Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse 9780739176887, 0739176889

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Eco-Nihilism

Eco-Nihilism The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse

Wendy Lynne Lee

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2017 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-0-7391-7688-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-7391-7689-4 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Preface: The Planet Doesn’t Need Human Beings; Human Beings Need the Planet

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Acknowledgments xiii 1 Ecological Apocalypse, The Pathologies Of Capital, Human Chauvinism—and the Improbable Desirable Future 2 Human Chauvinism, the Geopolitics of Climate Change, and the Pop-Cultural Ecocentric Solution

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3 The Nihilistic Rhetoric of Climate Change Denialism, Neoliberal Anxieties, and the Death of Science—Seven Takes

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4 Globalization in the Circulatory System of Exchange and the Death of the Nation State—The Fully Capitalized Planet, Five Takes

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5 Salvation Capitalism: Steady-State Sustainability, Techno-Utopia, and Planetary Metastasis—Six Takes

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6 The Reclamation of Human-Centeredness and an feminist Systems Approach to the Desirable Future

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Bibliography 411 Index 441 About the Author

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Preface The Planet Doesn’t Need Human Beings; Human Beings Need the Planet

Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road,1 tells the story of a dying father’s heroic effort to protect his child from starvation, violence, and disease as they struggle to cross the devastated landscape of a post-apocalyptic America. We don’t know what’s happened to bring about so tragic and terrorizing a circumstance, but we’re nonetheless drawn to the stark images McCarthy evokes and, though we work feverishly to deny that such a tragedy could befall us, we can imagine it. Indeed, for Syrian refugees, Niger Delta villagers, Northwest Kenyan pastoralists, Chukchi Sea coastal fishermen, Ecuadorian rainforest dwellers, Mexican fishermen, Pennsylvania farmers, indigenous Sengwer, the citizens of Kiribati Island’s thirty-two atolls, and many more, fables like The Road reek of a reality already poisoned nearly beyond repair and foreshadow future crises—environmental, economic, geopolitical, social, and moral—for which the prospect of recovery seems little more than fiction. Such crises are as predictable as are the implications of an economic system, namely neoliberal or conquest capitalism, whose objectives and governing logic are, I’ll argue, inherently incompatible not only with the just, the good, or the beautiful—but with life itself. Conquest capital devours and digests values, ethical, civic, and aesthetic, reducing each to that single value without which it can neither replicate itself nor grow: exchange. In so doing it generates a state of affairs that can only rightly be described as pathologically nihilistic: Capitalism destroys its own existential conditions through the wholesale commodification of the finite ecosystems upon which it depends. It cannot do otherwise and be capitalism. Hence, to continue down this road guarantees a future disfigured by the violence consequent on abject desperation and subjugation not only to domination by multinational corporations, but ultimately to more prosaic though terrorizing prospects— like thirst. vii

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The environmental crises that now threaten life on the planet more than war or terrorism, namely deforestation, desertification, water, air, and soil pollution, antibiotic resistance, virulent disease, species extinction, and the crisis that connects and dwarfs them all, anthropogenic climate change— simply mirror the bastardizing of qualitative reasoning into quantitative appraisal; the goal of capital is to achieve its objective in the least costly, most efficient fashion possible. To this end, it must convert all value into exchange value demanding, as a condition of its survival, commodification, growth, consumption, and waste disposal—without end. Conquest capitalism is not gluttony normalized as culture; indeed, diagnosis of mere moral vice is too easy. As post-Marxist theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argue, capitalism is the accumulation and profit-driven disposal of wealth institutionalized as culture’s premier virtue—the “culture industry,” or perhaps better: “culture” industrialized to manufacture its own eternal growth.2 A system not merely economic, but hegemonic with respect to its capacity to reduce all value to exchange value, conquest capital takes full advantage of whatever divisions of race, sex, gender, culture, class, and species are available to it for exploit as resource or labor, or to reinforce whatever social order is most conducive to its goals. It’s thus not surprising that a tiny class of mostly white, Western(ized), men identified with the global North and its in-country surrogates are systemically entitled to destroy forests, poison waterways, and disgorge greenhouse gases without effective constraint or culpability. And it’s equally ironic that despite the legion of euphemisms deployed to camouflage its destructive consequences, “development,” “Westernization,” “economic progress,” “modernization,” conquest capital’s immense ecological footprint effects the erosion of cultural and religious hierarchies, generating its own backlash in the form of, for example, terrorist franchises like Al Qaida or the Islamic State, organizations themselves largely dominated by men.3 As Karl Marx warned long ago, the trajectory of capitalism is the ever-widening gap between the wealthy and the poor, the privileged and the destitute. But what Marx perhaps could not have foreseen were the catastrophic consequences for the planet’s ecologies and its nonhuman citizens—consequences that threaten not only life on earth, but in so doing capital conquest itself. We needn’t have taken this course. Nothing in our DNA fates us to this chauvinism; “we” itself is a deeply contestable term of reference, privilege, and blame. But one thing’s clear as day: to continue this conquest is suicide. The dilemma of our time is not just whether we can change—but how. Governed by what principles, by what means, with what sacrifices, for whom, to what ends? Whether value beyond exchange is salvageable seems nearly as nonsensical a proposition as whether

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one-hundred-year-old hemlocks can be replaced, moribund coral reefs can be restored, or passenger pigeons can be revived from extinction: About September 1, 1914, the last known passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. She was roughly 29 years old, with a palsy that made her tremble. Not once in her life had she laid a fertile egg . . . [R] esearchers have agreed that the bird was hunted out of existence, victimized by the fallacy that no amount of exploitation could endanger a creature so abundant.4

The passenger pigeon wasn’t merely hunted out of existence, but rather suffocated by a worldview according to which the value of everything is a function of human interest. A philosophical disposition deluded by the fallacy that the planet and all that inhabits it exists for the use of the most powerful, exchange value recognizes not living or nonliving, organic or inorganic, but rather conscripts for its own reaffirmation a vocabulary in which everything can be exhaustively defined as, for example, “obstacle,” “resource,” “entertainment,” or “disposable.” For it, Chukchi Sea coastal communities, Ecuadorian forest villages, or South Pacific Islands are simply obstacles in one way or another to oil and gas exploration. Passenger pigeons offer “free proteins,” lowland gorillas, panda bears, Sumatran elephants, entertainment commodities. For conquest capitalism, the question whether a particular “business plan” will require, for example, compulsory evictions, or might result in the prospect of extinction or the destruction of entire ecosystems, is of necessity the stuff of cost/benefit analyses for the enterprise. That the isle of Kiribati will sink by 2080, displacing or vanquishing all of its human and nonhuman population is, for the oil and gas multinationals, simply the cost of that plan—a cost borne disproportionately by those who’ve had no say in the disposition of their existential conditions. That climate change is a key player in the Syrian drought figures into the boardroom decisions of such companies only as a factor in the protection of their Middle East assets—or in positioning themselves to take maximal advantage in fueling the war on terrorism. Even decisions to “save” a species from extinction are driven not by considerations of their contribution to biodiversity, their place in their native ecosystems, or (least of all) the value of their member’s lives as unique individuals, but by whether future generations will continue to generate revenue for that corporate enterprise called a zoo.5 To insist that conquest capital will privilege of necessity what profits it most cannot be read as overstatement or hyperbole: profit is not only its object, but its existential condition. Commodities form the oxygenating corpuscles of its bloodstream, money the bone marrow of its ligature. Hence, the object of every business plan is not merely growth, but to grow the body of capital forever, or die.

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This, then, is capital’s irresolvable contradiction: it must grow beyond what the planet can sustain, and it cannot do so. That the planet is a fountain of endless resources is a myth. No future worth wanting can sustain or even reform its inherently rapacious conquest for marketable commodities. No international law, regulatory strategy, trade pact, nation state, or pitch to global restraint can contain its pathological pursuit of exchange value. This book is about how the machinations of capitalism have conspired to our arrival at an historical juncture of environmental and moral depravity. It’s about the cultural dispositions, customs, practices, and institutions—ecological, philosophical, economic, geopolitical, and psychosocial—that maintain its normalized axes of power. Hence, it’s about just how radically transformative a revolution of conscience, courage, and resolve will be required to take the smallest step back from this precipice called climate change. More than anything, this book’s about why this insurgency must begin now, and it’s that claim which governs the selection and order of its topics. I’ll begin by articulating a framework, a scaffolding of arguments (Chapter 1), intended to support a set of critical analyses of conquest capitalism, as well as foreshadow an argument for just what an “insurgency” to overthrow it might look like. My aim is to show how the logic of capitalist enterprise is simultaneously responsible for environmental deterioration as well as social and economic injustice. To that end, I’ll evaluate a set of strategies aimed at defending, reforming, or salvaging capitalism, showing that insofar as each remains beholden to that logic none can offer a viable path to a sustainable, much less desirable, future. The upshot here is not, however, necessarily nihilism: moral bankruptcy doesn’t merely make the struggle to realize radically alternative ways of life imperative; it opens a door to their possibility. To reject the logic of capital is to reject a system of valuation that precludes all other values, aesthetic, civic, and moral; its repudiation can thus help us clear ground for recuperating, as Karl Marx might put it, their creative realization, or praxis. None of this, however, will be easy; every aspect of human and nonhuman life is permeated by the pathology of capital—and by the denial of that fact. So sewn into the fabric of the ordinary is its metastasis that we treat slurping water out of petro-plastic bottles as if we were sipping from mountain streams. We don’t ask where our sneakers come from, or under what conditions they were stitched. We don’t question whether there’s more than one kind of corn, or bananas, or rice, or soy. We think terrorism is about religion—not hunger or boredom or long-calcified desperation. We deny climate change as if we think whales are fish; we ignore it with even smarmier insolence. It’s against this backdrop that we’ll explore the philosophical geopolitics of climate change, including Christian Parenti’s breathtaking tour through the “geography of violence,” Frederic Bender’s depiction of Homo Colossus,

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Arne Naess’ ecocentric eight-point platform, Derrick Jensen’s call to blow up the dams, Walter Benjamin’s marriage of lawmaking and the threat of violence, Herman Daly’s sustainability economics, Martin Lewis’ technoutopian corporatism, Dale Jamieson’s critique of “reason in a dark time,” Elizabeth Kolbert’s history of environmental catastrophe, Jason Moore’s introduction of the “Capitalocene,” McKenzie Funk’s astute evaluation of “climate capitalism,” Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s review of the debauchery of science, Regina Cochrane’s view of “civilizational crisis,” Alison Jaggar’s analysis of debt in the global South, Greta Gaard’s critique of the United Nation’s environmental platform, Sandra Steingraber’s defense of “Mother Earth,” Naomi Klein’s demolishing critique of Big Green environmental organizations, Thomas Linzey’s “rights of nature,” and John Dewey’s hopeful argument for the aesthetic in experience—among many others. And, as will become evident, we’ll do so through a sometimes more subtle and more often less so feminist lens. We’ll also explore climate change denial, its “Truther” crusaders and their ideological objectives, and we’ll canvas some creative if perverse endeavors to cash in on climate instability by a “new” generation of particularly mercenary conquest capitalists. We’ll consider whether current instantiations of “Big Green” environmental activism can offer us much hope. We’ll travel to many ports, sweatshops, factory farms, abandoned fishing villages, desiccated farm fields, mining operations, nuclear power plants, Big Box stores, zoos, and boardrooms. I’ll argue that the capitalist necessity for growth that connects them all has gradually, but ineradicably, transformed the nation state into a subjugate of capital, and that this sets the stage for an even more virulent pathology that, in the name of “free trade,” embodies a form of hegemonic chauvinism dwarfing all of its previous incarnations. Metastasizing trade pacts like the Transpacific Partnership could not illuminate the urgency of our condition any more plainly. The insurgency must begin now—on the courage of conviction firmly anchored to reason. To that end, I propose the following principle: the only future worth the collective struggle to realize it is the one that takes the experience of the aesthetic, the ethically defensible, and the civic or public good to be of such priceless value that the prospect of despoiling the world that makes that experience possible is unthinkable. Indeed, it prescribes the precautionary principle to be the bedrock of that future. To have a stake in such a future is to cast one’s lot with every creature potentially capable of that experience; it is to take as given that erring on the side of caution with respect to what species of creature these are can only contribute to the diversity and stability of that world’s ecosystems, and hence to the good conceived existentially, globally, and oriented to future experience. A world committed to such a conception of experiential value must be more

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than merely sustainable; it must be desirable to the least privileged and most vulnerable among its inhabitants. It must make ample room for what philosopher John Dewey calls the aesthetic in experience. Whether any such future is attainable, I don’t know. What I do know is that the alternative is suicide, or rather—eco-cide. NOTES 1. Cormac McCarthy. The Road (New York: Vintage, 2006). 2. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment and Mass Deception,” 7. http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/AdornoHorkheimer-Culture-Industry.pdf. 3. RT News, “Pentagon: Climate Change Enables Terrorism,” March 7, 2014. https://www.rt.com/usa/pentagon-climate-change-terrorism-294/. 4. Barry Yeoman. “Why the Passenger Pigeon Went Extinct: And Whether It Can, and Should, be Brought Back to Life a Century After It Disappeared,” Audubon Magazine, May–June 2014. http://www.audubon.org/magazine/may-june-2014/ why-passenger-pigeon-went-extinct. 5. Sarah Zhang. “What Happens to Harambe’s Gorilla Troop Now That He’s Gone? It’s Complicated,” Wired, June 2, 2016. http://www.wired.com/2016/06/ happens-harambes-gorilla-troop-now-hes-gone-complicated/.

Acknowledgments

It is customary to thank all of those people, friends, family, and colleagues, whose patience and forbearance make research and writing possible. And there are certainly plenty of these folks to thank here. “That’s how books don’t get written,” I’d say too many times when I’d shirk responsibility for watering the garden, taking out the compost, bringing in the mail. So, for putting up with that and for sorting through with me a thousand conversations that mattered, thanks to my partner, Kevin Heatley. For letting me yammer only more or less coherently over beer about “writing a good book,” and for suggesting that long chapters are more digestible in bite size chunks, thanks to my buddy, Jay Nixon. For trying to make me feel better when I just couldn’t see the book-forest through the word-trees, thanks Mom. For prancing about on my shoulders, my forehead, and my keyboard, thanks to Quantum the cockatiel. And for waiting patiently (more or less) at the study door while I tried to find just one more right word, thanks doggies—Disney, Jenny-Pants, Ella-Mae, and Mr. Luv-Lyte. Here’s my big fat wish: that future generations might stumble into an old dusty copy of this book, read a few pages, and then laugh raucously at the idea that we’d nearly done ourselves in. For in that case, I’m either wrong, or we’ve learned something. Both are good.

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Chapter 1

Ecological Apocalypse, the Pathologies of Capital, Human Chauvinism—and the Improbable Desirable Future

THE PATHOLOGIES OF CAPITAL: THE END OF “ENDLESS RESOURCES” The Metastasizing of a Planet: Conquest Capitalism However much we ignore the fact that human activities contribute to the erosion of the planet’s ecologies, its biodiversity, and its capacity to support life; however much we pretend the resources upon which we’re existentially dependent are inexhaustible—clean water and air, arable soil, hydrocarbons, animal bodies, laboring human bodies, sugars—we know better. Like the smoker who knows her lungs can absorb only so much nicotine and tar, we know the planet and its atmosphere is finite, permeable, and increasingly tenuous. Like government agencies who specify “sacrifice zones,” relying on deep-going prejudices and bigotries to gain acquiescence to ecologically destructive industrial projects, we know that there really are no “sacrificial people,” that “other” cannot be squared with any consistent commitment to human rights or environmental integrity. As Naomi Klein remarks in “Let them Drown: the Violence of Othering in a Warming World”: [T]he thing about fossil fuels is that they are so inherently dirty and toxic that they require sacrificial people and places: people whose lungs and bodies can be sacrificed to work in the coal mines, people whose lands and water can be sacrificed to open-pit mining and oil spills. As recently as the 1970s, scientists advising the US government openly referred to certain parts of the country being designated ‘national sacrifice areas.’1

Whether we mean “sacrifice area” literally, for instance, entire counties in Pennsylvania conscripted by the gas industry,2 or figuratively, say, a Lowland 1

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Gorilla shot and killed to preserve the legitimacy of zoos, or as an ironic coda describing, say, the nuclear power plant catastrophe at Fukushima,3 we know that “sacrifice” isn’t as much sacrifice as it is surrender to a system within which “value” can as readily mean “disposable” as it can mean resource; insofar as “sacrifice” presupposes some original value beyond exchange, the reference to “sacrifice areas” is, by definition, oxymoronic. Put differently: we know that the willful ignorance necessary to deny the facts of our planetary violence is an energy intensive enterprise, one for which the ecological, economic, moral, and geopolitical costs are very high. We know too the cost in suffering is borne disproportionately by the “sacrificed,” and that those who benefit most from plundering the earth’s resources are rarely those, human and nonhuman, whose laboring bodies make the plunder possible. We must then not only deny the plunder, we must deny that we deny it. After all, while the scorched landscapes, crushing violence, and sorrow of fictional dystopias may be fueled by war, disease, terrorism, or nuclear accident, these are the safe versions of the apocalypse. Each in their way hint that we’re still in control; we can do something. Peace accords, better antibiotics and antiviral drugs, drone strikes, alternative forms of centralized energy production—that’s how we prevent the apocalypse. The trouble is that climate change isn’t a failed nation state or a terrorist group; it’s not contained, however tentatively, to populations. We can’t quarantine a warming planet; it doesn’t respect geographical borders. There’s no big wall that can keep it out. We can’t shut the planet down to recalibrate its factory settings. So, what’s required to deny climate change is, in effect, the denial that the planet is a planet and not just another manipulable commodity. We must pretend that the earth and its atmosphere is a fountain of eternal youth and a bottomless toilet, that everything sacrificed is fully restorable, and that every environmental crisis is like war or disease, terrorism or nuclear meltdown—we just need to find the right policy, technology, or bit of political will. And then we must deny that we do, in fact, know that climate change makes all this poppycock. As ecocentrist Derrick Jensen puts it, what we must deny is the fact that the “endgame” for an earth despoiled by human greed is simply the ironic zenith of a constitutive, yet ineradicably pathological, characteristic of capitalism realized to its predictably apocalyptic ends, and that to treat war, disease, terrorism, or nuclear accident as if these could be neatly separated from climate change and the human activities that cause it is itself a mistake borne of the same pathology.4 We know the truth: the cost of commodification to the planet and its inhabitants is immense. We have ready examples virtually anywhere we turn. Consider the fossil fuel industrialization of the Niger Delta. In his analysis of the adventures of Chevron, Shell, and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Nnimmo Bassey, co-founder of Friends of the Earth Nigeria, argues that



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The primary sources of conflict in the Niger Delta are the transnational oil corporations because their oil exploration and exploitation activities are inherently violent, exploitative and pollutive. Oil spills and gas flares are the greatest manifestation of violence against any community. The environment and the people are under a state of siege.5

Oil exploration, according to Bassey, is inherently violent because the people of the Niger Delta are existentially dependent on their intimate relationship to potable water; its destruction is their destruction. “In a context where the peoples of the region depend largely on environmental resources . . . potable water from the streams, creeks and rivers; fuel wood for energy; herbs for medicine; the land for agricultural produce and the creeks for fishing,” he writes, “environmental degradation has become a wholesale harbinger of death.”6 Among the names of these harbingers is Chevron: In 1999, a group of Nigerians of the Niger Delta region . . . brought a lawsuit against Chevron in US federal court. The plaintiffs allege that they suffered human rights violations, including torture and summary execution, at the hands of the Nigerian military and police acting in concert with Chevron to suppress the plaintiffs’ protests against Chevron’s environmental practices in the Niger Delta . . . First, two protestors were shot by Nigerian military and police allegedly recruited by Chevron at its Parabe offshore platform. Second, two Nigerian villages, Opia and Ikenyan, were attacked by Nigerian soldiers using helicopters and boats allegedly leased and/or owned by Chevron, and these attacks allegedly caused the death and injury of a number of villagers.7

That the U.S. Supreme court in 2012 declined to hear the appeal of a lower court ruling clearing Chevron of the charges is cold comfort for the people of the Niger Delta given that their environmental conditions have scarcely improved, at least as of 2010 when, although “the delta itself, some 51,800 sq km (20,000 square miles) of wetlands in southern Nigeria, is home to about 150 species of fish and other wildlife . . . [it] remain[s] endangered by spills.”8 But “endangered,” of course, is what describes the conditions for human beings, nonhuman animals, and the vegetative life of ecosystems everywhere and anywhere, as Noam Chomsky puts it, when profits are valued over people. As Suzana Sawyer explains in Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador: Between 1972 and 1990 the Texaco-operated Trans-Andean pipeline spilled an estimated 16.8 million gallons of crude into Amazonian headwaters—over one and a half times the amount spilled by the Exxon Valdez . . . Texaco invested minimal resources in maintaining deteriorating pipelines, and “clean-up” of

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petroleum spills often took the form of covering them up. With Oriente rainfall reaching between four and five meters a year, buried oil spills and inundated pits have resulted in alarming toxic seepage throughout the northern Oriente. The fallout has been fatal; industrial wastes from oil operations contain known carcinogens that bioaccumulate. Crude oil’s most toxic components . . . have been shown to negatively affect the reproductive and cellular development of all life forms, and lead to skin disease, reproductive abnormalities, nerve damage, and various forms of cancer among humans.9

It’s not hard to see how The Road winds its way through rainforest fragmented by petroleum pipelines just as it slogs its way through ignitable rivers of the Niger Delta. Whatever McCarthy had in mind, all roads paved by the demand for hydrocarbons lead to human rights abuses and environmental collapse.

Denial, Power, and the Myth of Endless Resources Many, especially global North petro-consumers used to filling up their gas tanks at the local Chevron, Shell, or ExxonMobil station, have mastered the capacity to ignore both ecological damage and human rights violations when these “others” seem far away. Why? Because though willful ignorance is energy intensive, it’s also necessary to sustaining the axes of privilege, power, and authority that define the relationship between the global North and the global South, and the relationship of the laboring populations to the privileged classes within their geographic spheres. What we know, in other words, is that even when (or because) environmental disaster occurs as near as the Gulf of Mexico—even when (or because) climate change knows no geographic or national barriers—the only effective way to insure that “we” will remain immune to the violent vicissitudes of a warming planet is through the maintenance of a social order whose axes are as deeply raced, sexed, and gendered as are multinational boards of directors white, male, and Western(ized). The myth of a planet whose resources are inexhaustible is as essential to that effort as it is essentially nihilistic. But while few remain unacquainted with the fact that “endless” is not endless, even fewer stand to benefit from keeping the myth afloat; the rest pay the cost of that lie. Whatever our point of departure, dystopian fictions like The Road or real and ongoing tragedies like petroleum pollution in the Niger Delta, pipeline destruction of Ecuadorian rainforest, or BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, each intimates in what the fully capitalized planet consists. Like the Enlightenment’s image of the world as a machine, inanimate and robotic, the fully capitalized planet suggests a paradise not lost—but sold; not merely squandered, but raped and enslaved. Ironically, environmental



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disaster instantiates in what the dream of conquest capitalism consists: wealth accumulation for its authorized and empowered beneficiaries without regard to the consequences for others. The key to realizing this dream is thus not, at least in the first place, material; it’s not hydrocarbons, corn, soy, plastics, sugars, or animal bodies per se. It’s philosophical: reason instrumentalized— mechanized toward realizing the conversion of all value into exchange value, all things into potentially exchangeable goods or services: commodities. The capitalist dream takes its objects, that is, any resource available to this conversion, to be endless. Whether such resources circulate through the body of capital as water or hydrocarbons, animal bodies or labor is relevant only to their capacity to oxygenate that body—to advance economic growth. “Potential” depends upon whether consumers, the lifeblood of economic “development,” can be created, their consumption cultivated and accelerated. What constitutes a commodity is thus simply a matter of convincing consumers that they are consumers, an achievement, Jeremy Rifkin argues, owed to the First and Second Industrial revolutions which “brought with them an all-encompassing worldview that legitimized the economic system by suggesting that its workings are a reflection of the way nature itself is organized and, therefore, unimpeachable.”10 According to this worldview, advertizing may be the best mirror of human nature. We are buyers of stuff, homo economicus, and in so doing we’re reassured that “endless” is endless, the globalization of capital is a natural expression of human being. In the world pathologized by capital, consumption becomes our most deeply felt desire and fervently held moral duty. It’s no surprise, then, that because the myth of endless resources is so fantastical a dream it requires an equally fanatical capacity for denial to stave off its nay-sayers. After all, the dream is premised on a lie. The planet’s resources are not endless; they’re limited, precarious, and increasingly polluted beyond reclamation. That we ignore the science that warns us every minute of every day about the costs of human insolence and greed is a credit to our psychic resourcefulness, but ingenuity anchored to cognitive dissociation will do us in just as quickly as a nuclear blast or an angry god. If there’s anything like a barometer of planetary equilibrium, it’s climate change whose effects threaten to disrupt the regenerative capacities of every ecosystem, whose denial requires layers of fiction to sustain it. “It is God’s planet,” says Rev. Jerry Falwell, asked whether greenhouse gas emissions were warming the planet’s atmosphere. “[H]e’s taking care of it. And I don’t believe that anything we do will raise or lower the temperature one point.”11 Falwell, like so many we’ll meet on these pages, epitomizes instrumental reason: take the object as given, then reverse-engineer the means to achieve it. If that object is endless economic growth plus the authority to preserve, augment, and exploit it, the

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means must be conceived as bottomless, inexhaustible, virtually eternal—or at a bargain basement minimum, seamlessly replaceable. What dystopias like The Road, or their real-time analogues, foreshadow are not merely the limits of our material resources, but the extent to which much of modern civilization, especially the global North, has wed itself to systemic falsehoods about water, soil, carbons, clean air, human and animal labor. This collective self-deception has only one outcome: the metastasis of the planet’s capacity to sustain life. Capitalism is thus not merely nihilistic, but eco-nihilistic: it destroys its own existential conditions in that it not only uses up all of the planet’s resources, it leaves behind a wasteland of what for it is unthinkable—the uncommodifiable; the dead. If such an account is right, what it implies is that the time to agitate for reform is long past. Paris Climate Conferences, carbon emission reduction initiatives, “clean” coal, industrialized wind and solar, green roof architecture, techno-utopian energy corporations, public service exhortations to conserve and recycle, eco-tourism—none address the philosophical essence of capital: the myth of endless resources. Hence, none can inspire a revolution whose objective only begins with the end of capitalism: a genuinely desirable future for those least likely to count as the beneficiaries of the status quo. The key to that future is also philosophical. Indeed, that unlikely revolution must begin by radically re-imagining a world in which anemic notions like “sustainability” are cast aside in favor of far more ambitious and risky ideas like that of a planet whose plants and animals, water and soil, bestow upon its human inhabitants not power, but epistemic as well as ethical responsibility. As I have said, we know better. What we fail to do is act on what we know. The Niger Delta is sustainable; so too Ecuador’s stunted forests or the Gulf of Mexico’s blighted waters. But a world that’s desirable—that requires much more. Whether we’re up to the task is as doubtful as it’s likely that we’ve already gone too far. But even denial has a shelf life.

THE RECLAMATION OF HUMANCENTEREDNESS FROM HOMO COLOSSUS “Deepwater Capitalism” and Its Deeper Roots in Human Chauvinism However we comprehend this bleak and violent picture of the human-dominated world, we can’t escape the fact that we—or some subset of this “we”— has had a substantive hand in creating it. Indeed, if we take the behavior of the multinationals as any indication, we seem pathologically unable to give up the myth of endless resources, yet we act with equal urgency as if we do



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get it that the well is about to run dry. We cultivate our cognitive dissonance and impudently deny that fact. Consider what Quincy Saul of Counterpunch calls “deepwater capitalism.” Recounting the worst oil spill in U.S. history, the BP/Anadarko catastrophe in the Gulf Coast, Saul describes the “death gyres” or rip currents that collect the bodies of dead marine animals: “the scale of death was so great it still seems impossible to quantify—estimates of the number of birds killed within the first hundred days ranges between 100,000 and one million.”12 But the real nightmare was offshore, as riptides and hired hands collected thousands of animal carcasses into “death gyres.” Saul asks whether we’ve learned any valuable lesson that might prevent future drilling disasters, but he concludes that, if anything, the oil and gas industry has doubled down. BP, ExxonMobil, Shell, Anadarko, and Chevron are each engaged in a kind of get-there-first death-match with every other big energy company for the last of the hydrocarbons: “A 2010 report . . . estimated that big oil would spend $387 billion on offshore drilling between 2010 and 2014–33% more than over the previous five years . . . building 20,000 offshore wells in ever deeper waters . . . by April 2011 . . . deep drilling in the Gulf, by BP and others, was back online.”13 In what Saul calls “the normalcy of the infinite war on mother earth,” he spells out the instrumental reasoning behind our resigned acquiescence not only to continued deepwater drilling, but to mountain top removal, hydraulic fracturing, and tar sands mining: “Big oil cannot be too strictly regulated or restricted—or punished. Their alibi is the world-system; the modern way of life . . . ” the penalty “has to be high enough that companies of this size won’t let a spill like this ever happen again. But, again, not so high as to be ruinous to their operation.”14 The problem is that spills like the Deepwater Horizon’s, its millions of plant and animal deaths, its eleven unrecovered human bodies will happen again; in fact, it already has. As reported by Reuters, May 12, 2016: A 2,100-barrel oil spill in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico forced Royal Dutch Shell on Thursday to shut in all wells that flow to its Brutus platform, federal regulators said. The U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) said a 2 mile by 13 mile (about 3 km by 21 km) sheen was visible in the sea about 97 miles off the Louisiana coast. About 88,200 gallons was reportedly released from the pipeline, the Coast Guard said, adding the source of the discharge was reported as secured. The sheen is near Shell’s Glider Field, a group of four subsea wells whose production flows through a subsea manifold to the Brutus platform, which sits in water with a depth of 2,900 feet.15 It’s not the fact of oils spills like these, but the sheer redundancy of their repeated performance that makes this “modern way of life” pathological in

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the strictest sense of the term; the perversion of human interests, moral and aesthetic values, and the human capacity for civilization on behalf of the metastasizing transformation of instrumental reason into conquest capitalism, now hegemonic multinational “Free Trade” capitalism. The human-centeredness which describes a set of perceptual, epistemic, psychological, somatic, and affective capacities of a species of creature, homo Sapiens, has long been conscripted to the prescriptive “world system,” the human chauvinism of what philosopher Frederic Bender calls Homo Colossus,16 the lethal result, Saul’s deepwater of human destitution: Deepwater capitalism is a terminal stage in the global metastasis of a social cancer we call the economy. Capitalism has gone to deep water, as it has gone to the hearts of mountains and into the depths of the earth. Offshore oil drilling is but one horseman, in a world-wide apocalypse of extreme resource extraction. The others are fracking, tar sands, and mountaintop removal. If imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, then today’s resource extraction apocalypse reveals the highest stage of imperialism—genocide and extinction.17

A gritty literal truth about the ecological apocalypse is that it may be too late to mitigate, Saul’s “global metastasis” is a metaphor for instrumental reason turned to mercenary justification for rapacious consumption. Just as Ron Hirschbein shows concerning the incongruities of waging war as a means for achieving peace, or utilizing drone strikes to protect a population, what’s required to maintain the myth of endless resources is either cognitive dissonance, the denial that “endless” isn’t endless, or, as Hirschbein proposes, cognitive insolence, the decision not to care.18 We need look no farther for an illustration of this potent cognitive combination than the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and its GOP nominee Donald Trump whose “America First!” energy platform epitomizes dissonance and insolence, often in the same sentence. Back in November 2012, for example, Trump tweeted: “[t]he concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”19 That is, in one tweet, Trump denies climate change and implies that we needn’t care because it was a hoax. He repeats this view in a 2016 stump speech in North Dakota, a central player in the U.S. fracking revolution, when in answer to a question about how he’d address climate change as president, he replied that “[w]e’re going to deal with real environmental challenges, not the phony ones we’ve been hearing about.” He goes on to claim that in his first 100 days, he’ll pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, rescind President Obama’s climate rules, defund the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), deregulate the fossil fuel industry, revitalize the carbon extraction industries, and “save” coal. “Under my presidency, we will accomplish



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complete American energy independence,” he said. “We will become totally independent of the need to import energy from the oil cartel or any nation hostile to our interest.”20 Setting aside the cornucopia of criticism concerning his basic understanding of the geopolitics of energy production and consumption, what Trump’s meteoric rise to power shows is not only his capacity to swim comfortably in the deeply fouled waters of Saul’s deepwater capital, but the even more horrifying extent to which his army of true-believers share in the dissonance of his climate change denial and the willful ignorance of an energy “policy” premised neither on science nor on astute political analyses about what slogans like “energy independence” might mean. If, in other words, “[d]eepwater capitalism is a terminal stage in the global metastasis of a social cancer we call the economy,” the emergence of candidates for high office like Trump must be understood as symptomatic of the fact that this “social cancer” now infects the very ways in which many Americans conceive themselves as citizens, workers, voters, and human beings. Trump personifies everything a conquest capitalist could wish for—at least insofar as “making America great again!” means liberating the fossil fuel industry to unregulated extraction and production, freeing some Americans to guilt-free petro-consumption. The only costs of “making America great” are the existential conditions of a survivable environment, one from which Trump and the millions of the “Trump Tribe” apparently believe they’re exempt.21 They’re not, of course; and some, for example, families who lose their homes to the machinations of eminent domain in the rush to build natural gas pipeline,22 or others whose children suffer from asthma associated with compressor station ozone and VOC (Volatile Organic Compound) emissions, will pay a steep price for American “energy independence” regardless their capacity for denial.23 Sporting his “Trump for president” baseball cap, “Regular Joe” may get to drive his gas-guzzling pickup to Outback Steakhouse for a few more years, but he and his family are likely to find cold comfort in the face of a skin cancer diagnosis caused by increased UV exposure.24 “Theories of Human Hierarchy” and the Axes of Human Chauvinism America’s Regular Joes and Josies are, of course, the lucky ones. The less lucky, the ones less likely to be seen at a Trump Rally, or, despite economic class differences, on the board of directors at Chevron, in the Pentagon War Room, or at a Koch Brothers dinner party are, as Klein puts it, the black, brown, female, or animal lives of “others” who make up the throngs of refugees escaping not merely terrorism but drought in Syria,25 not merely poverty but hurricane in Louisiana, not merely hunger but desertification in Southern and East Africa:

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A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centres, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat. When that happens, theories of human hierarchy—that we must take care of our own first—will be marshalled to rationalise these monstrous decisions. We are making this rationalisation already, if only implicitly. Although climate change will ultimately be an existential threat to all of humanity, in the short term we know that it does discriminate, hitting the poor first and worst, whether they are abandoned on the rooftops of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina or whether they are among the 36 million who according to the U.N. are facing hunger due to drought in Southern and East Africa.26

Klein’s right that these “theories of human hierarchy” permit rationalization like “we must take care of our own first.” But there’s so much more to this form of human chauvinism. Such hierarchies provide a structure whose axes of race, sex, gender, species, and ecosystem are ready-made for the advantage of capital, but they’re not relevant only to the black and brown of human lives. Their deep-going historical roots “justify” slavery, sex-trafficking, compulsory eviction, and labor abuses—but also zoos, industrial animal experimentation, factory farming, deep-sea drilling, mountain top removal, tar sands extraction, and deforestation. We not only cannot afford to merely “take care of our own first,” we’re all in this together, and that includes ecosystems and nonhuman animal lives we’ll never know or experience. “Theories of hierarchy” are just one way to define what counts as “our own,” and therefore that about which we are or aren’t required to care. But if we do not come to comprehend the intimacy and complexity of these connections, and that the pathology of conquest capitalism is to exploit whatever’s available to it, we’ll continue to privilege the ways in which environmental crises endanger human populations. And that is as chauvinistic a version of “our own” as is discrimination along the rails of race, sex, gender, or species. Put differently: given conquest capital’s compulsion to drive us to the ecological and geopolitical ruin of climate instability, what must be recuperated is our capacity for reason. No doubt, this reads like a laughably disappointing understatement. But reason is what the expropriation of human-centeredness by human chauvinism has suffocated; it is the single tool that makes possible revaluing the desirable in what we hope for the future. It’s what, corrupted by objectives already given as profit, can do no other than find the most efficient means to achieve that objective. Reason is thus not instrumental reason; it’s the courage to take nothing as given other than a premise fundamental to our existential condition: as far as anyone knows, we’re dependent on one planet whose resources are finite and whose complex, diverse, and interconnected biota are all likely endangered



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by anthropogenic climate change. It is the foundation of the precautionary principle. Any future likely to be experienced as desirable by human beings, or any species of creature so capable, is possible only if we act to mitigate its effects. But if we do not proceed in recognition of the intimacy of our interconnection, we will fail, and that failure will ultimately amount to suicide along every axis of our chauvinism, no matter how our hierarchies are configured. My objective is therefore not reform, but revolution. Regardless culture, historical moment, religion, or geography, at the core of our human, all too human, epistemic disposition beats the idea that reason can be utilized to solve problems, confront crises, disentangle dilemmas. We must believe we’re capable of compassion, forbearance, and the appreciation of beauty and diversity. We cannot forego the claim that the future matters to us. Or we can, but then we may as well forego even the most ordinary activities that make our lives better: eating, bathing, sleeping, sex, children, dogs and cats, watching the sun go down. Reason can outfit human-centeredness to something other than chauvinism’s myopic, predatory, materially-driven, short-sighted self-interest; if not, it’s still our moral duty to pretend otherwise because to do anything else in the face of climate change condemns the future to little but a ghost dance. However metastasized our economic condition, whatever ecological and social damage has been achieved through our pathological quest for growth, it’s still possible to recuperate and revalue a human being who’s not merely a conqueror, laborer, consumer, consumed, or disposable, but instead a creator of value, moral and aesthetic, for whom the future matters, and for whom it’s possible to see that value in light of the complex and interconnected ligature of its ecologically dependent life. This is a rough road; it will require far more than mere tenacity. But we do have other models, other “patterns of civilization,” other ways of life we could cultivate through foresight, a collective conscience, and will, and these don’t require commitment to an unrealistically romanticized “return” to a primitive antitechnological subsistence. Moreover, even if we really are the violent greed-driven creatures reflected in the damage we’ve done to the planet, it doesn’t matter because we cannot afford to believe it and live. If we cannot be moved to care about what makes our experience worthwhile and the conditions that make it possible, then we are beyond reclamation and we have always been so. Even if the vision of reason I’m preparing to advocate is a fiction, if it offers a plausible, compassionate, emancipatory, aesthetically rich, and just possible future, then however arduous and risky is the work to achieve it, we must try. Indeed, however challenging are the questions it raises about difficult subjects like whether, in the face of the climate crisis, we ought to forsake capitalism, resort to violent protest, abandon democratic decision-making, favor unified global governance—it’s now or never. The nihilistic alternative is unthinkable,

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continued denial is a grave for our children, and the enfranchisement of this “we” could not be more crucial to a future promising something more than the merely sustainable. As McCarthy writes in the final passages of The Road, just as the child is preparing to leave the three-day dead body of his father: He walked back into the woods and knelt beside his father. He was wrapped in a blanket as the man had promised and the boy didn’t uncover him but he sat beside him and he was crying and he couldn’t stop. He cried for a long time. I’ll talk to you every day, he whispered. And I won’t forget. No matter what. Then he rose and turned and walked back out to the road.27

The simple facts are that there is no turning back from climate change; nor will any credible alternative to our current dispossession of the ecological conditions of human and nonhuman life stand a chance without revolutionary change in the ways we regard that life. We must find another way. As critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno observed in Dialectic of Enlightenment, “[e]nlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.”28 It’s a good question, of course, who besides (mostly white and/or Western(ized)) men, are included in Enlightenment liberation, and who has paid the price for their entitlement. But that’s just the point: if “disaster triumphant” is the zenith of Enlightenment sovereignty, it’s no wonder we find ourselves caught between the rock of embracing Enlightenment reason conscripted to the pathologies of capital and the hard place of its disastrous consequences for the planet. As Regina Cochrane recounts in her essay “Climate Change, Buen Vivir, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” “the disenchantment [and subsequent domination] of nature was necessary in order to free humans not only from ‘necessity and scarcity’ but also—and primarily—from pre-modern bondage to fate, idolatry, and a social mastery enforced via mythic legitimization of the status quo.”29 The ironic price, in other words, of our liberation from “necessity and scarcity,” but also from ignorance and religion, is knowledge put to a technologically brokered divorce of human need from nonhuman nature, now disenchanted and de-mythologized.30 The crucial tool of this divorce is instrumental reason, ideally suited not only to human liberation from scarcity, but to capitalism. The Heteropatriarchal Footprint of Homo Colossus In stark contrast to what we might envisage as the ecologically oriented citizen of the sustainable future, that invention of capital, Homo colossus, is defined by boundless and immediate want. According to the Global Footprint Network, “an international think tank that provides Ecological Footprint



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accounting tools to drive informed policy decisions in a resource-constrained world,” we exhaust “the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste,” and some, the “debtor nations” of the “global North” use up and waste more by orders of magnitude than their neighbors in the “global South.”31 Put simply, the trouble is that unlimited consumption requires endless resources, which in turn requires the labor-intensive and/or technological means by which to extract, grow, or otherwise produce them. This in turn requires innovation and expertise to maximize productivity, and that requires capital investment. As that investment becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of a few multinational corporate ventures, the consumption balance between the wealthy global North and the “developing” global South tips ever more precariously out of control. And on it goes. Conquest capitalism: want begetting want for the many, consumption begetting consumption for some, wealth begetting wealth for a tiny few, and all of it manufactured for a global culture industry whose apparently inevitable if denied “product” is environmental apocalypse. The central question is whether it had to be this way. From the point of view of instrumental reason, human-centeredness is simply an expedient pretext for continuing capital conquest; we’re inherently chauvinistic, and “progress” or “development” justify our narrative for an expanding global culture devoted to increasing consumption. Yet, however much we ignore and deny it, we’re caught between acculturated want and the hard limits of a suffocating planet. “Unfortunately,” remarks Bender, “the ecosphere can neither provide the resources needed for unlimited production, nor can it absorb the waste economic growth generates. The infinite expansion of anthropogenic impact on the planet is impossible.”32 The irony, then, is that the very logic that liberates us from the hands of fate, religion, and tribal despots is the same as that responsible for the capitalist machinations that have generated the conditions for grotesque social and economic injustice, pollution, species loss, and climate change; what liberates enslaves, what frees us threatens eco-cide. Klein captures the point when, in This Changes Everything, she observes that “[t]he core problem [concerning how we produced global warming] was that the stranglehold that market logic secured over public life in this period [the late twentieth century] made the most direct and obvious climate responses seem politically heretical.”33 “Market logic” is, of course, instrumental reason fully neoliberalized and ready for battle against any and all government action cast as “Communist.” “Direct and obvious” includes government subsidies for alternative and/or decentralized energy cast by the capitalist as “heretical” “interference in the ‘free’ market. Kline laments this option has been lost on American environmental activists who, failing to demand more from government, have “wasted precious decades attempting to make the square peg of the climate crisis fit into the round hole of deregulated

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capitalism, forever touting ways for the problem to be solved by the market itself.”34 The endless parade of examples offered by the Global Footprint Network surely make it seem as though we can’t do otherwise than to despoil our own nests—and the nests of countless others in the process of our chauvinistic excess. In short, we’re a bit like the child who can’t bring himself to leave the body of his dead father; we don’t seem to understand the position we’re in, and we don’t seem to comprehend the logic that got us here. We moralize, hand-wring, and fist-clench about “Mother earth,” but without a radical reevaluation of what sorts of creatures we are and to what ends we have put our capacity for goal-directed reason, this is all just self-righteous whining before we head out for bacon burgers, ignoring as a matter of Western birthright the cost of our consumption and waste to others who remain out of sight and out of mind. But the facts are clear: we can no more afford the market-logic mythology of “endless” production and consumption than can the child from The Road afford to remain by his father’s body—and for largely the same reasons. Given the facts of climate change, the Global Footprint Network’s reference to “overshoot” is actually just a polite way of pointing out that continuing the capitalist campaign amounts to a nihilistic death-wish: [t]he result [of overshoot] is collapsing fisheries, diminishing forest cover, depletion of fresh water systems, and the build up of carbon dioxide emissions, which creates problems like global climate change . . . Overshoot also contributes to resource conflicts and wars, mass migrations, famine, disease and other human tragedies—and tends to have a disproportionate impact on the poor, who cannot buy their way out of the problem by getting resources from somewhere else.35

How it is that American (or any) environmental activists fail to grasp the gravity of this dilemma hints at the extent to which we’ve failed to grasp the significance of its intimate relationship to social and economic justice. Then again, perhaps it’s not that surprising. As feminist philosopher Greta Gaard documents in her essay “Ecofeminism and Climate Change,” disregard for the implications of environmental issues, including climate change, for the developing world—and especially for developing world women—is global, and she offers a telling example: “[w]hen the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) organized the World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet in Miami, Florida,” in 1991, “it was seen as an opportunity to build on the gains of the United Nations Decade for Women.” (ECC, p. 4).36 But, Gaard continues, “for many of those sitting in attendance . . . it was not clear how our views shaped or even contributed to the process of agenda formation.”37



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Indeed, though many women (and some men) have worked tirelessly to gain a place at the table of United Nations policy-making, and many others, like Gaard, have advocated for more comprehensive representative analyses of the relationship between environmental crisis, social and economic injustice, and “development,” the conditions of the developing world continue to deteriorate on virtually all fronts: In developing countries, women living in poverty bear the burden of climate change consequences, as these create more work to fetch water, or to collect fuel and fodder, duties traditionally assigned to women. When households experience food shortages, which occur regularly and may become more frequent due to climate change, women are the first to go without food so that children and men may eat. As rural areas experience desertification, decreased food production, and other economic and ecological hardships, these factors prompt increased male out-migration to urban centers with the promise of economic gain and wages returned to the family; these promises are not always fulfilled. In the short term, and possibly long term as well, male out-migration means more women are left behind with additional agricultural and household duties, such as caregiving. These women have even fewer resources to cope with seasonal and episodic weather and natural disasters.38

What this passage makes plain is that while the translation of instrumental reason into market logic disproportionately benefits some at great cost to others, it’s not remotely sufficient to assign responsibility to human chauvinism without at the same time assigning it to the specific axes—heteropatriarchy in this case—responsible for its particular instantiations. Climate Change Is a Feminist Issue That women are the first to go without food is not an arbitrary or coincidental feature of a population’s vulnerability to climate change; it’s one of the specific ways in which some are more at risk than others—and some institutionally better-equipped to escape at least some of the worst consequences of catastrophic weather patterns. It’s easy to condemn human chauvinism as a one-size-fits-all explanation for environmental crisis; it’s too easy to gloss over how, for example, sex and gender plays key roles in the climate change dynamics of the developing world. Why? It not only takes more work to see how and why issues of social and economic justice are crucial to a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between centeredness and chauvinism, it’s also harder to maintain the view that human chauvinism is a ubiquitous feature of human nature once we see that its axes—ethnicity, sex, gender, and species—systemically benefit some at the expense of others and, via instrumental reason’s translation into market logic, empower the few to

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commodify the many according to institutionalized forms of domination and oppression. As Cochrane, Kline, and Gaard show, there is no one-size-fits-all with respect to who’s more likely to suffer the fallout of ecological apocalypse. Fact is, multinational corporations aren’t the only ones who benefit from the view that human chauvinism is ubiquitous; many others do as well, especially those institutionally or economically privileged by our failure to interrogate our assumptions about human nature. Despite, for example, the immeasurable loss to human and nonhuman life, the irrecoverable damage to the ecology of the Gulf Coast region of Louisiana, and $40 billion in oil spill liability, BP is financially stronger in 2015 than before the 2006 Deepwater Horizon disaster; it’s board of thirteen directors includes ten white men, two white women, and one man of African descent, it’s two chief officers, Carl-Henric Svanberg and Bob Dudley, both white, both multimillionaires. To put it in perspective: BP and its executive board members were economically benefited by a catastrophe that left horrifically damaged or dead millions of nonhuman animals, eleven human beings, and untold aquatic plant life. Yet when we read accounts of this tragedy, we largely miss the roles played by race, sex and species despite the fact that the eleven dead were all male, that women play virtually no decision-making role in any part of the story, that those impacted were disproportionately nonwhite, and that the animal loss was immense. One story, for example, profiles Aaron Dale Burkeen, white, 37 years old: Philadelphia, Mississippi. Known to friends and family as “Big D” or simply “Bubba,” Burkeen’s favorite television show was “Man vs. Wild,” about people dropped into the wilderness. He once told his sister: “Anything ever happens to me on that rig, I will make it. I’ll float to an island somewhere. Y’all don’t give up on me, ‘cuz I will make it.” Burkeen was a crane operator on the Deepwater Horizon and had worked for Transocean for a decade before the disaster. Survivors said the blast blew him off a catwalk, and that he fell more than 50 feet to the deck. He left behind a wife, Rhonda, and two children.39

In another, from the Business and Human Rights Centre four years after the disaster, a reporter remarks that “[a]t the Pointe a la Hache boat harbor . . . five African-American men gather over a pile of crabs . . . All of them attended the BP ‘Vessels of Opportunity’ job training . . . but none of them got work from it. One of them, Orin Bentley . . . said, ‘They ain’t hiring nobody from East Bank. We losing everything—losing our business, losing our money and losing our minds.”40 The losses for sea turtles, birds, and marine mammals were, of course, voiceless but, as documented by the Ocean Conservancy, the numbers are staggering—and likely under-represented. Here’s just a few: 600,000–800,000 birds,



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including 25 percent of the North American population of Northern Gannets; Barataria Bay Dolphins were found to be five times more likely to have moderate to severe lung disease than dolphins unexposed to oil slicks. The numbers of injuries or deaths for other cetaceans, including bottlenose dolphins, were similar.41 Nonetheless, as Saul makes clear, the prospect of steep profits at the end of the fossil fuel era far outweighs the possibility of fines, or deaths, for the deepwater capitalist. Hence, it’s no wonder that BP is “back at the scene of the crime,” drilling into deeper and deeper coastal waters. What’s critical for us to comprehend, however, is that the big hydrocarbon extraction corporations are enabled to be “back at the scene of the crime” not simply because we’re addicted to fossil fuels, but because we subscribe without question to the assumption that BP’s is normal behavior, that multinational capitalism is simply an expression of human nature institutionalized, that human-centeredness just is human chauvinism. The fault, then, for future drilling blowouts, mine-shaft collapses, eroded shorelines, etc., is not simply the greed made manifest in the behavior of companies like BP; it’s the pathologically distorted conception of Homo Colussus which supports that predatory behavior as the normal. It’s this unquestioned worldview that prevents us from, as Saul remarks following Michael Klare’s The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for World’s Last Resources,42 “pulling the brakes,” not that we don’t know we need to pull the brakes: The global economy which depends on this kind of extreme resource extraction, which gives corporations like BP orders and alibis, and which bends executive, legislative and judicial power to its needs, is on the move, and it will strike again. Bhopal, Macondo, Fukushima—the beat will go on until we pull the emergency break. Michael Klare writes in conclusion to his comprehensive global survey of our doomsday terrain: “As the race for what’s left gains momentum, this sort of predatory behavior will become more frequent and more brutal. . . . Only if we abandon the race altogether . . . can we hope to avoid calamity on a global scale.”43

“Abandoning the race altogether” has, of course, different meanings and implications for different people. That there’s no one-size-fits-all with respect to power and privilege along the axes of human chauvinism holds even where it’s the case that its beneficiaries neither occupy positions privileged by Western institutions nor identify with capitalist values. The Bangladeshi father who abandons his family in the midst of catastrophic flooding doesn’t enjoy the largesse of BP’s Carl-Henric Svanberg, and while committed environmentalists like Frederic Bender insist on human chauvinism’s ubiquity in order to justify moral condemnation of Homo Colossus, this isn’t because he’s trying to sell us something; far from it—and ironic, given that Bender, like his male colleagues in both corporate America

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and the environmental movement are among the most privileged citizens of our society. Sherilyn MacGregor makes this point in an illuminating way in her essay “Only Resist: Feminist Ecological Citizenship and the Post-Politics of Climate Change.” She argues that not only do mostly white Western men direct corporate policy, they also dominate the global climate policy arena as its prominent spokespeople whose worldviews and vested interests serve to construct the issue in stereotypically masculinized ways. For example, not only is the issue constructed in a way that demands techno-scientific solutions, from which there is money to be made, it is also presented as a threat to national security and international security, for which the reinforcement of militarism is the answer.44

The mostly-men who stand to benefit from environmental disasters like Deepwater Horizon are, in other words, the same mostly-men authorized to draft and implement climate policy—or call for “abandoning the race altogether.” Insofar as each or any of these factions subscribe to the ubiquity of human chauvinism, it’s not surprising that they see the solutions in either technological and/or militarist terms that fortify the hegemony of the global North over the “developing” South, or in Jensen’s Endgame terms of blowing up the dams to hasten the apocalypse. As MacGregor argues, “climate science itself operates at the global level, aggregating and calculating facts in ways that are often detached from local experience,” detached, that is, from the axes of human chauvinism that determine who’ll be empowered and disempowered by climate change policy, and hence relieved of responsibility to pay them meaningful attention as matters of environmental and/or social and economic justice. While MacGregor points out that her critique of the science is not an argument for climate change denial, that the scientific consensus as consensus and as global policy recommendation operates through channels that continue to exclude alternative and/or marginalized voices reinforces the presupposition that there’s only one “human nature,” and that’s predatory human chauvinism. It’s that human nature that demands that “we” reduce “our” carbon footprint (liberal environmentalists), strive for energy independence (the American Natural Gas Alliance), or “abandon the race altogether” (Endgame ecoprimitivists). However otherwise different these positions are from each other, each assumes that it’s possible to achieve its goals without substantive suffering on behalf of its “we,” and without sacrifice of it place among others, human and nonhuman. Human chauvinism, in other words, is itself conceived as masculine, as essentially characterized in terms of qualities traditionally, if stereotypically, regarded as male. This makes difficult the task for feminists concerned with interrogating the discourses of climate change since it requires disrupting not only



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scientific authority, but the foundation upon which it rests—a conception of human nature responsible for institutionalizing both what counts as scientific knowledge and reinforcing oppression, commodification, and injustice, namely masculinized human chauvinism taken as a feature of human nature. “Feminist epistemology” argues MacGregor, “has always aimed to critique western science, and yet it is increasingly difficult to ask questions about climate science . . . Will feminists be able to express deep reservations about the assumptions being made about humans and nature in the scientized and securitized climate discourse?”45 Yes—but only through the radical recuperation of a human-centeredness empowered to take climate change science seriously precisely because it takes as its point of departure not what reproduces the hegemonic discourses of the status quo, abetting the fortunes of Homo Colossus, but begins instead with the implications of ecological apocalypse for those least able to defend themselves against the rising tides and gale force winds of climate instability. But even beyond the critique of conquest capitalism, revaluing human-centeredness begins with those for whom “abandoning the race” means certain death, those for whom “national security” pales in comparison to eating tomorrow, and those whose carbon footprint remains invisible next to the deep impression left by the work boots of the fossil fuel engineer. This feminist project, in other words, begins by investigating how instrumental reason became metastasized into the cancerous body of global capitalism.

HUMAN-CENTEREDNESS AND HUMAN CHAUVINISM: THE PATHOLOGIES OF REASON Masculinist Reason Dissociated from the Natural World: Civilizational Crisis Instrumental reason is no more merely a tool of self-interest than is human chauvinism the only driver of conquest capitalism. Taken together, however, they’ve overseen the transformation of all value—aesthetic, moral, civic— into the exchange value of market logic now realized as a globalized circulatory system for which differences of ethnicity, sex, gender, and species supply specific forms of opportunity for commodification, but are otherwise ignored in the discourses of the ecological implications of that circulatory system metastasized. To the extent that human reason, yoked not to the creation of things whose value can be assessed in terms of any criteria of the beautiful, the good, the compassionate, or the just, but rather to the extraction or creation of manufactured products, human-centeredness seems destined to manifest itself as pathologically predatory, competitive, and masculinist. Under

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these conditions, labor and consumption become its existential imperative particularly in the global South where, as Alison Jaggar argues in “A Feminist Critique of the Alleged Southern Debt,” “its impacts for women are felt especially acutely: [l]arge-scale cash crop development has displaced women’s subsistence farming and thereby contributed to famines, especially in Africa. In India, the destruction of forests for large-scale agriculture has resulted in an increase in the time women must spend collecting firewood and fodder, which in turn means they have less time available for crop production; their income is reduced and their nutrition suffers. 46

It’s not hard to see that, in light of its consequences and given its exclusive orientation to goals, market logic is necessarily short-sighted; its notion of progress geared to present profits over future consequences, and its outsourcing of the costs of its production systemically borne by those least able to fend off its insatiable need for hydrocarbons, water, animal bodies, or sugars. This in turn necessitates an unquestioned commitment to the inexhaustibility of resources. Such is reason “disenchanted” and dissociated from the natural world as the natural world, converted from a reflective capacity for living well with nature, and made instead into a reflexive tool for the circulation of commodities. Instrumental reason’s capacity for judgment is thus divested of culpability for protecting its own ecological conditions, and put instead to the service of transforming nature, including clean air, potable water, plants, animals, and people, into exchange value. Reminding his reader of the obvious, as he puts it, critical theorist Fredric Jameson remarks that: “this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world; in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and terror.”47 Reason instrumentalized, demythologized, and disenchanted via the demands of capital, fueled by hydrocarbon extraction, weaponized in the armies of corporatized nation states or multinationals who can afford armies, all wrapped up in the flag—that is the underside of Saul’s deepwater capitalist culture. That it manifests itself as “blood, torture, death, and terror” is not news. What does seem to be news to too many (including many who’d claim they’re environmentalists) is that this violent state of affairs is a “civilizational crisis.” As Cochrane puts it, following Venezuelan sociologist Edgardo Langer, [t]his reason is associated with a subject who turns nature into an external thing or object to be known, in order to control it or transform it into material goods



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for human consumption. For Lander it is the sustained growth of this “industrial civilization” and its “logic of mercantilization” that has led to the contemporary civilizational crisis—a crisis whose leading edge is nature’s destruction “in most profound terms [via] so-called climate change . . . This Eurocentric, colonial . . . and “carcinogenic civilizational pattern” . . . which naturalizes human inequality and wages a systematic war against nature, must be radically questioned.48

Civilizational crisis, in other words, is the unintended (yet predictable) consequence of reason’s conscription to a logic that systematically divests nature of its status as living and evolving, of which human beings are a part, and converts it into property—inert, objectified, controllable, commodified. At the same time, human-centeredness is transformed, via this “carcinogenic pattern” of reason, from conceiving itself in terms of what Cochrane describes as buen vivir—living well—in harmony with the natural world into human chauvinism, a disposition to both human and nonhuman nature that sets the stage not only for gross inequalities of race, sex, and gender, and species, but for climate change, and eventual environmental apocalypse.49 Given the sheer scale of damage we’ve exacted against the planet’s atmosphere, water, and soil, it’s no wonder that human-centeredness understood as a descriptive fact about a species of animal is forgotten, and replaced, as Bender puts it, by Homo colossus: Homo colossus’ imprint on the land is now spiraling out of control, not merely because of population growth, agriculture, and the like, but also due to poor planning skills. Habitats that nature took millions of years to fine-tune for maximum biodiversity are bulldozed into oblivion in only a few minutes. The sprawl of the concrete city, designed to meet the needs of cars instead of people, now metastasizes in every direction . . . In most places, in our nation of transients, hardly anyone remembers the species that once lived there, or cares enough about a place to try to protect what remains.50

A dark image of humanity to be sure; Naomi Klein expresses the point succinctly when she characterizes the relationship of our economic system to the planet and its forms of life as “at war,” insisting that the only way to avoid the collapse this war entails is to recognize that only one of the governing sets of rules can be changed— “and it’s not the laws of nature.”51 But here’s what we forget at our absolute peril; indeed, it’s what we’re surely trying to recuperate in every word we write about climate change, or civilizational crisis, or conquest capitalism—or the underside of culture as “blood, torture, death and terror”: human-centeredness is no more necessarily chauvinistic than is buen vivir necessarily vivir mejor, “a ‘living better’ rooted in unlimited progress, endless accumulation, and competition that relegates the vast majority to ‘living badly,’ vivir mal . . .”52 It can’t be.

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For if human-centeredness is human chauvinism, vivir mal will come to describe not only the condition of the many, or even the despair of The Road, but the nihilism of the planet. The Pathological Appropriation of Reason as a Masculinist Disposition This could, of course, be our eco-cidal trajectory, but we have no good reason to think so. Indeed, we can’t afford to think so, and we’ve very good reason to think we’ve mistaken a set of descriptive facts for a “civilizational pattern” of prescriptive dispositions. The capitalist appropriation of instrumental reason transforms a set of evolved traits describing the interests of a particular species—perceptual, psychological, somatic, cognitive, epistemic, linguistic, and affective—into a prescriptive disposition acculturated from the cradle to the market logic of conquest capitalism. A laborer and consumer for the culture industry, human chauvinism appears by every reasonable standard of evaluation to reflect natural interests satisfied by a culture whose primary objective is the circulation of exchange value. Detached from its moorings to nonhuman nature as anything other than a resource, Homo colossus conceives land as his property, water as bottled, animal bodies as “meat,” children as progeny, women as objects of sexual commodification. He takes the volatile organics besotting the skies of Beijing and the oily sheen of Louisiana Gulf Coast tides as the price of progress. He vacations somewhere else. He takes for granted that consumption is the most highly valued good for civilization— and he believes Western “development” is the avenue for advancing this good to the rest of the planet. Globalized capitalism is thus best understood less as an institution, or even a practice, but rather as a masculinist enculturated temperament or disposition rooted in what Cochrane calls the “disorientation” of human beings, or better: the pathologic appropriation of human-centeredness to the circulatory system of exchange. Human chauvinism, in other words, is not merely a transformation of a set of descriptive traits; it’s a disorienting pathology among whose primary characteristics is the denial that it is psychopathological. Denial, moreover is fundamental to chauvinism’s fitness for global capitalism precisely because in it consists the tools for embracing the myth of endless resources, and repudiating climate change as an anti-free-market conspiracy. Cochrane puts the point succinctly: “[g]lobal warning and climate change can thus ultimately be understood as the result of the “overall disorientation of the [human] species on the earth associated with the productivist ethic and industrial revolution.”46 This “ethic” is of course conquest capitalism itself understood as the natural expression of human being.



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Thus pathologized, human chauvinism provides the scaffolding which supports not only the domination by human beings of nonhuman nature and animals, but also of women by men, South by North, gay by straight, black by white. Neither monolithic nor static, it’s animated by an array of mutually reinforcing axes—patriarchal, Westernized, heterosexist, racist, and speciesist—each of which assigns value in terms of the ways in which a particular incarnation of chauvinism commodifies and markets its objects as labor, slave, sex object, consumable, etc. In “Restoring Environmental Conscience to Human-Centeredness,” for example, I argued that The heterosexualizing of nonhuman nature . . . is not merely a function of anthropomorphizing [treating nonhuman animals and objects as if they exhibited human traits], but a basic function, that is, a function without which we would experience nonhuman nature in substantially different ways. What we discover, in fact, is that such linguistic practices are not only gendered, but that they serve to naturalize and thereby normalize a heterosexist view of the nonhuman world which then reinforces asymmetrical divisions of status and power reflected in institutions like church, family, and the military. “Basic,” then, does not imply “determined” or “inevitable,” but rather “naturalized” in that what is reflected in our linguistic practices—in anthropomorphizing especially—are the specific ways in which human beings have institutionalized relationships of prerogative and power.47

Anthropomorphizing, however, is only one way in which human chauvinism, realized as heterosexual normativity actually shapes human experience and governs relationships, privileging some at the expense of others. Animalizing offers another: We anthropomorphize when we attribute human characteristics to nonhuman animals, and in doing so elevate their status, and we animalize when we attribute “animal” or “beastly” characteristics to human beings, but in so doing devalue their status. Both presuppose the superiority of human beings.48

As Carol Adams showed in her 1995 Neither Man nor Beast, Feminism and the Defense of Animals, this later strategy has been deployed especially effectively against persons of color and/or women in order to insure their place(s) as labor, sexual object, or social disposable.49 Just as pathology is its own denial, disorientation is simultaneously reorientation in that, as both anthropomorphizing and animalizing demonstrate, human chauvinism is not about human nature other than that the latter provides its nominal substrate; it is about power and control for whomever is authorized to determine value, especially as exchange value.

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Within the neoliberal conceptual economy, “Earth” acts as a metaphor for that inexhaustible store of carbons, land, grains, potable water, nonhuman animal bodies, women’s reproductive capacities, etc., resources out of which the authority to dominate and commodify is forged and institutionalized. Its axes of value need a planet rich in endless resources precisely because each of its dominating relationships are dependent on, mutually reinforced by, and in competition with each of the others. What market logic dictates is not simply what counts as a candidate for the assignment of exchange value, but rather, as raced, gendered, heterosexualized, and identified as species, how and when. Everything counts for conquest capitalism as potential resource even as some bear its consequences in more violent ways than others, and while heteropatriarchal oppression certainly predates capitalism in many cultures, the latter, disguised as “development,” has wasted no time in taking advantage of dominating relationships it could readily exploit. As Cochrane explains, following Bolivian feminist Julieta Paredes, “gender injustice did not originate with colonialism . . . Decolonizing gender thus means recuperating memories of struggles undertaken by indigenous women against a precolonial patriarchy that was later reinforced, upon Spanish colonization, by Western patriarchy.”50 Conquest capitalism, in other words, conceives heteropatriarchal institutions in the same way it conceives carbons, water, animal bodies, and sugars—as resources for the circulatory system of exchange value. Recuperating the memories of a precolonial patriarchy is thus likely to be difficult since it’s as wholly naturalized an institution—the existential conditions of its subjects are fully colonized and acculturated—as is human chauvinism itself. That’s what makes institutions reinforcing ethnic, sex, gender, and species oppression ideal for the capitalist; they’re ready-made for commodification and taken to be inalterable artifacts of nature. Even the essentially recuperative notion of buen vivir is vulnerable to forgetting that human-centeredness need not realize itself as chauvinistic, and, Cochrane argues, its proponents do in fact forget. They ignore the heteropatriarchal relationships within cultures, assuming instead that the buen vivir to be recuperated applies to all human beings equally. In the interest of advancing a more holistic view of the bond of human beings to nonhuman nature, they ignore “power relationships within particular cultures and communities, especially differences related to gender and class.”51 In light of Cochrane’s analysis, it’s no wonder that each of the axes of human chauvinism is steeped in denial. As it becomes clear that the crises of ecological collapse are inextricably interwoven with economic and social injustice, that each axis in the array is as mutually dependent as it is reinforcing, those who stand to benefit, mostly white, Western, affluent, and male, find themselves confronted with a terrifying prospect. Regardless what



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commodity—labor, sex, water, land, or weapons—and however much they need the contrary to be true, they cannot not know that endless isn’t endless at all. Not only is the global environment straining to reproduce itself, its resources either polluted or exhausted, the institutions responsible for this devastation are themselves under siege as women, indigenous peoples, sexual minorities, and the defenders of nonhuman animals demand to be treated as rights-bearers as opposed to commodities. Given the pathologies of conquest capitalism, however, rights-bearers themselves demand little more than admission to the circulatory system of exchange value as equal players, and are therefore as susceptible to myth of endless resources and the denial of ecological collapse as their oppressive predecessors. What the facts show is that the capacity to deny the advance of climate change is colossal; hence, while the face of that denial may become a woman’s and/or a person of color, so long as emancipation from oppression is dependent on equal access to resources—so long as that’s what rights-bearing means—it seems unlikely in the extreme that we’ll arrive at a point where we can constructively confront the prospect of ecological apocalypse, at least before we’re on McCarthy’s road. (Re)Inventing a Human-Centered Anti-Masculinist Conscience In light of these observations, it’s not surprising that competition over access to resources, including clean water and breathable air, has become more violent, the social and economic disparities upon which “endless” depends for cheap labor less tolerable, the ecologically degraded conditions of The Road more plausible. Those who continue to benefit do so at the ever-escalating cost. For example, although Chevron recently won a case tried in U.S. courts against Amazonian plaintiffs in Ecuador because the plaintiffs had allegedly engaged in bribes, the original amount assessed against the energy giant for extensively polluting the Lago Agrio region of the country was $18.2 billion52; once tapes surfaced documenting the company’s attempts to hide evidence, Chevron was still “[o]rdered to pay $9.5 billion to clean up their [water] contamination.”53 From paying lobbyists to secure votes against regulating pollutants, to developing more destructive extraction technologies, to ignoring disappearing coastlines and forests, to war, to new forms of virulent disease, mounting species extinctions, catastrophic weather events, to contracting expensive private surveillance firms to preempt obstacles to the industrial production of animals, fossil fuels, and food—denial isn’t cheap. Nonetheless, however painful Chevron might find a $9.5 billion fine, it’s still those traditionally vulnerable, socially and economically, to ecological instability who suffer the most. Louisiana, for example, loses approximately 16 square miles per year to eroding shorelines,54 and since Hurricane Katrina,

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August 29, 2005, killing more than 1000 people, “New Orleans has lost nearly 86,000 people . . . The population now consists of 369,250 residents, down from 455,000 prior to the storm. Nearly half of the African-American men in the city are not working as the city’s job base continues to shrink.”55 Even the devastating aftermath of Katrina pales, however, in comparison with the nightmare that is Ebola. According to a recent Newsweek report, although the causal relationships are complex, the likelihood that outbreaks of infectious disease like Ebola are connected to weather patterns that produce drought—driving villagers to consume “bushmeat” in the form of infected animals—is very high.56 As Klein puts it, “we can’t keep this up.” Gaard lays out an even starker picture of the costs of conquest capitalism: Gender inequalities mean that women and children are 14 times more likely to die in ecological disasters than men . . . For example, in the 1991 cyclone and flood in Bangladesh, 90% of the victims were women. The causes are multiple: warning information was not sent to women, who were largely confined in their homes; women are not trained swimmers; this meant that women trying to escape the floods were often holding infants and towing elder family members, while husbands escaped alone; moreover, the increased risk of sexual assaults outside the home made women wait longer to leave, hoping that male relatives would return for them. Similarly in the 2004 Tsunami in Aceh, Sumatra, more than 75% of those who died were women. In May 2008, after Cyclone Nargis came ashore in the Ayeyarwady Division of Myanmar, women and girls were 61% of the 130,000 people dead or missing in the aftermath (CARE Canada, 2010). The deaths of so many mothers leads to increased infant mortality, early marriage of girls, increased neglect of girls’ education, sexual assaults, trafficking in women and child prostitution. Even in industrialized countries, more women than men died during the 2003 European heat wave, and during Hurricane Katrina in the US, African-American women—the poorest population in that part of the country—faced the greatest obstacles to survival.57

What Gaard makes starkly clear is that the view that human-centeredness just is human chauvinism benefits those who can exploit it to support the capitalist conception of value, and that the cost of this continuing conflation is borne disproportionately by precisely those whose labor, natural resources, and lands are extorted and stolen from them. It’s in the interest of multinationals like BP and Chevron to convince us that human nature just is what the capitalist needs it to be: acquisitive, competitive, and insatiable. Indeed, that human chauvinism so neatly fits the capitalist worldview, that it’s so effective convincing us of what is either false, namely that resources are endless, or insolent, namely that we can ignore the lives of the exploited without consequence, should make us suspicious. Here, however, we arrive at a truly daunting problem: suspicion, even rejection,



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of the ubiquity of human chauvinism will solve nothing unless we can identify something worth salvaging in our human-centeredness. Given the mess we’ve made, is it rational to hope that there yet exists a self-reflective, future-oriented, anti-masculinist human-centered reason? Can we articulate a defensible human-centeredness that can reignite the capacity for self-critical self-reflection, address meaningfully human oppression and the exploitation of nonhuman animals—sans the mythology of endless resources—or even because we recognize these limits? We either have to hope so—or we have to invent what we might call a post-chauvinist (or post-human) reason whose core ethical sensibilities derive from the active recognition that, as a set of descriptive facts about our epistemic situation, centeredness entitles us to absolutely nothing—but it does invest us with responsibilities that, in virtue of that set of facts, are greater and unlike any other creature’s. Such a project is post-chauvinist because, unless we can somehow get beyond the “human” of our current trajectory, the one reflected in the corporate “personhood” of companies like Chevron, we seem all but doomed to the “civilizational crisis” depicted in The Road, or worse, namely the road that’s already here: Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sumatra—the “we” who will suffer first are those suffering now.

