon the rest of the world to subdue it and then tear down industries everywhere. But even if we make the wild assumption that West would be capable of this, how to prevent the others from rebuilding? Occupy the world indefinitely? United States has grave difficulties with controlling even one Middle Eastern nation. How well it would cope with a occupation zone hundred times greater, with a mission of throwing the locals into poverty and keeping them there, and without powerful industrial base to support its army? Genocide of all heretic cultures or Nazi-style targeted murder of their technocrats and intellectuals might do the trick, but faced with that kind of threat, they would fight back with terrible ferocity and any weapons necessary, nuclear warheads included. Impacting upon already weakened biosphere, such apocalyptic world war would cause the very ecological collapse it was supposed to prevent.

What it would take is a total catastrophe, wrecking every modern society beyond repair, but without damaging the rest of biosphere. A genetically engineered pestilence perhaps, with an incubation period of several weeks, infectious through aerosol spread and long before any symptoms appear, with mortality rate close to 100%. Quite possibly some group of self-appointed saviours will attempt this in the coming decades, once biotechnology develops far enough. It remains to be seen if such perfect killer is viable, but if so, maybe it could kill so many humans that our cultures would utterly collapse, and due to its long incubation period, hamper any efforts by governments and other factions to isolate in safe havens groups of professionals with stores of equipment and information. Maybe. There's so many ways such a plan could go wrong, and it has to succeed pretty much perfectly to achieve its aims. No seeds for the rebirth of Evil World Order could be allowed to survive -- they might begin to grow, and if they do, they'll do so far faster than the ecological damage inflicted on biosphere can heal even in the best of conditions.

That was the first obstacle. In finishing my deliberations on it, I came upon the next one: the problem of making sure that industrial society will never rise again. It is hardly impossible to damage the highly interconnected modern world to the extent that collapsing societies will draw others down with them, and complete recovery could easily take centuries, but we're looking for an end, not any fleeting hiatus. Perhaps our scientific and technological knowledge, the centuries of painstaking research, could be eradicated. However, the fundamental basis of modern world, the First Seed if you like, isn't science or any other relatively new development like that. It's agriculture. As hunter-gatherers, we lived as one species among others. Our societies were small, relatively egalitarian, and the work of practically every member was directed to gaining sustenance. After Neolithic revolution, we retreated from the wilderness into farms, where we reigned as masters above a small number of plant and animal species, and to the best of our ability attempted to keep the rest of nature out. This new way of living created much more food, making possible far larger, hierarchical societies, sustaining all kinds of specialists whose work had nothing to do with food. Kings, soldiers, craftsmen, artists, priests, philosophers... For some time, in the Deep Green dream world, communities could stay small and independent from each other. This would be no doubt helped by some extremely conservative religious mythology, demeaning humans and any attempts to reach anywhere beyond their destined role of groveling in mud. Yet, after global communications had broken down, cultures would again begin to diverge. Some communities would grow and subjugate their weaker neighbours, giving birth to first empires of that not-so-brave new world. Some communities would become less conservative, adding to their prosperity and power through innovation. Each small step would seem innocent and beneficial in itself, surely nothing like the supernatural powers of mythological god-imitators who savaged the world in their madness. Yet every step would be a part of the long march towards their resurrection. Eventually, a potential for the self-reinforcing feedback loop of economic and technological progress would come to existence. In most cultures, it would no doubt remain a potential, as it did in our history. We cannot know just how special case Europe was, and what are the propabilities for history repeating itself. The myths and ancient ruins would serve as a warning to some, but as a temptation and inspiration to others.

There is simply no reason to assume that we could retain agriculture and prevent industrial society from re-emerging. Our hypothetical man-made apocalypse would cause a massive die-off amongst our cereal plants, which are dependent on us for reproduction, but some isolated communities in remote areas would survive intact, and with them, the agriculture. Ironically enough, some of them might be primitivist communes of Deep Greens, quite a few of whom fawn over agrarian way of life. There is no conceivable way to reliably destroy agriculture without wiping out humanity altogether, especially not when many less sophisticated radicals are ignorant of it being the foundation of large-scale societies and the mindset of mastery over nature.