HUMAN-CENTEREDNESS, SOCIAL JUSTICE, THE DESIRABLE FUTURE: THE ECOFEMINIST SYSTEMS APPROACH A Post-Chauvinist Human-Centeredness? Were it possible to articulate a human-centeredness sans its pathological appropriation by conquest capitalism—including its associated axes of domination and commodification—that human-centeredness might offer us a chance to build better conceptual scaffolding for more ecologically, economically, and socially responsible decision-making about our place among others inhabiting the planet. This post-chauvinist human-centeredness is not adequately described merely as, say, a reformist outlook, but rather is a radically alternative epistemic disposition toward that place. It seeks to deliberately understand itself not in the inherited terms of superiority, power, or entitlement, but as something akin to Aldo Leopold’s “plain citizen” from his Sand County Almanac.58 Contrary, however, to Leopold’s notion, this “recuperation”/reinvention of centeredness would not seek to escape the facts of its membership in Homo sapiens; it does not, in fact, see centeredness as an obstacle, but as an opportunity—one we must act on now. The aim of a recuperated/reinvented centeredness is to embrace the epistemic situation of human being as a point of departure rooted in the humility

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that accrues to recognizing our intimate social and ecological interdependencies and in a cultivated allegiance to our own, our nonhuman fellows, and the planet’s desirable future. As I argued in “Restoring Human-Centeredness to Environmental Conscience”: However plastic and evolving the somatic, perceptual, cognitive, psychological, epistemic and affective capacities native to Homo sapiens, they are still specific to human—and not Chimpanzee or dolphin—being. Human consciousness is, in other words, informed by the unique articulation and interaction of capacities that characterize human embodiment, capacities whose exercise creates the conditions for human experience . . . I am not suggesting that what defines human-centeredness is that human beings have capacities that others species of creature do not; this may or may not be true given any particular comparison. What I am suggesting is that the unique configuration of capacities that describe Homo sapiens inform an experience unique to this species and thereby define this consciousness in terms of this configuration.59

The denial of centeredness is, in other words, as forlorn a project as desiring to grow wings or run like a Cheetah or see out the backs of our heads, and this is simply to point out the obvious: the experiential disposition of any species is determined by a unique set of somatic and cognitive facts informing its epistemic situation. Human beings are, in this respect, no different than the parrot, the Cheetah, or the rabbit (respectively). It thus may make more sense (and wastes less time) to revalue centeredness as a locus of epistemic and moral responsibility as opposed to an obstacle to moral decision-making. Cultivating such a disposition will not be easy, especially since what it requires is the lived recognition of its experiential interdependence with other living and nonliving things, and the commitment to hold itself accountable to sustaining the planet’s finite resources and species diversity. By “unique articulation and interaction” I don’t mean separated from nonhuman animals by some supernatural entity like the soul; I also don’t mean that human beings enjoy some set of cognitive characteristics unavailable to other species of creature. I mean that insofar as culpability for ecological apocalypse falls on us—on our waste, consumption, resource exhaustion, our destructive use of technological invention—and insofar as we’re the only creatures we know to be capable of undertaking a radical recuperation or reinvention of disposition necessary to make a difference at this point in time, so too the responsibility to respond to ecological crisis falls on us as the only species of creature who can act to make that difference. Can we imagine human-centeredness without human chauvinism? This is a tall order given a human history that makes it seem that we can do no other than dominate and commodify practically everything. As Rifkin tells the story of the Enlightenment, for example, “eventually the idea of improving



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one’s calling [as a faithful Christian] became indistinguishable from improving one’s economic fortunes . . . Self-worth became less about being of good character in the eyes of God and more about being productive in the new market exchange economy.”60 Human chauvinism may not describe our natural condition, but it’s not trivial that it’s our naturalized condition. Many, both among the fans of conquest capital and among more radical environmentalists, believe that capitalist excess is simply a mirror of human being as opposed to an institutionalized system of exchange that could be otherwise. But it doesn’t really matter; if we’re to find our way beyond climate change, we must embrace the possibility that a world post-chauvinism is possible. Otherwise, our trajectory is bleak in that the die we’ve cast leads to only one conclusion—the exhaustion of our ecological—existential—conditions and the war, famine, and disease that follow in its wake. We thus arrive at another way the project of revaluing human-centeredness is revolutionary: recognizing that the ultimate consequence of systemic commodification is ecological collapse and the acceleration of social and economic injustice, it’s clear that conquest capitalism cannot be reformed; it must be overthrown as inconsistent with life on the planet. Cochrane hints in this direction when she remarks that, While neoliberal governments deflect struggles against the interlinked oppressions of capitalism and racism by offering limited forms of pluri-nationality, intellectual elites identifying—rather than being in solidarity—. . . with those severely marginalized by class, gender, and race disseminate narratives of a civilizational crisis conceived as essentially ethno-cultural. Meanwhile, the exploitation wreaked by capitalism continues unabated, ruling out fundamental changes in humanity’s relation to human and nonhuman nature.61

So long as we persist in seeing civilizational crisis only in terms of how human populations are marginalized, and not in terms of the capitalist exploitation of all of the axes of human chauvinism—including nonhuman species and ecosystems—we will continue to seek only the reforms associated with plurinationality, for example, in Ecuador.62 In light of the facts of climate change, however, these reforms aren’t only inadequate, they’re counterproductive in that they reinforce the powers of “intellectual elites” to define what constitutes justice, and in so doing deflect attention away from capitalism’s role in the unabated exploitation of people, nonhuman animals and ecological resources. In short, what the narrative of plurinationalism accomplishes is an excuse for ignoring systemic commodification and exploitation. The U.S. court’s judgment for Chevron is a case in point. The energy giant won against the charges that Chevron polluted Ecuador’s Lago Agrio because the claimants had engaged in bribes affecting the case. But the effect of that judgment—however otherwise just—was that the irreversible harm done

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to Ecuador’s environment was disregarded until secretly recorded evidence showed the company had violated other laws relevant to the disclosure of the release of toxins related to its drilling activities. Even then, the final fine assessed was just over half the original, and the judgment was less about the environment, and more about the deception perpetrated by the company. Chevron, in other words, was not really punished for its environmental contamination; it was punished for not playing by the rules that allow it to treat such resources as endless so long as the harm to people—already marginalized along other of the axes of human chauvinism—is not so egregious that they’re forced to appeal to the courts to protect their existential conditions. It’s thus not really surprising that while some elites may identify with those marginalized along the axes of human chauvinism, they cannot without hypocrisy claim solidarity with them; they benefit from a reinforced status quo that, while it may require some minor concessions cast as reform, does not challenge the neoliberal system keeping on their lights, fueling their vehicles, and heating their houses. Gasland filmmaker Josh Fox made this point in an unintended but poignant way when it became clear that his Solutions Grassroots Tour was really an infomercial for Ethical Electric, a global corporation that uses existing lines of centralized energy distribution to promote wind and solar powered electricity. As I argued in “When the Roots Aren’t Made of Grass,”63 however good the conversion to wind and/or solar may sound, the facts are that, first, because companies like Ethical Electric ignore the ecological costs of industrial-scale manufacture of solar panels and wind turbines and second, because they ignore the cost to developing world laborers exploited in the process, their Big Green promotion of Big Solar and Big Wind is as much beholden to the myth of endless resources as is Chevron’s. Their resources are no different—marginalized workers and their commodified ecologies: In addition to reinforcing a system—centralized corporatized utilities—that reproduces an economic and class system [in the U.S.] within which some benefit while others are likely to continue to struggle to pay their utility bills, still others—out of sight and apparently out of mind [in the developing world]—remain vulnerable to labor exploitation and to exposure to harmful toxins in the manufacture of these panels. As reported by National Geographic, although solar panels are certainly an improvement over coal-fired power plants because they produce renewable energy: “[f]abricating the panels requires caustic chemicals such as sodium hydroxide and hydrofluoric acid, and the process uses water as well as electricity, the production of which emits greenhouse gases. It also creates waste. These problems could undercut solar’s ability to fight climate change and reduce environmental toxics. (How Green Are Those Solar Panels, Really?)” Among these chemicals is cadmium: “OSHA estimates that 300,000 workers are exposed to cadmium in the United States. Worker exposure to



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cadmium can occur in all industry sectors but mostly in manufacturing and construction. Workers may be exposed during smelting and refining of metals, and manufacturing batteries, plastics, coatings, and solar panels.” (Safety and Health Topics | Cadmium).64

While Chevron ignored the ecological costs—but was forced to pay some damages for harms to the people affected, Ethical Electric ignores the harms perpetrated against the people who manufacture its solar panels and wind turbines in the interest of mitigating the ecological costs created by companies like Chevron; and both benefit primary the same people—white, Western, male—that maintain the privileging institutions along the axes of human chauvinism. Perhaps it counts for Ethical Electric’s identity with plurinationalism that they can boast “that the 588,471 pounds of Co2 not emitted into the atmosphere since 2012 [in virtue of customers’ switching from coal and natural gas-fired power plants] is a contribution to mitigating climate change”65 This is good for the planet. But as their suppliers are the “wholesale market,” Ethical Electric can’t claim that they stand in solidarity with workers who perform dirt-cheap labor under the abysmal of conditions behind that “wholesale.” Solidarity in a project of conquest capital isn’t solidarity at all unless we accept it that human chauvinism is the driver behind all human action, and that human labor is rightly counted as an endless resource. Put differently: because the causes of climate change accrue not only to environmental abuses, but to commodification along all of the axes of human chauvinism, we cannot hope to address it until we confront every version of “endless.” Until we see that among these is human labor, even identitifying with the need to “do something” about the global environment will achieve little by way of the solidarity necessary to overthrow a circulatory system for whom “endless” is essential, and whose beneficiaries are the same people regardless whether their energy production is fueled by carbons, wind, or sunshine. Aesthetic Experience and the Desirable Future Given the stakes, it’s hard to imagine any realistic incentive sufficient to propel global scale action toward mitigating environmental apocalypse. We can argue until the cows come home (or exit the feedlot for the slaughterhouse) that what we need to do is radically revalue human-centeredness, but what’s as clear as day is that fear of ecological apocalypse alone will not provide that incentive. What we need is something so desirable in itself—and so threatened by our current trajectory—that the prospect of losing it can supply the propellant. Here’s what I think that is: the prospect of losing the possibility of experience that, in virtue of its aesthetic qualities, broadly conceived,

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signifies the difference between the merely sustainable future and the desirable one. Revaluing human-centeredness must include the aesthetic for the simple reason that we can imagine the merely sustainable world—the world of policies and decisions premised on the reform of systems left largely intact—as morally acceptable, barely. But acceptable is no more desirable than identity is solidarity, than “green” is just and, given the analysis of deepwater conquest capitalism we’re preparing to undertake, we’ve no good reason to think that “acceptable” will produce “sustainable” in any future but the short term. The future must be something we want, and this “we” must be a “we” that doesn’t merely include the developing world as “plurinational,” but as revolutionary, that is, a “we” whose beneficiaries begin with those most vulnerable, oppressed, and most exploited. Anything else threatens to reproduce merely identity, but not solidarity and certainly not desirability. What’s required, in other words, for creating the conditions for that radical transition away from The Road must be something worth the struggle to overthrow not only the systems of domination that compose human chauvinism—but the instrumental reason that drives commodification itself. We could envision a world where we’ve gone some ways, as we have, to conquer racism, masculinism, Western domination, and speciesism, one that’s ecologically sustainable, a world of relative equality surviving in a degraded ecosystem. But, like the Kantian world where all are treated justly but none are happy, the merely sustainable world offers little reason to find the future desirable (and much to return us to resource exhaustion and waste). Any future worth wanting must include the possibility of experience that is worth the labor required to create what amounts to revolutionary new ways of life. In exchange for the hard work of turning away from fossil fuels, nonhuman animal consumption, and waste, it must offer the possibility of creating cultures that embrace beauty, humor, color, diversity, novelty, and fun—aesthetic experience—along with an end to heterosexism, racism, and speciesism. Indeed, the prospect of stemming any of these mutually reinforcing systems of domination demands putting an end to them all—a systems approach—that in pursuing a recuperated/reinvented human-centeredness as post-chauvinist is also post-human in the sense that it rejects at the core of its disposition to living things the systemic devaluation signified by sex, sexual identity, ethnicity, and species. Such radical change is the stuff not merely of activism, but insurgency. Its post-chauvinist human-centeredness cannot be read as a strategy for simply reforming the systems responsible for ecological collapse and social injustice—but rather as a clarion call to the work of re-conceiving humancenteredness in light of what we know about how we got here—how the crises we have produced for ourselves intersect intimately and consequentially with every others species—and how it is thus up to us to act to radically alter not only what we do, but what we value in what we do, and therefore who we



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are. Such an argument is not about recycling, bicycle riding, etc—it is about radically reinventing how we live—culturally, geographically, ecologically. It’s about confronting squarely the masculinist authority we take for granted as an ineradicable feature of human institutions. The systems approach draws no artificial distinction between, for example, species of creatures and the systems upon which they depend, and it does not assume the continuation of institutions as institutions—religion, family, military, government—implicated in one way or another on the road to The Road. It does not treat central issues of social and economic justice apart from the ecological conditions that make human communities possible, and it does not accept reforms that tend to benefit some at the cost of others. This is not about fixing the system; it is about what a revolution premised on sound ecological reason, informed by the sciences, combined with a strong dose of urgency might look like on the way to a future not merely survivable but desirable particularly to those who’ve borne the brunt of human chauvinism’s oppressive and commodifying systems of exchange. Imagining the desirable future isn’t easy—but the eco-apocalyptic alternative is unthinkable. Or is it? Turns out, the answer to this question depends on who you ask. For Jensen, civilization has become so corrupted by greed that the only recuperation possible is by return to a way of life whose first commandment is to reject human-centeredness wholesale and put the well-being of nonhuman nature ahead of human interests. Only ecocentrism can salvage the planet after the “end game.” At the opening of his New York Times bestseller, Endgame, Jensen laments: As a longtime grassroots environmental activist, and as a creature living in the thrashing endgame of civilization, I am intimately acquainted with the landscape of loss, and have grown accustomed to the daily weight of despair. I have walked clearcuts that wrap around mountains . . . and I’ve sat silent near empty streams that two generations ago were “lashed into whiteness” by uncountable salmon coming home to spawn and die. A few years ago I began to feel pretty apocalyptic. But I hesitated to use that word . . . I didn’t want to use it lightly. But then a friend and fellow activist said, “What will it take for you to finally call it an apocalypse? . . . Give me a specific threshold, Derrick, a specific point at which you’ll finally use that word.”66

We seem highly unlikely, from Jensen’s point of view, to undertake any transformation to a sustainable future voluntarily, and he’s sure enough of this that he’s willing to bet we’re willing to be suckered by just about any narrative that promises we can keep consuming at the rates we do now: [A]ny culture based on the nonrenewable use of renewable resources is just as unsustainable: if fewer salmon return each year than the year before, sooner or later none will return. . . . [T]he substitution of other resources for depleted ones

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will, some say, save civilization for another day. But at most this merely holds off the inevitable while it further damages the planet.67

There is, for Jensen, no technological, substitutive, reformist fix. The first premise of his Twenty Premises is that “civilization is not and will never be sustainable,” and therefore must in some fashion be brought to an end.68 Asked during a talk how many environmentalists it takes to change a lightbulb, he answers, “Ten.” One to write the lightbulb a letter requesting that it change. Four to circulate on-line petitions. One to file a lawsuit demanding it change. One to send the lightbulb lovingkindness . . . One to accept the lightbulb precisely the way it is . . . One to write a book about how and why the lightbulb needs to change. And finally one to smash the fucking lightbulb, because we all know its never going to change.69

Whether, given his own apparent assumptions about the ubiquity of human chauvinism, we can adopt an ecocentric disposition remains to be seen (Part Two), but one thing’s clear: if civilization is the “fucking lightbulb,” and chauvinism its natural light, not only is no voluntary transition to ecocentrism likely in the offing, only the most violent—apocalyptic—incentive will provide sufficient force to, as Jensen puts it, “blow up the dams.” What comes after that? What’s on the other side of that revolution—and who? These questions at least raise the prospect whether “smashing the lightbulb” is worth pursuing even for the most ardent ecocentrist. Is Human Chauvinism a Constitutive Feature of Human Nature? On the other side of this gamut of response to ecological apocalypse are theorists advocating a potent cocktail of corporate, environmental organization, and government “partnerships” who insist that conquest capitalism—suitably reformed—is not the enemy but the savior. These folks argue that with a bit more and better technology, we can have our cake and eat it too—continue to consume at the same rates we, especially citizens of the global North, always have without the unpleasant inconvenience of discovering that our resources are really finite. In Green Delusions, for example, Martin Lewis argues for a position he calls Promethean environmentalism, a revamped or “guided capitalism” whose aim is to produce a technologically driven global economy capable of achieving environmental sustainability and social equity—a goal Lewis insists can only be achieved working through “the corporate structure of late 20th century capitalism” as opposed to against it. On this view, human chauvinism is not only reflected in capitalist economic systems, but—suitably



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guided—can be a positive impetus to reform both for maintaining our current levels of material consumption and saving the planet. Problems of social equity are thus more likely to be remediable “working through” the competitive forces of the market system that “fighting against it.” For Lewis, the greatest threat to achieving sustainability are not capitalists but environmentalists, like Jensen, whom Lewis calls “eco-radicals.” Fundamentally misguided, eco-radicals hold that contemporary human society is entirely unsustainable, if not evil, and must be re-constructed according to an entirely “different socio-economic logic,” whose central unit of value is the small-scale community. I don’t know whether Lewis has Jensen in mind specifically here, but what’s striking is that both take human chauvinism to be ubiquitous to human nature; Lewis embraces it as an opportunity to achieve sustainability, and Jensen decries it as the anthropogenic culprit of climate change. Both also agree that the resource waste of the past cannot continue except for at our ecological peril; but whereas Jensen advocates an end to civilization and a subsequent return to smaller less technologically dependent societies, Lewis sees in technological innovation the potential for creating substitute resources that can meet the demand for endlessness: “I would suggest that as toxic waste decomposition and recycling techniques are perfected, the use of synthetic materials will entail far less environmental destruction than will the continued production of natural products like paper, wood, and cotton. The future may yet be in plastics.” For Lewis, the answer to thwarting ecological apocalypse is not a revolution against capitalist commodification; it’s getting the right capitalism with the right things commodified, an exchange, we might say, of deepwater for technologically purified bottled water. Both of these views are, I think, profoundly mistaken, and among the reasons why is that neither can provide adequate incentive to propel the sheer labor necessary to get to any sustainable future—much less a desirable one. As Lewis rightly points out against the assumption that smaller communities are less destructive: “decentralized, small-scale political structures can be just as violent and ecologically wasteful as large-scale centralized ones. Small is sometimes ugly, and big is occasionally beautiful.”70 Moreover, if human beings just are as chauvinistic as Jensen appears to assume, we have good reason to think that small communities will re-constitute the same axes of domination as he finds condemnable in larger ones; so, it’s at least unclear what makes a future modeled after Jensen’s vision desirable. But—as Jensen could counter against Lewis—we have just as little reason to believe “guided capitalism” will go any distance to end its institutionalized axes of exploitation and oppression. Why would it? Why would we think that the beneficiaries of capitalism would give up their prerogative to dominate for the sake of sustainability when they could achieve the latter and maintain the racist,

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heterosexist, and speciesist axes of human chauvinism that have worked so well for them in the past? Unless, then, you’re fortunate enough to be white, male, and Western(ized), it’s not obvious that there’s a desirable future for you in Lewis’ guided capitalist techno-utopia. The trouble with both Jensen and Lewis is, in one sense, pretty simple: the world doesn’t end at the close of McCarthy’s dark tale of ecological apocalypse. A child—a child we know will survive, who wants to play, experience, live and laugh, will demand a world colored not merely by the dull hues of “sustainability” but the brighter and more vibrant pigments of a world worth wanting. It’s essentially that child for whom this manifesto is written—a child charged with creating a world of value beyond commodification. Moreover, just as there is no “going back” for the child depicted in The Road—no earlier, more “primitive” way of life to which to return—so too there’s no ecocentrism for us to embrace short of a post-apocalyptic destitution that could just as well include the heterosexist and racist institutions of the past. We know too much; our technologies are too sophisticated, our science too advanced to believe rationally that we could commit ourselves to the collective forgetting of Jensen’s “end game.” Yet, there’s also no “staying here.” However much climate change denial may be popular among tea partiers, conservatives, and conspiracy theorists, the facts are still the facts, and the earth is still the only planet we have. THE VITAL ROLE OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE IN THE SYSTEMS APPROACH: WHAT MATTERS MORE THAN SUSTAINABILITY John Dewey’s “An Experience” The vital role played by aesthetic experience in articulating a world modeled after a recuperated, reinvented, and revalued human-centeredness is one we might conceive broadly and deeply following John Dewey’s “an experience,” that is, experience worth remembering, worth the desire to return to it, to reproduce it. Such a notion can be made universally flexible—and culturally specific. It can appeal to identity—but it can solicit solidarity. Its roots lay deep in the capacity for reason. As Dewey makes the point in “Art as Experience” [W]e have an experience when the material experienced runs its course to fulfillment . . . A piece of work is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its solution; a game is played through; a situation, whether that of eating a meal, playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation, writing a



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book, or taking part in a political campaign, is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation. Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficient. It is an experience.71

Like eating a memorable meal or completing a long-worked manuscript, or listening to Lake Loons, the aesthetic in experience, for Dewey, signals not only itself as of value, but the context within which it’s made possible—a context made eminently more desirable via the rich biodiversity upon which all action—like eating a meal, writing a book, listening to loons—depends. “For life,” writes Dewey, “is no uniform uninterrupted march or flow. It is a thing of histories, each with its own plot, its own inception and movement towards its close . . . A flight of stairs, mechanical as it is, proceeds by individual steps, not by undifferentiated progression.”72 The very character of experience, in other words, is aesthetic—but it can be made richer or poorer depending on the context, cultural, economic, social, and ecological, of that experience. Connecting Dewey’s concept of aesthetic experience to the emancipatory project of the feminist movement, I argued in “On Ecology and Aesthetic Experience” that [a] feminist axiology [theory of value] seeks to value less in terms of worn western binarisms (intrinsic versus instrumental, . . . whole ecological systems versus individual members), and more in terms of a deeper and more inclusive appreciation for the complex and interconnected ligature of our collective existential conditions. One aspect of this appreciation is, I suggest, the potential for aesthetic experience. For where the motivation supplied by moral obligation, assessment of possible consequences, or even empathy for nonhuman subjects fails to move us to action, we may yet be able to be moved by the awe we experience in the beauty of natural objects and phenomena (and, obversely, in the potential destitution we may experience in the contemplation of their loss). Where the autonomic compulsion of duty fails to deliver sufficient moral impetus, aesthetic response may stand a better chance.73

In short, among the conditions necessary to revaluing human-centeredness is getting beyond “worn western binarisms,” that is, getting beyond human chauvinism and its binary dominations of human/nonhuman, culture/nature, white/black, Western/non-Western, men/women. If we can accomplish that daunting task, we can begin the work of articulating not merely a morally defensible sustainable future, but a future worth the struggle. Thing is, we don’t have much time, and despite (or perhaps in virtue of) the threat of climate change, we’ve short-changed ourselves, settling for a sustainability that’s short term at best, and likely not even that. Our dilemma is that

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for all our moral hand-wringing we’ve failed to achieve more than a passing commitment to reducing our carbon footprint, mitigating climate impacts, or decreasing our animal consumption. Our moral arguments fall short, making it clear that the prospect of a merely sustainable future cannot supply the momentum to do the work of conservation, much less propel the shift to renewable sources of energy, end the exploitation of labor, or put a halt to animal agriculture. But these changes are minimally necessary to get us even that far. Truth is, sustainability just doesn’t offer enough in return for the forfeiture of comfort and consumption it demands, especially from those whose comfort and consumption is not the lion’s share cause of ecological deterioration. It offers the cover of moral rectitude without the substance. Settling for sustainability is thus more likely to presage the very disaster it was intended to preempt, and its consequences will be borne more heavily—as they are now—by those least able to defend themselves against vanishing shorelines, catastrophic weather patterns, food shortages, and inadequate access to clean water. Equally troubling is that global level policies crafted to achieve sustainability make disproportionately onerous demands on those already suffering the effects of climate change, effectively reinforcing the multinational corporatist appropriation of human chauvinism that initiatives such as the ambitious United Nations 2013 World Economic and Social Survey, Sustainable Development Challenges seek to reign in.74 As Sharon Beder notes in “Costing the Earth: Equity, Sustainable Development and Environmental Economics”: The ethical principle of equity . . . is central to the concept of sustainable development. Yet governments all over the world are adopting sustainable development policies that reinforce existing inequities and create new ones. These policies have been strongly influenced by environmental economists of the neoclassical school. They involve monetary valuation of the environment and the use of financial incentives aimed at using market mechanisms to allocate scarce environmental resources.75

Given these dynamics, it’s at least unclear whether the sustainable world is sustainable or even attainable. Even at the level of global policy-making, the moral arguments have had little positive effect on blunting the continuing deepwater capitalist exploitation of resources and labor. More greenwash than green, sustainability cannot supply sufficient momentum to embark on the revolutionary change—especially with respect to ending the reign of fossil fuel addiction, curbing waste, and reducing consumption in the global North—toward achieving environmental stability, much less climate justice. Making demands of developing world countries to reduce their carbon footprints is self-defeating even if the moral argument for achieving greater global sustainability by reducing carbon emissions is sound.



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The reason, however, isn’t merely because the global South won’t be able to achieve these goals; it’s because there’s little in the moral argument for the goals themselves to entice peoples whose futures look bleak regardless, and whose survival, given the necessity of industrializing to be able to compete in the global markets, depends on fossil fuels. However poorly recognized in the platitudes of U.N. agendas, the global South is caught between a sustainability rock and a coal-fired hard place. Insofar then as the disadvantage of developing world countries like India and China is reinforced through demands that directly and negatively impact the health and welfare of peoples already economically marginalized, the human chauvinism of conquest capitalism is not challenged, but buttressed. And its costs are borne most heavily by women. As feminist Vandana Shiva shows in Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development: “[d]evelopment could not but entail destruction for women, nature, and subjugated cultures, which is why, throughout the Third World women, peasants and tribals are struggling for liberation from development just as they earlier struggled for liberation from colonialism.”76 From this point of view, “sustainability” is really just a new masculinist colonialism; it’s unlikely to be achieved except via oppressive hydrocarbon-policing measures themselves enforced by the global North on the global South—reinforcing the axes of human chauvinism, and unlikely to attain even reformist goals for reducing climate change (all the while encouraging escalating geopolitical unrest and terrorism). As German blogger and environmentalist Daniela Turß remarks in “Biofuels, Development and (Neo)-Colonialism,” Poor women from the Global South have recently become the main target group of development projects, especially since it is being increasingly recognized that they are strongly affected by climate change. But what seems like a success story in the making turns out to be seriously flawed . . . Many projects are built upon and reinforce existing hierarchies, very often colonial ones. All in all, indigenous people, especially women, continue to pay the price for environmental crises they are not responsible for.77

The ecofeminist systems approach argument for the not merely sustainable— but desirable—world reaches beyond platitudes and statistics about what counts as “development” in that it’s rooted in the fundamentally moral premise that the future must be conceived as desirable not only to wealthy Westerners who can afford to make reform sufficient, but to those for whom only the revolutionary transformation of the global economy can mean survival. “Sustainable,” in other words, has to mean something more than “good for us,” survivable for “them”; we can paint cosmetics on a cadaver, but only a living planet can offer us a future. Why would people whose life resources,

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cultural inheritance, and aesthetic enjoyment of natural phenomena have been expropriated and destroyed by Chevron risk corporate-friendly U.S. courts to achieve environmental justice unless they believed they could invest hope in their own futures? The answer to this question, though perhaps not obvious, is pretty straightforward. It’s what constitutes the bone marrow of human-centeredness conceived not as a metastasized bastion of greed but a repository of responsibility: “if we took the aesthetic value of natural objects more seriously than we do now as a value worth cultivating, we might find ourselves nearer to an ethos whose vision of moral action . . . is justified at least in part by the possibility of experience whose loss we cannot endure, and whose objects we cannot but know to be vulnerable to our present state of environmental abuse.”78 Given, in other words, that what climate change means is the deterioration not only of ecological, economic, geopolitical, and social stability, but the loss of the very experience that makes life worth living and the future desirable, articulating the argument for the inclusion of the aesthetic in any approach aimed at addressing ecological apocalypse is more than just attractive; it’s imperative short of giving up to the moral arguments we already know fail. MORE THAN “SUSTAINABILITY” The value of aesthetic experience to recuperating human-centeredness is, however, not likely to be found at the forefront of arguments for a sustainable future like either Jensen’s or Lewis’ (much less in the cognitive dissonance and geopolitical insolence of political celebrities like Donald Trump). The human chauvinism they assume isn’t, at least obviously, compatible with “taking the aesthetic value of natural objects more seriously” or envisioning what a human future is for. On the one hand, Jensen seems quite willing to see immense civilizational destruction for the sake of securing an ecocentric aftermath, and the value he invests in the primacy of ecology is intrinsic— accruing to the mere being of a thing—not aesthetic (we’ll explore this in Chapter 2). On the other, Lewis is very clear that while the quality of our experience matters, the techno-utopian future will be able to provide that quality—irrespective any particular connection to the natural world. The only point on which Jensen and Lewis would likely agree is that the conditions for aesthetic experience in the present world have become irretrievably degraded. But, as I argue in “Sustainable Wasteland,” this is precisely why aesthetic experience is imperative to articulating the systems approach: If the aesthetic dimension of human experience is key to what makes the future desirable, then taking moral responsibility for imagining that future just means



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taking responsibility for a future in which human beings can have that experience. Because that future is premised on fostering the biodiversity that enhances the possibility of aesthetic experience, and because biodiversity contributes to ecological stability, our first responsibility is to articulate an ethic consistent not merely with what is sustainable, but stable. It’s precisely at this juncture that the ethical meets the aesthetic: some few of us can perhaps survive a world that’s sustainable, but no such world can adequately entreat us to the labor required to realize it because no such world is desirable.79

Nothing requires the sustainable world of The Road include biodiversity; these worlds are cadavers, and we’d be hard-pressed to conceive their possible futures as cornucopias of aesthetic opportunity. Both are consistent with Jensen’s ecocentric world after we blow up the dams, or Lewis’ market-driven technological utopia, but neither offer good reasons to want them other than that what we have is unsustainable; and what is unsustainable for the most well-off must be accounted as a death gyre for the rest. The trouble is that fearing an unsustainable future isn’t the same thing as wanting a desirable one; thus, no threat to environmental stability or to social justice will, by itself, be enough to propel enduring change. What makes aesthetic experience—as opposed to, say, moral, political, sexual, or athletic experience—specifically desirable as a possible component of all experience is not some shallow version of novelty—this year’s car, that new video game, that weight-loss pill, this month’s movies—but that it signals the possibility of experience made possible only by a world rich in at least some number of the things that make life worth living, things that stimulate the senses, satisfy emotional needs, provide avenues to knowledge, and connect us to others. To return once more to Dewey: “[e]xperience in this vital sense is defined by those situations and episodes we spontaneously refer to as being ‘real’ experiences; those things of which we say, in recalling them, that was an experience.”80 That “real” can be, of course, the stuff, of many things; as Dewey points out, a thunderstorm, a meal, the flow of a river.81 But it can only be sustainably desirable under conditions that provide biotic diversity, opportunity, joyfulness, safety, and chance of completion. Why else pursue the mountain climb? The surfing? The new spicy food? For entirely too many, however, the “real” spells only repetition, dullness, and danger; hiking the water back down to the village from further and further away because of its scarcity, navigating a rocky and perilous gorge to graze animals, eating rice tainted by insecticide. Yet these are the conditions generated by pollution, deforestation, and climate change; they are global in their very nature and consequences. Hence there’s no way to address them for anyone’s experience—not at least on the long term—without addressing them at the level of the least fortunate first—especially in the global South.

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To troubleshoot, such a conception of aesthetic experience doesn’t mean that “desirable” can be neatly equated with “safe,” “unobjectionable,” or “usable.” Far from it. The aesthetic in the experience of natural objects isn’t desirable because it’s comfortable or easy, but because it affords the opportunity to make evaluative comparisons concerning qualities like richness and variety. Such experience is unlikely in the one-size-fits-all world of marketed mass consumption and its correspondingly pale notion of “ecosystem,” but, from the point of view of a re-valued human-centeredness, vital to the recuperation of place. Dewey offers this sumptuous description of “an experience” of a river as distinct from a pond: In such experience every successive part flows freely, without seam and without unfilled blanks, into what ensues. At the same time, there is no sacrifice of the self-identity of the parts. A river, as distinct from a pond, flows. But its flow gives a definiteness and interest to its successive portions greater than exist in the homogeneous portions of a pond. In an experience, flow is from something to something . . . The enduring whole is diversified by successive phases that are emphases of its varied colors.82

Though rivers and ponds both involve water and flow, their qualities are nonetheless different; similarly, the qualities of an experience are made aesthetically appreciable in virtue of their diversity, their varied colors, their differing flow, qualities that rely on the diversity, variety of color, and differing “flow” of natural phenomena. These qualities are also made different in virtue of one’s place in that context, one’s epistemic access to it, one’s ecological relationships in it. Bubba Burkeen, the BP rig-worker blown fifty feet to his death off the Deepwater Horizon during the gulf coast disaster, had a relationship to the gulf, to work in a deepwater oil field, to his cultural and economic context, to his wife and children. That his favorite TV show was “Man vs. Wild,” “about people dropped into the wilderness,” intimates something about that relationship. That he told his sister: “Anything ever happens to me on that rig, I will make it. I’ll float to an island somewhere. Y’all don’t give up on me, ’cuz I will make it,” tells us something about how he saw himself, his abilities, the value he invested in his life, his place. We can’t know what an experience might have been like for Burkeen, but what we can reasonably surmise is that it required a life and livelihood stable enough that he expected to be able to get home to his wife, his TV, and whatever reproduced a man who at least believed he could swim to shore. That Burkeen forfeited this place on behalf of the frenetic rush to drill oil out of the ocean floor is, indeed, tragic. But even more, it reflects something about what’s fundamentally necessary to an experience—life sufficiently stable to comprehend its aesthetic qualities however we conceive them—that TV show, those friendships, that oil rig.



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AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE AND THE CENTRAL PLACE OF NONHUMAN LIFE IN THE SYSTEMS APPROACH Grounding a Revolution: Aesthetic Experience and Biotic Diversity An experience isn’t likely possible for each and every living thing, but only those perceptually, cognitively, and affectively equipped to experience aesthetic appreciation in some fashion. To be clear, however, this isn’t a point about differences between human and nonhuman animals; many nonhuman animals may well be satisfactorily equipped, and many human beings— weighed down by poverty, the oppressive axes of human chauvinism, illness, and/or wage labor—may not. The possibility of aesthetic experience, and any judgment about its future desirability, depends not only upon the biodiversity jeopardized by ecological deterioration, but on the conditions under which human beings reproduce their own lives. Ecuador’s Lago Agrio may be sustainable post-Chevron, but because its prospects for an experience are so depleted, its future forecast so aesthetically bleak, it could hardly be counted as desirable. It’s thus at precisely this juncture that the aesthetically valuable meets the morally defensible for the systems approach, for “[t]o include aesthetic experience in a theory of ecologically grounded moral value not only gives us one more reason to behave in less destructive short-sighted ways toward the environment, but also prods us to consider deeper questions about why our complex relationship to nonhuman nature has netted so much damage—despite our claim to value its aesthetic worth.”83 In The World Without Us, author Alan Weisman offers insight to these deeper questions when he asks this tantalizing question: what would the world be like without us? He opens his first chapter with a description of a Puszcza—Polish for “forest primeval”: Straddling the border between Poland and Belarus, the half-million acres of the Bialowieza Puszcza contain Europes last remaining fragment of old-growth lowland wilderness. Think of the misty, brooding forest that loomed behind your eyelids when, as a child, someone read you the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales. Here, ash and linden trees tower nearly 150 feet, their huge canopies shading a moist, tangles understory of hornbeams, ferns, swamp alders and crockery-sized fungi.84

The experience Weisman conjures for his reader is aesthetically rich through and through. It elicits a winsome longing for return to a fabled past which, for modern readers faced with the grim facts of logging or mining, seems almost too exotic and diverse to be believable. Indeed, “last remaining” is the key phrase for Weisman since the biodiversity of the Bialowieza Puszcza—the very qualities that make it part of

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a desirable future—are all but lost in the present. More importantly, they could be just as lost in the merely sustainable world even though “sustainable” encourages us to think all is well. Consider, for example, Penn State University’s program for restoring ecological habitat destroyed by hydraulic fracturing drilling infrastructure, Marcellus by Design.85 Sponsored by the university’s Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research (MCOR), Marcellus by Design exists to foster the view that ecosystems can be “restored” after a drilling operation has ended. The program solicits landscape architectural plans from graduate students and in so doing effectively treats an artifact of nature as if it were an artifact of design—as if long-evolved bio-diverse systems of plants and animals could be replaced without loss through the design of landscape draftsmen. Such an ecosystem may be sustainable, but the questions it leaves unanswered point in only one direction: a net loss for the possibility of experience that would make such an ecosystem desirable to the future—at least to any recuperated/reinvented human-centeredness for whom critical self-reflection includes a component of aesthetic appreciation. Marcellus by Design is, in fact, an aesthetics not of ecological objects and biodiversity, but of greenwashing for the sake of supplying cover to an industrial practice that, in converting natural gas deposits into marketable commodities, leaves little but environmental destruction and species loss in its place. Restoration ecologist Kevin Heatley asks what “restoration” could even mean in this context. The questions are at once philosophical and deeply practical: • How are you going to insure desirable forest regeneration when you are creating edge habitat everywhere? • How are you going to correct the problem with nutrient loading of streams after you cut down “only 2%” of the forest? The issue isn’t merely sediment and erosion, but rather changes in stream chemistry when deep forest is converted into open field. • How are you going to maintain viable populations of interior forest dwelling animals like neotropical migrants and amphibians? • How are you going to prevent population isolation and genetic inbreeding from animals that avoid road and right-of-way crossings due to predation threat and moisture gradients? • How are you going to provide for viable corridors for wildlife migration when you are creating a grid of pads, roads, and pipeline right of ways? • What is your restoration plan for interior forest, what is the timeframe, and what is the funding source? We might be tempted to see these as issues only of moral or ecological significance—but what a systems approach shows is that they have a crucial



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aesthetic dimension; in cases like these we might call it cadaver cosmetics. Consider one more example, this one from the Passaic River, New Jersey: In a recent news story, “A new angle on cleaning up the Passaic River: Swap your catch for a cleaner Fish,” industrial-scale polluters offer what they call “ecological restoration”: In what critics call a desperate bid to avoid the most expensive toxic cleanup in New Jersey history, the companies responsible for polluting the Passaic River are promoting a plan they say will help keep people safe: swapping contaminated fish pulled from the river with healthy ones. The companies responsible for polluting the river want to clean up hot spots like this one, instead of fully dredging, while offering clean fish to anglers. Some of the highest levels of cancer-causing dioxin in the Passaic River have been found in mudflats in Lyndhurst. The plan would involve a less-extensive cleanup along with the establishment of an indoor fish farm so anglers along the Passaic—one of the most polluted rivers in the nation and a federal Superfund site—can exchange the fish they catch with fish that are safe to eat.86

The “sustainable remedy” proposed by industry to avoid paying up to $3.5 billion for the actual restoration of the river ecosystem is to offer fisherman a trade of their toxic fish for “clean” fish redeemable at a local grocery. Besides the obvious absurdity of this “solution,” namely that it will achieve nothing with respect to restoring the river, it also makes a mockery of the very experience of fishing the Passaic. On this “remedy,” the possibility of meaningful experience is reduced to a cosmetic, shallowly decorative, pretense to the experience of actually fishing on the river. Imagine casting your line, waiting patiently, reeling it in, casting again, getting a tug, retrieving your fish—and then heading off to a grocery to exchange your toxic cadaver catch for something edible. Few will find such a solution desirable because, besides gutting the fishing of the fun, few will be convinced that any such plan offers a future river with any of the value of the past. Nonetheless, such a remedy is perfectly sustainable given that the aesthetics of sustainability require nothing beyond mitigation, “beautification,” or, in this case, mercenary substitution.87 A far cry from the Bialowieza Puszcza, far even from a denuded hillside now “landscape architecture” sprinkled with picnic pavilions, this “restoration” of the Passaic River so eviscerates the concept of an experience of natural phenomena that the prospect of a future that makes it a commonplace seems at least distasteful. Indeed, if it doesn’t, then climate change really is a reflection of human nature taken to its logical conclusions. But that was not the response of, for example, the Ecuadorians who sued Chevron to force the company to clean up the Lago Agrio; it has not been the response of at least some Pennsylvanians who reject Marcellus by Design as greenwashing propaganda, and it’s never been the view of folks who want to fish the Passaic.

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As far back as 1981, environmental groups like the Passaic River Coalition have been trying to wrestle the river from industry, “‘Our hope is to make the river once again a recreational resource for local residents,’ said William Krueder, president of the Canoe Club: ‘[i]f it is as polluted as they say, people shouldn’t swim in it or touch it, but does that mean they can’t at least enjoy sitting along the river at a restaurant or sailing its waters?’ said Robert Myers as he peered at the river, ‘[p]eople want to come down to the riverfront . . . It’s a beautiful river. All you have to do is give people a chance to see that,’ says Mimi Turco.”88 The Inclusion of Nonhuman Animals in the Systems Approach What these examples illustrate is that at the core of human centeredness lay the capacity for a kind of experience—an experience—whose recuperation as value beyond commodity may supply the key to a systems approach to a future worth wanting beyond capitalism. To settle for the sustainable is like marrying not for love but for comfort—or even just survival. To demand a future desirable to every species of creature capable of pleasure and pain is like marrying for love—more work, more risk, more joy. To demand that future implicitly recognizes that an experience includes those creatures who, while not necessarily able to draw the kinds of comparative evaluations that Dewey describes, nonetheless enjoy experiential relationships to things as likes and dislikes, attractions and repulsions. While an experience for creatures like ourselves “has a unity that gives it a name, that meal, that storm, that rupture of friendship . . .”89 a unity we call “aesthetic,” many species of nonhuman animal (perhaps any capable of consciousness) enjoy a wide range of perceptual, cognitive and affective states for whom a damaged ecology is clearly a loss—to them. As I wrote in memorial for my aged, fifteen-year-old, four-and-a-half-foot Green Iguana, Mr. Luv-Lizard: Despite the soft edges of his name, Mr. Luv Lizard was always a wild animal. A Green Iguana, he came to live with me nearly 15 years ago, and was one of the most labor intensive, sometimes cranky-pants, animated, clever, and just plain physically strong of all my rescue critters. I loved him with the same commitment I love all my animals—but a wild animal is never ever anything like a pet. Indeed, a “pet” is a piece of property. I don’t have pets; I have animals who, while they depend on me for their daily care, offer in return an entire world of irreplaceable good, of laughter, of consolation. They are “my” rescues—but the truth is that they are my refuge. Mr. Luv Lizard was no different. He ought to have lived his life in a tropical rain forest canopy—just as whales ought never to be made into entertainment, just as chimpanzees ought never to be made into



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surrogate children, just as my rescue parrots—Rosie and Taco—ought to be able to fly free of this room . . . Mr. Luv Lizard liked blueberries, but not bananas. He liked Romaine lettuce—but not as much the collards he needed to be healthy . . . He loved his jar of lizard fruity treat, and his carrots, and cauliflower—but broccoli? He just tossed that out of his habitat. I know that “habitat” is a polite word for cage.90

It’s an easy thing, perhaps, to demand revolutionary change to correct the economic and social injustice suffered in virtue of the heterosexist, racist, and classist axes of human chauvinism, but there is no full recuperation or revaluing of human-centeredness—at least without hypocrisy—that ignores the devastating costs to nonhuman animals of countless forms of commodification and its resultant ecological apocalypse. The inclusion of nonhuman animals is thus essential to the systems approach and to its recuperation of aesthetic experience as a central value. This is true in at least three ways. First, as Weisman illustrates so beautifully in his description of the Bialowieza Puszcza, a vital component of the most desirable aesthetic experience for human beings is the plant and animal biodiversity of an evolving and undisrupted (or at least thoughtfully preserved) ecosystem. This is to say neither that the complexity of this system, nor the quantity of plants and animals in it are necessarily vital to having an experience, though both may contribute. It’s to say that a degraded ecosystem—like the “reclaimed” shale fields or the unfishable Passaic River—correspond to a degraded experience, at least for anyone who takes human-centeredness as a locus of epistemic responsibility seriously. Why? Because we would know (would not be able to not know) that the ecosystemic integrity of that forest, mountain, or river was degraded, and in knowing we’d also recognize that the substance of our experience may be more cosmetic than original, more “greenie” than green. When we watch a movie about the Bialowieza Puszcza, we don’t expect to be immersed in the original (though we may yet lament its loss). If, however, we travel to the Bialowieza Puszcza and are greeted with what amounts to a cadaverous diorama of what it used to be, the only experience we’re likely to have—other than feeling cheated—is disappointment at the loss of its diversity of plants and animals, a loss that, given the facts of ecological deterioration globally, cannot likely be restored. Second, even if all we meant by “desirable future” was desirable for us, we’re still affected by the same environmental pressures that endanger the existence of other human beings and species of nonhuman animal. The biodiversity that makes possible an experience for us are the same more or less as that which makes it possible for them; we must then take the integrity of a bio-diverse ecosystem seriously for them. It doesn’t matter, moreover, whether we can resolve what species of creature are capable of aesthetic

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experience; we don’t need to make that determination. What a responsible human-centeredness makes crucial is that we take it seriously, given the interconnected legacies of our evolutionary heritage, that some critters are so capable, and that erring on the side of caution is more likely to insure the future of an experience for all of us. Consider, for example, zoos. In a recent incident at the Cincinnati Zoo, Harambe, a lowland gorilla, was shot and killed after a toddler fell into his enclosure. In the public hand-wringing that followed, many questions were raised about the responsibility of the mother, the enclosure barriers, the zoo’s handling of the case. But only a handful of writers, most notably Andrew Revkin and Marc Bekoff raised serious questions about whether lowland gorillas ought to inhabit zoos—or whether there ought to exist zoos at all. As Revkin observes, An overarching factor behind the interspecies tragedy at Gorilla World is how we have uncritically accepted the raising and displaying of gorillas, among our closest kin, behind glass or moats or fences in the first place . . . Captive apes don’t all die from a gunshot; but almost all die having never really experienced what it is to be a gorilla. Harambe was born in a zoo in Brownsville, Tex.91

Few could rationally doubt that Harambe was an intelligent creature capable of a wide and diverse range of experience. What of that experience might qualify as aesthetic—I would not pretend to know. But that isn’t what matters. What erring on the side of caution for a responsible human-centeredness demands is that we take the ecological integrity of the habitats of lowland gorillas to be of value for them—for their sakes—as a value for us. And what that means is that the first and most egregious wrong done to Harambe didn’t happen when he was shot; it happened when he was born. As Bekoff makes the point: Being a zoo-ed animal, Harmabe lost all of his freedoms—the freedoms to make choices about how he was to live, what he would eat, when he would sleep and go to the bathroom, where he would roam, and if he were to become a father. While some might say Harmabe had a “good life” in the zoo, it doesn’t come close to the life he would have had as a wild gorilla, with all its attendant risks. Indeed, one might argue that the animal people were seeing was not really a true western lowland gorilla, surely not an ambassador for his species.92

Far more than any sum of its parts in not getting to choose where to live, what to eat, when to sleep, where to roam, what Harambe did not get to be was a gorilla. And while zoos and aquariums work tirelessly to justify the forced imprisonment, breeding, and menagerie status of their wards, it’s hard to imagine an institution more committed to the commodification of nonhuman



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animals. After all, zoos are profit-driven enterprises, a fact that makes it all the more tragic that a lowland gorilla graces the cover of the Cincinnati Zoo’s 2014/15 Annual Report, where the park reports $40,063,912 income.93 What makes this story even more tragic, however, is that lowland gorillas are critically endangered numbering just 100,000 in the wild. But instead of working to insure habitat sufficiently robust and protected from human predators such that their numbers could rebound, for example, in the Congo, zoos exploit their status as endangered to make, as Bekoff puts it, zoo-ed animals. As reported by Sarah Zhang in Wired: The Cincinnati Zoo, which has a long track record of breeding gorillas, had planned to let Harambe father baby gorillas when he got a little older, again in accordance with the species survival plan. “It will be a loss to the gene pool of lowland gorillas,” zoo director Thane Maynard said at a press conference this weekend. After Harambe died, the zoo saved and froze his semen, but it’s unclear if they’ll use it to breed gorillas in the future.94

It’s hard to exaggerate the hypocritical insolence of the gorilla survival program since if the zoo genuinely cared about gorillas as endangered—as gorillas— they could put their considerable resources toward stemming the three major factors that threaten gorilla survival in the wild: hunting and illegal trade, habitat loss and degradation, and disease.95 Such a program would not, of course, be a moneymaker since it doesn’t offer entertainment to human spectators; it doesn’t offer us an opportunity to appear caring when an animal is shot. The Pathologies of Capital Meets “Endangered Species” Harambe, and countless other zoo-ed animals—didn’t count as a gorilla for the Cincinnati Zoo; he was a spectacle—an entertainment commodity. From the point of view of exchange value, he was no different than the factory farm animal that we merely consume differently—with catsup, but without indignation. Harambe’s being a member of an endangered species just makes us feel better about getting to gawk at him. And that too is hypocritical insofar as, third, climate change makes of us all potentially endangered species, human and nonhuman. Some are “more immediately endangered” and some “less,” but no desirable future, at least as I’ve argued here, can be reconciled with Homo Colossus’ quantifying and commodifying valuation of species and ecosystems. It’s not just that climate instability makes a mockery of the concept “endangered species.” It’s that the way we assess the value of a species in terms of whether there are enough of them such that we’re “safe” in treating them as disposable eviscerates the world itself as a locus of experience worth wanting.

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In the pathology of conquest capital, an endangered species is simply a special kind of pricey commodity—like diamonds or honest politicians. For the conquest capitalist, the meaning of “endangered” can only be calculated as price; the cost to salvage, the savings to let go to extinction. Endangered, moreover, signals “something important” only if it’s something in demand; hence the value of gorillas is a function of advertising, their beneficiaries the advertisers. Consider, for example, the Ocean Conservancy’s study of the impacts to mammal and aquatic life along the Louisiana gulf coast four years after the BP disaster. In it they document “unusual mortality events” among endangered and non-endangered species, and that “cetacean deaths are thought to be underestimated. One analysis suggested that carcasses are recovered, on an average, from only 2 percent of cetacean deaths.” Given the likelihood that what applies to the cetaceans also applies to other gulf coast species, it’s alarming that “[o]f the total number of sea turtles collected 809 (481 dead) were endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles.” What’s alarming here, however, isn’t “just” that this species of sea turtle may be closer to extinction; it’s that we’re tempted to take the example seriously only because it’s nearing extinction—because, in other words, there’s not enough to regard them as disposable. It’s an artifact of human chauvinism, in other words, that the value assigned to the sea turtles is primarily quantitative; our alarm is triggered by an immediate threat—and not by the far larger environmental conditions that consign us all to “endangered.” This isn’t just short-sightedness or a product of our capacity for denial; that puts the cart before the horse. What triggers alarm over the destitute condition of the sea turtle is the sense that that, although their value is justly calculated as quantity, there are just too few of them. It’s as if we comprehend it that something would be lost if the sea turtles are allowed to go to extinction, but we’re so acculturated to conceiving value in terms of exchange that the only way we can comprehend this loss is quantitatively. This too is pathological since in exempting ourselves from the possibility of extinction, we exempt ourselves from the very forces that impinge on the sea turtles, and in so doing we alienate ourselves from the experience that could move us beyond the determination that a thing is valuable just because there’s not enough of them, namely an experience. As Dewey makes clear, the aesthetic value of an experience is not about its object, per se; that could be witnessing the sea turtle or the gorilla, the Sumatran elephant, or the purple pig-nosed frog—or the baby male chicken about to be ground to bits. The value of an experience is in its phenomenal qualities, its feel, its smell, its sound—qualities that cannot be quantified or commodified whether they elicit a sense of beauty or horror, humor or sublimity. To appreciate that value demands the restoration of a world in which that experience can be possible for any and every creature capable of it.



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The critic might argue that some species of creature matter less to biodiversity than others, and therefore that our experience of them is unlikely to be as rich because we know this. Perhaps male chicks matter less than sea turtles, and that’s why we’re comfortable grinding up millions of the former, but we at least feign outrage at the potential extinction of the latter. Perhaps “endangered” or “rare” is a natural quality of aesthetic appreciation. The trouble, however, is that we have no way of making that determination so acculturated we are to accepting as valuable that which is simply advertised to us as such: diamonds are not rare, but we treat them as such and pay great sums accordingly. The purple pig-nosed frog is rare—critically endangered—and most folks don’t know this creature even exists. A species of sea turtle may be rare, and that has meant precisely nothing with respect to BP’s return to the gulf coast. For Homo Colossus, in other words, fewer sea turtles doesn’t necessarily imply “more valuable”; it implies only “less disposable” if and when someone (or organization or zoo) decides to advertise the value of that creature. That value is thus more about demand for “sea turtles” or “gorillas” as products than about their plight, and, given the commodifying pathology of our worldview, we have no more reason to believe that the demand to save them is driven by the desire to experience them in their natural habitat than, say, Big Greens like the World Wildlife Federation have in their selection of polar bears over naked mole rats, Sumatran elephants over purple pig-nosed frogs the desire to save any creature from extinction for reasons beyond the continuing existence of WWF. After all, were we invested in an experience, we’d neither destroy the biodiversity that makes it possible, nor select to salvage only those species who look good on billboards, nor tolerate the multinationals like BP who return to the scene of the crime knowing the implications.96 The critically endangered Sumatran elephant will not likely see the end of the twenty-first century, and the reason is because illegally poached ivory is of greater value on the black market than the lives of these creatures. That is the meaning of endangered according to Homo Colossus; the criteria for assessing value is the same calculus that determines the replacement of Heinz as compared to Del Monte catsup on the shelves of the Walmart superstore. We decry the loss of endangered sea turtles, deploying armies of volunteers packing Dawn dish soap to clean the shells of survivors—but continue to buy blue fin tuna despite the fact that “oil caused deformed or damaged hearts in bluefin tuna, yellowfin tuna and amberjack.” We acknowledge that, especially since reporters were kept far from “the scene of the crime,” the numbers of dead or dying animals scooped up by the death gyres are likely abysmally low, but we breathe a collective sigh of relief when BP announces that tourism has returned to the gulf. We’ll bewail the loss of the Sumatran elephant, but we’ll fail to see ourselves in the trajectory of that death spiral.

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Recuperating that seeing is, however, crucial to revaluing human-centeredness. While the limitations which describe homo Sapiens as a specific species of animal insure that I can’t see the world as a bat, or a sea turtle or an elephant or an iguana, that does not, for the systems approach, exonerate me from making the effort at least insofar as it can offer me insight into the interconnectedness of our ecological and existential conditions. The prospect that, say, the elephant may be able to have an experience only enhances the quality of my own because it may help me to reclaim aspects of it not commandeered by the culture industry; it reminds me that centeredness need not be the command post of Homo Colossus, but rather an epistemic point of departure for articulating a future whose biodiversity is an essential component of its being worth wanting. Including species among the axes of institutionalized human chauvinism isn’t then only about the extent to which nonhuman animals are commodified, oppressed, and driven to extinction; it’s also about reclaiming another kind of place, namely the place of creatures for whom an experience may be as rich as our own, and for whom, in any case, the conditions of that possible experience requires the very same ecological stability as our own. THE SYSTEMS APPROACH AS AN ECOFEMINIST PROJECT Why the Systems Approach Must be Ecofeminist Part of what defines the systems approach is that it identifies its points of departure not only in the critique of human chauvinism, but in a renewed grasp of the relationships between human beings, the human-made world, the nonhuman world, the particularity, sentience, and capacity for suffering of nonhuman animals, the value of aesthetic experience, and the important role played by technology. While the critique of Homo Colossus is critical to gaining our bearings for conceiving the future, it is the beginning of this project—not its end. The systems approach is thus explicitly ecofeminist in that central to it are the questions “Who has benefited from the ways in which we currently assign value as exchange value?” “At whose expense or ecological cost?” How ecosystems, indigenous peoples, minority populations, women’s bodies/reproductive capacities, and nonhuman animals are valued as commodities are crucial to it precisely because institutionalized commodification decides not only who and what count as deepwater capitalism’s beneficiaries, but who and what count as the resources upon which its pathological forms of exploitation depend. As has been discussed by many feminist scholars, including Vandana Shiva, for example, the relationship between “casualized” labor, women’s



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reproductive capacities (both as domestic and sexual reproductive), and ecological deterioration is an intimate one dictated in large part by the heterosexist axis of chauvinist commodification. As I argue in Contemporary Feminist Theory and Activism (CFT): While it’s no wonder that women bear the brunt of the destruction of resources in terms of the destruction of their own opportunities to engage in productive (and reproductive) labor . . . casualization [low wage, few hours jobs] begins in the displacement of those forms of productivity more directly associated with soil, water, and vegetation. It begins . . . not only with the destruction of a variety of labor performed primarily by women, subsistence farming, but with the alienation of a primary element of women’s cultural, gendered, and even personal identity, the provision of food, from those whose work—once valued as essential to family and community—is now displaced by casualized labor itself characterized as “women’s work,” that is, as feminized.97

Examples like this one shed light not only on how human chauvinism delineates itself into its many axes, its conscripted labor, dislocated populations, products, its disposable casualties, but why. In this case, the lowwage “McJobs” of the casualized labor force benefit corporate entities both through the appropriation of land for manufacturing facilities and through the conscription of labor from those displaced by the corporation from their own lands. Shiva calls these dynamics “maldevelopment” in that “it’s hardly surprising that from the point of view of those who benefit the imposition of Western capitalist values looks like “development,” but for those whose lands are polluted and whose labor is devalued, it can hardly be said to be so.”98 Maldevelopment, in other words, captures the relationship of economic coercion to ecological destruction as part of a system—multinational capitalism—whose beneficiaries are responsible for both. The systems approach treats human chauvinism as systemic, recognizing that institutionalized varieties of commodification form mutually reinforcing hierarchically organized systems through which the prerogatives of its beneficiaries are reinforced and naturalized. One objection to this approach is that among the achievements of the feminist movement is that at least some women are now empowered to compete on relatively equally footing with some men for the advantages afforded through capitalist profit ventures. True; liberal feminism has meant opportunity for some mostly white Western women. The trouble is that despite overcoming some aspects of patriarchal domination, becoming the female CEO of BP or Monsanto, or Duke Energy, fails entirely to address the ecological destruction caused by these corporations, and it reinforces the exploitive relationships responsible for that destruction. Consider, for example, Lynn Good, president and chief executive

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officer of Duke Energy, a Fortune 500 company,99 culpable for one of the most massive toxic coal ash spills in American history: A little over a year since approximately 39,000 tons of toxic coal slurry gushed into a major North Carolina river, the company responsible is being fined $25.1 million for the disaster. Duke Energy, the largest electricity supplier in the country and the primary supplier of energy in North Carolina, was served the penalty by North Carolina’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources . . . It’s the largest fine ever incurred for environmental damage in the state . . . Coal ash is a heavy metal-laden and possibly radioactive by-product of coal plants that is stored in ponds. In February 2014, a massive Duke Energy coal ash pond drained directly into the Dan River after the aging storm drain-pipe that the pond was inexplicably built over suddenly broke. Duke Energy’s reputation is dogged by a litany of accusations of coal ash mishandling: The company has been sued by state environmental officials for groundwater and wastewater violations at the Dan River plant and 11 other sites in North Carolina.100

That Good is female hardly excuses her for an ecological catastrophe of this magnitude, and it doesn’t exempt her from responsibility for the consequences to the millions of people and nonhuman animals affected by it. Women too can be Homo Colossus. That Duke Energy has a history of environmental violations that predate Good’s tenure at the company magnifies the point that equal opportunity for some comes at tremendously high cost for others. Another objection to the systems approach, however, is that we now see more women, nationally and globally, empowered by grassroots environmental organizations aimed at taking on specific crises—pollution, toxic waste dumps, carbon extraction, factory farming, deforestation, climate change, and so on, and that these efforts have made real headway. Also true. Indeed, at the level of the truly grassroots campaigns women overwhelmingly occupy positions mostly voluntary (or poorly compensated) and heavy on labor. For example, currently heading the Delaware River Keepers, a group devoted to maintaining a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing in the Delaware River Basin is Maya van Rossum; at Keep Tap Water Safe, Iris Bloom; on the speaker’s bureau for Shale Justice, researcher Dory Hippauf. Unlikely activists, many women like Barbara Sha Cox of CAFO Watch work tirelessly for no compensation to keep factory farms out of residential neighborhoods: According to Cox, industrial farms come into rural communities where not many people live and “upend the culture and health of the population, displacing small farms, destroying roads and polluting the water and air.” For these reasons, the Indiana CAFO Watch brings citizen watchdogs together to patrol neighborhoods for any signs of abuse, including testing the air for pollutants coming off of farms. Sometimes gas masks are a must for volunteers, according to Cox.101



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The trouble is that all too often these efforts are overshadowed by corporatestyled Big Green environmental organizations that, very much like their masculinist counterparts in government and/or private industry, are largely dominated by white Western men. This is especially true of Big Green nonprofits such as the Sierra Club (Michael Brune), The Nature Conservancy (Mark Tercek) the Environmental Defense Fund (Fred Krupp), 350.org (Bill McKibbon), or the Audubon Society (David Yarnold), whose donor bases, membership lists, political allies, and industry-friendly “cadaver cosmetic” agendas reinforce institutionalized gender, racial, and species divides, as well as make political and economic beneficiaries of a small handful of welleducated, virtually uniformly white, men. This point is important because we might be tempted to look to the Big Greens for examples and inspiration in showing where women or persons of color have had opportunities to be effective advocates—perhaps even good candidates for articulating a defensible human-centeredness. This is a mistake; in fact, the Big Greens are as comfortable a home for the men of Homo Colossus as is Chevron, and as masculinist in their orientation to environmental justice. Consider a recent Foreign Affairs “expert poll” addressing the question “Should We Frack?” Of its twenty respondents, none were persons of color, and only three were women. Of the two experts from large environmental non-profits, neither were women, one (Bill McKibbon, 350.org) raised objections on climate change grounds, and the other (Mark Tercek, The Nature Conservancy) actively supported continuing carbon extraction citing more jobs—failing to acknowledge the contribution of methane to climate change. Of the three women, only one (Ruth Greenspan Bell, public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars) raised concerns about the environmental costs; the other two women supported fracking citing economic benefits, and ignoring environmental costs or the effects of climate change for women, indigenous peoples, coastal populations, or nonhuman animals. Of the remaining respondents—all white men, nearly all sited national security, cheap energy, and profitability for U.S. corporations as justification for the continuation of HVHF—fracking. The lesson here seems clear: we have little reason to believe that either being a woman and/or being associated with environmental policy-making attunes even an “expert” to the many forms of human chauvinism relevant to making informed decisions concerning the effects of increasing methane emissions associated with climate change. Although these folks may be the “experts,” it’s unclear whether any of them see beyond the constraints of the multiple systems that empower and benefit them economically, socially, or politically. Each occupies a position—including those at the helms of 350.org and The Nature Conservancy—far removed from the real impacts and consequent experience of those impacted by the

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systems, racist, heterosexist, and speciesist, that commodify their resources and/or labor. While several reference the destruction of clean water, only one raises any questions about entrenched carbon interests who’d continue converting a necessity of life into a scarce commodity for the sake of profits.102 What the Foreign Affairs example illustrates is the extent to which human chauvinism is no single system, but an adaptive set of systems that capture some features of their beneficiaries, but not others. That some poll respondents were female guarantees little with respect to their sensitivity to the heterosexist oppression experienced by other women occupying far less privileged positions, especially in the casualized labor pools of the global South. That none of the experts consulted were persons of color is telling, especially since the qualification for “expert” was up to the journal editors. They could have sought out the African American Environmentalist Association, or African-American activists like Will Allen, Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Van Jones, or philosopher Robert Bullard. Note that this is not to say that these experts would have taken different positions on fossil fuels. President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) appointment Lisa Jackson may have made it her “priority to focus on vulnerable groups,” but she is widely criticized for her stand on hydraulic fracturing which, contrary to substantial evidence, she insisted was “safe.”103 It’s also not surprising that the Big Greens have contributed little to mitigating climate change. They have as much invested in maintaining the system that supports their organizational survival as do corporations have in their well-paid lobbyists. Take for example, the Sierra Club; as journalist Jane Hamsher notes in a 2010 Huffington Post piece about Club president Carl Pope’s response to President Obama’s inaction with respect to the BP Gulf Coast disaster: “President Obama is the best environmental president we’ve had since Teddy Roosevelt,” Sierra Club chairman Carl Pope told the Bangor Daily News last week. “He obviously did not take the crisis in the Minerals Management Service adequately seriously, that’s clear. But his agencies have done a phenomenally good job.” This is a truly incredible claim in light of the facts, including the secret night dumping of thousands of mammal and bird carcasses to keep reporters from covering the real story; it’s even more incredible given the risks President Obama is apparently willing to underwrite for the sake of continued drilling. As Saul observes: And so BP and the Gulf and all of us have come full circle, back to the scene of the crime . . . As big oil races ever faster and ever deeper, time somehow seems to stand still. The rush put on the workers is the rush put on the managers, is the rush put on the CEOs, is the rush put on the shareholders, is the same rush put again upon the workers. And in this “race for what’s left” . . . we are left standing still, watching death approaching, as the drilling rigs, like monster space-age vultures, circle Macondo once again.104



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Hamsher argues that the Big Green allegiance to survival over environmental integrity “has hamstrung their ability to act as trustworthy arbiters and advocates in the situation, above the realm of politics,” a claim that seems to understate by orders of magnitude the death gyres that await the next “spill.”105 This failure of commitment to the environment, the public, and to the future drives not only the Sierra Club but The Nature Conservancy to get into bed with the oil companies to the tune of millions of donor dollars.106 The point is not simply that to look to the Big Greens for a revolutionary recuperation and revaluing of human-centeredness—much less an articulation of the desirable future—is bound to be disappointed. It’s that the Big Greens are hamstrung not only by donors beholden to the status quo, but by the masculinist human chauvinism that decides their place, so long as they remain squarely on the reformist agenda that votes for “sustainability,” but settles for the sustainability of their comfortable place.

The Masculinization of Environmentalism In her essay “Only Resist: Feminist Ecological Citizenship and the PostPolitics of Climate Change,” feminist Sherilyn MacGregor argues that “we are witnessing the masculinization of environmentalism. Men dominate in all spheres of climate politics . . . It is an ‘expert and elitist discourse’ in which a host of “interests, views, and voices are very much neglected.”107 What’s also true, however, is that even at the level of grassroots organizing where we do find more women, they’re still almost uniformly white and relatively affluent (often retired) despite the fact that the costs of environmental collapse are disproportionately borne by persons of color, the economically vulnerable, poor rural white family farmers, and nonhuman animals. Van Rossum, Bloom, and Hippauf are all white and middle class, and while the Delaware River Keepers have taken on secrecy with respect to factory farm water pollution and animal cruelty, they stand virtually alone among grassroot greens in addressing CAFOs. According to MacGregor, however, the issue is not only about who’s empowered to articulate the relationship between environmental and social or economic justice—but what counts as an issue: “[t]he types of environmental justice issues that have traditionally been most relevant to women (poor and racialized women in particular) arguably have been marginalized, even though they have not been solved.”108 She points out that “campaigns on pesticides, industrial pollution, nuclear radiation . . . animal welfare, and seed saving” receive relatively little attention, and that climate change “is now being used to trump” other environmental issues in a process which depoliticizes global warming as a crisis and is instead cast as a that which merits the totalizing response of effectively dictatorial policies.

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Whether MacGregor is correct about the global response to climate change—whether that response jeopardizes women, indigenous peoples, the poor, or nonhuman animals—leads us to one of the central questions raised by an ecofeminist systems approach: Given what we know about the causes of our current ecological crises and forms of social injustice, what we know about who is affected and who stands to benefit, who is the “we” most suitable to take up this project of articulating an alternative strategy for securing a desirable future? Who—given the many axes that characterize human chauvinism and the many opportunities to be co-opted by these—occupies the best available epistemic position to begin the work of imagining a world not only free of chauvinism, but desirable to those who have borne the brunt of the harms meted out in this one? This is a difficult question. Those most responsible for generating the conditions of our current ecological crisis are neither likely to embrace this revolutionary project, nor are they well suited to the self-critical evaluation it demands, not is it in any way obvious that they’ll see the value of re-appropriating aesthetic experience as a value to the ends of preventing ecological apocalypse. The less obvious, but arguably greater difficulty for an ecofeminist recuperation of human-centeredness is that while others like Barbara Sha Cox may seem like better candidates, there’s no guarantee they’ll see themselves as oppressed or exploited along any of the axes of human chauvinism; aside from her fight against CAFO’s, “Cox and husband Dan still sport a Bush-Cheney sticker on their pickup truck, and they live outside of Winchester, population 5,037 at last Census count, just north of I-70 on the Ohio border.”109 Still, it’s just these latter who, benefiting the least from the globalization of exchange value, and who remain the most vulnerable to the effects of polluted water wells, melting ice caps, flooding, drought, disappearing shorelines, and catastrophic weather events—in addition to labor exploitation—may occupy the most promising positions for this tall order: evaluating the effects of human chauvinism, comprehending the difference between sustainability and desirability, and reclaiming aesthetic experience to the ends of articulating a desirable future. On the one hand, not only are developing world (or ecologically degraded regions of the developed world) people supplied with ample motivation to articulate a human-centeredness beyond human chauvinism, they’re less likely to have a stake in the maintenance of systems that conspire to harm them (though they may have some). On the other hand, experience is no guarantee of the capacity for self-reflection—and insight doesn’t ameliorate the risk to one’s safety, employment, social standing, or family agitating for change. Among the most conservative of American Tea Partiers are climate change deniers, creationists, and religious ideologues—and while these folks are likely to be white, they’re not necessarily sitting on the boards of Chevron



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or BP. Moreover, while they’re likely to be acutely aware of government intrusion via the permitting of property seizures for private profit ventures, that doesn’t mean they can afford to hire attorneys to protect the surface rights of their farmlands. Similarly, being a middle class African-American couple whose home’s in a neighborhood blighted by a toxic waste incinerator—and recognizing the danger to one’s health and family—isn’t by itself empowering against the risk being fired for speaking out. What becomes clear is that it’s possible (even likely) to be advantaged by one variety of human chauvinism and harmed by another. Young Muslim men recruited by the Islamic State are beneficiaries of a profoundly patriarchal religious ideology—yet, they are likely to be at the bottom of the scale both in their home countries and in Europe for access to jobs. African-American women in the United States have made enormous strides in employment and education—yet may still live in neighborhoods blighted by crime. Rural mostly white farmers are discovering that the deeds to their farms and its surface rights protects them not one whit from the incursions of gas companies seeking to drill a “sweet spot” in the Marcellus shale a mile under their barns. Who, then, is best suited to lead the charge to carve out a vision of the future in which human-centeredness implies restoration, social justice, and equitably distributed accountability is a very difficult question. But it’s precisely because it is so that this project is a feminist project. In one sense we’re all “best suited” to such a project in that short of parting ways with the planet we can all act in some way less destructive to our waning resources. But the difference between deciding to purchase a Honda instead of a Hummer and making a smaller dinner fire from the scrap wood we journeyed ten miles round trip to acquire is nearly incomparable—and it only reinforces the prerogative of the privileged to ignore these facts. Recognizing that chauvinism describes no single system, but rather forms the scaffolding of mutually reinforcing ones, the systems approach is both feminist and ecologically feminist because it understands that the causes of environmental destruction, speciesism, labor exploitation, racism, heterosexism, and all other forms of commodification share a common currency—instrumental reason’s reduction of all value to exchange value. Moreover, it understands that there is no coherent strategy for ending human chauvinism while leaving intact any of its axes. Addressing social and economic justice is addressing climate change; the world desirable to the least advantaged is the world beyond mere sustainability. Such a world cannot support continuing fossil fuel extraction, factory farming, uncontrolled human fertility, monoculture food manufacture, chemical warfare, nuclear power generation, or deforestation. It is a radically different world whose vision of justice is intimately tethered to the responsibility taken by its communities and their members for a centeredness premised on epistemic responsibility,

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democratic-decision-making, and the reclamation of value beyond exchange. It’s in this utopian sense that this work is a manifesto, a call to insurgency where “action” takes its cue from a human-centeredness enacted by those who’d take up that call. A manifesto is a door opened—in this case to six fundamental premises: • We cannot continue on our current eco-cidal trajectory; it is a pathology of capitalized human nature—but not an ineradicable condition. • This trajectory has as its primary cause masculinist human chauvinism and the capitalist reduction of all value to exchange value. It delineates itself into several axes of commodification: speciesism, heterosexism, and racism. • Chauvinism is not ubiquitous to the human condition, but is an historical artifact originating in the rise of conquest capitalism, an expropriation of reason effectively metastasized to the ends of endless consumption. A human-centered system of value needn’t reproduce value exclusively as exchange value, but could be radically re-envisioned as an enduring locus of epistemic and moral responsibility in a world for which ecological stability is recuperated as an essential value oriented to the future. • The currently popular narrative promoting ecological sustainability as a solution to ecosystemic collapse is consistent with human chauvinism in all its forms, and is thus inadequate for articulating a human-centeredness whose objective is to reclaim any value beyond exchange value. • A sustainable world is not sufficient to a desirable one, especially for those made most vulnerable to oppression and commodification in virtue of gender, sex, ethnicity, indigenous, or economic status, or species to ecological destruction and social injustice. • “Desirable” includes an aesthetic dimension of an experience that can provide a driver to action toward realizing ecological integrity, stability, and diversity, as well as the social and economic justice necessary for enduring human communities. It is open to nonhuman animal experience as an important value recognizing the interconnected relationship between human beings and nonhuman animals, as well as the mutual interdependencies that feature as fundamental to the rejection of exchange value and the recuperation of the aesthetic in experience. The systems approach is ecofeminist in its critique of human chauvinism, but it’s also post-chauvinist in its rejection of the notion that we can be no other that human beings. The recuperation of the aesthetic in experience is built as a potent driver into its radically revised concept of human-centeredness because it takes as its central object a world desirable beyond deepwater capitalism and the reproduction of the institutions responsible for climate change. From this “center” the future is desirable precisely because it is so to those for



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whom the present—however sustainable—is incompatible with a world that a creature capable of ingenuity, intellect, and imagination would want for their offspring. The systems approach is revolutionary because it takes ecological integrity as valuable—morally and aesthetically—in itself and as that which offers the only viable path—however thorny and strewn with risk—away from The Road.

NOTES 1. Naomi Klein, “Let Them Drown,” London Review of Books 38 (11) (June 2, 2016): 11–14. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n11/naomi-klein/let-them-drown. 2. Chris Amico, Danny DeBellius, Scott Detrow, and Matt Stiles, Natural Gas Drilling in Pennsylvania Interactive Map, National Public Radio: State Impact Pennsylvania, http://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/drilling/. 3. Fukushima Accident, World Nuclear Association, http://www.world-nuclear. org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-accident. aspx. 4. Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Volume I, The Problem of Civilization (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), 35–42. 5. Nnimmo Bassey, Oil, Environment and Human Rights: The Case of Nigeria’s Niger Delta, 2. www.foe-scotland.org.uk/sites/www.foe…org…/s%20speech_0.doc. 6. Bassey, Oil, Environment and Human Rights, 2. 7. Chevron Lawsuit (re Nigeria), http://business-humanrights.org/en/chevronlawsuit-re-nigeria. 8. Associated Press, “Shell reports record oil spillages in Nigeria,” The Guardian, May 5, 2010. 9. Suzanna Sawyer, Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005), 102, my emphasis. 10. Jeremy Rifkin, “The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, The Collaborative Commons, and The Collapse of Capitalism” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 59, my emphasis. 11. Paul Slansky, Idiots, Hypocrites, Demagogues, and More Idiots: Not So Great Moments in American Politics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 140. 12. Quincy Saul, “Deepwater Capitalism,” Counterpunch, April 20, 2015 http:// www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/20/deepwater-capitalism/. 13. Saul, “Deepwater Capitalism.” 14. Saul, “Deepwater Capitalism.” 15. Huffington Post, “Shell Oil Spill Dumps Thousands of Barrels of Crude into Gulf of Mexico,” May 12, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ shell-oil-spill-gulf-mexico_us_57353058e4b060aa7819ee00. 16. Frederic Bender, The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep Ecology. (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 2003), 23.

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17. Saul, “Deepwater Capitalism.” 18. Ron Hirschbein, The United States and Terrorism: An Ironic Perspective (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), Ch. 5. 19. Donald Trump, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” Twitter, November 6, 2012. https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/265895292191248385. 20. Ashley Parker and Coral Davenport, “Donald Trump’s Energy Plan: More Fossil Fuels and Fewer Rules,” New York Times, May 26, 2016. http://www.nytimes. com/2016/05/27/us/politics/donald-trump-global-warming-energy-policy.html. 21. Ron Dreher, “Trump as Tribal Leader,” The American Conservative, June 1, 2016, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-tribal-leader/. 22. Wendy Lynne Lee, “Trees Can Be Trees, or Trees Can Be Money: The Holleran’s Sugar Bush and the Constitution Pipeline,” The Wrench, March 6, 2016. http://thewrenchphilosleft.blogspot.com/2016/03/trees-can-be-trees-or-trees-can-be. html. 23. Elizabeth Shogren, “Air Quality Concerns Threaten Natural Gas’s Image,” All Things Considered: National Public Radio, June 21, 2011. http://www.npr. org/2011/06/21/137197991/air-quality-concerns-threaten-natural-gas-image. 24. National Institutes of Health, “National Institutes of Environmental Health: Cancer, Impacts of Climate Change,” http://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/ geh/climatechange/health_impacts/cancer/index.cfm. 25. Henry Fountain, “Researchers Link Syrian Conflict to a Drought Made Worse by Climate Change,” New York Times, March 2, 2015. http://www.nytimes. com/2015/03/03/science/earth/study-links-syria-conflict-to-drought-caused-by-climate-change.html?_r=0. 26. Naomi Klein, “Let Them Drown,” 11–14. 27. Cormac McCarthy, The Road. (New York: Vintage, 2006), 286. 28. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 3. 29. Regina Cochrane, “Climate Change, Buen Vivir, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” Hypatia 29.3 (Summer 2014), 589. 30. Cochrane, “Climate Change, Buen Vivir, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” 589. 31. Global Footprint Network, http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/ GFN/. 32. Bender, The Culture of Extinction, 277. 33. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 19. 34. Klein, This Changes Everything, 20. 35. Global Footprint Network, http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/ GFN/. 36. Greta Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Climate Change,” Women’s Studies International Forum 49 (2015), 4. 37. Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Climate Change,” 4–5. 38. Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Climate Change,” 10.



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39. Associated Press, “BP Oil Spill: Portraits of the 11 Who Died on the Deep Water Horizon,” April 19, 2015. http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2015/04/ bp_oil_spill_portraits_of_the.html. 40. Business and Human Rights Resource Center, “Human Rights Impacts of Oil Pollution: U.S. Gulf Coast,” http://business-humanrights.org/en/human-rights-impactsof-oil-pollution-us-gulf-coast-4. 41. Ocean Conservancy, “Four Years After the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Disaster,” http://www.oceanconservancy.org/places/gulf-of-mexico/pdf-4-years-after-bp. pdf. 42. Michael Klare, The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for World’s Last Resources (New York: Picador, 2012). 43. Klare, The Race for What’s Left, 218 and 210. 44. Sherilyn MacGregor, “Only Resist: Feminist Ecological Citizenship and the Post-Politics of Climate Change,” Hypatia 29 (3) (Summer 2014), 626, my emphasis. 45. MacGregor, “Only Resist,” 626. 46. Cochrane, “Climate Change, Buen Vivir, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” 582. 47. Wendy Lynne Lee, “Restoring Environmental Conscience to Human-Centeredness: The Ecocentrist’s Dilemma, the Role of Heterosexualized Anthropomorphizing, and the Significance of Language to Ecological Feminism,” Ethics and the Environment 14.1 (Spring 2009), 42. 48. Wendy Lynne Lee, Contemporary Feminist Theory and Activism: Six Global Issues (Ontario: Broadview, 2010) 202. 49. Carol Adams, Neither Man Nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals (Herndon, VA: Lantern Books, 1995), 73. 50. Cochrane, “Climate Change, Buen Vivir, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” 586. 51. Cochrane, “Climate Change, Buen Vivir, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” 586. 52. BBC News, “U.S. Judge Annuls Ecuador Oil Ruling Against Chevron,” March 4, 2014. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-26441836. 53. CBS News, “Chevron Fined 9.5 Billion in Ecuador,” February 14, 2011. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/chevron-fined-95-billion-in-ecuador/. 54. Adam Wernick, “Louisiana Coastline is Disappearing at the Rate of a Football Field an Hour,” PRI, September 23, 2014. http://www.pri.org/stories/2014–09–23/ louisianas-coastline-disappearing-rate-football-field-hour. 55. Milwaukee Community Journal, “Eight Years Later, Ravages of Hurricane Katrina Still Hurt Mostly Blacks,” September 7, 2013. http://communityjournal.net/ eight-years-later-ravages-of-hurricane-katrina-still-hurt-mostly-blacks/. 56. Elijah Wolfson, “Ebola and Climate Change: Are Humans Responsible for the Current Outbreak?” Newsweek, August 12, 2014. http://www.newsweek.com/ climate-change-ebola-outbreak-globalization-infectious-disease-264163. 57. Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Climate Change,” 10. 58. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Toronto: Random House Publishing, 1966).

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59. Wendy Lynne Lee, “Restoring Environmental Conscience to Human-Centeredness,” 37. 60. Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, 59. 61. Cochrane, “Climate Change, Buen Vivir, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” 594. 62. Phillip Altman, “Plurinationality and Interculturality in Ecuador,” Iberoamericana: The Indigenous Movement and the Development of Political Concepts.” Nordic Journal Of Latin American and Carribean Studies, Vol. XLIII, 1–2, 2013, 47–66. 63. Wendy Lynne Lee, “When the Roots Aren’t Made of Grass, The Solutions Save the System, and the Only Thing Hotter than the Planet is the Bacon,” The Wrench, March 16, 2015. http://thewrenchphilosleft.blogspot.com/2015/03/whenroots-arent-made-of-grass.html. 64. Lee, “When the Roots Aren’t Made of Grass.” 65. Lee, “When the Roots Aren’t Made of Grass.” 66. Jensen, Endgame, Volume I, 3. 67. Jensen, Endgame, Volume I, 36. 68. Jensen, Endgame, Volume I, IX. 69. Jensen, Endgame, Volume I, 451. 70. Lewis, Green Delusions, 9. 71. John Dewey, Art as Experience. (New York: Perigee Books, 1934), 205. 72. Dewey, Art as Experience, 205. 73. Wendy Lynne Lee, “On Ecology and Aesthetic Experience: A Feminist Theory of Value and Praxis,” Ethics and the Environment, 11.1 (2006), 3. 74. United Nations; Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Economic and Social Survey 2013: Sustainable Development Challenges,” https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/2843WESS2013.pdf. 75. Sharon Beder, “Costing the Earth: Equity Sustainable Development and Environmental Economics,” New Zealand Journal of Environmental Law 4 (2000), 227–43. https://www.uow.edu.au/~sharonb/esd/equity.html. 76. Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. (Boston: South End Press, 1988), 290. 77. Daniela Turß, “Biofuels, Development and (Neo)-Colonialism,” Friedrich Ebert Stiftung: Sustainability Blog, September 3, 2014. http://www.fes-sustainability. org/de/blog/degrowth/biofuels-development-and-neo-colonialism. 78. Lee, “On Ecology and Aesthetic Experience,” 24. 79. Wendy Lynne Lee, “Sustainable Wasteland: Ecological Humanism, Cadaver Cosmetics, and the Desirable Future” (Berlin: Springer International, 2015), 3. 80. Dewey, Art as Experience, 205. 81. Dewey, Art as Experience, 205–6. 82. Dewey, Art as Experience, 206. 83. Lee, “On Ecology and Aesthetic Experience,” 24. 84. Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007), 9. 85. PennState University, The Hamer Center for Community Design, “Marcellus by Design,” http://sites.psu.edu/marcellusbydesign/.



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86. Scott Falon, “A New Angle on Cleaning Up Passaic River: Swap your Catch for a Cleaner Fish,” North Jersey.com, November 32, 2013, my emphasis, http:// www.northjersey.com/news/passaic river_polution_EPA_newark_cleanup_superfund.html. 87. Wendy Lynne Lee, “Cadaver Cosmetics: The Aesthetics of Sustainability,” The Wrench, December 5, 2013. http://thewrenchphilosleft.blogspot.com/2013/12/ the-aesthetics-of-sustainability.html. 88. Lena Williams, “Passaic River’s 2 Faces: One Dirty, One Scenic,” New York Times, September 8, 1981. http://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/08/nyregion/passaicriver-s-2-faces-one-dirty-one-senic.html. 89. Dewey, Art as Experience, 206. 90. Wendy Lynne Lee, “Mr. Luv-Lizard Liked Blueberries, but not Bananas,” The Wrench, January 22, 2015. http://thewrenchphilosleft.blogspot.com/2015/01/mr-luvlizard-liked-blueberries-but-not.html. 91. Andrew Revkin, “After Harambe’s Death, Rethinking Zoos,” New York Times, June 2, 2016. http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/after-harambesdeath-rethinking-zoos/?_r=0. 92. Marc Bekoff, “Why Was Harambe the Gorilla in a Zoo in the First Place?” Scientific American, Blog, May 31, 2016. http://blogs.scientificamerican. com/guest-blog/why-was-harambe-the-gorilla-in-a-zoo-in-the-first-place/ 93. Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden: Annual Report, 2014–15. http://cincinnatizoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/AnnualReport_FY-2014–15.pdf. 94. Sarah Zhang. “What Happens to Harambe’s Gorilla Troop Now That He’s Gone? It’s Complicated,” Wired, June 2, 2016. http://www.wired.com/2016/06/ happens-harambes-gorilla-troop-now-hes-gone-complicated/. 95. World Wildlife Federation, “Western Lowland Gorilla,” http://wwf.panda. org/what_we_do/endangered_species/great_apes/gorillas/western_lowland_gorilla/. 96. Amanda Williams. “We Can’t All be Pandas! Meet the World’s Ugliest Endangered Animals . . . and the Campaign to Save them from Extinction,” Daily Mail.com, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2877388/We-t-pandas-Meetworld-s-ugliest-endangered-animals-campaign-save-extinction.html. 97. Lee, Contemporary Feminist Theory and Activism, 102–3. 98. Lee, Contemporary Feminist Theory and Activism, 103. 99. Duke Energy, Lynn Good, https://www.duke-energy.com/about-us/leaders/ lynn-good.asp. 100. Zoe Schlanger, “Duke Energy Fined 25.1 Million for Toxic Coal Ash Spill that Polluted NC River Last Year,” Newsweek, March 10, 2015. http://www.newsweek.com/ duke-energy-fined-25-million-one-year-after-its-toxic-coal-ash-gushed-north-312824. 101. Advanced Reporting, “An Unexpected Advocate: Barbara Sha Cox,” https://advancedreportingfall13.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/an-unexpectedadvocate-barbara-sha-cox/ 102. Foreign Affairs “Should We Frack: Foreign Affairs’ Brain Trust Weighs In,” January 29, 2015. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015–01–29/ should-we-frack.

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103. Jonathan Leff and Joshua Schneyer, “EPA Fracking Regulations Fall on Lisa Jack Successor,” The Huffington Post, December 27, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/28/epa-fracking_n_2373391.html. 104. Saul, “Deepwater Capitalism.” 105. Jane Hamsher, “The Sierra Club No Longer Deserves Your Trust,” The Huffington Post, June 14, 2010. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-hamsher/whythe-sierra-club-no-lo_b_611447.html. 106. Jane Hamsher, “Environs Go Veal Pen 2.0 with BP’s Money,” Firedog Lake, May 24, 2010. http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/05/24/envirosgo-veal-pen-2–0-with-bps-money/. 107. MacGregor. “Only Resist,” 623. 108. MacGregor. “Only Resist,” 623. 109. Steven Higgs, “Barbara Sha Cox Leads the Statewide Fight Against CAFOS,” NUVO.net, April 15, 2010. http://www.nuvo.net/indianapolis/barbara-sha-cox-leadsthe-statewide-fight-against cafos/Content?oid=1344207.

Chapter 2

Human Chauvinism, the Geopolitics of Climate Change, and the PopCultural Ecocentric Solution

THE “GEOGRAPHY OF VIOLENCE,” CLIMATE CHANGE, AND THE CAPITALIST ENDGAME OF CHRISTIAN PARENTI’S TROPIC OF CHAOS Post-Colonialism Meets Climate Instability: “Bad Adaptation” In his 2011 Tropic of Chaos investigative journalist and writer Christian Parenti details the “geography of violence” characterizing the relationship between climate change and the geopolitics of post-colonialism: Between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer lies what I call the Tropic of Chaos, a belt of economically and politically battered post-colonial states girding the planet’s mid-latitudes. In this band, around the tropics, climate change is beginning to hit hard. The societies in this belt are also heavily dependent on agriculture and fishing, thus very vulnerable to shifts in weather patterns. This region was also on the front lines of the Cold War and of neoliberal economic restructuring. As a result, in this belt we find clustered most of the failed and semi-failed states of the developing world.1

Note that Parenti isn’t speculating about future impacts; he’s charting the destabilizing, potentially lethal implications of climate change for nations states within the “Tropic of Chaos” right now. He cites a Swedish government study which projects 46 countries—2.7 billion people—where the effects of climate change in interaction with “economic, social, and political problems”—especially rising rates of poverty, unstable government, cultural, and educational institutions, lack of access to clean water, and increasing starvation—will create a high risk of violent conflict.”2 67

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Parenti goes on to discuss how American and other Western military powers are already preparing for the contingencies of climate change conflict, a point made even starker by the fact that the manufacture, distribution, and operation of the weapons of war contributes directly to the exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves necessary to carry out military action. The dark irony is that because these weapons run on oil and gas, their use not only contributes to the destruction of soil and water but, in so doing, reinforces the widening division between the global “North” and the exploited global “South” creating the conditions for more war—and thus the “justification” for more carbon extraction. Indeed, insofar as hydrocarbon extraction contributes to global warming, preparation for war has a hand in climate change refugeeism—itself a factor in the recruitment of terrorist soldiers for organization like the Islamic State. In any case, this cycle of violence is a vicious one. It may not lead directly to ecological apocalypse, but that’s only because, in its ever-escalating “justifications” for the defense of turf, national security, assets, or religion, it solicits the conditions for deploying more massive weaponry, including weapons of mass destruction first. Like its analogues in the raced, gendered, sexed, and speciesist patterns laid down by the logic of conquest capital in other industries, “North” and “South” serve both geographic and critical symbolic purposes reinforcing what counts as resource, labor, commodity, or disposable for the global North’s corporate appetites. Add anthropogenic climate change to this already toxic brew of exploitation, dispossession, and repression, and you’ve got a recipe for a “damaged society,” a post-colonialism whose imploding institutions and social practices are likely to expel widespread global shrapnel. Parenti argues that, much like individuals, the ways that societies deal with conflicts and crises is conditioned by “the traumas of their past,” that is, sometimes irrationally, and in a fashion short-sighted and self-destructive. “In the case of climate change,” he argues, “the prior traumas that set the stage for bad adaptation,” and he includes among these traumas Cold Warera militarism and the pathological structure of conquest capitalism. Parenti laments that what passes for solidarity in response to climate change realizes itself not as global cooperation but as “exclusionary tribalism,” accompanied by violence, corruption and police repression. He concludes by insisting that we not concede that such a dismal state of affairs in natural; the resort to tribalism is the consequence of history, particularly the history of the global North’s exploitation of the global South.3 On the one hand, “bad adaptation” to climate change sets the stage for “exclusionary tribalism.” On the other, it “justifies” ever more brutal police repression. The key point here, however, is that both epitomize human chauvinism along all of its repressive axes. Peoples of the global South—non-Western, nonwhite, including the indigenous and/or the immigrant labor of Western industrialized countries—and

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their resources—carbons, rare earth minerals, fertile soils, clean water, labor and animal bodies—are “used and abused”—commodified in a circulatory system that instantiates exchange value as all value. As Parenti points out, “[c]apitalism has always functioned as an international system,” (p. 19). What’s new is that, in light of the failed post-colonial state combined with the trauma-producing effects of climate change, what “bad adaptation” means is a psychotically authoritarian human chauvinism revealing itself as violent tribal warfare and, as Parenti puts it, the “climate fascism” of the corporatized state, “a politics based on exclusion, segregation, and repression [that is] horrific and bound to fail.”4 In Parenti’s global version of The Road, affluent states like the United States and Europe transform themselves into “armed lifeboats” that, faced with climate apocalypse, stay afloat by “turning into neo-fascist islands.” While it may seem like he’s flirting with hyperbole, the evidence for the emergence of such islands isn’t hard to find. We needn’t travel to West Kenya, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or eastern Afghanistan to discover some very bad adaptation. We can find it here right at home in the global North’s increasingly repressive politics of fossil fuel fascism. As we’ll see, it’s not hard to find examples of this bad adaptation exerting itself in the calculated but anxious development of expensive and innovative technologies designed to extract every last hydrocarbon from deep inside the earth or under the ocean in order to sustain the high level of consumption to which global North citizens are accustomed. While Americans may not (yet) be the victims of Chevron-paid mercenaries like those faced by citizens of the Congo, there’s plenty of reason to be anxious: shrinking hydrocarbon resources, rising demand, the despoiling of the Colorado Rockies,5 the Florida Everglades,6 and Native American tribal lands in North Dakota,7 catastrophic weather patterns flooding Louisiana,8 and multiplying pockets of resistance, for example at Lake Seneca, New York.9 Yet, so addicted are we to fossil fuels that we’re willing to sell off our own national treasures for what amounts to a hail Mary pass to the myth of endless resources. The Machineries of Fossil Fuel Fascism: Drill Bits and Surveillance Cameras Divisions found within communities trying to cope with hydraulic fracturing operations sprinkling silica on sand boxes outside elementary schools, spilling frack-waste into high-value trout streams, or contaminating drinking water wells may not paint as stark an image as the murdered Kenyan pastoralist of Parenti’s opening story—but the conquest capitalist dynamics that create that division are just the same. What connects rural Pennsylvania to West Kenya isn’t simply that the corporate beneficiaries of fossil fuel fascism

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(including gun-makers, privatized water companies, rubber and steel manufacturers, etc.) are the same; it’s because the logic that arms the lifeboats of those beneficiaries is; it’s because the fossil fuel lifeboat is shrinking and sinking. Bad adaptation is bad adaptation. Climate change knows no geographical boundaries; hence, we can expect to see the number of communities traumatized by capital multiply. Still, we might be tempted to think that terms like “fascism” overstate the power of the fossil fuel industry at least in the United States where environmental regulation ostensibly protects us against risks to health and safety posed by drilling and transport activities. Aren’t we a democratic republic? Don’t we have a say in the use of our resources, especially our national treasures? These are, of course, very complex questions, but what the evidence suggests is that we no longer (if ever) have the say we imagined, and that the reason is because in a world dominated by the geopolitics of fossil fuel, “a say” beyond “fill’er up” is an obstacle to generating hydrocarbon revenues. The “climate war forensics” of the Tropic of Chaos—the potential loss of the very resources of life—isn’t different than those of rural Pennsylvania other than as a matter of degree. Consider an example: we might be tempted to excuse as “freakish accident” incidents like the one that occurred in Charleston, West Virginia, January, 2014, where 300,000 people were exposed to 5000 gallons of toxic chemicals spilling into their main source of clean drinking water, the Elk River.10 But freakish accident doesn’t capture the fact that just over a year later another accident equally horrific forced thousands of West Virginians back to bottled water (many of whom cannot easily afford it) after 109 tanker cars—built according to new standards made possible by improved antirupture technology—and two locomotives derailed and exploded sending a fire ball along with huge plumes of toxic black smoke from burning oil and plastic into the atmosphere. “It was like a 500-pound bomb going off,” said Brandon Truman, 32, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan . . . “You could feel the pressure and the heat.”11 It’s in part because oil tanker train derailments are just one sample on the menu of the oil and gas industry’s willingness to deploy technology, in addition to paying lobbyists top dollar, donating lavishly to targeted candidates, pressuring elected representatives to vote against environmental regulation, and hiring former government officials, that we have good reason to think that “fossil fuel fascism” is the appropriate description of the role that multinationals play in the global economy. But if we think that earthquakes in Oklahoma, toxic spills in Missouri, the liquidation of state forests in Pennsylvania, or radon exposure as a by-product of hydraulic fracturing don’t indicate the extent to which “North” indicates power, not place, expediency, not geography, we’ll want to review one of Parenti’s key claims: capitalism

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has always been an international system. While its beneficiaries may wave their country’s flags as good advertising, in this case for “cheap, abundant, and American natural gas,” their “armed lifeboats” float quite free of any moral duty to country or culture. The moral, of course, is that from the point of view of the logic of capital, it doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about exclusionary tribalism or neo-fascist islands; both amount to “armed lifeboats” whose missions are to protect the privileges and prerogatives of their occupants for as long as possible. While the latter is outfitted with good wine, weaponry, and emergency fuel—it’s still a lifeboat on high and turgid seas whose most valuable piece of technology, turns out, isn’t its guns, but its navigation equipment; or “navigation equipment,” that is, its capacity to form relationships with government agencies, law enforcement, and private security firms in order to watch, harass, intimidate, and ideally silence the traumatized casualties of its industrial excess. Put differently: among the most persuasive arguments for the claim that human chauvinism is ubiquitous to human nature isn’t necessarily its frenzied development of production technology, but the sheer lengths to which an industry will go (the very different kinds of technologies it will use) to insure the unimpeded flow from production to global markets in the face of dwindling resources. One set of production technologies are the drill bits, chemical explosives, biocides, tanker trains, pipelines, fertilizers, feeding machinery, birthing cages, antibiotics, conveyor belts, and waste-pit liners— the machinery of production. Their shortcoming is that none of these alone insure a profit margin wide enough to cover their substantial expense. What the fossil fuel industry requires—what transforms an enterprise into a fascist machine—is another kind of technology, one that can preempt obstacles to the flow of that production—the security cameras, electrified gates, pepper spray, guns, plastic handcuffs, and communication surveillance devices. No mere law-enforcement laundry list, what identifies these as the technologies of fossil fuel fascism are the strategically crafted relationships that make a different “machine,” one whose aim is to define, locate, and neutralize any possible impediment to profitability before it can become that impediment. What makes these relationships fundamentally fascist is that they function to corporatize government—to subvert government agencies tasked with protecting citizens who think they have a say into weaponized and surveillance-driven arms of multinational profit ventures for whom a say is a calculable risk. The Function of Repression in the Logic of Capital One example of this kind of machine is Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale Operators Crime Committee. As documented by Earth Island Journal’s investigative reporter, Adam Federman,

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[MSOCC is] a little-known intelligence-sharing network that brings together law enforcement, including the FBI, Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security, the oil and gas industry, and private security firms. Established in late 2011 or early 2012, the Marcellus Shale Operators’ Crime Committee (MSOCC) is a group of “professionals with a law-enforcement background who are interested in developing working relationships and networking on intelligence issues,” according to an email sent to group members by James Hansel, regional security manager for Anadarko Petroleum.12

MSOCC functions to insure that the business of extracting and transporting natural gas is uninterrupted. It’s a network whose objectives, like the industry itself, are dictated by instrumental reason to insure the flow of gas by insuring the flow of information about particular kinds of obstacles, namely human ones. While some obstacles might be poor well-casings, gutted rural roads, inconvenient safety or emissions regulation, others are people whose efforts to expose the dangers of high-volume hydraulic fracturing may involve protests at drilling sites, letters to elected representatives, photographs, or acts of civil disobedience. Human beings can be obstacles to fossil fuel profits in at least two ways: first as physical impediments to the process of extraction; this might include protests or lock-downs at drill sites, blockades of truck deliveries, or sabotage of equipment. Second, citizens can generate bad public relations between the industry and the consumer by exposing the environmental hazards in photographs or film, holding press conferences, demanding health studies, divulging corruption, staging public protests. The central point, however, is that the logic of capital doesn’t care what the obstacle is; all that matters is that that obstacle is in the way of realizing the goal of a particular capitalist venture: profitability. MSOCC could no more be merely a group of agencies and business that a car is merely a collection of parts. The latter describes a machine that moves an object called an automobile, the former describes a machine that removes objects called people. If human chauvinism is ubiquitous, it’s no wonder that human trauma is its by-product; MSOCC could not be a better fit for Parenti’s economic pathology of neo-liberal capitalism. The form of human trauma generated by machines like MSOCC is repression, its bad adaptation varied responses ranging from resignation, to therapeutic consumption, to protest, to civil disobedience, to violence. What the traumatized share in common, the Kenyan pastoralist and the Pennsylvania farmer alike, is that each is assigned an exchange value as resource, obstacle, or disposable; each is subject to the instrumental reasoning of machines like MSOCC to exact “whatever’s necessary” to facilitate that exchange value. In the case of the pastoralist “whatever’s necessary” may turn out to be a bullet to the head fired by another traumatized tribesman competing for vanishing

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resources; the latter repeated harassing visits by “landsmen” representing gas company claims to subsurface drilling rights. Both could organize their families and neighbors, but both are unlikely candidates to orchestrate resistance since, conditioned by a past scarred by ecological exhaustion and its consequences for community solidarity, both also likely know that trauma festers into anxiety and resignation—but rarely righteous anger and direct action. The transparent message of MSOCC is that resistance will be treated as the detritus of production, as the cost of doing business by an industry that depicts itself as the victim of “radicals,” “greenies,” and “tree-huggers.” It’s not hard to see how this too reinforces trauma since insofar as the fossil fuel industry can convince law enforcement it’s a likely target of eco-terrorists, or even just angry farmers, the law can be subverted to its own purposes. Trauma thus describes not only a people’s circle-the-wagons response to the destruction of its vital resources, but the cost to their sense of security and safety— their community; it ultimately erodes the most essential resources a people have, their ingenuity, intellect, and imagination. As Parenti puts it, “prior trauma sets the stage for bad adaptation.” The violent history that “sets the stage” for both fossil fuel fascism and the exclusionary tribalism it produces is its own form of repression. Hence, it’s not surprising we’re convinced that human-centeredness and human chauvinism are essentially synonymous. It’s also not surprising that Jensen’s view of the human ingenuity responsible for technological innovation produces only the endgame of a planet so degraded that even “sustainable” seems naïve. In this version of The Road, bad adaptation describes just about everyone; after all, there’s still fighting going on. It’s pretty hard to see how you get to the desirable future from here, and it’s hard to imagine a world where human chauvinism, in its repressive splendor, isn’t just what human being is and does. Parenti himself, however, seems unwilling to draw this moral from his otherwise dark account in Tropic of Chaos. The bleak consequences of even the most psychotic capitalism token, for him, not the “natural” and inevitable but rather “[are] the result of [a] history” that, however traumatizing, need not foretell the future. The trouble, however, is that many have made this diagnosis of capitalism, arguing at least for substantial reform if not revolution—and yet here we are faced with anthropogenic climate change. Many have insisted, like Parenti, that this armed lifeboat can be turned, that our past needn’t be our future; we surely need that to be true if we’re going to muster the will to confront even some of the effects of climate change. But turning a lifeboat armed with weapons of mass destruction and commandeered by corporate tyrants hell-bent on capitalizing every last carbon depends on our being able to decisively reject a view of human history that—naturalized in the oily bone marrow of capitalism—seems patently obvious: we just are chauvinists. What we need, in other words, is a really persuasive counterargument.

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Is human-centeredness inalterably self-aggrandizing such that capitalism is simply its reflection? Or is the “armed lifeboat” a product of an albeit messy complex history in which the intersection of ethnicity, sex, gender, species, and ecology gave rise to institutionalized forms of domination which, in turn, became the seedbed of exchange value, commodification, and repression? If we conquer capitalism, does this at least fulfill a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for articulating the desirable future? Must we conquer it in order to tackle climate change? Can we?

PROMETHEAN ENVIRONMENTALISM VERSUS POP-CULTURAL ECOCENTRISM Our Dreams May Be Our Dreams . . . But: Derrick Jensen’s Endgame I think the answer to each of these questions is a carefully qualified “yes,” but only after we have cleared the ground of a number of competing and influential competitors many of which take as given that human chauvinism is unalterable. Here are two: the first are signaled by arguments like that of Martin Lewis’ Green Delusions in which the best strategy for dealing with environmental crises is through creating new technologies whose explicit aim is to decouple human life from nonhuman nature. Lewis argues for a variety of techno-utopia wherein nonhuman nature is preserved via the substitution of energy sources—without any consequent necessity for reducing consumption (we’ll examine Lewis’ argument more fully in Chapter 5). A second argument that takes human chauvinism as a given is epitomized in what I’ll call the pop-cultural ecocentrism of Derrick Jensen’s Endgame I–II. Particularly in Volume I, The Problem of Civilization, Jensen advocates putting an end to civilization, replacing it with an ecocentrically governed society, composed of small sustainable human communities. Jensen’s own utopian vision is grounded in the philosophical ecocentrism of thinkers like Arne Naess: “[e]very living being is connected intimately, and from this intimacy follows the capacity of identification and as its natural consequences, practice of non-violence . . . Now is the time to share with all life on our maltreated earth through the deepening identification with life forms and the greater units, the ecosystems, and Gaia, the fabulous, old planet of ours.”13 Jensen makes a similar point in Endgame—though he also makes clear that a “deepening identification” with nonhuman nature necessitates overthrowing “an inherently destructive economic and social system,” and thereby makes equally clear that the conditions for the future of this “fabulous old planet” will likely include considerable violence to achieve it:

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To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There’s no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter that these people’s dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I—or does anyone else—have to destroy them? At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?14

For Jensen, our dreams may be our dreams, but the world’s right to exist unmolested still takes precedence: “How do I want the land where I live to be in a thousand years? The answers to that question depend of course on answers to: How does the land want to be in a thousand years? And those answers depend on answers to: How was the land prior to civilization?”15 In example after example, Endgame details the very real violence perpetrated by a social and economic system dependent on ecological destruction, proposing strategies for putting an end to the system itself, returning the “maltreated earth” to its (neo) primitivist origins. Jensen goes some ways to popularize a “deep resistance,” recruiting not only adherents but agents willing to, say, blow up dams in the interest of restoring the land “prior to civilization.”16 While Naess favors non-violence as lifestyle, he nonetheless renounces human-centeredness as incorrigibly chauvinistic—opening a door to Jensen’s musing: If you are driving to a dam with liberation on your mind, do not speed. Do not have a broken taillight. Do not have an expired tab on your license plate. Do not tell your friends about it. Do not tell your girlfriend, the daughter of a deputy sheriff. Do not tell anyone about it. Do not tell anyone who does not need to know. Do not tell anyone who isn’t directly involved. Do not tell anyone except those you know will keep quiet even if it means they go to prison for forty years.17

The ecocentric opposition to Lewis’ techno-utopian Promethean coudn’t seem starker; while Lewis endorses exchange as a measure of all value, Naess introduces the concept of intrinsic value. While Lewis seeks a divorce from nonhuman nature brokered through corporate-financed technological innovation, Jensen advocates using readily available technologies, like the explosive C-4, to restore the flow of rivers in virtue of their inherent worth. The ecocentric worldview derives its legitimating force from the idea that value exists intrinsically to organisms and ecosystems as an inhering property of a thing—like being a mammal or having a blood type. Recognizing intrinsic value is, in Naess’ view, the necessary first step out of the perils of human-centeredness because it compels us to recognize a value that transcends commodification, that the fact of a thing’s existence constitutes an inexpugnable source of

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equal worth among organisms and ecologies. Intrinsic value demands that we adopt a worldview committed to preserving ecological integrity as our first priority—even if it means sacrifice for human communities and persons. A decisive repudiation of human self-interest, ecocentrism denies that human-centeredness can be divorced from baser self-aggrandizing motives, and thus demands an uncompromising turn toward nonhuman nature, prodding its recruits to embrace, for example, John Seed and Aldo Leopold’s, “think like a mountain,” intentional anti-anthropocentrism.18 No easy path to be sure, the ecocentric disposition challenges us to adopt a life of, for example, Duane Elgin’s voluntary simplicity19 that, while there’s much to recommend it with respect to its call for conservation, restoration, and respect for nonhuman animals and biota, is not without its critics. New York Times reporter Chris Erikson points out, for example, that “[s]kepticism about the movement is not new . . . Critics dismiss it as budget-cutting dressed in New Age clothes, and even some adherents reject the ideological proselytizing that can accompany the practical advice.”20 The practical reality is that, given the geopolitics of armed lifeboats, the ecocentric life(style) is likely accessible only to those who can afford the land, provisions, and weapons required to achieve it—or at least its trendy magazines like Time-Warner’s Real Simple.21 Fact is, neither the West Kenyan pastoralist nor the Pennsylvania farmer are in any position to adopt voluntary simplicity—much less participate in bringing civilization to an end to make way for it. For them this would be suicide, and to blame them for their failure to recognize intrinsic value in the face of the struggle for existence seems at least victim-blaming if not itself symptomatic of cognitive dissonance. Consider ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson. He recently joined a lawsuit to keep a water tower for nearby hydraulic fracturing operations off his property—a multi-million dollar estate paid for by gas and oil revenues. For Tillerson, “civilization” could hardly offer a better deal, and the worst-case scenario for a gentleman who’s more than comfortable with gas and oildrilling infrastructure—so long as it’s on someone else’s land—is that he’d sell his house and move into one of his others. Tillerson is also, of course, not likely to adopt an ecocentric worldview; why would he? And that’s precisely the point: those who occupy the best possible social and economic positions—the very beneficiaries of the civilization Jensen condemns—have no cause to adopt the voluntary simplicity of the ecocentric worldview—much less for blowing up dams; and it’s not that Jensen thinks so. No doubt, he hopes to reach folks like the Pennsylvania farmer—but that’s just the rub since the farmer’s in no economic position to make intrinsic value the driver of her decisions. After all, her property values collapse under the conditions that generate Tillerson’s wealth, namely the fossil fuel extraction that

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contributes to the ecological deterioration that informs the warp and woof of Jensen’s call to end civilization.22 The difficult question for the ecocentric alternative to human chauvinism is thus both philosophical and practical: • Philosophically: can we show that human nature is inherently chauvinistic such that the only reasonable path away from our current trajectory is through the deliberate rejection of that chauvinism, replacing it with the recognition of intrinsic value and the consequent demand that we put ecological integrity before human wants if not needs? Can we give a defense of intrinsic value that is itself coherent and compelling? • Practically: on the assumption that we can adequately address the philosophical issues, can we articulate an ecocentrism that’s not plagued by the social and economic injustices of its predecessors? Can we draft it such that, while it places the value of ecological integrity before human wants and even needs, does so equitably—without reproducing the same inequalities and injustices that produce the armed lifeboats and exclusionary tribalisms? These questions are daunting: however violent, West Kenya’s exclusionary tribalism is, if not ecocentric, still an effort to preserve traditional ecologically sustainable ways of life in the global South. So too the Pennsylvania farmer whose livelihood is jeopardized in ways Rex Tillerson’s will never be. The issue, then, is not simply whether ecocentrism is philosophically elitist; the issue is whether adopting intrinsic value is sufficient—or even viable—in and of itself for the rejection of exchange value as a determinant of social and economic place. Can we draft an adequate translation of the philosophically ideal into a realizable future world that’s not merely sustainable (for some) but desirable (for many)? Can ecocentrism help us reach this objective? The Ecocentric Elitism of “Intrinsic Value” One answer to this question is an unqualified yes exemplified in the work of thinkers like Jensen. Operating like a kind of carrot and stick, the argument here is that if we don’t adopt a perspective that privileges the stability of our ecologies before “industrial civilization,” we’ll not only reap the catastrophic consequences of climate change, but have adopted a worldview itself morally bankrupt. While there will be casualties, the right ecocentrism will mitigate against human and nonhuman losses, bringing “civilization” to an end in the interest of creating a future for more just human communities. Indeed, from the perspective of “thinking like a mountain,” even if no such future comes to fruition, we can still know that we acted rightly.

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The other answer is no: given the socially and economically disproportionate effects of deforestation, desertification, pollution, species extinction, disease vectors, and climate change for the global South, the primarily global North adoption of ecocentrism is more like outfitting another armed lifeboat for the self-selected few who, as Benito Cao argues in Environment and Citizenship, occupy privileged positions—especially corporations.23 Elitist in its failure to address these effects directly and forcefully, the ecocentric perspective effectively buttresses the capitalist institutions that sustain its fortunate adherents. Ironically, it reinforces the very human chauvinism the adoption of ecocentrism was meant to supplant. From this vantage, ecocentrism looks more like philosophical cover for maintaining privilege than a morally defensible strategy to avoid The Road; intrinsic value a tactic to insure compliance through repressive policies privileging the “special places” of the elite rather than an ethic designed to put a halt to ecological destruction and its consequences for vulnerable human populations. The kinds of difficulties plaguing the effort to make philosophical ecocentrism viable do, however, offer real opportunities for developing alternatives, including ecofeminist arguments. Taking as its point of departure the recognition that intrinsic value fails to adequately address the commodification attendant on conquest capitalism, the ecofeminist critique of the beneficiaries of exchange value shows how calls to end “industrial civilization” are inadequate to insure that the ecocentric future won’t bear a striking resemblance to the chauvinistic past. For just as human chauvinism can’t be evaluated outside the axes—race, sex, gender, species—that, institutionalized as conquest capitalism, systemically benefit some at the cost of others, so too “civilization” cannot be understood simply as a one-size-fits-all responsible for ecological destruction. Some are more responsible than others; however we see the West Kenyan pastoralist or the Pennsylvania farmer, they’re not responsible for climate change in any way like Rex Tillerson. But the concept of intrinsic value won’t help us see why because “intrinsic” does not imply “inviolable.” Put differently: without some principled way for determining what has intrinsic value—some way that doesn’t simply reinvent the well-worn axes that animate human chauvinism—the concept has little practical value other than for the ecocentrist’s own iteration of the armed lifeboat. Consider: that corporations are created “persons” doesn’t mean that they’re excluded from candidacy as having intrinsic value. We identify intrinsic value in many “created” entities—genetically altered mice, modified seeds, the products of xenotransplantation, people outfitted with prosthetics connected to nerve pathways. What justifies the exclusion of corporate “persons?” Moreover, as accounts like Parenti’s illustrate, while we may not use the vocabulary of “intrinsic,” we behave as though some things qualify, and some things don’t,

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in virtue of arbitrary criteria—ethnicity, sex, gender, or species. Perhaps, as Jensen might argue, these are just the risks we must be prepared to take in the interest of avoiding ecological apocalypse, and that at the end of the day we’ll see the emergence of ecocentric communities desirable to all. Maybe—but this is a mighty risk to take for those already disadvantaged by a status quo that privileges the ecocentrist. We also still have at least one other alternative insisting it’s the road to the desirable future: Lewis’ Promethean environmentalism. Lewis’ techno-utopian liberation from nonhuman nature promises to antiquate lifeboats and tribalism through technologies that make necessities and comforts alike cheap to manufacture and thus widely accessible. As he makes the point, “economic growth of this type [technologically facilitated] is absolutely essential. Only a strongly expanding economic base can generate the capital necessary to retool our economy into one that does not consume the earth in feeding itself”24 Human chauvinism, if not conquered, is at least converted into a source of material prosperity. But here’s the rub: Lewis and Jensen each seek to tackle a history of ecological destruction by radically altering the conditions under which “we” conceive “our” relationship to nonhuman nature. For Lewis this takes the form of deliberate detachment; for Jensen ecocentric reconnection. Lewis embraces exchange value as the driver behind a technologically facilitated divorce; Jensen rejects “high” technology advocating neo-primitivism as the way out of ecological apocalypse. While big corporations are vital partners in resolving environmental crises for Lewis, Jensen capitulates to the possibility that overthrowing corporatist fascism will require colossal violence, suffering, and loss of life. And neither offer any answer beyond the generic “we” to the question who will be the winners of their high-stakes gambles and who will be the losers. Without that answer—without a clearly articulated commitment to social and economic justice in addition to establishing sustainable ecologies—we’ve good reason to believe that the winners and losers will be the same people they’ve always been. The winners: mostly male, mostly Western, and affluent; the losers: mostly female, non-Western and/or indigenous, working class, and nonhuman. When Lewis argues that “[i]t is especially important that environmentalists work with the leaders of the largest corporations,” and that “[w]ithout corporate consent, a far-reaching environmental reform program will prove chimerical,” he effectively reinforces the racism, masculinism, and speciesism institutionalized in the very structure of that consent.25 Indeed, “consent” is itself an interesting choice of words since it accedes to the “largest corporations” the authority to make decisions governing our relationship with human and nonhuman nature—and that is simply another way of ascribing fascism to the pursuit of capital.

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Race, Sex, Gender, Species: The Critical Role of Ecofeminism We have good reason to fret that, however otherwise different from each other, Promethean environmentalism and pop-cultural ecocentrism leave far more intact with respect to their beneficiaries and the repressive institutions that situate them to take advantage of pop-cultural fads like “voluntary simplicity,” than they actually change. This isn’t, moreover, just because they fail to distinguish centeredness from chauvinism; it’s because their view of human chauvinism fails to account for its winners and losers. Insofar as the “recognition” of intrinsic value remains in the hands of the winners, moreover, it also remains vulnerable to becoming just one more narrative to justify this status quo. So why not just abandon both and move on? Four reasons, equally important: • Popularity: Promethean environmentalism and pop-cultural ecocentrism offer arguments that seem persuasive and coherent, and thereby generate popular support. They have thoughtful adherents and come in many flavors directed to more or less educated audiences. If they’re wrong there’s a substantial audience that needs to be shown why. • Consequences: Given that audience, given beliefs have consequences, and given beliefs about urgent matters can have big consequences, if Promethean environmentalism and pop-cultural ecocentrism are wrong, showing that their consequences can be big—and bad—becomes a moral imperative. Lewis’ and Jensen’s arguments come with strategies aimed at recruiting true believers, and what that can mean is that potentially bad consequences can be dangerous ones. That “bad” consequences are likely to disproportionately impact those whose lives are spent along axes of human chauvinism both largely ignore—ethnicity, sex, gender, and species—also highlights the importance of addressing questions about who occupies the ranks of their likely recruits and who doesn’t. • Alternatives: Demonstrating in clear terms that Promethean environmentalism and pop-cultural ecocentrism are wrong-headed opens a door to alternatives—especially ecofeminist alternatives since these are likely to take as their point of departure analyses of the winners and losers who—whether the imagined future looks more like a techno-utopia or a primitivist wonderland—largely ignore issues of ethnicity, sex, gender, and species. • The reclamation of human-centeredness: Because an ecofeminist view of human-centeredness rejects the view that human chauvinism is inalterable, opting instead for a more nuanced, culturally attentive historical account that traces it through its raced, sexed, gendered, and species contexts, it occupies an optimal vantage point for making the argument that Promethean environmentalism and pop-cultural ecocentrism have more in common

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with their presumed adversaries, Western, affluent mostly white men, than with more radical approaches aimed at the institutionalized causes of climate change. In showing this, an eco-feminist approach positions itself to reassess the question whether centeredness is chauvinism necessarily, and thus to re-conceive a human-centeredness that not only includes the casualties of conquest capitalism, but those of views like Lewis’ and Jensen. An ecofeminist approach seeks a radical—to the roots—alternative to both the conquest capitalism that leaves all value as exchange substantially intact and the ecocentrism that seeks a radical revaluing of organisms and ecosystems, but in the end reinvents race, sex, gender and species as criteria for determining what has value beyond exchange. A characterization Jensen would strongly reject on the grounds that he explicitly identifies the abuse of women, the exploitation of indigenous peoples, child molestation, and animal cruelty with the abuse of nonhuman nature, it’s instructive to see how an argument that seems to be in line with feminist commitments on the surface actually undermines itself via its conceptual scaffolding; but such is precisely the case in Endgame and thus for any pop-cultural ecocentrism following Jensen’s lead. DERRICK JENSEN’S CALL TO “PUT AN END TO CIVILIZATION” The Unintended Reinvention of Human Chauvinism In A Language Older Than Words, Jensen offers a smorgasbord of compelling accounts of the abuse of human and nonhuman animals—each the product of conquest capitalism and each, at least implicitly, an example of the failure to recognize intrinsic value. Here’s just one from factory farming: Inside the chute, facing a blank wall, stands a steer. Until the last movement he does not seem to notice when a worker places a steam-driven stunner at the ridge of his forehead. I do not know what the steer feels in those last moments, or what he thinks. The pressure of the contact triggers the stunner, which shoots a retractable bolt into the brain of the steer. The steer falls, sometimes stunned, sometimes dead, sometimes screaming.26

Jensen then compares the slaughter of factory farm animals to his own experience of childhood abuse to that of rape victims and lastly to developing world children in factory sweat shops: My father, in order to rationalize his behavior, had to live in a world of makebelieve. He had to make us believe that the beatings and rapes made sense, that

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all was as it should, and must, be . . . Here’s what I think: it’s a sham. It’s a giant game of make-believe. We pretend that animals feel no pain, and that we have no ethical responsibility towards them. But how do we know? We pretend that other humans—the women who are raped, for example . . . or the one hundred and fifty million children who are enslaved to make soccer balls, tennis shoes, Barbie dolls, and the like—are happy and unaffected by it all. We pretend all is well as we dissipate our lives in quiet desperation.27

Jensen understands the consequences of converting all value into exchange value. He comprehends the geopolitical dynamics governing the lives of countless developing world children, and he deplores the suffering created by these conditions. Jensen sees that the time for reform is long past; an ironic and illuminating turn of phrase, “make-believe” evokes the chauvinism liable for the systemic pretense that “anything we do not understand—anything that cannot be measured, quantified, and controlled—does not exist,” and that value is exclusively the function of that control: “We pretend that animals are resources to be conserved or consumed when, in reality, they have purposes entirely independent of us.”28 The same goes for “human resources,” women’s bodies, children, and ecosystems; however otherwise violated, each is a site of intrinsic value—has a purpose of its own. Jensen remarks similarly in Endgame six years later: We are at war. War was declared against the world many thousands of years ago. War was declared against women. War was declared against children. War was declared against the wild. War was declared against the indigenous.29

Given his palpable commitment to emancipating victims of the world of make-believe, it seems at least uncharitable to accuse Jensen of reinventing human chauvinism—his stated aims run clearly to the contrary. The trouble is that the strategy he advocates for achieving the end of civilization undermines his aims; indeed, the more successful, the wider becomes the chasm between Jensen’s aspirations for ecological restoration and the prospect of just human communities. The best way to see why this is the case, and why it’s important, is to examine that strategy, the Twenty Premises, where Jensen argues that “industrial civilization” must be overthrown in order to restore the earth to its rightful inhabitants.30 On a first read, it certainly seems he’s attentive to issues of social and economic justice; he refers to hierarchies of property and power enforced through institutionalized violence, and he seems to take seriously the ways in which race, sex, gender, and species intersect to inform the axes of human chauvinism. Because Jensen appeals to a diverse audience, the Premises neatly illustrate in what a popularized ecocentrism consists as a

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tool for recruiting activist adherents. He speaks of actions that can be taken (blowing up dams, for example), and it’s easy to feel a kind of video gameready Rage Against the Machine urgency in his prose especially attractive to young disaffected readers. “Bringing down civilization” is sexy, and Jensen has an incredibly vivid way of making the ecocentric future sound like the next really cool thing in which his readers can feel invested. The Premises don’t read like a calmly drafted plan for achieving sedate sustainability; they read more like a Mad Max, Road Warrior’s vision of the next great insurgency—but this offers a hint about who the Premises are really for, and who can expect to be invited to Jensen’s hipster ecocentric future. The problems, however, emerge pretty quickly; in short, the concepts central to Jensen’s call to end civilization are, in fact, irreconcilable with the survival of any other than those who can afford to outfit the armed lifeboats necessary in the advent of ecological apocalypse to fend off whomever (and whatever) is deemed unsuitable to the post-rubble ecocentric world. We can pay as much lip-service decrying the fates of the exploited and enslaved in the current world as we wish—but that by itself won’t insure their survival, and nothing in the Twenty Premises will either. Why? Because nothing in the Premises shows us how to get from intrinsic value to social, economic, or environmental justice; why? Because nothing does. Even The Road assumes as its main survivors those we’d expect, white, male, property-owning, as if it’s their civilization that counts as the greatest loss, their values worth salvaging, their progeny that must be saved. It is their civilization—that much is true. But it’s the concept of “civilization” itself, somewhat ironically, that must be counted among the first casualties of what Jensen envisions at the end of civilization. Jensen’s Twenty Premises: Ending “Civilization” Let’s examine some of the major tenets of Jensen’s Twenty Premises: • Premise One: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.31 • Response: It’s difficult to see what Jensen means by “civilization” or “industrial civilization.” Does it include art, music, architecture, science, or medicine? Does it include the end of these human activities? Are adherents to this premise prepared to commit themselves to foregoing chemotherapy in case of cancer or antibiotics in case of serious staff infection, surgery for a ruptured spleen? Can we reasonably expect people in the global South to be as ready to give up treatment for Ebola as male pattern balding victims to give up Rogaine in the global North? Who’s authorized to give the signal for “the end” to commence? Are we prepared to witness the deaths—or

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even participate in the genocide—of the millions of human and nonhuman animals that this “end” would require? Who’s likely to die first? If Jensen is going to make this claim, isn’t he responsible to explain why we (and they) should accept the disproportionate consequences for those—like the pastoralist or the farmer—who will be its first casualties? • Premise Two: Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their land bases to be damaged so that other resources—gold, oil, and so on—can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities.32 • Response: This claim is faulty in at least two ways that shed light on why we must take the axes of human chauvinism seriously. First, traditional human cultures have contributed to their own demise or migration by destroying their land bases. To romanticize them as if they avoided environmental destruction undervalues the complexities of their cultures, glosses over their intersection with ethnicity, sex, gender, and species, and paints a picture of “traditional” that provides only illusory scaffolding for adopting an ecocentric worldview. Second, though there’s truth to the claim that “those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities,” there’s also no simple calculus here. As I argued in my review of Nicholas A. Robins Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver in the Andes, What Robins shows is that the ground for the emergence of corporations powerful enough to determine the course of nations, control their own militaries, and conscript their own labor armies is traceable directly to the growth of silver-based currency, itself made possible through a refining process whose human and environmental toll was (and is) devastating . . . Robins’ story is, however, not only that of how the forced labors of native peoples produced silver, but also of how the appeal to religious dogma combined with the rationalization of nationalistic conquest and barely concealed greed generated immense wealth for some and tremendous hardship—if not death—for many others: “The belief in the unending flow of silver from the Americas also encouraged profligate spending by the [Spanish] crown, underwrote Spain’s military and political ambitions, and reinforced its commitment to Catholic orthodoxy. . . . This unprecedented flow of New World silver was not only the catalyst for the development of a global economy; it also sustained the world’s economy for centuries.”33 In other words, while there’s plenty of destruction to go around, the story of silver mining isn’t reducible to a one-size-fits-all recipe for defending traditional communities against the incursions of “civilization.” Jensen ■■

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might respond, of course, that he’s speaking in general terms to make his conceptual point, but this doesn’t really suffice since what’s true in Robin’s—and countless stories of capital conquest—is that the conscription of labor from traditional communities involves not only outright enslavement, but a more nuanced brew of religion, family structure, the roles of women and children, and the place of those who collaborate with the invaders. Moreover, in what traditional communities consist is not only a matter of, say, what kinds of technologies sustain them, whether they’re part of the developing world, or even whether an invading corporation flies another nation’s flag: While we may not enforce an explicit mita [effective enslavement] system in the United States, the fact of the matter is that economic necessity provides the coercion that guarantees labor in coal mines, drill rigs, and at hydraulic fracturing (fracking) well pads; labor exposed to many of the toxins to which the Andean mine-workers were exposed. While government might insist that there is little comparison to be made given more sophisticated methods for extraction in addition to more stringent laws governing the use of toxic agents, this provides at best cold comfort to the families of coal workers recently lost to a mine-shaft collapse in West Virginia, the wife of a man killed in Pennsylvania while working on a frack pad, the residents of the Riverdale Mobile Home Community (Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania) summarily evicted from their homes for the sake of constructing a water withdrawal facility for use in fracking operations, or the mothers of children suffering from asthma unfortunate enough to live next to natural gas compressor stations.34 In these traditional American rural communities, the likelihood is that everyone drives a car, has a cell phone, and identifies with the same patriotic Christian convictions, including CEOs like Tillerson responsible for coal mine collapses, drill rig accidents, coercive evictions, or childhood asthma. But common culture doesn’t prevent the hydrocarbon corporations from treating the economically vulnerable in essentially the same ways as the invading Spanish treated the Andeans, namely as expendable labor. And in that case, it’s not at all clear what bringing down civilization even could mean. Only a more sophisticated account that takes seriously the roles played by ethnicity, sex, gender, and species can clarify who’s vulnerable and in what ways, thereby making sense of the notion that “traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell their resources.” After all, Tillerson’s community is the rural Pennsylvania farmer’s— and it’s also not. Insofar as his community’s resources include, for instance, the reproductive value of its women, the work-value of its ■■

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livestock, the food-value of its farm fields, or the value of its subsurface minerals, it can never be destroyed; it must be conscripted and commodified. But it’s those same relationships that make “voluntarily” a very murky notion indeed. If the farmer leases her subsurface rights in order to avoid having her land taken by a pipeline company via eminent domain—is she simply acceding to corporate fascism? If she organizes her neighbors in order to resist the company—but does so out of deeply reactionary nationalist sentiments, does she better fit Jensen’s image of “involuntary”? As I remarked, “[f]rom the most powerful agents of government sent to Potosi and Huancavelica to insure the smooth production and transport of silver, to the country-side priests whose own collusion with the mine owners guaranteed the continuing oppression of their local residents, to the hierarchies of bosses involved in the mining and amalgamation processes, responsibility taken for the human beings most at risk from dangerous and toxic work was not just sorely lacking but altogether absent.”35 No doubt, laborers “most at risk” gave up nothing voluntarily—but that doesn’t mean others—some in positions of substantial power in the traditional community—didn’t collude. • Premises Three-Five: Our way of living—industrial civilization—is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence. Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims. The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control—in everyday language, to make money—by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice.36 • Response: There is certainly truth here as well—yet again, Jensen’s affinity for over-generalizing in the interest of painting with broad brushstrokes a human-centeredness that’s unsalvageably chauvinistic distorts that truth by rendering invisible the real victims of “industrial civilization.” For example, although “[s]ilver mining at Potosi and Huancavelica is a metaphor for the egregious human labor and environmental abuses that characterize global capitalism and its penchant for what I have called genocidal profiteering” it’s a powerful metaphor because we can give an account that puts faces ■■

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and specific conditions to that abuse.37 If “[p]rofiteering”. . . describe[s] not only the callous disregard for human welfare characteristic of colonial silver mining in the Andes, but the motives which fueled it” that’s not only because there exist “invisible hierarchies” that institutionalize who counts as a beneficiary (and presumably their “right” to callous disregard), but because within those hierarchies exist relationships that make some more vulnerable than others. In other words, “widespread violence” takes many forms, but because many of these are institutionalized in the very ways we think about ethnicity, sex, gender, and species, it’s not obvious that we’re in any position to know reliably what counts as “violent.” Do voluntary sado-masochistic relationships like that depicted in Fifty Shades of Grey count? What about the slaughter of grass-fed cattle? So-called “free range” chickens? While Jensen makes a valuable point that “[t]he property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below,” because he does not interrogate the place of “property” within the circulatory system of exchange value, he fails to see that within capitalism “property” can mean anyone or anything— including those more empowered in the hierarchy even if their commodification is more comfortable. Once we see that human chauvinism divides into axes defined by ethnicity, sex, gender, and species, we can no longer coherently hold the view that violence is perpetrated only by those who control more property; violence is an essential property of the system itself—not only its hierarchical relationships. In Petosi, some of the most intimate relationships were among the most deadly: wives cooking food for families unknowingly poisoning them with contaminated water and cooking utensils, corrupted priests taking advantage of hierarchical—but also trusting—relationships to sell their parishioners into the Mita system of wage slavery, single outsider men seeking solace in the arms of local prostitutes—and every exchange of silver coinage. Similarly, in the shale fields of Pennsylvania, school children breathe silica floating over playgrounds, families turn up their TVs to drown out the loud truck traffic, Tillerson organizes his own wealthy neighbors to produce a lawsuit, and frack-rig crews are exposed to toxic chemicals—but the violence endemic to every one of these cases is as invisible as are the toxins that connect them. In premise six, Jensen claims that “civilization is not redeemable” and that if 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.”38 He insists (premise seven), that “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.”39

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Jensen’s Dilemma of the “We”: Who Lives? Who Dies? Jensen’s dilemma is that we’ve no way of knowing who occupies the “we” charged with bringing civilization down—except that it’s more likely to be those who occupy the least vulnerable positions with respect to arrest and prosecution, or who have avenues available which enable them to flee. We’ve no way of knowing for whom “bringing it down” will be messy—except that it’s likely to be far less messy for those who occupy positions that allow them to escape the fallout. We’ve no way of knowing who will live and who will die—except that we can guess the latter will be those human beings, nonhuman animals, and plant species least able to protect themselves from the violence that will surely ensue in the “end.” In other words, we do know. A blunt instrument aimed at “human chauvinism”—but not at its specific axes of privilege and power—the recruiting cry to end civilization can as easily be deployed by Mad Max as “justification” for committing genocide against whomever is in the way as can abuses of developing world labor and resources be “justified” as “progress” by an enterprising CEO like Tillerman; both epitomize reason instrumentalized to ends taken as given. A commitment to “end civilization” doesn’t imply the construction of a just society after the rubble is cleared, and there is no mechanism or decision-making criteria in the ecocentrist’s commitment to intrinsic value by itself that supplies direction for how those disempowered before the “end” are to be treated after. Even the language of “to be treated” assumes an authorized “by whom.” Just as it was commonplace to “justify” the enslavement of Africans in the U.S. South by appeal to the bankrupt notion that the slaver knew better what was in the interest of the enslaved than the slave, so too little prevents the post-rubble leaders—those who armed lifeboats enabled them to survive in the least damaged condition—from appealing to the same illogic to justify a social order that privileges them. Perhaps the “intrinsic value” of the slave just is in serving her master; perhaps the woman’s just is in sexual service; perhaps the animal’s just is essentially food. The point is that intrinsic value offers us no real hedge against this sort of rationalizing because in making everything trivially equal it makes everything equally vulnerable to the instrumental reasoning of whomever is in power; or better: whomever is empowered to define and enforce what constitutes value. In the absence of a critical understanding of how human chauvinism is instantiated in its mutually reinforcing axes—ethnicity, sex, gender, species—there is no translation of the ecocentric imperative to respect intrinsic value that provides direction to morally defensible action. Moreover, because “intrinsic” has no more practical utility that its assigners bestow on it, it has no utility beyond the extent to which those who bestow it are

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themselves empowered; as a practical matter, then “intrinsic” means no more than “decided by those in a position to enforce it.” THE EXCLUSIONARY TRIBALISM OF THE ECOAPOCALYPSE, AND ITS CASUALTIES Lierre Keith: Planetary Primacy Self-described radical feminist Lierre Keith, Jensen’s co-author along with Aric McBay in Deep Green Resistance, puts the point succinctly—if not quite intentionally in her essay, “The Problem”: For “sustainable” to mean anything we must embrace and then defend the bare truth: the planet is primary. The life-producing work of a million species is literally the earth, air, and water that we depend on. No human activity—not the vacuous, not the sublime—is worth more than that matrix. Neither, in the end, is any human life. If we use the word “sustainable” and don’t mean that, then we are liars of the worst kind who let atrocities happen while we stand by and do nothing.40

A passage both ecocentric, “the planet is primary,” and human-centered (“earth, air, water that we depend on”), both a denunciation of atrocity—and an implicit apology for violence too easily justified in the elevation of “that matrix” over “any human life,” the crucial question Keith fails to address is this: “Who is this ‘we’ responsible to “defend the bare truth”? Wealthy CEOs like Tillerson whose “primary” is his golf game, or West Kenyan pastoralists grazing emaciated cattle on the grassless African plain? Nothing in the Twenty Premises recommends one over the other as a matter of principle or justice, and, fact is, the CEO doesn’t have to care about “bare truths” and the pastoralist doesn’t have the time. So who does this leave? When does “defending the bare truth” permit, if not require, killing people? Who does the killing? How shall we account for violating the “intrinsic value” of the killed? Perhaps Keith can offer some insight. In “Liberals and Radicals” she argues that the call to end industrial civilization “is not a call to behave and ask nicely”: I believe in breaking the law because the edifice is supported by a federal constitution that upholds a corrupt arrangement of power. It was written by white men who owned white women as chattel and black men and women as slaves . . . We have no moral obligation to respect it; quite the opposite . . . But there are legislative victories and court rulings—like the Civil Rights Act of

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1964 and Roe Vs. Wade—that have changed people’s lives in substantive ways, redirecting the flow of power towards justice.41

Jensen enthusiastically endorses Keith’s argument, but doesn’t seem to recognize it’s internal tension: on the one hand, she explicitly derides the constitution as “a corrupt arrangement of power,” but on the other, concedes that within that arrangement some victories have been won. The trouble here is not that good decisions can’t flow from bad institutions—they can. It’s that Keith offers no principled criteria for deciding what count as “victories” from an ecocentric point of view and, again, appealing to intrinsic value won’t help us. If we can argue that fetuses have intrinsic value (why not? Keith makes this claim for snails), then why is Roe Vs. Wade a victory? Many feminists argue that Roe Vs. Wade is a crucial victory because it emancipates women from unwanted reproduction, and hence from the patriarchal constraints of institutions like marriage, motherhood, and compulsory heterosexuality. Well and good. But how do we reconcile the feminist argument that this form of human chauvinism, heteropatriarchal oppression, must be ended with the ecocentric imperative that we act to protect intrinsic value when intrinsic value gives us no criteria on the basis of which to make moral judgments about oppression at all? Keith offers tacit acknowledgment to the uneasy relationship between “ending civilization” and recognizing some legal successes with respect to those disempowered by civilization’s institutions when she grants that “we need to examine calls for violence through a feminist critical of norms of masculinity,”42 and that the struggles of women and/or minorities make “the complexity of the issue of violence . . . apparent.”43 She appears to see that the first casualties of “bringing it down” may be the same old ones, women, nonhuman animals, children, nonwhite, non-Western. She understands that human chauvinism delivers its payload of injustice along the lines of ethnicity, sex, gender, and species. But what Keith fails to acknowledge is that in the end—or rather at the end of civilization—the injustice of human institutions does not and cannot really matter because they too are just a feature of civilization all of which must be brought down. Premise Twelve of Jensen’s Twenty Premises claims that: There are no rich people in the world, and there are no poor people. There are just people. The rich may have lots of pieces of green paper that many pretend are worth something—or their presumed riches may be even more abstract: numbers on hard drives at banks—and the poor may not. These “rich” claim they own land, and the “poor” are often denied the right to make that same claim. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into

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these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world.44

Although it’s trivially true that money amounts to “pieces of green paper,” to deny the effects of that “trivial” truth belies and undermines the claim that we must pay attention to how we conceive violence; that it’s on behalf of protecting those “pieces of green paper” corporations conscript their own armies and nations go to war to defend corporate interests as national interests. When Keith asks whether “industrial civilization can be stopped,” her answer is that “[t]heoretically, it’s not that difficult,” Industrialization is dependent on a very fragile infrastructure. It requires vast quantities of fossil fuels, which come from relatively few places . . . Industrial civilization is dependent on electricity, and the electric grid is a million miles long. The system is also dependent on the Internet; globalization would not be possible without it to organize and transfer both information and capital.45

She follows up with advice about how the fossil fuel system could be targeted and disrupted by activists, but nowhere does she mention—much less discuss—who are the specific human (or nonhuman) casualties consequent on that disruption—or who even the disrupters are likely to be. Following Jensen, the reason is clear: ending civilization is not for human beings; consistent with ecocentrism, it’s for the planet, the one Keith insists we can “render lifeless.”46 From that perspective neither the human casualties—however predictable—nor the axes along which their lives took place as rich or poor, male or female, black or white, indigenous or conqueror, Mita laborer or mining baron, wealthy CEO or West Kenyan pastorialist, human or nonhuman animal—matter, or can matter. For all the sincerity, starkness, and righteous anger Jensen and Keith pour into their accounts of abuse, power, and hierarchy, neither offer any way of insuring that what we’ll get after the dams blow aren’t exclusionary tribalisms, armed lifeboats—or simply the gradual return to the status quo. So long as conquest capitalism isn’t directly addressed, especially the axes along which it takes advantage, we’ve little reason to think that blowing up its symbols will yield any revolutionary transformation of value. Why aren’t Tillerson’s children the future of the ecocentric community? Why can’t they adopt ecocentrism as an enforceable tactic for insuring the most sustainable, efficient—chauvinistic—use of resources on a planet scorched by climate change? What prevents ecocentrism from being deployed as a survival strategy—a rhetoric of an impending apocalypse aimed at insuring resources are used to the most efficient effect for those who call the shots at the end of civilization? In other words, why not read Jensen’s Twenty Premises as a

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strategy for outfitting, populating, and unifying the armed lifeboat the ecocentrist favors? The one who can afford voluntary simplicity? And finally, if that ecocentrist is more likely than not to hail from the same Western class and culture as his corporate counterparts—the Tillersons who live across the street—what guarantees against the prospect that the very attraction of the ecocentric perspective for him isn’t its tacit promise that the post-end of civilization society will also favor him? How cool is that? The Pop-Cultural Ecocentric “Cool”: Identifying with the Sane In the context of an end to civilization, “pop-cultural” intimates a peculiar kind of “cool,” namely an ecocentrism defined by its promise to reaffirm its adherent that they’re, as it were, the “chosen,” the righteous, the just, and as Jensen puts it in Premise Ten, the sane. The ecocentrist is made special by his capacity to distinguish the sane from the crazy—by being the sane: “The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.”47 To identify with Premise Ten is to occupy a pretty cool place; you get to identify with the sane—against Thanatos—and thus with others who, desiring to be among the sane and reading the same premises, are set up to be recruited by an “us against them” strategy for which ending civilization is effectively justified as treatment for insanity. Nearly everyone, of course, qualifies as insane since its diagnostic test just is participating in civilization. But what this implies, by contrast, is that the “sane” are those who, self-selected in their purchase of the book, opt in, join forces, sign onto a worldview made available (conveniently enough) by the Twenty Premises. Again—how cool is that? To describe “civilization” as not only immoral, but pathological, offers Jensen a recruitment tool like no other. For where we’re not persuaded by arguments appealing to cool-headed dispassionate reasons for moral judgment, we can sometimes be lured by promises that we’ll be made saner, better—cooler—signing onto something hip. What could be more hipster than the “end of civilization”? Jensen would likely deny that he’s looking to extort consent to the Twenty Premises, but when we examine this stark dichotomy in light of images like “death drives”—you’re either an insane hanger-on of civilization or a sane ecocentric guerilla ready to blow up dams—it’s hard to avoid concluding that what he’s after is the creation of something like a cult capable of recruiting exactly the membership that can bring it all down. The thing is, Jensen does have his finger on something here. But he misses the forest for the trees. In the interest of justifying a very particular recruitment strategy—one that has all the allure of Grand Theft Auto—Jensen misses the locus of civilization’s real pathology: conquest capitalism. He offers a diagnosis of something as grand but altogether vague as “civilization,” and

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in so doing makes literally anything and everything a target. In so doing he makes of himself authority and prophet. He offers a movement, of sorts, that revolves around himself as the father of the Twenty Premises. Jensen’s like the Moses of twenty-first century environmental radicalism. Blowing up the dams presents itself as a kind of panacea at least to followers who ask few questions about what “civilization” is or means. “Bring it all down!” Sounds good. But very much like the problems that haunt Keith, Jensen’s failure to specify precisely in what civilizational pathology consists—what institutions or practices—destine his Theses to either reproduce the racism, heterosexism, and speciesism left unaddressed within those institutions, or incite arbitrary acts of violence to overthrow them—and these amount to the same thing. Without providing any criteria for distinguishing the empowered from the subjugated, the exploiter from the commodified, the latter will continue to be brutalized. The human chauvinism that generates vulnerability under the present capitalist culture industry will be just as ready to reproduce it in the aftermath of civilization’s end. Upshot: for whatever his protest to the contrary, Jensen’s pop-cultural ecocentrism is no more radical than the self-styled constitutionalist who, in clinging to an antiquated and rigid interpretation of U.S. founding documents mistakes archaic for conservative—a Leftist version of Donald Trump, all sound, no fury unless we really do become willing to bring it all down, including the very conditions that make the aesthetic in experience possible. But “we” won’t do that. This reading of Jensen is reinforced via his cyberspace presence. He’s got a book club and a forum—but he only permits posts from those who have signed onto the Twenty Premises by promising as a rite of passage into his cyberspace that you’ll never—ever—criticize him. Here was my unfortunate interaction trying to offer polite criticism in that venue in 2010: Dear Derrick Jensen: I have read Endgame—as well as several other of your works directed at diagnosing our present environmental crisis and fomenting a revolution directed against, as you put it, “civilization.” I have also tried to engage you concerning some things that, to be quite honest, really trouble me about your claim that all of civilization must be brought to an end. But engaging you turns out to be very difficult. For example, while you invite participants to join you in your reading club devoted to drafts of your newest works, you explicitly forbid criticism of any kind: “I want no criticism or editorial suggestions. I cannot stress enough how unhelpful I find criticism or editorial suggestions from people I don’t know. I only accept criticism or editorial suggestions from my closest friends (and then only when I ask) and the book’s editors. Praise is welcome. Also, if you

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happen to see an incorrect fact or a typo, I would appreciate learning of those. This latter is NOT an invitation for criticism.”48 Moreover, a book club participant must actually pay for the privilege of offering you only praise: $10.00, one month, $35.00, six months, and a discounted rate of $60.00 for a year. I can only assume the content of this work is spectacular since, as you apparently believe, it cannot benefit from criticism, evaluation, alternatives, challenges, or questions AND one must pay for the privilege showering you with applause. I’m afraid I would not be able to refrain from asking you questions, possibly even challenging some of your assumptions—so I opted not to join. I think I’m just not very good at being that kind of true-believer, but then again, I wasn’t a very good Christian either.

I decided to try an alternative, and I signed up for the Derrick Jensen Forum.49 There were conditions here too: “You agree, through your use of this forum, that you will not post any material which is false, defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, or harassing.” These seemed quite doable in comparison with the conditions for the Derrick Jensen Book Club. I had no interest in posting anything that was false, defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, or harassing. What I wanted to do was offer some questions and—admittedly critical—observations about the 20 core “premises” Jensen elaborates in Endgame. I have posted them below, along with my premise for premise questions and observations. But I came away mystified. Within less than an hour, I was banned from Jensen’s forum for being “rude.” This was the explicit reason given for the banning. I was certainly querying and critical, but I was not “rude,” and “rude” was not actually a category for which a poster could be banned. “Rude” is not defamatory, inaccurate, etc. So, I asked to be reinstated—to no avail.50 I came away from this experience with the indelible impression that the Derrick Jensen Forum was not so much a forum as a club. Membership positions you as an insider’s insider, the coolest of the ecocentric-cool in a “forum” that offers the appearance of genuine dialogue, but little of the substance. Orchestrating the highly restrictive and (self) selective conditions of access, Jensen’s club creates the impression of really important work going on that only the “insider” gets to know about so long as they sit in tranquil admiration of the messiah’s performance—who we can assume has big plans that might include you. Being permitted entry no doubt creates a sense of entitlement, but to perform little more than the supplication of acolytes at the feet of a kind of self-styled messiah. The very way Jensen orchestrates the arguments, the voluminous examples, the presentation, and the access to his work (and to him) offers about as clear an example of exclusionary tribalism as we could imagine. Maintaining privileged access to his cyberspace acts as an effective test of loyalty; it outfits those who pass (via silent meditation and

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overt praise) with the reassurance they’ll be survivors, arming another lifeboat with explosives awaiting detonation by enthusiastic ecocentric Hoplites. There is irony here. Membership in Tribe Endgame seems at once to demand both the soldier’s resolve, toughness, and willingness to engage acts of violence—and the acquiesence of the true believer to authority. Jensen’s book club and forum feel more like boot camps for ordering future ecocentric communities than refuge for any genuine dialogue over what such communities might look like. Combined with the Premises, the effect of Endgame is actually very familiar, namely the fundamentally masculinist militarizing of environmental activism toward a future as potentially oppressive as the one whose dams he seeks to see exploded. Pop-Cultural Ecocentrism and the Axes of Human Chauvinism Perhaps this characterization of Jensen’s book club and Forum is too harsh— but I don’t think so. Part of what’s troubling here is that it’s hard to imagine who—beyond young, mostly white men raised on video games slathered in sexy apocalyptic themes—would be attracted to these tribal-cyber-clubs, young guys who (having just polished off a round of Grand Theft Auto), sign up for Jensen’s view of sanity believing that they’ll survive the end of civilization—that they’ll be the “we.” Why not? They’ve discovered truth, and while they may have to forfeit their cell phones they’ll finally get to use their really nice camping gear. It’s troubling because what we don’t have is reason to think there will be many women or indigenous or nonwhite or non-Western people signing up for the chance to patronize the prophet. Why would they? They can’t even ask Jensen about his plans for the post-apocalyptic future, or what in it might make for a desirable existence for them, a question made all the more pressing by the fact that it’s not obvious that there’s room for them in the armed lifeboat—even if they sat silently. And it’s actually even worse than simply the reproduction of the axes of human chauvinism. Ending oppression is explicitly subordinated to saving the earth; hence, the fundamental idea of a hierarchy that determines the value of some over others not only retains its authority, it’s actually strengthened. You’re either for the earth, or you’re the enemy. If you’re the latter, you’re part of civilization—and therefore a legitimized casualty. The essentially religious fervor of Jensen’s hierarchy is reinforced through the identification of those who dare to ask questions or put up resistance as insane. After all, if “sanity” comes to be defined as “ready to blow up dams,” and insanity, by contrast, as mired in the civilization that, for example, means your access to chemotherapy and art museums, what you have is a recipe for a “civilization” that can reproduce all manner of subjugation, oppression, servitude, and violence in the name of intrinsic value—as the prophet decides it. That puts Jensen in

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league ideologically with the same terrorists who force ten-year-old girls into marriage (Boko Haram), or behead infidels (the Islamic State). Perhaps, however, the greatest irony of Jensen’s Twenty Premises and the world that would presumably follow their execution is that such a world might be sustainable. But in creating and enforcing its central premise, the privileging of the planet over human needs and interests as a matter of course, Jensen effectively creates another variety of fascism—ecocentric fascism. Did the post-dam-blown world offer the prospect of rich and diverse aesthetic experience, perhaps this bargain would be worth it. But it can’t. After all, the civilization Jensen decries is certainly not going down without a fight—and that includes the multinationals who’d surely dispatch their standing armies against Jensen’s devoted, but otherwise ill-prepared band of insurgents, and who don’t lose sleep even now over despoiled land and water. So, at the end of blowing up dams, what would there be? We need look no further than, for example, a little boy sitting bloodied and silent in a makeshift ambulance in Aleppo.51 Everything else is just arrogance.

THE INTRACTABLE AUTHORITARIANISM OF THE ECOCENTRIC WORLDVIEW AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL DICHOTOMY THAT GROUNDS IT Reverse-Engineering Pop-Cultural Ecocentrism to Its Philosophical Premises While Jensen’s argument that ending civilization is necessary to realizing the ecocentric worldview represents only one possible future, that it can be made pop-culturally attractive via its direct appeal to legitimate concern over environmental crises—but also in virtue of its tacit appeal to teen angst, hipster disaffection, a sexy sense of “cool,” the lure of violence, and the desire to belong to something bigger—should move us to want to understand its moral and philosophical premises. Jensen’s recruitment strategy swaps apocalyptic rhetoric for sober argument, and it cultivates a cult of personality to evade critical evaluation. Nonetheless, there are arguments in support of an ecocentric worldview that, perhaps, escape this biting criticism. If they’re going to have any chance of helping us articulate a desirable future in realizable terms, it’s because their premises and foundational arguments can be shown to be coherent, morally defensible—able to withstand criticism. Can ecocentrism be made coherent? Are its foundational presuppositions—especially concerning the ubiquity of human chauvinism and intrinsic value defensible? Can it be made realistic without significant distortion of its premises? Can it be adopted as an ethic—a way of life? Will its adoption

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help us achieve a desirable future? A just one? Can we reckon the casualties regarded as acceptable losses in Jensen’s Endgame as a reasonable (or inevitable) implication of the ecocentric worldview—and thus morally defensible? Or could we avoid them? Can we reverse-engineer the Twenty Premises back into their philosophical soil? As Jensen surely appreciates, appeals to philosophical arguments by themselves rarely inspire the kind of radicalized action he advocates. But insofar as he markets the Twenty Premises as a principled platform—a decision-procedure—for real-time choices in response to urgent environmental crises—that can gain traction even among folks who aren’t philosophers. This isn’t, moreover, because Jensen downplays the ecocentric presuppositions that inform the Premises; it’s because they’re woven into a narrative presented as beyond interrogation. Jensen takes his “insider” audience for granted—that’s part of Endgame’s “cool” reinforced in his forum and book-club rules; he no doubt knows that too. From the point of view of recruitment, climate change is made for arguments like Endgame. It offers the enterprising ecocentrist an opportunity to capitalize on a real crisis to justify otherwise outrageous claims and actions like those of the Twenty Premises. There are reasons why Endgame catapulted to the top of the New York Times best-seller list—and stayed there. Neither an argument for ending civilization, nor for adopting an ecocentric disposition, nor even really good writing, alone would have gained that traction—but Jensen’s did. Certainly the demographics of his intended audience, the prophet-elevating strategy of his forum and book club, the sexiness of his program for ending civilization, the appropriation of “sanity” as a tactic for pitting an ecocentric “us” against a chauvinistic “them” combined with the exploitable legitimate fear of ecological apocalypse played their parts. But even taken together, none of these are enough to retain that audience were there not something deeper, something that appeals to the true believer—or creates one. Philosophical ecocentrism offers us just that. However sexy the apocalyptic rhetoric, it wouldn’t have been enough to produce Jensen’s true believer, dividing organizations otherwise ideologically and strategically similar, for instance, Deep Green Resistance adherents from Earth First!-ers, did his Twenty Premises not resonate with a generation of disaffected environmentalists. Something in Jensen’s vision of the future was able to spirit away members of these more traditional radical organizations, and ultimately inspire considerable acrimony.52 True believers need sustenance, and Jensen doesn’t disappoint; something in his ecocentric worldview is different. The central question for the Twenty Premises, however, isn’t whether its ecocentrism coheres with the philosophical disposition of other similar organizations like Earth First! but whether there’s justification within philosophical ecocentrism for conceiving our current environmental crises in the way Jensen contends that can support acting to resolve them in the way

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Jensen advocates regardless the approach of other organizations. The question isn’t “Can Jensen articulate adequate philosophical scaffolding to support an ecocentrism that’s popular?” It’s “Can he articulate that scaffolding such that we can defend charting a course for the end of civilization?” I think the answer here is a carefully elucidated but resounding “yes.” Yes—we can get from philosophical ecocentrism to blowing up dams, and, yes, Jensen’s version of how the end of civilization follows from philosophically ecocentrist premises is in keeping with the latter’s governing assumptions and logic. But there’s more: reading the philosophical arguments through Jensen’s radical program can shed valuable light not only on crucial questions about how we ought to respond to environmental crises, but on whether philosophical ecocentrism offers the best avenue to a desirable future. Here I’ll argue the answer is an equally resounding “no.” No—philosophical ecocentrism does not shed any uniquely valuable light (more than other theories) on how we should respond to environmental crisis, and no, we have no reason to believe that the world Jensen envisions after the dams blow up is desirable to anyone other than the mostly male, white, and Western occupants of Cyber-Tribe Endgame. Indeed, we’ll have good reason to believe that the post-rubble world resembles its preapocalypse predecessor in every substantive detail other than the source of its oppressive institutions. The Ironic Authoritarianism of the Deep Green Resistance With some irony, this latter appraisal is shared by Earth First!—an organization that would seem to have much in common with Deep Green Resistance, DGR, but departs from the latter on distinctly philosophical grounds—or rather, on the absence of apparent philosophical grounds. In an insightful if scathing analysis for Earth First! Journal, Michelle Reneé Matisons and Alexander Reid Ross argue that DGR’s willingness to sanction—even advance—a strategy for bringing civilization to an end that reinforces a “traditional authoritarian vanguardism” in which the “masses” are deployed to carry out immense violence that produce “large scale human suffering,” at the behest of the few—the DGR elite—who direct the revolution is a neo-liberal “obscenity.” According to Matisons and Ross, the “theoretical leap of faith” required to support DGR’s dogged insistence that, despite massive casualties, ordinary people will join the revolt to end civilization once they adopt an ecocentric perspective is extremely unlikely, and as such delivers a fatal blow to Jensen’s brand of ecocentrism. Someone who, for example, loses a child due to a hospital power failure isn’t likely to be comforted by these philosophical platitudes; they may instead discover moral bankruptcy at the heart of the ecocentric worldview.53

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But while Matisons and Ross are no doubt right in their incredulous response to the pop-cultural ecocentric strategy, they misidentify its philosophical underpinnings to the extent that, while its authoritarianism appears to reproduce the “vanguardism” of earlier historical revolutions, it really goes deeper appealing not to the institutionalized authoritarianism of parties or movements, but that rooted in the human chauvinism Jensen takes to be a ubiquitous feature of human nature. In other words, since what is imperative to adopting the ecocentric perspective is a radical shift in disposition from a human-centeredness understood as irreconcilably self-centered to one that privileges ecosystems, anyone who adopted that disposition would see the loss of their child in the bigger picture attenuated by recognizing the intrinsic value of all things—including those whose survival chances are enhanced by an end to a civilization for whom a child is simply one more casualty. Sanity, on this view, demands the wholesale sublimation of things like personal affection in exchange for, as Matisons and Ross put it, a “dispiriting and rationalistic” calculus of value. Such a revolutionary sees him or herself not merely as a demanding change, but as an embodiment of the rational. His/Her actions are thus not justified by “mere” political ideology—but by reason itself rooted in the recognition of an intrinsic value that renders the child equal—but not greater—than the ecology damaged in the building of a hospital. Anything else is castigated as the “insane.” So while Matisons and Ross are correct that DGR “manifests both an ideological and strategic misdirection that stumbles over its own critical analysis foreclosing the potential for participatory democracy,” by going on to argue that this “misdirection” derives from DGR’s failure to align itself with the right political objectives, they miss precisely how “the potential for participatory democracy is foreclosed.” It is foreclosed from the outset—but not by political objectives, at least not in the first place. The possibility of participatory democratic decision-making is foreclosed by the authoritarian prerogative inherent in a worldview that demands it true believers subordinate the value of living things—including their children—to the peremptory goal of ending civilization in order to save the planet—including its living things. To suggest that Matisons and Ross misidentify DGR’s ideological roots is not to suggest that, had they probed more deeply, they’d change their minds about the “obscenity” of Jensen’s view, and it’s not to say that once we see Jensen’s ecocentrism aright, we’ll decide he’s on to something. Quite to the contrary, the obscenity they rightly decry in Jensen’s Twenty Premises impugns his ecocentrism in ways not merely troubling but revealing with respect to the authoritarian impulse made manifest in his objectives. Consider: is it ludicrous to believe that the committed ecocentrist would be sanguine about the loss of their child? Yes. Could even the truest of believers detach themselves from that tragedy? No. The level of self-deception required

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to adopt such an attitude makes a mockery of Jensen’s definition of sanity, and it makes, as Matisons and Ross put it, a “rationalistic calculus” of the value of life and death. If we’re to take an ecocentric worldview seriously, however, that commitment is what follows from it; it defines the “true” in true believer—and it’s what authorizes an ecocentric messiah like Jensen to determine—given the end of civilization as the objective—whose lives really matter. Every Thing Is Equally Expendable: Ecocentric Nihilism Put differently: because ecocentrism can supply no account of the ways in which the specific axes of human chauvinism—racism, heterosexism, or speciesism—play a role in determining value, it effectively renders everything equally culpable in abetting “civilization,” and thereby renders everything equally expendable at its end—a child, a dog, a people. Appeals to intrinsic value can only reinforce this “rationalistic calculus” in that value deemed intrinsic, but otherwise unidentifiable, applies to everything and therefore to nothing in particular. Once we comprehend the logic grounding the Twenty Premises, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the ecocentric worldview is inescapably authoritarian, if not ultimately nihilistic. That Jensen is able to cloak this logic behind a mix of apocalyptic rhetoric, us-against-them recruitment strategies, fear-mongering, and a cult of personality may expose him as disingenuous—but it doesn’t make him inconsistent. In fact, if the ecocentric view of human chauvinism is right, he’s right on the money; virtually any form of violence—from leaving a hospitalized child to die to blowing up the dam that shuts off her access to electricity—can be justified in the name of establishing the reign of intrinsic value. The ecocentric view of human chauvinism is, however, not only mistaken, but to borrow a term from Matisons and Ross, obscenely wrong—in very important ways. The ecocentrist’s commitment to chauvinism’s ostensive ubiquity is in actuality a pretext to justify a profoundly authoritarian conception of what constitutes a morally defensible human life, and hence a “desirable” future—at least for those whose armed lifeboats outfit them for survival civilization ends. If human actions are driven primarily by narrow self-interest, it’s little wonder, according to this view, that we find ourselves in environmental crisis; “civilization” is simply shorthand for “chauvinism” writ large; capitalism civilization’s effective ethic. Given this ubiquity (and consequent iniquity), the only chance we have at survival depends on a deliberate and comprehensive repudiation of chauvinism followed by the fervent embrace of an ecocentric disposition instilled in the cradle. Because no other option can forestall environmental apocalypse, the ecocentric disposition must become civilization, the appeal to intrinsic value its

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guiding ethic. The ecocentric outlook is not, therefore, merely a philosophical exercise, but a moral imperative that, encapsulated in the Twenty Premises, yields a design for a future human culture that supplants all previous ways of life even as it pays lip service to preserving “primitivist” aspects of a few. Given the ecological stakes—especially the ultimate existential stakes signaled by climate change—it will never be enough merely to evince ecocentric values. Insuring human survival into a sustainable future will depend on being able to enforce intrinsic value as law. From this point of view, climate change must be seen as a gift to the ecocentric worldview. It supplies precisely the urgency and consequent pressure necessary to the adoption of intrinsic value as the bedrock of moral judgment, and thus the justification for ending civilization as the indispensable prelude to creating the sustainable future. It epitomizes human chauvinism as an iniquitous causal agent. What could be more self-evident than that human-centeredness had no other course than self-interest? Doesn’t climate change show once and for all that civilization could have developed in no other fashion? This seems quite convincing—especially if we look only to the consequences—climate change—and not to the ethnicity, sex, gender, or geographical identity of the responsible human agents. From the point of view of the consequences, there are no human victims of climate change, only perpetrators—and the ecocentric worldview cannot have it any other way. Here’s why: philosophical ecocentrism is rooted in an intractable dichotomy. Either the chauvinism at fault for climate change is inherent in human nature, ecological damage its inevitable outcome, or although human nature is essentially chauvinistic, it can, under the right conditions, with the right pressure, provided the right alternative, be redirected to a survivable course and perhaps even a sustainable future. But it’s one or the other, its tribes are only two—those who embrace intrinsic value and those who perish at civilization’s end; its lifeboat only one—the survivors. While the ecocentrist opts for the ostensibly more optimistic course that allows us to change course, that course is premised on the assumption that self-interest describes all human character and action more or less equally—regardless other factors including ethnicity, sex, gender, geographical location, culture, or class. While some may be more responsible than others for causing environmental damage, we must all be held accountable since—given the dichotomy—there’s no other way to stipulate the right conditions under the right pressure on the path to the right alternative. Pitted against the possibility that ecological apocalypse is inevitable, there can be no exceptions; human chauvinism is what must be conquered. Hence, none can be exempted from the demand for change even if this costs the vast majority of human beings their lives—and this authoritarian impulse combined with the very real urgency of ecological crisis guarantees

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that any actual attempt to realize the Twenty Premises will result in oppression the magnitude of which rivals that of the most exploitive capitalist enterprise.

WHERE THE DEEP IS THE SHALLOW AND VIOLENCE IS THE LAW: ARNE NAESS’ ECOCENTRISM AND WHY IT FAILS The Philosophical Ecocentrism of Arne Naess The celebrated architect of philosophical ecocentrism, Arne Naess, would no doubt find my analysis anathema to his vision of a human future realized in ecocentric terms. The restoration of ecological stability, the radical transformation of human consciousness, and the rebirth of communities via sustainable institutions and practices dominated the arc of his life and work, clearly propelled by a beneficent vision of the good and a deep commitment to the purported nonviolence inhering in respect for intrinsic value. Well before the turn of the twenty-first century, Naess saw, as Parenti puts it, that “[c]ivilization is in crisis, though the effects are not yet fully felt. The metabolism of the world economy is fundamentally out of sync with that of nature. And that is a mortal threat to both.”54 Along with theorists like Robert Sessions, Warwick Fox, and Frederic Bender, Naess articulated the founding premises of what came to be known as deep ecology, and his defense of it offers one of the most enduring statements of the ecocentric tradition to date. As fellow Norwegian Johan Galtung, muses, “What was his [Naess’] basic theme? In one word: nonviolence, but in a broader and deeper sense than most approaching [that] demanding idea.”55 Given the utopian impulse and basic moral sensibility of Naess’ lived environmentalism, it’s hardly surprising that most of his readers (like Jensen’s) have simply taken him at his word, elaborating on the implications of intrinsic value—but not really querying its conceptual coherence. The trouble is that regardless Naess’ enduring commitment to nonviolence, regardless the example he provides of his own life, deep ecology not only sanctions violence, the realization of its worldview necessitates it. Jensen, in other words, offers not only an authentic translation of philosophical ecocentrism into a strategy for achieving Naess’ Eight-Point Platform, the platform itself clears the way for Jensen’s Twenty Premises—or something like it—and only something like it. As we’ll see whether we want to defend the end of civilization—whether we think it defensible—we will not be able to escape concluding that its violent demise follows as the natural outcome of Naess’ philosophical ethic. The conceptual disquiet within philosophical ecocentrism turns out, however, to go even deeper; it’s unable to withstand either the critique of its governing premises or the investigation of what taking these seriously

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implies for the beneficent communities Naess envisioned. The premises are spurious and the implications are at great risk of reproducing social and economic injustice, including the institutions that reinforce the most oppressive forms of human chauvinism. The issue is not just that arguments like Naess’ provide support to arguments like Jensen’s; it’s that they drive them. As we’ll see, there’s no consistent adoption of an ecocentric worldview without at the same time pledging oneself to the violence required to realize it, no navigating our way to the ecocentric utopia without armed lifeboats. At bottom, the difference between Naess and Jensen is simply a matter of comfort with that reality—not a difference of moral principle or philosophical view. Naess’ Eight-Point Platform: Eco-Authoritarianism The trouble for philosophical ecocentrism begins in Naess landmark 1986 essay, “The Deep Ecology Movement,”56 where, taking the ecocentric dichotomy as given, he develops an eight-point platform whose implications turn out to be well suited to the strategy of the Twenty Premises. This includes, as we’ll see, the necessity of erecting a regime as authoritarian and oppressive as any in human history in order to sustain a post-civilization society whose governing aims are to control, if not eradicate, human chauvinism. If the Premises spell out a decision-procedure for how to propel and execute the end of civilization, the Eight-Point Platform supplies its logic, its philosophical scaffolding, and, crucially, its moral authority. As fellow ecocentrist, Frederic Bender decries in his 2003 book The Culture of Extinction, Homo colossus “has released some 160 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, half of it since 1960. Carbon dioxide emissions now exceed five billion tons annually, at least 100 times the amount of the Earth’s volcanoes,” and it just gets uglier from there on. For him, we are the crisis; Homo colossus simply names a vector, a one-dimensional array that must be radically altered if the planet is to remain habitable. The trouble is that, while it’s one thing to be able to justify ending the civilization of Homo Colossus, it’s quite another to articulate the world that’s to come after—and the laws that will govern it. Naess lays out this philosophical scaffolding—the logic of his utopia— through his development of the ecocentric dichotomy. Dividing the “shallow” from the “deep,” the former, according to Naess, supports a reformist environmentalism that assumes human-centeredness (anthropocentrism) is chauvinistic and the latter advocates the ecocentric alternative. He argues that the dichotomy is epitomized in the actions of some professional ecologists in the extent to which they compromise their environmental principles—go shallow—in the face of market-driven pressures only to ultimately contribute to ecosystem loss.57 He laments, not unlike Parenti, that “[e]stablished corporate interests—the fossil fuel companies and the pampered large banks . . . do not

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wish to see downward redistribution of wealth and power, nor the economic annihilation of all the sunk capital that is the fossil fuel economy.”58 And as Galtung notes, Naess would likely find further evidence for the ecocentric dichotomy in his native Norway’s contemporary penchant for capitalist and militarist solutions to national problems. “[I]nstead of deep ecology,” writes Galtung, “Norway buys eco-quotas abroad so as to proceed as before; Norway joins one US-led war after the other—Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya; Norway propagates itself as a world norm, not diversity; and textbooks are back to normal, Western regional philosophy.”59 For Naess, policies like Norway’s would surely have epitomized the shallow self-defeating penchant for compromise that, by reinforcing a globalized system of exchange value, contribute to ecological apocalypse.60 As Bender, following Naess, makes the point, [w]hy continue to sacrifice ecospheric integrity to preserve business-as-usual growth? Why refuse to consider deliberate change, based on the best science currently available, rather than wait to have changes thrust upon us by deteriorating circumstances? Why not consider the ethics of voluntary simplicity and start developing elegant, minimal impact technologies consistent with an ecologically sustainable, postindustrial economy?61

The trouble is that, given the ecocentric dichotomy, Homo Colossus is not capable of altering the vector of his chauvinistic nature so willingly; reformist policies are at best half measures that stave off some if the worst effects of climate change briefly, and more often cover stories for the continuing extraction, pollution, and exhaustion of vital resources. But that is the modus operandi of human chauvinism. It’s no doubt true that the impulse behind Naess’ and Bender’s call to voluntary simplicity is a fundamentally ethical one. But it doesn’t matter: if we are Homo Colossus and climate change is a direct reflection of human nature, then so is ecological apocalypse. And if we have no reason to believe that an apocalypse can alter that nature—as Naess and Bender clearly do not believe—why would we think appeals to science or philosophy or ethics would? Naess abandons the notion that “shallow” reformist policies can lead to ecologically sustainable ends. Recognizing nonetheless that crisis by itself is not sufficient impetus, he argues for a radical transformation of human consciousness—essentially an entirely new curriculum for nonhuman nature— through which to realize a new form of human agency, one whose moral disposition is driven by the principle of intrinsic value. If we’re to restore earth’s environmental integrity, the chauvinism (anthropocentrism) exemplified in “shallow” environmentalism must be replaced, argues Naess, by the “deep ecological” commitment to the eight-point platform:

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1. The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth have value in themselves [intrinsic value]. These values are independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes. 2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves. 3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs. 4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantially smaller human population. The flourishing of non-human life requires a smaller human population. 5. Present human interference with the non-human world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening. 6. Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present. 7. The ideological change will be mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between bigness and greatness. 8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to implement these changes. 62 To see how the platform translates smoothly into Jensen’s Twenty Premises consider: if “humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity [of the planet’s ecologies] except to satisfy vital needs,” and such a reduction follows from civilization, it’s a short step to blowing up dams not only to restore richness and diversity, but because human beings have no right to interfere beyond satisfying vital needs. If “the flourishing of non-human life requires a smaller human population,” and if humans have no right to reduce this capacity for flourishing, then whatever actions result in reduced human population are potentially permissible to restore that capacity, particularly under conditions of extreme urgency like those of climate change. Naess no doubt would find the prospect of genocide to achieve these ends horrific, but the logic—a utilitarian calculus of ends to justify means—offers little hedge against it; it seems unlikely in the extreme that Homo Colossus is going to submit to this form of voluntary simplicity, “stop making babies!” without the coercion of law. Ecocentrism—By Any Means Necessary: Anthropocentric Is not Chauvinistic Naess observes that the “present human interference with the non-human world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.” There is no

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denying that he’s right, particularly given eroding shorelines, polluted (or exhausted) resources, desiccated forests, and dwindling land-base. As ecocentrists, he argues, our first moral imperative is to act to preserve and restore that ecosystem. Hence, the only sane response to point five is to staunch the interference. Nevertheless, given the potentially lethal marriage of environmental urgency to chauvinistic recalcitrance, this can only mean “by any means necessary.” If subscribing to the platform entails the obligation to implement it—and civilization is standing in the way—why not begin by blowing up dams, bombing the World Trade Center, or weaponizing SARS? So long as the ends are kept squarely in site and the urgency is constant, on what grounds could we exclude any particular action—even a monstrously violent one? This is at least obscure. Perhaps Naess could argue that in undergoing a transformation of consciousness from Homo Colossus to Homo Ecocentricus, we would reach a “profound awareness” of what he calls the difference between “bigness” and “greatness” (point seven). But he offers no account of this difference—leaving it up to the interpretation of readers who may have very different agendas than his own (say, Rex Tillerson), and he offers no argument for what might count as an impetus to undergo the transformation itself. If climate change can’t supply it, what can? We like Big Macs, Big Gas, Big Box, and Big War. Moreover, while “voluntary simplicity” might give us a better idea—defining “bigness” as quantity of goods and experience and “greatness” as quality—it still doesn’t tell us anything about why we’d want greatness over bigness when we continue to want bigness despite overwhelming evidence that it’s eco-cidal. How then do we even begin to develop a “profound awareness” of what actions are defensible in the pursuit of an ecocentric worldview, which aren’t—and which are condemnable, if any? How can we know whether or when we’ve arrived at this “awareness” as opposed to the merely arcane observation that “we should do something”? Why, when we’re still happy with Big Macs, Big Gas, Big Box, and Big War—when civilization is as close as Amazon—wouldn’t we think that “bigness” was pretty damn good? From the point of view of Homo Colossus, voluntary simplicity sounds like deprivation—and short of a complete transformation of consciousness, he can’t imagine anything else. So he’s not going anywhere else—not voluntarily. For him, notions like “profound awareness,” much less, “transformation of consciousness” can only sound ridiculous, or stupid—or torturous. This brings us to the crucial driver of Naess’ ecocentrism—and its spurious logic: by conflating “anthropocentric” with “chauvinistic,” Naess defines human-centeredness in terms of a failure to acknowledge the intrinsic value of nonhuman nature; this failure is thus conceived as insane. Whether Naess wants to endorse it or not, such a failure is ineradicable and inexpugnable except for through the execution of means not merely “radical”

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or transformative”—these are euphemisms—but at least authoritarian, even tyrannical. Herein also emerges an inconsistency: while on the one hand, the ecocentric dichotomy depicts human chauvinism as if it were an ineradicable feature of human nature, even the most tyrannical regime of ecocentric purification assumes that human nature is malleable—transformable—under the right conditions. Like “reparative therapy” deployed against gays and lesbians to “make them straight,” however, we’ve good reason to be skeptical about whether any such “transformative” program could be effective, even if we could justify it. Many gay men report that, following the therapeutic interventions of programs like Exodus, a potent mixture of religious indoctrination, shaming, and bribery, they find themselves quickly returning to their original homosexual orientation. They wonder what it would have taken to transform them into heterosexual men. So too here; if chauvinism really is like sexual orientation—part of the innate fiber of our character—what would it take to eradicate it? To replace it with a disposition that prescribes profoundly different choices and actions? Who is rightly authorized to decide? The stakes for the planet are, however, even higher if the consequences of our chauvinism is ecological apocalypse. After all, the gay man or lesbian simply desires to love who they love; the chauvinist presumably desires everything. Given the conflict between the climate change stakes and the pathological desires of Homo Colossus, ditching civilization for the ecocentric view, isn’t so much an end as it is a purgative—a pungent and coercive laxative through which to purify humanity and the planet of humancenteredness altogether. The conflation of centeredness with chauvinism thus reinforces the key premise of the ecocentric dichotomy—that the only viable route out of that failure is the disavowal not only of centeredness, but of human being conceived as essentially evil. The problem is that, like the gay man who prefers the company of other gentlemen to women, Homo Colossus prefers Big Macs, Big Gas, Big Box, and Big War. Why should either give up what they love? It’s difficult to see anyone, even if they wanted to, being able to achieve this sort of transformation by themselves. To think, however, that anything less is required for the ecocentric venture than the total transformation of both individual and community consciousness would seem deluded, if not insane, as Jensen argues. Ending civilization, purging humanity of the cosmic felony of being human, undergoing a transformation of consciousness are thus not rightly conceived as ends-in-themselves; they’re tools for actualizing the ecocentric future. Or, more precisely given the dichotomy and the struggle required to achieve this future, they’re an application of instrumental reason through which is created a new entity, an ecocentrically governed post-human being whose “profound awareness” of the intrinsic value of things insures not only that the ends determine the means, but that the authority vested in those

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who speak for the ends is secured in advance. There is a kind of “simplicity” here: one fundamental principle—intrinsic value—governs (post) human action. The rub, as Homo Colossus knows, is that there’s nothing voluntary about the transformation, and there’s nothing to reward his self-interest, no Big Macsat at the end of it. The same instrumental reason which governs the underlying logic of the eight-point platform is precisely the same that we rightly indict in the logic of capitalism, and thus for producing the conditions of climate change. In other words, while Naess (and Jensen) identify laudable ends, the means they articulate for achieving them are as suspect as the conquest capitalist’s. This isn’t merely because it’s applied by the same mostly while, male, affluent agents, but because—having no morally inconvenient facts with which to trouble itself—it can act expediently, systemically, and tyrannically; only the ends matter. The only morally relevant issue for the ecocentric application of instrumental reason is the one settled in advance of ending civilization: what has value? Everything, equally and intrinsically; therefore, no thing more than any other has value. Authorized with that kind of certainty, intrinsic value is thus not only instrumentalized; it’s weaponized. In the hands of the captains of the armed lifeboats, it provides lethal justification for even genocidal violence disguised as “saving the planet.” The end of civilization is thus only the beginning of the reign of the ecocentric worldview, the “greater” realized in the far smaller human populations of the ecocentric faithful, the merely “bigger” abandoned along with cars and shopping malls and hospitals; the reclaimed lives of earth’s future citizens won by the actions of their liberating predecessors—who also happen to be their enslaving contemporaries. The Paradox at the Heart of Naess’ Eight-Point Platform The implications of the eight-point platform are not, however, merely troubling; they’re also paradoxical: were Naess’ view of the transformative moral and philosophical virtues of adopting an ecocentric ethic persuasive at the level of individual persons, we’d have no need for the apocalyptic rhetoric exemplified in Jensen’s advocacy of violence. Homo Colossus would just put the Big Mac down, and turn off his truck engine. We’d not need the preemptively instrumentalized “reasoning” of intrinsic value to recruit sign-ons to the ecocentric future; we wouldn’t need to coerce people into doing the right thing. We wouldn’t need to bribe them, as Jensen arguably does, through encouraging a cult of personality and all the fun coolness that goes with blowing things up. Instead, dismantling civilization would be undertaken as the voluntary, even joyous, expression of an enlightened consciousness happily transformed to a living recognition of the equality of all things.