One could argue that the world of post-industrial age would be too depleted of resources to allow rebirth of industrialism. It is quite true that while we're not exactly facing any resource shortages other than Peak Oil, we're facing the imperative to develop improved methods to extract old resources (ie. deeper mineshafts to reach new deposits) and ways to utilize previously useless materials (ie. uranium suddenly becoming precious when fission power was invented). Both are dependent on society possessing high technology and continuing its development past contemporary levels. Any resurgent industrial society could not access the resources we can, but would have to be content with whatever can be easily scratched out of earth. Much of that stuff has indeed been used already, though there still is considerable amounts of coal and metal ores left. The necessity of relying on our leftovers and less efficient substitutes could easily mean that the regrowth of industrialism would be severely slowed or stunted altogether. A poor consolation, that. Large-scale agricultural societies have been notorious for causing considerable habitat loss through deforestation, overgrazing and consequent erosion. An industrial society going through its earliest, most inefficient stages is even worse. In effect, humanity would keep on picking at the wounds it cut into biosphere, constantly hampering its slow regeneration. This, of course, would happen against the background of climate oscillating between Ice Ages and warm interglacial eras. These extreme, fairly sudden and recurring changes in climate are a considerable stress on biosphere by themselves, with both cooling and warming phases driving some species into extinction and severely weakening many others. Throwing human pressures into the mix is a recipe for disaster. During the transition from the last Ice Age into the current interglacial, the migration of Indians into North America coincided with the extinction of most of continent's large mammals. If relatively modest migration of people was enough to push them over the edge, what manner of damage would the teeming masses of ravenous, desperate humans from agricultural empires inflict once their fields began failing with the onset of Ice Age? Who knows. Farmer doesn't change into an efficient hunter in an eyeblink, and anyway most of damage would be done to other humans in desperate struggles for remaining farmland. Yet it stands to reason that the stress from climate change would be made considerably worse by humans, once again crippling any process of healing.

No doubt some Deep Green thinks that this would still be better than the utter disaster awaiting us on our current path, and surely we can somehow abandon agriculture too, can't we? Perhaps we could, if we indeed managed through some magical trick climb over the second obstacle, return to hunting and gathering permanently. Perhaps we could mitigate this disaster by human hands to some degree. But let's take a longer view. Let's take a look at the sheer pitilessness of universe, the third and the most terrible obstacle blocking the path to saving nature by returning to her. During the last 600 million years, there's been five mass extinction events, each one utterly shattering the biosphere and forcing it to rebuild from bottom up. Assuming Earth will stay capable of supporting complex life for the 3,5 billion years it'll take for Sun to begin turning into red giant and destroy all life on Earth forever, and the rate of catastrophes stays roughly similar, it would mean 34 mass extinctions altogether. If industrial ecocide proceeds to the bloody end, there'll be 35. If Deep Green ideas are followed through successfully, one mass extinction out of thirty-five will be somewhat less severe. That's it.

We cannot save nature by breaking our industries to pieces, and neither will it deliver us the Eden of some foolish romantic's dreams. All such choice would mean is that we relinquish our chance to build sustainable foundation for modern society. We would throw away our chance to guard life on this planet from the dangers that lurk in the dark, uncaring universe, and perhaps eventually spread it beyond our solar system, there to thrive even when our Sun has faded away. Sustainable industrial future would of course necessitate gigantic increases in productivity. To provide at least the basics of material prosperity to all the billions of humans and more to some of them requires that we produce much more wealth with less strain on environment. This extremely difficult goal puts massive demands on human ingenuity, in developing advanced technology and applying it in ecologically friendly manner while avoiding any catastrophic mishaps at the same time. Sadly, the anti-technological, passive and misanthropic attitude of Deep Greens and many other environmentalists works almost directly against this. We cannot go back and we certainly cannot stay where we are now. We must run forward, fleetly and without stumbling.

Perhaps we could. As it is, I don't feel particularly optimistic.