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There’d be no violent predecessors we’d need to thank for our liberation; instead we’d have stories of great-grandma’s and great-grandpa’s awakening to the mess folks had made of things, their consequent disavowal of selfish human-centeredness, and their optimistic participation in democratic decision-making to set things aright. Homo Colossus would take on the character of myth from the bad-old past. The problem is that, if human-centeredness is actually pathologically chauvinistic, it can’t go this way. What the eight-point platform requires is not simply a change in the way we think about some things; it’s not just educational. What it demands is nothing less than a “religious” conversion beginning with the repudiation of oneself, one’s culture, one’s civilization—a performance of violence to oneself so profound that it’s easily translated into acts of violence against others deemed Homo Colossus Luddites. This is how the lifeboats become armed—the first weapons aren’t explosives, they’re ideological purity combined with entitlement. Whether that purity derives from faith in conquest capital or intrinsic value is irrelevant; the application of instrumental reason for which the ends systemically justify the means—no matter how attractive the ends—is a prescription for a future as oppressive as the present—and possibly even more so. Jensen’s understanding of what’s necessary to realizing ecocentrism is, in other words, more consistent with Naess’ Eight Point Platform than what any appeal to the innocuous language of “transformative consciousness” can achieve on its own even if what originally inspired Naess was the urgency of our dire environmental condition; that’s the paradox. In appreciating the urgency of our ecological crises Jensen sees that we’ve no time to waste on voluntary change; that gets us no further than reformist environmentalism. The enlightenment to which Naess aspires, but doesn’t quite get, could take centuries; climate change offers us only years. If we accept the premises and follow the logic of the ecocentric dichotomy, we cannot fail to conclude that the future necessitates the authoritarian. The only issue remaining is whether that future is worth the destruction required to realize it and the authoritarian law required to sustain it. Is it desirable for more than the few? Is it sustainable? If it’s a Mad Max desert or a cannibal scene from The Road, do we still want it? Does it matter that the many who number among the casualties of ecocentric authoritarianism are likely to reflect the same ethnicities, sexes, genders, and species ignored in the rush to blow the dams. Will they be satisfied with the claim that their misgivings can wait until later? Jensen’s “blow up the dams” rendition of the eight-point platform should not be read as a repudiation of Naess’ devotion to nonviolence, but rather as the only way to begin the spade work of constructing a society that, assuming we accept the ecocentric dichotomy as a truth about human nature, redefines non-violence as compliance. This, of course, isn’t really redefinition but only, as Parenti might put it, the most extreme to date version of the bad adaptation

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of a fundamentally fascist program for social order disguised as an ecologically sustainable utopia. Given the dichotomy, it’s unlikely in the extreme that we’re capable of undertaking so fundamental a change if its only driver is the peril provided by immanent catastrophe; we need the threatof violence. Ironic in the darkest possibly sense, what we need is the appeal to self-interest; even Homo Colossus wants to survive. Such a utopia, as Jensen intimates in the sheer magnitude of violence he’s willing to brook, comes at high cost. Should we conceive as desirable a world whose ideal post-human citizen is she or he who can consent to the death of their child for the sake of ecocentric fidelity? Is it possible that this citizen embodies not the post-violent, but the essentially violent—she or he who, in their fidelity to the equality of intrinsic value, recognizes essentially no value? If so, does there exist any practical difference, any difference that could matter to the West Kenyan pastoralist, the Pennsylvania farmer, the millions displaced once the dams are blown, between intrinsic value and the instrumental value thinkers like Jensen and Naess both condemn? Especially when their self-interest in survival is the least likely to be met? In short, no; the ecocentric utopia has no place for what, from the point of view of intrinsic value, are arbitrary, merely sentimental choices of one’s child. Like that old chestnut about whether we’d rescue our dog or our kid from the burning house, there are sentiments and dispositions here that, whether they’re worthy of moral respect, nonetheless are deeply interwoven into human character; Homo colossus extraordinaire Rex Tillerson loves his kid. A good argument can be made that we should go back—even at grave personal risk—to get the dog; we might think that anyone who didn’t is morally suspect. The point is that however we decide such cases, anyone who claims such decisions are easy is surely either lying, in denial, suffering some socio-pathology about the strength of human affection—or perhaps sane according to the single-value decision-criteria presented by appeal to intrinsic value. Herein, however, is a problem: whether acting on sentiment is morally defensible is a different question that whether it ought to be codified as a violation of law to do so. Need the ecocentric society, in other words, criminalize actions not in accord with its values? Yes—how else is such a society to prevent an outbreak of chauvinism? How else can it preclude the rise of another Homo colossus? The growth of terrorist groups bent on re-asserting self-interested prerogatives? Not choosing one’s child is profoundly counterintuitive; hence, it’s hard to imagine anything short of the force of law—and hence the threat of violence—adequate to guarantee that Homo ecocentricus does not revert to Homo Colossus. Put differently: what the ecocentric dichotomy tells us is that human selfinterest is at fault for human and nonhuman suffering as well as ecological

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deterioration; it doesn’t distinguish between corporate self-interest deployed to hydraulically fracture a state forest to oblivion and private self-interest exercised in saving one’s kid from a burning house. It’s all the same qua “chauvinistic,” and as such must be treated as similarly eradicable in the quest to establish the ecocentric society. How could we, after all, adjudicate which self-interests are worth preserving, and which present too great a danger to the ecocentric society? Isn’t it likely that leaving to private conscience any such decisions opens the door to revolt? There are many of course who, like Naess, have voluntarily adopted an ecocentric conscience to govern their personal lives; but if what we’re after, following Jensen, is the end of civilization in hopes of forming a new social contract modeled on ecocentric principles, no voluntary decisions will suffice. Homo Colossus must be either seduced— perhaps through the sexy violence of the Twenty Premises—conscripted—say through threat of death—or killed. But whomever is not either a casualty or a committed true believer will, in virtue of their own potential to commit acts of self-interest, need to be governed not only by inculcation, but by law, criminal laws. This is more than speculative. Just as the recidivism rate for child molestation and rape is very high—necessitating harsh measures like aversion therapy or the use of potent psycho-pharmaceuticals to insure sanity, so too we must imagine the recidivism rate equally high or higher for committing acts of human-centeredness—requiring harsh measures like aversion therapy or the use of potent psycho-pharmaceuticals for those convicted of crimes of selfinterest. Perhaps this seems absurd. As opposed to criminalizing self-interest, we could surely just make it unattractive, morally revolting, un-cool; but so are rape and child molestation—and only a few are tempted to commit these crimes. We’re all potential suspects for committing acts of self-interest. It’s in this sense that appealing to instrumental reason is the ecocentric lawmaker’s best friend since the only law that would seem just is that applied universally and mechanically—protecting the intrinsic value of all by treating all violations of it equally, all violators as deterrent examples to others, who could be anyone. We could, after all, all be, as Jensen claims, insane. Such “criminals” are for all practical purposes therefore commodities that “advertise” the price of breaking the law in being convicted and thereby reinforce a central claim of the Twenty Premises, namely that the failure to put the ecosystem first is evidence of the pathology of Homo Colossus. The Moral Proscription of the Excessive—And the Arbitrary If it still seems we’re pressing ecocentrism’s implications too far, consider point five of Naess’ platform once more, from a slightly different angle: “[p]resent human interference with the non-human world is excessive, and

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the situation is rapidly worsening.” In the face of climate change, etc., this is clearly true. But what point five does not tell us is what counts as “excessive.” Or, perhaps more importantly, whose actions count as excessive? Who’s legitimately authorized to decide? What must “we” do to diminish human interference? Can we gauge whether or when we’ve achieved it? Who/what gets sacrificed on the way? “Excessive” is, in other words, a messier notion than it may seem for at least two reasons: first, besides irrecoverable ecological damage and its threat to render human life extinct, there’s no way of determining, on the ecocentric view, what it means short of appeal to the authority of intrinsic value. From that point of view, eradicating smallpox could count as excessive since its value is equal to a hospitalized child’s or a West Kenyan pastoralist’s. So too Ebola, HIV, the Zika virus. All human action is interference in some sense. But if the only “rationalistic calculus” for determining what counts as excessive is the ecocentric dichotomy, we must assume that all interference is excessive since it all derives from chauvinistic motives—like not wanting to be ill. Consider an example: in The Vegetarian Myth Lierre Keith argues that virtually everything human beings do in order to eat, namely agriculture, is excessive: [t]he truth is that agriculture is the most destructive thing humans have done to the planet, and more of the same won’t save us . . . agriculture requires the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems. The truth is that life isn’t possible without death, that no matter what you eat someone has to die to feed you.63

In some sense, of course, this is true; living requires killing. Keith continues, arguing that “[t]he reality is that agriculture has created a net loss for human rights and culture: slavery, militarism, class divisions, hunger and disease.”64 Also true. Keith then offers a particularly compelling condemnation of animal agriculture—the factory farm—citing both its failings as agriculture and its “torturous treatment of animals.”65 Good so far. The trouble appears when, in the interest of applying the law of intrinsic value to the consumption of nutrients, Keith (a) treats all living things as “someone,” that is, as equally valuable (even conscious), and then, (b) defends human meat-eating as justified because all creatures have the right to consume what they need to survive. She insists that “[a] vegetarian diet—especially a low fat version, and most especially a vegan one—is not sufficient for long term maintenance and repair of the human body. To put it bluntly, it will damage you.”66 Setting aside for the moment whether we have a moral duty to be vegetarian or vegan on cruelty grounds, and/or whether Keith is correct with respect to the health consequences of such a diet, the logic of her argument illustrates a crucial feature of ecocentrism: its moral proscriptions are essentially

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arbitrary. Here’s why: Keith defends the claim that all living things have equal intrinsic value; if they didn’t, the killing of one “someone” to feed another wouldn’t be a moral issue. Calling all living things from the turnips to the dolphins “someone” reinforces this presupposition. She also insists, however, that it’s moral to kill and eat nonhuman animal “someones” because human beings need meat for the sake of our health and survival. So, since all living things are equal, the only principle that can sensibly govern who can kill and eat whom is existential need. But if this is the case, it makes no morally relevant difference whether “who” is killed and eaten is the turnip, the ant, the chicken, the cow, the pig, or the baby. If some blight descended upon human beings, and its only cure was “dead baby,” killing and eating human babies—neither more nor less valuable than nonhuman animals—would be permissible and fully consistent with the ecocentric ethic. Perhaps, however, we’re alright with this; maybe our rejoinder is that the lives of nonhuman animals and ecosystems are equal in value to those of human babies, and if we’d acted that way, we’d not be in the environmental mess we’re in now. Maybe—but this raises at least two more problems: first, given the authoritarianism built into the ecocentric worldview, what constitutes “need” simply turns out to be the prerogative of those empowered to decide it—and is thus arbitrary by definition. Second, since science occupies no privileged status in a world where every living thing can be accounted as conscious, we can’t appeal to it to adjudicate questions about what/who to consume—or what we need, or even what “need” means. Keith couldn’t illustrate this point more vividly: she is simply wrong about the health effects of vegetarianism or veganism, and while that fact alone isn’t a defense of eating or not eating nonhuman animal bodies, it does illuminate the extent to which Keith, and ecocentrism more broadly, doesn’t feel herself limited or restricted to empirical evidence, a point supported in Jensen who’d likely argue that science is as compromised as every other aspect of civilization. Consistent with a reasoning that reverse-engineers its moral proscriptions back from its desired goals, whether it’s true that veganism is bad for our health is irrelevant; what is relevant is whether eating animals bodies can be made to fit the ecocentric worldview. Keith shows it can, so long as we’re willing to let truth be the casualty. The trouble here is that the appropriate rejoinder to the claim that science is compromised and untrustworthy (or just another way of knowing) isn’t less science; it’s not less demand for evidence; it’s more. Anything else lends itself to the worst variety of authoritarianism, namely that which governs not by any commitment to the truth, but only in virtue of its own self-interest. This last observation returns us to a second point concerning Naess’ appeal to “excessive” and the place of science at the end of civilization. Consider a recent case of unintentional noninterference: “Dozens of foreign insects

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and plant diseases slipped undetected into the United States in the years after 9/11, when authorities were so focused on preventing another [terrorist] attack that they overlooked a pest explosion that threatened the quality of the nation’s food supply.”67 While Naess, appealing to the relevant science, would rightly point out that such a pest explosion is itself conditioned by a number of factors relevant to the factory-scale food production required by a growing human population, and that many of these factors (the use of herbicides, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides, for example) constitute polluting interference, what’s also true is that the subtraction of that interference in no way restores ecological integrity—or even makes sense of it. Our interference with nonhuman nature is simply too complex to be described (merely) as interference or noninterference: “‘[w]hether they know it or not, every person in the country is affected by this, whether by the quality or cost of their food or not being able to enjoy the outdoors because beetles are killing off the trees,’ said Mark Hoddle, an entomologist specializing in invasive species at the University of California, Riverside.”68 Upshot: the ecocentrist appeals to the sciences when it supports the case for a radical transformation of consciousness; they have to. No other domain of inquiry can supply the necessary evidence supporting the claim that without that transformation, we’ll doom ourselves to an unsustainable planet. However, in the very way Naess appeals to “excessive” he effectively denies that science should be our guide to action. Consider: point five of the platform implies that it’s possible to return to some original, less “interfered” state like those hinted in Jensen’s romanticized description of indigenous cultures or in his call to blow the dams to return rivers to their original courses. But what the example of unintentional noninterference actually shows is that, for better or worse, there’s no going back, and this isn’t mitigated by the fact that the noninterference in this case is unintentional. Intentionally blowing up dams would have more immediate but not necessarily more devastating or more predictable effects than an asteroid hitting the earth or the plague possible for the conditions of The Road, or an accidentally unleashed virus like the one hinted at in The Walking Dead. The notion, then, that the violence countenanced by the Twenty Premises or the Eight-Point Platform would provide adequate conditions for ecological restoration is nonsense. First, there’s no reasonable way of predicting the effects of any particular interference specifically enough to justify it, especially violence as enormous as the end of civilization whose complexities and multiple sites cannot as a practical matter be fully comprehended. Second, given these facts, beyond the most shallow of inferences—some things will survive, some will evolve, some will be driven to extinction—the concept “restoration” can be no more meaningful for the ecocentrist than it is to anyone, including Homo Colossus. The notion that the world will continue whether or not civilization

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comes to an end isn’t news. Ecological restoration seems then a pretty thin reed upon which to hang a justification for blowing up dams.

POLICING THE ECOCENTRIC UTOPIA: WALTER BENJAMIN’S CRITIQUE OF VIOLENCE AND THE ROLE OF LAW Walter Benjamin: The Threat of Violence Codified as Law The stark picture that gradually comes to light by carrying out the logic of the Eight-Point Platform via Jensen’s Twenty Premises has to make us wonder what—given what it took to get here—is required to maintain the ecocentric “utopia” and insure fidelity to intrinsic value. As I’ve intimated, the short answer is more violence; the longer answer is more violence codified as the law. In his famous essay, “Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin argues that “a cause, however, effective, becomes violent, in the precise sense of the word, only when it bears on moral issues.”69 A critique of violence must however be divorced from whether the ends of deploying that violence are just since, assuming they are, the central question is whether even the most just of ends legitimate the use of violence to achieve them. We can, for example, assume that acting to prevent ecological crisis constitutes a just end and that it bears on a cornucopia of moral issues—environmental, economic, and social. Moreover, because a crisis like climate change is global, because its causes are readily traced to the immense excesses of conquest capitalism, it seems plain that the response must be globally coordinated and substantial; it’s hard to imagine, say the Pennsylvania antifracking movement getting off the ground without well-organized and enduring blockades of drilling sites, corporate offices, and the like. But these acts of civil disobedience are, however large or loud, decidedly nonviolent. Other than an occasional arrest for trespass or disruption of a political event, such actions present no real threat to a system of permitting well pads, pipelines, and export depots. According to Benjamin, such a cause, say, preventing the construction of a silica-spewing drilling operation next to a public school, becomes violent when the moral issues it evokes have no “easy” resolution. On the one hand, perhaps the school, in need of revenue, leased the land to the gas company; perhaps the drilling operation promises to bring jobs to a depressed rural economy. On the other, just as indigenous Andeans experienced first hand through their brutal conscription into silver mining, exposure to silica can induce crushing health effects—neurological damage and lung disease among them. What’s crucial to see, however, is that the role played by law in any such context is as a codified and enforceable means by which to regulate behavior,

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and therefore resolve conflict. This does not necessarily imply, as Benjamin makes clear, that any moral objective has been achieved—but only that violence is as deeply woven into the making of law as is its propensity is a feature of human character: All violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving. If it lays claim to neither of these predicates, it forfeits all validity. It follows, however, that all violence as a means, even in the most favorable case, is implicated in the problematic nature of law itself. And if the importance of these problems cannot be assessed with certainty at this stage of the investigation, law nevertheless appears, from what has been said, in so ambiguous a moral light that the question poses itself whether there are no other than violent means for regulating conflicting human interests.70

Law, in other words, is preserved, is the law, in its being broken and subsequently reinforced through punishment or sanction. If the law “appears in an ambiguous moral light,” it’s because its grounds—the making of laws—are themselves inherently violent to the extent that they presuppose conflicts to be resolved. The ambiguity that haunts these grounds, moreover, can only be resolved ultimately through coercion, and coersion is arbitrary and authoritarian by definition. Benjamin continues: We are above all obligated to note that a totally nonviolent resolution of conflicts can never lead to a legal contract. For the latter, however peacefully it may have been entered into by the parties, leads finally to possible violence. It confers on both parties the right to take recourse to violence in some form against the other, should he break the agreement. Not only that; like the outcome, the origin of every contract also points toward violence. It need not be directly present in it as lawmaking violence, but is represented in it insofar as the power that guarantees a legal contract is in turn of violent origin even if violence is not introduced into the contract itself. When the consciousness of the latent presence of violence in a legal institution disappears, the institution falls into decay.71

Just as the laws governing the mining of silver in the Andes, enforced by an invading corporatist venture in collusion with corrupt local officials, were both brutally executed and a source of conflict resolution (however morally insolvent) so too we can see the outline of a “legal contract” embodied in Naess’ Eight-Point Platform and Jensen’s Twenty Premises. This contract must at its core be more authoritarian than any we have seen to date in human history since what is requisite to its instantiation is a compulsory transformation of consciousness, one that eradicates the chauvinism of Homo Colossus and replaces it with the deep ecological values of Homo Ecocentricus.

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Intrinsic Value: Another Form of Exchange Value This transformation, however, will be no easy task given the ubiquity of human self-interest, and therefore cannot be left to the capricious whims of voluntary self-abnegation. No—the contract and thus the peace of the ecocentric society relies on the threat of violence, first—for the sake of consequences—to insure the ideological purity of what has been deemed by its progenitors the only viable salvation from ecological apocalypse and, second—for the sake of conceptual coherence—because without the threat of violence there can be no contract at all, therefore no post-civilization, and no justificatory narrative for ending civilization short of collective suicide. Whether the ecocentric utopia justifies the immensely violent means required to achieve it is not, from the point of view of lawmaking itself, relevant; the only relevant matter is whether having established it, it can be preserved. Given, however, that the progenitors of the post-civilization social contract are likely to be from the same class, ethnicity, and sex as those whose armed lifeboats numbered among the survivors after the dams are blown, “law-preserving” will likely recreate itself along the same axes as its predecessor institutions. The threat of violence implicit in “law-preserving” is thus as likely to be meted out, just as the Spanish delivered it to the indigenous peoples of the Andes, not according to any principle of justice or fairness, but along the well-worn rails of race and sex and gender and species. There is, as Benjamin makes clear, nothing to prevent this. At the core of lawmaking is not justice, but rather violence justified to some other end. Where that other end, however, is not merely the resolution of a potential conflict, but the salvation of the world, even the end of civilization can be counted among its legitimate means. The surprising outcome here is that, as the product of instrumental reason and authoritarian enforcement, the new social contract, the one in which intrinsic value is codified as the denominator of all value, effectively converts all things into commodities. Intrinsic value is exchange value, for insofar as each is none other than a representation—an instantiation of value—each reflects the law-preserving force of exchange at the core of the ecocentric worldview. “Exchange” because in putting the planet ahead of self-interest, one makes oneself dispensable, “law-preserving force” because while the ecocentric society may be sustainable, it will only likely be desirable to those empowered to enforce the law, “commodities” because value, however conceived as intrinsic, is drained of its meaning when its recognition is attenuated by the absence of the opportunity for joy—or even just respite from its oppressive determination of action. However circuitous the route, Benjamin brings us full circle to Parenti’s observation that “[i]n much of the world, it seems that the only solidarity forthcoming in response to climate change is an

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exclusionary tribalism, and the only state policy available is police repression.” What Parenti provides is a starkly vivid example of how lawmaking and law-preserving are undertaken under conditions that threaten to make the planet uninhabitable; exclusionary tribalism simply instantiates and reveals in what this social contract consists, the necessity of its repressive edicts, the violence that arms the lifeboats, blows the dams—and founds the ecocentric society. Nonetheless, however stark the images and parables we find in Tropic of Chaos, Parenti steps back from the precipice that is the ecocentric dichotomy: “[t]his is not ‘natural’ and inevitable,” he writes, “but rather the result of history.” And that moment of hope also brings us full circle back to our original question: are we these creatures, Homo Colossus, so committed to our self-interest that only the threat of violence can keep us from destroying the planet? Is the repressive regime of Homo Ecocentricus our only hope of escape from ecological apocalypse? NOTES 1. Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Nation Books, 2011), 9. 2. Parenti, Tropic of Chaos, 9. 3. Parenti, Tropic of Chaos, 8, my emphsis. 4. Parenti, Tropic of Chaos, 11. 5. Jesse Coleman, “University of Colorado Part of Fracking PR Scheme,” Huffington Post, September 15, 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-coleman/ university-of-colorado-pa_b_8155404.html. 6. Lynn Kaucheck, “Fracking Around the Everglades,” Physicians for Social Responsibility: Environmental Health Policy Institute, http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental-health-policy-institute/responses/fracking-aroundthe-everglades.html. 7. Theresa Braine, “Dakota Access Pipeline: Standing Rock Sioux Chairman Archambault Calls on Obama for Aid,” Indian Country, August 17, 2016. http:// indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/08/17/dakota-access-pipeline-standingrock-sioux-chairman-archambault-calls-obama-aid-165497. 8. Emma Brown, Ashley Cusick, and Mark Berman, “Louisiana’s Flooding is the Country’s Worst Natural Disaster Since Hurricane Sandy, Red Cross Says,” The Washington Post, August 17, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/postnation/wp/2016/08/17/louisiana-flood-victims-face-long-road-back-to-normal-i-losteverything/?utm_term=.14114d50586f. 9. The Seneca Lake Defenders, “We Are Seneca Lake,” http://www.wearesenecalake.com/seneca-lake-defendes/. 10. Becky Bratu and Henry Austin, “West Virginia Chemical Spill Cuts Water Up To 300,000, State of Emergency Declared,” NBC News, January 10, 2014.

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11. Dan Heyman and Richard Pérez Peña, “Spilled Oil Keeps Flames Burning After a Train Derailment in West Virginia,” New York Times, February 17, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/18/us/west-virginia-train-derailment-dumpsoil-into-river.html?_r=1 12. Adam Federman, “State Police Documents Show Intelligence Sharing Network Between Law Enforcement and Marcellus Shale Drillers,” Pittsburgh City Paper, October 8, 2014. http://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/state-police-documentsshow-intelligence-sharing-network-between-law-enforcement-and-marcellus-shaledrillers/Content?oid=1782447. 13. Space and Motion.com, “The Dynamic Unity of Reality,” http://www.spaceandmotion.com/. 14. Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Volume I, The Problem of Civilization (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), 125. 15. Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Volume II, Resistance (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006). 577. 16. Jensen, Endgame, Volume II, Resistance, 583. 17. Jensen, Endgame, Volume II, Resistance, 642. 18. John Seed, “Beyond Anthropocentrism,” Thinking Like a Mountain: A Council of All Beings (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1988), 2. 19. Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity: Towards a Way of Life that is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich (New York: Will Morrow Company, 1993). 20. Chris Erikson, “The Pursuit of Less,” New York Times. September 3, 2000, http:// www.nytimes.com/2000/09/03/nyregion/the-pursuit-of-less.html?pagewanted=all. 21. Erikson, “The Pursuit of Less.” 22. Daniel Gilbert, “Exxon CEO Joins Suit Citing Fracking Concerns,” The Wall Street Journal, February 20, 2014. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702 304899704579391181466603804. 23. Benito Cao, Environment and Citizenship (New York: Routledge, 2015). 24. Martin W. Lewis, Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 10. 25. Lewis, Green Delusions, 23. 26. Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words (New York: Context Books, 2000), 5. 27. Jensen, A Language Older Than Words, 5–6. 28. Jensen, A Language Older Than Words, 6. 29. Jensen, Endgame, Volume II, 543. 30. Jensen, Endgame, Volume I, IX–XII. 31. Jensen, Endgame, Volume I, IX. 32. Jensen, Endgame, Volume I, IX. 33. Wendy Lynne Lee, review of Mercury, Mining and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes, by Nicholas A. Robbins, Environmental Philosophy 9 (2), 2012, 208–12. 34. Lee, review of Mercury, Mining and Empire, 4. 35. Lee, review of Mercury, Mining and Empire, 5. 36. Jensen, Endgame, Volume I, IX.

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37. Lee, review of Mercury, Mining and Empire, 1. 38. Jensen, Endgame, Volume I, IX–X. 39. Jensen, Endgame, Volume I, X. 40. Lierre Keith, “The Problem,” in Deep Green Resistance, ed. Aric McBay, Lierre Keith, and Derrick Jensen (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011), 25, my emphasis. 41. Keith, “Liberals and Radicals,” in Deep Green Resistance, ed. Aric McBay, Lierre Keith, and Derrick Jensen (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011), 74. 42. Keith, “Liberals and Radicals,” 75. 43. Keith, “Liberals and Radicals,” 79. 44. Jensen, Endgame, Volume I, XI. 45. Keith, “Liberals and Radicals,” 109. 46. Keith, “Liberals and Radicals,” 93. 47. Jensen, Endgame, Volume I, XI. 48. Derrick Jensen, “The Derrick Jensen Reading Club,” http://www.derrickjensen.org/community/reading-club/. 49. Derrick Jensen, “The Derrick Jensen Forum,” forum.derrickjensen.org/. 50. Wendy Lynne Lee, “Open Letter to Radical Environmental Writer, Derrick Jensen, Best-Selling Author of Endgame,” The Wrench, August 11, 2010. 51. Chandrika Narayan, “Little Boy in Aleppo a Vivid Reminder of War’s Horror,” CNN, August 18, 2016. 52. Michelle Reneé Matisons and Alexander Reid Ross, “Against Deep Green Resistance—A Critique,” Earth First! Newswire, August 10, 2015. http://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/2015/08/10/against-deep-green-resistance/. 53. Matisons and Ross, “Against Deep Green Resistance.” 54. Parenti, Tropic of Chaos, 225. 55. John Galtung, “Arne Naess—The Next Hundred Years,” The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research,” January 31, 2012. http://blog.transnational.org/2012/01/arne-naess-the-next-hundred-years/. 56. Arne Naess, “The Deep Ecology Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects,” in Deep Ecology for the 21st Century: Readings on the Philosophy and Practice of the New Environmentalism, ed. George Sessions (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1995), 64–84. 57. Naess, “The Deep Ecology Movement,” 64–5. 58. Parenti, Tropic of Chaos, 230. 59. Galtung, “Arne Naess—The Next Hundred Years.” 60. Galtung, “Arne Naess—The Next Hundred Years.” 61. Frederic Bender, The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep Ecology (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 2003), 90. 62. Naess, “The Deep Ecology Movement,” 68. 63. Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food Justice, and Sustainability (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2009), 3. 64. Keith, The Vegetarian Myth, 4. 65. Keith, The Vegetarian Myth, 5. 66. Keith, The Vegetarian Myth, 9.

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67. Tracie Cone, “AP Impact: Foreign Insects, Diseases Got into U.S.,” The Anniston Star, October 10, 2011. http://www.annistonstar.com/news/ap-impact-foreigninsects-diseases-got-into-us/article_d31dd5c5–9d92–51cb-bc52–85ad171521ce. html. 68. Cone, “AP Impact: Foreign Insects, Diseases Got into U.S.” 69. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanowich, Inc., 1978), 277. 70. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 287–8. 71. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 287–8.

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The Nihilistic Rhetoric of Climate Change Denialism, Neoliberal Anxieties, and the Death of Science—Seven Takes WHEN ALL THE FISH ARE GONE: CLIMATE CHANGE REFUGEES, TERRORISTS REAL AND IMAGINED, AND CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL, TAKE ONE Of Snowballs and Drill Bits: The Geopolitics of Climate Change Denial In late February 2015, Republican Chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Senator James Inhofe, “threw a snowball . . . in an effort to disprove what he sees as ‘alarmist’ conclusions about man-made climate change.” He said the snowball was from outside in Washington, which he used to argue against claims that the earth’s temperature is rising due to greenhouse gas emissions. “In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair, do you know what this is,” Inhofe said to Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) . . . as he removed the snowball from a plastic bag. “It’s a snowball. And it’s just from outside here. So it’s very, very cold out.”1

Senator Inhofe goes on to voice contempt for an Obama administration report citing anthropogenic climate change as “an urgent and ongoing threat,” insisting that a greater threat to national security and geopolitical stability came not from greenhouse gases, but from terrorists, undocumented workers, and a “porous” U.S.-Mexico border. In the interest of advancing legislation aimed at addressing the latter—and moving U.S. policy-making away from climate change—the senator sponsored a bill acknowledging that climate change real, but not human-caused,2 and another that would make 123

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English the official language of the United States, the “English Unity Act of 2015.”3 While Amendment 29, the climate change bill, was a transparent and cynical attempt to circumvent the political debate concerning climate change, the English Only bill aimed at discouraging border crossings; two apparently different issues until we realize that, despite his characterization of undocumented workers as drug-runners and terrorists, many of the migrants are, in fact, climate change refugees. Inhofe’s reasoning, in other words, is self-contradictory. He denies the human contribution to climate change but implicitly recognizes that it produces conditions for migration; he calls global warming a “hoax,” but sponsors a bill to deter migrants seeking to flee its consequences.4 However much political mileage Senator Inhofe is able to generate by casting undocumented workers as drug-runners, terrorists, or even just noncitizens looking to take away American jobs,5 what a closer look reveals is that there are other motives at work. These have very little to do with drugtrafficking, terrorism, or jobs—at least in any sense the senator would likely own up to—and everything to do with insuring the continuing power exercised by fossil fuel corporations over developing world countries and policies. For elected representatives like Inhofe, it’s a more profitable venture to wager contradictory bills than it is to allow for any obstacle to future drilling—even if that means disseminating a fear-mongering narrative replete with terrorists and narcotics traffickers. In short, the possibility that climate change is anthropogenic, could conceivably be mitigated, and left unaddressed contributes to the conditions which propel migration simply cannot be permitted into the calculation of future oil and gas extraction profits. Of Smokescreens and Fear-Mongering: “Drug-Runners” and “Terrorists” To be clear, the reason climate change refugeeism cannot be allowed to figure into the business as usual of multinational corporations isn’t because there are no such things as drug-runners and terrorists. It’s because even if there weren’t, there’d be motive if not pressure, given the stakes, to make them up. We need drug-runners and terrorists. Whatever the facts concerning them, real or fabricated, in crossing the U.S. Southern border they provide an indispensable tool to the fossil fuel industry and its policy-making advocates for at least five interconnected reasons. First, the possibility that migrants could be fleeing environmental crises not only detracts from U.S. drug-trafficking and terrorism narratives, in doing so it detracts from the “free trade” expansionist propaganda of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement whose architects and beneficiaries need the terrorist narrative as cover to deny—or at least ignore—climate

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change. As Parenti shows, while NAFTA’s tour through Mexico is complex, its neoliberal blend of constitutional “evisceration,” lax environmental and labor law enforcement, privatization, corporatization, foreign investment, increased use of chemical fertilizers, factory farms, and overfishing, have guaranteed that its role in the creation of climate change migrants is a potent one.6 So potent, in fact, that only an equally compelling alternate narrative—a smokescreen—can be counted on to mask it; hence appeal to the longstanding racist storyline of “illegal aliens” who pose a grave threat to national and economic security, and thereby justify both a massively armed U.S.-Mexican border, expensive military contracts to maintain it, and more fossil fuel consumption for a U.S. military already exempted from reporting requirements.7 We need, however, to add three clarifying points: • The racist narrative of the illegal alien/drug runner/terrorist neither confirms nor denies that there exist undocumented immigrants, narcotics traffickers, or terrorists; that’s the central point. What the narrative exploits is the ambiguity at the fraught interstice between the subjugated role nonwhite ethnicity plays along the axes of human chauvinism and the reality of immensely violent drug cartels like Mexico’s Sinaloa, Zetas, or Juarez,8 and terrorist organizations like ISIS, Boko Haram, and Al Qaeda. Despite the fact, for example, that California Representative Duncan Hunter’s claim that ISIS fighters had crossed into the United States from Mexico in October, 2014 turned out to be an invention of Judicial Watch, a widely discredited hard-right website, this had little effect on members of congress, including Senator Inhofe, who not only repeated the story, but used it in his efforts to undermine President Obama’s climate change policy.9 “The President,” claims Inhofe, “puts an emphasis on climate change as a means to address our national security, which is nothing new and not a strategy . . . Having spent more than 120 billion tangible taxpayer dollars on climate change and having put into motion nearly $1 trillion in defense budget cuts over the past six years, our national security is no better off.”10 • In addition to being racist, the drug-runner/terrorist narrative is fundamentally apocalyptic and fear-mongering: either authorize government to weaponize the border against a monstrous threat, or face the prospect of invasion, infiltration, or attack on U.S. soil. The likelihood that people could be fleeing starvation on their own soil is obfuscated, if not entirely negated, by this story, leaving wide open the prospect of future fossil fuel ventures made possible by NAFTA. Indeed, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto recently signed into law, despite protests from environmentalists, government corruption, and the threat of violence from the drug cartels,11 “a historic opening of Mexico’s state-run oil, gas and electricity industries to foreign and private companies” like Chevron and ExxonMobil.12

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• Lastly, appeal to the drug-runner/terrorist narrative doesn’t imply that elected representatives like Senator Inhofe are engaged in any secret conspiracy to conceal the real motives driving climate change denial. They don’t have to do that much work; the institutionalized framework insuring the continuing hegemony of conquest capital is already well established. The irony of NAFTA is that by making already vulnerable people even more vulnerable to the drug cartels, the narrative equips representatives like Inhofe with ample ammunition to agitate for militarized borders. The making of environmental refugees is the making of desperation is the making of drugrunners. And, of course, although the real story isn’t this simple, the very “free” trade policies that have so effectively displaced people from their lands and whose most recent beneficiaries are the fossil fuel companies are also responsible for creating the demand for an even more militarized border to protect the “bonanza” of future extraction revenues: “Trade rules will have to be relaxed to allow the U.S. companies to quickly move labor and special equipment back and forth across the border . . . Peña [also] has to deal with the Zetas and Gulf Cartel, two vicious drug and gun-running gangs whose turf overlaps Mexico’s shale patch. Nabbings, extortion, murder and oil theft by the gangs have made U.S. drillers—traditionally cavalier about violence in the areas where they work—wary of venturing into the shale-rich states of Tamaulipas, Coahuila and Nuevo Leon.”13 It’s hard to imagine a more ideal scenario for climate change denial—or one that makes it more imperative. So long as the human chauvinist scaffolding of conquest capita is in place, no conspiracy’s required; it’s the pathological circulatory system of neo-liberalism itself that decides the justificatory narratives best suited to advance its objectives. The second reason that acknowledging the capacity of climate change to make refugees is unthinkable for multinational corporations and the governments who facilitate their projects is that increased public awareness could gradually transform the racist narrative of drug-runners and terrorists into more humanized accounts of victim-refugees. That’s bad for the fossil fuel industry whose projects depend on the denial of global warming. Add to that public recognition that the causes of climate change are anthropogenic, could have been prevented or mitigated, and that they’re directly connected to U.S. policy via NAFTA, and you have the makings of a seismic shift in American attitude toward her neighbor to the South. Mexico simply provides a textbook case of why environmental refugees cannot be given a human face; they make climate change real. They put the lie to a narrative vital to U.S. policy—that it’s about drugs and terrorism; but this is not only because that narrative helps maintain that axis of human chauvinism through which race is subjugated, but because it helps to maintain a symbol crucial to militarized nationalism, the

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border itself. If we saw that immigrants had reasons to risk their lives crossing it other than to sell narcotics, create terror, or steal jobs, and that these reasons were directly implicated in ecological deterioration, water and air pollution, loss of arable land, and climate change, we might begin to experience something problematic for continuing fossil fuel consumption: empathy. And while it’s empathy by itself won’t generate policy change, it does cost the fossil fuel industry money it would rather spend on drilling by making for bad public relations and even occasional acts of defiance. Third, the border between the United States and Mexico also serves another purpose as a commodity—a kind of insurance policy purchased from fossil fuel corporatized governments to protect themselves from, as Parenti puts it, “the downward distribution of wealth.” For conquest capitalism, borders are both complication and opportunity; complication because laws, policies, and policing vary from one border to another. Opportunity because conflicts between nations, however otherwise cast as religious or territorial, ultimately redound to access to energy—and hence act as markets. As Mother Jones’ writer, Michael Klare puts it, “[i]t would be easy to attribute all this [conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, etc.] to age-old hatreds . . . but while such hostilities do help drive these conflicts, they are fueled by a most modern impulse as well: the desire to control valuable oil and natural gas assets. Make no mistake about it, these are twenty-first-century energy wars.”14 Fossil fuel companies sell us the border as the symbol of the national security we must protect—by subsidizing the biggest polluter on the planet, the U.S. Department of Defense. DOD environmental violations include the “uninhibited use of fossil fuels, massive creation of greenhouse gases, and extensive release of radioactive and chemical contaminants into the air, water, and soil.”15 The fourth reason climate change refugees can have no place in business as usual is that despite the fact that illegal border crossings from Mexico to the United States don’t readily lend themselves to the religious conflict narratives of the Middle East, the economic and ecological costs to Mexicans won’t in the end substantially differ from those experienced by Iraqis, Syrians, Ukrainians, West Kenyan pastoralists, or Pennsylvania farmers. But this is a fact that can’t withstand scrutiny if fossil fuel extraction is to continue. Straddling the border between Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico, for example, the Chihuahua Desert is the third most diverse ecosystem on the planet. It’s also, as writer/photographer David Lauer puts it, “firmly in the sights of the fracking industry.”16 Although the Chihuahua Desert has been identified by the American National Park Service as one of the most important ecosystems for determining the progress of climate change, this is not apparently an overriding consideration for Pemex (Petroleos Mexicanos) who’s looking to partner with U.S. energy companies to finance drilling.17 This too, however, presents

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complication and opportunity for the fossil fuel industry. On the one hand, given the potential loss to aesthetic, cultural, and recreational experience caused by climate change, it makes redoubling the effort to deny it that much more imperative. Drilling in Chihuahua is like drilling in the Arctic: millions will be spent to counter the claims of protesters; Pemex, like Shell, Exxon, and BP would surely rather keep their rigs in Texas and Oklahoma. Except for that, on the other, it’s a tremendous opportunity for conquest capitalists who can take advantage of both the shale deposits under the fragile desert floor and the sale of expertise for an extraction process known both for its immediate environmental costs and its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Among these, for example, are methane emissions, open-air pit toxic evaporation, deep-injection well leaks, explosions, and the potential for liquefied natural gas tanker hull ruptures.18 In short, for some a warming planet may yield the turn to a violent religiosity—ISIS. But for many, it means something more inane, if equally crushing: migration, the suffering generated by fear, uncertainty, vulnerability, the turn to the drug cartels as a source of income, resignation—perhaps uncontrollable outrage. The fifth, and last reason climate change refugeeism must remain firmly wrapped in denial is because the prospect of terrorism is so saturated by various forms of violence that it provides effective justification for continuing extraction operations even in the most sensitive ecosystems like Chihuahua’s Otero Mesa. It does so not only by providing a distraction, but by making access to fossil fuels crucial to national defense and the international distribution of power. Terrorism is thus not only an invaluable fear-mongering tool, but as a violent reality a gift to the fossil fuel industry. As Klare makes the point: It should surprise no one that energy plays such a significant role in these conflicts. Oil and gas are, after all, the world’s most important and valuable commodities and constitute a major source of income for the governments and corporations that control their production and distribution . . . the governments of Iraq, Nigeria, Russia, South Sudan, and Syria derive the great bulk of their revenues from oil sales, while the major energy firms (many state-owned) exercise immense power in these and the other countries involved. Whoever controls these states, or the oil- and gas-producing areas within them, also controls the collection and allocation of crucial revenues. Despite the patina of historical enmities, many of these conflicts, then, are really struggles for control over the principal source of national income . . . we live in an energy-centric world where control over oil and gas resources (and their means of delivery) translates into geopolitical clout for some and economic vulnerability for others.19

Given these stakes, the only wonder is that there’s anywhere beyond the reach of the fossil fuel industry. But this too is rapidly changing, making the

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climate change denial narrative more essential to the deepwater toolbox with each passing day. It’s that narrative, and no other, that makes it possible to drill in places as irrecoverable as Mexico’s Otero Mesa. Part of the Chihuahua Desert, the Otero Mesa straddles the U.S./Mexico border and is home to “Mexico’s healthiest and purest herd of pronghorn . . . [It’s] also “crucial wintering ground for the burrowing owl, countless raptor species, and migratory songbirds, including Baird’s sparrow and lark bunting . . .” “[M]any birds winter in Otero Mesa due to the abundance of vital seeds that only this remote native grassland can provide. As recently as April 2006, the endangered Aplomado falcon, listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1986, was sighted in the area.”20 Faced, then, with the enormity of loss consequent on drilling in places like this, it’s vital for the fossil fuel industry to cultivate allies like Inhofe, militarize borders that support sloganeering for “energy independence,” make climate change denial a central feature of the reigning narrative—and fear-monger the threat of terrorist organizations like ISIS, Boko Haram, and Al Qaeda, not because these aren’t legitimate threats, but because whether they are or not—they’re moneymakers. Such, then is the key role played by the climate change refugee made to masquerade as the drug-runner, the terrorist, the job-taker—as urchins from the global South, pirates from Bangladesh, Muslims from Syria. Demonized and dehumanized, they fit the racist axis of Homo Colossus’ hegemonic chauvinism; they function as unwitting pawns in the global commodification of borders, labor, expertise, deserts, endangered falcons, migratory songbirds, and genetically unpolluted herds of longhorn prong. I say “commodification” because each and all of these have an exchange value in the terrorism calculus insofar as it sets the standard whereby we’re willing to sacrifice each and all of them for the sake of extracting the oil and gas that fuel the weapons with which we combat the terrorists. And, of course, we must combat the terrorists in order to guarantee access to the fossil fuels with which to combat future terrorists. Such is the pathological logic of conquest capitalism at its most nihilistic—drilling the Chihuahua. Of Denial and Desperation: The Making of Climate Change Refugees Even the most cursory second look behind the veil of this nihilism, however, exposes its mercenary opportunism and its flag-waving rhetoric as very thinly veiled metastasis. However much the fossil fuel industry needs the terrorist to justify the liquidation of the planet, the most volatile and toxic by-products of its nihilistic logic are not the ecosystems irreparably degraded, but the anguish and abject desperation manifest as acts of human violence. It won’t matter what we call it. It won’t matter whether we reference The Road or

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Mad Max or The Walking Dead. The eventual conditions produced by the nihilism implicit in the conversion of all value to exchange value are terrorizing; they’ll make the actions of ISIS seem innocuous by comparison. It’s thus a staggering fact, and potentially just about all we’ve got for articulating the desirable future, that even among those most harmed by environmental erosion and climate change, so few have (yet) resorted to violence. Parenti, for example, offers us Jose Ramirez, a fisherman “displaced by the economic aftershocks of 1997–1998’s El Nino.”21 Like many others, Ramirez’s story is complex—and a very poor fit for narratives like Inhofe’s. It features toxic algae blooms in the fishing town of Michoacán Mexico where Ramirez lived. It tells the story of El Nino and the “rampant development of tourist hotels, golf courses, and agro-export fruit plantations, all of which discharge more sewage and organophosphates into the sea, feeding toxic algae blooms.”22 For Ramirez, however, the story is simply that he couldn’t fish, couldn’t feed his family, was propelled to seek work North, and ended up in the violent border town of Juarez where he survives as a day laborer. Parenti quotes him: “The killings around here make it very hard. I saw a child killed right in front of me. Not far from here at a store, they shot a man and then the child.”23 Hardly an account of drug-running, terrorism, or robbing Americans of desirable jobs, Ramirez insists that he simply wants to work. Stories like Ramirez,’ however, are repeated in West Kenya, Eastern Afghanistan,24 Kyrgyzstan,25 all locales of U.S. military and policy interest, and all of which expose Inhofe’s snowball stunt denial as calculated to very specific geopolitical objectives—regardless the potential human cost—which means regardless the potential to create terrorists. “Established corporate interests,” such as the fossil fuel companies and the big banks, argues Parenti, can’t afford any “downward spiral” with respect to the distribution of wealth, authority, and power; they can’t afford not to cash out on the capital invested in the hydrocarbon economy. Climate change denial is thus simply the geopolitical reflection of that reality. Tethered to the political posturing of elected representatives like Inhofe, it’s not merely an existential necessity for fossil fuel operations in countries like Mexico, but crucial to maintaining the institutions whose beneficiaries control the geopolitics of distribution. As Parenti spells out, Mexican corporatism expanded markedly in the late 1930s under President Lazaro Cardenas whose programs of land reform, the nationalization of essential industries including the railroad system set the pattern for nationalizing “the ultimate prize,” petroleum, by 1937. “This brought him into direct confronation,” write Parenti, with Standard Oil, Shell, and the U.S. government.26 By 1982, however, Mexico had descended into a profound debt crisis resulting in the privatization of a number of state-owned industries, and by January 1, 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, “took

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effect,” dismantling most agencies that provided subsidies to Mexican farmers, increasing landlessness, and driving many Mexicans to abandon their land and head North.27 “The suffering and social polarization produced by neoliberalism [conquest capitalism],” writes Parenti, “has fostered corruption and exacerbated relative deprivation.”28 The stark irony for Mexico and many other nation states, especially in the developing world, is not that climate change contributes to terrorism by making people vulnerable to displacement from their lands, and thus easy prey for predators who will exploit their desperation; it’s that while this is true, the vast majority of Mexicans are like Jose Ramirez—fleeing North seeking little else but work. The wonder is that the citizens of Mexico—and Kenya, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and the rest of the global South—don’t declare war on the fossil fuel industry, executing their CEOs, lobbyists, paidoff electeds and other advocates, expropriating their weaponry, and demolishing their operations. But they can’t. That would require the gas to which we are all enslaved. The drug cartels thus owe a debt of gratitude to the fossil fuel companies for helping to create the conditions that provide their labor pools, and the fossil fuel companies owe a similar debt to the drug cartels for providing them drug-runner cover stories by which to demonize border-crossers like Jose Ramirez. The situation is desperate because, as Ramirez puts it, its yield is dead children; it’s ironic because it offers low-hanging fruit to powerful public figures like Inhofe who, not unlike the drug cartels, are looking to exploit migrants to corporatized nationalist ends. As Parenti makes the point: When displaced populations meet with more poverty and unemployment, slum living, the lure of the underground narcotics trade, state corruption, inequality, and a media landscape full of materialism, narcissism, sexism, and blood lust, the resulting anomie and relative deprivation they experience fuels crime. Crime justifies Mexican state repression and . . . Xenophobic hardening of policing in the United States. In this fashion, a crisis of natural systems becomes a crisis of urban violence and border repression.29

Take an economic, political, and cultural situation already inequitably distributed along the raced and sexed axes of human chauvinism, add the appropriation by the state of resources necessary to life that, to insure its own relevance and survival, then privatize these resources via trade agreements like NAFTA, and add climate change. What you get is a bitter recipe for the corporatist expropriation of resources and labor made possible by the nationalist narratives of the global North, itself the product of competition thinly veiled as “border disputes” among corporate interests for access to those resources. What you get, as Parenti shows, are cities like Juarez, “the city that NAFTA built and then begin to kill,” a “task” that NAFTA may have

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initiated, but that climate change will finish. As climate change forces people off the land, writes Parenti, it’s no wonder they cross the border in search of work. But desperation makes people, and especially their children, vulnerable to the drug economy. Contemporary Juarez “and the militarized border against which it leans,” he continues, isn’t the result of climate change, but it is the conduit through which refugees are now compelled to pass—many of whom simply “get stuck” and die. The “vortex of murder” that now defines that city thus offers, Parenti concludes, a stark metaphor for a world where climate change and the responsibility to work to mitigate it has been ignored, and where “adaptation takes the form of violent class apartheid.”30 The vortex that defines Juarez, and West Kenya, Eastern Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan—the rural farm fields of Pennsylvania and the tropical rain forests of Ecuador—is, for hydrocarbon behemoths like Chevron and ExxonMobil, simply the outsourced cost of doing billions of dollars of business in the bleak face of a dwindling resource. Carbon extraction will end. Hence, it’s in just that sense that it’s almost laughable understatement to suggest there’s a lot at stake in the geopolitics of conquest capitalism; so much so, in fact, that to feign surprise at climate change denial seems disingenuous if not a denial of denial, or better: the nihilistic denial that the real terrorists wave flags and throw snowballs.

OF SNOWBALLS AND SILENT SPRINGS: MARKET LOGIC AND RED (GREEN) BAITING, CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL, TAKE TWO Green Is the New Red: The Climate Change Truther-Crusaders Given the stakes, we shouldn’t be surprised that among the most common of the climate change denial-strategies is also one of the most predictable: good old-fashioned red (now green) baiting. As I’ve intimated, the only thing better than a foreign terrorist is a domestic one nefariously worming its way into the public conscience, such as it is, about such things as pollution, waste, or a warming planet. Eco-Tyranny writer Brian Sussman offers his reader just what the denial-doctor ordered, arguing that “Marxists have hijacked the environment in order to push a grossly anti-American agenda.”30 According to Sussman the claim that climate change is anthropogenic is part of a conspiracy to eliminate capitalism in order to usher in “a global era of socialism,” and put elitist environmentalists in control of the air, water, forests, and natural resources.31 As entre to a chapter devoted to showing that Karl Marx and, later, Vladimir Lenin conceived the environment as an opportunity to impose Communist dictatorship,32 Sussman describes astronomer

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Carl Sagan as a Marxist fellow traveler,33 Rachel Carson as “cunning,” and the groundbreaking Silent Spring, as a “breathless, 363-page assault on mankind.”34 He similarly excoriates Nobel Prize winner in genetics, H.J. Muller as an “anti-American Communist,” and calls Paul Ehrlich’s work on human overpopulation “anti-human”—quite an auspicious start to a work devoted to painting the American environmental movement as a hotbed of domestic eco-terrorism. It’s pretty easy, of course, to dismiss Sussman as a paranoid crank—and we’d not be wrong here. The trouble is that he commands a large audience, large enough in fact that Eco-Tyranny’s front cover includes an endorsement from Senator Inhofe: “Eco-Tyranny provides a thought-provoking analysis of the origins of the modern-day ‘sustainable’ movement.” Given Sussman’s ideological commitments, it’s not surprising that he makes virtually no reference to corporate interests other than as defenders of property “synonymous with liberty and security.”35 In advancing his “Twelve Point Plan” to save private property rights from the conniving environmentalists, Sussman recommends the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency, repealing the Endangered Species Act, and reversing all federal policies that would limit offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the Alaskan Arctic.36 He then moves swiftly to the federal divestiture of all public lands—bequeathing them to the states to sell off to private interests.37 Sussman makes it clear that for him, like Inhofe, the rights of property preempt all others. Such is the very stuff of human chauvinism. Sussman’s hysterical screed does, however, reflect something more than the merely pathological will-to-commodify typical of Homo Colossus. Scratch a bit beneath this surface and we discover that red-green baiting diatribes like his are symptomatic of a strain of profound anxiety endemic to deepwater capitalism, an anxiety that can’t be adequately addressed within any form of its market logic, including those that accept climate change as both real and anthropogenic, for example, the salvation capitalisms of Martin Lewis’ techno-utopia or Herman Daly’s steady-state economics (that we’ll explore in Chapter 5). We’ll see, moreover, that this anxiety remains palpable even though multinationals like Dutch Royal Shell have no reason to worry that their drilling almost anywhere under any conditions is in danger—including in the Arctic. May 11, 2015: The Obama administration gave conditional approval on Monday for Shell Gulf of Mexico, Inc. to start drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean this summer. The approval is a major victory for Shell and the rest of the petroleum industry, which has sought for years to drill in the remote waters of the Chukchi seas, which are believed to hold vast reserves of oil and gas. “We have taken a thoughtful approach to carefully considering potential exploration in the

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Chukchi Sea, recognizing the significant environmental, social and ecological resources in the region and establishing high standards for the protection of this critical ecosystem, our Arctic communities, and the subsistence needs and cultural traditions of Alaska Natives,” Abigail Ross Hopper, director of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, said in a statement. “As we move forward, any offshore exploratory activities will continue to be subject to rigorous safety standards.”38

Consider: Shell was given permission to drill despite plain evidence of climate change affecting the cultures, ecologies, and wild life of the Arctic. NASA, for example, reports that Winter 2015/2016 saw a new record low for sea ice coverage. According to Walt Meier of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Science Center, “[i]t is likely that we’re going to keep seeing smaller wintertime maximums in the future because in addition to a warmer atmosphere, the ocean has also warmed up. That warmer ocean will not let the ice edge expand as far south as it used to . . . Although the maximum reach of the sea ice can vary a lot each year depending on winter weather conditions, we’re seeing a significant downward trend, and that’s ultimately related to the warming atmosphere and oceans.”39 Organizations like Greenpeace, for example, have mounted substantial, and as of this writing modestly successful, protests to halt Arctic drilling,40 compelling Shell to file a lawsuit to silence them.41 But it would be folly for environmentalists to celebrate too loudly or too confidently. A number of factors played a role in Shell’s ultimate decision to pull out of the Arctic, not the least of which was faulty science concerning the Chukchi Sea oil reserves, the cost of drilling technology necessary to drill in that location, the falling price of oil, and the company’s shift to natural gas as a more lucrative fossil fuel commitment. Only the latter could mean Shell’s permanent abandonment of plans to drill in the Arctic. As Bloomberg’s Paul Barrett points out, environmental objections played some role, but not a determinative one. Anthropogenic climate change, moreover, played virtually no role at all in the company’s decision.42 Although President Obama, citing concerns from the Pentagon, decided not to open any new oil reserves near the Southeastern Atlantic Ocean, “the federal government moved ahead with plans to lease other big new reserves by 2022, including three untapped seams in Alaskan waters.”43 Whether any company will pursue drilling in any of these locations remains to be seen. But that’s beside the point. The point, as Bloomberg’s Will Hares puts it, is that the Arctic is “among the last under-explored oil and gas frontiers in the world, and holds immense geological potential [and] significant strategic importance to the U.S.”44 He continues that he’d be “very surprised if one (albeit very expensive) very expensive well failure would discourage the entire industry from attempting to explore this highly encouraging region

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despite the regulatory/environmental/operational challenges it presents.”45 From the point of view of the fossil fuel fascists, there wouldn’t seem to be much to be anxious about. Yet even Hare’s hopeful observation contains a hint: “last under-explored oil and gas frontiers in the world.” He’s right about that. Any company willing to undertake the risk, expense, and resistance entailed by drilling in the Arctic does so only because it’s rapidly becoming one of the last profitable places to extract hydrocarbons—and they know that “profitable” is a relative term. Hare can try to spin the facts in the positive light of the “frontier,” but hydrocarbons are becoming scarce, too scarce to reproduce the $5.4 billion that, for example, Shell made in 2014.46 If Shell could drill somewhere easier to access, somewhere without the potential extinction of polar bears or other catastrophic ecological disasters, it would. But if Alaskan waters are the “last frontier,” we can bet that neither polar bears nor sea ice melt will keep the company from reserves made available under whatever government administration is in office. Indeed, an American president like Donald Trump could mean the end of the frontier status of “the last frontier.” He’s promised that he’ll pursue America’s “energy dominance,” and “push aggressively for more oil drilling . . . including on federal lands in Alaska.”47 But strident political rhetoric has no bearing, of course, on the question whether drilling the last frontier will be a profitable venture—hence anxiety. Like BP, ExxonMobil, and Chevron, Shell is willing to brook the very bad public relations made evident in protests so aggressive that the company preferred to secure an injunction to keep the protesters off their boats as opposed to giving up the prospect of drilling in the Arctic—until they decided to pull out. Why? Because the company is acutely aware that their fishing holes are running dry. The very fact that they’re willing to drill the Arctic, the home of an apex predator crucial to its ecosystem, the first vertebrate species to be listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, a prime example of charismatic megafauna, and one of the most popular symbols of the concern to protect wildlife, the Polar Bear, implies that Shell knows that the myth of endless resources is false. Indeed, the fossil fuel behemoths must deny both climate change and resource limits. That’s a heavy load. But what the ideological commitments of conquest capitalism requires is that nothing, including the most ecologically sensitive places on the planet, is exempted from the logic of exchange value. From this point of view, then, climate change denial operates like a purgative—removing obstacles like protesters out of the way of business as usual, smoothing the way to treat the last frontier as if it were the first great oil discovery. Shell’s plan to drill in the Arctic simply plays the game out to its logical—if nihilistic—conclusions. And it plays it out whether they drill or not, whether some other company drills, whether polar bears are driven to extinction, or whether the sea ice disappears altogether.

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Hence even though climate change denial is the product of two contradictory struts of contemporary capital, it’s likely to remain central to the business plan of fossil fuel fascism. The first of these is that its essential resources are unlimited, and the second is that the results of its production (extraction, manufacture, slaughter, etc.) are ecologically benign, posing no serious hazard to future profitability. That both of these premises are false is as irrelevant to accumulating capital as the extinction of the Polar Bear, the lives of climate change refugees, West Kenyan pastoralists, or the livelihoods of Alaskan fishermen. And from that point of view, it’s really no wonder that Sussman’s red-green baiting narrative is very shrill. It has to be to keep us from the truth. Conquest Capitalism: An “Uncompromising Structure of Negotiation” Writer Adrian Parr puts this point succinctly in the context of the costs to “the world’s most vulnerable” when she argues that “[t]he contradiction of capitalism is that it is an uncompromising structure of negotiation. It ruthlessly absorbs sociohistorical limits and the challenges these limits pose to capital, placing them in the service of further capital accumulation.”48 Conquest capitalism is uncompromising because endless accumulation and the consequent reinforcement of its authorized beneficiaries is its sole objective; its only “structure of negotiation” is the market logic through which commodification transforms fossils into fuel, animal bodies into food, human beings into labor. It must thus “absorb sociohistorical limits” because, as writers like Sussman demonstrate in the very effort they undertake to deny climate change, capitalism cannot represent itself as “working to establish individual and collective well-being” and simultaneously destroy the conditions for that well-being.49 It must convince us that all is well in the face of facts harder and harder to ignore, possibilities that make it “shameful to think that massive die-outs of future generations will put to pale comparison of the 6 million murdered during the Holocaust; the millions killed in two world wars; the genocides in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Darfur; the one million left homeless and the 316,000 killed by the earthquake in Haiti.”50 In short, if fossil fuel companies don’t accommodate a “downward distribution” of power in the interest of “decarbonizing” the planet,51 it’s because they can’t. But that’s not “merely” about the cost to their profit margins; it’s about the unthinkable forfeiture of the ideological hegemony of the worldview that, as Sussman puts it, “in a capitalistic, free-market system void of overreaching, central government regulation a new worker or immigrant could progress up the class ladder in conjunction with his or her effort and reap the happiness associated with owning his or her own business, farm, home, or estate.”52 There’s no decarbonizing that.

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As BP discovered in its “beyond petroleum” campaign, the very idea that there might be something beyond petroleum created anxiety over the possibility that carbons might not be endless and that the bad consequences of continued drilling like climate change might be real. BP couldn’t afford that distraction—and, turns out, didn’t need to. Parr make a similar point when she argues that, [d]istractions such as decarbonizing the free-market economy, buying carbon offsets . . . installing green roofs on city hall, and expressing moral outrage at British Petroleum . . . for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, although well meaning, are merely symptomatic of the uselessness of free-market “solutions” to environmental change. Indeed, such widespread distraction leads to denial.53

It was no surprise, in other words, that the name change back to British Petroleum happened nearly as quickly as the “beyond petroleum” campaign began. As a “free market solution,” “beyond” merely distracted consumer attention, legitimated moral outrage, and miscalculated that outrage as a demand for alternative energy. But what writers like Sussman and Inhofe understand is that what’s really needed is a convincing narrative to which corporate CEOs, lobbyists, governments, Big Green environmental organizations, and ordinary folks like Regular Joe and Josie could appeal to deny that the Deepwater Horizon spill was a disaster, much less one with future implications like climate change. BP exemplifies the deepwater capitalist narrative even as they ooze—literally—the ideological contradiction that is fossil fuel extraction. As reported by Greenpeace, during BP’s brief PR foray, the petro-giant “invested 93 percent . . . into oil and gas in comparison to 2.79 percent on biofuel and 1.39 percent on solar initiatives.”54 In other words, the “beyond” campaign was never about BP hedging its bets against any real prospect that consumers might want alternatives to fossil fuels; it was about getting consumers to love BP—and buy more gas. The fossil fuel industry’s anxiety isn’t about the fact that fossil fuels aren’t endless or that burning them contributes to climate change; it’s just about whether consumers might come to believe any of this. “Beyond petroleum” was greenwashing from its inception. Nonetheless, the PR campaign offers invaluable insight into the question why writers like Sussman go to such great lengths to defend the argument for climate change denial: climate change denial is imperative because people really do want a desirable future and they know they’re not going to get it if the planet’s burning up.55 Fact is, combining dwindling reserves of extractible carbons with increasing demand, especially in developing countries like China and India, with a warming planet sets the stage for more than snowball stunts, however apt the

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metaphor, and that takes a lot of denial. For at least twenty years the fossil fuel companies have funded organized attacks on climate science.56 Parenti goes on to document Exxon’s $23 million (1998–2008), and between just 2005–2008, another $24.9 million from Koch Brothers–controlled foundations to fund climate change denial. Unacknowledged in American consumption, only 57 percent of whom even agree the planet is warming (down from 77 percent in 2006), is that it’s not only that climate change threatens the global market in virtue of its effects on the environment and human activity; it’s that, should citizens of the global North decide this actually matters, the fossil fuel industry wouldn’t be able to sustain any version of “business as usual.” As Regina Cochrane argues, insofar as we’ve not only failed to cultivate alternatives—insofar as we know nothing else—we can’t afford to recognize climate change without it becoming prelude to civilizational crisis: “climate change can thus ultimately be understood as the result of the ‘overall disorientation of the [human]s species on the Earth associated with the productivist [exchange value] ethics and industrial revolution . . .’”57 And therein lies another iteration of the contradiction Parr describes: on the one hand, to confront climate change would be to face our pathologically disoriented relationship with non-human nature, raising the prospect that the deeply entrenched human chauvinism upon which authority like Inhofe’s and Sussman’s depend isn’t an expression of nature at all, but an artifact owed to the disorienting substitution of exchange value for all value. On the other, to deny climate change generates the conditions, as Parr puts it, for the “shameful” prospect that “massive die-outs of future generations” will make events like the Holocaust, Rwanda, Darfur, Haiti, etc., seem modest by comparison. That kind of denial requires not only consistent repetition, not only copious reassurances that all is well; that kind of denial needs an enemy that can be compared to terrorists, rapists, and genocidal Nazis. Senator Inhofe knows this; he knows, as Naomi Klein puts it, that “[c]limate change detonates the ideological scaffolding upon which contemporary conservatism rests.”58 Hence, it’s no surprise that Inhofe’s 2012 book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, offers an argument for contradiction two, except that for him there’s no contradiction because there’s no climate change. It’s all a hoax perpetrated by red-green radicals who, not content with heavy-handed emissions regulation and Earth Day, need a crisis so large they can use it to drive “the entire U.S. government into a socialist paradigm.”59 Sussman puts this point in especially hysterical terms early one in EcoTyranny: “A bigger crisis had to be concocted—one that really could prohibit development, inhibit property rights, convince people to have fewer children, and redistribute American wealth.”60 It’s not enough, however, that the climate change hoax is the nefarious product of radicals. Sussman’s “radicals”

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have to be able to justify Inhofe’s specific agenda: the elevation of “environmentalist” to “terrorist,” that is, the greatest threat to American security and the “homeland.” Sussman provides just what Inhofe needs: “Pollution has never been Earth’s most troubling foe—Marxism has. And Marxists have always seized upon pollution, both real and imagined, as an effective weapon in their unrelenting war on freedom.”61 Great Big Irrational Climate Change Denial: Creating the “Eco-Tyrant” It’s genuinely hard to quantify the magnitude of this denial but, to make tangible what Inhofe and Sussman are claiming, although seven million acres of American farmland have now been lost to hydraulic fracturing,62 although it’s clearly established that this drilling process causes earthquakes,63 leaks carcinogens into ground water,64 and causes air pollution,65 Sussman denies that the resultant carbon dioxide emissions are a pollutant, insisting that while atmospheric CO2 is 35 percent higher now than in the past 160 years, since there have been CO2 shifts in the past, the current escalation is simply part of a cycle and has no significant human contribution: “It’s stunning how they [environmentalists] have so perfectly pulled this caper off. A perfectly natural atmospheric gas is now a vilified pollutant. But we’re told there is a cure: rigid government intervention and mitigation of one’s personal carbon footprint.”66 By divorcing “natural,” tacitly defined as “clean,” and “pollutant,” Sussman effectively denies that any amount of CO2 is a pollutant. But if in recognizing this illogic we’re tempted to wonder what could provide a motive to so absurd a claim, Sussman is ready: Unfurling the flag of eco-tyranny, the left is engaging in a devious twofold process. On the one hand, they are developing an aggressive, eco-based propaganda campaign designed to convince the majority of Americans that mankind’s presence on earth has irreparably harmed the planet, and that the only way to prevent the environment from destruction is to create laws that will dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect all manner of species . . . On the other hand, they are also taking advantage—and abusing—our republican form of government by doing virtually anything to elect amicable-appearing politicians, who will enter office with the subversive green agenda tucked in their briefcases.67 Fortunately, as of early 2015, 56 percent of Republicans are willing to stand with Inhofe and deny climate change,68 one-third of all congress members as of March, 2016,69 and that 170 elected representatives in the 114th Congress accepted over $63.8 million from the fossil fuel industry ought not, according to Sussman, play a role in our analysis of their climate change denial.70 Indeed, according to conquest capitalism, we ought not only

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thank Sussman for pulling the alarm on the climate alarmists, we should write thank you letters to Devon Energy, for their nearly $40,000 in donations to Inhofe’s campaign as both a patriotic gesture and a resounding rejection of green Communism.71 Conveniently, Sussman provides Inhofe a way to import terrorism directly into the denial narrative through characterizing not only individuals, like Rachel Carson and Al Gore, as effective Communist sympathizers, but entire organizations like the Sierra Club as “eco-socialist” and composed of “radicals.”72 “It took a few years,” writes Sussman, “but finally the left achieved a monumental victory on April 7, 2007. That was the date when the Supreme Court threw science under the bus by declaring CO2 was a pollutant.” He lists a number of states party to the decision, remarking that “[e]co-socialist organizations including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club were also involved.”73 Never mind that Sussman misrepresents the 5–4 Massachusetts Vs. Environmental Protection Agency decision by ignoring crucial issues such as whether the petitioners had standing to bring the case; never mind that the science concerning CO2 is clear that it’s a greenhouse gas. Never mind that the environmental organizations listed are arguably among the most conservative in the U.S.—several having accepted funding from the very industries they purport to reject as polluters. What matters to climate change denial is that a “credible” domestic threat can be created which can justify not only treating citizens who’d dare object to the fossil fuel industry as at least un-American if not potentially eco-terrorist, but can be deployed to justify the claim that the true American supports BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, etc against “radicals” and “communists.” As Inhofe reassures us in The Greatest Hoax, “American security” just is the security of corporations who fly the flag—especially the oil and gas companies who he says are unfairly taxed and targeted by “extremist” environmental policies, “alarmist activists,” and rogue scientists all of which deter the free market and kill American jobs: “President Obama also continues his administration’s restrictions on deepwater permits in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the pacific and Atlantic coasts, and its constraints on federal lands. He repeatedly calls for increasing taxes on oil and natural gas producers . . . [I]t leads to less development, fewer jobs, and less economic growth.”74 Never mind, in other words, that even without climate change we’re on track to deforestation, desertification, and species loss; never mind that Inhofe can supply no motive to explain why so many scientists have gone rogue. “Your future” isn’t really your future—unless you are Exxon’s Rex Tillerson, Chevron’s John Watson, or BP’s Bob Dudley.

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DEEPWATER CAPITALISTS, THE PATHOLOGIES OF REASON, THE EXTORTION OF SKEPTICISM, AND “LIFE ITSELF”: CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL, TAKE THREE Anxiety: Five Reasons Why Denial Is the Road to Ecological Apocalypse Books like James Inhofe’s The Greatest Hoax and Brian Sussman’s EcoTyranny might be best read as a metaphor for twenty-first century multinational capitalist ideological commitments—and the mammoth level of denial necessary to sustain them. We might be tempted to read these masterworks of “capitalist apology” as an example of what endangers any meaningful response nationally or globally to climate change; and, of course, there’s substance to that anxiety. But there’s more to this story; more that reaches beyond ecological devastation, or even social and economic injustice. More that reaches beyond migration, polar bears, bottlenosed dolphins, family farms, or purple pig-nosed frogs. It reaches in fact down into the very ways in which we will conceive the future—especially with respect to the role that science and technology play in it. And its message is clear: if we remain on the course laid out for us by the beneficiaries of conquest capitalism like Inhofe and Sussman that future looks very grim indeed. In fact, climate change denial is a high-speed Interstate to The Road for at least five reasons. Reason One: The Poverty of Science Education The first and most important reason why the denial of global warming paves the road to ecological hell is that, as Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway argue in Merchants of Doubt, industry advocates (supported by elected representatives like Inhofe) can count on a public whose comprehension of science is poor, and whose acculturated sense of entitlement to consume is high. An uneducated public is primed for sowing the seeds of doubt. As they remark, “[t]he doubts and confusion of the American people are particularly peculiar when put into historical perspective, for scientific research on carbon dioxide and climate has been going on for 150 years.”75 It has indeed, but so has our dependence on fossil fuels. What’s equally clear is that, given our disoriented relationship with nature, extortive appeals to patriotic sentiment spiked with red-green fear-mongering about “radicals” saturated by that dependence makes for a potent brew of denial. Oreskes and Conway profile that history, noting that, “American scientists started to warn our political leaders that this [carbon dioxide emissions] could

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be a real problem, and at least some of them—including Lyndon Johnson— heard the message. Yet they failed to act.”76 Dale Jamieson puts the point even more starkly in Reason in a Dark Time: Ignorance abounds, the political system is sclerotic, and people are angry and mistrustful of elites. We are confused about the interrelations between facts, values, science, and policy, and generally not well equipped to attempt to deal with problems that have the characteristics of climate change . . . to the extent to which denialism about the reality of climate change is successful, the economic question becomes moot: if there is no problem, then there is no need for action.77

The elites to which Jamieson refers are those, Al Gore for example, routinely pilloried by the “sclerotic” system’s career politicians like Senator Inhofe, and his reference to “not well equipped” hints at why his book’s subtitle is “Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—And What It Means For Our Future.” “The most difficult challenge in addressing climate change,” argues Jamieson, “lurks in the background. Evolution did not design us to solve or even recognize this kind of problem. We have a strong bias toward dramatic movement of middle-sized objects that can be visually perceived, and climate change does not typically present this way.”78 While it’s likely true that we’re psychologically and epistemically better outfitted to defend ourselves against bear-size hyenas than future Hurricanes, our transformation from Homo Sapiens into Homo Colossus is, for largely the same reasons, the result of the “capitalist apologist’s” marriage of happiness to consumption, consumption to progress, progress to what Frederic Bender calls the “sanctity of capitalism,” that is, consumption promised as a permanent and ever-expanding product of the culture industry.79 Reason Two: The Sanctity of Entitled Consumption The second feature of this “more to the story,” then, is that it’s just this sanctity, packaged as “progress,” and wedded to the myth of endless resources upon which it all depends, that Inhofe and Sussman defend, ironically (if unwittingly) swapping middle-sized “terrorists” for climate change, exchanging readily demonized domestic enemy-activists for complex anthropogenic phenomena. Anchored in our post 9–11 anxiety, the fear-mongering slide from foreign terrorist to domestic eco-terrorist provides Inhofe, Sussman, and their climate change denier colleagues an “object” made for the erection of private security firms and information-sharing organizations like the Marcellus Shale Operator’s Crime Committee whose aim is to protect America’s fossil fuel infrastructure from pipe-bomb wielding Earth First!-style “alarmists.” That almost nothing supports the claim that the industry is actually in danger of domestic attack (and that there exist substantial ideological

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differences between Earth Firsters! and, say, Sierra Clubbers) is as irrelevant to the capitalist apologist as is the fact that Inhofe’s snowball implies absolutely nothing about climate instability. The fact that those who’d dare protest the human rights violations of Chevron, BP’s gulf coast wreckage, or Shell’s plans to drill the be-jeebers out of the Arctic are mostly folks more comfortable in sensible shoes, fanny-packs, and khakis than with explosives registers not even a nod of recognition. Why? The denier knows that retaining the myth of endless resources is sacrosanct no matter inconvenient truths about domestic terrorism or climate change or American environmental organizations. The Arctic can’t be the end. To be clear, the reason is not because climate change isn’t ecologically disastrous anyways; it is. It’s because if carbons aren’t endless, if we’re finally forced to seek alternatives and serious conservation, that could force us to confront the fact that we have so horrifically compromised our ecological and thus existential conditions that we don’t have time to develop alternatives, generate equitable plans for conservation, or deal with the eroded ecosystems we’re left with. We’re already on the highway to The Road, and that makes the “Live today! Tomorrow we may die!” narrative look pretty good. Professional deniers like Inhofe and Sussman exploit that fear. They know that the best way to retain that myth of endless resources is to create an enemy here at home, the global warming alarmist, against which CEOs like Rex Tillerson can be cast as soldiers for “the American way,” protectors of freedom understood as endless consumption—and thus as the victims of those who’d insist that climate change is real, and that the geopolitics of fossil fuel consumption is the cause. The myth of endless resources is thus really an entire edifice of myths, metaphors (like snowballs) and narratives (the American way) about resources, entitlements, consumption, rights, authority, the global North and South—and money. It is the bulwark story of self-justification told by Homo Colossus. Reason Three: The Myth of Endless Resources The trouble, however, is that this edifice is actually a house of cards. Indeed, the third reason there’s more to this story is that insofar as the myth of endless resources is built on the moving sand of denial and fabrication—as well as the “sclerotic” American political system itself appropriated by the rapacious needs of the fossil fuel industry—it cannot be other than pathologically dissociated from reality, and thus wholly incapable of getting to the desirable future—indeed, into any future. It’s hard to say whether Inhofe regards “alarmists” or actual terrorists as a greater threat to American interests (Sussman seems comfortable with calling them all Communists); as we’ve seen, “terrorist” operates in this global narrative as a placeholder

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for “obstacle to carbon-commodification.” But if we follow out this line of reasoning, we must conclude that the “alarmists” are a greater threat than any real terrorists since, if they’re right about the contribution of fossil fuel extraction to climate change, then it doesn’t really matter whether or not there exist endless hydrocarbon resources; these would need to stay in the ground in order to avoid contributing to climate instability. The “alarmists,” in other words, must be cast as a greater threat to national security than real terrorists since no matter what there’s left to burn, what climate change denial requires is that there’s no consequence to burning it that’s not progress defined as consumption. And that makes anyone who’d scoff at Inhofe’s snowball stunt more dangerous than the Islamic State. After all, at least ISIS uses gas. Casting the “alarmists” as a potential threat is thus not about terrorism at all. It’s about the shudder of collective existential terror the fossil fuel industry experiences at the very prospect that we might stop consuming oil and gas, a terror so profound that the fact that fossil fuels are no more endless than the planet’s atmosphere is boundless becomes as irrelevant as whether the Bialowieza Puszcza forest survives to the twenty-second century. Ending that consumption is as relevant to the prospect of a desirable future as it’s unthinkable to the sanctity of deepwater capitalism in the present. Fortunate then for the capitalist that “ignorance abounds,” and that’s a bonanza for “apologists” like Inhofe and Sussman who can pump our faulty intuitions about middlesized objects, and solicit our contempt against those for whom ignorance may not abound, namely IPCC and other scientists whose prognostications about climate change might require us to do the one thing we manifestly don’t want to do: consume less of practically everything. What more apt an enemy could Inhofe create to support the charge of “alarmism” than a science (already cast as the enemy of Christianity) that dares to question whether it’s ethical to build more coal-fired power plants? Frack more farmland? Strip mine more mountains? Build more factory farms? Drill more desert or ocean floor? What better foil than the U.N.’s IPCC which includes “rogue” nations alleged to harbor terrorists? Or even, as more hysterical deniers would have it, communists?80 No doubt writers like Jamieson, Oreskes and Conway, and Bender are correct that the appeal to patriotism combined with the fear-mongering that characterizes the particular brand of denial practiced by folks like Inhofe and Sussman have been hugely effective in derailing any responsible effort to respond to climate change, or for that matter virtually any ecological crisis. What matters even more here, however, is that arguments like Inhofe’s aren’t only about the denial of science for the sake of insuring corporate profits; it’s about the denial of science that conflicts with a whole range of ideological and religious commitments.

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Reason Four: The Paradoxical Character of Homo Colossus The fourth reason that climate change denial is potentially catastrophic for life on the planet is that it reveals something instructive about the character of Homo Colossus: confronted by the fact of rapidly dwindling extractible carbons, he doesn’t merely double down on drilling for the sake of “business as usual”; he doesn’t merely hire capitalist crusaders to demonize scientists and the activists who demand an end to fracking or mountain top removal or tar sands mining. Instead, he denies the validity of science and the scientific method even as he appeals to the sciences to engineer bigger drill bits. He “forgets” his own dependence on the science that makes that engineering possible, but he does this not only without penalty—but as a beneficiary of the human chauvinism that authorizes, even necessitates, that forgetting. Put differently: if we could imagine a crisis even greater than climate change, it’s that which begins to materialize when the sanctity of capitalism is allowed to trump the consensus of the sciences at the cost of the planet and life itself—that allows some to determine that truth is a co-efficient of commodification and profitability. This is eco-nihilism. As Sherilyn MacGregor argues, the issue is not that the sciences ought themselves to be treated as sacrosanct. Quite to the contrary, she argues that the tendency in the discourse around climate change is to assign responsibility to a global “we” ignoring, for example, that “it is unjust that those who are most vulnerable are not the most responsible for causing the problem.”81 She goes on to worry whether “feminists [will] be able to express deep reservations about the assumptions being made about humans and nature in the scientized and securitized climate discourse.”82 These are legitimate worries. But while it’s one thing to interrogate the sciences on the basis of “deep reservations” about the way it conceives its objects of inquiry—a longstanding feminist occupation—it’s another to castigate as “alarmist,” and therefore a “hoax,” or worse, a “Communist” conspiracy threatening a country’s national security, substantive scientific evidence that fails to conform to a dominant narrative whose beneficiaries are precisely those “responsible for causing the problem,” namely climate change. Naomi Kline hints at this point when she argues that climate change denial “isn’t about political preferences . . . it’s about the physical boundaries of the atmosphere and ocean,”83 boundaries whose finitude we cannot seem to comprehend. If we fail to heed the tipping points made clear by IPCC projections, and continue with “business as usual,” the ideological crusades of climate change denial think tanks like Heartland and The Heritage Foundation will still come to a halt—but not before they’ve paved the road for environmental catastrophe. Except for that they won’t come to a halt; in fact, we’ve every reason to believe that this “ideological crusade” will become more hysterical,

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that more activists will be cast as eco-terrorists, and that respect for science will become further degraded—right along with the Bialowieza Puszczas, endangered dolphins, indigenous peoples’ cultures, and purple pig-nosed frogs hanging in the balance. After all, Shell is being permitted to drill in the Arctic. Jamieson makes a similar point, but casts it in the light of the Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts Vs. EPA—the very case that Sussman claims as a victory for the eco-radical alarmists. Despite being corrected for confusing the troposphere with the stratosphere, Justice Scalia’s reply was “Whatever. I told you, I’m not a scientist.” He then added over the laughter that swept the courtroom, “That’s why I don’t have to deal with global warming, to tell you the truth,” demonstrating not only his ignorance of the facts relevant to the case but, as Jamieson points out, his “indifference to his ignorance.”86 However much life itself depends on the “boundaries of the atmosphere and ocean,” the blood pumping through the veins of deepwater capitalism is not, as we might imagine, made first and foremost of carbons; it’s made of the opportunity to commodify through which carbons (nonhuman animal bodies, indigenous lands, and women’s reproductive capacities) circulate without the acknowledgment of any boundary other than the exchange value that animates the markets. In that context, the inconvenient truths of science have little chance, particularly when their stalwart opponents have the institutionalized prerogative of human chauvinism on their side. As Forbes reports, among its 400 wealthiest beneficiaries, nearly all white, Western, and male are included not only the Koch Brothers, but the tycoons of communications, banks, mining, agriculture, health care, and Big Box, each protected by its own army of ideologically and monetarily invested “experts,” like the Heartland Institute, who are as ready to deny the earth is round or that cigarettes are carcinogenic, as that the causes of climate change are anthropogenic; they have to.84 The fossil fuel industry supplies conquest capital’s red blood cells, climate change denial white, but the global markets that are its geopolitical body supply its raison d’être, its disoriented pathological instantiation of life itself, and they can no more survive without fossil fuels than can the Bialowieza Puszcza exist without trees. Reason Five: Climate Trutherism and More Denial of Science With that observation, we arrive at the fifth and final reason there’s more to the story of Senator Inhofe’s snowball stunt: what the denial of science as a legitimate source of knowledge demands are “guardians” whose mission is to protect the reigning narrative. In an Op-Ed aptly titled “Armageddon for Climate Change Deniers,” the Daily Beast’s Jay Michaelson depicts the ideological guardians of the Heartland Institute’s paid climate change deniers as

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something more than apologists. Indeed, he deploys the religious-sounding language, capitalist crusaders.85 Climate trutherism christens the bow of their armed lifeboat. Its sanctified ports of departure are twentieth century campaigns like the tobacco industry’s crusade to deny the link between cancer and cigarettes or the pesticide maker’s cynical effort to devalue Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring legacy,86 or Inhofe’s fear-mongering exchange of the climate change refugee for the drug-runner. “Truthers” include not just politicians but researchers like Willie Soon, exposed by a Greenpeace Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for failing to disclose the millions he received in funding from the fossil fuel industry to pose, regardless the science, as a “climate change skeptic.”87 The difference, however, between cigarette or pesticide industry “skeptics” and climate trutherism is that the fossil fuel industry not only represents billions of dollars in potential revenue in a dwindling resource but, unlike cancer sticks or bug spray, its denial is attended by an “air of respectability” derived from what amounts to the extortion of what’s in fact, not a single science but a suite of disciplines—meteorology, geology, ecology, chemistry, etc. What makes climate change denial seem plausible, in other words, isn’t just poor science education or slick industry campaigning, it’s that the science itself is different. Hockey stick graphs don’t pack the same punch as x-rays of cancerous lung tissue; estimates of two percent rise in Celsius don’t feel like a silent spring. However manufactured a distortion of science, the “reports” of skeptics like Soon function as a highly effective shield against embarrassment in face of the fact that 99.83 percent of actual experts agree that, as Michaelson puts it, “climate change is a thing” precisely because the thing it is seems distant, complicated, and ephemeral; climate change just doesn’t feel like death. The issue with Soon’s failure to disclose his funding isn’t that his skepticism might not be warranted; that’s as much the stuff of science as MacGregor’s worries about how science conceives its objects. One can be paid to lie and nevertheless tell the truth. The issue is that rational skepticism has been so replaced by whatever is required to preserve the view that endless extraction poses no danger to the earth’s atmosphere (and that carbons are endless) that legitimate concerns about, say, the appropriate objects of scientific inquiry, whether particular claims are supported by evidence, or whether new technology raises questions for established views, are overshadowed by the effort to protect, in this case, climate trutherism and its clients in the fossil fuel industry. For committed ideologues like Inhofe and Sussman, there never was any other “truth” than that climate change is not occurring or that, if it is, it has no anthropogenic contribution; textbook instrumental reason—objectives first, strategy second. Jamieson puts it this way: climate trutherism can be made to look like rational skepticism because, unlike cigarette smoking where lung cancer offers

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us middle-sized objects to evaluate, the evidence for climate change is about atmospheric patterns, weather events, distant shorelines, moving breadbaskets, animal migrations, melting ice caps, not objects like your lungs: “[c] limate change poses threats that are probabilistic, multiple, indirect, often invisible, and unbounded in space and time.”88 Climate truthers at Heartland, the Manhattan Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Institute for Energy Research, and the CATO Institute simply exploit that fact. As Jamieson notes, “[e]volution did not design us to deal with such problems, and we have not designed political institutions that are conducive to solving them.”89 (RDT, p. 61). The truther’s aim is to make sure we don’t. CLIMATE TRUTHERISM COMES TO A TV COMERCIAL NEAR YOU: CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL, TAKE FOUR A Steady Diet of Horn-Swaggle for Middle America’s Regular Joes and Josies What climate change truthers need more than anything are versions of the “argument” for denying anthropogenic climate change accessible to Regular Joe or Josie who, like most of us, want to believe they’re on the right side of things—but who hope it doesn’t mean they have to change. Lucky for the fossil fuel multinationals, the Heartland Institute is happy to rise to this particular occasion. Naomi Klein, for example, offers us Richard Rothchild who tells a crowd that the reason he decided to run for commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County was because the fight to mitigate global warming was “an attack on middle class capitalism.” He goes on to speculate in fact that the anti-global warming movement is a “green Trojan horse whose belly is full of Marxist socioeconomic doctrine,” a conspiracy to quash American freedom and substitute for it an environmental one-world government. Rothchild’s claims about attacks on middle class American capitalism are ludicrous; yet they gain traction among both Regular Joes and savvier industry true believers because Rothchild, like Inhofe and Sussman, can count on his conservative base to be happy to swap the slog through science for the salacious conspiracy theories manufactured by the crusaders for freedom and the American way—especially if it sanctifies signing gas leases, driving Hummers, or chomping bacon burgers. Rothchild’s tirade against “red-green Marxists” isn’t a winning strategy necessarily because “ignorance abounds,” but because it offers a public already dependent on burning fossil fuels and eating animal bodies a justifying narrative oozing with caricatures of deceitful “Trojan horse” enemies who, dangerous to “our” way of life, can

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be harassed, subjected to surveillance, arrested, and prosecuted as domestic eco-terrorists because, science be damned, hydrocarbons are as American as apple pie, Clint Eastwood, and Christie Brinkley. Climate trutherism, in other words, can be pretty sexy-cool sort of like bad movies, say, American Sniper. Sexy-cool, as well as racist, heterosexist, and speciesist, climate trutherism is as rooted in human chauvinism as apple pie is American, and the proof is in the pudding. Few even among the most stalwart of environmentalists really believe that Chevron, BP, or ExxonMobil are actually going anywhere, or that climate science is going to win the day. But, for its beneficiaries, it’s fun to be faux-fearful so long as your stocks don’t tank, and you have avenues, like Heartland, to confirm your neoliberal values and patriotic worldview, and make sure Regular Joe and Josie do too. Climate trutherism is titillating; anyone can get on-board, and it’s like a rollercoaster ride. You could conceivably fall off (the science could win out), but you probably won’t (we’ll keep burning hydrocarbons), and if you can’t afford to attend the Heartland shindigs (because you’re not Senator Inhofe), you can be inspired by a beautiful stately blonde from the American Natural Gas Association (ANGA) reassuring you through TV spots that fossil fuel extraction is “clean, natural, abundant— and American.” Drilling for oil and gas, and hence the necessity to deny its environmental consequences, is so American in fact that, at least in the case of hydraulic fracturing (fracking), Regular Joe and Josie can be expected as a matter of patriotic pride to lay down their lives so the gas companies can extract the “energy independence” that’s under their barn, their house, their church, their aged parent’s retirement villa, their YMCA, or their kid’s school. This expectation is neither exaggeration nor hyperbole. Unlike ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson,90 who can afford to join a lawsuit to insure gas-drilling operations don’t impact the enjoyment or market value of his property, Regular Joe and Josie may, according to a 2015 Penn State study, face the prospect that their drinking water well is polluted by carcinogens: These findings are important because we show that “chemicals traveled from shale gas wells more than two kilometers in the subsurface to drinking water wells,” said co-author Susan Brantley, distinguished professor of geosciences and director of the Earth and Environmental Institute at Penn State. “The chemical that we identified either came from fracking fluids or from drilling additives and it moved with natural gas through natural fractures in the rock . . . all of the data are released so that anyone can study the problem.”91

That chemical surfactant is 2-butoxyethanol, found in paint and cosmetics, and while found to be carcinogenic only in fairly high concentrations, it’s only one of the chemicals used in the fracking process. If it can travel more than two kilometers from subsurface to drinking water, probably so possibly

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can they; and some of these are highly carcinogenic even in small concentrations, especially BTEX Compounds (benzene, toluene, xylene, and ethylbenzene), methanol, diesel, lead, hydrogen fluoride, naphthalene, sulfuric acid, crystalline silica, and formaldehyde. As Business Insider reporter Michael B. Kelley notes, “scary stuff.”92 Getting Regular Joe and Josie to accept that kind of risk to their family’s health, their animals, and their property values requires a compelling narrative that firmly identifies climate change as “junk” science, the disreputable province of leftist hippies, and “radical” environmentalists. Indeed, getting Regular Joe and Josie to be willing to, for all practical purposes and intents, lay down their lives for the fossil fuel industry is the point of creating fearmongering stories about domestic eco-terrorists. Sussman lays out the case: The infectious perspective of the environmental movement has slithered into every aspect of American life, including our schools, churches and synagogues, and public policy. An entire generation and more have now been raised in a perpetual pall that declares the earth is doomed because of mankind’s pollution. These same citizens have been duped into believing that America’s experiment with capitalism and free markets has been a complete failure, and the major evidence is climate change . . . But let’s be clear about this movement—it’s being driven by a devout communistic and socialistic ideology . . . And what do the radicals propose in place of the American way? Tyranny.93

Sussman’s is an effective apocalyptic rhetoric—but this isn’t because the beneficiaries of deepwater capitalism necessarily believe it; it’s not even because Regular Joe and Josie do. It’s because in its sexy-cool images of sickening disease “slithering” into the woodwork of our important institutions, it replaces an old tired Communist enemy with a new fresh one—that’s right here at home. It’s because, as Klein notes, it solicits a uniting sense of patriotism against an enemy whose disguise Sussman strips away from the Marxist-snake threatening to desecrate the sacred center of American values: the free market. It’s hard to imagine anyone from the Sierra Club conspiring to tyranny, but it doesn’t matter. What fossil fuel’s Homo Colossus needs are committed patriots ready to give up everything, including their drinking water wells, for the sake of siphoning the last hydrocarbon out of the ground to fuel the weapons against the Communists whose tyranny would mean the apocalyptic end of the American way. Or, it needs us to wonder just enough if this narrative could be true such that we keep gassing up our cars. Whether climate truthers ascribe to Sussman’s absurd screed, they know that what makes some version of it vital to deepwater capitalism is that, through its appeal to patriotic “good Americans,” it’s convincing to Regular Joe and Josie who aren’t likely to join forces with the red-green

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environmentalists if they see themselves in the armed lifeboat with Tillerson, Inhofe, Sussman, and Rothchild—ready to sacrifice for flag and country. That regular folks are rowing the boat while Tillerson and Inhofe captain its course is largely irrelevant so long as Joe and Josie believe they’re on the right side of things. Or better: it’s no wonder that “patriotic” organizations like Heartland pull out all the stops to support those in elected office, like Inhofe, deny climate change. It’s not simply that if acceptance that global warming “was a thing” reached civil disobedient critical mass corporations like Shell would have to stop drilling in the Arctic; it’s that the denial narrative is fundamental to maintaining the hegemonic status quo, the axes of human chauvinism, that keep the Inhofes in their captain chairs—even if Regular Joe and Josie end up thrown overboard. In “The Corporatization of American Democracy” I make the point this way: The very narrative of citizenship has been co-opted to ends having naught but coincidentally to do with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and everything to do with profits and share-holder portfolios, “democracy” has itself become just another advertising slogan: we are free to wave our flags while bulldozers take down our trees and tear up our land to make room for access roads, frack pads, compressor stations, and transmission lines . . . according to the new national patriotic narrative, only he or she who fails to have the nation’s interests at heart or who simply does not understand the immense benefits to the economy would deign to complain that this is not “freedom,” much less stand and accuse the gas industry of poisoning American citizens for profit.94

It’s one thing, of course, to be Regular Joe who doesn’t get it that his contaminated well serves a larger “patriotic” purpose; it’s another to be Regular Josie who reads Endgame and joins the deep green resistance. Joe, even if he deigns to grouse about his well, can be dealt with through the use of eminent domain laws that allow fossil fuel companies to define private profit ventures as public utilities. Josie, however, is an invaluable gift to zealots like Sussman. She’s a fresh chance to demonize Communist “tree-huggers” in the interest of reinforcing the most fundamental premises of neoliberal capitalism: freedom as consumption, value as exchange, and “nature” as endless commodity. The Sexy-Cool of Climate Trutherism: Race, Sex, Gender, Species Climate trutherism is a sexy-cool way to achieve these very familiar objectives. It’s sexy-cool because, as Till Bruckner, blogger for the Huffington Post, argues, while Naomi Klein’s dead-on that “climate change denial is driven not by their [American Conservative] ignorance . . . but by their acute awareness of the fundamental economic restructuring required to cut down

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carbon emissions enough to avert a worldwide catastrophe,”95 she nonetheless falls right into the truther’s alarmist caricature the minute she invokes a resistance whose activists don’t look or talk like Rothchild, Inhofe, or even Sussman, and whose lexicon includes references to the global North and South. Sketching possible strategies to meaningful carbon reduction, argues Bruckner, Klein unfortunately “drags the reader along on a syrupy tour of the entire New Age kitsch pantheon, from the “brave” climate warriors who chain themselves to bulldozers over “a lone Mi’kmaq mother kneeling in the middle of the highway before a line of riot police, holding up a single eagle feather” to the goat-herding yogi who “can feel the earth breathe,” before finishing up by literally dolloping out wisdom from her womb.”96 What makes Bruckner’s description more illuminating then he likely intends, however, is that, on one hand, he’s no doubt right—Klein’s “tour” is easily appropriated into the truther’s alarmist “red-green Marist” narrative when she argues that what we need is a revolutionary plan to address climate change, especially when Klein argues that what we need is a “Marshall Plan” for the Earth than can mobilize its financing and technology on a global scale in order to leverage hydrocarbon emission reductions and improvements in quality of life all in the same few decades. Regular Joe, who’s looking forward to a royalty check, is horrified. Resistance Josie is galvanized and joins a lockdown protest. Klein asks whether regular people have ever demanded real change “when leaders have wholly abdicated their responsibilities,” and then suggests that though the answer is “sort of,” we should look to the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movement for inspiration, invoking, no doubt, a tingle of faux-horror at “movement” followed by a sigh of relief at “sort of” from the truther crowd.97 On the other hand, and a problem for Bruckner, is that any critique of conquest capitalism’s contribution to ecological apocalypse would generate the charge of climate alarmism, so on this score Klein is just not that special. Invoking mothers and yogis is not even all that radical; but no matter. What does matter are appearances: creating the appearance of hippy alarmists who could turn from earth mother to bomb-throwing eco-terrorist, from yogi to red-green eco-rebel; that’s what climate trutherism is for. That’s what keeps us all frozen in place behind the wheels of our cars. So it’s unfortunate that Bruckner helps the truthers by reinforcing the implicit racism and sexism of their worldview when he describes as “syrupy” Klein’s reference to Mi’kmaq mothers or goat-herding yogis. By singling out examples that solicit the “other” of global North hegemony and invoke stark images of difference, at least for a Heartland audience, Bruckner effectively endorses the human chauvinism foundational to the truther’s denial of climate change—all the while he agrees that climate change “is a thing.” Bruckner’s critique of Klein, in other words, gets at what makes her argument

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vulnerable to the truthers—but then reinforces the fundamental premises of climate change denial. But this is precisely the muddy logic trutherism banks on (even when the truthers don’t know it): not only will most “regular folks” not seek out the science, they can be counted on to assume without question the human chauvinism that empowers and/or subjugates “others” according to the ways in which race, sex, gender, and species can be appropriated to the creation of an enemy so sinister that response to it justifies the pathological oratory of an inhofe, Sussman, or Rothchild. This, however, also points to one last way in which climate trutherism is sexy-cool, at least for its beneficiaries: it’s an apocalyptic narrative designed to sustain the axes of human chauvinism institutionalized as deepwater capitalism. It’s “apocalyptic” because it builds a threat of violence, as Walter Benjamin might put it, into the very fabric of “truth” conscripted to the instrumentalized and, a la climate change, pathologized aims of capital accumulation; it’s a narrative because it offers a patriotic storyline that can be deployed by truther-crusaders to protect “civilization” from indigenous mothers and yogis, hippies, undocumented workers, and scientists. This is American Sniper, not The Partridge Family. Upshot: the real danger to conquest capitalism isn’t climate change, even if it’s true, it’s environmentalists who’d blow up dams and draft premises designed to end civilization. They’re not dangerous because they’ll blow up dams or end civilization, but because they might convince enough folks to solar panel their houses, drive Teslas, and stop eating animal bodies, just when the fossil fuel industry needs them more than ever to buy bigger houses and bigger trucks. Consider: while BP junked its beyond petroleum campaign once they saw that their global North consumers really didn’t care about climate change and their gulf coast drilling permits were safe virtually no matter how many human and nonhuman casualties they caused, that didn’t mean the company wasn’t vigilant about its image. “Beyond petroleum” was about making BP look like a good neighbor all the while the company hedged its bets against the prospect that folks might be persuaded by the climate science. Indeed, what puts the lie to the claim that conquest capitalists are any more worried about climate change than what might imperil their prerogative to commodify is that, as National Geographic’s Rachel Hartigan Shea reports, some are already strategizing to cash in.

A Capital Conquest for the Twenty-First Century: Cashing In on Climate Change In an interview with Mckenzie Funk concerning his excellent Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming, Rachel Hartigan Shea asks who might stand to benefit from the effects of climate change. Funk’s answer is telling,

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though not surprising. It’s important, she points out to “put a time scale” to global warming: At 6 degrees of warming, there are almost no winners. Winners are just for the short term. Basically, the more north you are, the more likely some of the effects are going to be positive. The obvious case is Greenland, where there’s hope that they can make money off melting ice in the form of better fishing and better access to minerals, oil, and gas, which will fuel their independence from Denmark.98

While Funk doesn’t identify any single company, it stands to reason that the corporate winners with respect to access to oil and gas would be Maersk, Shell, Statoil, France’s GDF, ExxonMobil, and Scotland’s Cairn, most of whom have in recent years curtailed gas exploration projects regarded as “too expensive and risky,”99 but who might be persuaded to return to Greenland under warmer conditions making it, as Funk puts it, “the first country created by climate change.”100 The names of the interested companies, however, don’t really matter. What does matter is that global warming turns out to be commodifiable; in other words, climate change has exchange value insofar as it can be converted from a problem into an opportunity for extraction wherever fossil fuel reserves become accessible. As a Wilson Center report puts it, “[t]he Arctic represents the final frontier of conventional hydrocarbon development” to the tune of 100 million in potential investment—thanks to climate change.101 Funk’s not quite right, then; it’s not climate change that makes countries, it’s what a warming landmass and the retreat of the ice make more accessible—country or no. And it’s not merely the retreat of the ice; it’s that the possibility of drilling (or grazing cattle, or growing Frankencorn) anywhere is the opportunity to drill everywhere. Where there are no sacrosanct places, no wilderness, nothing pristine, where we’ve definitively entered the Anthropocene,102 that is, the era where there exists “no nature independent of human influences,” or as Jason Moore puts it, the Capitalocene,103 then all that really matters is that the relevant bargaining agents be in a position to execute their prerogatives within the pathological circulatory system of conquest capital. Indeed, in the endless resources lexicon, terms like “country,” “nation state,” or “border” stand merely as mechanisms (sometimes obstacles) for producing whatever formal permissions, territorial claims, agreements, threats of war, etc. are necessary to drill. While governments like the United States and Russia may haggle over the right to extract the “last frontier,” in this case the Arctic’s Kara Sea, they’re really just agents for the fossil fuel companies whose own dependence on oil and gas insures compliance with the aims of ExxonMobil and OAO Rosneft,104 or Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) and Carso (The United States and Mexico). The Arctic may be one “last

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frontier,” but even the American Saudi Arabia of fossil fuel extraction, Texas, is another. Projecting a 2017 operations start date, the ETP-Carso partnership envisions a 143 mile, 42 inch, 1.4 billion cubic feet per day, natural gas pipeline, the Trans-Pecos, right through Big Bend, “one of Texas’ last unspoiled wilderness areas and one of few remaining holdouts in a state riddled with energy transmission pipelines and large-scale oil and gas activity.”105 That ETP’s board of directors includes former Texas governor Rick Perry in the predictable revolving door relationship between the state and the fossil fuel industry only reinforces the relative insignificance of geographical borders (however otherwise useful they may be as a marketing strategy for NAFTA); what really matters is that deals can be struck without the expensive and time-consuming resort to military force—a strategy for negotiating access to fossil fuel reserves, but a messy one. As Michael Klare notes, it’s telling that when President Obama—no neophyte with respect to climate change— explicitly connects increasing U.S. oil and gas production to national security he has every intention of making sure ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, ETP, BP—and Carso—have whatever they need to get the gas out of the ground: Keep in mind that President Obama understands well the dangers of global warming. His sideline moves—increasing vehicle fuel efficiency, reducing coal-powered plants in the U.S., setting aside parts of Alaska’s Arctic seas as no-drill areas—reflect an often repeated “commitment” to bringing climate change under control. At the same time, however, he has overseen a startlingly drill-baby-drill energy program from the Gulf of Mexico and the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota to the waters of the coastal southern Atlantic, which his administration has just opened to a future bonanza of oil and natural gas drilling. He has, in short, presided for six years over the turning of this country into “Saudi America.”106

Perhaps, then, a darker, but more apt definition for the Anthropocene Era, or what sociologist Jason Moore calls the “Capitalocene,” is not merely that there exists no nonhuman nature independent of human influence. It’s that there exists no planet earth immune to the commodifying pathology of capital, to the capacity, in other words, of multinational corporations to utilize private security firms, government policy-makers, and militarized police forces, to re-inscribe human chauvinism as the natural(ized) reflection of human nature. What’s essential to capitalism, no matter what form it takes, isn’t climate change; it’s the myth of endless resources. That’s what makes returning to countries like Greenland, drilling in the Arctic, opening the coastal Southern Atlantic, bisecting Big Bend with a monster pipeline, or extracting the Chihuahua, worth the risk even though it’s precisely that relentless drive for profits that has as its terminus ecological apocalypse.

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It’s important to remember that the myth of endless resources isn’t reserved to fossil fuels. Whether it’s oil, gas, rare earth minerals, wind, solar, nonhuman animal bodies, sugar, soy, wheat, Frankencorn crops, labor, or women’s reproductive labor, to whatever extent the “market logic” of exchange value determines all value, even where developing some commodities is more sustainable than others, development not rooted firmly in the radical recuperation and revaluation of the desirable future offers little to celebrate for what Klein calls the “ferocious love” of the world and its peoples. Indeed, even if the nations of the global North pursued the carbon emission reductions she recommends through the shift to solar and wind energy, that doesn’t mean these shifts will be attended by more just social and economic relations for the global South. As Parr argues, however much we in the global North may decry, for example, toxic emissions from Chinese factories, the fact that products manufactured are likely outsourced by corporations flying American or European flags taking advantage of cheap labor, poorly enforced or nonexistent environmental regulations, and lax child-labor laws is largely ignored by Northern consumers—whether they drive Hummers or Toyotas, heat with coal or solar, eat bacon or Boca burgers: “there is good reason to suggest that the figures describing China’s increase in emissions unfairly point the finger of blame at China and divert attention away from the United States . . . the increase in China’s emissions are most likely the result of high-income countries . . . outsourcing their own dirty manufacturing to China.”107 Truth is, sustainable development doesn’t necessarily mean a fair shake for Regular American Joe who, if he’s unlucky enough to live in the Newfound Lake region of New Hampshire, may find himself living next to the Spruce Ridge Industrial Wind project—29 wind turbines, each 499 feet tall, each requiring a nacelle containing 150 gallons of highly flammable lubricating oil.108 Regular Joe may not face the chilling circumstance that confronts Jose Rameirez (or a Chinese solar panel factory worker), but the idea that we could simply exchange one kind of Big Energy corporate venture for another “sustainable” one begs the larger question about who will bear the costs when the beneficiaries of human chauvinism remain essentially the same. The larger point, then, is that however the deepwater capitalist hedges their bets, climate change or no climate change, the absolute necessities in the equation are the endless existence of commodifiables, especially the carbons upon which the extraction, growth, and transport of all other commodities depends, and enough global demand to make drilling them profitable—even in the Arctic, even over the threat of the Mexican drug cartels, even if polar bears are driven to extinction, even if it means mowing down Mi’kmaq mothers and spending millions to make it all look like the defense of national security and the American way.

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Sustaining the demand for carbons is the point of climate change denial; without them the circulatory system providing the lifeblood of conquest capitalismand the fortunes of Homo Colossus collapses—quite literally. That this is true despite the fact that climate change is also quite literally the carcinogenic product of our failure to leave whatever carbon deposits remain in the ground, and that we cannot fail to know this, is pathology. It is eco-nihilism. Climate change denial is simply its most telling terrifying, and terrified symptom. What drives truthers like Sussman is in the end not about the climate: it’s about preserving the unearned entitlement that defines Homo Colossus; it’s about the crushing anxiety of knowing that the armed lifeboat of that entitlement charts a sea of systemic injustice and oil slicks, quite literally, that, however much denied, displaced, outsourced or sublimated as fast cars, philanthropic gifts, or offshore bank accounts cannot be wished away in the face of catastrophic weather events, species extinctions, and the migration of the human disenfranchised. It’s about self-deception on a planetary scale—quite literally. And with it, Mexican Deserts, Arctic ice sheets, polar bears, Mi’kmaq mothers, Chinese laborers, endangered falcons, bottlenose dolphins, purple pig-nosed frogs, the Bialowieza Puszcza, and displaced working fishermen like Jose Ramirez be damned.

“THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING”: CLIMATE TRUTHERS, PROGRESSIVE ENVIRONMENTALISTS, AND THE APPROPRIATION OF “SUSTAINABILITY” BY EVERYONE, CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL, TAKE FIVE The Big Easy “Get Out of Jail Free” Card: “Sustainability” For climate truthers like Brian Sussman the greatest danger to the future of human beings are the Al Gores and Rachel Carsons who, cast as red-green “Communists,” conspire to inaugurate global eco-tyranny. Sussman ignores the fact that neither Gore nor Carson raise any sustained direct challenge to the prevailing economic system, and he misses entirely that their call for more stringent and enforceable environmental regulation can be turned into a winning public relations stratagem for the fossil fuel industry. Indeed, regulations drafted by and for the industry, legislated by friendly representatives like Senator Inhofe, and packaged as “environmental responsibility,” “sustainability” or “corporate good-neighborliness,” are as much a part of “business as usual” as are deep-sea platform explosions, forest liquidations, pipeline blowouts, oil train derailments, and carcinogenic emissions. While ExxonMobil makes no mention whatever of melting ice caps, vanishing polar bear populations, or damage to Arctic cultures in its TV ads or promotional literature, it does

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boast millions of dollars spent to study potentially affected mammal, bird, and fish habitat—as if knowing what the losses might be in advance will ameliorate the devastation, or at least exonerate its perpetrators. We’re told that Exxon has plans to spend even more on training oil spill response teams, as if it’s a positive company attribute that they’re ready for the irrecoverable disasters they sponsor. Similarly, although environmental disasters like the 105,000 gallons of crude oil dumped onto the coastline of Northern Santa Barbara County, California, May 2015, is just “business as usual,” Plains All American Pipeline reassures us they’ll be ready with sponges, towels, skimmers, hazmat suits, and truckloads of Dawn dish soap.109 `In short, the human chauvinism appropriated and naturalized as “human nature” via conquest capitalism positions us as guiltless consumers in the fossil fuel industry’s own savvy version of climate change denial, one that need not resort to conspiracy theorizing, “Communist” baiting, or for that matter any explicit denial. All it requires is that their “business as usual” become our next trip to the gas station, steak house, or the cruise ship, their next disaster an opportunity to show us what good neighbors they really are. Tacit denial is like a “get out of jail free” card. The fossil fuel industry’s version of it is the stealth strategy of making sure Regular Joe’s gas-guzzler truck is featured in commercials next to the flag, and that Resistance Josie is castigated as an un-American hippy. Whether or not earth can sustain it, the world of the fossil fuel CEO, the factory farm shareholder, the agri-business executive, the American senator or house representative, or the climate truther is the Anthropocene/Capitalocene, a mirror of Homo colossus’ unquestioned presupposition that, as ecocentrist George Wuerthner puts it (with contempt), human beings have so influenced nature, the best way to understand it is as a thing to be “managed” “as if it were a giant garden waiting for human exploitation,” as something that’s improved through human control and handling—a capitalist dream113 The fossil fuel companies are happy to advance the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene to the Capitalocene; after all, theirs’ is a future built not out of petroleum per se, but out of our pervasive dependence on a “culture industry” whose lifeblood is made of oil and gas molecules and animal bodies; the Anthropocene is really just another name for human chauvinism embraced as the natural trajectory of the only interests that count— ours, or some of ours. “Anthropocene” naturalizes the culture industry as the achievement of human interests, its institutions instantiating the fully “human” face imprinted and imposed on nonhuman nature. The Capitalocene describes more specifically the nature of these institutions, and the countenance of the self-satisfied CEO as its crowning achievement. The “Anthropocene Boosters,” as they’re called, are right that no corner of the globe is free of human influence. But as Wuerthner points out, there’s a world of difference

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between recognizing this fact and embracing it as if it were ordained destiny. And there’s a difference between “mere” human influence and the metastasizing of the planet that is capitalism—hence, Moore’s Capitalocene. A boon for the fossil fuel moguls, the Booster argument that the “expansion of economic opportunities is the only way to bring much of the world’s population out of poverty” treats the environmental consequences of economic expansion as, if not entirely negligible, remediable through technological invention—an argument attractive to progressives and conservatives alike because it paints a social justice face on continuing extraction. As Mexico’s experience with NAFTA shows, however, the reality of fossil fuel extraction and industrial animal agriculture for the world’s most vulnerable is anything but an end to poverty or an “expansion of economic opportunity.” The work to conceal, diminish in value, or distract us from the ecological destruction, diminishing shorelines, oil-soaked pelicans, gasping dolphins, catastrophic floods, human migration—suffering and the death— demands a very savvy form of “denial,” a kind of cognitive dissociation, and not just concerning climate change, but of the moral obligation to consider whether it’s even occurring. Industry is more than ready to oblige: their websites, billboards, donations to colleges, community centers, parks, and voluntary fire departments, their purchase of primetime TV ads, use of state police and private security forces, and their lobbying-purchase of senators like Inhofe ooze reassurance that all is well. We’ll get to keep living just as we do now (at least in the global North), and like well-meaning fossil fuel fathers Exxon, etc. will make sure the gas pumps are full, the heat’s on, the plastics get made, the bacon’s with the eggs, the wind turbines keep turning. This too, however, is pathology, the collective mutually reinforcing pathology of the culture industry. From this point of view, climate truther-crusaders are really just self-appointed insurance policies whose job is to insure against the possibility that we’ll reconsider our carbon consumption. Far more important in the long run than the promotion of climate change denial per se is making sure Regular Joe, for whom “Anthropocene” is as about as useful a piece of vocabulary as “anthropogenic,” who doesn’t think all that much about “the environment,” likes middle-sized objects like his truck, and wants to see himself as a good American is convinced that “there’s nothing to see here” even when he’s faced with massive flooding in Texas—including a young mother washed away in her house. As the evidence mounts, Regular Joe needs to be distracted, and there are few more effective strategies to this end (besides a Donald Trump rally or Monday night football) that soliciting resentment, as climate truther and Forbes writer Charles Kadlec puts it, of “elites using the coercive instruments of government to control the lives of people everywhere.” In other words, deny the anthropogenic contribution to climate change, make unnamed “elites” responsible for taking away your

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“freedom,” and leave natural disasters like floods to “acts of God,” and Exxon can drill anywhere. “Market Epistemologies”: A Stratagem for the Discerning Denier Somewhere in between the red-green baiting climate truthers like Sussman, the stealth denial-by-silence strategy of the fossil fuel companies and the denial-dependent policy-makers like Inhofe are climate truthers like Benny Peiser of the comparatively sophisticated Global Warming Policy Foundation.114 While Peiser does occasionally make incendiary references to “global warming alarmists,” it’s clear that GWPF’s main tactic is to create the sense that there’s still scientific debate over the human contribution to climate change. As Dale Jamieson puts it, “[t]he main aim of the climate change denial campaign has been to prevent the formation of a consensus for political action on climate change. The strategy has been to suppress both belief in the science and belief that there is consensus about the science.”115 An effective tactic, creating uncertainty not just about climate change but about whether the experts agree about it insures that people and countries, waiting for the “go ahead,” do nothing. Peiser, like Sussman and Kadlec, also works to create the belief that climate change scientists have politically or economically motivated agendas for which they deliberately fudge the data. In academic appearing “publications” with titles like “Inquiry launched into Global Temperature Data Integrity” and “Royal Society Misinterprets Climate Science,” GWPF can count on its self-selected audience to believe that where there’s a cold Winter there must be something wrong with global-warming predictions. The stock and trade of organizations like GWPF, in other words, is to bamboozle an audience who, perhaps a bit put off by the green-red baiting rhetoric of a Sussman, and perhaps better educated, still want to have good reasons not to buy Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, poo-poo the neighbor who buys a Prius, and god-forbid join the Deep Green Resistance with Regular Josie. What Sussman sells to Regular Joe, in other words, GWPF offers online to Affluent Biff and Buffy. Jamieson makes this point in an especially lucid way when he argues that “denialists” aren’t really skeptics. The denialist doesn’t raise skeptical questions about an otherwise well-supported claim, but instead “asserts its contrary,” and then denies the credibility of the evidence for the claim by appealing to a conspiracy, some plot to deceive the public, or to “junk science.” Denialists are thus, concludes Jamieson, really dogmatists in that no matter the well-established evidence against their position, they persist in their denial. Jamieson refers to at least the more sophisticated versions of denialism (such as Peiser’s GWPF) as a variety of “market epistemologies”:

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rather than convincing people of the truth or utility of ideas, theories, or understandings of the world, we now brand and market them, and manipulate consumers . . . into accepting or rejecting them. This is not a secret, and climate change is not unique in this regard . . . What is missing is not an awareness of these developments, but a sense of revulsion about them. The attentive American public would once have been shocked by the commodification of epistemology. Now we are mainly interested in how well people succeed at it.116

A market epistemology, in other words, is a set of claims that looks like “knowledge” but of which no one expects it to actually be connected to truth. Regular Joe “buys” a set of claims called “climate change denial” every time he votes for Senator Inhofe, or buys a new truck, or evinces contempt for his sister, Regular Josie, as a tree-hugger hippy. He isn’t stupid—he’s followed news reports about flooding in Texas, drought in Australia, melting ice sheets in the Arctic as much as anyone—even at Regular Josie’s behest. But, ideologically dogmatic about things like “energy security,” “free markets,” Sarah Palin’s “Resource First” view of God-Given fossil fuels,117 and the like, Regular Joe can no more work up revulsion about climate change than the legions of viewers of Bravo TV’s “Housewives Of Orange County” can work it up over the bling, the insipid drama, or the immeasurable waste of time and money typical of their reality show celebrities. In fact, from Regular Joe’s point of view, these are essentially the same. The trouble, of course, is that they’re not the same. Climate change is not reality TV. Truth is not a commodity, and in that light, Regular Joe’s lack of revulsion must be understood as symptomatic of the collective pathology of the capitalist culture industry. Market epistemology simply converts the value of truth into “truth,” making it as disposable and forgettable as last year’s Housewives. The trouble is that as the evidence for climate change piles up (or melts away), climate truthers of all stripes are likely to find they’re fighting a rearguard action no matter how sophisticated (or not) their denialist strategies. Texas senator Ted Cruz, for example, is called out as “shameful” by climate change experts at Penn State and Texas A&M for refusing to talk about whether climate change played a role in the 35 trillion gallon May 2015 flooding in Texas that, to date has killed at least 28 people: “At a time of tragedy, I think it’s wrong to try to politicize a natural disaster,” claimed the senator, soliciting the climate truther mantra that climate change is a politically motivated scheme to subvert “the American way.”118 Nevertheless, as more people—like recovering Texans—discover themselves directly affected, climate change denial will begin to lose its sheen, even if by then it’s too late to mitigate its most devastating effects, like 35 trillion gallons of water. One evidence of this transformation of consciousness is that Klein’s This Changes Everything has been translated into several languages besides

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English, its reviews generally pretty glowing. Among the reasons for the popularity of Klein’s latest is that she asks the direct question that those bearing the brunt of climate change want to hear: “What is wrong with us?” Without flinching, she answers that we don’t have as much a climate change problem as a “capitalist problem,” and that “we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism . . . We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of surviving catastrophe—and would benefit the vast majority—are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stronghold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”119 The deregulated capitalism Sussman celebrates as the American way Klein identifies as the locus of environmental disaster. The free trade agreements, like NAFTA, Klein exposes as pernicious for both ecosystems and their members,120 Sussman simply lumps in with “rights to property,” ditto cap and trade market solutions that Klein shows to be perilously inadequate.121 The “corporate globalization process” Klein decries as the engine of global warming,122 Sussman all but ignores, right along with the science. The science Klein confirms, Sussman insists is tainted with “Marxist” plotting to “take away our freedom.” Naomi Klein’s Starry-Eyed Romance with “Grassroots” Activism Still, however much her arguments point in the direction of a revolution to end neoliberal capitalism and replace it with more just alternatives—something a bit closer to Jensen without the ecocentric ideological baggage— Klein comes up woefully short, advocating for “grassroots” movements she hopes will enfranchise a critical mass of people who, through a wide variety of nonviolent actions—protests, petitions, marches, letter-writing campaigns, sit-ins, Op-Eds, and the like—will demand sustainable energy alternatives and a re-tooling of capitalism to more humane ends. She enthusiastically describes climate change, for example, as an “historic opportunity” to “advance policies that dramatically improve lives, close the gap between the rich and the poor, create huge numbers of good jobs, and reinvigorate democracy from the ground up.” What Klein doesn’t see is that “sustainable” has been as successfully appropriated by conquest capitalism as has “green,” “environmental,” “re-newable,” or even “American” to the ends of preserving its circulatory system, its beneficiaries, and its mythologies. “Sustainability,” in other words, is as much subject to the logic of “market epistemology” as is climate change denial itself. Unlike, for example, the universal healthcare policies that appeared in some Western countries after WWII that really did benefit millions, we have little reason to think that “sustainability” offers the same hope on anything like the same scale; “sustainability” has become a

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commodity whose exchange value cannot be measured in antibiotics, tumor removals, or knee replacements. Also unlike universal healthcare, the product of “sustainability” could turn out to be the opposite of “benefit” no matter how we measure it. Given, for example, that the manufacture of solar panels and wind turbines is beholden to the same capital interests as drill rigs and deep-injection wells, demands for renewables in the global North could mean continuing ecological devastation and labor abuses in the global South—even if we call the transition sustainable. While Jamieson is thus right that we have a hard time getting our heads around issues that are not about “middle sized objects,” what makes climate change very unlike universal healthcare is not that both are somewhat abstract ideas, but that the prospect of giving up fossil fuels is just too big; it’s almost too concrete. Whereas healthcare, in other words, lends itself to fairly specific human needs, Regular Joe may not even know what-all is made out of petroleum—including the steak he’s eating, his plastic water bottle, fishing rod, shoes—or his toilet seat. He surely doesn’t want to give up his health care, but he doesn’t even know where to start in limiting his hydrocarbon consumption. Part of the problem is that “sustainable” just doesn’t mean “desirable” even if it approaches something more like the latter for a lucky few. An ostensibly environmental movement, like the one Klein hopes for, one that demands “sustainability,” is no more likely to realize a desirable future than are communities in Texas likely to fully recover from 35 trillion gallons of floodwater. They’ll recover—yes—but insofar as degraded ecosystems are sustainable, there’s no reason to think oil and gas production won’t carry on business as usual in Texas, or that Senator Cruz won’t both continue to enjoy substantial campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry and be applauded for ignoring the connection between the flooding and climate change. This too is market epistemology: to whatever extent Cruz can market “jobs,” “freedom” and “the American way,” to whatever extent he can appeal to the “controversy” over climate change, he can secure votes and funding—even as a house with a mother in it washes away in his home state flood. Every time ANGA, the American Natural Gas Alliance, advertizes natural gas as a “bridge” to renewables, as sustainable shale development, they’re co-opting the language of “sustainability” as advertising for unconventional natural gas extraction—fracking.123 Every time BP advertises the Louisiana coastline as a tourist destination, they’ve co-opted “green.” Every time Klein calls for a “Marshall Plan for the Earth” (following Bolivia’s climate negotiator, Angelica Navarro Llanos reference) to “mobilize financing and technology transfer on scales never seen before” in order to reduce greenhouse emissions, but then appeals to what she calls “Blockadia”—the emergence of grassroots movements whose mobilizing mantra remains sustainability—she

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unwittingly accedes to what’s already been co-opted to advertising for fossil fuels’ “Sustainable Energy Blueprint.”124 As long as Klein’s aspirations remain constrained by the anemic expectations associated with “sustainability,” her advocacy of grassroots activism will remain equally unconvincing and limited. As evidence, we might look to her endorsement of Stanford Engineering’s Mark Z. Jacobson’s “100 percent renewable energy plan by 2030.”125 Although she rightly chastises Big Green environmental organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Nature Conservancy, for withdrawing support from Jacobson because he rejects the “bridge fuel” argument for fracking (and they endorse it), she nonetheless offers a thumbs-up to his plan for renewables without any substantive recognition of the social and economic justice issues that compromise companies like Ethical Electric whose purchase of solar panels on the open market includes Chinese wage-slave factories. Klein also implies by contrast with the Big Greens that Jacobson is “grassroots,” but she doesn’t consider the fact that what he advocates is as beholden to “market logic” as are any of the fossil fuel companies. Similarly, while Klein’s description of the Heiltsuk’s protest of Enbridge’s plans to construct a $6.5 billion 1,117 kilometer, tar sands crude pipeline, the Northern Gateway, a project that will impact the livelihoods and ecologies of communities in and around Bella Bella, British Columbia,126 is certainly inspiring, her claim that the Heiltsuk protest is a model for grassroots opposition to fossil fuel industrialization everywhere is neither borne out by the facts nor are the Heiltsuk a particularly clear example of Klein’s critique of capitalism. In fact, although Enbridge continues to face “strong opposition”127 from First Nations such as the Haidi, the Gitxaala, Kitaxoo/Xai’xias, Nadleh Whut’en, and the Nak’azdli, particularly among young people,128 Heiltsuk chief, Marilyn Slett broadcasts a message that’s actually rather mixed: We are not anti-development because like other British Columbians and Canadians we do need and want jobs, income security, training, education, improved health, better housing, and other benefits and opportunities for our communities and families . . . But at the same time, we won’t support development at all costs, including the negative impacts against on our environment and wildlife that are so central to our cultural, social, and economic well-being.129

Chief Slett’s pro-development—but anti-pipeline—position isn’t uncommon; it can be found in many communities, for example, Northeast Central Pennsylvania’s Responsible Drilling Alliance,130 Colorado’s Windsor Neighbors for Responsible Drilling, or the Clean Air Council’s suggestions for negotiating pipeline right of ways.131 The trouble is that the language of

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“development,” much like “sustainability,” accedes to capitalism precisely what Klein shows is insupportable, namely corporate “quest[s] for natural resources [that] will become more rapacious, [and] more violent” especially in the global South “unleashing a new stage of neocolonial plunder layered on top of the most plundered places on Earth.”132 She’s exactly right, there is no having the cake and eating it too. So it seems odd that Klein holds up the Heiltsuk, or at least Chief Slett, as a model for other grassroots endeavors since, in effectively holding that capitalist economic development is consistent with sustainability, Chief Slett not only seems to be trying to have the cake (however unwittingly), but in so doing, identifies with the Big Greens Klein decimates.133 Klein gets an awful lot right, but even if the Heiltsuk could offer a fully consistent example of a protest against capitalism as an indefensible global system of “neocolonial plunder,” it’s very unclear that this model has gained traction elsewhere at least in the United States or Canada other than perhaps Bold Nebraska’s defiant protest of the Keystone Pipeline. Clearly Klein wants to see a grassroots environmental movement with some vision of the world beyond “capitalist plunder” emerge, but her understanding of “grassroots movement” seems naïve, and she doesn’t really have any excuse.134 She gets it that “neocolonial” capitalist expansion will have devastating effects for the global South—but she appears to ignore the debilitating conditions for global South workers in her endorsement of Jacobson. She rightly wants to advance transition to renewable energy—but doesn’t seem to quite realize that global North beneficiaries of things like solar panels are purchased—literally—at the expense of the labor and health of the global South. What environmental justice demands is that we consistently follow out the implications of Klein’s vitiating critique of neoliberal capitalism—but that she do so as well.135 A grassroots co-opted by sustainability is co-opted by the market epistemology of having our cake (at least in the global North) and eating it too (at the expense of the global South). At the Root of the “Capitalist Problem” Is the Human Chauvinist Problem I don’t doubt Naomi Klein’s commitment in This Changes Everything—she’s dead-on. Climate change changes everything. The trouble, however, isn’t just that appeals to sustainability are inadequate to generate a global movement that could engender meaningful change toward environmental integrity and social justice. The trouble isn’t even that sustainability was always ripe for the exploitations of conquest capitalists, or that it’s as vulnerable to “market epistemologies” that have co-opted “environmental,” “green, “freedom,” and so on. The trouble is that what we have isn’t an environmental problem, but a “capitalist problem,” as Klein rightly argues, and that even Klein doesn’t

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see how big, or how deep, the problem really is. She advocates grassroots movements to demand carbon emission reductions, and that’s great, but the truth is that the only movement that stands any chance of success on the only scale that matters at this point, the global scale, is the one that not only seeks to stop what’s bad, like the Northern Gateway Pipeline, but articulate a realizable good after capitalism, a world worth wanting that makes the immense work of movement building, and the sacrifice it will require, worth it. If Chief Slett isn’t able to see beyond “development,” it’s because she’s not been offered that choice. If Pennsylvania’s anti-fracking movement has been colonized by the false promise of “better regulation,” it’s partly because it’s hard to see beyond the liquidation of its natural resources and the destruction of its communities; settling feels safer that putting up a fight when what’s beyond the struggle is so murky.136 What Klein misses in her analysis is the specifically philosophical insight that at the root of the “capitalist problem” is a very human one: mistaking human chauvinism for human-centeredness. But this insight must be accompanied by all of these: • The recuperation of human-centeredness as a locus of responsibility, • The reclamation of moral reasoning from utilitarian market logic, • The recommitment to a desirable future for the planet understood in terms of its biotic interconnectedness and the profound implications of climate change, • The revaluation of what John Dewey calls the “aesthetic in experience” that, rooted in biotic, ecological, and human diversity, makes the work of achieving a desirable future worth the effort. In short, only a movement for a world worth wanting will be in the best position to ignite concerted and collective global action. And this, of course, is a very tall order—especially given ongoing ecological deterioration, increasing hydrocarbon consumption (especially in the global South), the systemic cognitive dissociation made possible by climate change denial, the racist replacement narratives promoted to explain away climate refugee migration, scientific illiteracy, and, as Jamieson spells out, the paralysis engendered by the fact that climate change just isn’t a “middle sixed object.” But the only other option is to capitulate to an instantiation of the “capitalist problem” that, in virtue of our current existential dependence on fossil fuels, is capable of erasing from consciousness the link between a warming planet and floods so catastrophic they can wash away people in their houses. That’s the function of market epistemology; climate change denial is simply one particularly pathological variety. The grassroots movement Klein envisions does indeed begin in radically reducing carbon emissions—and

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putting a halt to animal agriculture, as she nearly entirely ignores. However else we parse it, however, the facts are that beyond reductions and halts, a grassroots movement that can’t articulate a world worth wanting—something to strive for—won’t be able to muster the momentum and commitment to stand up to the pepper spray, the arrests, the harassment, the surveillance, and the bullets that billion dollar industries will dispatch in order to keep the drill rigs operating, the pipelines full and flowing, the export depots busy. Climate change denial is more than anything else a symptom of that psychotic determination to keep it all going—a preemptive metaphorical bullet designed to neutralize any obstacle before it can get in the way of the drill bit.

HOMO COLOSSUS, “FEROCIOUS LOVE,” AND MOTHER EARTH: THE GRASSROOTS ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT, CLIMATE CHANGE DENIALISM, TAKE SIX Progressive = Reform = More of the Same Klein would likely find my critique of This Changes Everything disquieting. Reading it might spur Regular Joe into reluctantly attending a climate change march, but if Regular Josie leaves off dissatisfied and headed for Endgame, we have to wonder what’s missing. The valuable lesson of her book, though not perhaps what Klein intends, lay in the conflict between her sharp critique of capitalism, especially her critique of the Big Greens, and her comparatively tepid vision of a grassroots movement. Why doesn’t she go further than the predictable recommendations of Progressives? Why stop at a reformist “Marshall Plan” that, in failing to demand an end to capitalism effectively reinforces it? We can certainly comprehend her advocacy of non-violence—but why doesn’t Klein more specifically call out conquest capital as the planet’s most pernicious perpetrator of violence? The market logic that governs corporate enterprise, government policymaking, and Big Greens “activism” is commonly modeled by grassroots organizations seeking to establish their own donor base. What this produces, however, is the tepid activism of petitions, Op-Eds, approved protests and marches—actions that indeed model resistance, namely resistance to offending donors. These activities actually strengthen the system in at least three ways: • By exhausting resources, energy, and time that could be put to far more creative and aggressive forms of non-violence—enduring blockades and sieges that manifest themselves as protest villages, for example.

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• By reassuring both the relevant government agencies and corporate representatives that they’ll not need to resort to any tactics—like mass arrests— that could lead to the bad public relations of, for example, the Greenpeace siege over drilling in the Arctic, or the protests in North Dakota by the Standing Rock Sioux against Energy Transfer Partners construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline to transport crude oil.137 • By effectively ratifying a system that disempowers those who resist it via, for example, trespass and vagrancy laws designed to privilege business interests, and “free speech zones” designed to silence speech. A Progressive Democrat, but no socialist or Marxist, Klein appears to hold that the system(s) responsible for climate change can be reconscripted to its mitigation given enough demand, effort, and time. She knows that time is running out, but she’s caught in what we might call the “Progressive’s dilemma.” On the one hand, from Regular Joe’s point of view, actions that threaten to “bring it all down” are Un-American. On the other, driving 50 miles, getting jostled on the subway, walking ten city blocks to find your grassroots group at the NYC People’s Climate March,138 then holding up a sign about the value of clean water for three hours calling out “Climate Action Now!” until her throat is raw, may help Regular-turned-Resistance Josie sleep better for a night. But when she wakes up to find she can light her faucet on fire, she’ll wonder why the march didn’t become the world’s largest incarnation of Klein’s Blockadia. Klein knows the nation state is deeply corrupted by corporate dollars, but effectively concedes to the value of political geography in the fight against climate change. Despite her recognition of “the capitalism problem,” Klein fails to fully appreciate, as Parr puts it, the “wrath of capital” with respect to the political system engulfed by it. Such is the hopeful—if misguided—worldview of the Progressive: fix the political system, and you can address the “capitalist problem.” The trouble is that the political system, at every level from township to federal, is fully metastasized by capital; to separate them would be like trying to separate conjoined twins who share a liver—conceivable, but unlikely. Or think of it this way: the Progressive’s regulatory reform remedy for the “capitalism problem” is rather like the incompetent oncologist who offers aspirin to cure her patient’s cancer. Resistance Josie knows that a palliative isn’t the chemotherapy she needs, even if the latter’s more painful. She knows that to think an analgesic (marches at this point are really just a placebo) can eradicate the carcinogens poisoning the ecological body politic is just another kind of denial, one that truther-crusaders like Sussman readily exploit. It’s the denial that the system called the “democratic nation state” is terminally diseased. It cannot be resuscitated because it just is a site, albeit a crucial one, for the activities of corporations. Regular Joe, for example, is happy to be

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convinced that having to change the way he lives is an affront to “freedom.” Hell’s bells, he recycles, uses an aluminum water bottle, and turns down the furnace; but he’s not trading in his truck and going vegan. Truth is, so long as Regular Joe’s got everything he needs—and as white, male, and Western, he just might—he doesn’t have to think about why climate change changes everything. It doesn’t change everything, at least not yet, and not for him. He doesn’t have to see that he benefits not only from “being an American,” but being an “American,” that is, being party to a brand called “America,” or “France,” or “The European Union,” or NAFTA, or the Transpacific Partnership. These are simply differing incarnations of the same market logic. While Klein certainly recognizes that what changes everything isn’t simply climate change but the deeply interwoven social and economic dynamics that accelerates class struggle, makes environmental refugees, and widens the gap between the global North and South, what she doesn’t quite grasp is that the real problem isn’t about capitalism per se, but the underlying logic that makes human and nonhuman commodification possible along the axes of a human chauvinism that benefits some and subjugates others according to race, sex, gender, and species. Only if we come to understand these dynamics can we see our way through to the refugees, the insurgents, and the poor in a fashion that reaches beyond lip-service to the Mi’kmaq, the bottlenose dolphins, the charismatic megafauna, the Chihuahua Desert, or the Pennsylvania hemlock stands. In order to see fully in what Resistance Josie’s dissatisfaction consists, and why it’s vital to understanding climate change denial, we need to explore her relationship to the grassroots environmental movement in light of her place along the axes of human chauvinism. The best strategy for this task is one largely absent from Klein but sheds light on the ways in which that chauvinism informs not only conquest capitalism, but many grassroots strategies for resistance, an ecofeminist strategy. The upshot, however, is clear: like their analogues in the fossil fuel industry, climate truthers aren’t committed to conquest capitalism simply for its own sake, but for the sake of preserving a system, human chauvinism, along whose axes they’re benefited not only as CEOs like Rex Tillerson, but as Western(ized), mostly white, men like Regular Joe. The inconsistencies in This Changes Everything along with its fairly unconvincing vision of grassroots movements misses the same point: a vital aspect of what’s at stake in the “capitalist problem” is a “heteropatriarchy, racist, and speciesist problem.” Both derive their power from the same ideological fountainhead. This isn’t to say there aren’t women among the deniers, but it is to say that not only do the vast preponderance of climate truther membership belongs to men, but that trutherism is a man’s game. GWPF, for instance, has no women on its 26 member Academic Advisory Council; of 29 climate change

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denial-oriented papers since 2013 at the American Enterprise Institute, four are written by women (three by the same woman, Karlyn Bowman). Ditto for the Heartland Institute. That all of these organizations, and an astonishing number of others, enjoy generous Koch brothers funding only emphasizes the point, one driven home by the fact that the Koch Industry board of directors includes only one women and no nonwhite members in its $98 billion conglomerate of companies.139 But the point goes much deeper: the old boys club that is climate trutherism isn’t merely a predictable reflection of the fossil fuel interests they tacitly represent, it’s also an expression of the nihilism festering at the core of conquest capitalism. The planet may not neatly divide into wealthy white Western(ized) men who dominate access to the existential necessities upon which we all depend, but as many feminists and others have shown, the overwhelming majority of those who control access to water, arable land, breathable air, and food are men; and the overwhelming majority of those subjugated under the governments and corporations dominated by these same men are women, indigenous peoples, nonhuman animals, and ecosystems. Climate trutherism, in other words, must be read as a strategy to shoreup not only human, but masculinist and racist authority against the increasingly precarious fortunes of the fossil fuel fascists and their analogues in government, animal agriculture, the Big Greens, etc. By the same token that the climate denial industry functions as a tool for refuting the connection between oil and gas extraction and the effects of increasing greenhouse gas emissions, it also helps to sustain institutions dependent on denial in the culture industry more broadly, for example, marriage, slavery, the commodification of sexuality, and nonhuman animal body consumption. An Ecofeminist Analysis of the Failure of Grassroots Activism It’s at precisely this juncture, however, that an ecofeminist analysis can shed real light on why grassroots environmental movements fail to gain traction against conquest capitalism. Put simply, although conquest capitalists have plenty about which to feel anxiety at the end of the reign of hydrocarbons, their occasional confrontations with grassroots activists needn’t be among them because what the capitalists have at their disposal is stereotyping conceptual machinery for feminizing and thereby inferiorizing the activists. Plus, the activists make it easy. With only a few exceptions (the (semi) permanent fracking moratorium in New York State and Maryland, for example), the resistance mounted by grassroots activists is, while certainly annoying, no significant danger to the continuation of fossil fuel extraction, at least yet. Why? Because in the interest of realizing a vision of peaceful protest, “Mother earth,” or “nonviolent solidarity,” too many activists in a movement

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run by men but affected mostly by women routinely confuse the enduring action required by meaningful civil disobedience for its bland and ineffective cousin: slightly restive mostly momentary disobedience. They confuse the willingness to absorb teargas, pepper spray, and even the bullets to which militarized multinationals will resort to protect their interests with acts of violence—and in so doing stand down before the only revolution that might really change everything even begins. The activists confuse, in other words, nonviolence for non-aggression—when only the aggressive refusal to move away from the drill rig, the capital building, the entrance to the factory farm, etc., by wave after wave of globally orchestrated insurgents might begin to get the attention of CEOs who can dominate their companies, their children, their mistresses, and their wives all in the same breath. If we promote Klein’s and, I suggest, a similar model of protest exemplified in activist eco-biologist Sandra Steingraber as the best options for movement building, grassroots environmental activism in the United States may turn out to actually go further to reinforce stereotypical sex and gender expectation than it does to confront the fossil fuel industry—or the climate truthers. Because their model expressly appeals to mothering images and metaphors without any analysis of what these images have meant historically or culturally in a system of heteropatriarchal domination, they reinforce a concept of femininity identified with subjugation, compliance, capitulation, and a visceral rejection of violence. This not only destines the grassroots to failure; it further naturalizes the view that the heteropatriarchal order is morally defensible. This is, of course, an enormous claim with important exceptions. But, as feminist Rebecca Tuvel argues in “Sourcing Women’s Ecological Knowledge: The Worry of Epistemic Objectification,”140 the very ways in which women are included in discourse concerning climate change—in this case, the ways in which some highly influential writers and grassroots activists include women in their own narratives aimed at confronting the fossil fuel industry—may be as fundamentally heteropatriarchal as have been the efforts to exclude women—especially global South women in the (not really) past. We may, in other words, be our own worst enemies in the very ways we seek to generate support and solidarity for the movement to end carbon extraction; and this isn’t because we have excluded women from participation in the grassroots, but because the ways in which we have included women circumscribes them and their appropriate sphere of action in the same way that the heteropatriarchal axes of human chauvinism situate women as commodities and disposables. As Tuvel illustrates the point in a related context, following Bernadette Resurreccion: Upholding women’s environmental knowledge as the cure for climate change tends to “naturalize and reinforce inequitable gender divisions of labor, thus

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inadvertently increasing women’s workloads in programmes aimed at empowering them. In short, they add “environment” and “climate adaptation/mitigation” to women’s already long list of caring roles.141

Although Tuvel’s aim is to show how efforts to include women, especially in the global South, in climate change discourse actually reinforces inequitable and disproportionate workloads assigned to women as mothers or caretakers—in this case of the entire planet—the same institutionalized dynamic applies to the movement to end fossil fuel extraction and/or bring attention to climate change. When grassroots activists solicit mother imagery as a strategy for highlighting the impacts to human communities, families, children’s health, nonhuman animals, and their ecologies of fossil fuel production, they unwittingly reinforce that axis of human chauvinism along which “mothering” is cast as a commodity to be exploited in unpaid domestic, inequitable workloads, and sexual service. This, in turn, not only translates into disproportionate responsibility for the immense work-load of the grassroots, but reinforces a conceptual framework benefiting the industry because it reproduces women’s roles as caretakers, low-wage, laborers, or mothers—but not as insurgents prepared to generate en masse resistance in the face of pepper spray and water cannons. In short, organizing around the mother image naturalizes the subjugation of women as reproductive commodities, and thereby consigns the grassroots to the disposable. The irony is that in Tuvel’s example, the objective is to include women in a discourse that at least recognizes climate change as impactful; in climate change denial, the objective is to insure fossil fuel hegemony against any movement that could gain traction against it. Women are exploited as stereotypically feminized either way, and both discourses narrowly circumscribe women’s role as caretakers—but it’s the climate change discourse to which “mitigation” is added as an added burden to women’s workloads. The climate truthers simply want women to buy Hummers and go shopping at Walmart for bacon, bottled water, and Ready Round-Up; the U.N. wants women, especially global South women, to be knowledge-dispensers about how to mitigate the most disastrous eventuality the world has ever known. How “Mother Earth” Disempowers Her Defenders From a slightly different angle: if we want to get to the bottom of the question, “how does climate change denial gain so much traction in the U.S.?” a key part of the answer is that it’s not merely that climate change isn’t a “middle sized” object, or that climate trutherism is a well-funded industry. It’s not only that fossil fuel extraction is a bastion of heteropatriarchal privilege

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and an opportunity for the racist manufacture of “terrorists.” It’s that the strategies, metaphors, and narratives advocated by many in the grassroots movement, especially those that solicit images of the “mother” or “mother earth,” feminize it, disempowering the grassroots by contrast with a profoundly masculinist industry that emphasizes patriotism, “manly” industrial operations, “energy independence,” and, as we saw, a virulent racism. Appeal to images of mothering, nurturing, and caretaking undermines grassroot goals within climate change discourse and activism because women are at the same time included and marginalized, consulted and circumscribed, the same way they’re included in conquest capitalism and climate change denial—as feminized consumers who can be counted on not to challenge the system in any deeper way than the mother image permits. Although the nihilism that rightly describes the competition for the last petroleum “plays” on the planet stands in stark contrast to the images of a nurturing mother earth raped by drill operations, the beneficiary of the violated mother is still Homo Colussus who, empowered to determine what constitutes a commodity, remains at liberty to assume that the value of “Mother Earth” can be calculated as exchange—just as the value of a woman can be calculated in terms of her reproductive, sexual, and domestic labor. From his point of view, the mother is another endless resource that can be treated as penetrable, inexhaustible, and willing to yield more. The status of the mother, in other words, is essentially the same in climate change mitigation discourse, “motherhood environmentalism,” because it too, as Tuvel shows, assigns to women the responsibility for caring, and thereby defines the roles of women according to the same market epistemology that animates fossil fuel extraction.142 With this view in mind, let’s return once more to Klein’s argument that for First Nation peoples like the Heiltsuk, the activists of “Blockadia,” whose grassroots actions offer a variety of what Klein calls “ferocious love.” Ferocious love, argues Klein, is what’s systematically “underestimated” by both the resource extraction companies and governments because it’s the one thing no amount of money can “extinguish.” Because it’s at the center of cultural identity and beloved places, because it represents both the honored past and the hopeful future for a people, it cannot be commodified or made into a “bargaining chip.”145 Nonetheless, however much this appeal to “ferocious love” may sound like a pitch in the direction of the desirable future, it’s missing several elements vital to that argument, elements that make Klein’s image of the “Heiltsuk hereditary chiefs waiting on the tarmac” of Bella Bella Island’s landing strip romantic, but not persuasive as a model for grassroots activism.143 Part of the trouble is that romantic is not necessarily the stuff of revolution—at least not by itself. After all, if “ferocious love” were enough to incite a grassroots movement equipped with the momentum necessary to stop the fossil fuel industry, Exxon would not be preparing to drill in the Arctic;

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Chevron would not be eyeing up the Chihuahua; Enbridge would not be preparing to build the Northern Gateway Pipeline through First Nations lands and pristine British Columbian forests, and there’d be no Tropic of Chaos—or at least there’d be global outrage on the behalf of, for example, West Kenyan pastoralists, Mexican fishermen, the Heilsuk, and rural Pennsylvania farmers. But, as of this writing, permits eagerly granted by corporatized states are exactly what’s going on. Enbridge doesn’t need any “bargaining chips.” It needs the necessary permits that the Canadian analogues of representatives like Senator Inhofe will see to it they get and the police, public or private, to enforce them against blockadia. As of early 2014, and despite First Nations outrage, that’s what Enbridge got. Approved with 209 “conditions,” “NDP (National Democratic Party) leader Tom Mulcair called it [the Northern Gateway Pipeline] ‘folly’ and ‘pure madness’ to think anyone can put supertankers in British Columbia’s Douglas Channel.”144 Tim Gray, of Environmental Defence, put it this way: “[a]pproving the Northern Gateway pipeline rejects science, disrespects First Nations, ignores the Government of British Columbia and brushes aside the voices of millions of Canadians.”145 It remains to be seen whether the Northern Gateway will be built, but one thing seems clear: the good citizens of British Columbia’s Blockadia can object to the liquidation of their natural resources until the cows come home—but not a minute of this grassroots movement’ “ferocious love” is going to be effective until some very unromantic issues are addressed, like whether they’re willing to take tear gas and bullets. It’s as if Klein walks up to the “blow the dams” precipice and, for a moment, stands next to Jensen, but she can’t bring herself to entertain the prospect that it all must come down, and that “ferocious love” might involve something more (and more aggressive) than the Mi’kmaq mother on her knees before the trucks, or the yogi, or the doubtless splendor of Heilsuk tribal chiefs. Ironically, however, her failure is Jensen’s; the Progressive’s is the self-styled radical’s, namely the failure to see that at the root of the capitalist problem is the human chauvinist problem. Put differently: if Jensen’s Twenty Premises ultimately miss the mark, it’s not because his pop-cultural ecocentrism is too radical. It’s because, without a globally comprehensive analysis of the ways in which human chauvinism is institutionalized along all of its axes, it can’t be radical enough, at least not for the peoples, nonhuman animals, and ecosystems most directly affected by climate change—no matter how they’re included or excluded from that discourse. Similarly, if the Progressive politics of Klein’s ferocious love can’t solve the capitalist problem, it’s because she doesn’t see how capital takes advantage of the presuppositions that govern the activism of “saving Mother earth,” namely that she’s a woman in need of being saved. This leaves Klein stuck advocating, as Bruckner puts it, “syrupy” love.

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“I’m Not a HEPA Filter”: The Mother Imagery of Sandra Steingraber One more example of “Blockadia” that amply illustrates what I think is missing from Klein’s analysis of the geopolitics of climate change is the ongoing blockade at the planned Crestwood Midstream liquefied natural gas storage facility approved by New York State’s Department of Conservation for construction in abandoned salt caverns on Seneca Lake.146 Hundreds of protesters have mounted what might well be called a campaign of “ferocious love” at the Crestwood gates, hundreds arrested (many of whom I know and admire). On May 7, 2015, sixteen women were arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience, including one pregnant woman. The event was billed as a “Mother’s Day” protest. The women were “holding banners that said, “Happy Mother’s Day! Honoring Mother Earth” and “Mothers Against Crestwood: Because I Said So, That’s Why,” [and the] protesters prevented all traffic from entering or leaving the gates before their arrests shortly after 11 a.m. by Schuyler County Sheriff’s deputies and NY state troopers.” While Klein doesn’t give this example, her examples of Mi’kmaq mothers and yogis have a “ferocious love flavor” similar to biologist Sandra Steingraber’s beautifully written pieces decrying fossil fuel extraction, and her direct participation at the Crestwood Blockade. The widely acknowledged mother of the anti-fracking movement, Steingraber’s appeal to mother imagery is inspiring but, sadly, another gift to the masculinism of the hydrocarbon industry, its lobbyists, elected representatives, and the climate truthers. On the one hand, when Steingraber evokes imagery of mothers, mother earth, and the like the effect is vibrant and galvanizing. For example, in an interview with Earth Justice, she remarks that And I feel, as a mother, it’s part of my responsibility as a parent that the environmental crisis is really a crisis of family life. It undermines my ability to be a mother. All the tasks of parenting kind of boil down into two categories: one is to protect your children from harm, and the other is to plan for their future. And as long as toxic chemicals are freely allowed to circulate in our environment, in our economy, I can’t protect my kids from harm. As I say in Raising Elijah, I’m a conscientious parent but I’m not a HEPA filter. I can’t stand between my child’s body and the 200 or so different brain poisons that are allowed to freely circulate in our economy.147

Similarly, in a speech heralded for its positive effect on New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s decision to indefinitely extend the moratorium on fracking, Steingraber makes the following announcement:

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Here is a loaf of bread from a bakery in my own village of Trumansburg, New York. You’ve seen me hold this bread before. You’ve seen me carry it into the state assembly chambers and submit it as testimony. You’ve heard me say that the flour that makes up this bread is ground at a local mill and that the heirloom wheat that makes up this flour is grown in local fields. And that the flour in this bread makes up the bodies of my children. Well, today, we’ve brought more than a hundred loaves of this bread, a symbol of the bounty of New York, and we’re going to bring them to our governor, with the message, “Break bread! Not shale!”148

On the one hand, Steingraber’s effort to create a narrative for the antifracking movement is worthy of real praise; her capacity to galvanize a crowd tremendous, her commitment tireless, just like Klein’s. On the other, several serious issues compromise her appeals to mothering, each of which shed light on Klein’s incapacity to see beyond “ferocious love,” and all of which render the mother narrative feminized and commodified (explicit in Steingraber, more implicit in Klein), and thus ineffective against an industry whose primary beneficiaries are empowered by human chauvinism. Steingraber’s certainly right; the most conscientious parent isn’t a HEPA filter. She’s right too that from drill bit to export terminal the processes characteristic of slickwater horizontal hydraulic fracturing, including Crestwood’s plan to store liquefied natural gas (LNG) at Lake Seneca, are ecologically pernicious, polluting, and carcinogenic. But, following Tuvel, to whatever extent Steingraber’s explicit evocation of the mother image—without any corresponding analysis of how that image reinforces heteropatriarchal prerogative—is a constant in her activism, it serves to reinforce the subjugation of women (and anything identified as feminine), and thereby undermines Steingraber’s own efforts to build the grassroots environmental movement.149 This, in turn, reinforces women’s oppression more broadly, adding to an already “long list” of responsibilities, strengthening precisely those institutions in whose interest it is to maintain the heteropatriarchal status quo of Homo Colossus. There are at least two additional ways that women’s roles are likely to remain oppressively circumscribed via the mother image. The first, actually the least troubling, concerns acts of civil disobedience: fossil fuel companies headed almost exclusively by wealthy white men are not going to take protest cast as the protection by mothers of their children seriously. The mother image is taken as pacifist; it lends itself to soft images of breast-feeding, nurturing, bread-making, or kneeling in a road holding up a feather. It’s easily deployed to reinforce stereotypes of femininity identified with the weak, the subjugated, the pliable, and the irrational, and it’s thus easily ridiculed, as is the case for this Marcellus Drilling News’ piece on Steingraber:

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One of Steingraber’s favorite methods in talking about fossil fuels (and fracking) is to wax “poetic.” Her latest discourse, recently delivered at Wells College . . . is described this way: “Rather than dissect the dispute [about fracking] through science, charts and graphs, visiting speaker Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D., instead probed the use of fossil fuels through anecdotes and imagery.” In other words, she just makes it up.150

Of course, Steingraber isn’t “just making it up.” Of course, there’s an important place for “anecdotes and imagery” in any movement, and of course the very way these claims are put appeals to the sexist distinction between hard science and soft metaphor. But that’s not the point. The point is that however unjust, the appeal to the mother image serves only to reinforce both the inferior softness or weakness ascribed to being female and, hence, the faulty notion that civil disobedience is necessarily nonviolent. As Jensen and co-author Aric McBay observe (following Lierre Keith): Fighting back means doing what is appropriate . . . It means not ruling out actions just because those in power . . . say they shouldn’t be used. And fighting back may or may not look like fighting: it doesn’t have to look like violence (although it may). It means not using violence when it’s appropriate not to use violence. It means using violence when it’s appropriate to use violence . . . . Radical movements that disavow the use of directed political violence can, in certain circumstances, succeed so long as they have very large numbers of dedicated people who understand that their goal is not to ask for the intolerable to stop, but to force it to stop.151

This gets us to the second way: given the heteropatriarchal circumscription of concepts like “mother” and its connection to stereotypes of femininity culturally interpreted as softness or weakness, it makes sense to assume that participating in any act of violence (including modest actions like lock-breaking/gluing, spray painting machinery, hurling obscenities) is foreclosed for the mothers engaged in, for example, the Steingraber-inspired Mother’s Day protest at Lake Seneca. Indeed, the arrested women seemed to assume this themselves. Although they did form a human blockade stopping traffic from entering or leaving the facility for several hours, none appears to have resisted arrest, instead opting for mother-centered statements after their release from the local lock-up. The pregnant woman commented, for example, that she has a 16 month old son and she’s pregnant; “If I’m going to create life, it’s my responsibility to protect it too.” Steingraber could of course respond that, especially in defense of their children, mothers can undoubtedly be ferocious. True; but given her analysis of the dangers to human health posed by storing LNG in seismic-prone salt caverns—not to mention the contribution the facility makes to the build-out

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of natural gas extraction—it simply begs the question to suggest that this isn’t that circumstance; it is. And it’s particularly so given that while the Lake Seneca instantiation of “Blockadia” has sustained itself since October, 2014 (as of this writing), producing more than 270 arrests, it’s unlikely to command the numbers Jensen argues are necessary to make nonviolence effective. It thus seems doubly important that Steingraber accompany her exhortation to resist the incursion of Crestwood at Lake Seneca with analyses not only of the potential health hazards, but of the ways in which the mother imagery can be reclaimed against the prevailing stereotype. Anything less not only forecloses any resort to the violence that might in fact be “appropriate” in this circumstance but, if we’re to take Steingraber and Klein’s own analyses seriously, might be morally incumbent to defend and protect the futures of children. Depoliticizing the Geopolitical Terrain of Climate Change To be clear, this is not to say that the hard questions about the uses of violence have been solved; they have not. It is to say that foreclosure is not solution, especially when the foreclosure reinforces the very axes of human chauvinism that provide scaffolding for the institutions responsible for environmental destruction and social oppression. Steingraber and Klein certainly recognize that ethnicity, sex, gender, and species play an important role in the dynamics of climate change, but what’s less clear is whether they see that these play a constitutive role. By failing to unambiguously chart the ways that race, sex, gender, species, the global North and South, infuse the bone marrow of the neoliberal circulatory system, Klein contributes not only to naturalizing the heteropatriarchal institutions responsible for the conversion of women’s reproductive value into exchange value, but to depoliticizing the geopolitical terrain she hopes to change, namely our relationship to fossil fuels. That makes it even easier for climate truthers to ignore her since the likelihood that the protests narratives of “ferocious love” are going to galvanize the audience to which the truthers appeal—Regular Joe—is slim. MacGregor makes a similar point when she argues that the ways in which the climate change crisis have been articulated at the level of policy-making, the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, for example, tend to remove it from the conditions, geographical, cultural, ecological, etc., confronted by particular people and communities.152 The consequences, she argues, are that women’s voices and concerns are being excluded from climate politics such that we are witnessing the masculinization of environmentalism. Men dominate all spheres of climate politics; men have produced the dominant scientific and policy frames . . . The types of environmental justice issues that have

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traditionally been most relevant to women . . . arguably have been marginalized . . . For example, women have spearheaded campaigns on pesticide use, pollution, nuclear radiation, multiple chemical sensitivity, biodiversity, animals welfare, and seed saving. Few of these issues now get much attention by climate change policy makers.153

And few gain the attention of Regular Joe because he stands to gain more, at least on the short term, from pesticide use on his Monsanto Frankencorn farm (CEO, Hugh Grant), his coal-fired power plant (say, Texas’ Sandy Creek, Synergy CEO, Bruce Williamson), his nuclear power facility (Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) chair, Stephen G. Burns), his factory farm (Tyson CEO, Donnie Smith)—or his LNG storage facility on Lake Seneca (Crestwood CEO, Robert G. Phillips). Steingraber’s appeal to mothering and Klein’s to “ferocious love” reinscribes the discursive framework empowering Grant, Williamson, Burns, Smith, Phillips, and Tillerson (ExxonMobil) by allowing it to dictate the terms of a discourse within which women are marginalized, subjugated, naturalized as commodities, and depoliticized regardless whether that discourse is pro-fossil fuel, anti-extraction, pro-climate change science, or squarely in the denier’s camp. It doesn’t matter; the market logic of human chauvinism is the same because the beneficiaries of any version of the discourse are the same: Western or Westernized mostly white, mostly affluent men. This inference follows in at least four ways: 1. Through the masculinization of environmental activism broadly that, aided by a counter-discourse that appeals to feminized images of the mother or Mother Earth, reinforces the hierarchical, racist, and heteropatriarchal structure of the Big Green environmental organizations. 2. Through fortifying the same masculinized power within conquest capitalism whose primarily male beneficiaries, like their counterparts in the Big Greens, are authorized to determine what issues are most important, what aren’t, at what level policy-making ought to transpire, what advertising should look like, and who counts as the target audience. 3. Through fortifying the same distribution of power within government agencies, regional, national, and global, whose beneficiaries, like their counterparts in the Big Greens and in industry, are authorized to determine what issues are most important, what aren’t, what constitutes regulation, and at what level policy-making ought to transpire. 4. Through reinforcing the masculinized (nationalist, hyper-patriotic) rhetoric of climate change denial that, in turn, helps to reinforce the hierarchical structure within industry, government, and the Big Greens all of whom benefit from marginalizing and depoliticizing those voices, women,

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indigenous people, and nonhuman animals, who, though superficially included in the “discourse” are in fact institutionally excluded from decision-making. “Depoliticized”: removed from the discursive, social, and economic contingencies of those not authorized as beneficiaries and decision-makers within the institutions empowered via human chauvinism, Big Energy, Big Agriculture, Big Government, Big Green, and Big Denier. To whatever extent, then, Steingraber and Klein reiterate the images and tropes by which masculinization is effectuated, they effectively contribute not to the politicizing of climate change discourse and to the strengthening of grassroots movements, but to deflating whatever momentum there may be to join. This not only helps out the climate truthers, encouraging deflated potential insurgents like Regular Josie to just go home, it makes Steingraber and Klein vulnerable to Bruckner’s argument that all this line of reasoning has in the end is the progressive’s hope-n-change chant, all sound, no fury. So in the end, I appreciate Klein’s “ferocious love” and I get it that Steingraber’s knows her audience—middle aged, mostly white, relatively comfortable shoe-wearing women ready to be hauled off in paddy wagons, but not to be pepper-sprayed. That makes it doubly troubling that, given my analysis here, “ferocious” love is destined to be less than ferocious. This is true not only because it re-inscribes women’s place along the axes of heteropatriarchal human chauvinism, but because it also ascribes more wherewithal to the grassroots than is warranted—raising hope, but ultimately disappointing its activists. Klein argues, for example, that the fossil fuel companies no longer feel the need to deal with the Big Greens because the latter can be bought off with donations or “conscience-clearing carbon off-set programs.” But it’s a different challenge altogether dealing with communities who aren’t looking to negotiate some better deal, but are simply saying no to hydrocarbon infrastructure that endangers them—and the planet.156 This would be great were it true, and it’s not that many communities have not (and are not as we speak) made a valiant effort to protect their ecologies and health, like the Heilsuk. But without a narrative that clearly articulates the desirable future in terms that account for all of the axes of human chauvinism that circumscribe and thereby depoliticize meaningful action, the Mi’kmaq mother’s and the Mexican fisherman’s, the Pennsylvanian farmer’s and the West Kenyan pastorialist’s, a narrative that includes the voices of the marginalized not simply as marginalized but as fully enfranchised agents in the creation of that future, that “no” will continue to fall on ears deafened by the sounds of gas flares, truck traffic, and drill bits. And that’s good for the climate change deniers. A marginalized, depoliticized grassroots movement whose own resistance strategies can be counted on to reinforce the masculinist

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prerogatives of the fossil fuel fathers is a boon for the truthers. Writers like Sussman cast themselves not only as the voice of reason and the good, but as crusaders, Medeival knights on a sacred mission to protect not merely oil and gas, but a pathologized notion of truth whose authority derives from a human chauvinism presumed without interrogation to be essentially male. From this perspective, fossil fuel extraction is itself a tool to proselytize that truth. It’s the lifeblood of the father who, happy to let Steingraber exhaust herself delivering bread, realizes an almost religious variety of “ferocious love” in the nihilism that elects power over life, armed lifeboats over climate stability.

TRUTHER HYSTERIA AND THE METASTASIS OF CAPITAL CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL, TAKE SEVEN It Must Grow: The Inherent Nihilism of Market Patriotism By the same token that climate trutherism is symptomatic of an industry frantic to cash in on the last carbon deposits before its armed lifeboat careens onto rocky shoals at the end of endless resources, it also reveals a pathological nihilism inherent to conquest capitalist ideology regardless industry or enterprise. That capitalism is nihilistic is not, however, a consequence of the potential for resource exhaustion per se, but is rather a feature of instrumental reasoning itself: because its primary objective is accumulation, a capitalist enterprise can have no acknowledged limits. It must grow; hence “market” logic simply denotes the single-minded decision-procedure by which any enterprise must pursue that objective. Such a pursuit is inherently nihilistic in that regardless natural, technological, or other limitation, its decisionmaking is, and must be, dictated by its objectives—even if those becomes ultimately unrealizable. If extractible fossil fuels become exhausted, BP (for example) will cease to exist. As we saw in its “beyond petroleum” campaign, the company could diversify, but given the expense and its own necessary investment in the myth of endless resources, the development of alternative energy resources can only seem counterproductive if not illicit from the point of view of accumulation. In order to stave off the eventuality that the myth is false, and remain competitive with other similar companies, ExxonMobil, Corso, Chevron, etc., BP must treat its essential resource is inexhaustible, and then pursue discovery of it even more relentlessly in direct proportion to its competitors. That this pursuit leads inexorably to the exhaustion of drillable deposits, and that BP can’t be oblivious to this fact, evinces the nihilism of capital conquest. The relentless pursuit of fossil fuels, even into the Arctic or the Chihuahua Desert, gives away the very thing BP cannot not know, namely that

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hydrocarbon deposits are exhaustible. That the industry cannot fail to know this fact, that knowing it is vital to their market epistemology (this is the reason BP abandoned “beyond petroleum”), accelerates the competition, reinforcing short-sighted decision-making despite the fact that the pretense to “endless” must remain in force in order to justify the immense expense of exploratory projects. Market logic is thus both nihilistic and root-bound by the denial of that fact: every capitalist enterprise behaves as if its essential resources are endless. But because the specific “when” of “endless” is unknowable, it’s also destined via its own internal logic to the knowledge of its self-destruction and the denial of that knowledge in advance of its actual collapse. It must act as if its essential resource is scarce and inexhaustible; it therefore must predict its demise and act to stave it off, and it must act as if it were effectively immortal to justify the expense of growth against competitors whose decision-making is governed by the same logic. This is not to suggest that capitalist enterprise is necessarily brittle or incapable of diversifying to protect itself from collapse; it is to say that inherent to the logic of capital are assumptions that cannot be squared with the facts of a resource-limited planet, and that the willful denial of this fact constitutes an intractable nihilism. Moreover, because some of these resources, especially water, define the necessary conditions of life for all organisms, their exhaustion (or pollution beyond reclamation) has the potential to affect the wherewithal of any enterprise in catastrophic ways. Intersecting with the myriad consequences of a warming climate, the scarcity of clean water, viable soil, or breathable air has the potential to create ruinous if not apocalyptic consequences from which none are exempt even if some, the beneficiaries of capital, can arm their lifeboats for longer. The nihilism of market logic must be understood as the systemic denial of its own existential conditions; climate change denial is a natural extension of this logic made manifest in a particularly hysterical, though ideologically consistent, way. Preemptively dissociated from the reality of the planet’s resource limits, market logic applies not only to conquest capitalism, but to any profit-seeking venture, insuring endemic short-sightedness in decision-making in the face of competition. Whether the vital resource is carbons, Frankencorn, diamonds, silver, gold, rubber, animal bodies, human labor, water, or even sunlight, what accumulation—growth—demands is that every resource be treated as scarce enough to warrant the high price necessary to justify its development and as abundant enough to realize the objective of developing it: profit. It’s thus not surprising that, given the direct threat to growth posed by rooftop solar panels, the fossil fuel industry has pushed hard “for state laws raising prices for solar customers” in an effort to commodify an inexhaustible, sunlight, and thereby make it fit the logic.154 The effort, however, to draft anti-solar state laws “failed spectacularly” even among “red state” fossil fuel fans, making

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the work of the climate truther ever more vital as a strategy for bringing together pro-solar “energy independence” conservatives and more traditional fossil fuel nationalists in the effort to fight the “home-solar insurgency.”155 But the truther needn’t look very far for that strategy. First and foremost Homo Colossus is a flag-waving patriotic American Regular Joe who, as such, can be effectively lobbied by the Heartland Institute into believing that government subsidies for solar power are the product of the same Communist conspiracy whose aim is to leverage the climate change “hoax” into world domination. In an effort to counter the claim that choosing solar is consistent with a principled libertarianism, Heartland’s J.B. Taylor argues that the solar industry is guilty of its own hoax, one promoted at the expense of Tea Party “grassroots conservatives”: The solar power industry has opposed limited government, free markets, consumer choice, and Tea Party principles 99 percent of the time, but when their lobbyists identify a rare program in which government has not chosen it as the politically designated winner, they make a phony appeal to free-market principles and seek to deceive the grassroots into doing their bidding for them. The end result of this scheme? The grassroots conservatives who launched the Tea Party movement in an effort to push back against government cronyism and largesse would be fighting for greater access to those corrupt practices.156

That this argument is nonsense in the face of enormous subsidies paid to the fossil fuel industry not only clarifies the extent to which the truther’s willing to go to defend fossil fuel turf, it also highlights a central point: Capital accumulation isn’t valued by Homo Colossus just for its own sake. It has another objective, ideologically deeper, for which capitalist enterprise simply acts as its most effective tool: human chauvinism. Whatever the strategy is for making solar energy fit the logic of capital—killing it, treating it as a taxable commodity, or industrializing it via outsourced manufacture—the beneficiaries remain the same. Indeed, the nihilistic logic is the same even if the essential resource, sunlight, doesn’t run out. And that guarantees the casualties remain the same whether a resource is endless or not, whether it’s development is cast as an enemy to the status quo or not, and whether it actually makes money—or not. At the helm of industrialized solar, Ethical Electric, presides CEO, Tom Matzzie and CFO, Jim Wiseman, both white, both male, both Americans— and both beneficiaries of market logic in precisely the same way as Exxon’s Rex Tillerson despite their claim to ethically produced energy. Just as the geopolitics of fossil fuel help to sustain gross economic disparity between the global North and South, just as extraction contributes to climate change, so too the manufacture of solar panels contribute to both, insuring the continuing

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hegemony not only of capital, but of the same racist, classist, and heterosexist institutions that define human chauvinism. As New York Times writer Austin Ramzy reports: Although China may be a cheaper place than Europe for producing solar panels, the savings come at a higher cost to the environment, a new study says. Weaker environmental standards and the more highly polluting sources of energy used by Chinese manufacturers are the reasons for the discrepancy . . . In 2011 the Chinese authorities suspended production at a solar panel plant in Zhejiang Province after days of protests by residents who said emissions from the factory polluted the air and nearby bodies of water . . . The latest study found that a solar panel made in China would have to be in service for about 20 percent to 30 percent longer than a European model to compensate for the energy used in its production.157

While European manufacture helps to mitigate against some labor abuses, the solar panel manufacturing process itself is no panacea against climate change. Indeed, insofar as Ethical Electric promotes their product as “clean,” their motto as “if you burn it, it isn’t clean” it’s as guilty of false advertising as is the natural gas company who promotes fracked natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to renewables.158 The point is simple: naturalized along its heterosexist, racist, and speciesist axes, market logic dictates not only that literally anything can be commodified—including sunlight—but how, that is, as female, as non-Western, as indigenous, as nonhuman animal. Here too climate change denial plays a vital role in that, as a natural extension of market logic, it serves to reinforce not only what can be commodified—but what counts as disposable, for example Chinese laborers. After all, if climate change is false, there are no climate refugees; if it’s a Leftist conspiracy, we can ignore the claims of those who’d decry diminishing shorelines, desertification, or crop failure. If there’s no such thing as climate change, who needs solar panels? The Value of Interference Narratives in the Face of Ecological Apocalypse Fact is, the pathologies of market logic preemptively undermine not only any realistic hope for ecological sustainability, but for social and economic justice. The prospect of a steady-state capitalist economy (Herman Daly), a techno-utopia (Martin Lewis), an economy heavily regulated to mitigate against racism, heterosexism, and speciesism (liberal feminism), or any other reformist capitalism is, given its inherent nihilism, forlorn because no enterprise large or small can escape the peremptory demands of accumulation, and therefore growth. However we define it, in terms of quality of life instead

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of quantity of disposable products, for example, the necessity of growth will inevitably agitate against the sustainability of even basic resources like clean water and arable land, and it will tend to the reproduction of human chauvinism, including its racist, heterosexist, and speciesist axes. Truthers perform a vital function in this circulatory system of capital by running interference narratives whose task is to obscure the nihilistic character of capitalism by denying the harmful consequences of producing a particular product. The industry is then reaffirmed as promoting the good, the rational, and the patriotic; the truther thus helps to advance industry growth. Indeed, as Oreskes and Conway show with respect to the tobacco industry’s denial that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer, we can read the pathological pursuit of that objective directly from the lengths an industry is willing to go to run its truther narratives: The [tobacco] industry’s position was that there was no “proof” that tobacco was bad, and they fostered that position by manufacturing a “debate,” convincing the mass media that responsible journalists had an obligation to present “both sides” of it. Representatives of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee met with staff at Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report . . . Their purpose was to “explain” the industry’s commitment to “a long-range . . . research program devoted primarily to the public interest”—which was needed since the science was so unsettled—and to stress to the media their responsibility to provide a “balanced presentation of all the facts” to ensure the public was not needlessly frightened.159

A virtually identical strategy with identical underlying objectives describes the fossil fuel industry’s creation of truther “committees” like the Heartland Institute; the logic, the beneficiaries, the manufacturing labor, the ostensive consumers, the strategies for advertising, the deleterious consequences, and the ultimate nihilism are all the same; only the essential resource and the extent to which industry hegemony is endangered by resource exhaustion or consumer abandonment varies. The difference between cigarette manufacture and fossil fuel extraction is that whereas the former simply had to scramble to find less witting markets (mostly in the global South), the latter face possible extinction in virtue of the specific facts about climate change—in addition to resource exhaustion. The prospect that not only will drillable oil and gas go dry, but that consumers will seek out alternative energy sources even before that happens raises the stakes for fossil fuel in ways never confronted by tobacco. No wonder, then, that the truther narrative has become increasingly hysterical. Consider, for example, the truther film, It’s Easy Being Green When You Have No Choice. In it, narrator Brian Sussman claims that “the global war on CO2 could not exist if the

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Soviet Union had not collapsed.”160 Climate change science, in other words, is an orchestrated military operation to demonize CO2 in the interest of forcing people to surrender to Soviet-style dictatorship, and if the Communists had won, we’d never have heard of “global warming.” Never mind that CO2 is a well-established greenhouse gas, the main objective of “the global Communist environmental movement” is, according to Sussman, to convince us that “freedom is the ultimate cause of global warming,” and that the only way for the red-greens to stifle freedom is to create a crisis whose implications are so global and so apocalyptic that only a despotic world government will be sufficient to save us from it. This “argument” is, of course, just silly, but that’s exactly why it can show us something important not only about the hysterical lengths truthers are willing to go to run interference for fossil fuels but, in light of this, why no variety of capitalism—no matter how reformist or regulated—is salvageable if what we really want is a desirable future. What’s significant about climate trutherism isn’t just the lengths to which its true believers (or paid propagandists) will go to denounce even modest proposals to mitigate the effects of climate change as totalitarian plots; it’s not the endorsements truthers get from elected public representatives like Inhofe. It’s not the unintentional caricature the truthers supply of a paranoid Homo Colossus or an angst-ridden conquest capitalist who works tirelessly to defend his “right” to drill everywhere. What makes truther claims crucial to understanding capitalism is that this ideological instantiation of human chauvinism isn’t even just the denial of climate change itself. True believers like Regular Joe can be suckered; crusaders like Sussman have other goals. What makes climate trutherism vital to understanding capitalism is that the Herculean effort its crusaders are willing to undertake to protect the fossil fuel industry epitomizes—simply in a different way—the same market logic inherent in the character of capital accumulation. Climate trutherism, in other words, is just one more natural outcome of the accumulation of capital, and as such, a reductio ad absurdum of conquest capitalism in the same way that denying that smoking causes lung cancer is a reductio of cigarette manufacture: the increasingly hysterical effort built into the denial is itself confirmation of the potential for harm. That the same can be said for animal agriculture’s denial of its own emission of greenhouse gases only further illuminates that this logic patterns itself across industries—that it’s endemic to capitalism itself. It’s thus entirely irrelevant to climate trutherism whether climate change is occurring, or whether it’s anthropogenic. The climate change denial narrative—even in its most hysterical formulations—is still a logical mechanism whose objective is to insure that an industry develops along its profit-driven trajectory to its natural, if nihilistic, terminus without obstacle. Trutherism is thus a mirror in the purest sense of that nihilism; climate change

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an obstacle that must be neutralized, as Oreskes and Conway show, by creating the appearance of debate—where there is none. Climate trutherism is thus just one iteration of market logic become the culture industry, that is, an industry that manufactures consent to drilling in the Arctic, fracking the Chihuahua, or dumping toxic waste into the Susquehanna River in the same way it manufactures consent to the brutality of animal agriculture, the exploitation of global South laborers, or the deforestation of the Ecuadorian Amazon. It succeeds in this first by creating Communist boogey-men conspiracies to “take away our freedom” to drill, eat bacon or, say, shrimp whose harvesting insured the loss of at least 70 percent of Ecuador’s coastal mangroves.161 The second way is more insidious: by selling us gas, bacon, shrimp—whatever—to distract us and then—having bought whatever—the truther tacitly guilts us out of organizing even the most ineffectual protests against the industry. “You drive a car, right?” “You heat your house?” “You eat at Mc’Donald’s?” “Bubba’s”? Indeed, against these odds, the only way that even weak notions like “sustainability” can generate any substantive attention against the calculus for future fossil fuel or animal agricultural business plans are where environmental conditions have deteriorated so thoroughly that executing a particular venture is made too expensive and/ or logistically prohibitive. But by then it’s too late; we’re racing across the arid desert with Mad Max, and the climate truther—like the carpet-bagger he really is—has already moved on. The size of the company, moreover, doesn’t really matter in the race to ecological apocalypse; it’s just as well facilitated by small companies, like Harlod Hamm’s Continental Resources,162 as by behemoths like Shell. Any proposal to mitigate climate change like Klein’s Marshall Plan for the Earth, endangers the modest “wild-catter” just as much as it does Shell, if not more since, regardless the scale of a drilling gambit, the logic for undertaking it is still the same. Hence the nihilism endemic to it is neither enhanced nor diminished; when the gas runs out, it runs out. Put simply: climate trutherism is a symptom of the metastasis of capitalism as an essentially nihilistic ideological enterprise. This argument makes sense of why writers like Sussman look to crucify moderates like Carson and Gore, but largely ignore far more radical writers like Klein or Jensen. Whereas the industry’s deepest fear is that the resource upon which it’s dependent isn’t endless (or that consumers recognizing this will turn to alternatives), the climate truther’s is that writers like Klein and, far scarier, Jensen, are right about the potentially apocalyptic implications of climate change. Already committed to defending an increasingly hysterical narrative about Communists and global cabals, the truther can’t afford to take on more radical arguments that might require even more hysterical conspiracy theories to combat. Put differently: on the one hand, while the fossil fuel industry will face catastrophic losses if it doesn’t seek out alternatives to oil and gas before the crash of

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its armed lifeboats, it could in theory diversify and survive. If, on the other, climate change comes to be accepted by the public as fact, the entire ideological edifice of a conspiracy that revives the Cold War, creates a formidable enemy, justifies immense military spending, and encourages rabid nationalism falls to pieces since even the need for fossil fuels in the manufacture of solar panels can’t support the ravenous appetites of a BP or a Shell. Carson and especially Gore provide recognizable enemies on the basis of which to advance that global conspiracy theory. Klein, while she may yet rise to this “honor,” is not yet as recognizable and is more easily dismissed in virtue of a grassroots advocacy that à la “ferocious love” hasn’t had (and likely will not have) the measurable effect on policy that followed from Silent Spring or An Inconvenient Truth. Klein herself makes this point: So here’s my inconvenient truth: I think these hard-core ideologues understand the real significance of climate change better than most of the “warmists” in the political center, the ones who are still insisting that the response can be gradual and painless and that we don’t need to go to war with anybody, including the fossil fuel companies . . . as 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists attest, the heartlanders are completely wrong about the science. But when it comes to the political and economic consequences of those scientific findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our liberalized and profit-seeking economy, they have their eyes wide open.163

However hysterical the narrative, writers like Sussman know their audience; they know its composition—white, male, and affluent—makes for ideal consumers of precisely the conspiracy theories the truther markets. Painting the Greenies Red; Getting the Greenies into Bed That those “warmists” in the center include most of the major American environmental organizations, the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Environmental Defense Fund—but that Sussman nonetheless identifies them as part of the Communist conspiracy to “take away our freedom” illustrates another key point: paint the moderates, the ones who argue for cap and trade, better regulation, heavier fines and taxes on polluters, the ones who “partner” with the corporations to “restore” the environment, but don’t actually agitate for any real change in the economic system or its logic—as crazy red-green Communists and the real revolutionaries can be made to look criminally insane. Make Al Gore look like a shrieking Pinko, Rachel Carson a “hater of humanity,” and Naomi Klein, well, consider Ronald Bailey’s recent review of This Changes Everything from the libertarian journal Reason:

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Klein’s list of remedies is more alarming than her exaggerations of climate change’s present-day effects. She wants to ban fracking, nuclear power, genetically modified crops, geoengineering, carbon sequestration, and carbon markets, thus turning her back on some of the climate-friendliest solutions currently on offer. She wants to block the Keystone pipeline, which would transport petroleum from Canadian oil sands to U.S. refineries; she would pressure pension funds and endowments to divest from fossil fuel companies; and she thinks we should transfer trillions of dollars to poor countries to pay off the rich countries’ debt for dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.164

And that, according to Bailey, is crazy talk. But here’s the thing: for capitalist crusaders like Sussman, Inhofe, and Bailey, “crazy” stands for “crazy like a fox”; as in: fear-inducing risk of profit-reduction. What the climate truthers know, in other words, is that arguments like Klein’s, arguments that appeal to a populist progressive base whose members might actually care about science, are capable of generating palpable anxiety for big shareholders at Chevron, BP, and ExxonMobil. Even if Klein can’t get a grassroots movement off the ground, she can convince a few in her progressive base to go solar, by electric cars, eat vegan. The best way, then, to make sure “crazies” like Klein (god forbid Jensen) don’t get a foothold in the public imagination is to pretend they don’t exist except for on that rare occasion (like a new book) where you’re forced to say something, as does Bailey here. Plastering the “warmists” as card-carrying Communists is the pre-emptive strike; pretending they’re all that exist in the pantheon of Leftist Tree-Huggers even better. But here’s the other thing: however much anxiety writers like Klein produce for climate truthers—and it’s not all that—it’s mostly wasted energy. Some of her most blistering critics are spokesmen for the Big Greens Sussman singles out as “Communist,” and at the root of their criticism is the claim that, despite climate change, their partnerships with multinational corporations like the fossil fuel companies have been good for the environment. The irony could not be more striking. Consider Eric Pooley, Senior Vice President of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) who, apparently offended, as Bruckner puts it, by her “merciless savaging” of nongovernmental organizations like EDF, rises to the occasion to chastise Klein and defend EDF’s partnership with, for example, McDonalds: We were the first environmental group to hire economists because we understand the surest way to get most people to do the right thing for the planet is to realign economic incentives so they are rewarded for doing the right thing. We partner with corporations when we see opportunities (but we don’t take their donations because that would undermine our independence and integrity). The results of our corporate partnerships speak for themselves. In 1991, we helped McDonald’s phase out foam “clamshell” sandwich containers. In 2004, EDF and

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FedEx launched the first “street-ready” hybrid trucks ever built. Today, hybrids are in hundreds of corporate fleets, from UPS to Coca-Cola to the U.S. Postal Service. And since 2008, EDF’s Climate Corps program has placed hundreds of MBAs at some of the biggest corporations in the world to both increase energy efficiency today and train them as business leaders of tomorrow. To date, our Climate Corps fellows have identified $1.2 billion in potential energy savings, with greenhouse gas reductions equivalent to taking 200,000 cars off the road.165

There’s a great deal to be said about Pooley’s specific claims. The substitution of paper for “clam shell” foam containers, for example, did not result in any environmental gain; the opposite is in fact true. According to Friends of the Earth, Charles Secrett, [i]f we look in a little more detail at the environmental impact of McDonalds’ demand for packaging of paper and plastics . . . we can see that they are encouraging very bad and environmentally damaging practices, in the forestry industry, for example . . . the wood that’s grown to produce paper and pulp is grown in forestry plantations. Those plantations occurs on land that was previously forested with wonderful native forests . . . and have been replaced by serried monocultured ranks, usually of conifer trees which have a very bad impact on the environment.166

Similar analyses are easily confirmed for Pooley’s claims concerning hybrid vehicles, etc. and, as Klein points out, the difference between a “partnership” and a “donation” is murky at best: “the [donation] policy doesn’t bear much scrutiny . . . Walmart doesn’t donate to the EDF directly. However, the Walton Family Foundation . . . gave the EDF $65 million between 2009–2013.”167 The point, however, is that Pooley is right that the “results of our corporate partnerships speak for themselves”; that is, he’s right, however much this is not quite what he means, that deepwater capitalism is advanced through Big Green corporate partnerships, and he’s right that critics like Klein pose a threat sufficient to those partnerships that executives like Pooley are compelled to draft Op-Ed responses. But that’s about it. Conquest capitalism continues on its nihilistic journey to the end of endless resources; Inhofe advances a racist smokescreen to conceal climate refugees from Mexico; climate truthers like Sussman run red-green conspiracy theory interference narratives; EDF continues its own utterly hypocritical denial narrative about getting people to “do the right thing,”; Ethical Electric pretends it’s doing something different and “clean,” Klein promotes a reforming grassroots effort defined by “ferocious love,” and Steingraber delivers bread to the New York governor. And climate change proceeds unabated. As writers like Parr (and to some extent Jensen) make painfully clear, this is all a sort of scripted dance. Capitalist crusaders like

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Sussman condemn as Communist organizations like EDF who agree that climate change has an anthropogenic component. Klein shows that the same organizations are steeped in money-soaked hypocrisy both with respect to their stated missions and their actual practice—EDF is a corporation whose aim is first its own survival and only second tackling environmental issues, and its reasoning is as indebted to market logic with respect to its objectives as is Chevron’s. Nonetheless, Klein is chastised by EDF for being too far “Left,” positioning EDF in the same deepwater ideological camp as the climate truthers. Or, better: since what really matters to deepwater capitalism is not whether the climate is changing—melting ice sheets represent a potential commodity—but only that drillable fossil fuels remain endless, it can’t matter to its truthers, however otherwise hysterical their narratives, that organizations like EDF take climate change to be anthropogenic. EDF “partners” with Walmart, McDonald’s and Southwestern Energy, a natural gas extraction company recently fined $128,031 for drilling unpermitted wells in Bradford County, Pennsylvania.168 The company may not send representatives to the Heartland conferences, but the offices of Southwestern are just down the street. Although climate truthers largely ignore writers like Jensen and Klein, Sussman does evince some anxiety about what he calls the “green gospel of ecocentrism.” After all, whereas Klein advocates a progressive mass movement,169 Jensen calls for blowing up dams. Where Klein calls for a twenty-first century Marshall plan to save civilization,170 Jensen drafts twenty premises to end it. Klein undertakes and exhaustive critical analysis of Big Green environmental organizations171; Jensen largely ignores them, arguing for a guerilla insurgency, a deep green resistance, instead. Consider once more Eco-Tyranny, this time Sussman’s description of the “green gospel”: Traditional religion is ceding ground to a doctrine that is rapidly gaining new adherents . . . this contemporary creed inspires, transforms, and actuates its adherents. This fresh dogma is being preached in America’s public schools and elite private colleges, as well in our churches and synagogues. It’s a pietism that has successfully mixed junk science, humanism, and paganism into an earthworshipping stew. It’s a spirituality known as “biocentrism” [ecocentrism], and its deity is Gaia.172

While he doesn’t mention Jensen specifically, it’s clear that for Sussman this “earth-worshipping stew” operates like a cult gaining believers by infecting vital institutions with the misanthropist view that “because humans are the more complex species, they have the greatest ability to harm all others,” and that what subscribing to intrinsic value implies is a dogmatic adherence to the absolute equality of living things.173 Sussman offers no analysis of

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“intrinsic value” (and indeed employs it to argue against abortion),174 and no defense against the claim that human beings occupy a position making it possible to for them create great harm (a claim demonstrably true). He simply goes on to identify every claimant to an environmental agenda from Al Gore to the Unibomber as a potential eco-terrorist in virtue of their alleged adherence to some form of ecocentrism.175 And that, of course, is just another flavor of truther hysteria, one that vaguely hints that, just as those who subscribe to climate change are un-American, they’re also likely not to be Christians— hammering down the last nail in the coffin of even the most modest calls for sustainability, and signaling the need for a far more radical—to the roots— insurgency to reclaim the future. NOTES 1. Timothy Cama, “Inhofe Hurls Snowball on Senate Floor,” The Hill, February 26, 2015. http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/234026-sen-inhofe-throwssnowball-to-disprove-climate-change. 2. James Inhofe, “ICYMI: Inhofe Co-Sponsors Whitehouse Amendment #29 that Says Climate Change is Real,” James M. Inhofe: U.S. Senator—Oklahoma, January 22, 2015. http://www.inhofe.senate.gov/newsroom/inhofe-informant/icymiinhofe-co-sponsors-whitehouse-amendment-29-that-says-climate-change-is-real. 3. James Inhofe, “Inhofe Introduces English Unity Act,” James M. Inhofe: U.S. Senator—Oklahoma, March 9, 2015. http://www.inhofe.senate.gov/newsroom/ press-releases/inhofe-introduces-english-unity-act. 4. Kimberly Dvorak, “Porous American Borders Too Tempting for Terrorists to Ignore,” The Federal Observer, August 25, 2014. http://www.federalobserver. com/2014/08/24/porous-american-borders-too-tempting-for-terrorists-to-ignore/. 5. On the Issues, “James Inhofe on Immigration,” http://www.ontheissues.org/ International/James_Inhofe_Immigration.htm. 6. Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Nation Books, 2011), 196–99. 7. Dimitrina Semova, Joan Pedro, Luis Luján, et al., “US Department of Defense is the Worst Polluter on the Planet,” Project Censored: The News That Didn’t Make the News,” http://www.projectcensored.org/2-us-department-of-defenseis-the-worst-polluter-on-the-planet/. 8. Jeremy Bender, “Nearly Eight Years into the Drug War, These Are Mexico’s 7 Most Notorious Cartels,” Business Insider, October 20, 2014. http://www.businessinsider.com/mexicos-7-most-notorious-drug-cartels-2014–10. 9. David Mikkelson, “Tijuana Transfer,” Snopes.com, October, 2014. http:// www.snopes.com/politics/immigration/isismexico.asp. 10. Amy Nordrum, “Obama’s 2015 National Security Strategy Emphasizes Doplomacy, Global Health Amid Threatsf Russian Aggression, Terrorism,” International Business Times, February 6, 2015. http://www.ibtimes.com/

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obamas-2015-national-security-strategy-emphasizes-diplomacy-global-healthamid-1808470. 11. Steve Levine, “Mexico’s Drug Cartels are Standing in the Way of a Fracking Bonanza,” Quartz, February 20, 2014. http://qz.com/178986/ mexicos-drug-cartels-are-standing-in-the-way-of-a-fracking-bonanza/. 12. John Deede and Mark Stevenson, “Mexico Opens Gas, Oil to Foreign, Private Firms,” Eagle Ford, Texas.com, August 12, 2014. http://eaglefordtexas.com/news/ id/133268/mexico-opens-gas-oil-foreign-private-firms/. 13. Levine, “Mexico’s Drug Cartels.” 14. Michael Klare, “7 Places Where Fossil Fuels are Fueling Conflict,” Mother Jones, July 9, 2014. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/7-places-whereoil-fueling-conflict. 15. Semova, et al., “US Department of Defense is the Worst Polluter on the Planet.” 16. David Lauer, “Fracking in the Chihuahuan Desert: A Letter Requesting Support from Anti-Fracking Activists in Mexico,” The Wrench, September 1, 2014. http://thewrenchphilosleft.blogspot.com/2014/09/fracking-in-chihuahuan-desert-letter.html. 17. Lorne Matalon, “Mexico Looking for US Help in Fracking Along the Border,” Latin American and Caribbean Energy Program: University of Texas at Austin, March 11, 2014. http://www.jsg.utexas.edu/lacp/2014/03/mexicolooking-for-us-help-in-fracking-along-the-border/. 18. Diana Washington Valdez, “Fracking May Be Coming to the Chihuahua Border, Mexican Officials Say,” The Daily Planet, August 18, 2014. http://alpinedailyplanet.typepad.com/alpine-daily-planet/2014/08/fracking-may-be-coming-to-thechihuahua-border-mexican-officials-say.html. 19. Michael Klare, “7 Places Where Fossil Fuels Are Fueling Conflict.” 20. The Wilderness Society, “Otero Mesa, New Mexico: Too Wild to Drill,” http:// wilderness.org/sites/default/files/legacy/TWTD-NM-Otero.pdf. 21. Parenti, Tropic of Chaos, 183. 22. Parenti, Tropic of Chaos, 184. 23. Parenti, Tropic of Chaos, 183. 24. Parenti, Tropic of Chaos, 97. 25. Parenti, Tropic of Chaos, 113–17. 26. Parenti, Tropic of Chaos, 191. 27. Parenti, Tropic of Chaos, 196. 28. Parenti, Tropic of Chaos, 197. 29. Parenti, Tropic of Chaos, 188. 30. Brian Sussman, Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda will Dismantle America (Washington, DC: WND Books, 2012), iii. 31. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, iii. 32. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, 9–16. 33. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, 3. 34. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, IX–X, 18. 35. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, 7.

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36. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, 137–52. 37. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, 214–18. 38. Coral Davenport, “U.S. Will Allow Drilling for Oil in Arctic Ocean,” New York Times, May 11, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/us/white-housegives-conditional-approval-for-shell-to-drill-in-arctic.html?_r=0. 39. NASA, “2016 Arctic Sea Ice Wintertime Extent Hits Another Record Low,” http://www.nasa.gov/feature/ goddard/2016/2016-arctic-sea-ice-wintertime-extent-hits-another-record-low. 40. April Glaser, “You Did It! Shell Abandons Arctic Drilling,” Greenpeace International, September 29, 2015. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/ news/Blogs/makingwaves/save-the-arctic-shell-abandons-arctic-drilling/blog/54263/. 41. Jennifer A. Dlouhy, “Shell Files Lawsuit Against Arctic Drilling Protesters,” Fuel Fix, April 7 2015. http://fuelfix.com/blog/2015/04/07/shell-fileslawsuit-against-arctic-drilling-protesters/. 42. Paul Barrett, “Why Shell Quit Drilling in the Arctic,” Bloomberg, September 28, 2015. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015–09–28/whyshell-quit-drilling-in-the-arctic. 43. Robinson Meyer, “Will Any Oil Company Ever Drill in the Arctic?” The Atlantic, March 17, 2016. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/ will-any-oil-company-ever-drill-in-the-arctic/474234/. 44. Meyer, “Will Any Oil Company Ever Drill in the Arctic?” 45. Meyer, “Will Any Oil Company Ever Drill in the Arctic?” 46. Sean Farrell, “Shell Profits Rise as Production Benefits Counter Plunge in Oil Price,” The Guardian, October 30, 2014. 47. Erica Martinson, “Trump Energy Plan Calls for More Drilling and fewer Environmental Protections,” Alaska Dispatch News, May 26, 2016. 48. Adrian Parrr, The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 5. 49. Parr, The Wrath of Capital, 5. 50. Parr, The Wrath of Capital, 145. 51. Parr, The Wrath of Capital, 2. 52. Parr, The Wrath of Capital, 7. 53. Parr, The Wrath of Capital, 2. 54. Haley Walker, “Recapping on BP’s Long History of Greenwashing,” Greenpeace Blog, May 21, 2010. http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/recapping-on-bpslong-history-of-greenwashing/. 55. Walker, “Recapping on BP’s Long History of Greenwashing.” 56. Parenti, Tropic of Chaos, 230. 57. Regina Cochrane, “Climate Change, Buen Vivir, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” Hypatia 29 (3) (Summer 2014), 582. 58. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 41. 59. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, 30. 60. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, 30. 61. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, 1.

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62. Maria Gallucci, “Oil and gas Drilling is Consuming Millions of Acres of US farmland: Study,” International Business Times, April 24, 2015. 63. Kelly Connelly, David Barer, and Yana, Skorobogatov, “How Oil and gas Disposal Wells Can Cause Earthquakes,” State Impact Texas, https://stateimpact.npr. org/texas/tag/earthquake/. 64. Garth T. Llewellyn, Frank Dorman, J.L. Westland, D. Yoxtheimer, Paul Grieve, Todd Sowers, E. Humston-Fulmer, and Susan L. Brantley, “Evaluating a Groundwater Contamination Incident Attributed to Marcellus Shale gas Development,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, April 2, 2015. http://www. pnas.org/content/112/20/6325.full.pdf. 65. Tanja Srebotnjak Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, “Fracking Fumes: Air Pollution from Hydraulic Fracturing Threatens Public Health and Communities,” The National Resource Defense Council, December 2014. https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/ fracking-air-pollution-IB.pdf. 66. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, 87. 67. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, 232. 68. Tiffany Germain, “Here are the 56% of Congressional Republicans Who Deny Climate Change,” Bill Moyers and Company, February 23, 2015. http://billmoyers.com/2015/02/03/congress-climate-deniers/. 69. Katie Herzog, “Surprise! A Third of Congress Members are Climate Change Deniers,” Grist, March 8, 2016. http://grist.org/climate-energy/surprise-athird-of-congress-members-are-climate-change-deniers/. 70. Germain, “Here are the 56% of Congressional Republicans Who Deny Climate Change.” 71. Open Secrets, “Top 20 Contributors to Campaign Committee (James Inhofe),” https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?cycle=2014&cid=N00 005582&type=I&newmem=N. 72. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, 69. 73. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, 69. 74. James Inhofe, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future (Washington, DC: WND Books, 2012), 5. 75. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 170. 76. Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt, 170. 77. Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—And What it Means for Our Futrure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 107, my emphasis. 78. Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time, 102. 79. Frederic Bender, The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep Ecology (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 2003), 86–8. 80. CommieBlaster.com, “Communist Climategate,” http://www.commieblaster. com/climategate/. 81. Sherilyn MacGregor, “Only Resist: Feminist Ecological Citizenship and the Post-Politics of Climate Change,” Hypatia 29 (3) (Summer 2014), 627.

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82. MacGregor, “Only Resist,” 626. 83. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 39. 84. The Heartland Institute, “Climate Change: Consensus,” https://www.heartland.org/topics/climate-change/consensus/index.html. 85. Jay Michaelson, “Armageddon for the Climate Change Deniers,” The Daily Beast, February 23, 2015. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/23/armageddon-for-climate-change-deniers.html. 86. Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt, 33. 87. Michaelson, “Armageddon for the Climate Change Deniers.” 88. Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time, 61. 89. Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time, 61. 90. Daniel Gilbert, “Exxon CEO Joins Suit Citing Fracking Concerns,” The Wall Street Journal, February 20, 2014. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702 304899704579391181466603804. 91. Matthew Carroll, “New Technique Shows Shale Drilling Additives in Drinking-Water Taps Near Leak,” Penn State News, May 4, 2015. http://news. psu.edu/story/355988/2015/05/04/research/new-technique-shows-shale-drillingadditives-drinking-water-taps. 92. Michael B. Kelly, “The 10 Scariest Chemicals Used in Hydraulic Fracking,” Business Insider, March 16, 2012. http://www.businessinsider.com/scarychemicals-used-in-hydraulic-fracking-2012–3. 93. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, 112–13. 94. Wendy Lynne Lee, “The Corporatization of American Democracy, Genicidal Profiteering, and Slickwater Hydraulic Fracturing: The Extortion of the ‘Good American.’ The Wrench, September 18, 2012. http://thewrenchphilosleft.blogspot. com/2012/09/the-corporatization-of-american.html. 95. Till Bruckner, “Naomi Klien’s Own Form of Climate Change Denial,” The Huffington Post, April 29, 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/till-bruckner/naomiklein-climate-chang_b_7148090.html. 96. Bruckner, “Naomi Klien’s Own Form of Climate Change Denial.” 97. Klein, This Changes Everything, 452–3. 98. Rachel Hartigan Shea, “Q&A: How to Make Money From Climate Change,” National Geographic, March 7, 2014. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/ news/2014/03/140307-climate-change-business-mckenzie-funk-windfall-science/. 99. RT Bews, “Major Oil Companies Pull Projects for Greenland,” January 14, 2015. 100. Shea, “Q&A: How to Make Money From Climate Change.” 101. The Wilson Center, Opportunities and Challenges for Arctic Oil and Gas Development, Eurasia Group Report for the Wilson Center, December 10, 2013. 102. George Wuerthner, “Anthropocene Boosters and the Attack on Wilderness Conservation,” Independent Science News, May 12, 2015. http://www. independentsciencenews.org/environment/anthropocene-boosters-and-theattack-on-wilderness-conservation/.

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103. Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso Books, 2015). 104. Ilya Arkhipov, Steven Bierman, and Ryan Chilcote, “Rosneft Says Exxon Arctic Well Strikes Oil,” Bloomberg, September 27, 2014. http://www.bloomberg. com/news/articles/2014–09–27/rosneft-says-exxon-arctic-well-strikes-oil. 105. Bryan Schatz, “Texans are Freaking out Over this Natural Gas Pipeline— And for Good Reason,” Grist, May 18, 2015. http://grist.org/business-technology/ texans-are-freaking-out-over-this-natural-gas-pipeline-with-good-reason/. 106. Michael Klare, “Tomgram: Michael Klare, A Republican Neo-Imperial Vision for 2106,” TomDispatch, February 12, 2015. 107. Parr, The Wrath of Capital, 14. 108. New Hampshire Wind Watch, http://www.nhwindwatch.org/. 109. Roger Yu, “Plains All American Pipeline Indicted After California Oil Spill,” USA Today, May 18, 2016. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/05/17/ plains-all-american-pipeline-indicted-after-california-oil-spill/84488896/. 110. Michael R. Blood and Alicia Chang, “Government Defends Cleanup Effort After California Oil Spill Amid Criticism by Lawmakers,” US News and World Report, May 30, 2015. http://www.usnews.com/news/science/news/articles/2015/05/30/ coast-guard-there-were-boots-on-the-ground-after-oil-spill. 111. Heather Smith, “Oil Spill Returns to its Ancestral Waters Near Santa Barbara,” Grist, May 21, 2015. http://grist.org/climate-energy/oil-spill-returns-to-itsancestral-waters-near-santa-barbara/. 112. Ilya Arkhipov, et al., “Rosneft Says Exxon Arctic Well Strikes Oil.” 113. George Wuerthner, “Anthropocene Boosters and the Attack on Wilderness Conservation,” my emphasis. 114. Paul H.B. Shin, “Texas Floods: Two More Bodies Identified, Including Mom Washed Away in House,” ABC News, http://abcnews.go.com/US/ texas-floods-bodies-identified-including-mom-washed-house/story?id=31456498. 115. Peiser, Benny. The Global Warming Policy Foundation, http://www.thegwpf. org/. 116. Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time, 86. 117. Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time, 87–8. 118. Fae Jencks, “Palin Falsely Claims Domestic Drilling is “The Solution” to High Gas Prices,” Media Matters, March 7, 2011. http://mediamatters.org/ research/2011/03/07/palin-falsely-claims-domestic-drilling-is-the-s/177292. 119. Think Progress, “‘It’s Shameful: Scientists Slam Ted Cruz for Dodging Climate Questions After Texas Floods,” May 31, 2015. http://thinkprogress.org/ climate/2015/05/31/3664206/ted-cruz-climate-change-texas-floods/. 120. Klein, This Changes Everything, 18. 121. Klein, This Changes Everything, Ch. 2. 122. Klein, This Changes Everything, 226–9. 123. Klein, This Changes Everything, 10. 124. Wendy Lynne Lee, “Sustainable Shale Development: The Middle Ground That’s Newspeak for Fraud,” The Wrench, October 21, 2013. http://thewrenchphilosleft.blogspot.com/2013/10/sustainable-shale-development-middle.html.

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125. Klein, This Changes Everything, 5–6. 126. Mark Z. Jacobson, The Solution Project. http://thesolutionsproject.org/. 127. Klein, This Changes Everything, 335–42. 128. Raincoast, “Enbridge Faces Strong Opposition from Heiltsuk,” Raincoast Conservation Foundation, November 4, 2010. http://www.raincoast.org/2010/11/ enbridge-faces-strong-opposition-in-bella-bella/. 129. Carol Linnitt, “B.C First Nations Crowdfund Over 200K to Oppose Northern Gateway,” HuffPost British Columbia, November 20, 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost. ca/carol-linnitt/bc-first-nations-crowdfund-enbridge-northern-gateway_b_6160450. html. 130. Coastal First Nations, “Heiltsuk Nation Responds to Federal Government Decision on Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline Project,” Coatal First Nations: Great Bear Initiative,” June 17, 2014. http://www.coastalfirstnations.ca/news-release/ june-17–2014–308pm. 131. Responsible Drilling Alliance, http://responsibledrillingalliance.org/. 132. Clean Air Council, “Pipelines,” http://www.cleanair.org/pipelines. 133. Klein, This Changes Everything, 49. 134. Klein, This Changes Everything, 64–86. 135. Klein, This Changes Everything, 214–15. 136. Wendy Lynne Lee, “ Of Aristotle and Anadarko: Why Better Laws Will Never be Enough,” The Wrench, October 21, 2013. http://thewrenchphilosleft. blogspot.com/2013/10/of-aristotle-and-anadarko-why-better.html. 137. Merret Kennedy, “Amid Tribe’s Protest, Construction of Oil Pipeline in N. Dakota Halts—For Now,” http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/08/19/ 490644450/amid-tribes-protest-construction-of-oil-pipeline-in-n-dakota-halts-fornow. 138. People’s Climate March, September 21, 2014. http://2014.peoplesclimate. org/. 139. Koch Enterprises, “Directors and Officers,” http://www.kochenterprises.com/ directors-and-officers. 140. Rebecca Tuvel, “Sourcing Women’s Ecological Knowledge: The Worry of Epistemic Objectification,” Hypatia, 30 (2) (Spring 2015), 319–36. 141. Tuvel, “Sourcing Women’s Ecological Knowledge,” 327. 142. Tuvel, “Sourcing Women’s Ecological Knowledge,” 327. 143. Klein, This Changes Everything, 338. 144. Laura Payton and Susan Mas, “Northern Gateway Pipeline Approved with 209 Conditions,” CBC News: Politics, June 17, 2014. http://www.cbc.ca/news/ politics/northern-gateway-pipeline-approved-with-209-conditions-1.2678285. 145. Payton and Mas, “Northern Gateway Pipeline Approved with 209 Conditions.” 146. We are Seneca Lake, http://www.wearesenecalake.com/. 147. Kari Birdseye, “Sandra Steingraber: The Fossil Fuel Body Burden,” Alternet: Interview, January 24, 2013. http://www.alternet.org/environment/sandra-steingraberfossil-fuel-body-burden. 148. Sandra Steingraber, “Fracking Abolition: Albany Speech,” Sandra Steingraber, January 23, 2012. http://steingraber.com/fracking-abolition-albany-speech/.

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149. Tuvel, “Sourcing Women’s Ecological Knowledge,” 325. 150. Marcellus Drilling News, “Sandra Steingraber’s Irrational Hatred of Fossil Fuels Continues,” http://marcellusdrilling.com/2015/04/sandra-steingrabersirrational-hatred-of-fossil-fuels-continues/. 151. Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay, What We Leave Behind (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009), 383. 152. Sherilyn MacGregor, “Only Resist,” 619–21. 153. Sherilyn MacGregor, “Only Resist,” 623. 154. Joby Warrick, “Utilities Wage Campaign Against Rooftop Solar,” The Washington Post, March 7, 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ health-science/utilities-sensing-threat-put-squeeze-on-booming-solar-roofindustry/2015/03/07/2d916f88-c1c9-11e4-ad5c-3b8ce89f1b89_story.html. 155. Peter Sinclair, “Civil War Between Pro-Solar and Anti-Solar Right,” Climate Denial Crock of the Week, March 11, 2015. 156. James M. Taylor, “Solar Power Lobby Seeks to Subvert Florida Tea Party,” The Heartland Institute, April 24, 2015. https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/ news/solar-power-lobbyists-seek-to-subvert-florida-tea-party-1. 157. Austin Ramzy, “China’s Solar Panel Production Comes at a Dirty Cost,” New York Times, June 2, 2014. 158. Ethical Electric, https://ethicalelectric.com/energy. 159. Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt, 16. 160. Brian Sussman, It’s Easy Being Green When You Have No Choice: Sustainable Development and the End of History. http://itseasybeinggreenmovie.com/. 161. Jefferson Mecham, “Causes and Consequences of Deforestation in Ecuador,” Centro de Investigacion de los Bosques Tropicales—CIBT, May 2001. http://www. rainforestinfo.org.au/projects/jefferson.htm. 162. Harold G. Hamm, Continental Resources, http://www.contres.com/about/ leadership/harold-g-hamm. 163. Klein, This Changes Everything, 43–4. 164. Ronald Bailey, “Naomi Klein Changes Nothing,” Reason: Free Minds and Free Markets, November 2014. http://reason.com/archives/2014/11/01/ naomi-klein-changes-nothing. 165. Eric Pooley, “Naomi Klein’s Criticism of Environmental Groups Missed the Mark,” Think Progress, September 11, 2013. 166. Charles Secrett, “Interview,” Friends of the Earth International Rainforest Campaign, 1997. http://www.mcspotlight.org/people/interviews/secrett.html. 167. Klein, This Changes Everything, 299. 168. Susan Phillips, “Southwestern Energy Fined for Drilling Unpermitted Wells in Bradford County” State Impact Pennsylvania, August 11, 2014. http:// stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2014/08/11/southwest-energy-fined-for-drillingunpermitted-wells-in-bradford-county/. 169. Klein, This Changes Everything, 388–438. 170. Klein, This Changes Everything, 5–7. 171. Klein, This Changes Everything, 199–229. 172. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, 95–6.

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173. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, 98. 174. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, 98–9. 175. Sussman, Eco-Tyranny, 101–12.

Chapter 4

Globalization in the Circulatory System of Exchange and the Death of the Nation State—The Fully Capitalized Planet, Five Takes THE RISE OF THE FREE TRADE TRIUMVIRATE: THE FULLY CAPITALIZED PLANET, TAKE ONE A “New Economic Grand Enclosure”: The Rise of the Free Trade Triumvirate Conquest Capitalism’s ideological commitment to “free trade” has a long and, from the point of view of this work, systemically oppressive history. Three of its most recent iterations, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), don’t signal anything new to the logic or trajectory of capital, but they do exemplify many ways in which that conquest affects the metastasis of the planet, its ecological systems, and its inhabitants on an ever-expanding globalized scale. What distinguishes TPP and company from their predecessors is the necessity of climate change denial to their proponents’ justifications, and the psychotic level of cognitive dissonance that suffuses their environmental and labor. “Psychotic,” moreover, is not hyperbole; it denotes the intractable insolence at the heart of “free trade’s” commitment to a planet of endless resources, to a chauvinistic sense of entitlement, and to the ecological apocalypse that follows as predictably as the melting of the polar ice caps and the extinction of the polar bear. What the science of climate change shows is that while previous incarnations of “free trade,” for example, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), can certainly be held responsible for their contribution to economic and environmental injustice, the stakes now are not merely higher, but radically different. It’s one thing to witness the erosion of the planet’s capacity to restore itself; but it’s another to be a generation or two away from 201

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presiding over its ecological collapse. It’s not only justice that’s at issue—but the conditions of justice, namely the ecological integrity of the planet itself. Turns out, however, that no matter how well established its hypotheses, science is no match for the purely instrumental reasoning of capital whose profit motives dictate that the only truths that matter are those quantified as price or cost. Although human chauvinism predates capitalism in largely the same way that the domination of women predates the commodification of reproductive sexuality, racism predates slavery, or speciesism predates animal agriculture or zoos, the die for each is cast in the advantage capital takes of conditions which supply its resources and labor. It’s in just this sense that the Anthropocene just is the Capitalocene—however more deceptively benign the former appears. While “Anthropocene” acknowledges human influence over nonhuman nature, only “Capitalocene” can capture the pathology of conquest capitalism and thus how it is that climate change is not merely anthropogenic, but a symptom of ecological nihilism itself routinized and normalized as denial. With all the pathos implied, I’ll refer to the constellation of TPP, TiSA, and TTIP as the Free Trade Triumvirate, arguing that it not only instantiates this pathological circulatory system but epitomizes its essentially nihilistic character. The role denial plays in the Triumvirate, both in rejecting science and embracing the myth of endless resources, is for “free trade” vital to legitimating the unprecedented levels of human, environmental, and animal body exploitation required to sustain what Wolf Streets Don Quijones calls the “new economic grand enclosure,” a new and potentially lethal form of hegemonic multinational capitalism. Quoting Julian Assange, who succinctly puts it in response to the Wikileaks’ release of the secret draft of TiSA, Quijones’ argues that: “Together, the three treaties [TPP, TTIP, and TiSA] form not only a new legal order shaped for transnational corporations, but a new economic ‘grand enclosure,’ which excludes China and all other BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa] countries” declared WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in a press statement . . . [T]his new enclosure system will impose on all our governments a rigid framework of international corporate law designed to exclusively protect the interests of corporations, relieving them of financial risk, and social and environmental responsibility.1

“Grand enclosure” is an interesting choice of words since it conjures up, among other things, a snapshot of a cozy planet embraced by its atmosphere, or perhaps the nation state wrapped in its geographic borders, protecting the lives and rights of its citizens. In stark contrast, however, to these comforting images stands the Free Trade Triumvirate, TPP, TTIP, TiSA, whose own

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“grand enclosure” is designed to wage an economic siege against any country whose laws conflict with the profit-driven aspirations of its multinational corporate investors, ultimately compelling them into the Triumvirate’s globaltrade corral, whether or not they actually gain status as members. If the world before the Triumvirate was largely, if imperfectly, dominated by Homo Colossus, the world remade in the image of a seamless, unregulated, unimpeded, and totalizing “Free Trade” bonanza makes writer Eric Loomis’ argument from Out of Sight: The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe seem almost quaint: [Corporations] could have become responsible citizens and made their products in ways that gave workers dignified lives and kept both consumers and ecosystems safe, but instead they chose to more their operations and recreate the old toxic and unsafe environments . . . Heavy industries moved overseas instead of investing in clean factories in the United States. New industries such as technology and computing have built factories in poor nations in order to take advantage of lax environmental and workplace regulation enforcement. Companies justify this with language about “competitiveness in a global marketplace,” which only obscures the enormous profits they make by investing so little in their workers.2

What makes Loomis’ appraisal somewhat quaint is that not only does the logic of capital make being a responsible corporate citizen virtually impossible given its profit objectives, what makes it easy for corporations to move jobs anywhere is the power they exercise over government. Certainly incentives like lack of regulatory enforcement, the opportunity to exploit child labor, or low wages, attractive, work moves seamlessly across national borders because, as the ideological architecture of the Free Trade Triumvirate makes clear, there are no borders other than as useful instruments of political advantage, branding opportunities, or “justifications” for the use of government-supported military force utilized in the interest of protecting corporate assets. What I’ll argue, in other words, is that the contemporary nation state functions virtually exclusively as a site, geographically, politically, and economically for: • Conducting the extraction, manufacture, processing, and transport associated with mass production. • Internalizing markets, using the nation state as an effective brand name, for the creation of consumers. • Externalizing the cost of doing business by limiting (or eliminating) labor, safety, and environmental regulations and utilizing the public commons (land, air, and water), as a repository of waste—human, animal, and environmental.

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• Protecting corporate interests in the form of business-friendly banking laws, subsidies, and the use of state-subsidized police or military force if necessary. Laws that “protect us from rapacious [corporate] behavior remain tied to national governments” not because they protect us, but because they don’t. Governments are, in other words, indispensable to achieving corporate objectives because they both help to construct a cover narrative for their rapacious pursuits in the form of “regulations,” and they deliver labor, resources, waste disposal sites, and police protection. The Free Trade Triumvirate codifies this relationship, euphemistically referring to it as a nation state-corporate partnership. But, given the inequality of the relationship, the essentially fictional status of borders, and the fact that “laws,” however benign or progressive they may seem, are drafted primarily to advance corporate utility, a better descriptor of the nation state might be: indentured servitude in a dress. A Free Trader’s Fantasy: Vietnam, Cambodia, and the TPP Dating Game It hasn’t always been this way, or better: quite this way. But following out its own instrumental reasoning, capital has always been on the way to its TPP trade pact utopia. Consider Cambodia. In 1997, and under pressure from American labor, President Clinton “agreed to a union proposal to provide the Cambodian government incentives to improve the conditions of apparel workers.”3 The plan was successful and, built into a trade agreement, “led to enormous improvements [in working conditions] and showed how government could improve workers’ lives.”4 Upshot: regulation is good for workers, and thus good for the country, even if more costly for apparel manufacture. The moment, however, the agreement expired, so too did the improvements: Cambodia now had to compete with the rest of the world without inspections or union contracts. Within weeks of the quota ending, underground sweatshops appeared with terrible working conditions. Companies were more free than ever before to concentrate in nations with the worst workplace standards, and Cambodian labor saw its union pacts quickly scuttled and its working conditions and wages plummet to some of the lowest in the industry. Wages fell by 17 percent for Cambodian garment workers between 2001 and 2011.5

What makes the case of Cambodia relevant to the Triumvirate, however, is that though Vietnam is included as a TPP “partner,” Cambodia isn’t. Why not? According to The Diplomat’s Prashanth Parameswaran, it’s because Cambodia was “not able to meet the high standards of the [TPP] agreement

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currently.”6 Parameswaran hastens to add, however, that the country can reapply, and that Cambodia’s eventual inclusion is certainly important. But while it’s unclear to what standards Parameswaran is referring exactly, they can’t be improved labor conditions. For despite the fact that President Obama touts Nike as an example of the benefits of TPP, one-third of Nike’s workforce are citizens of Vietnam who labor under some of the planet’s worst safety, wage, and environmental conditions. What elevates Vietnam’s TPP candidacy, in other words, is that its labor laws are even weaker (and without union representation) than Cambodia’s. Indeed, as is laid out in detail by the Worker’s Rights Consortium, what “high standards” actually means is “high profitability standards” according to Nike.7 It’s not merely that Vietnam has more to offer TPP countries with respect to labor; in the name of “free trade,” the country also offers more to American and other multinationals in virtue of its virtually wholesale forfeiture of environmental, economic, and intellectual property protections, all of which help facilitate the mass manufacture of cheap products, and thus more consumers, especially outside Vietnam: If Vietnam joins the TPP, Nike will no longer have to pay tariffs to import shoes that range from eight to 15 percent (a cost that adds about $3 to each pair). U.S. companies will get additional protections for their intellectual property so Vietnamese contractors can’t just replicate it. And U.S. companies will also have the ability to sue in an international court if they feel like they have been treated any worse than a Vietnamese company . . . U.S. financial services have more access to operate in Vietnam, and they might have less competition from Vietnamese state-owned companies . . . All of those changes, which give U.S. companies greater protections and conveniences when doing business in countries party to the agreement, will likely lead to a flood of footwear and apparel contracting into Vietnam.8

What seems a contradiction—Cambodia’s exclusion from TPP on grounds that intimate poor labor conditions—is in fact a perfectly consistent example of the market logic driving the trade pact. During the 2015 World Economic Forum on East Asia, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen expressed disappointment, arguing the exclusion put Cambodia at significant economic disadvantage.9 Others have pointed out that excluding Southeast Asian countries could generate resentment and competition between countries that have access to American markets and those who don’t. But that’s exactly the point: while resentment may or may not advantage TPP signatory countries, competition to attract corporate interests advantages the big multinationals who, like Nike, are looking for the best deal. It’s a bit like a perverse version of The Dating Game where potential date countries, competing for Nike’s attention, offer up more and more of their

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“virtue” (promising to “go all the way” on the first date) to the company in exchange for a lop-sided marriage called “trade partner” status. TPP is simply the symbol of that recognition worn like a cheap wedding ring by a bridecountry who’s already pregnant (with sneakers) by the time she arrives at the altar. The gendered language is, however odious, also apropos. Poor countries are treated very much in TPP “negotiations” like the indigenous labor of a Nike factory according to the OXFAM report, “We are not Machines,” disproportionately female and poor.10 It’s little wonder, then, that Bangladesh is also excluded from TPP; such countries function to insure that Vietnamese wages, just high enough to provide competition, will be kept under control, that is, low. The more Cambodia or Bangladesh want to be in TPP, the more their citizens have to be willing to sacrifice for the privilege. The dilemma for such countries, moreover, is that they can’t opt out of wrangling for membership in TPP; Cambodia’s Sen can do nothing else than argue for inclusion. He surely knows that leaving out some countries, perhaps largely arbitrarily, introduces downward pressure on wages and regulations on member countries who will be regularly reminded, just as Sen made sure, of what nation states like his own are willing to do to achieve “high standards,” like allow wages to fall precipitously at the end of a trade agreement. The Washington Post’s Lydia DePillis argues that “wages in the countries left behind by U.S. businesses will decline, and wages in Vietnam will probably rise.”11 Vietnamese earn almost twice that of Cambodians, $1910.50 compared to $957.80.12 But that’s precisely the avenue for Cambodia’s and Bangladesh’s ultimate inclusion in TPP: lower wages combined with oppressive labor agreements that open their countries to more “Free Trade,” bringing even Vietnamese wages down over the long run.13 Another key aspect of Vietnam’s inclusion in TPP and in the Free Trade Triumvirate more broadly is fossil fuels, the lifeblood that makes every other manufacturing and export pact possible. In August, 2014 Bloomberg News reported that PetroVietnam had struck a deal with Exxon to for a $10 billion project to develop Vietnam’s natural gas fields.14 The fossil fuel behemoth also operates an offshore natural gas production platform at Damar field off the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia, another TPP signatory, and arguably its most ethically problematic member.15 The message to Bangladesh and Cambodia seems clear: get on the natural gas bandwagon. In fact, the only obstacle to Chevron’s pursuit of its $160 million investment in oil and gas fields discovered in the 1950s (left undeveloped during the reign of the Khmer Rouge that killed one of every four Cambodians) is the nation state, or rather its inconvenient geographic borders, in this case, maritime borders in conflict with Thailand,16 itself actively seeking inclusion in TPP.17 Put more succinctly: the only obstacle for Cambodia is that it is Cambodia.

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The Function of the Nation State in the Calculus of Capital None of this, however, is really about Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Bangladesh, or Malaysia who, like pawns on a Chess board (or hopeful dates waiting their turn on the set of The Dating Game), are simply placeholders awaiting the decisions of the actually empowered agents: corporations like Nike, ExxonMobil, Shell, Walmart, Nike, etc. The crucial philosophical point is that however we conceive the status or value of the nation state, whoever are the corporate players, and however long the realization of their objectives have been in the works, the aims of the Free Trade Triumvirate are to insure “free,” unencumbered and unregulated, trade and its sin qua non, endless capital accumulation. What realizing that objective requires is that the nation state acts as a site for purging inconvenient laws, exploiting useful ones, preventing new laws from being drafted unless they serve a specific corporate objective, and insuring that conflicts, whether between corporations or between corporations and governments, are resolved efficaciously in favor of the Triumvirate’s investors. We can think of this as a sort of algorithm: where the nation state is useful, say, in keeping wages down, creating cheap labor pools, gutting environmental regulations in the name of private property rights, creating consumers, demonizing immigrants, providing patriotic propaganda, or in brokering property acquisitions, it has value; where its laws form an obstacle, say, to controlling maritime traffic, requiring pollution controls, or paying a minimum wage, it must, according to market logic, be preempted and redirected to whatever course it is that benefits trade. This effective “right” to preemption, institutionalized as the “new” law of “Free Trade,” is, I think, the core concept empowering the Triumvirate, and it points to a foreboding underlying truth: this global set of trade pacts—TPP, TTIP, TiSA—collectively authorize a variety of corporate fascism uncontained and therefore unhindered by geopolitical borders. Its potential for ecological plunder and human rights violations are not only more global, but more likely to lead to war and terrorism, as well as disease, migration, and species extinctions over which the nation state will exercise little real power. The state’s significance, like every commodifiable, is gauged not in terms of suffering, but only with respect to whether any particular geopolitical “incident” is an impediment or an avenue to profits. The nation state thus becomes a tool of the Triumvirate, one that can be picked up and put down. The relegation of the nation state to instrumental status is not, however, the result of conspiracy or explicit design; it’s simply the globalized trajectory of conquest capitalism rooted in a human chauvinism whose own institutionalized axes of privilege and subjugation supply “justification” to its exploitive, oppressive, and ecologically destructive itinerary. The consequences are, however, equally if not even more

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potentially apocalyptic, since, unlike a conspiracy the Free Trade Triumvirate has no diabolical leader, no cabal, no director—just market logic running its mercenary course—right into the vortex of climate change. It’s not hard to see why Derrick Jensen advocates blowing up the dams. To take a slightly different example, one illustrating another way in which the nation state is undermined in its regulatory function, consider Quijones example of the relationship between TiSA and the large banks: “TiSA would effectively strip signatory governments of all remaining ability to regulate the financial industry in the interest of depositors, small-time investors, or the public at large.” Governments, he points out, will no longer have control over the flow of capital, even over derivatives, “the largely unregulated weapons of mass financial destruction that helped trigger the 2007–2008 Global Financial Crisis.”18 Described as a “complex financial product,” and rebooted under a provision of TiSA, derivatives destroyed the pensions of millions of Americans during the Great Recession, and made a few rich white, Western(ized) men richer in its “Golden Parachhute” aftermath, including the CEOs of the meltdown banks, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, and Bank of America,19 none of whom were prosecuted by the Department of Justice for fraud or any other crime.20 TiSA, in other words, has the potential to make the Great Recession appear like a light case of the sniffles compared to the scale of global depression made possible by, as law professor William Black refers to it, the “deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization” of banks “too big to fail.” Black argues that not only have the “3DEs” been critical to modern financial crises, but that as a super-enhanced adaptation of 3DE, “TiSA is designed to replicate [and] optimize the criminogenic environment that made fraudulent financial CEOs wealthy by ‘looting’ ‘their’ banks,” that it contains no provisions either for reforming the international banking system to prevent economic disaster or for prosecuting “private bankers” for illegal activity. What “deregulated” and “desupervised” means in fact is that banking practices that are clearly harmful to especially pension investors will be legal and that the governments of the 52 TiSA member countries would have no say.21 As Black puts it, government is not merely “stripped” of its regulatory power, “the draft [of TiSA] is designed as a one-way ratchet under which nations are only allowed to further loosen their already inadequate regulation, supervision, and prosecution systems.” TiSA member states, in other words, can only deregulate their banking industries, and “even more insanely,” TiSA is designed to make it far more difficult for competent regulators to respond rapidly to a developing crisis and contain it” in that: bankers must be told everything that regulators are thinking about adopting and have ample opportunity to influence the regulators’ drafting of the rule. But

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TISA is an international secret that will remain an international secret for five years after it is adopted. Like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the drafts are kept secret even from Congress. Indeed, TISA is “classified” so that those who might blow the whistle on the travesty may be prosecuted.22

For the investors of the Free Trade Triumvirate, there’s probably no better provision of this set of trade pacts than their secrecy. Liberated to liberalize behind the closed doors of corporate boardrooms and government agency offices, secrecy gives new meaning to free trade’s “grand enclosure,” namely closed to those who’ll bear the externalized costs of TiSA’s trade in services—though wide open to those like Bank of America’s CEO Brian Moynihan to internalize not merely immense profits, but the mercenary market logic deployed to achieve them. What’s great for the big banks is also great for the fossil fuel industry. TiSA frees, for example, Shell to finance its $7 billion plan to drill in the Arctic in virtually any way it deems conducive to capital since any financial industry regulation perceived as favoring domestic competition can be challenged in front of “corporate arbitration panels” away from public scrutiny. Not only does this provision preempt and quash regulatory-minded legislation and/or oversight, it externalizes the cost of financial transactions onto governments. Bound by what TiSA refers to as “Investor-State Dispute Settlement,” that is, a “backstop” which guarantees government backing for entities deemed too big to fail, the environmental crisis that could result from out of control drilling is just one potential disaster that awaits taxpayers. The second is a near-future economic crisis on a scale, as Quijones puts it, “unimaginable,” though we can well imagine what’s already reality for Mexican climate change refugee Jose Ramirez. The “grand enclosures” of “free trade” are indeed enclosures, but of the sort more akin to penal colonies and violent border towns—or Nike factories—for those unfortunate enough to be geopolitically disfavored along the axes that empower multinational Homo Colossus whose armed lifeboats are now liquefied natural gas tankers. From the Holocene to the Capitalocene: Histories of Ecological Apocalypse Among the lessons we fail to learn at our peril from the Free Trade Triumvirate is that there’s no going back to a simpler, less apocalyptic time, whether or not we blow up the dams. Despite Jensen’s nostalgia, that image of a cozy world enclosed in its atmosphere is itself more myth than reality—especially with respect to the role climate change plays in the lives of communities, the emergence of institutions, and the rise of “free trade.” Offered as cautionary tales in Field Notes From a Catastrophe, writer Elizabeth Kolbert canvasses

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the history of civilizations whose collapse and desertion traces not primarily to war or disease, but to a shifting atmosphere. From one of the world’s first cities, Tell Leilan of the Babylonian Empire, to Classic Mayan Civilization, to the Old Kingdom of Egypt, shifting climactic patterns and ensuing drought have vanquished peoples and cultures many times throughout the Holocene.23 Their stories, however, aren’t about colossal carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants or factory farms, but merely the ecological conditions confronted by human communities for as long as there have been communities. Imagine, argues Kolbert, what unchecked greenhouse gas emissions, the hallmark of the Anthropocene, could mean for future communities given what we now know about the relationship of climate to human fortunes in the past? What will be in store for us if the “business as usual” of CO2 pollution continues—or accelerates among competing “Free Trade” countries? To answer this, Kolbert appeals to Princeton engineering professor Robert Socolow, director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative, who lays out the potentially catastrophic implications of climate change, and then insists two things must happen if we’re to avoid exceeding tipping point of 500 parts per billion of CO2 concentration in earth’s atmosphere: • Immediate, globally coordinated, action to reduce our carbon footprint, • Future carbon emissions growth held to zero.24 That’s a tall order for a warming planet whose Free Trade Triumvirate seems hell-bent on drafting “rules” that bind the regulatory functions of nation states in favor of endless growth. As Kolbert puts it, although “luck and resourcefulness are . . . essential human qualities,” and while it’s true that stabilized weather patterns 10,000 years ago created the conditions for the Holocene’s civilization, it’s also clear that the Anthropocene has become so entrenched in ever “narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest” that we’re in the process of destroying the capacity to create future civilizations.25 However certain, in other words, are present-day fossil fuel captains that their offshore bank accounts will survive what the citizens of Tell Lielan likely experienced as the apocalypse, the picture Socolow paints of that future is far less than desirable, even for Shell. Understood in light of that history that transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene to the Capitalocene, the Free Trade Triumvirate is just the latest, though most terrifyingly global, iteration of this destructive form of self-interest, one headed in the opposite direction Socolow admonishes. “Destructive form of self-interest” paints in colors too pastel. The future’s armed lifeboats are painted in shades of ash and mud, the colors of “free trade” cloaked by secrecy and soaked in urgency, putting the lie to any capitalist solution to climate change.

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In light of this analysis, we can’t help but realize that “free” trade is, at bottom, simply a metaphor for the commodifiability of everything. What the combined effects of the Free Trade Triumvirate will likely imply for a growing populace of climate change refugees, communities sued out of their bills of rights by multinationals, nation states unable to protect their world heritage sites, and for global South countries struggling to mitigate ecological and human disaster, isn’t different from what the North American Free Trade Agreement, means for Mexican fishermen like Jose Ramirez: the systemic expropriation of basic human rights in the name of “free trade,” and with it subjugation to the violent “law” of a “new” “world order” orchestrated to advance a very old objective: endless wealth. Unlike the world order popularized by far-right conspiracy wonks and climate change deniers hell-bent on reliving the Cold War, however, the world according to “Free Trade” is neither new nor is it about relations between nation states. It is, however, so lucrative for its Triumvirate investors that even human slavery cannot be permitted to stand in its way.26 This not-so-new world order is in fact profoundly and systemically violent. But, however terrifying and terrorizing (especially for those unlucky enough to be born in the global South, or to be female, or a nonhuman animal), it would be a short-sighted view of history to see the Free Trade Triumvirate as a disorder of civilization. In fact, its violence indicates neither disorder nor disease, but simply the natural course of conquest capital. This is not to say that the market logic instantiated in the Triumvirate is not essentially pathological. Indeed, from the point of view of human welfare, respect for nonhuman animal life, or ecological integrity, the global culture industry made possible by TPP, TiSA, and TTIP effectively personifies pathology in both its relentless drive to capital accumulation and in its use of the agencies of the nation state to normalize rapacious corporate behavior. Consider, for example, the Wikileak analysis of TiSA’s “Core Text”: The Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) is being negotiated by a self-selected group of mainly rich countries, calling themselves the “Really Good Friends of Services.” The leaked “core” text provides further evidence of their game plan to bypass other governments in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and rewrite its services agreement in the interests of their corporations. It also makes the new risks from TISA to governments’ right to regulate in their national interest much clearer.27

These “really good friends” include the “too big to fail” banks, Verizon, UPS, and Walmart—whose labor abuses set the gold standard for global retailers. One of the major products, moreover, of the “free trade” iteration of the global culture industry just is the euphemistic narrative—the vocabulary—through

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which business is conducted. “Free trade” is itself among the most important weasel words in the deepwater lexicon, but it’s followed swiftly by “nation state,” “really good friends,” “liberalized,” and, as we’ll see, “sustainability” among others. Just as important to the “free trade” narrative are not only the secrecies— but the silences. The silence, for example, of TPP negotiators with respect to Malaysia’s status as a “hub of human trafficking,” is neither shocking nor unexpected; in fact, it’s not really different from labor abuses in Vietnam, ecological liquidation in the Arctic or Ecuador, groundwater contamination in the Pennsylvania shale fields, or the destruction of small-scale fishing in Mexico. It all follows from the instrumental reasoning whose core actionable value is exchange. We rightly call this “pathological,” but other than as a description, even this freighted appellation doesn’t mean much so long as we continue to believe that governments have the power to regulate or that there exists some variety of capitalism equipped to resist the conversion of everything into a commodity. However appalling a violation of human rights, putting an end to slave trafficking is discounted against other more important trade objectives. In fact, for some it is a trade objective. And in recognizing that, we swap the right to be appalled and shocked for the hypocrisy attendant on the pretense that we’re shocked and appalled—however much the pretense is party to the cosmetic geopolitical narrative of the “really good friends” who just want to make trade more free. In other words, we’ve got no excuse. The fact is that in the case of Malaysia silence preserves a key “chokepoint” for international shipping, the Strait of Malacca. It’s this geography that makes the country not only a candidate for inclusion in the Free Trade Triumvirate, but for a geopolitical and militarist rhetoric “demonstrating” to the Chinese that the United States “is not going to allow an expansionist Beijing to dominate the region.” A strategy, in other words, cloaked in the geopolitical vocabulary of conflicts among nation states is in fact aimed at protecting and advancing the economic interests contained in a secret trade pact, TPP.28 This isn’t because there exists no such conflict between the United States and China. It’s because the nation state serves to broker the interests of companies whose profit ventures depend on particular labor pools, resources, ports, etc.—located in a specific place. The geopolitical is the economic. We might call this profit-patriotism. In the case of the Strait of Malacca, for example, the success of TPP provides critical competition to the investment-banking alternative China is preparing to offer non-TPP nations, namely the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).29 Let’s not get lost, however, in the free trade weeds. What’s crucial here aren’t the details of the relationship between the United States and China. What’s important isn’t the nation state, even if it’s a Superpower. It’s that the criterion of value enshrined as “free trade” doesn’t necessarily include human

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rights protections (much less concern for animal welfare, or ecological integrity) even where the narrative of the nation state’s legitimate assertion of its interests is advanced, such as “not allowing Chinese expansionism,” and even where the state claims to respect and foster human rights. Indeed, such claims are themselves part of the pretense enshrined as “free” and “fair” trade, and this makes “human rights” just another euphemism in the vocabulary of deepwater capitalism—just another product. Once we understand this logic, there’s no conflict between the deafening silence that surrounds Malaysia’s role in human slave trafficking and the flag-waving promotion of the nation state’s putative obligation to protect its citizens; there’s just the silence, the secrecy, and ultimately the suffering borne by those who bear the externalized costs of “free trade,” in a sense all of them slaves at least to the extent that under the Free Trade Triumvirate, there are no citizens—only subjects.

FREE TRADE FASCISM AND CIVILIZATION, INC.: THE FULLY CAPITALIZED PLANET, TAKE TWO The Nation State as a Branded Product of Free Trade Fascism In the world of the combined potential effects of TPP, TTIP, and TiSA—the Free Trade Triumvirate—civilization is probably better or at least more honestly understood as “Civilization, Inc.,” as one of the many branded products of free trade fascism. Nation states wave their flags like magic wands over “national security” or “human rights” or “national treasures,” but where the right not to be enslaved, exploited, subjugated, or simply destroyed is discounted in exchange for profit-centered advantages like cheap labor, deficient environmental regulations, or reliable shipping access, it’s clear that “exchange security” is what counts. Free Trade thus consigns the nation state to the status of an expedient—a geopolitical site for resource extraction, labor, waste disposal, or trade negotiation—and a brand name. By the same token, however, that branding confers legitimacy on an industry, for example the American Natural Gas Association’s “Clean, Natural, and Abundant!” campaign, it serves to undermine the nation state even further.30 This isn’t merely in virtue of associating the identity of a country with a product, but by appropriating that identity as cosmetic subterfuge to mask the ecological destruction and social injustice consequent on its production, consumption, and disposal, both at home and abroad. Crucial to the geopolitics of branding is that the nation state appear to remain authoritative, that its borders stay at least selectively intact, and that its interests retain a convincing veneer of legitimacy—though the state as a state is largely one among the many tools of market logic, and all the more so with

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the rise of the Free Trade Triumverite. My argument, however, has its detractors. According to Leo Panitch and Doug Henwood in their essay “Demystifying Globalization,” globalized capital doesn’t entail the weakening of the “imperial” state since only a powerful nation can insure property rights.31 Yet, while this has been historically true to some extent, Panitch and Henwood fail to consider that TPP not only strengthens the powers of corporations to sue in the interest of protecting those rights from the state—to circumvent then state—but that although “tribunals” have long existed to mediate conflicts the relationship between states and corporations under TPP is substantially inverted in favor of the latter. The New York Times reports that under typical trade agreements appeal to “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” tribunals has been limited by “the size, legal budgets and market power to come after governments in the United States.” This all changes, however, with TPP: “according to Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, about 9,000 foreign-owned firms operating in the United States would be empowered to bring cases against governments here. Those are as diverse as timber and mining companies in Australia and investment conglomerates from China whose subsidiaries in Trans-Pacific Partnership countries like Vietnam and New Zealand also have ventures in the United States . . . More than 18,000 companies based in the United States would gain new powers to go after the other 11 countries in the accord.”32 In other words, although Panitch and Henwood are right that “[s]tates construct markets and markets depend on states, and that’s what capitalism is all about,” for what markets depend on states is so significantly transformed by TPP that the identity of the state itself is altered—making it not merely a brand, but vitally so in the sense that just as McDonald’s needs its golden arches, BP its yellow and green sunshine flower, and ExxonMobil its red, white, and blue, so too flying the American flag strengthens McDonald’s, BP, and ExxonMobil to sue the United States, to circumvent its laws, and, in so doing, to effectively create its own. Panitch and Henwood recognize the value of international treaties arguing that they’d “like to see a reinvestment in local and national democratic structures . . . linked internationally through the types of treaties that are the exact opposite of the treaties that bring us free trade . . . treaties where people commit themselves to one another to cooperate and redistribute the world’s resources in a more egalitarian way.”33 What they don’t fully appreciate in this pre-Triumvirate piece is that pacts like TPP, TTIP, and TiSA are not simply expanded versions of NAFTA, but encompass far broader corporate or corporatized powers. As The Nation’s Lori Wallach puts it: Think of the TPP as a stealthy delivery mechanism for policies that could not survive public scrutiny. Indeed, only two of the twenty-six chapters of this corporate Trojan horse cover traditional trade matters. The rest embody

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the most florid dreams of the 1 percent—grandiose new rights and privileges for corporations and permanent constraints on government regulation. They include new investor safeguards to ease job offshoring and assert control over natural resources, and severely limit the regulation of financial services, land use, food safety, natural resources, energy, tobacco, healthcare and more.34 Hyperbole aside, “Trojan horses,” “florid dreams,” and “grandiose new rights” are a far cry from cooperation and redistribution with respect to the world’s peoples and resources. Indeed, if the geopolitical, economic, environmental, and moral implications of the Free Trade Triumvirate’s plans are unsettling, what follows both philosophically and with respect to the future of the nation state is all the more so: • No salvageable capitalism: there is no variety of capitalism that, following the dictates of market logic running its natural course, can be reformed, mitigated, or modified consistent with any substantive or enduring commitment to human rights, nonhuman animal welfare, or ecological sustainability. Markets demand growth; growth demands commodities; commodities demand resources. “Free Trade” makes manifest these dynamics on an increasingly global scale. Where a right, for example, to clean water stands in conflict with a corporation’s “right” to industrial use (as drilling lubricant, disposal site, or coolant, say), market logic dictates discounting the former in favor of the latter even where predictable and serious harm results, for instance, butoxyethanol contamination of drinking water in the Pennsylvania shale fields, and even where asserting that right requires appeal to the courts.35 • No commitment to human rights: cases where corporate interests appear to coincide with the exercise of a right are fortuitous but cannot be counted as typical. In “The Sunny Side of Greed,” New York Times columnist Frank Bruni argues that Walmart’s decision to remove Confederate Flags from its shelves after a brutal massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopalian Church in Chareston, South Carolina, counts as evidence of that corporations are “great” on social and moral issues.36 But Bruni doesn’t take into account decisions like Wal-mart’s exploitation of hundreds of undocumented workers to clean its stores,37 or its investment in TiSA via its elimination of “restrictions on store size, number, or geographic location” and “merchandize restrictions.”38 What’s great for Walmart is that the world’s largest retail chain is freed by TiSA to replace main streets, and to flood markets with mass manufactured products transported over long distances, and thereby leave a mammoth carbon footprint.39 • No authoritative nation state: where market logic necessitates it, the status of the nation state is systemically subordinate to “free trade.” For example, nation state signatories to TPP, TiSA, or TTIP that ignore crimes committed

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by fellow signatories (and hence their own economic/survival interests), do so at the steep price of undermining their authority as entities bound to protecting the rights of their citizens. But that is, as Kolbert rightly notes, “business as usual”; the penalty for snubbing the Free Trade Triumvirate could be economic isolation, a disaster especially for those countries (ironically) faced with the drought and/or flooding consequent on climate change. To return once more to Malaysia, when the passage of TPP meant ignoring the country’s troubling record of human slave trafficking in order to insure that the 60 percent of international commerce traveling through the Strait of Malacca continued unimpeded, the United States was more than willing to accede to its Malaysian trading partner, sending a clear message to U.S. corporations that advancing “free trade” trumps ending slavery. But if we scratch beneath this surface, we quickly discover that the real story is about the lifeblood of the capitalist machine: fossil fuels. Malaysia is rich in oil and gas deposits; Exxon, for example, operates 43 production platforms in seventeen fields, generating 376 million cubic feet per day of natural gas.40 Given that profit venture, human rights aren’t merely discounted, but discounted systemically. After all, that 60 percent of commerce is transported on ships fueled by oil and gas. • No mitigating climate change: “free” trade is the predictable if ultimately self-consuming and nihilistic extension of the market logic that drives capital accumulation. “Nihilistic” derives from the recognition that although vital resources like fossil fuel and water are not in fact endless, they must be treated as such in order to maintain growth, thus initiating an increasingly urgent pursuit of new shale deposits, usable water, etc., at an ever more expansive scale of investment. TPP just is that pursuit codified as a trade “agreement,” and to the extent that its investors understand this, we must come to terms with the fact that the pursuit of agreements like TPP is a cynical if not reckless gambit to profit as much as possible as a hedge against a future irreparably mutilated by climate change and other varieties of significant harm, for example, war, terrorism, increasing vulnerability to disease, crop shortages, species extinctions, and mass human migrations. Combined with TiSA and TTIP, the motto of the Free Trade Triumvirate could be “cash-in, and get out,” that is, “internalize profits, externalize costs, until the sun goes down, rather literally, on the climate.” • No new beneficiaries: given the objectives of the Triumvirate, the makeup of its negotiators, its “friends of service,” and the multitude of silences, omissions, and accomplice relationships to which it must remain committed, to expect that the beneficiaries or disposable casualties of “free trade would reflect anything other than those long-institutionalized along the axes of human chauvinism is unlikely in the extreme. As Panitch and Henwood remark, “capitalism does raise their [workers] standard of living.

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The trouble is, it does it in ways that are horrific very often.”41 Any redistribution of wealth, other than in the most cosmetic placating fashion (say, a slight rise in wages, an agreement not to drill in a swath of state forest, monies for a school in a drought-ravaged community, a sale on this year’s blue jeans), is thus anathema to the aims of capital since markets “are made up of unequal social relations in which there’s exploitation embedded between classes,” but also in virtue of race, sex, gender, and species.42 • No hope for democratic decision-making: to expect, as Panitch and Henwood hold out as possible in a world dominated by agreements like NAFTA, that the aims of Triumvirate country investors would be consistent with respect for human rights, democratic decision-making, or the prevention of unnecessary suffering and injustice, other than coincidentally, or that allusions to “rights,” “community,” “democracy,” or “welfare” indicate anything more than placating gesture or advertising strategy fails to appreciate the scope entailed by “free” to the investor, especially given the urgency to profit in the face of climate change. Just as meeting the “high standards” for membership in TPP means signing onto agreements that liberate Nike to exploit its workers without the burden of union wages, or that TiSA frees the banks to trade in volatile derivatives, or that TiSA investors are free to enjoy secret negotiations and secret court proceedings, so too are the consequences of “free trade” to be calculated—euphemistically—as externalized costs. As I’ve argued, if human rights are among the Triumvirate’s first casualties, the nation state is a close second. But this concerns the state not only as a geographically bordered body or a geopolitical entity, but as a locus, as Walter Benjamin puts it, of lawmaking and law-preserving. Lawmaking and Law-Preserving in the World of Free Trade To see why lawmaking and preserving are critical to understanding free trade fascism, and how this illustrates from another perspective why no variety of capitalism is salvageable, consider New Republic writer, David Dayen who spells out the geopolitics of the relationship between “fast track,” TPA— Trade Promotion Authority—and TiSA in terms of how governments can make and enforce laws, The Obama administration’s desire for “fast track” trade authority is not limited to passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). In fact, that may be the least important of three deals currently under negotiation . . . The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) would bind the two biggest economies in the world, the United States and the European Union. And the largest

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agreement is also the least heralded: the 51-nation Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) . . . negotiated since 2013, between the United States, the European Union, and 22 other nations, including Canada, Mexico, Australia, Israel, South Korea, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, and others scattered across South America and Asia . . . [N]egotiations have carefully incorporated practically every advanced economy except for the “BRICS” coalition of emerging markets (which stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) . . . The deal would liberalize global trade of services . . . air and maritime transport, package delivery, e-commerce, telecommunications, accountancy, engineering, consulting, health care, private education, financial services and more, covering close to 80 percent of the U.S. economy. Though member parties insist that the agreement would simply stop discrimination against foreign service providers, the text shows that TiSA would restrict how governments can manage their public laws through an effective regulatory cap. It could also dismantle and privatize state-owned enterprises, and turn those services over to the private sector. You begin to sound like the guy hanging out in front of the local food co-op passing around leaflets about One World Government when you talk about TiSA, but it really would clear the way for further corporate domination over sovereign countries and their citizens.43

Empowered by the Trade Promotion Agreement (TPA), “fast track’s” preemption of Congressional authority to amend or disapprove any particular trade agreement, TiSA effectively transforms the president into an authorized agent or profit venture conduit for the multinationals. This is no exaggeration—though it does seem surreal. Consider: although TPA preempts the legislative branch of government in favor of the executive, TiSA preempts and thus effectively nullifies the president’s authority to make and/or enforce laws regulating state-owned enterprises (for example, utilities, communication grids, universities, or access to pharmaceuticals). In short, the executive is empowered by the wedding of TPA to TiSA to forfeit its own authority to regulate trade in services to corporate enterprises, foreign and domestic, whose interests, given the trade agreements, must be treated as equal. Trade promotion agreements are vital to “Free Trade” precisely because they bind state authority systemically to the objectives of its multinational investors. TPA insures that the agreements are executed speedily and efficiently. This should not, however, be read as necessarily serving the public interest. Quite to the contrary: while the president retains putative authority to reject particular trade agreements, the provisions of TiSA that “restrict how governments can manage their public laws through an effective regulatory cap” make it clear that the real power lay with the Free Trade Triumvirate. The president can, in other words, hypothetically reject an agreement—but for all except the most transparently criminal this is highly improbable. There are at least two reasons why:

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• Triumvirate membership creates pressure to sign trade agreements particularly (and ironically) among the most prominent and ostensibly powerful nations. • In signing, the lawmaking/preserving functions of government are constrained to advancing corporate objectives and/or protecting the state from corporate lawsuits alleging discrimination in virtue of TiSA’s “regulatory caps.” The only way, however, the state can protect itself is by acceding in advance to corporate stipulations. Put another way: the authority ascribed to the president under “fast track” is effectively to run interference against potential lawsuit. The mechanism by which TPA empowers the Triumvirate—empowering the president to circumvent congressional oversight in order to appropriate the authority to forfeit authority with respect to trade agreements—demonstrates how the nation state is in yet another way made into a tool of the “new” world order, all the while it’s rendered redundant as a site for democratic decisionmaking, representational government, or protections for human rights. This does not make for a good day for human rights, nonhuman animal welfare, or environmental protections. And that, I think, is the upshot of Dayen’s mournful remark that “you begin to sound like the guy hanging out in front of the local food co-op passing around leaflets about One World Government.” Fair enough; unfortunately, this “one world government” isn’t the product of some evil cabal or conspiracy; all it requires is the unimpeded march of capital. What Dayen gets is that for all but the beneficiaries of conquest capitalism, the “free trade” future is a dark one; indeed, climate change will catch up even with those favored by human chauvinism—denial notwithstanding. Nevertheless, U.S. Senators like Elizabeth Warren and Charles Schumer, who both oppose TPP, etc., don’t seem to grasp how dark that future could really be under the Triumvirate, or, for that matter any version of Free Trade modeled after it. When they express fear that, as Warren puts it, “the provisions [of TPP, TiSA, TTIP] would infringe on United States sovereignty and impinge on government regulation,” they beg a crucial question, namely whether the “sovereign” had the authority they presuppose it had before the Triumverite, that the state is invested with actionable meaning over and above the realization of investor objectives. But, contrary to Panitch and Henwood’s claim that the state still exercises its own geopolitical prerogative, it doesn’t in fact have that power. Were that the case, the rise of the Free Trade Triumvirate would have been met with more resistance, its departure from NAFTA more publicly criticized, its secret negotiations less likely, its ratification less given. But that’s not what happened even among the most powerful heads of state; in fact, especially among them. When Senator Schumer grouses that the passage of TPP “seems to indicate that savvy, deep-pocketed foreign conglomerates

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could challenge a broad range of laws we pass at every level of government,” he’s speaking out of turn (if unwittingly) since TPP simply makes more explicitly manifest what’s already the case: that the only law enforceable as law is that which serves capital. It turns out, however, that the crucial two-way marriage between TPA and the Free Trade Triumvirate is in fact a three-way nuptial, one that further exposes the status of the nation state as a useful but profoundly cynical charade abetted by elected representatives who, playing their roles as “offended,” “demanding change,” and worst of all, as “defending the working class,” actually help to reinforce the growing power of “free trade.” Consider: at the same time President Obama put his signature to TPA, he also signed TAA, the Trade Adjustment Assistance bill, “extending aid to US workers who might lose their jobs as a consequence of free-trade deals.”44 In the same breath, in other words, that Obama accepts an arguably unconstitutional authority granted to him by the Congress as sole trade negotiator (TPA), he signs a bill to provide aid to workers displaced by the deals to which he commits them—aid whose expense will be borne by taxpayers who are, of course, the workers themselves. But in acknowledging that U.S. workers could lose jobs, Obama effectively concedes he knows the aims of the multinationals are to secure the cheapest labor possible, that these aims are made vastly more realizable by TPP and TiSA, and that the success of the trade pacts he negotiates will lead to job displacement in favor of less expensive outsourced workers. He also tacitly acknowledges what follows from the original premises, namely that because “extending aid to U.S. workers” will require U.S. tax dollars, thus internalizing the cost of outsourcing jobs onto the same workers potentially displaced, that TAA in fact aids multinationals seeking to externalize the cost of doing business. Rising unemployment made possible by outsourcing combined with the effort to keep jobs at home will, moreover, drive wages down further. A win-win for the Free Trade Triumvirate, the only mystery is why elected representatives would support TAA. Perhaps that answer can be found in Warren’s and Schumer’s protection of their own political capital. But whatever the case, and however much TAA is made to sound like “aid,” its main beneficiary is Homo Colossus. The U.S. Trade Representative Office, however, insists that “fears” like Warren’s and Schumer’s are “overblown.” We ought, urges President Obama at a rally in Oregon, embrace trade pacts like TPP because they insure that every multinational is playing by the same rules, that the flow of “free trade” will respect all relevant parties and thereby improve export opportunities for American companies. What the president doesn’t say is that “playing by the same rules” means playing by rules, especially “fast track’s,” that sanction, as Ralph Nader puts it (referring to “King Obama”), the “circumvent[ing of] the

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checks and balances system,” institutionalizing “secret negotiations with 11 other nations, some of which are brutal regimes.” Nader goes on to point out that TPP entitles corporations and only corporations to “sue the government for any alleged harm to their profits from health, safety or other regulations.” We rightly applaud Nader for seeing the crucial connections between executive authority, secrecy, and the power to sue. But, though apparently more astute that Senators Warren and Schumer, even he doesn’t see the full weight of the corporate fascism built into “free trade,” especially the critical role played by secrecy.45 The Façade of the Superpowers: The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank Here’s what Ralph Nader misses: President Obama makes an “urgent” appeal to support giving the executive branch “fast track” authority to make trade deals in secret. He cheerleads for TPP at an arranged event in Beaverton, Oregon, where he quips that “[b]eef is really expensive in Japan. Let’s make sure they try some Oregon steaks.” He chirps that he wants “to make sure Japanese wine consumers have the opportunity to partake . . . in our excellent Oregon wine,” and, sprinkling the whole event with a dash of fear-mongering, insists that “If we don’t write the rules for trade around the world, guess what? China will!”46 Without saying it directly, Obama’s no doubt referring to the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), whose 46 founding member “stampede” to join the TPP competitor include Taiwan, “still considered a breakaway territory by China,” fourteen “advanced economies,” including France and Germany, and Norway whose relationship with the Chinese remains “chilly.” Jane Perlez, New York Times, makes the point April 4, 2015: The last-minute surge to join the bank was considered a major victory for China in a rare public showdown with the United States, which opposed the bank, as the two powers try to outmaneuver each other for influence in Asia. It was also a recognition of economic reality. China has deep pockets, and the institutions backed by the United States have not met the growing demands for roads, railroads and pipelines in Asia.47

It’s only in light of the emergence of the AIIB that we can make full sense of both fast track and the Free Trade Triumvirate’s secrecy, though the connection is itself simple: without the liberty to negotiate deals swiftly, unencumbered by democratic institutions like a congress, the Unites States won’t be able to compete with the AIIB, and thus could not maintain the façade of the superpower nation state. It’s no accident that Obama refers to Japan—one of the TPP’s vital nation state members. After all, what goes for the U.S.

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gander will go for the Japanese goose, namely the capacity to act as a player in the geopolitics of free trade fascism. Some capitalist reformers, Herman Daly for example, argue that capitalism needn’t necessarily or inevitably generate the geopolitics of growth-obsessed free trade fascism (we’ll explore this in depth in Chapter 5). But given the implications of climate change already well underway, it’s hard to imagine an economic arms race between the United States and China that could result in anything other than environmental damage and human rights violations; yet “economic arms race” is precisely what describes the relationship between the Free Trade Triumvirate and the AIIB. To be clear, this isn’t because there exist geographic superpowers in any important sense; indeed, the sheer array of countries that compose the “grand enclosures” of either the Triumvirate or the AIIB testify to the relative insignificance of geography. Rather, the economic arms race is the intentional product of competing—and fickle— multinationals that can “play” nation states against each other for things like dependable access to the Strait of Malacca, “sweet spot” drilling leases in the Kara Sea, or cheap labor pools in Vietnam. This really is like a perverse version of The Dating Game where the super-power who offers the best conditions for “free trade” gets to date the multinational. Perlez notes, for example, that none were more surprised than the Chinese at “[t]he avalanche of countries wanting to join [the AIIB].” A sign-on frenzy “was set off in recent weeks by Britain . . . which concluded that China was such a large export and investment market that it could not afford to stay on the sidelines of one of that country’s pet projects.”48 Crucial, however, to The Dating Game between, say, China National Petroleum and its $1.3 billion “resource barbarian” joint venture partner Dutch Royal Shell, or many of its other gambits, for example, to produce genetically modified seeds able to compete with Monsanto or Syngenta,49 is that “China has now demonstrated it can construct a broad-based institution without the United States in the lead.” Indeed, and what makes this possible—what fast track and the negotiation secrecy of the Free Trade Triumvirate is designed to emulate—is that China is not burdened by the inefficiencies of democratic decision-making.50 China, however, can no more escape the pressures associated with the free trade dating game than can the United States, or for that matter any nation state whose fortunes are impacted by multinationals like Shell or Monsanto— that is, virtually every country on the planet. The more “powerful” the nation state, the more vulnerable it is to pressure to “put out” in the form of lower wages, less regulation, fewer protections, all of which mean more destitution, more pollution, and more violence, and each of which erodes that much more irreversibly the institutions defining it as a nation state. My choice of metaphors is, again, deliberately sexualized to stress the extent to which subjugation continues to be a ubiquitous feature of capitalism even for a “new” world

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order. That the “new” order is in fact the old one is made abundantly clear in the very way its armed lifeboats are outfitted, who captains its ships, and who and what counts as disposable. China depends on the same long-established axes of human chauvinism to supply its labor and resources as does any nation state, and this fact makes a mockery of the claim that “[n]ow, the onus is on the Chinese organizers [of the AIIB] to build an institution that meets transparency, lending and environmental standards and that fits the demands of many kinds of members with different agendas.”51 That these many members consist of corporations like Shell and Monsanto and that their agendas have little to do with transparency or environmental standards doesn’t dissuade the Triumvirate from advertising for itself as ethically superior to the AIIB; and that such standards will be, at best, honored in the breach by both is just more of business as usual. The difference is that the stakes are so much higher. This, then, brings us to the most important feature of the AIIB, namely that it’s a bank—a service. So although it’s posed as competition for TPP, its closest analogue is actually TiSA, especially with respect to the relationship between state-owned interests, for example, PetroChina or Hunan Xindaxin, and privately held interests—Shell and Monsanto respectively. What becomes clear in even a cursory examination of TiSA, however, is that very much like fast track, China’s speed and efficiency set the standard for the corporate dating game. TiSA, for example, “liberalizes” laws governing the pursuit of corporate ventures making state-owned services available to appropriating privatization, including their acquisition by foreign interests. To clarify, it’s one thing for private domestic interests to sell to foreign corporations; Forbes reports, for example, that Chesapeake sold natural gas field stakes in Oklahoma and Kansas to the Chinese company Sincopec.52 It’s another, however, when a critical public utility like water becomes the privatized province of corporate control, as is the case, for example, with the French “behemoth” Veolia and Suez (known as United Water in the United States) whose worldwide operations control water access for millions of people.53 It’s little wonder, reports Public Citizen, that Fortune magazine refers to water as “the oil of the twenty-first century,” but the point’s not only about the increasing scarcity of clean water; it’s about the moneyed bonanza that T. Boone Pickens, among others, see in privatizing public utilities responsible for insuring access: Corporate raider T. Boone Pickens made billions as a Texas oil baron, but he’s betting that the real money will come from mining “blue gold”—water. Pickens owns more water than anyone in the U.S.—he’s already bought up the rights to drain 65 billion gallons a year from the Ogallala Aquifer, which holds the groundwater for much of the Great Plains. Almost all the Ogallala water—95 percent—is used for agriculture, but Pickens plans to pipe it down to Dallas, cashing in on the hotter-and-drier weather from climate change . . . Pickens isn’t alone in his new role as a water baron. Multinationals

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such as Nestlé are buying up water rights, siphoning lakes, and selling our most precious resource to the highest bidder.54 There’s a great more to be said about the privatizing and commodifying of a resource necessary for life. But for now, the point is simply this: the Free Trade Triumvirate makes no distinction between necessary and negotiable resources. A gallon of water and a gallon of oil are equally valuable candidates under TiSA itself governed more by expected revenues than actual ones—a crucial feature of Free Trade with respect to scarce commodities. To see why, consider: TiSA would “allow foreign corporations to sue the United States government for actions that undermine their investment expectations and hurt their business.” In other words, TiSA privileges foreign corporations over the nation state not only in terms of access to labor and natural resources within an country’s borders, but with respect to state institutions that might present a obstacle to achieving its goals. A fossil fuel company, for example, could sue a state on the premise that it might object to a natural gas extraction operation on state forest or game lands. T. Boone Pickens could sue Nebraska should the state try to block his attempt to sell his substantial stake of the Ogallala Aquifer to, say, Viola. In short, a company can sue as a preemptive strike to insure the state does not act to thwart a profit venture in advance of any actual pursuit of it.55 For all practical purposes, the TiSA “expectation” provision transfers authority to make and enforce law to the multinationals since, in the effort to avoid expensive litigation, the state can be counted onto concede, or simply accede before the threat of lawsuit becomes a reality. Under the Investor-State Dispute Settlement—the ISDS tribunal—foreign companies could challenge U.S. laws, and potentially to pick up huge payouts from taxpayers—without ever stepping foot in a U.S. court . . . Imagine that the United States bans a toxic chemical that is often added to gasoline because of its health and environmental consequences. If a foreign company that makes the toxic chemical opposes the law, it would normally have to challenge it in a U.S. court. But with ISDS, the company could skip the U.S. courts and go before an international panel of arbitrators. If the company won, the ruling couldn’t be challenged in U.S. courts, and the arbitration panel could require American taxpayers to cough up millions—and even billions—of dollars in damages.56

Better not to ban such chemicals at all. The insertion of “expectation” into the trade pact language reflects the reality of a state hamstrung not only as a strategy to insure that laws inconvenient to corporate objectives aren’t written (at least not enforced). As the above example illustrates, the vocabulary of “expectation” also helps to facilitate just that case where the prospect of future ecological catastrophe is sufficiently real that the backward calculation of profit must include it as justification for accelerated industrial or

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manufacture activity. Put crudely, but accurately: “free trade” is written to insure that nothing will impede the “balls to the wall” stampede to extract every last drop of fossil fuel, every last hour of labor, every last cent from a patent extension, every last nutrient from the soil, and every last edible animal body. That this behavior is nihilistic is not mysterious; that it’s treated as just “doing business” is indicative of the pathology that has become the global culture industry. OF BLUE JEANS AND BEDROOM SUITES—THE FULLY CAPITALIZED PLANET, TAKE THREE The Role of Expectation in the Calculus of Future Profits: Economic Fascism Whether the Free Trade Triumvirate package of trade deals passes from their Wikileaks drafts into reality or some other version of free trade fascism takes its place, the central point is this: when we look closely at the promotional rhetoric, the multiplying layers of denial, the ad hoc efforts to consolidate power, the relationships among the deals and the dealers, the role of international courts, the combined muscle of the multinationals to thwart regulation, the branding of the nation state and its political enfeeblement, and the contorted logic that undergirds the vocabulary of the pacts themselves, we must conclude that TPP and company reflect not only the next predictable if monstrous iteration of conquest capitalism but, in light of the unprecedented circumstances posed by climate change—something more. That more is what I’ve described as the “anxiety” evoked by the recognition that a limited planet cannot support unlimited growth, and that the business as usual strategy of evoking denial to evade this unchangeable fact is becoming more and more untenable, requiring more and more confabulation, like climate change denial. It’s really no wonder that at this point in history we see the emergence of clownish, if terrifying, incarnations of political and moral malaise in figures like the U.S.’ Donald Trump, French Nationalist Party’s Marine LePen, or Britain’s Boris Johnson. Whatever position they take on the merits of TPP, each personifies the sheer absurdity of a nation state seeking to reclaim its identity in the wake of its expropriation by multinational interests. In their fear-mongering, flag-waving, and cartoonish promise-making, each personifies the desperate effort to deflect, elide, and deny the effects of that expropriation, to make the environmental deterioration, class division, wage slavery, smoldering racism, increasing crime rates, the environmental refugeeism, threats of terrorism, and the disquiet of their constituencies the fault of some “other.” It’s just that denial that ensures the place of each in the circulatory system of capital, and it’s just that denial that’s getting harder and

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harder to make into convincing propaganda against the backdrop of a planet on fire in California, drowning in Louisiana, sinking in Kiribati, exploding in Ankara, and starving in Aleppo. In this light, it’s best to read sloganeering like “Make America Great Again” not as an attempt to reclaim a country, but rebrand a product; candidates like Trump are not as much seeking to be elected to lead a nation, but to be hired as the new CEO of America, Inc. When Trump touts his expertise in “making better deals,” he’s endeavoring to position the United States as a more attractive pick in the free trade dating game. CEO of America, Inc. is, of course, a very different job, one that situates him squarely in the camp of the free trade fascists—one that in his posturing himself as “man of the people” effaces the distinction between “president” and “CEO.” But even incarnations of free trade fascism like the “Donalds” of the world know the party’s nearly over; the sheer theatricality of their out-sized performances is a barometer of their anxiety in the face of that knowledge. What this incarnation of Homo Colossus needs is a reliable ideological mechanism for evading the nihilism at the end of the myth of endless resources, a way to catapult from the reality of a present where we’re still, for example, drilling with impunity to a future that resembles that present—but with greater wealth at least for the beneficiaries of human chauvinism. What this Homo Colossus needs is a well-armed, bottled water stocked, food and wine-provisioned lifeboat that can helicopter over the high seas of climate change arriving unscathed on the verdant money-green of the other side. Evading the fact that there is no other side requires not merely the capacity for self-delusion, but a reliable anchor to hold it steady. Fortunately, the mercenary reason of capital provides just such a mechanism—however completely dissociated from the reality of a sustainable planet, namely calculable expectation. Calculable expectation is nothing new to market logic; it’s simply the reckoning of profitability on the presupposition that resources are endless and that obstacles are conquerable. It is, in other words, business as usual. What’s changed is that climate change changes everything, including the reliability of the presuppositions upon which market logic must operate. This is true for at least three reasons: • Resources critical to conquest capitalism, especially hydrocarbons and clean water, are becoming increasingly scarce, more difficult to access, and thereby increasingly expensive. Tar sands extraction for bitumen is, for example, “slow-moving, complicated, and costly. The cumbersome process of extracting entrapped bitumen from sand in a remote geography while attempting to minimize environmental impact, blending it with premiumpriced diluent, and transporting it thousands of kilometres to faraway markets is indeed fraught with complexity and expense.”57

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• Although climate change will alter planetary ecological conditions in ways predictable to some extent, this does not necessarily imply that expectations with respect to profit ventures will remain readily calculable, especially given resource scarcity and the irrecoverable pollution accruing to industrial-scale food-crop farming and animal agriculture. • Given resource scarcity, increasing pollution, and the implications of climate change, it’s now more imperative than ever that corporations maintain public confidence. What this requires, however, is an increasingly grueling task given scarcity, pollution, and climate change. It’s thus no wonder that we see ever greater campaign donations made to elected representatives like climate change denier Jim Inhofe, more money spent on advertising by associations like the American Natural Gas Association, the emergence of a whole industry devoted to discrediting the science of global warming, or shrill pronouncements like those of presidential candidate Donald Trump that climate change is a Chinese “plot” to “make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”58 In short, expectations are becoming less calculable, more expensive, and riskier just when they need to be more reliable, less expensive, and less risky, and this lends itself to a psychotic level of denial, willful cognitive dissonance, and pressure on corporations to make more consumption more attractive—partly to generate profits, and partly to distract Regular Joe’s and Josie’s attention from a collapsing environment. Future profits aren’t merely about hoping to get lucky and make money; capitalist ventures may be gambles, but they’re not coins in slot machines. Calculable expectation is thus not an aspiration; it’s an existential necessity. Insofar as calculating future profits must include removal of potential obstacles, climate change poses potentially the greatest barrier imaginable because it’s not simply an obstruction. In fact, it’s not an obstacle at all; it portends the radical alteration of the very conditions that make the calculation of expectation possible. It threatens that all bets are off. The focus of conquest capital must therefore turn to obstacles that are conquerable, that fall within the domain of its global hegemonic influence; market logic may not be able to alter the physics of the planet, but the geopolitics of nation states are another matter altogether. Indeed, insofar as the regulatory powers of the state can impede or facilitate capital projects, and insofar as the relationship of the state to multinational corporate fascism is well entrenched and transgenic, the state offers a ready-made site for establishing calculable expectation. One way to recruit the state powers to function as such a mechanism is to effectively restrict its actions through fear of lawsuit into legislating only those statutes that advance its objectives. It’s thus no surprise that the “business-friendly” language of the Transpacific Partnership is tailored such that multinationals aspiring to benefit from its commitment to “free trade”:

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• Avoid interference with investor expectations. • Externalize the costs of extraction, production, pollution, and transport. • Advance expected corporate profit-objectives regardless resource limitations. • Avoid regulatory obstacles directed to environmental preservation, living wage, or working conditions. The fact that the cost of gauging profits expected to accrue to the long term, and then acting on that prediction, could be disastrous for the environment, nonhuman animals, and human populations cannot be allowed to appear in any regulatory legislation or political platform; it can’t disrupt the lobbyist’s luncheon, the boardroom presentation, or the long-range business plan. Such possibilities are seen simply as obstacles to be conquered, not as existential liabilities. According to this instantiation of instrumental reason, profits are thus calculated backward from expected high return on investment; projected profits are then used to “justify” unprecedented competition to extract, manufacture, transport, and consume. Calculable Expectation in Action: The Marcellus Shale Boom Let’s look at a specific example: In 2006 Penn State Geology Professor Terry Engelder predicted that the natural gas recoverable from hydraulically fractured horizontal wells in the Marcellus Shale could exceed 489 trillion cubic feet (TCF). This ignited a rush (literally) of oil and gas companies looking to cash in on the Pennsylvania Fracking-Bonanza.59 Despite the fact that the United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimated the reserves to be far less, 84 TCF, virtually none among the big players (Cabot, Chesapeake, Anadarko, Exco, Halliburton, Range Resources, and XTO) were put off. The expected gas yield governed the way the laws—everything from road widening to well-pad construction to water withdrawal to compressor emissions to disposal protocol to site reclamation—were enforced, drafted (by the industry), or disregarded. The problem was that “expected” turned out to imply something more like “hoped for,” not “actually recoverable.” Indeed, calculating a process so expensive, poorly understood, and risky defies expectation. Yet, and ironically, it was precisely the urgency intimated by Engelder’s numbers hat dictated the ways in which laws were drafted and enforced, with little oversight, routine negligence, and virtually no punitive action in case of toxic spills, blowouts, truck accidents, emissions violations, safety hazards, etc. The results were predictable: huge short-term profits for the hydrocarbon behemoths and catastrophic long-term environmental, health, and community damage for citizens of the Commonwealth.

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Consider, for example, Christopher Bateman’s 2010 Vanity Fair story from Dimock, Pennsylvania: Craig and Julie Sauntner were in the process of renovating their modest but beautifully situated home on tree-canopied Carter Road when land men from Houston-based Cabot Oil & Gas, a midsize player in the energy-exploration industry, came knocking on their door to inquire about leasing the mineral rights to their three and a half acres of land. The Sautners say the land men told them that their neighbors had already signed leases and that the drilling would have no impact whatsoever on their land. They signed the lease, for a onetime payout of $2,500 per acre—better than the $250 per acre a neighbor across the street received—plus royalties on each producing well. Drilling operations near their property commenced in August 2008. Trees were cleared and the ground leveled to make room for a four-acre drilling site less than 1,000 feet away from their land. The Sautners could feel the earth beneath their home shake whenever the well was fracked. Within a month, their water had turned brown. It was so corrosive that it scarred dishes in their dishwasher and stained their laundry. They complained to Cabot, which eventually installed a water-filtration system in the basement of their home. It seemed to solve the problem, but when the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection came to do further tests, it found that the Sautners’ water still contained high levels of methane. More ad hoc pumps and filtration systems were installed. While the Sautners did not drink the water at this point, they continued to use it for other purposes for a full year. “It was so bad sometimes that my daughter would be in the shower in the morning, and she’d have to get out of the shower and lay on the floor” because of the dizzying effect the chemicals in the water had on her, recalls Craig Sautner. . . . She didn’t speak up about it for a while, because she wondered whether she was imagining the problem. But she wasn’t the only one in the family suffering. “My son had sores up and down his legs from the water,” Craig says. Craig and Julie also experienced frequent headaches and dizziness. By October 2009, the D.E.P. [Department of Environmental Protection]had taken all the water wells in the Sautners’ neighborhood offline. It acknowledged that a major contamination of the aquifer had occurred. In addition to methane, dangerously high levels of iron and aluminum were found in the Sautners’ water. The Sautners now rely on water delivered to them every week by Cabot. The value of their land has been decimated. Their children no longer take showers at home. They desperately want to move but cannot afford to buy a new house on top of their current mortgage. “Our land is worthless,” says Craig. “Who is going to buy this house?”60

During this same period, Cabot Oil and Gas, the company responsible for contaminating the Sauntner’s water, sickening their family, and demolishing their property values, published an annual report titled “An Outstanding Year in Review.” In it the company posted a 43.5 percent record production growth, $122.4 million in profits, a seventh consecutive year over 100 million.

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The report’s brief discussion of Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania mentions nothing about water contamination or illness; it cites nothing from the D.E.P. report, others living in the town of Dimock, or the Saunters’ own story. The report says merely this: The Company completed nine Marcellus acreage trades over the past few years covering about 13,800 acres. Cabot is currently working on several others, which are expected to include more than 13,000 plus acres should they be completed as planned. These completed and contemplated trades allow the Company to further consolidate its already well-blocked lease position, providing operational advantages and drill-bit access to the thickest, most productive area of the Marcellus shale.61

Even though Cabot’s fortunes in the Marcellus shale have not continued to meet the company’s projected expectations through 2015, CEO Dan Dinges has every reason to believe the Free Trade Triumvirate has his back. After all, the Sierra Club reports, TPP is good for natural gas production and export: In order for the United States to export natural gas to another country, the Department of Energy (DOE) must first conduct a public analysis to determine whether those exports are consistent with the public interest . . . Unfortunately, the DOE loses its authority to regulate exports of natural gas to countries with which the United States has a free trade agreement that includes so-called national treatment for trade in gas. The TPP, therefore, would mean automatic approval of LNG [liquefied natural gas] export permits—without any review or analysis—to TPP countries. And many TPP countries would likely be quite interested in importing LNG from the United States. This is particularly true of Japan—the word’s single largest LNG importer . . . DOE is considering applications to export approximately 45% of the total U.S. domestic gas production. Exporting this volume of U.S. LNG would in turn mean increased fracking.62

Free Trade not only reinforces the power companies like Cabot already have despite histories of environmental and human rights violations, it reinvests the oil and gas industry with fresh hope for a future of high profitability via LNG exports despite the fact that the pipelines necessary to get the gas to export terminals aren’t built yet. According to Marcellus Drilling News, Cabot, for example, is just waiting on a pipeline: “The Constitution Pipeline is still on track and Cabot predicts it will be operational in mid-2016.” From CEO Dan Dinges: “The New York DEC [Department of Environmental Conservation] is currently finalizing responses to the comments received during the public comment period. The Constitution now has possession of 100 percent of all the tracks necessary to begin construction. The Constitution is working toward the finalization of New York State permits by the end of the second

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quarter and FERC [Federal Energy Regulatory Commission] implementation plan is expected to be filed by [Williams] during the second quarter.”63 FERC, an agency financed through fees paid by the gas companies in exchange for pipeline permits, granted approval to the pipeline company, Williams, on December 4, 2014, including property condemnations (eminent domain) against landowners who refused right-of-way access for construction on their properties. Put differently, FERC granted approval to construct a 124 mile, high pressure, natural gas pipeline over the objections of at least 5 percent of New York and Pennsylvania citizens who refused to grant permission for the pipeline to cross their properties, and the agency did so on the expectation of increased profitability for oil and gas companies through export of LNG. Moreover, while the agency has a long history of ignoring citizen objections (it has, to date, never denied an interstate pipeline permit application), granting permits to private profit ventures although their charge is expressly the service of public utilities, FERC effectively operates well within the “free trade” paradigm insofar as expectation, not need, governs permit approval.64 It’s in this sense, then, that the trade pacts composing the Free Trade Triumvirate are not new, but rather simply more rapacious iterations of the fascism at the heart of the capitalist circulatory system. FERC epitomizes not only the market logic of the gas and oil companies, but the transgenic relationship between the multinationals and government; it operates with quasi-governmental authority, yet with the advent of TPP trade pacts, FERC’s mission is to run interference for pipeline companies seeking the most efficient route from well-pad to export terminal. It facilitates calculable expectation. To extend the circulatory metaphor, FERC works like Heparin, thinning the blood, freeing it of clots; freeing the pipeline company by “thinning out” clots in the form of the right to clean air, water, or your yard. Of Blue Jeans and Bedroom Sets: Patriotism and Consumption It’s no wonder that there exists a U.S. Business Coalition for TPP, and that among its flag-waving proponents are included ExxonMobil, Halliburton, Chevron, Cargill, Citigroup, the National Pork Producers Council, the American Feed Industry, GlaxoSmithKline, Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Walmart, among a host of others.65 The irony is only that, although the U.S. Business Coalition for TPP ostensibly endorses such trade pacts as a project of the United States (or a Mexico Coalition for Mexico, or a VietNam Coalition for VietNam), it can’t make good on the soaring rhetoric found in the Office of the United States’ Trade Representative’s Summary of U.S. Objectives: The Obama Administration is pursuing TPP to unlock opportunities for American manufacturers, workers, service providers, farmers, and ranchers—to

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support job creation and wage growth. We are working hard to ensure that TPP will be a comprehensive deal, providing new and meaningful market access for goods and services; strong and enforceable labor standards and environmental commitments; groundbreaking new rules designed to ensure fair competition between state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private companies; commitments that will improve the transparency and consistency of the regulatory environment to make it easier for small- and medium-sized businesses to operate across the region; a robust intellectual property (IP) rights framework to promote innovation, while supporting access to innovative and generic medicines and an open Internet; and obligations that will promote a thriving digital economy, including new rules to ensure the free flow of data.66

The likelihood, of course, is that the U.S. Business Coalition for TPP doesn’t expect to make good on this high-minded advertisement, but instead rightly sees it as patriotic cover for what its members really care about: opportunities to expand their enormous market-shares. Forbe’s blogger Tim Worstall may put the objectives of TPP best in an article hilariously titled “The Beneficiaries Of TPP and Free Trade Agreements Are the Poor” when he argues that: [L]ow skill labour intensive manufacturing should be done by people with low skills and earning low wages. Because that marries the low skill with low skill and also provides those goods, whatever they are, at the lowest possible price to the consumer. As long as the consumer gets a slightly cheaper price on her bluejeans and bedroom suites, who cares if China or any other country isn’t playing by WTO [World Trade Organization] rules or adhering to labor and environmental standards? . . . the vast majority of the market is indeed based upon price, not upon whether anyone’s playing by WTO standards. Thus, from the behaviour of most to almost all consumers we can see that most people indeed don’t care.67

In a single paragraph, Worstall strips the veil from the high-minded rhetoric of the U.S. Trade Representative’s advertisement for TPP by arguing that the poor will benefit the most from TPP because, since even more poor people will be making more things for the rest of us to consume, there will be more consumption and hence more jobs for the poor. Environmental and labor conditions may deteriorate even further, but since what consumers care about is getting things cheap and not how we get them cheap or where they come from, this cannot be a concern for the architects of TPP. That “what consumers care about” is itself a creation of effective corporate advertising is irrelevant since blue jeans and bedroom sets can be sewn, manufactured and shipped just like sneakers. Few, in other words, need Nikes—but need has nothing to do with it.

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As Karl Marx observed long ago, created “need” is the meaning of “liberalized trade,” and that, in Worstall’s refreshingly cynical breakdown is why there exist supportive coalitions for TPP. Worstall concludes: The American people do not want to protect American jobs at the cost of higher prices to American consumers. If they did then we would need not trade restrictions at all as no one would buy the cheaper goods at the cost of American jobs. So, arguing for trade restrictions is obviously and clearly arguing against the express desires and wishes of the American people.68

Americans, in other words, don’t give a fig about whether their consumables are made in America, and the architects of TPP are counting on it that Mexicans and Vietnamese don’t care either. Hence, other than as a thin fig leaf, a maneuver to seem relevant, the nation state acts as little more than a somewhat cloying host for negotiations among the real players. While Worstall would likely cringe at the reference to “free trade fascism” to describe the ways in which he thinks the poor benefit from TPP, that cringe captures the same irony in a different way: despite its soaring patriotic rhetoric, the Free Trade Triumvirate institutionalizes like never before price and created demand as the driver of the global markets unimpeded by labor or environmental laws, unobstructed by geographical, political, or moral boundaries, and in so doing renders the nation state as antiquated a relic as, say, AM Radio or cassette tapes. Some folks may still listen to AM and play cassettes, but not many, and not for long. Antiquated, moreover, doesn’t mean without usefulness; free trade fascism may have no say over the physics of the planet’s limited resources, but its re-purpose of the state as a brand, a labor pool, a police force, a site for negotiation empowering its corporate interests sufficiently to sustain the one thing it can’t function without: denial that climate change is going to burn its house of cards down to the ground.

CASHING OUT ON HYDROCARBONS: TEA PARTY NATIONALISM AND THE STRANGE ROLE OF CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM IN “FREE TRADE,” THE FULLY CAPITALIZED PLANET—TAKE FOUR The History of Civilization, Inc.: Human Chauvinism and Colonialism By the time we become resigned to the fundamental restructuring of our relationship to nature, its ecosystems and species, to human labor, nonhuman animals, food and water, and to the future of the Capitalocene via Free Trade,

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particularly as it’s incarnated in agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, we will have decisively (however unwittingly), subjugated ourselves (and many others) to the preemptive transformation of our existential conditions. I say “preemptive” because what we’re living out are the implications of a logic whose self-contradictory “profit at all costs” objectives undermine the planet’s capacity to sustain life. What might seem to some a new world order is just the latest instantiation of a very old ideology about what counts as value, as necessarily endless, as a certain sort of fiction called a “nation state,” what counts as a person, a commodity, a tool, or a disposable. To gain a sense of its scope helps to explain why the appellation “fascism” to “free trade” under the Free Trade Triumvirate is neither hyperbole nor alliteration—but simply descriptive. At its core, the constellation of trade agreements which form the Triumvirate reiterate a worldview as old Nicholas Barbon’s 1690 A Discourse of Trade, itself a kind of manifesto for Homo Colossus: The Native Staple of each Country is the Riches of the Country, and is perpetual, and never to be consumed; Beasts of the Earth, Fowls of the Air, and Fishes of the Sea, Naturally Increase: There is Every Year a New Spring and Autumn, which produceth a New Stock of Plants and Fruits. And the Minerals of the Earth are Unexhaustable; and if the Natural Stock be Infinite, the Artificial Stock that is made of the Natural, must be Infinite . . . To Conquer, and leave them [a conquered people] Free, only paying Tribute and Homage, Is the same as not to conquer them: For there is no Reason to expect their Submission longer, than till they are able to Resist; which will not be long before they make the same Opposition, if they continue in the same Possession; and therefore, though the Romans in the Infancy of their Government, did leave several Countries Free, as an Assistance to other Conquest; yet, when they grew stronger, they turned all their Conquest into Provinces, being the surest way to keep them from Revolting.69

An early illustration of the crucial role played by the myth of endless resources and of the relationship between capital, conquest, and colonialism, the only real differences between Barbon’s view of “free” trade and the Triumvirate’s is that for Barbon the country designates a meaningful geographical entity, governments are empowered “partners” in capital conquest, and violence is an expressly legitimate tool in achieving that objective. Like Tim Worstall’s, Barbon’s capitalism is refreshingly forthright in its tactics and aims—in direct contrast with the “free trade” rhetoric of the corporate and/or government brokers for the Triumvirate—and despite the fact that the latter’s objectives, more cynically and urgently pursued than ever, remain largely the same. For both, conquest, however it’s pursued, remains an economic venture first and foremost.

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To refer to the preemptive transformation of our existential conditions isn’t then quite right. For while many may see TPP, etc., as “new,” the conversion of the planet’s ecologies into commodities, its indigenous populations into conquered subjugates, and its cultures into “Civilization, Inc.,” isn’t really all that different from Barbon’s approval of turning free peoples into colonized provinces, their resources into commodities deployed to the state’s largesse. Although Roman conquests were less technologically sophisticated, this doesn’t mean they were more brutal—as a survey of Mexican drug cartels, Vietnamese working conditions, and West Kenyan cattle raids make clear. That we can trace Free Trade’s key ideological features (at least) to 1690, and that Barbon provides a rather perceptive caricature of Homo Colossus, sheds light on “preemptive,” highlighting the fact that it’s in the interest of Triumvirate investors and their nation state “partners” to convince us that what’s in TPP, TiSA, and TTIP is good, liberating, and fair—that globalization offers a “new” kind of capitalism—not the same old oppression, enslavement, resource depletion, pollution, and violence. Just as climate change deniers create doubt about whether continuing fossil fuel extraction is warming the planet, leaving just enough room for an LNG tanker to eek though, the soaring rhetoric of “unlocked opportunities,” “enforceable labor standards,” and “meaningful market access” creates a sense of a new (American) frontier. The trouble, however, is not only that there’s no such thing as a “new” frontier on a planet whose every corner has been “unlocked” to capital conquest, or even that “meaningful market access” will unleash a level of environmental and labor exploitation that might have dispirited even the Romans. It’s that Free Trade instantiates a myopic conquest, a pathology that reasons exclusively from the standpoint of its objectives, namely unconstrained hegemony over whatever can be converted to exchange value and thereby made available to the endless circulation of capital. It’s that, equipped with the technology, the state-supported military, the industry-crafted laws, the inaccessible courts, the international banks, and that machinery called a “trade pact,” the Free Trade Triumvirate is in a position to make of the Anthropocene not only the complete human penetration of nature, but the wholesale expropriation of what counts as “nature,” as “human being,” and as “free,” Jason Moore’s Capitalocene. When President Obama suggests the Japanese should try some Oregon wine, for example, he implies that TPP makes possible something really different—a new day for international cooperation and free exchange. That this day isn’t new, or that what “free” turns out to mean is “the unfettered conquest of capital,” just isn’t important so long as the advocates of “Free Trade” get the marketing right. After all, trade agreements (especially when they determine so much more than trade) are themselves products that have to be promoted and sold. Put differently: it would be a mistake to think that Obama’s most important audiences were Regular Joes and Josies who,

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as Worstall notes, don’t care where their blue jeans and bedroom sets come from (or who buys their wine). The president may be speaking to ordinary Americans (or using us as advertising to the Japanese), but he’s speaking for trade pact investors interested in insuring that what people want to try are what they want to sell; the Anthropocene is a market too. The trouble is that once we understand what’s essential to the globalization of “free trade,” instantiated as TPP, TiSA, TTIP, TAA, TPA—and the AIIB— we can’t miss the fact that “new” is not just old, but the same old—oppression, exploitation, pollution, and commodification. From the point of view of its beneficiaries, the Triumvirate simply continues a natural trajectory, empowering conquest in ways designed to insure the global hegemony of capital and a fully global culture industry via • The capacity to effectively make law and pursue litigation on the basis of profits expected to accrue to the application of those laws. • The use of secrecy in negotiating trade pacts to insure the least interruption or obstacle to the realization of specific objectives. • The smooth execution of trade negotiation lubricants (TPA and TAA) to facilitate objectives expeditiously. • The establishment of conflict-resolution tribunals and courts inaccessible to the public. • The further appropriation of the nation state as a brand, labor pool, deployable military, front—and the simultaneous erosion of its powers as a geographically bordered political, civic, and cultural entity. • The conversion of geographic borders into labor venues, exchange value, or militarized protection of assets. Once we understand, in other words, what’s in the Free Trade Triumvirate— we realize that Barbon’s reference to “submission” tell as true a story in the twenty-first century as it did in the seventeenth. Indeed, reading A Discourse of Trade reinforces three critical presuppositions inherent in the market logic of capitalism, each of which sheds light on its philosophical evolution to capitalism, then to international agreements like NAFTA, onward to conquest capitalism, and then finally to the fully globalized Free Trade Triumvirate: • First, human chauvinism is, however tacitly, taken for granted as a description of human nature. However we might euphemistically describe it, the world can be carved at its joints into the conquerors and the conquerable, the rulers and the subjugated. That the rulers are primarily male and that value divides along joints defined by race, sex, gender, and species, are as true now as ever. That institutions including government, religion, and economic class are complicit in maintaining the prerogative to define value

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in terms of exchange is reinforced through Free Trade, but not significantly altered by it. That conquest has been conceived as an expression of the natural order historically is not substantially different now than it was for thinkers like Barbon. This is not to say that multinationals think in terms of notions like “natural order,” but simply that the world inherited from the conquerors Barbon praises is “ordered” to their advantage. • Second, the conquered are assigned value along the axes of human chauvinism, itself an intersection of race, sex, gender, species, or ecology, and from this point of departure as labor, consumer, commodity, obstacle, or disposable. Whether colonized by Roman soldiers, Malaysian sex-traffickers, American oil and gas companies, Mexican drug cartels, or factory farmers, subjugated populations remain essential to capital conquest because profits are maximized through the appropriation of resources, the reduction of costs as low wages (or slavery), the avoidance of health, safety, and environmental regulation, or by externalizing expenses onto other entities. Whatever endangers access to resources crucial to profit-generating activities such as extraction, production, transport, export, or marketing, creates conditions for greater subjugation since the margin between the production expense and profit is likely narrow. • Third, the Free Trade Triumvirate instantiates a globalized, more technologically sophisticated iteration of capitalism. What distinguishes it from its predecessors aren’t its basic presuppositions or logic, but that it can facilitate three apparently divergent courses, each a response to climate change, all of which embody the instrumentality of reason appropriated to capital. These include business as usual (cash-out), climate change denial/trutherism, and climate change capitalism (cash-in). The upshot, however, is straightforward: the appearance of divergence is just that, appearance. Insofar as each describes a strategy toward achieving an objective, namely the realization of exchange value, which is to be deployed in any given circumstance by the advocates of Free Trade is determined not by commitments to truth-telling or value beyond commodification, but simply by the likelihood of success. The first of these, as Kolbert puts, is, business as usual: this most obvious course insures maximally efficient profitable conditions for “traditional” multinationals, the big banks, privatized water companies, GMO food production, global supply chain retail goods and services, pharmaceuticals, and fossil fuels, each seeking to cash out for as long and lucratively as possible on expected future profits despite the potential effects of climate change. Trade—Not Trees: The Fortunes of Tea Party Regular Joe Given these aims, it’s not surprising we find “business as usual” incorporated into the environmental clauses of TPP as an absence of provisions that would

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commit any signatory country to regulatory enforcement. According to the Wikileaks summary, for example, what’s protected by TPP is trade—not trees: The Environment Chapter clearly shows the intention to first and foremost protect trade, not the environment. The principle is spelled out in this draft that local environmental laws are not to obstruct trade or investment between the countries. Furthermore, there is great emphasis on the self-regulatory principle when it comes to environmental protection, and emphasis on “. . . flexible, voluntary mechanisms, such as voluntary auditing and reporting, market-based incentives, voluntary sharing of information and expertise and public-private partnership.” But even such measures should be designed in a manner that “. . . avoids the creation of unnecessary barriers to trade.”70

The TPP “Environment Working Group” denies this, of course, but the evidence is clear: there are virtually no enforcement mechanisms in the trade pact; it relies on the voluntary reporting of industries whose histories of self-disclosure are laughably poor, and it explicitly privileges trade over environment.71 While, moreover, it’s important to remember that different industries will be affected differently by a warming planet—extractible carbons will run out, but GMO corn and soy can (in theory) be grown indefinitely—none can ignore entirely retreating ice sheets, vanishing shorelines, shifting breadbaskets, and changing patterns of disease even if they deny them. Hence, we must read the TPP clauses as a preemptive strike against environmental regulations aimed at mitigating the effects of climate change wherever their creation or enforcement pose a risk to future profitability. What’s remarkable is that, however evasive, the TPP Environmental Working Group report is a response to climate change, and as such presents a dilemma for those who fancy themselves committed to both the ideology of unregulated trade and to the nation state as a locus of legitimate authority. Consider, for example, TPP from the point of view of Regular Joe, free trade libertarian, Tea Party member and, like his fellow “Americans who support the conservative Christian movement, sometimes known as the religious right,” a committed Christian believer.72 In the first place, TPP looks good to the libertarian—at least for a while: its environmental provisions are nonbinding. They allow that any nation state whose environmental regulations “could cause a reduction in the company’s future profits” could be exposed to lawsuit. According to Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, for example, “New York’s fracking ban would be a likely candidate for a Tribunal suit, should these agreements be signed by the President.”73 Private citizens like Tea Party Regular Joe, however, would

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also have no standing to sue for environmental damages should the state make available his property through eminent domain for the construction of, for example, a high-pressure natural gas pipeline. Reinforcing an increasing number of state court cases seeking to prevent lawsuits by multinationals, a private citizen who loses a case against the state’s failure to protect their property rights, would have few other avenues for the pursuit of redress. As Ecowatch writer Alison Rose Levy puts it: “[f]oreign corporations can take our food, health and safety protections and bring us [the U.S.] before these tribunals and if they lose, we pay millions of dollars in compensation. Upshot: in a competition between defending itself against a powerful corporation and protecting Regular Joe’s drinking water well and property values, the state will chose itself even if this means sacrificing Regular Joe and/or conceding in advance to repealing the regulations that protect his property and property values.74 Second, TPP pits nationalism against free trade. That private citizens like Tea Party Regular Joe are disempowered by TPP is particularly thorny for libertarian, flag-waving, mostly white Christian conservatives. As a libertarian, Regular Joe’s a staunch advocate of free trade and private property rights; indeed, he probably sees them as largely the same. As an ideological conservative, he’s also probably a committed nationalist (perhaps even a member of the Constitution Party).75 As a fundamentalist-leaning Christian, he may have a social and political agenda that includes a hefty dose of climate change denialism.76 And if Regular Joe’s an elected representative, he may need donor support to advance that agenda. So however else we see Regular Joe’s rights as an American citizen, his commitments present serious problems: • Although Tea Party Regular Joe is happy to see that his libertarian antiregulation commitments are built into TPP, he may not see that his position empowers multinational hydrocarbon corporations to take advantage of his property, or, for example, the mineral rights they’ve leased from the state a mile under it. Such is already reality in thousands of cases, for example, Encana’s permit to drill for natural gas in a suburban Denver housing development.77 • However much Regular Joe might, especially in light of his climate change denial, applaud TPP’s weak environmental provisions, he might also discover that Encana’s right to lease the mineral rights under his house violate even more basic human rights, for example, the right to clean water or the right to be free of noise or light pollution. When all-night fracking in that Denver neighborhood began to cost Mike Lozinski his sick time at his job as an air traffic controller, Encana offered to put his family up in a local hotel—but not to stop the night operations. When Lozinski was finally able to have Encana cited for noise pollution, the company responded that it

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amounted to “the equivalent of a ticket,” and the drilling continued.78 Combine the fact that TPP allows companies like Encana to sue for expected profits—calculable expectations—with weak environmental, including noise, regulations, and Lozinski, who doesn’t oppose fracking per se, has every reason to believe that his right to sleep will be trumped by Encana’s “right” to derive the maximum utility from its gas lease. • As a climate change denier/truther, Tea Party Regular Joe would likely oppose environmental regulatory provisions not only on anti-regulatory grounds, but because however weak, TPP does (vaguely) recognize climate change as real, urging its signatories to act to mitigate it. Regular Joe could thus find himself in the unenviable position of wanting to see greater protections for his property rights or, like Mike Lozinski, his right to sleep at night—but discover that he’s traded his right to sleep (drink clean water, see the night stars, tap his sugar maples, graze his cows, use his driveway, avoid toxic exposure to benzene) for his right to oppose regulations that, aimed at curbing climate change, might have also curbed the fracking operations on or under his property. • A significant conflict of commitment for Regular Tea Party Joe is that his anti-regulatory free-market libertarianism is, however much he ignores it, inconsistent with his patriotic nationalism specifically with respect to the weakening of the nation state under TPP. The Encana drilling operation that keeps him up at night along with Mike Lozinski isn’t an American company seeking to serve a domestic market; it’s Canada’s biggest natural gas corporation who struck a 2010 deal with Korea Gas “to bring gas to the surface from a huge patch of land” in the natural gas fields of British Columbia.79 Regular Joe might not care about this so much as long as the gas he heats his house with stays cheap. But Encana’s plans for LNG shipments to the Asian markets where the price is nearly three times higher will mean higher prices at home. More importantly to Regular Joe, perhaps, is that what’s reflected in that price is that Encana, like its American analogues (Chesapeake, Anadarko, ExxonMobil, Southwestern, Devon), doesn’t make its decisions premised on nationalist loyalties, but rather expected profit margins. His patriotism isn’t their patriotism, and his endorsement of the nation state is undercut every time he pays his gas bill to corporations whose export objectives make heating his house more expensive. What undermines the authority of the nation state, moreover, also weakens the power of its electeds to agitate for things Tea Party Regular Joe wants: strict border patrols, a powerful military, “English only” initiatives, and a single national Christian identity. • Another problem for the Tea Party is that although its libertarian commitments are consistent with TPP as free trade, its adherents object to giving the president executive—fast track—powers to negotiate trade deals. Such

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powers are, after all, arguably unconstitutional. Such is the position of one of the major Tea Party groups, Americans for Limited Government (ALG) who support TPP on free trade grounds, but object to fast track TPA: “Congress is getting ready to give Obama more power, just when we’re getting ready to choose his replacement . . . If Congress gives Obama fast-track power, he’ll use it to write more regulations for our economy—for the entire world.” It’s ironic that ALG’s worry is that President Obama will abuse his authority to draft more regulations when the purpose of TPA is to circumvent the potentially regulatory intentions of Congress. ALG, in other words, supports a trade deal that would permit Encana to continue to drill in violation of Mike Lozinski’s right to sleep, but opposes authorizing a president the option to reject a deal because it violates environmental regulations. That the president is unlikely to reject any such deal is irrelevant; ALG effectively sides with Encana (or whomever) against the president, and therefore against its members like Regular Joe who was protected by regulation even if he rejects it.80 • Tea Party Regular Joe is likely happy that, according to Wikileaks “[t]he Environment Chapter [of TPP] is noteworthy for its absence of mandated clauses or meaningful enforcement measures.” In other words, TPP environmental provisions are not only nonbinding, they’re missing in action. Worse, “[t]he dispute settlement mechanisms it [TPP] creates are cooperative instead of binding; there are no required penalties and no proposed criminal sanctions. With the exception of fisheries, trade in ‘environmental’ goods and the disputed inclusion of other multilateral agreements, the Chapter appears to function as a public relations exercise.”81 But Regular Joe’s not really benefited since the likelihood that his interests would be relevant to any dispute settlement is negligible. If Encana contaminates Regular Joe’s well water, he’d be well advised to take whatever they offered to buy out his property because if he walks away (say, this was his dream house or his grandma’s), so will Encana, and an exercise in public relations offers cold comfort at best.82 • However Tea Party Regular Joe might be tempted to see TPP as free trade, the nonbinding environmental clauses count as lawmaking. They preemptively bar the state from imposing environmental statutes inconsistent with TPP. Any state that erects, say, a fracking ban in virtue of noise pollution, or a factory farm ban in virtue of toxic odors, can be sued for discrimination against a corporation’s expected earnings. Regular Joe must choose between the conviction that genuinely free trade is inconsistent with regulation and the equally important conviction that communities—municipalities, counties, townships, states—ought to be able to decide for themselves whether they want a particular industrial activity like fossil fuel extraction. In effect, then, like the president, Regular Joe becomes a spokesperson for

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Encana the moment he takes the podium at a township meeting to speak against an ordinance to ban drilling within his township. He may wave the stars and stripes as if he were defending a national commitment to free trade, but the effect is to externalize the environmental and health costs onto the very unit he likely holds to be central to a functioning nation state—the community itself. • Lastly, according to Senior Trade Analyst for Friends of the Earth, William Waren, the consequence of weak or absent environmental constraints in conjunction with the capacity to sue for expected future profits “will unleash a gigantic explosion of trade in fossil fuels,” including strip-mining for coal in the Wyoming Powder River Basin, “bomb train” rail transport to Oregon and Washington State ports, including the Puget Sound, the expansion of the TRANSCO in Pennsylvania, and a reincarnation of the Keystone XL Pipeline which “would likely become the basis for an Investor State Tribunal suit brought by Trans Canada,” the pipeline’s builder.83 Whatever else Tea Party Regular Joe holds, his libertarianism, his membership in Americans for Limited Government, and his Christian conservatism, will not protect his home, his land, his water, his health, his family, or his property values from the conquest capitalism reinforced in TPP. He is, like the citizens of the Roman provinces Barbon notes, a subject whose relationship to his land, community, and country are being radically re-inscribed by the mercenary objectives of Free Trade. That Regular Joe doesn’t see this isn’t, however, surprising. After all, every time he wraps himself in the flag, he’s effectively advertizing for the Free Trade Triumvirate. Fundamentalist Christianity and Climate Trutherism The second response to climate change facilitated by the Free Trade Triumvirate is Denial/Trutherism, for example, Senator Jim Inhofe whose political fortunes rely on a potent mix of denial, anti-immigration racism, and nationalism, or representative Ted Cruz, whose own religion-infused trutherism, the American Energy Renaissance Act, won a record-setting fifteen million in SuperPac money to support his (albeit failed) run for the 2016 Republican nomination for the U.S. Presidency.84 This response intersects then with another important aspect of Tea Party Regular Joe’s convictions—his fundamentalist Christianity. Religion, in fact, plays a vital role brokering the relationship between “business as usual,” climate trutherism, and climate change opportunism. Indeed, the infusion of religion can make an ordinary venture in conquest capitalism far more lucrative—and far more terrorizing. First, however otherwise parasitic, that climate trutherism is itself a profitcentered venture is made clear by the proliferation of well-financed institutes

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like Heartland devoted to merchandizing doubt about climate change, to creating the appearance of debate where there is none, and to running interference for companies who stand to gain from the trade pacts which form the Triumvirate. That hydrocarbon companies have an immense stake in denying climate change is old news, but what’s less often explored is the extent to which an old ally, far-right conservative Christianity, the religious base of the Tea Party, has assumed a “new” role: helping to facilitate the fortunes of the oil and gas industry on an ever more global scale while at the same time advancing a human chauvinism whose beneficiaries aren’t merely the usual suspects, but are presumed to be so as a reflection of God’s providence and intentions. It’s no coincidence that the lion’s share of truthers, fossil fuel company executives, and Triumvirate negotiators are white, male, Western(ized), and affluent; religion plays a central role reinforcing institutions throughout the history of conquest capitalism that make them their primary beneficiaries. But if the voices that prevail are those who hold, like Ted Cruz, that “the miracle of America” is instantiated in an industry whose record of human rights violations is nothing short of staggering—wedding the country’s presumed religious destiny to the conquest of oil and gas—human chauvinism takes on a face that, though not new, is more menacing and rapacious than ever. Second, while the fossil fuel industry spends a good deal on climate change denial, it also banks on melting Arctic ice sheets to make more drilling possible. In fact, running interference is what makes drilling in the sensitive ecologies of the Arctic possible, and it’s on both denial and the fact of climate change that wealthy campaign donors, like the $15 million Wilks Brothers, depend to finance a cornucopia of extreme right religious causes. The brothers have indeed lavished their fracking fortunes on, for example, work to introduce conservative biblical dogma in public school classrooms and establish crisis pregnancy centers whose personnel “refuse . . . to talk to single women about contraception.”85 They subscribe to a version of Christianity that “believes women should stay quiet in church and subservient to men,”86 and they’ve “poured” millions into “the work of Farris Wilks’ ‘baby,’ the Thirteen Foundation, one of the biggest and quietest anti-abortion donors in the United States.”87 Claiming to look forward to “end times,” Farris Wilks may well deny climate change but he appears to cheerily embrace its consequences as part of providence—giving new meaning to “apocalypse.” Third, we might be tempted to dismiss the likes of the Wilks Brothers as far-right outliers whose real impact on the fossil fuel industry is negligible. This, however, would be a mistake. Consider elected Texas representative Ted Cruz who claims that natural gas is God’s “providential blessing,” offering an ideal fit to the “holy” union of climate change opportunists and truthers. As Lindsay Barnes, Salon, reports, Cruz’ logic is simple: if there’s no climate change, there’s no good reason to bar drilling anywhere, and drilling is

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the explicit goal of his American Energy Renaissance Act, a gift not only to advocates of Free Trade, but to their religious allies like the Wilks Brothers whose fracking profits fuel advocacy for their biblical world view. Indeed, however we’re tempted to treat it as a kind of absurd theater when Cruz compares “global warming alarmists” to “flat-Earthers,” or himself to a persecuted Galileo, we need to remember that denial isn’t about truth or falsity; it’s about selling uncertainty. Truthers make their money buying time, not conviction. By linking fossil fuel extraction to a religious adaptation of manifest destiny, Cruz not only positions himself as an authorized witness to “the miracle of America,” he helps to re-inscribe the very human chauvinism upon which the oil and gas industry (and thus the parasitism of the Truthers) depends to justify its continuing ecological devastation and its disquieting human rights record. Fourth, the longer the public remains unconvinced that climate change is anthropogenic, the less pressure it will exert to include even weak environmental provisions in trade pacts, including TPP (or oppose it altogether). To whatever extent, moreover, that same public, Regular Joe and Josie, are Christian Tea Party fundamentalists, the easier to convince them that climate change is a Leftist (read: atheist) plot intent on a one-world government run by “tree-huggers,” and as Brian Sussman would have it, red-green Communists. Introduce elected representatives like Cruz who explicitly marry God’s presumed intentions to a patriotic discourse about an American energy “renaissance,” and what you have are conditions ripe for the Free Trade Triumvirate. To be clear, this isn’t because either Cruz or the Wilks Brothers publicly support TPP. To the contrary, though plainly indecisive, Cruz evinces wariness that Tea Partiers among his libertarian and conservative Christian base could be put off from his presidential campaign by support for what Cruz calls the “Washington cartel.” But it just doesn’t matter. In this world of God’s providence, fossil fuel companies like Lone Pine Resources are empowered to sue countries like Canada to force the suspension of a natural gas-drilling moratorium, in this case, under the St. Lawrence River.88 The fossil fuel industry benefits directly from the anti-regulatory commitments of libertarian Tea Partiers and the industry rewards their ideological cheerleaders with campaign largesse. So Cruz can disparage the “Washington cartel” until he’s blue in the face, but so long as the dollars flowing into his SuperPAC find their way back to wellheads or frack pads, his opposition is disingenuous. Fifth, the Free Trade Triumvirate is vital to the fossil fuel industry not just because it offers lucrative possibilities like “a pathway for energy exports to Japan,” but because it advantages conquest capitalism no matter what the public’s perception or even dissent. Elected representatives like Ted Cruz have have nothing to lose by grandstanding in opposition to TPP since decrying it as an infringement on state “sovereignty,” while good theater, has no other consequence that filling his campaign coffers and advancing an agenda

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devoted to far-right conservative social engineering.89 Like Inhofe, Cruz refers to undocumented immigrants as “criminals” and, as I’ve argued, this functions to conceal climate change refugeeism. Characterizing fracking as the “reigniting” of “the miracle of America,” Cruz makes manifest destiny out of fossil fuel conquest, epitomizing a Tea Party dream justification for “Free Trade” as the onward march of the Christian soldier who, equipped with his “miracle,” uses the wealth made possible by drilling to create a “biblical” society. Religion helps to build the LNG tankers of conquest capitalism; climate truthers supply them with crusaders who, sailing off to ports like Japan, salute not merely the American flag, but the almighty to the cause of Free Trade.90

THE CONQUEST OF THE CLIMATE CHANGE CASH COW AND THE BIGGEST LIE OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY—THE FULLY CAPITALIZED PLANET, TAKE 5 Cashing In On Catastrophe The third and doubtless most lucrative course for the conquest of capital is climate change capitalism. For these “forward looking” entrepreneurs, a warming planet is an opportunity to capitalize on a “new” commodity: climate change, including its social, ecological, health impact, and economic implications—no matter what these turn out to be, how catastrophic, or for whom. Indeed, climate capitalism might well be described as the art of posturing to take maximal advantage of the windfall, as McKenzie Funk puts it, created by occurring or future climate change. Depending on the industry, a changing climate can offer markets either for new products like privatized fire response service,91 and water-focused hedge funds,92 or new portfolio additions for established businesses such as climate disaster insurance,93 drill sites,94 flood protection and air conditioning,95 water privatization,96 droughtresistant biotech crops and genetically modified seeds.97 It can offer prospects for global monopolies like the merger of Monsanto, the world’s largest GMO seed producer, and Syngenta, the pesticide maker.98 It can encourage unlikely partnerships like the Memorandum of Understanding between California’s governor Jerry Brown and China to reduce carbon emissions and develop clean technologies.99 It can offer multinationals like DuPont opportunities to act as leaders in the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and then use their success to more nefarious ends such as effective cover for a disquieting record of human rights abuses, unsavory business partnerships, other forms of air and water pollution, and liability evasion.100 What the climate capitalist knows is not

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only that a crisis is an occasion to shape future markets, but that the terror, uncertainty, guilt, and anxiety it creates are potential opportunities to mold future consumption. They know that if capital conquest is going to survive the twenty-first century it must grow, regardless costs, so long as these, environmental, social, health-related, geopolitical, can be externalized onto others. The business of climate change, in other words, must become business as usual; it must secure its labor, grow its markets, outsource its waste; that is what market logic dictates. But most importantly what the climate capitalist knows is that confronted by news reports of the potential ecological, health-impact, and civilizational consequences of climate change, it’s imperative to convince consumers not only that climate capitalist manufacturing processes, labor conditions, products and services are “green” from cradle to grave, but that the climate capitalist has undergone a conversion—of sorts, from a deepwater mercenary myopically driven by the bottom line, to a capitalist with a conscience. Needless to say, this is a tough sell given conquest capitalism’s long history of “outsourcing catastrophe.” As Loomis meticulously documents, this history may be best described as the “scourge of capital mobility,” the outsourcing by corporations of hazardous manufacturing processes to developing world countries in the interest of taking advantage of poor or nonexistent protections for labor, wages, and the environment: Americans today rarely experience workplace disasters, burning rivers, or fatal smog. There are two reasons for this. First, the regulations that Americans demanded in the sixties and seventies have had tremendously positive results . . . The second reason is far more alarming: corporations moved their operations across the globe to escape these very regulations . . . Companies justify this with language about “competitiveness in a global marketplace,” which only obscures the enormous profits they make by investing so little in their workers. If wages rise too high or workers try to unionize or nations begin to enforce environmental regulations, the companies happily pack up their factories to another country more willing to do their bidding.101

We have every reason to believe this grim picture will be made all the grimmer by the rise of the Free Trade Triumvirate. Its trade pacts not only further liberalize and codify capital mobility, they also threaten to unravel the gains made in the United States or any of its trading partner countries with respect to human rights and environmental integrity. Contrary to the optimistic picture Loomis paints of labor and environmental movements ready to join forces to resist the erosion of relevant wage, hours, working condition, and pollutant emission standards, the Free Trade Triumvirate paves the way for return to a status quo more commonplace in

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the developing world, and with it the “workplace disasters, burning rivers, or fatal smog” made possible by competition for jobs permanently endangered by the mobility of capital. That U.S.-based corporations like Nike, “General Electric, Caterpillar, Microsoft, Walmart, Chevron, Cisco, Intel, Stanley Works, Merck, United Technologies, and Oracle” among others have histories of outsourcing jobs, and that collectively, these companies “cut their workforces by 2.9 million people over the last decade [2001–2011] while hiring 2.4 million people overseas” often under abysmal conditions, signals what conditions will be like under TPP.102 Hired according to the lowest common denominator, labor protections that prevailed before TPP, and the weak environmental provisions codified in it, workers in any of the trade pact’s twelve countries could find themselves confronted with choices that don’t include, for example, unionizing—much less resistance—especially when outsourcing is almost always aimed at cost-savings as opposed to “world class capabilities.” What TPP insures is that U.S. workers won’t be excluded from the leveling of the global workforce playing field, and that they’ll be as hard-pressed as their developing world counterparts to compromise on wages and working conditions. It’s simply the climate change capitalist—the conquest multinational by another name—who occupies the best position to take advantage of this leveling. Building and sustaining an environmental movement under these oppressive conditions, especially one aimed at preventing a future climate crisis for which there exist plenty of deniers, will become far more difficult for at least three reasons: • Because competition for jobs is escalated by the mobility of capital, it effectively insures the complicity of workers—whose own tenuous status encourages risk aversion—in anti-environmental efforts. • Although TPP will create pressures to weaken, ignore, or even dissolve the regulatory gains Loomis notes, because this deterioration will likely be gradual (one lawsuit at a time), and because enforcing regulation could mean job losses, workers forced to choose between working low wage, safety and/or health hazardous jobs and agitating for regulatory enforcement will still chose what puts food on the table. • While climate capitalists claim to be committed to sustainable manufacturing and distribution processes, because their first objective is profitability, because their businesses are as much or more benefited as any by TPP, because they’re as likely as any corporate enterprise to already have a history of capital mobility outsourcing labor, and environmental pollution, we have little reason to take at face value their more muted commitment to fair labor practices.

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President Obama insists that the goal of TPP is to bring jobs back to the United States, and as we’ve noted, it’s remarkable that he offers as example Nike whose working conditions and environmental record in Vietnam are “disturbing”: “Nike Inc., a huge importer of footwear, says a proposed Pacific trade agreement backed by President Barack Obama would help it bring thousands of jobs to the U.S. . . . [T]he company said provisions of the deal would ease the creation of 10,000 manufacturing and engineering jobs in the U.S. if the pact is completed and enacted by Congress.”103 American workers might find some, if cold, comfort in the fact that Nike’s proposed manufacturing process would likely be automated as opposed to “labor intensive,” but they’ve no reason to believe the sneaker giant wouldn’t be emboldened by the prospect of being able to sue on the grounds that U.S. labor and environmental regulations impose an unfair impediment to the company’s expected profits—their “manufacturing innovations.” What, in other words, Nike’s proposal makes clear is that the company has a market share stake in appearing to care about the fate of American workers—hence “10,000 jobs.” But what Nike’s explicit reference to its own capital mobility in the context of TPP shows, as Chief Executive Mark Parker puts it, is that: “Now we will be able to accelerate our investments to continue to drive manufacturing innovation,” that is, Nike will enjoy greater mobility than ever, including the option of making sneakers in the United States on the “equal” Free Trade Field provided by TPP—or threatening to go elsewhere. Marketing “Natural Capitalism”: Green Is the Color of Money In their vigorous defense of a pro-growth capitalist response to global warming, L. Hunter Lovins and Boyd Cohen certainly know that the appearance of environmental concern does not constitute a conversion to an ecocentric conscience. Nonetheless, they argue that provided with the right incentives, we can trust capitalist entrepreneurs to do the right thing, or better, entrust them to make the right thing the profitable thing. In their book, Climate Capitalism, they argue that “intelligent use of market mechanisms can solve the climate crisis,” not as an added expense but as an investment, “delivering enhanced profitability and a stronger economy as well as a better future for the planet.”104 They go on to show that it’s clearly possible to invest in climate change at a profit, arguing that the right mix of technological innovation, careful strategic planning, genuinely free markets, and an intensive investment in energy efficiencies will deliver that win-win. They offer three principles of what they call “Natural Capitalism,” each no doubt designed to elicit the conscience of Homo Colossus:

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The first principle, buying time by using all resources as efficiently as possible, is cost effective today and is the best way to address many of the worst problems facing humankind105 [T]he second principle . . . redesign how we make and deliver all products and services.106 Achieving a truly sustainable economy will also mean managing institutions so they are not just efficient and innovative, but also restorative of human and natural capital, the third principle of Natural Capitalism.107

On their face, these principles sound reasonable—and lucrative. The challenge is that unless they can be fitted to the market logic governing business as usual—made profitable regardless environmental conditions—they’re destined to fail as a strategy for the redemption and maintenance of conquest capitalism. Insofar, moreover, as the Free Trade Triumvirate encourages high-stakes competition for dwindling resources, incentivizes downward pressure on wages, and empowers corporations to dominate and weaken institutions “restorative of human and natural capital” (or simply appropriate them as advertising), it’s clear that globalization is not likely to incorporate even the modest sustainability Lovins and Cohen seem to have in mind. Instituting such principles must, in other words, not only be made profitable, but so profitable that the conquest capitalist, driven by the sheer urgency of climate change chaos, doesn’t opt instead for cashing out on a TPP-accelerated version of business as usual, or stay the “natural capitalism” course for as long as it makes money—and then return to business as usual as soon as it seems the climate has been stabilized (or appears to be so). The trouble is that in the long run rarely calculated in any capital enterprise, both of these options turn out to be bad. The renowned James Hanson and his NASA science team, for example, predicts that that “even staying within the internationally agreed goal of keeping the planet within the 2-degree Celsius temperature warming limit has already caused unstoppable melting in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.”108 Aled Jones of the University Global Sustainability argues that catastrophic food shortages could lead to civilizational collapse within as little as thirty tears, and a study published in Anthropocene Review “shows how humans are causing catastrophic shifts in planetary ecosystems that have been unprecedented for 500 million years” and that “while “species extinctions and other changes are far more advanced” already, “[g]lobal warming as a phenomenon is just beginning.”109 Given these predictions, the natural capitalist seeking to cash in on climate change, no matter how committed he or she was to its principles, is thus left with just three choices: • Homo Ecologicus: produce less, more efficiently, more locally; focus less on growth; pay living wages under safe environmentally sustainable

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conditions; go green by actively contributing to programs that seek to mitigate, restore, and reclaim animal habitat and human communities locally and globally. Measure success in accord with ecological integrity, human and nonhuman health, and species diversity. This option constitutes the wholesale rejection of the Free Trade Triumvirate and, although ideologically consistent with aspects of natural capitalism’s three principles (depending on interpretation), particularly with respect to restoring human capital, Homo Ecologicus cannot meet the primary profit objectives of the climate change capitalist. • Homo Colossus Climaticus: produce more efficiently through technologically more sophisticated means; maintain the established global wage and working condition system; go “green” by using as an effective façade token contributions to local and global programs seeking to mitigate climate change; invest heavily in advertising appeals to “sustainability” along with traditional memes (patriotism, fun, family, safety, etc.) to insure growth. Measure success via growth. This option is consistent with Free Trade, but little incentivizes climate capitalists to pursue it other than Lovins and Cohen’s three principles, nothing in TPP’s environmental provisions compel it, and while a green façade offers competitive advantage, more than a token commitment to mitigating climate change detracts from profit generation—in a business climate made increasing urgent (if not hysterical) by the liberalization of Free Trade. • Homo Colossus Mercenary: produce more by whatever means are likely to insure growth; maintain global wage and working condition system; advertise in whatever fashion is calculated to generate profits, including going “green” so long as costs are either negligible, recouped as profits, or externalized as lower wages, outsourcing, and the avoidance of environmental regulation. This option is maximally well fitted to the aims of Free and, as such, will have enormous advantage over Homo Ecologicus creating pressure for Homo Colossus Climaticus to absolve themselves of the commitment to the principles of natural capitalism, and pursue business as usual. Given the market logic that defines capitalist enterprise, it should be clear that Homo Ecologicus is self-defeating. Regardless to what principles a particular enterprise might be committed, efficiency for example, capitalism is defined by growth, by its capacity for competitive conquest. The contemporary machines of that growth are trade pacts those of the Free Trade Triumvirate; for them the “local” functions as the outsourced material realization of its objectives, and as an externalized repository for its waste. Free Trade not only reinforces the absolute necessity of growth, it seeks to “liberate” its agents— driving down wages domestic and/or outsourced ever further and thus producing the conditions for “catastrophic shifts in planetary ecosystems.” What’s

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self-defeating for Homo Ecologicus is precisely what drives even the most efficiency-committed Homo Climaticus to elect conquest over conscience: the survival that’s dependent on growth. Indeed, given the escalation of pressure to compete made probable by the Free Trade Triumvirate, even Homo Climaticus will soon find that a commitment to the appearance of combating climate change is a far better guarantor of survival than any action that might contribute to the reality of a desirable future. Recognizing that growth is vital to capitalism, including climate capitalism, Lovins and Cohen are caught between a wall—the moral and environmental ideals evinced in their three principles and a hard place—the mercenary market logic of Free Trade. While they don’t directly address TPP, it doesn’t really matter since TPP and its fellow trade pacts just are the next instantiation of the globalization of capital. In one sense Lovins and Cohen argue for Homo Colossus Mercenary, observing that “[c]oncern over the climate is all well and good, but what really motivates a business is the chance to make money.”110 For them, however, Homo Colossus Climaticus is, contrary to the mere façade of an environmental conscience, genuinely committed to combating climate change seeing in that fight a win-win for the future of both the planet and the profits. Lovins and Cohen go on to develop a number of examples of what they call “the best and most certain way to make large amounts of money, and a very large difference,” and they insist that “[b]usinesses that work to protect the climate,” like the ones they cite, “are and will continue to be sources of untold wealth across the planet.”111 In fact, they argue, incentivizing businesses to be more efficient is so potentially lucrative that “it does not matter whether you believe in climate change or not.”112 You could, in other words, be a committed climate truther and still put into practice the kinds of efficiency-producing strategies, technologies, or materials—just for the sake of profitability.113 The Climate Capitalism of DuPont As an example, Lovins and Cohen offer multinational chemical corporation, DuPont: DuPont was among the early climate capitalists. About a decade ago the company’s leaders pledged to cut its carbon emissions 65 percent below their 1990 levels, and to do it by 2010 . . . Has DuPont joined Greenpeace? No. The company made its announcement in the name of increasing shareholder value. And it delivered on its promise. The value of DuPont stock increased 340 percent while the company reduced its global emissions 67 percent.114

There are at least two serious problems with this example, problems that illustrate the extent to which Lovins and Cohen go to convince us not only

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that climate capitalism offers real solutions to climate change, but that multinationals like DuPont are on the right track—whatever their motives. The first, and more minor, problem is that Lovins and Cohen misrepresent the real causes of DuPont’s emissions reductions. According to a 2011 Environmental Leader report, DuPont says by keeping energy use flat, it avoided over $6 billion in energy expenditures from 1990 to 2010 while growing the company by over 40 percent. The report said that many of DuPont’s manufacturing sites were idle for part of 2009, significantly lowering overall energy consumption, water use and greenhouse gas emissions, and that it enjoyed an economic rebound in 2010. Since DuPont measures and reports in absolute numbers, this resulted in an increase in many of the company’s environmental metrics from 2009 to 2010.115

The economic recession, in other words, had more to do with DuPont’s emission’s reductions—whatever their commitment to efficiency—than any deliberate strategy on the company’s part. Moreover, their dedication to efficiency so conspicuously predates DuPont’s espoused desire to reduce its carbon footprint we have to wonder whether the latter isn’t more about greenwashing in the interest of exploiting environmental sympathies than genuinely green— and why Lovins and Cohen omit stories like this one in their discussion of the company. Consider: For seven years, DuPont has tried to build a $217 million synthetic nylon 6,6 factory in the jungle highlands of Goa, India’s smallest state, to capture the booming Asian market in automobile tires. Because of India’s longstanding prohibition against foreign companies owning a majority share in Indian businesses, DuPont hooked up with Thapar, a prominent industrial company. In 1985, the new partnership, Thapar-DuPont Ltd. (TDL), picked the village of Keri, 30 miles from the state capital of Panjim, as the site of its future nylon factory. The state Economic Development Corporation agreed to use its authority under the national Land Acquisition Act to take the land from a local cooperative, then lease it back to TDL for a nominal rate in exchange for an 11 percent share in the project. The state’s participation also guaranteed the company discount rates for water and electricity hookups. Over the next several years, TDL built a road to a bulldozed plateau, where it constructed several administrative buildings, dug bore wells for water and put up a huge billboard at the front gate that greeted the occasional visitor: “Thapar DuPont Limited: Better Things for Better Living.” DuPont claimed the project would provide needed jobs in a state with high unemployment and, through the export of nylon, help boost India’s push to develop an export-oriented economy . . . Eager to avoid the liability problems that Union Carbide faced [in Bhopal], DuPont has written into its contract with TDL a limited liability clause that exempts the U.S.-based parent company in the event of a chemical accident or pollution problem. For

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many years, local opposition to the factory was muted, principally because TDL claimed its production process was pollution free. To bolster its claims, DuPont took out a full-page ad in a Goan newspaper in which TDL President Eugene Kreuzberger reiterated the company’s environmental policy: “We will not handle, use, sell, transport or dispose of a product unless we can do it in an environmentally sound manner.”116

There’s a good deal to be said about this example, but suffice it to point out that DuPont’s partnership with Thapar is a common strategy for gaining access to land or resources, one likely to become more common under the Free Trade Triumvirate; ditto for the land seizure made possible by the Indian government, and the displacement of the Keri villagers; ditto for the liability exemption demanded by DuPont in case of chemical accident or pollution. It’s notable that what DuPont sought to avoid in the wake of Bhopal was not necessarily a repeat of the disaster that occurred there killing between 3800 and 16,000 people, exposing 600,000 to deadly methyl isocyanate, but future liability if a disaster occurred at Keri.117 It’s also notable that DuPont’s claims about pollution free production processes for the manufacture of nylon 6.6 are not merely false given the role that benzene plays in the process—but belie their demand for liability exemption.118 Although Lovins and Cohen might respond that of course DuPont’s first priority is to make a profit and that the company has undergone significant reform since the 1980s with respect to their pledge to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and prevent other chemical mishaps, the fact is that DuPont continues to commit serious violations of even weak environmental laws resulting, for example, in four deaths at a chemical plant in La Porte, Texas, where the company had been cited at least two dozen times.119 Whatever else the company might mean by “efficiency,” moreover, it clearly isn’t attended by any apparent commitment to human rights. What “efficiency” means is outsourcing to low wage, poor working condition countries with lax and/or non-existent environmental regulations like India and China.120 DuPont, in other words, is the ideal climate capitalist. Like Homo Colossus Climaticus, the company actuates strategies to mitigate its own carbon footprint, but like Homo Colossus Mercenary, does so as a shrewd and effective campaign to produce greater efficiency and conceal the company’s labor abuses as well as a host of other environmental crimes. Like many of the corporations Lovins and Cohen applaud, DuPont sees in its profit-driven commitment to efficiency a golden opportunity to greenwash its company image, scrubbing away an ugly history as well as craft an eco-responsible façade as public relations for its present projects. The fact, however, is that DuPont is simply mercenary in the pursuit of its objectives, distracting us from its abysmal human rights record, its efforts to control food production through collusion with Monsanto

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among others, and from the company’s endeavor to control the future of food production through GMO seed patent protections.121 Once we see behind this green curtain, the differences between Homo Colossus Climaticus and Homo Colossus Mercenary quickly fade revealing the old Homo Colossus of the Capitalocene. Having Our Growth Cake and Eating It Too: Enbridge The story of DuPont exposes the Achilles heel of the climate capitalist, namely that the vocabulary of environmental responsibility is good public relations whether or not it’s grounded in any resolve to combat climate change. Lovins and Cohen concede as much when they congratulate DuPont whose calculated appropriation of the carbon footprint narrative conceals a litany of environmental and human rights woes. More importantly, however, is that the very fact of the Free Trade Triumvirate just is that concession; that TPP’s environmental clauses effectively liberate the world’s most egregiously polluting multinationals to continue “business as usual” at an even more reckless pace puts the lie to any corporate protest of concern for the environment. While it appears then that Lovins’ and Cohen’s “have your growth cake, and eat a sustainable planet too” argument conflicts with TPP’s toothless environmental clauses, this is not the case. In fact, they’re perfectly consistent. Consider Canadian multinational natural gas pipeline company, Enbridge. Like DuPont, Enbridge has a policy on climate change: Enbridge is committed to being part of a collaborative solution: our climate change strategy focuses on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from existing operations, designing new facilities with a view to reducing emissions and on developing new renewable and alternative energy sources. This is in keeping with our overall commitment to protecting the environment, while enhancing our position as one of North America’s leading sustainable energy delivery companies.122

It goes without saying that the reference to “sustainable energy” in the context of fossil fuels is oxymoronic; but it’s also perversely ironic in that it appropriates the vocabulary of sustainability to the ends of preserving the myth of endless resources. That “leading sustainable energy delivery companies” commits a grammatical amphiboly (does sustainable refer to energy or the company?) only weakens Enbridge’s policy statement further. But all this pales in comparison to the staggeringly aggressive line of attack the company takes to constructing pipeline:

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The disruptive phone calls came at dinnertime, and were not the usual telemarketing solicitations. The caller identified as a representative from a multinational oil company that wanted to run a 24-inch pipeline [the Sandpiper] through farmland owned by James and Krista Botsford. The caller . . . wanted the Botsfords to sell a right of way through their North Dakota land. This pipeline would push 300,000 barrels of oil a day to ports in Superior Wisconsin. The crude oil, pumped straight from the Bakken Oil Fields, could not be sold on the world market until it was processed at refineries on Lake Superior . . . [Botsford] told the caller in no uncertain terms that he and his wife were not interested . . . he did not want to participate in a private enterprise that would increase global warming and threaten the lives of his heirs. This was a moral imperative and no amount of persuasion, including money, would make him change his mind . . . In a final heated and somewhat ugly exchange over the phone, Botsford suggested to the caller in no uncertain terms that the company just go around the property. “They (the caller) said they were Enbridge and they don’t go around anything—they go through it, Botsford says.” [Enbridge] desperately needs the Botsford’s quarter section (160 acres) of family farmland as a lynchpin in its delivery system.123

This story needs little interpretation. Enbridge wants to build a pipeline through the land of a private property owner in North Dakota for natural gas transport to a refinery on Lake Superior ultimately destined for the global market. Botsford, the property owner, says no, citing the prevention of climate change as morally imperative. Enbridge then seeks and wins recognition by the North Dakota Public Utility Commission by creating a joint venture, the North Dakota Pipeline Company with their American partner Marathon, even though the company “doesn’t provide any public services to North Dakotans” and has one of the worst records of pipeline spills in the United States and Canada.124 This puts Enbridge precisely where it wants to be: “the company did what big companies always do and filed suit against the little guy; citing its rights to the land under North Dakota’s eminent domain law.” Enbridge, in other words, can now seek to have the Botsford’s land condemned, and then take it. The Botsfords rightly claim that Enbridge is guilty of an “[a]busive overreach of the use of eminent domain [a lawsuit to win the forced condemnation of Botsford’s land] by a (foreign) corporation for private gain,” and we can only imagine the increase in the number of stories like these once the Free Trade Triumvirate is made law. But, for our purposes, that’s not the central point. It’s this: whatever else is the case, Enbridge’s policy on climate change is clearly little more than a tissue thin veneer behind which their real objectives—getting LNG to the global markets—is quite transparent. Fact is, even their own “Environment, Health and Safety” website page is devoted entirely to occupational safety, with no mention of “environment” after the title. No

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doubt the Botfords know this, hence their resistance. Like DuPont, Enbridge deploys the sustainability narrative—and we can see right through it. But unlike DuPont, Enbridge has not attempted to rebrand itself as frontline warrior against climate change. Put differently: Homo Colossus Climaticus cannot be counted as substantially different from Homo Colossus Mercenary; both deploy more efficient energy use [pipelining through the Botford’s land], and the “sustainability” narrative to profit-seeking ends. The latter, Enbridge, may be more transparent, and the former, DuPont, a savvier advertiser. Both are driven by the need to grow, and both make a mockery of Homo Ecologicus. Who then is more mercenary? The answer here, principles of natural capitalism notwithstanding, is the climate capitalist, DuPont. While Enbridge may yet get on-board the climate capitalist wagon, so long as they can appropriate the powers of the state to achieve their objectives (even as a foreign company TPP will further empower), they don’t need to gain the approval of North Dakota’s Regular Joe and Josie; they don’t have to care what they look like to them. Enbridge will very likely trample the Botsfords even though the latter have Honor the Earth and the Winnebago Nation on their side.125 What we can safely infer then from this comparison is that the adoption of at least the appearance of the principles of natural capitalism is likely driven either by a loss of market share (and hence the need for rebranding) or because the best way to attain new markets (say, by drilling the Arctic) recommends a company care what they look like. The climate capitalist cares because, contrary to Lovins and Cohen, they know that their bottom lines depend on the public perception of their activities—particularly when in those activities they’re cashing in on climate change either directly (melting ice caps) or indirectly (catastrophic weather insurance policies). Enbridge exploits the state to get a pipeline through a parcel of land essential to its route; the climate capitalist exploits the public/ consumers to rebrand itself as responsible in the interest of what is ultimately even more reckless behavior—driven by an even more rapacious need for growth. Facilitating this growth we’ve seen a veritable explosion of corporate mission statements, billboards, Internet ads, TV commercials, online energy blogs, and magazine ads espousing the “sustainable,” “renewable,” “green,” “adaptable,” “steady state,” “efficient,” and so on, all jockeying to convince us that multinationals like Walmart and ExxonMobil really care about the environment, human welfare, and social justice. But as Oreskes and Conway show, an industry threatened is an industry willing to spend lavishly on creating doubt and denial, and as Loomis documents, “outsourcing catastrophe” is part and parcel of the mobility of capital.126 Whether climate change can be mitigated is an issue that matters to climate capitalists only insofar as mitigation is profitable, and it’s not; at least

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not enough. It’s not just that Homo Ecologicus can’t compete in the world of Free Trade, it’s that the principles to which he/she is committed have been displaced by the fact that the moneymaker is climate change. Even brutish companies like Enbridge will eventually figure that out. What the climate capitalist gets is that the more global warming, the better. Just as TPP pays lip service to “environmental justice concerns,” but is poised to realize a Free Trade that will contribute mightily to greenhouse gas emissions, so too the climate capitalist works to recast the appearance of an opportunistic, parasitic and/or polluting company like DuPont as a positive mitigating agent in the fight against global warming. The sustainability lexicon is essential to this enterprise not because it represents (or can) a future that’s genuinely sustainable, but because—like the climate truther’s “global warming alarmist” narrative—it runs interference, providing a placating distraction all the while the climate capitalist cashes in on accelerating climate change. As we learned from the efforts to deny tobacco caused cancer, a lexicon deployed to appearances is just an advertizing strategy aimed at consumption. Out of sight does not mean without effect, and when we consider the fact that the effects of climate change are, however variable, nonetheless global, the notion they can be externalized and/or outsourced—shunted out of sight—is exposed as nonsensical given the simple fact of a single planet. At the same time that corporations like ExxonMobil are paying climate truthers to deny global warming, they’re developing plans to exploit melting ice caps and retreating glaciers.127 Others, like Monsanto, saw the profitpotential presented by accelerating drought and flood even earlier, and have sought to cash in not only on the development of genetically modified seeds adapted to a changing planet, but on the perception that their rapid response is about preventing the hunger which accrues to drought and flood. Still others, like Walmart, appeal to climate change to “green” the public’s perception of the discount giant, adopting the vocabulary of “sustainability” as part of an advertising campaign intended to lure consumers who want to feel better about shopping at a Big Box whose supply chain includes an immense global carbon footprint—but who uses an array of solar paneling to light its stores. Some of the new climate change commodities include fires made more possible by drought,128 seawalls made more necessary by flooding,129 staple foods and clean water made more scarce by desertification,130 cheap labor pools made more abundant by climate change refugees, and fear made more palpable by an uptick in catastrophic weather events. As Funk makes the point: The expansionist exuberance of the Arctic petroleum rush, which has men running around like Elizabethan invaders, claiming virgin territory, fades into the grim free marketeering of a Malthusian world without enough water, then into the bunker mentality of sea-level rise and hurricanes, which could be what

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finally makes climate change persona; for many Americans—and against which long-shot technology is viewed as our only escape hatch . . . I met hundreds of people who thought climate change would make them rich . . . I met profiteers, engineers, warlords, mercenaries, vigilantes, politicians, spies, entrepreneurs, and thieves.131

This seems like long ways from Lovins’ and Cohen’s principles of natural capitalism—but it’s not. Once we’re reminded that anything can become a commodity if a market can be created to either produce it or prevent it, we have to see that from the point of view of the climate capitalist, climate change is an occasion, not a crisis. The company Firebreak, for example, profits off disaster: “they protect only the wealthy.”132 “I found a consistent theme,” says Funk: “I met hundreds of people who thought climate change would make them rich” (Windfall, p. 9). So too Lovins and Cohen; in fact, their Climate Capitalism may be best read as a “how to” for the very people Funk profiles as profiteers and mercenaries. The Pseudo-Diversity of Climate Capitalism Consider, for example, just a few companies, each of which illustrate the diversity of multinationals pursuing the climate capitalist course, how they’re connected via climate change, and how the Free Trade Triumvirate will benefit them. First up is the Climate Corporation whose Smart Phone application, Climate Basic, provides farmers with “real time data” for crop decisions.133 The company recently sold itself for $930 million to Monsanto who uses its application to develop and market genetically modified seeds capable of adapting to drought or flood produced by climate change.134 Although CEO David Friedberg knew the partnership would be controversial, he insisted in a letter to employees that Google used to be called evil too, but “Monsanto [like Google] has created amazing and safe technology” in its genetically modified seeds, able to withstand global warming, and that with their new partner, the Climate Corporation was “going to lead the world to revolutionary solutions to historic problems.”135 The fact that calling Monsanto “evil” may be supported by the company’s direct influence on the July 25, 2015, U.S. House of Representatives passage of the Deny Americans the Right to Know or DARK Act that bans states from requiring GMO labeling on foods, or that the company “lists the effects of climate change-related precipitation changes and droughts as a potential “opportunity” in its filings with the Carbon Disclosure Project,136 or that they have a seat at the negotiating table for TPP, or that TPA could make it possible for companies like Monsanto to sue countries that label GMOs,137 apparently had no effect on Friedberg’s decision to sell. His observation about

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Climate Basic, that “[u]ltimately all of this [calculation of weather patterns] is the digitization of physical phenomena, and using that to better predict the future,” is consistent with TPP provisions for expected profits (using Climate Basic will empower Monsanto to sue TPP nation states with GMO bans such as New Zealand), and with the likely TPP ban on GMO labeling.138 That climate change is a potential profit bonanza for companies like Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Hunan Xindaxin isn’t surprising; that—like their fossil fuel analogues—their activities contribute to climate change, especially through deforestation: ditto. That CEOs like Friedberg can call “revolutionary” what is in fact a conquest for new markets that depends on climate catastrophe— that is climate capitalism. Second up is Walmart. This multinational cashes in on climate change directly and indirectly by appealing to “sustainability” in their marketing and by insisting that it makes good “business sense” to “fight” climate change by, among other things, forming a partnership with General Electric “to innovate lower costs for light-emitting diodes (LEDs).”139 GE, however, has among the worst human rights and environmental pollution records on the planet. Included on a long list of other infractions: General Electric ran the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Richland, Washington as part of the U.S. weapons program. Beginning in 1949, General Electric deliberately released radioactive material to see how far downwind it would travel. One cloud drifted 400 miles, all the way down to the California-Oregon border, carrying perhaps thousands of times more radiation than that emitted at Three Mile Island.140

Even if we think it unjust to hold a company responsible for the actions of long-past decision-makers, GE remains responsible for 78 federal superfund sites, and a host of serious labor and consumer safety violations, including defective subway car wiring in New York in 1982,141 and a litany of U.S. defense contracting fraud.142 General Electric simply epitomizes corporate corruption, waste, and greed. Nonetheless, Lovins and Cohen not only make no mention of this, they applaud the Walmart/GE alliance as a model of the principles of natural capitalism—as indeed, it is once we recognize that these principles are about branding and public relations, not the responsibility to mitigate climate change.143 Rebranding the company as environmentally conscientious, Walmart executives stood with President Obama at a California store in May 2014, while he “unveil[ed] his latest set of solar policies,”144 and, like DuPont, Walmart has crafted very effective window-dressing, in this case, literally, cutting unnecessary packaging by 5 percent saving the company eleven billion globally.145 Yet though the world’s largest retail chain insists their environmental

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claims are not just “PR stunts,” “EPA figures show that Walmart currently only receives 3% of its energy is sourced from clean technology produced onsite.” The company’s labor and human rights record is no better. As reported by Reuters, January, 2014: The U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Wednesday issued a complaint against Wal-Mart Inc, alleging the world’s largest retailer violated labor laws in 14 states by taking action against striking workers. A complaint issued by the NLRB’s general counsel’s office said Walmart representatives appeared on national news broadcasts and threatened to retaliate against workers if they went on strike. It also alleged they disciplined and fired workers for engaging in legally protected protest activity.146

That Walmart engages in union-busting activities isn’t surprising. That the corporation takes advantage of undocumented Mexican workers, some of them likely climate change refugees, however, fits the same pattern—all of it aimed at maximal profits.147 Indeed, that the world’s biggest retail chain discriminates on the basis of sex echoes a human chauvinism that, appropriated by the market logic of the climate capitalist, simply illustrates the distinction without a difference between Homo Colossus Climaticus and Homo Colossus Mercenary. This latter, however, is perhaps most relevant to the multinationals seeking the cheapest labor pools made possible by TPP—women. As Nina Martin of Pro Publica reports concerning a U.S. Supreme Court case alleging sex discrimination at Walmart stores: When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 5–4 decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes in June 2011, no one needed a Richter scale to know it was a Big One. In throwing out a mammoth lawsuit by women employees who claimed that they’d been systematically underpaid and under-promoted by the world’s biggest corporation, the ruling upended decades of employment discrimination law and raised serious barriers to future large-scale discrimination cases of every kind.148

Crafting the appearance of fighting climate change may well be the best strategy Walmart can develop in its interest to retain nonunionized, economically vulnerable, and compliant labor pools throughout its stores and distribution centers. Yet even this strategy has had its limits. As reported by Brookings in early 2015, the company decided to raise its minimum wage to $9 and hour in April 2015, and to $10 by 2016,149 no doubt pressured by reports that their low-wage workers cost American taxpayers billions in public assistance.150 What’s missing in Lovin’s and Cohen’s Walmart success story, in other words, is that however viable a public relations campaign it may be to join up with General Electric to get more efficient light-bulbs into Walmart Super

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Centers, however much consumers don’t care—so long as they get their blue jeans and bedroom suites—about whether immigrant laborers clean the stores for slave wages or whether women are systematically underpaid, consumers do care when they’re footing the bill to shore up Walmart’s Mr. Scrooge behavior. But that too is about money—as Walmart knows. As bloggers, Jesse Bacon and Stacey Mitchell note: “Walmart’s investment in sustainability extends just far enough to change its public image, but not so far as to change its business model and its impact on the planet. Walmart’s progress on renewable power is particularly pitiful when you look at other retailers. Staples, Kohl’s, and Whole Foods . . . have already passed the 100 percent renewable power mark. Starbucks and McDonalds are also way ahead of Walmart.”151 Third up are natural gas company executives who both deny climate change and market the polluting process of hydraulic fracturing as a cleaner “bridge fuel” to renewables. While former Exxon CEO, Lee “Iron Ass” Raymond, for example, denied “global temperatures were rising,” current CEO Rex Tillerson claims “simply” that climate change fears are “overblown.” The latter, in other words, admits the facts, but dismisses the implications; hence Tillerson’s climate change capitalism promotes the “bridge fuel” argument.152 As early as the 1981 discovery of an “immense reserve” of natural gas in Indonesia, Exxon gave birth to its two-pronged strategy to deny and exploit climate change, a full seven years before climate scientist James Hanson made his testimony to the U.S. Congress. While Exxon has spent at least 27 million on “sowing the seeds of doubt,” argues journalist Steve Coll, it knew that a melting Arctic was a lucrative proposition: “as the company attacked global warming publicly . . . geologists working within ExxonMobil were examining how a warmer Earth . . . could create new business opportunities for ExxonMobil.”153 This is the same company who denied responsibility for torture committed by soldiers hired to guard its Sumatra Indonesia plant, and then won a Supreme Court decision disallowing foreign plaintiffs to sue American Corporations for human rights violation in U.S. courts.154 The question whether Exxon can be held morally liable for what these guards did is a live one. But the question whether foreign plaintiffs should be able to sue American Corporations is not—or at least should not be. Nonetheless, to the extent that multinational, including American, corporations will be further empowered by the Free Trade Triumvirate to sue states and even municipalities for impediments to potential earnings, the private citizens of any country will find themselves like the Botsfords of North Dakota—without a leg to stand on, and yet still facing the potentially catastrophic implications of climate change. These examples can go on to eternity. But what they all have in common, however otherwise different their products and goals, however the logic of

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calculable expectation is executed, is that they recognize that one way or another climate change is a cash cow; it’s like an infusion of fresh plasma into the circulatory system of capital. The key philosophical upshot, however, is this: what the logic of capitalist enterprise dictates is that decisions about what kinds of ventures ought to be pursued are made not according to any criteria of truth, such as whether climate change is occurring or is anthropogenic, but according to whether the venture is likely to be profitable. Climate change may well define the environmental and geopolitical terrain for these decisions, but what determines which of these three courses (or which in combination) will inform any particular decision depends not first and foremost on any fact about climate change or any of its implications, but on which business model will offer the greatest advantage toward achieving the widest most reliable margin of profit. Climate change, in other words, charts the geopolitical and environmental topography of twenty-first century capitalist conquest, but it’s the exchange value of a “new” kind of commodity, catastrophic weather events, food shortages, melting ice sheets, human migrations, drought-inspired fire hazards, eroding shorelines, disease, species extinctions, loss of biodiversity, deforestation, etc., that supplies its markets. And it is for this reason if no other that capitalism—free trade fascism—whose demand for growth is as voracious as it is essential, is unsalvageable. NOTES 1. Don Quijones, “LEAKED: How the Biggest Banks are Conspiring to Rip Up Financial Regulations Around the World,” Wolf Street, July 2, 2015. http://wolfstreet. com/2015/07/02/leaked-how-megabanks-are-conspiring-to-rip-up-financial-regulations-around-the-world-tisa-tpp-ttip/, my emphasis. 2. Erik Loomis, Out of Sight: The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe (New York: The New Press, 2015), 8–9. 3. Loomis, Out of Sight, 54. 4. Loomis, Out of Sight, 54. 5. Loomis, Out of Sight, 73–4. 6. Prashanth Parameswaran, “Cambodia’s Hun Sen Slams ASEAN—Splitting TPP,” The Diplomat, April 21, 2015. http://thediplomat.com/2015/04/cambodiashun-sen-slams-asean-splitting-tpp/. 7. Worker Rights Consortium. “Made in Vietnam: Labor Rights Violations in Vietnam’s Export Manufacturing Sector,” May 2013. http://www.usfashionindustry. com/pdf_files/WRC-Report-Vietnam.pdf. 8. Lydia DePillis, “How More Business with Nike Could Affect Workers in Vietnam,” The Washington Post, May 8, 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/

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blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/05/08/how-more-business-with-nike-could-help-workersin-vietnam/. 9. Parameswaran, “Cambodia’s Hun Sen Slams ASEAN—Splitting TPP.” 10. Timothy Connor, “We are not Machines,” Clean Clothes Campaign: OXFAM, March 2002. https://cleanclothes.org/resources/publications/we-are-not-machines. pdf. 11. DePillis, “How More Business with Nike Could Affect Workers in Vietnam.” 12. Dylan Matthews, “Why Obama’s Big Trade Deal Isn’t a No-Brainer for the World’s Poor,” VOX: Policy and Politics, April 30, 2015. http://www.vox. com/2015/4/30/8517787/tpp-trade-global-poor. 13. DePillis, “How More Business with Nike Could Affect Workers in Vietnam.” 14. Jason Folkmanis and Nguyen Dieu Tu Uyen, “PetroVietnam Sees Exxon Pact by 2015 in $10 Billion Project,” Bloomberg, August 22, 2014. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-21/petrovietnam-sees-exxon-pact-by-2015-in10-billion-gas-project. 15. Offshore Staff, “ExxonMobil Reports First Production from Damar Gas Development Offshore Malaysia,” Offshore, February 14, 2014. http://www.offshoremag.com/articles/2014/02/exxonmobil-reports-first-production-from-damar-gasdevelopment-offshore-malaysia.html. 16. Oil and Natural Gas Race: Map, http://www.regionalgeography.org/ cambodia2012/2013/02/10/oil-and-natural-gas-race/. 17. Open Development: Cambodia, “Oil and gas Blocks,” http://www.opendevelopmentcambodia.net/briefing/oil-and-gas-blocks/. 18. Quijones, “LEAKED: How the Biggest Banks are Conspiring to Rip Up Financial Regulations Around the World.” 19. Alison Fitzgerald, “After the Meltdown, Part 1: Ex-Wall Street Chieftains Living Large in Post-Meltdown World,” The Center for Public Integrity, September 10, 2013. http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/09/10/13326/ ex-wall-street-chieftains-living-large-post-meltdown-world. 20. William Black, “Obama’s Latest Betrayal of America and Americans in Favor of the Big banks: TiSA,” New Economic Perspectives, June 24, 2014. http:// neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/06/obamas-latest-betrayal-america-americansfavor-big-banks-tisa.html. 21. Black, “Obama’s Latest Betrayal of America and Americans in Favor of the Big banks: TiSA.” 22. Black, “Obama’s Latest Betrayal of America and Americans in Favor of the Big banks: TiSA.” 23. Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 96–7. 24. Kolbert, Field Notes From a Catastrophe, 137. 25. Kolbert, Field Notes From a Catastrophe, 188–9. 26. Zach Carter, “Obama Shrugs Off Global Slavery to Protect Trade Deal,” Huffington Post, July 27, 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ malaysia-human-trafficking-tpp_us_55b66521e4b0224d8832fe28.

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27. Jane Kelsey, “TiSA: The Leaked Core Text,” Wikileaks, https://wikileaks.org/ tisa/core/analysis/Analysis-TiSA-Core-Text.pdf. 28. Akbar Shahid Ahmed, Ryan Grim, and Laura Barron-Lopez, “Why is the U.S. Desperate to OK Slavery in Malaysia?” Huffington Post, May 27, 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/26/tpp-malaysia-slavery_n_7444978. html. 29. David Andelman, “While Washington Dithers, China Rebuilds Asia in its Own Image,” USA Today, June 18, 2015. http://www.usatoday.com/story/ opinion/2015/06/16/tpp-china-excluded-aiib-foreign-policy-column/71212566/. 30. American Natural Gas Association, http://anga.us/blog/2013/1/15/naturalgas-americas-clean-abundant-energy-resource. 31. Leo Panitch and Doug Henwood, “Demystifying Globalization,” in Capitalism and its Discontents, ed. Sasha Lilley (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 79–80. 32. Jonathan Weisman, “Trans-Pacific partnership Seen as Door for Foreign Suits Against the U.S.,” New York Times, March 25, 2015. http://www.nytimes. com/2015/03/26/business/trans-pacific-partnership-seen-as-door-for-foreign-suitsagainst-us.html?ref=business&_r=2. 33. Panitch and Henwood, “Demystifying Globalization,” 85, my emphasis. 34. Lori Wallach, “NAFTA on Steroids,” The Nation, June 27, 2012. 35. Nicholas St. Fleur, “Fracking Chemicals Detected in Pennsylvania Drinking Water,” New York Times, May 4, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/science/ earth/fracking-chemicals-detected-in-pennsylvania-drinking-water.html. 36. Frank Bruni, “The Sunny Side of Greed,” New York Times, July 1, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/01/opinion/frank-bruni-the-good-among-thegreed.html?smid=fb-share. 37. Steve Greenhouse, “Walmart to Pay U.S. $11 Million in Lawsuit on Illegal Workers,” New York Times, March 19, 2005. 38. Wikileaks, “TiSA Annex on Domestic Regulation,” https://www.wikileaks. org/tisa/domestic/04-2015/page-3.html. 39. John Upton, “Walmart’s Carbon Emissions Soar Despite All That Green Talk,” Grist, November 14, 2013. http://grist.org/news/walmarts-carbon-emissionssoar-despite-all-that-green-talk/. 40. Zain Schauk, “Exxon-Mobil Starts Production at a New Field in Malaysia,” Fuel Fix, February 14, 2014. http://fuelfix.com/blog/2014/02/14/exxonmobil-starts-production-at-new-field-in-malaysia/. 41. Panitch and Henwood, “Demystifying Globalization,” 87. 42. Panitch and Henwood, “Demystifying Globalization,” 80. 43. David Dayen, “The Scariest Trade Deal Nobody’s Talking About Just Suffered a Big Leak,” New Republic, June 4, 2015. http://www.newrepublic.com/ article/121967/whats-really-going-trade-services-agreement. 44. RT News, “Obama Signs Bill Giving Him Fast Track Powers for Trade Deals,” RT, June 29, 2015. http://rt.com/usa/270517-obama-fast-track-trade/. 45. Ralph Nader, “King Obama, His Royal Court, and the TPP,” Common Dreams, June 25, 2015. http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/25/ king-obama-his-royal-court-and-tpp.

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46. Japan Times, “Obama Says TPP Will Be a Good Thing for U.S. Exporters,” http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/05/09/business/economy-business/obamasays-pacific-free-trade-pact-will-be-a-good-thing-for-u-s-exporters/#.V7pERChy_0c. 47. Jane Perlez, “Stampede to Join China’s Development Bank Stuns Even Its Founder,” New York Times, April 2, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/03/ world/asia/china-asian-infrastructure-investment-bank.html. 48. Stanley Reed and Dexter Roberts, “Shell is ‘Welcome Barbarian’ in China’s Shale Gas,” Bloomberg, November 18, 2011. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2011-11-18/shell-is-welcome-barbarian-in-china-s-shale-gas-correct-. 49. Chuin-Wei Yap, “China Seeks to Develop Global Seed Power,” The Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2015. http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-seeks-to-developglobal-seed-power-1427049765. 50. Perlez, “Stampede to Join China’s Development Bank Stuns Even Its Founder.” 51. Perlez, “Stampede to Join China’s Development Bank Stuns Even Its Founder.” 52. Ben Lefebvre, “Sincopec to Buy Stake in Chesapeake Energy Asset,” The Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2013. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142412 7887324338604578325901158645038. 53. Walter Barons, “Defending the Internal Water Empire,” The Center for Public Integrity, February 4, 2003. https://www.publicintegrity.org/2003/02/04/5712/ defending-internal-water-empire. 54. Maude Barlow and Wenonah Hauter, “The Great American Water Crisis,” Sojourners, November 2013. https://sojo.net/magazine/november-2013/ great-american-water-crisis. 55. Weisman, “Trans-Pacific partnership Seen as Door for Foreign Suits Against the U.S.” 56. Elizabeth Warren, “The Trans-Pacific Partnership Clause Everyone Should Oppose,” The Washington Post, February 25, 2015. http://www.washingtonpost. com/opinions/kill-the-dispute-settlement-language-in-the-trans-pacific-partnership/2015/02/25/ec7705a2-bd1e-11e4-b274-e5209a3bc9a9_story.html. 57. The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, “The Future of the Canadian Oil Sands: Growth Potential for a Unique Resource Amidst Regulation, Egress, Cost, and Price Uncertainty” (Oxford: University of Oxford University Press, February, 2016), 34. 58. Politifact, “Yes, Donald Trump did Call Climate Change a Chinese Hoax,” http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/03/hillary-clinton/ yes-donald-trump-did-call-climate-change-chinese-h/. 59. Tony West, “THE BIG PLAY: Reading Tea Leaves—For the Money in Marcellus,” The Public Record—Philadelphia, September 22, 2011. http://www.phillyrecord.com/2011/09/the-big-play-reading-tea-leaves-for-the-money-in-marcellus/. 60. Christopher Bateman, “A Colossal Fracking Mess,” Vanity Fair: Hive, June 21, 2010. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/06/fracking-in-pennsylvania-201006. 61. Cabot Oil and Gas Corporation, “An Outstanding Year in Review: 2011 Annual Report,” http://www.cabotog.com/pdfs/COG-2011-AR.pdf.

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62. Sierra Club, “An Explosion of Fracking? One of the Dirtiest Secrets of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trace Agreement,” https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/ www.sierraclub.org/files/uploads-wysiwig/TPP-LNG_Factsheet_Updated.pdf. 63. Marcellus Drilling News, “Cabot Continues to Lower Cost/Mcf Plans for Constitution in 2016,” April, 2015. http://marcellusdrilling.com/2015/04/ cabot-continues-to-lower-costmcf-plans-for-constitution-in-2016/. 64. Julia Reischel, “Constitution Pipeline Receives Federal Approval, Eminent Domain Power,” Watershed Post, December 3, 2014. http://www.watershedpost. com/2014/constitution-pipeline-receives-federal-approval-eminent-domain-power. 65. U.S. Coalition for TPP, “Benefits of TPP,” http://tppcoalition.org/about/. 66. Office of the United State’s Trade Representative, Executive Office of the President “Trans-Pacific Partnership: Summary of U.S. Objectives,” https://ustr.gov/ tpp/Summary-of-US-objectives. 67. Tim Worstall, “The Beneficiaries Of TPP and Free Trade Agreements Are The Poor,” Forbes, June 26, 2015. http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/06/26/ the-beneficiaries-of-tpp-and-free-trade-agreements-are-the-poor/#3e609ce221b8. 68. Worstall, “The Beneficiaries Of TPP and Free Trade Agreements Are The Poor.” 69. Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade: Of Trade and the Stock, or Wares of Trade (New York: Prism Key Press, 2013), 10, my emphasis. 70. Wikileaks, “TPP—Sacrificing the Environment for Corporate Interests,” https://wikileaks.org/tpp-sacrificing-the-environment.html. 71. Wikileaks, “Secret TPP Treaty: Report from Chairs of Environment Chapter for all 12 Nations,” January 15, 2014. https://wikileaks.org/tpp2/static/pdf/tpp-chairsreport.pdf. 72. PewResearchCenter, “The Tea Party and Religion,” Religion and Public Life, February 23, 2011. http://www.pewforum.org/2011/02/23/tea-party-and-religion/. 73. Alison Rose Levy, “Obama’s Trade Deal Could Overturn New York’s Fracking Ban and Accelerate Climate Change,” Ecowatch, March 26, 2015. http://www. ecowatch.com/obamas-trade-deals-could-overturn-new-yorks-fracking-ban-andaccelerat-1882023214.html. 74. Levy, “Obama’s Trade Deal Could Overturn New York’s Fracking Ban and Accelerate Climate Change.” 75. Constitution Party, http://www.constitutionparty.com/. 76. Juliet Eliperin and Scott Clement, “Tea Party Republicans are Biggest Climate Change Deniers, new Pew Poll Finds,” The Washington Post, November 1, 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2013/11/01/only-tea-partymembers-believe-climate-change-is-not-happening-new-pew-poll-finds/. 77. Mark Jaffe, “Drilling Rigs and Housing Development Face Off in Colorado Suburbs,” February 13, 2015. http://www.denverpost.com/2015/02/13/ drilling-rigs-and-housing-development-face-off-in-colorado-suburbs/. 78. Ernst v. Encana Corporation, “Encana’s Noise Keeping Weld County’d Mike Lozinski Up at Night: ‘When it happens at night, it’s unreal,’” http://www.ernstversusencana.ca/encanas-noise-keeping-weld-countys-mike-lozinski-up-at-night-whenit-happens-at-night-its-unreal/.

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79. Nathan Vanderklippe, “South Korean Firm Joins Encana in B.C. Gas,” The Globe and Mail, February 8, 2010. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/south-korean-firm-joins-encana-in-bc-gas/ article4352049/. 80. Paul Blumenthal, “Tea Party Group Brings Trade Deal Opposition to New Hampshire Primary,” Huffington Post, April 22, 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost. com/2015/04/22/tea-party-trade-deal_n_7121954.html. 81. Wikileaks, “Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP)—Environment Consolodated Text,” https://wikileaks.org/tpp-enviro/pressrelease.html. 82. Weisman, “Trans-Pacific partnership Seen as Door for Foreign Suits Against the U.S.” 83. Levy, “Obama’s Trade Deal Could Overturn New York’s Fracking Ban and Accelerate Climate Change.” 84. Zaid Jilani, “Fracking Industry Billionaires Give $15 Million to Ted Cruz’s Super PAC,” Alternet, July 25, 2015. http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/ fracking-industry-billionaires-give-record-15-million-ted-cruzs-super-pac. 85. Bill Berkowitz, “Meet the Frackers: Right Wing Billionaire Brothers’ Biblical Ambitions,” Alternet, September 12, 2014. http://www.alternet.org/ meet-frackers-right-wing-billionaire-brothers-biblical-ambitions. 86. Anna Merlin, “FYI: Major Anti-Abortion Groups Funded by Crusty Male Billionaire,” Jezebel, December 23, 2014. http://jezebel.com/ fyi-major-anti-abortion-groups-funded-by-crusty-male-b-1674488671. 87. Merlin, “FYI: Major Anti-Abortion Groups Funded by Crusty Male Billionaire.” 88. Global Affairs Canada, “Lone Pine Resources v. Government of Canada,” http://www.international.gc.ca/trade-agreements-accords-commerciaux/topicsdomaines/disp-diff/lone.aspx?lang=eng. 89. Berkowitz, “Meet the Frackers: Right Wing Billionaire Brothers’ Biblical Ambitions.” 90. Tom Cutler, “The Trans-Pacific Partnership as a Pathway for U.S. Energy exports to Japan,” NBR: Energy Security Program, http://www.nbr.org/downloads/ pdfs/eta/ES_essay_cutler_012815.pdf. 91. FirebreakPro.com. http://firebreakpro.com/. 92. Summit Water Capital Advisors, http://summitwatercapital.com/. 93. Evan Mills, “Responding to Climate Change: the Insurance Industry Perspective,” WWW.CLIMATEACTIONPROGRAMME.ORG, http://evanmills.lbl. gov/pubs/pdf/climate-action-insurance.pdf. 94. McKenzie Funk, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (New York: Penguin, 2014), 61–78. 95. Carl Franzen, “Meet the Companies that are Going to Get Rich from Global Warming,” The Verve, August 12, 2013. http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/12/4613802/ cashing-in-on-climate-change-flood-wall-air-conditioning. 96. Heather Clancy, “10 Companies Making Waves in Water Innovation,” GreenBiz, August 4, 2014. http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2014/08/04/10-companiesinnovating-water-making-waves-water-innovation.

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97. Frank Byrt, “3 Agricultural Stocks Poised to benefit from Drought,” TheStreet, July 20, 2012. http://www.thestreet.com/story/11625309/1/3-agriculturalstocks-poised-to-benefit-from-drought.html. 98. Tom Philpot, “Monsanto Bets $45 Billion on a Pesticide Soaked Future,” Mother Jones, May 13, 2015. http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/05/ monsanto-syngenta-merger-45-billion-pesticides. 99. Ari Phillips, “China and California Form Unlikely Partnership to Address Climate Change,” Think Progress, September 16, 2013. http://thinkprogress.org/ climate/2013/09/16/2626181/california-china-climate-deal/. 100. IPS Correspondents, “ENVIRONMENT—INDIA: DuPont Under Fire for Poor Safety Record,” Inter Press Service, April 9, 1996. http://www.ipsnews. net/1996/04/environment-india-dupont-under-fire-for-poor-safety-record/.101. Loomis, Out of Sight, 8-9. 102. Zaid Jilani, “CHART: Top ‘U.S.’ Corporations Outsources More than 2.4 Million American Jobs Over the Last Decade,” Think Progress, April 19, 2011. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/04/19/159555/us-corporations-outsourced-americans/. 103. William Mauldin and Sara Germano, “Nike Offers to Bring 10,000 Jobs to U.S. Under Deal,” The Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2015. http://www.wsj.com/articles/ nike-offers-to-bring-10-000-jobs-to-u-s-under-pacific-trade-deal-1431089594. 104. L. Hunter Lovins and Boyd Cohen, Climate Capitalism: Capitalism in the Age of Climate Change. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011), 3. 105. Lovins and Cohen, Climate Capitalism, 284. 106. Lovins and Cohen, Climate Capitalism, 284–5. 107. Lovins and Cohen, Climate Capitalism, 285. 108. Oliver Milman, “Climate Guru James Hanson Warns of Much Worse than Expected Sea Level Rise,” The Guardian, March 22, 2016. https://www.theguardian. com/science/2016/mar/22/sea-level-rise-james-hansen-climate-change-scientist. 109. Dahr Jamail, “The New Climate ‘Normal’: Abrupt Sea Level Rise and Predictions of Civilization Collapse,” Truthout, August 3, 2015. http://www.truth-out. org/news/item/32131-the-new-climate-normal-abrupt-sea-level-rise-and-predictionsof-civilization-collapse. 110. Lovins and Cohen, Climate Capitalism, 29. 111. Lovins and Cohen, Climate Capitalism, 28. 112. Lovins and Cohen, Climate Capitalism, 130. 113. Lovins and Cohen, Climate Capitalism, 26–58. 114. Lovins and Cohen, Climate Capitalism, 6. 115. Tanner Wilner, “DuPont’s Emissions Rise on Back of Rebound,” Environmental Leader, October 12, 2011. http://www.environmentalleader.com/2011/10/12/ duponts-emissions-rise-on-back-of-rebound/. 116. Gary Cohen and Satinath Sarangi, “DuPont: Spinning its Wheels in India,” Multinational Monitor, March 1995. http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/ issues/1995/03/mm0395_11.html. 117. Alan Taylor, “Bhopal: The World’s Worst Industrial Disaster, 30 Years Later,” The Atlantic, December 2, 2014. http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2014/12/ bhopal-the-worlds-worst-industrial-disaster-30-years-later/100864/.

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118. O ECOTEXTILES, “Nylon 6, 6,6,” https://oecotextiles.wordpress. com/2012/06/05/nylon-6-and-nylon-66/. 119. Neena Satilja, “Plant Where Workers Died Reported Recent Violations,” The Texas Tribune, November 16, 2014. http://www.texastribune.org/2014/11/16/ dupont-plant-where-workers-died-reported-recent-vi/. 120. Jean-François Tremblay, “A Flouropolymer Partner in China,” Chemical & Engineering News, 92 (28), July 14, 2014. http://cen.acs.org/articles/92/i28/Fluoropolymer-Partner-China.html. 121. Corporate Watch, “DuPont: Corporate Crimes,” http://www.corporatewatch. org.uk/company-profiles/dupont-corporate-crimes. 122. Enbridge, “Corporate Social Responsibility: Environmental Commitments,” http://www.enbridge.com/about-us/corporate-social-responsibility/environment. 123. Georgianne Nienaber, “Farmer Won’t Sell Easement So Enbridge Oil is Suing,” Huffington Post, August 8, 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/georgiannenienaber/farmer-wont-sell-family-f_b_7960084.html. 124. Peter LaFontaine, “TransCanada, Enbridge, and the Tar Sands Industry’s Tarnished Legacy,” National Wildlife Federation, December 6, 2012. http://www.nwf.org/News-andMagazines/Media-Center/Reports/Archive/2012/12-06-12-Crude-Behavior.aspx. 125. Winona LaDuke, “Worse Than Keystone: The Pipeline Project You Never Heard Of,” In these Times, January 5, 2015. http://inthesetimes.com/article/17444/ worse_than_keystone. 126. Loomis, Out of Sight, 1–22. 127. Funk, Windfall, 47–9. 128. Funk, Windfall, 101. 129. Funk, Windfall, 215–34. 130. Funk, Windfall, 117–37. 131. Funk, Windfall, 9–10. 132. Funk, Windfall, 105. 133. The Climate Corporation, https://www.climate.com/farm-data-withclimate-basic/. 134. Tim McDonnell, “Monsanto Is Using Big Data to take Over the World,” Mother Jones, November 19, 2014. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/11/ monsanto-big-data-gmo-climate-change. 135. Michael Specter, “Why the Climate Corporation Sold Itself to Monsanto,” The New Yorker, November 4, 2013. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/ why-the-climate-corporation-sold-itself-to-monsanto. 136. Maggie Severns, “5 Ways Monsanto Wants to Profit Off Climate Change,” Grist, October 11, 2013. http://grist.org/ climate-energy/5-ways-monsanto-wants-to-profit-off-climate-change/. 137. Telesur, “US Lawmaker Slams Monsanto Provision in Fast Track Bill for TPP,” April 29, 2015. http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/US-Lawmaker-SlamsMonsanto-Provision-in-Fast-Track-Bill-for-TPP-20150429-0030.html. 138. Trisha Marczak, “Trans Pacific Partnership Might Include International Ban on GMO Labeling,” Mint Press News, September 12, 2013. http://www.mintpressnews.com/monsanto-trans-pacific-partnership-bans-gmo-labeling/168797/.

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139. Lovins and Cohen, Climate Capitalism, 12. 140. Multinational Monitor, “GE: Decades of Misdeeds and Wrongdoing,” July/ August, 2001. http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2001/01july-august/julyaug01corp4.html. 141. Multinational Monitor, “GE: Decades of Misdeeds and Wrongdoing.” 142. Charlie Cray, “General Electric,” Corporate Watch, http://www.corpwatch. org/section.php?id=16. 143. Lovins and Cohen, Climate Capitalism, 12–14. 144. Sophie Yeo, “Walmart: Tackling Climate Change is not a PR Stunt,” Climate Home, May 29, 2014. http://www.rtcc.org/2014/05/29/ walmart-tackling-climate-change-is-not-a-pr-stunt/. 145. Lovins and Cohen, Climate Capitalism, 13. 146. Amanda Becker, “U.S. Labor Board Alleges Walmart Violated Labor Law in 14 States,” Reuters, January 15, 2014. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/15/ us-walmart-labor-idUSBREA0E1PY20140115. 147. Steven Greenhouse, “Wal-Mart to Pay $11 Million in Lawsuit on Illegal Workers,” New York Times, March 19, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/19/ business/walmart-to-pay-us-11-million-in-lawsuit-on-illegal-workers.html?_r=0. 148. Nina Martin, “The Impact and Echoes of the Wal-Mart Discrimination Case,” Pro Publica, September 27, 2013. http://www.propublica.org/article/ the-impact-and-echoes-of-the-wal-mart-discrimination-case. 149. Gary Burtless, “Wal-Mart Boosts Pay of its Low-Wage Workers: Is Inflation Just Around the Corner?” Brookings Press, February 24, 2015. http://www.brookings. edu/research/opinions/2015/02/24-walmart-pay-boost-inflation-burtless. 150. Peter Van Buren, “Wal-Mart Wages are the Main Reason People Depend on Food Stamps,” The Nation, February 16, 2016. http://www. forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-walmart-workers-costtaxpayers-6-2-billion-in-public-assistance/. 151. Jesse Bacon and Stacey Mitchell, “The Truth Behind Wal-Mart’s Green Claims,” Huffington Post, June 1, 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-mitchell/walmart-climate-change_b_5063035.html. 152. Associated Press, “Climate Change fears Overblown Says Exxon-Mobil Boss,” The Guardian, June 28, 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/ jun/28/exxonmobil-climate-change-rex-tillerson. 153. National Public Radio, “Exxon-Mobil: A Private Empire on a World Stage,” May 2, 2012. http://www.wbur.org/npr/151842205/exxonmobil-a-privateempire-on-the-world-stage. 154. Ian Shearn and Laird Townsend, “Did Exxon-Mobil Pay Tortuers?” Mother Jones, October 5, 2012. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/10/ did-exxon-pay-torturers.

Chapter 5

Salvation Capitalism Steady-State Sustainability, Techno-Utopia, and Planetary Metastasis—Six Takes

SALVATION + CAPITALISM = TAR SANDS STRIP-MINING - THE APOCALYPSE THAT STICKS TO YOUR SHOES “The World’s Most Environmentally Responsible Oil Sands Project Ever Builts” Insofar as the most recent and most hegemonic iteration of Free Trade to date, namely the Free Trade Triumvirate (TPP, TTIP, TiSA) makes possible new varieties of conquest capitalism each driven by the quest for new markets (such as climate trutherism and climate capitalism), it becomes harder to imagine any profit-enterprise not destined from inception to become predator, prey, or disposable casualty in a shrinking pool of behemoth corporate multinationals. Because the logic of capital depends on the always possible transformation of resources and organisms into commodities, on calculable expectation, and because these resources are destined to course through a circulatory system oxygenated by the beneficiaries of human chauvinism, the evolution from Homo Sapiens to Homo Colossus, to Homo Colossus Mercenary is, if not inevitable, not surprising. Free trade pacts like the Trans-Pacific Partnership instantiate this logic in a fashion that makes a mockery, if still an expedient, of the nation state. Climate change is merely the most recent and potentially most deadly effect of making over the planet, its ecosystems, inhabitants, and communities into extraction colonies, factory farms, industrial zones, sweat shops, deep-injection wells, landfills, toilets, slave-brokers, machines, etc. That Homo Colossus Mercenary looks to cash in on the crises—ecological, economic, and geopolitical—produced by ecological disasters like climate change is as predictable as the melting of the Greenland ice sheets, the rise of privatized fire service, 271

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and the increasing potential for civil war and terrorism fueled at least in part by the exodus from desertified farmlands. Given this reality, one that cannot be constrained to “economics,” the prospect of recuperating a radically revalued human-centeredness anchored in the responsibility to contribute to a future not merely sustainable but desirable seems more remote than ever; the prospect of creating the broadly aesthetic conditions for the kind of “an experience” John Dewey articulates—one that makes for a future worth wanting—surely appears at this point naïve if not deluded. To make matters worse, our trust not only in notions like “free markets” but “just government” is further undermined by the realization that the vocabulary of our commitment to that future has been hijacked as a marketing tool by the very parties culpable for the systemic destruction of our ecologies and communities. To give just one example, consider U.S. Oil Sand’s CEO Cameron Todd defending his company’s commitment to environmental responsibility as it prepares to begin the first tar sands mining operation in the United States; from an Associated Press story titled “First U.S. Tar Sands Mine Open for Business”: On a remote Utah ridge covered in sagebrush, pines and wild grasses, a Canadian company is about to embark on something never before done commercially in the United States: digging sticky, black, tar-soaked sand from the ground and extracting the petroleum . . . “We’re dedicated to having the world’s most environmentally responsible oil sands project ever built,” CEO Cameron Todd said in a boast that has failed to reassure protesters . . . Across the rolling green hills of the Book Cliffs of eastern Utah, about 165 miles from Salt Lake City, the company plans this fall to begin digging the first in a series of pits, each the size of a football stadium, and start unsticking oil from the sand that crumbles in your hand like a brownie . . . Instead of relying on the usual industrial-strength hydrocarbon solvent, U.S. Oil Sands says it will employ the biodegradable citrus extract that is in grease-cutting household products. Utah officials who recently approved the mine also imposed a key requirement environmentalists considered a victory: The company must monitor water and air quality. And instead of leaving open pits, ponds of mining debris and barren land, U.S. Oil Sands says it will fill in the holes with the clean leftover sand and plant grass and other vegetation.1

The phrase “the world’s most environmentally responsible oil sands project ever built” might stir a chuckle were it not a flatly terrifying oxymoron given that tar sands mining is one of the most carbon-intensive, ecologydestroying, polluting extraction processes ever devised. As reported by Scientific American’s David Biello [T]he oil sands industry has greenhouse gas emissions greater than New Zealand and Kenya—combined. If all the bitumen in those sands could be burned,

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another 240 billion metric tons of carbon would be added to the atmosphere and, even if just the oil sands recoverable with today’s technology get burned, 22 billion metric tons of carbon would reach the sky. And reserves usually expand over time as technology develops, otherwise the world would have run out of recoverable oil long ago. The greenhouse gas emissions of mining and upgrading tar sands is roughly 79 kilograms per barrel of oil presently, whereas melting out the bitumen in place requires burning a lot of natural gas—boosting emissions to more than 116 kilograms per barrel . . . producing and processing tar sands oil results in roughly 14 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than the average oil used in the U.S. And greenhouse gas emissions per barrel have stopped improving and started increasing slightly, thanks to increasing development of greenhouse gas–intensive melting-in-place projects. “Emissions have doubled since 1990 and will double again by 2020,” says Jennifer Grant, director of oil sands research at environmental group Pembina Institute in Canada.2

What’s troubling in Todd’s pitch for environmental responsibility could fill several books, but suffice this much to make the point: there is no orange extract that can counteract, remediate, or restore the ecological and habitat destruction caused by the strip-mining of potentially 148,000 acres of federal and state land in the “Tar Sands Triangle” of Eastern Utah.3 Moreover, according to geophysicist William Johnson, the extract Todd claims is environmentally safe, d-Limonene, can “unlock carcinogens . . . naturally found in bitumen . . . [that] might migrate into groundwater.4 Although U.S. Oil Sands has been confronted on environmental, safety, and health grounds by protesters challenging proprietary rights protections for the use of d-Limonene, exposing the lack of protections for endangered species, and decrying what an escalated demand for extracts could mean for the price of oranges, Todd simply applauds Utah as a “can do state for petroleum production.” He then urges the governor “to quickly dispatch ‘obstructionist’ groups opposing his project.”5 We’re left to wonder what he means by “quickly dispatch,” but one thing’s clear: Todd sleeps well at night knowing whose interests the state protects. For U.S. Oil Sands “environmentally responsible” is simply a comforting bedtime story intended to reassure a public extorted by decades of fossil fuel flag-waving over “energy independence” and “national security.” Regular Joe and Josie are reassured that they can keep driving their big trucks and heating their big suburban houses. Fact is, this doesn’t take very much, and Todd knows it. He, like his colleagues across the fossil fuel industry, counts on it that, standing behind orange peels to hijack the vocabulary of “environmental,” most Americans (and many others) will ignore the fact that tar sands mining carbon emissions contribute more than just about any other extraction process to climate change. But Todd isn’t alone in the hijack, and he couldn’t pull off so egregious a misappropriation of “environmental responsibility”

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without help. In fact, save only a handful of protesters, the public is profoundly complicit in this window-dressing subterfuge. So accustomed to charting value as consumption, we simply pretend not to see the ecological erosion and species loss that, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, may mean the extinction of at least two species of wildflower that grow only on the “oil shale formations in Colorado and Utah.”6 We just don’t care. Insofar as the warp and woof of our relationship to nonhuman nature is governed by exchange value, encouraging us to experience things in isolated units (bytes, price points, deliverables), “endangered wildflowers” count simply as data for a cost-benefit analysis that registers their worth on a scale of value determined not in virtue of their uniqueness, beauty, or contribution to the ecosystem of which they’re an intimate part, but according to the price of gas. On that scale, nothing is irreplaceable and everything is substitutable. Hence, it’s no surprise that as early as 2012, Utah officials gave “the green light to begin mining oil sands . . . without first obtaining a pollution permit or monitoring groundwater quality.”7 So much for the wildflowers, or the songbirds that depend on them, or the water that feeds them—or the people that live nearby. Free Trade Fascism as the New Normal Trade agreements like TPP further empower companies like U.S. Oil Sands to sue states like Utah should they become less “can do” by drafting or enforcing inconvenient environmental or safety regulations.8 Having the “right” to realize profits from their leases, TPP also strengthens Todd’s demand that the “obstructionists” be “dispatched” as an obstacle, further eroding the powers of individuals and communities to protect themselves against conquest capitalism. The confidence with which Todd makes this demand is, moreover, well supported by the evidence that it’s effective, even if his word choice is especially mercenary. Consider, for example a case from Longmont, Colorado, as reported in the New York Times: Longmont has become a cautionary tale of what can happen when cities decide to confront the oil and gas industry. In an aggressive response to a wave of citizen-led drilling bans, state officials, energy companies and industry groups are taking Longmont and other municipalities to court, forcing local governments into what critics say are expensive, long-shot efforts to defend the measures. While the details vary—some municipalities have voted for outright bans, and others for multiyear suspensions of fracking—energy companies in city after city argue that they have a right to extract underground minerals, and that the drilling bans amount to voter-approved theft. They also say state agencies, not individual communities, . . . set oil and gas rules.9

Fact is, this form of corporate fascism is the new normal not only in Colorado, but for several California counties: San Benito, Santa Clara,

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Alameda, Monterey, Santa Cruz, and Butte,10 and even for Texas: in a recent case from Denton, residents worked tirelessly to pass a ban on industrial drilling activities within their community only to have it overturned by the state.11 Indeed, even federal lands are not exempt from industrial incursion.12 The new normal, moreover, isn’t just about the extraction of increasingly scarce fossil fuels; it also extends to the formation of powerful corporate monopolies on the very stuff of life, namely seeds. In an article titled “Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear,” Vanity Fair writers Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele tell the story of Gary Rinehart who “clearly remembers the summer day in 2002 when the stranger walked in and issued his threat.” It came from Monsanto’s reputedly aggressive patent department that claimed it “had proof that Rinehart had planted Monsanto’s genetically modified soybeans.”13 Barlett and Steele explain that [s]cenes like this are playing out in many parts of rural America these days as Monsanto goes after farmers, farmers’ co-ops, seed dealers—anyone it suspects may have infringed its patents of genetically modified seeds. As interviews and reams of court documents reveal, Monsanto relies on a shadowy army of private investigators and agents in the American heartland to strike fear into farm country. They fan out into fields and farm towns, where they secretly videotape and photograph farmers, store-owners, and co-ops; infiltrate community meetings; and gather information from informants about farming activities. Farmers say that some Monsanto agents pretend to be surveyors. Others confront farmers on their land and try to pressure them to sign papers giving Monsanto access to their private records. Farmers call them the “seed police” and use words such as “Gestapo” and “Mafia” to describe their tactics.14

These are the kinds of examples that make the use of what might seem a quite loaded term—fascism—simply and accurately descriptive. Like their counterparts in the fossil fuel industry, Monsanto’s “seed police” preempt the need to wager lawsuits by insuring that their investments are protected not only from protesters that might have to be “dispatched,” but from communities trying to protect their access to clean water or farmers who might dare to opt out of the hegemony of GMOs—much less those who’d advance the rights of wildflowers to exist unmolested by strip mines. The tactics are transparently fascist: U.S. Oil Sands, the natural gas industry, Monsanto, Nike, Walmart, and their analogues operate not only with the blessing of the state—but with its active complicity and cooperation to realize an enterprise whose single objective is profit. The upshot’s clear enough: anyone committed to sustainability, species survival and diversity, to environmental and economic justice, or to creating a desirable future, faces an incredibly weighty burden to show that capitalism can be rehabilitated, that the fully capitalized planet can also be the sustainable planet. Given the mercenary trajectory inherent to its logic, the tangible

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consequences of its capacity to commodify quite literally anything (including fear and anxiety), and its relentless pursuit of profits regardless climate change (consequences for which fossil fuel, GMO, and animal agriculture bear immense responsibility), it’s hard to see how any variety of capitalism can play any role in the realization of that future. Todd knows that tar sands mining makes an enormous emissions contribution to climate change. Monsanto’s CEO Hugh Grant operates an army of surveillance and enforcement soldiers to insure its seed-hegemony. Against massive protest and long-established environmental hazards, Shell’s CEO Ben van Beurden won approval from the Obama administration to drill in the Arctic.15 CEOs like Todd, Grant, van Beurden seem not merely unconcerned by the environmental implications of their industries, they actively exploit them in order to access and/or create new markets, to advertise their own industrial processes as safe, and to fortify their entitled positions as the industrial patriarchs of human chauvinism. The Rise of Salvation Capitalism: Reading Russell Gold’s The Boom Put simply: it’s cashing in or cashing out, and the options for the entrepreneur committed to minimizing their carbon footprint, respecting human rights, offering moral consideration to nonhuman animals, and working to restore ecosystem integrity, as opposed to a rapacious liquidator of the planet, seem limited at best. Add to this, first, that the multinational giants leave virtually no room in the thin crevices of their competition for any but the most enterprising cash-in upstarts, and second, Dale Jamieson’s astute observation that because “[c]limate change must be thought rather than sensed, and we are not very good at thinking,” the threat it poses goes ignored, and even the idea of a capitalism that can save us—and the planet—from market logic seems deluded.16 In one sense, then, it’s surprising that there have indeed arisen a number of what I’ll call salvation capitalisms: efforts to articulate a system of capital exchange whose built-in regulatory mechanisms, recognition of ecological limits, and respect for human and nonhuman life advance at a minimum a future-oriented set of sustainability objectives squarely situated in the challenges posed by climate change and its implications. These include at least the following: • The realization that vital resources like fossil fuels, clean water, and breathable air are not endless; • The revaluing of quality over quantity in goods and services; • The meaningful pursuit of environmental sustainability as a minimum condition of desirability—not its final objective; • The reclamation of species preservation and diversity;

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• The restoration of nonhuman animal habitat; • The institutionalizing of environmental and labor justice; • The support of human communities to democratic self-determination in concert with that of neighboring communities locally, regionally, and globally; • The innovation of technologies via John Dewey’s broadly aesthetic notion of “an experience,” which complement the valuing of quality over quantity; • The commitment to a future that advances these ethical ideals locally, regionally, and globally in accord with other values, cultural, political, and aesthetic. In another sense, however, to the extent that Homo Colossus has become naturalized as the standard-bearer for human-centeredness, it’s not surprising that writers like the Wall Street Journal’s Russell Gold draft works devoted, for example, to the history of how horizontal slickwater hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” “ignited the American energy revolution and changed the world” without pausing, even briefly, to consider whether the fully capitalized planet is itself a morally defensible objective. In The Boom17 Gold describes a conflict between what he calls “a clash between two different modes of capitalism,” one aiming for “a factory in rural Pennsylvania for the extraction of gas molecules” the other to farm, the first “the output of geologists who studied the alignment of the shale,” the second a longstanding dairy operation.18 Neither sustainability, the welfare of dairy cattle, potential harm to the nearby community, nor any of the issues above played any role in resolving the conflict between the farmer and Chesapeake—the gas company. “The conflict was soil versus rock, farming versus petroleum engineering,” and that was it.19 Gold chronicles no other options (say, the possibility of nonviolent civil disobedience), even though the farmer’s quality of life, well water, property values, and community were all endangered by Chesapeake’s incursion. While Gold does acknowledge climate change as a “profound challenge to the planet,”20 it’s just as quickly snuffed out by laudatory prose concerning the “rebirth of manufacturing,” and “energy independence.”21 Gold points out as if it were a fact of nature that “modern societies run on fossil fuel,” and later that “[f]racking came at an auspicious time”: “[j]ust when it seemed like we had used up all the easyto-tap fossil fuels, forcing the world to get serious about renewable energy technologies, an enormous new supply of oil and gas emerged.”22 He cheerily discusses “large checks to landowners,” the strengthening of the U.S. dollar, and even “untangling some of the thorniest foreign policy challenges the nation has faced for the last forty years,”23 all without any further serious mention of climate change and the massive contribution fossil fuel extraction makes to it other that to say than “[t]he Earth is warming, and once the source

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rock is depleted, the era of fossil fuel will end whether we are ready or not” as if nothing else in the Holocene will have changed.24 Reading The Boom is rather like reading history as if no other trajectory than the emergence of fossil fuel multinationals were possible—illustrating the extent to which the attempt to save capitalism by radically reconfiguring the conditions of economic exchange for a planet imperiled by capitalism is difficult even to imagine, let alone realize. Gold’s descriptions of some of the more colorful personalities of the American natural gas “revolution” in chapters titled, for instance, “everyone comes for the money” would leave us to believe that the destiny of human being just is material wealth—at least for those already well positioned to take advantage of the new technologies that have briefly postponed the end of the era of fossil fuel—letting us cling a little longer to the myth of endless resources. Hardly anyone else makes an appearance on the pages of The Boom making the introduction of notions like environmental justice—much less the implications of trade pacts like TPP for the developing world, its human populations and ecosystems—seem that much more insignificant. “Everyone,” or at least everyone who matters to conquest capitalism, does come for the money. So it’s in just this context that those who’d try to defend capitalism against “everyone,” salvation capitalists, for whom the sustainability objectives above do have a substantial moral claim on human action in the Holocene, stand out either as promising visionaries or hopeless romantics. Broadly speaking, the salvation capitalist argues that self-interest tempered by science, beholden neither to cash out nor cash in “business plans,” yet optimistic about the prospect that technological innovation can be put to the task of saving the planet, and its inhabitants is possible. We’ll no doubt see many more or less plausible iterations of salvation capitalism, especially as cash-out exhausts itself with the end of the era of fossil fuels, and cash-in becomes confronted by an ecological collapse that no insurance policy, fire service, anti-terrorism policy, electrified border, military force, medical intervention, or floating house construction is up to. We’ll consider two, along with some variations, of perhaps the most promising candidates: Hermann Daly’s steady-state sustainability economics and Martin Lewis’ “guided capital” techno-utopia as it has become translated through the “optics” of the 2015 Paris Climate Conference (the Conference of the Parties 21—COP21). Before we get our hopes up, however, let’s be clear: whatever novel use each of these arguments make of various rhetorical strategies aimed at getting us committed to the above list, including inciting valid apprehension about the alternatives, the potential for a technological solution, the possibility that sustainable environmental policies will follow on the realization of social and economic justice, the postulation of enemies against which “salvation capitalism” can appear less oxymoronic, or even the lure of a global “green”

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economy powered by a transition to a “new” techno-utopian version of “endless,” will fail. Indeed, salvation capitalism fails spectacularly because, with or without excuse, its advocates fail to take to heart what makes money for CEOs like Rex Tillerson, namely that the fully capitalized planet is the fully commodified planet: • The logic of capital requires the commodification of every potentially profitable resource—no matter what it is or whether its exhaustible. • The translation of all value to exchange value charts an inalterable course away from ecological integrity, much less environmental or social/economic justice, and toward reinforcing the power of those beneficiaries already well established along the axes of human chauvinism. • The beneficiaries of capital will deploy—literally and figuratively—every means at their disposal to insure that their “armed lifeboats” stay afloat. Insofar as this endeavor will be imperiled by increasingly acute planetary and geopolitical instability, environmental disintegration will continue to be both imbricated and elided in acts of terrorism, civil war, human migration, religious extremism, and other forms of political violence and oppression. • Among these “means” is necessarily included the myth of endless resources. The myth forms an operational feature in the logic of capital regardless the facts or implications of natural resource exhaustion; fossil fuels are endless—until they run out. The myth is thus also a critical driver in the techno-utopian’s salvation capitalism; technological innovation is endless—and will never run out. • The stark lesson of contemporary multinational capitalism, including the climate change deniers, the Free Trade proponents, the climate capitalists and, as we’ll see, their “salvation” variants among the steady-state sustainability advocates and the techno-utopians is that, whatever else its implications, climate change is ultimately irrelevant to profit generation unless or until the planet implodes. As Tillerson starkly puts what could be the credo of this fully capitalized planet, “If you want to live by the precautionary principle, then crawl up in a ball and live in a cave.”25 Where, even in the face of climate change, the most modest promotion of caution solicits “go live in a cave” derision, the task before the salvation capitalist is more than merely daunting. Tillerson doesn’t have to spend much time worrying about whether environmental harms or human rights violations ought to be considered before a profit venture is undertaken because, like its friends among the multinationals, ExxonMobil dictates the terms of the “dating games” among competitors that quite literally run the world. Even if terms like Free Trade Fascism ought to be reserved for globalized capital at

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the expiration (or extirpation) of the nation state, trade pacts like TPP make it hard to deny we’re at that point. For players like Todd, Tillerson, and van Beurden the geopolitics of things like carbon footprints and sites of manufacture are important only insofar as they affect the bottom line—which is not, in fact, very much. Jamieson shows why pointing out that while enormous attention is paid to computing carbon footprints and then debating who’s responsible for the actual emissions, “manipulation of the global carbon cycle is intrinsic to the existing global economy.” He offers an example of coal mined in Australia, but ultimately burned in Chinese electricity generators used to power factories that make products shipped to consumers in Europe and the United States It doesn’t matter, argues Jamieson, who precisely are the miners, generators, transporters, and consumers. What matters is that the system itself is structurally dependent on hydrocarbons.26 The only feature of this account that might keep Homo Colossus up at night is that “the manipulation of the global carbon cycle is intrinsic to the existing global economy.” After all, that’s just another way of saying that the circulatory system that is capitalist exchange is not only oxygenated by fossil fuels, but will choke to death without them. That latter, of course, is the stuff of nightmares. But so long as we’re willing to preserve the myth of endless resources through the pretense that even tar sands mining is just another kind of drilling—despite both monumental expense and destruction—it’s clear that money remains an effective sedative.

SALVATION CAPITALISM ONE: HERMAN PM E DALY’S STEADY-STATE SUSTAINABILITY CONFRONTS THE MYTH OF ENDLESS RESOURCES Salvation Capitalism One: The Economics of Sustainability The first, and perhaps most, persuasively articulated salvation capitalism belongs to steady-state economist Herman E. Daly who, in his masterwork Beyond Growth, rejects the myth of endless resources and repudiates the expansionist growth inherent to conquest capitalism.26 Daly grounds his vision for a sustainable alternative squarely on the premise that the planet’s ecosystems are finite, its resources limited, and hence that the economy must be treated as a subset of the global ecosystem.27 He argues that: [t]he power of the concept of sustainable development is that it both reflects and evokes a latent shift in our vision of how the economic activities of human beings are related to the natural world—an ecosystem which is finite, non-growing, and materially closed. The demands of these activities on the containing

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ecosystem for regeneration of raw material “inputs” and absorption of waste “outputs” must, I will argue, be kept at ecologically sustainable levels as a condition of sustainable development.28

Any model of economic activity that discounts the full scale of ecological costs—resource exhaustion, waste absorption, species extinction, loss of diversity, and the inequitable distribution of responsibility—does so not only at the peril of the planet’s capacity to regenerate the necessary conditions for life, but at that of the markets to act as “the main mechanism for solving the problem of efficient allocation of resources.”29 As we’ll see, however, insofar as “efficient” no more means “equitable” than “sustainable” implies “just,” Daly’s steady-state solution to ecological collapse is as likely to retain the inequitable social and geopolitical structure of its chauvinist predecessors. Or worse: Because the steady-state economy retains the commodifying market logic of conquest capitalism, “efficient” is at least vulnerable to being instantiated as repressive social policy—all in the name of sustainability. For while market mechanisms may be able to be deployed to sustainable ends, nothing in achieving this steady state implies (much less demands) that environmental justice figure in as an important component. In fact, what efficiency dictates is that the opposite is more likely, emphasizing the point once again that “sustainable” does not necessarily imply “desirable” at least for those not already well positioned to take advantage of the market mechanisms Daly’s keen to preserve. Insofar as eroded ecological conditions means shrinking opportunities for profit venture growth, the first priority for Daly’s salvation capitalism is to reconfigure capital investment on the model of a “steady state” economy, that is, a system of exchange in which, as Daly puts it, “biophysical limits to growth . . . [namely], finitude, entropy, and ecological interdependence” supplies the governing principle to all economic activity.30 For such an economy “sustainability” is an essentially economic measure of the desirable future for a human being whose “centeredness” is conceived not only as anthropocentric but economic—self-interested, competitive, and enterprising. Daly’s Holocene, in other words, is still a Capitalocene, and his view of the principle drivers of human action remains largely consistent with its neoliberal predecessors. “We should strive,” he argues, “for sufficient per capita wealth—efficiently maintained and allocated, and equitably distributed—for the maximum number of people that can be sustained over time under these conditions.”31 While Daly thus aims to redefine “wealth” for what is still a fully capitalized planet in terms of the quality of products as opposed to quantity, he doesn’t interrogate, at least in any sustained way, what kind of creature is “human being,” leaving untouched deeper questions about the relationship

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between human chauvinism and conquest capitalism. On the one hand, Daly cautions us about the “corrosive effects on moral standards resulting from the very attitudes that foster growth.”32 But on the other, value within the steady-state economy remains defined in terms of exchange; its object remains wealth—even if what qualifies as wealth is theoretically confined to the biophysical limits of the planet as a “closed ecosystem.”33 “Wealth,” in other words, remains essentially defined as a commodity, and therefore, valued quantitatively despite Daly’s insistence to the contrary. Achieving sustainability within the steady-state economy consists not in any particularly radical interrogation of our disposition to value or our relationship to nonhuman nature as a resource for us, but in recognizing that if we’re to maintain a worldview within which human welfare—access to wealth—ranks as the preeminent objective, we must enact global scale policies to preserve the ecological conditions that support and ratify it.34 Daly’s, in other words, is salvation capitalism made for Homo Colossus. And that failure—the failure to interrogate the commodifying logic of capital and its correlate, human-centeredness naturalized as essentially acquisitive and competitive—guarantees that Daly’s vision of a sustainable planet is not only unsustainable, but self-defeating. Although the steady-state economy constitutes a significant departure from business as usual and/or climate capitalism with respect to its rejection of the myth of endless resources, the same cannot be said for its potential to realize economic or environmental justice, especially for the global South whose labor remains subjugated as a largely invisible and disposable commodity. We have, in fact, little reason to think that the basic axes of human chauvinism—sex, gender, race, and species—aren’t preserved and reinforced in Daly’s vision of salvation capitalism, that his use of “we” refers to the same mostly male white, Western(ized) and wealthy global players. His call to move toward a steady-state economy may make for some anxiety at the World Bank,35 but, as William Easterly lays out in his withering attack in The White Man’s Burden,36 the attempt to save capitalism for the capitalist also saves gross economic injustice for the corporate fascist—even if it casts a veneer of “sustainability” onto the environmental conditions capital conquest requires. And there’s irony: just as the pop-cultural ecocentrist’s call to blow up the dams and bring down the powers responsible for ecological destruction falters on the issue of who will bear the heaviest burden of that revolution, so too the steady-state economy is likely achieved at the cost of those already subjugated as labor, consumable, or disposable. If the sustainable future is to be secured primarily for those authorized and privileged by the oppressive institutions of the present, it’s not only at least murky what makes “sustainable” desirable, much less equitable for those whose labor and resources are conscripted to sustain it; it’s also plausible that “steady state” could create worse

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conditions for those for whom the World Bank’s “development” has already been disastrous.37 This isn’t to say that steady-state economics don’t demand at least the appearance of a Titanic psychic as well as economic shift away from value gauged as quantitative exchange and toward qualitative improvement, that is, “development without growth”38; it does. But while such development demands we forsake the myth of endless natural resources, it remains agnostic on questions concerning “development for whom” and under what conditions. Daly argues, for example, that “[f]or nonrenewable natural capital the question is not how to invest, but how to best liquidate the inventory, and what to do with the net wealth realized from that liquidation,”39 and that “[t] he general rule would be to deplete nonrenewables at a rate equal to the rate of development of renewable substitutes.”40 This sounds reasonable—in the abstract. But consider: we have no particularly good reason to believe that the capital forces at work in the exhaustion of nonrenewable resources will realize themselves any differently in the development of renewables. To the contrary, the conquests of the climate capitalists suggest that Homo Colossus will be as well positioned to take advantage of the “sustainable” steady-state economy as his fossil fuel predecessors. Who decides—and for whose benefit—that the inventory “best liquidated” in the transition to the steady-state economy is Ecuadorian forest, Pennsylvania farmland, Chihuahua Desert, or Arctic ice shelves? Whose life-sustaining jobs in West Virginian coalmines are to be traded for solar panel wage labor in China? Can the steady-state economy justify the forced relocation of indigenous peoples in the name of sustainable re-foresting projects? Stemming the Tide of “Growthmania”: Global North/Global South The trouble is that we have little reason to think that the net wealth generated through the “development” of renewables (itself ill-defined) isn’t just as likely to be pocketed by the same voracious multinational corporate structure responsible for egregious human rights abuses. Daly’s no doubt right that incorporating the ecological limits that determine “inventory” into future business plans is crucial to stemming the tide of “growthmania.”41 He’s right too that “internalizing the externalities” of development helps to clarify ecological costs and benefits.42 Neither, however, speak directly, much less adequately, to the intimate relationship between benefits accruing mostly to citizens of the global North—whose conscience is assuaged by trading coal-plants for solar panels—and the costs likely to remain largely invisible because they’re borne by the global South. For this latter “development without growth” is no more likely to realize itself as the qualitative improvement of existential condition than earlier United Nations, International Monetary Fund or World

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Bank programs that effectively function as brokers for corporate interests in tandem with repressive and often corrupt government agencies.43 Consider, for example, how “development without growth” might be instantiated in technologies utilized to advance sustainability. “Advances in science and technology,” writes Daly, are beneficial, increasing both our understanding and range of choices about how humanity and the environment relate. We must seek constant improvement in both . . . in order to achieve eco-efficiency, protect and restore natural systems, and change consumption patterns.”44 This too sounds good, and in some respects Daly’s no doubt right. The trouble is that because the primary ideological drivers of the steady-state economy are, at least in the first place, moving beyond the myth of endless resources, achieving “eco-efficiency” and “protecting and restoring natural systems,” ventures that seek to capitalize on these objectives are effectively exempted from the substantive consideration of possible consequences for human populations—including those dependent on ecosystems degraded by previous capital conquests. That they’re degraded implies neither less human dependency (in fact, the opposite may be true) nor less sustainability since the “sustainability quotient” is likely to be calculated according to the needs and wants of the global North—making the human communities of the global South not less vulnerable to exploitation, but more. The upshot is that eco-efficient policies and programs could come at high cost to those potentially displaced from jobs, lands, or other existential resources in the name of “sustainability,” especially those whose voices have been marginalized by the beneficiaries of human chauvinism. But this bodes ill for the steady-state economy. Realized at the price of environmental justice, it’s not only likely to fail, its success for the global North could be disastrous for “development without growth” for the global South. The United Nations/World Bank REDD—“Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation”—project offers a stark case in point. According to the No REDD in Africa Network (NRAN), the Sengwer Indigenous Peoples Programme, and the Indigenous Peoples’ Biocultural Climate Change Assessment Initiative, “massive evictions and forced relocations” of the Sengwer as “squatters” from their ancestral Kenyan lands in order to reforest it toward carbon emission offsets is nothing more than another form of capitalist exploitation of the peoples of the global South by powerful profitdriven interests in the global North: REDD+ is a neo-liberal, market-driven approach that leads to the commodification of life and undermines holistic community values and governance. It is . . . driven by economic processes such as trade liberalization and privatization and by actors like the World Bank whom have been responsible for the destruction of forests and livelihoods of Indigenous Peoples all over the world. The concept

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of “Green Economy” is a vehicle for promoting trends of commodification of nature.45

Little in this rendition of sustainability precludes the potential for human rights abuses, and much encourages it since such a steady state is best achieved, according to Daly, via market mechanisms. Carbon offset programs certainly conform to Daly’s vision of ecoefficiency, but at a tremendous cost to cultural destruction and human displacement that—because it transforms farmlands back to forests as carbon-factories—is leveraged to “justify” compulsory eviction of the indigenous Sengwer. Beside the fact, moreover, that carbon offset programs accomplish little with respect to encouraging measurable conservation among polluters (let’s just grow more trees!), they also reinforce precisely the same ideological disposition responsible for deforestation—the commodification of nature. Analogues that illustrate the dangers of failing to challenge this disposition are not hard to find. While some environmental organizations like Oceana applauded Shell’s September 2015 decision to halt exploration for oil and gas in the Arctic’s Chukchi Sea, noting that, because the price of gas is low, the predicted reserves disappointing, Shell’s decision must have been motivated by economic and environmental concerns, inferring the latter is folly. Had Shell’s predictions panned out, business as usual would have won the day—Arctic be damned. We’ve no reason to think that the same market logic won’t govern the planting of trees, the desalination of water, the production of solar panels and wind turbines, the reclamation of prairies, marshes, wetlands, etc.—in order to manufacture sustainability. Sustainability brokering, in other words, is just one more variety of climate capitalism. The plight of the Sengwer offers just one poignant example of the capital conquest for “sustainability” in complicity with governments seeking monetary benefits, and little in Daly’s vision for a steady-state economy prohibits such human rights abuses; indeed, much in his view supports the subordination of human welfare to ecological stability—or at least to its appearance as “sustainability.” The human rights activists at NRAN insist that “[t]he denial of complicity by the World Bank in the forced eviction of the Sengwer people from their forests is ludicrous.” Nnimmo Bassey, founder of Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) in Nigeria and former Chair of Friends of the Earth International puts it this way: “[w]e will not be fooled as the fingers of international financial institutions (IFI’s) like the World Bank and other carbon cowboys are clearly visible in the unrepentant push of neoliberal agenda to exploit, despoil and displace poor communities and grab their resources including carbon.” NRAN continues: What is perhaps most disturbing about the statement is the World Bank’s offer to the Kenyan government, “to share best practices in resettlement in line with its safeguard policies. These seek to improve or restore the living standards of

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people affected by involuntary resettlement.” The World Bank is both admitting its complicity in the forced relocation of the Sengwer People as well as offering to collude with the Kenyan government to cover-up cultural genocide. Claims of being able to restore and improve the living standards of evicted people such as the Sengwer are crude, paternalistic, colonial in nature and above all smack of sheer arrogance on the World Bank’s part.46

Involuntary resettlement describes the very sorts of programs necessary to achieving a steady-state economy. These are at least repressive if not culturally genocidal. They also position sustainability as the next big global money-maker, its “carbon cowboys” the same privileged beneficiaries of conquest capitalism, the pitch to “eco-efficiency” the most effective cover story yet for concealing egregious human rights abuses behind the gloss of environmental responsibility. The Ultimate Failure of Daly’s Salvation Capitalism: Carbon Sequestration While Daly recognizes the import of “how humanity and the environment relate,” prioritizing sustainability over environmental justice offers only cold comfort in the face of forced dislocation for peoples like the Sengwer. As a marketable response to climate change, carbon sequestration technologies are ripe for appropriation by climate capitalists because they’re another way to commodify the planet to the ends of capital. The irony runs deep: while Daly’s right that economies are subsets of the planet’s ecology—there are no endless natural resources—the steady-state economy he advocates as the alternative to “business as usual” depends on its own variety of endless, namely the equally untenable myth that, short of genocide, human beings can be exploited, displaced, consumed, and discarded in the interest of whatever is the next marketable commodity. Climate change, in other words, must be seen as itself marketable to provide the impetus necessary to realize the steady state. It’s in this way that even the most egregious forms of environmental destruction become just another iteration of the fully capitalized planet. So Daly’s right: “we do not consume matter/energy, but we do consume (irrevocably use up) the capacity to rearrange matter/energy”47; that makes it all the more surprising that he misses the role human action plays in the latter, and the ways in which that role distributes itself inequitably. Daly recognizes that the first challenge is the toughest: getting Homo Colossus to see that an economy whose “throughput—the flow beginning with the raw material input, followed by their conversion into commodities, and finally into waste output,” is contained within and limited to “the regenerative and absorptive capacities of the ecosystem.”48 But throughput is also contained within and limited to the regenerative and absorptive capacities of peoples,

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like the Sengwer, whose cultures are destroyed along with the resources sustaining them for generations. And this runs directly contrary to the fact that the myth of endless resources is a non-negotiable ideological premise of capitalism. How are peoples like the Sengwer to be convinced to forfeit not just their labor, but their lands, homes, and ways of life for the sake of “fixing” environmental crises caused by the agents responsible for expropriating their resources? Why should they sacrifice their communities and livelihoods in exchange for the assumed “rights” of wealthy global Northerners to pollute? How is this really different from earlier incarnations of empire—another iteration of colonialism in the guise of “sustainability”? This is like asking the rape victim to pay for the abortion of the assailant’s offspring. It will fail. To swap one form of oppression—fossil fuel—for another—sustainability—will not wrest Homo Colossus from the brink of his own eco-cidal trajectory, and may in fact accelerate incidents of refugeeism, terrorism, and civil war in its creation of destitution and the conditions of starvation. What’s crucial to see in Daly’s vision of sustainability is that the relationship he seeks to radically reconfigure is not that of human beings to nonhuman nature (much less nonhuman animals) per se, but rather our relationship to our existential conditions. These are very different things: while the former accords value to things independent of their contribution to human welfare, the latter does not. While the former could require actions or policies inconvenient or even anathema to (some) human interests, the latter is dictated by what’s expedient to human objectives. The latter is the domain of Homo Colossus whose competitive self-interest drives the steady-state economy, redirecting the market’s capacity to incentivize innovation, especially technological innovation, to “sustainable development.” I say “technological innovation” because, while Daly rightly cautions us against the “usual ploy” of “appeal to the infinite possibilities of technology and resource substitution” as a means to “outrun resource depletion and pollution,”49 he also recognizes that “[w]e must seek constant improvements in both science and technology in order to achieve eco-efficiency, protect and restore natural systems, and change consumption patterns.”50 In other words, while Daly’s vision of a sustainable planet involves more than a technologically facilitated swap of one energy source for others (even renewables), the transition from “quantitative” consumption to “qualitative” development still won’t be accomplished without the right tools—and these include more than wind turbines and solar panels. Fact is, at least in its current configuration, wind turbines and solar panels are as deeply ensconced in Free Trade as are any other mass production consumable—like carbon sequestration. Determining what are the right tools, how to use them to sustainable, no-growth, steady state ends, that is a matter of developing a convincing profit-generating argument capable of governing decisions aimed, for Daly,

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not at sustainability per se, but at what can make optimal use of market mechanisms toward realizing an economy for which sustainability is necessary condition, explicit objective, and profitable venture.51 Quaint notions like “justice” play little role among these decision variables, and that is precisely what makes the Sengwer vulnerable to cultural (if not literal) genocide; for the steady-state economy’s version of climate capitalism, what’s in the way of sustainability is in the way of profits. A sustainable planet is not of value to Daly for its own sake; it’s not of value for the sake of human beings per se; it’s of value for the sake of human beings conceived as sites, individual and collective, of economic activity.52 Homo Colossus, in other words, isn’t going to be convinced to make the shift to the steady-state economy without being sure that no substantive sacrifice will be required of him. But while Daly cautions us that it’s a “severe abstraction” to conceive human economic agents merely as “self-contained atoms,” pointing out that our “concrete experience” is essentially communal, he depicts human relations largely in the lexicon of economic exchange: “[w]e are related not only by a nexus of individual willingness to pay for different things, but also by relations of trusteeship for the poor, the future and other species.”53 The problem, however, with this use of “we” is that it implicitly situates the “poor, the future and other species” as other, and the “we” as their authorized benefactors, thereby recreating and reinforcing within the conditions of the steady-state economy the axes of human chauvinism responsible for ecological collapse and human subjugation. What Daly’s use of “we” in such descriptions implies is that his concern for the poor is blunted by his uncritical assent to the geopolitical framework in which “they” remain the “other” whose “place” reproduces the economic vulnerability that makes it possible for Nike to run sweat shops in Vietnam, Malaysia to export human slaves, Monsanto to commandeer seeds, and the World Bank to involuntarily remove people from their lands and homes. To be clear: this is not to say that Daly doesn’t care about the suffering of the world’s poor; he does. It is to say that so long as he defends “market mechanisms” as suitable means to “allocate resources,” mechanisms whose primary beneficiaries reproduce in their “trusteeship” decisions economic relationships beholden to human chauvinism, the world’s poor will likely faire little better within the steady-state economy than they do now. Daly’s view of human overpopulation offers another striking case in point. “[T]here are two classes of investment for reducing the need for throughput,” he argues.54 “The most obvious is investment in reducing population growth— first stopping growth and then gradually reducing numbers of people by reducing birthrates.”55 Daly then goes on to hand-wave in the direction of “female literacy” and “social security systems,” along with “contraceptives and their delivery systems.”56 But he says virtually nothing about the extent to

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which the responsibility for birth control, child-rearing, or care for the aged— where there are too many people—falls disproportionately on women, and that it does in part because the “market mechanisms” through which access to resources is allocated are controlled substantially by men for purposes of insuring the reproduction of laborers. He does not see, moreover, that the same market mechanisms that, under the sustainability regime, would evict the Sengwer will also insure a disproportionate level of harm to women and girls who, especially in the developing world, are primarily responsible for subsistence farming.57 Without, in other words, a more careful evaluation of the institutionalized gender inequalities that contribute to human overpopulation, it’s unclear in what Daly’s recommended investment could consist beyond female literacy and education—good things, but clearly not enough as Daly himself demonstrates in his discussions of Ecuador58 and Paraguay,59 implying that more repressive measures, particularly with respect to population control, may well be legitimated for the sake of pursuing sustainability. This latter more ominous possibility is reinforced in Daly’s discussion of China’s one child policy. He applauds the Chinese who “have finally gotten serious about population,” chastising “other countries” for their disapproval of “a few reported human rights violations.”60 This dismissive tone is troubling; it not only fails to square with facts about human rights violations in China’s enforcement of its birth control policies, it obscures the role played by over-consumption in the global North, a key factor in the demand for goods contributing to the reproduction of the heteropatriarchal social relations and consequent economic class structure which fuels conquest capitalism in China. Daly applauds the Chinese for the same reasons he’d likely approve the factory forest project forcing the relocation of the Sengwer: both deploy governments to establish programs advancing sustainability, and both make their countries more attractive to economic development ventures supported by the World Bank. The Heterosexism and Speciesism of Planet Daly Greta Gaard makes the potentially disastrous consequences of ignoring the gender and class dynamics of population-reduction discourses like Daly’s starkly clear in light of the impacts of climate change for women in the global South. In “Ecofeminism and Climate Change” she spells out the extent to which “[r]educing third world population becomes increasingly important when first-world over-consumers realize that the severe climate change outcomes already heading for the world’s most marginalized communities will create a refugee crisis and urgent migrations of poor people.”61 Motivated, in other words, by the fear that climate change may transform the “other” into a refugee threatening “our” jobs, resources, and communities, population

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reduction discourse is often not only deeply sexist, but racist. As Gaard succinctly makes the point, “[c]laims about overpopulation in climate change analyses function as an elitist rhetorical distraction from the more fundamental and intersecting problems of gender, sexuality, and inter-species justice.”62 This is not to say, of course, that controlling human population growth isn’t vital to ecological sustainability; it is. But that’s a point about the real misery produced by human overpopulation in a degraded environment—not, at least in the first place, about whether a steady-state economy can be successful under such conditions. Population is about our complex relationships with human and nonhuman nature, relationships defined fundamentally in terms of sex, gender, species, and race, and not only by our existential conditions or economic systems as Homo Sapiens. Hence, it’s at least an open question whether the abstract fact of human overpopulation justifies Daly’s peremptory tone when he goes on to advocate a “radical birth control policy, beginning with family planning incentives, but eventually moving to real population control” as necessary to thwarting the environmental crises awaiting, for example, the people of the Ecuadorian Amazon.63 What an ecofeminist analysis shows is that any discussion of human overpopulation, especially in the global South, not explicitly tethered to a discussion of over-consumption in the global North, and to the racial, sex, gender, and species dynamics of population and consumption in both, will produce only a profoundly distorted picture of the relevance of population to ecological crisis.64, 65Daly’s approach to “real population control” epitomizes this distortion, and thus effectively reinforces the continuing oppression of women and girls that accompanies it. “Without these facts of world hunger, food production [particularly animal body consumption], gender, sexuality, and species restored to an analysis of climate change,” argues Gaard, “charging human overpopulation as a root cause of climate change seems misguided at best; instead climate change may be described as white industrial capitalist heteromale supremacy on steroids, boosted by widespread injustices of gender and race, sexuality and species.”66 In his failure to include these aspects of human chauvinism in his analysis, Daly effectively reinforces the conditions that give rise to conquest capital, grounding his project on the self-defeating shores of the same cognitive insolence and resulting dissonance that, ironically, makes him the fortunate beneficiary of heteropatriarchal entitlement. Whatever “real population control” means, the oppressive surveillance of women’s movements and interactions, compulsory birth control, or forced abortion, for example, we’ve no reason to think that Daly’s interested in consulting the affected demographic, poor Ecuadorian women. Gaard offers an especially poignant example of this failure when, concerning a WorldWatch report “of two women and three children captioned “[a] family on their parched land in Niger,” that “[t]he report offers no interview with the women

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targeted for family planning to discover whether this strategy is one they desire or would be able to implement.”67 Locating decision-making squarely at the level of government, what Gaard refers to as the “Father knows best” approach,68 Daly opts for the abstract remarking only that “[s]uch a radical program could only be carried out by a nation that clearly perceived its alternatives as national survival versus national liquidation.”69 He seems to take it as obvious that national survival trumps the human rights of the people upon whom such a policy would fall the hardest, but who would likely have the least say in its implementation. At a minimum, Daly’s lack of explicit consideration for the sex, gender, race, and class contexts of human population growth suggests that his Homo Colossus really is, if not a “self-contained atom,” the same Western(ized), authorized CEO of conquest capitalism. It’s his existential condition that informs Daly’s vision of the steady-state economy; he’s the “father” who knows best. This disposition is further reinforced in the snarky side-swipe Daly takes at American feminists, writing that “[h]eightened sensitivity to reproductive rights seems to have dulled our sensitivity to reproductive responsibilities.”70 Daly argues that “[n]onrenewable natural capital is like an inventory of already produced goods, rather than a productive machine or a reproducing population. For nonrenewable natural capital the question is not how to invest, but how to best liquidate the inventory, and what to do with the net wealth realized from that liquidation.71 What or who constitutes the “inventory,” who decides its liquidation, and who benefits, however, become clear only when we examine such claims in light of other considerations vital to achieving the steady-state economy. Daly argues, for example, that to achieve sustainability, “we must create a limited number of rights to pollute,” that, at least initially, must be offered to different people to insure an “ethically just distribution,” and only later reallocated “through markets in the interest of efficiency.”72 This sounds equitable—except that people like the Sengwer could not likely rise to the occasion to pollute on anything like the scale of an ExxonMobil or a Monsanto, and as Gaard points out, they’re unlikely to be consulted—especially if they’re female. Moreover, it just doesn’t take into adequate account the gulf of difference between global North polluters and global South. As Scientific American reports, citing the work of the Sierra Club’s Dave Tilford, “between 1900 and 1989 U.S. population tripled while its use of raw materials grew by a factor of 17.”73 The report continues, “[w]ith less than 5 percent of world population, the U.S. uses one-third of the world’s paper, a quarter of the world’s oil, 23 percent of the coal, 27 percent of the aluminum, and 19 percent of the copper . . . Our per capita use of energy, metals, minerals, forest products, fish, grains, meat, and even fresh water dwarfs that of people living in the developing world.”74 Given these facts, Daly’s “right to pollute” seems misguided if not disingenuous.

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However much he may claim it “involve[s] relationships with the poor, the future, and other species that are fundamentally social in nature rather than individual,” a right’s not meaningful unless there exists a way to exercise it. Similarly, there’s little in the steady-state economy that recognizes more than exchange value to nonhuman animals. This isn’t to say that other species might not be benefited (or can be ignored in toto), but their welfare, as Daly makes clear, is not his primary objective: “[a]lthough the maximum is human lives, the SSE would go a long way toward maximizing cumulative life for all species by imposing the constraint of a constant throughput [converting raw materials into commodities] at a sustainable level,75 thereby halting the growing takeover of habitats of other species . . .”76 What’s good for human beings is often enough good for other species of creature, maximizing their cumulative life, but if we could only achieve the steady-state economy by allowing, say, penguins to be driven to extinction, there’s nothing about them cumulatively (much less individually) that necessarily acts as a constraint against annihilating them. That this possibility is unlikely is irrelevant: sustainability is, for Daly, about the human existential condition, not our relationship or responsibilities per se to nonhuman beings or ecosystems—not even cumulatively. This rather shallow hand-waving level of inclusion also misses Gaard’s central point, namely that to fully comprehend the institutionalized dynamics that produce climate change, we must understand how race, sex, gender, and species inform not only corporate activities but government policies and the strategies of nongovernmental agencies and organizations.77 “Today’s industrialized production of animal bodies for human consumption,” she writes, “emerges from a constellation of oppressive practices,”78 not the least of which is identifying “development” with the consumption of meat.79 To be fair, Daly does entertain the “ethicosocial limits” of the current paradigm of expanding capital accumulation, and he does acknowledge as a “major philosophical task” determining criteria for the valuation of nonhuman species.80 Nonetheless, he leaves this project to the future, and his uninterrogated masculinist conception of human-centeredness reinforces a clear order of priority privileging “heteromale” human actors as a matter of course over nonhuman animals and ecosystems. To see this from another, perhaps less obvious, angle, consider three “propositions” Daly offers to limit the “desirability of growth,”81 to an ecologically sustainable world: first are “costs imposed on future generations” of people,82 second, the loss of “subhuman” but sentient animal species and habitat83 third, the “self-cancelling effects” on human welfare of satisfying relative, as opposed to absolute wants. Because relative wants are defined by desires—not needs—they only increase by being satisfied; economic growth is thus “less productive of general happiness” because it encourages more self-interest, not more satisfaction.84 Daly sees the danger in this, arguing

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that “[t]he desirability of growth is limited by the corrosive effects on moral standards resulting from the very attitudes that foster growth, such as glorification of self-interest and a scientistic-technocratic worldview” designed to satisfy relative wants and create new ones.85 Daly clearly sees, in other words, that Homo Colossus is vulnerable to a form of moral deterioration in fostering vices like greed and waste. But recognizing the “attitudes” endemic to human chauvinism and the validation they supply to conquest capitalism isn’t the same thing as offering a moral argument against the system that produces, rewards and, even in the face of environmental collapse resulting from this chauvinism, expands that conquest through ever more aggressive growth policies and initiatives like those of the Free Trade Triumvirate. The problem is that Daly’s in no position to decry that system; he counts on its “market mechanisms” to drive the policies, initiatives, and technological development to realize the steady-state economy. He counts on it already wellestablished heteropatriarchal structure to supply its authoritative decisionmakers. We can clench our fists at the moral bankruptcy of an ExxonMobil or a Monsanto, but we’re neither entitled nor empowered to condemn them as hypocrites for acting on the same dispositions—capital conquest grounded in human chauvinism—that sanctions the cultural genocide of the Sengwer for the sake of sustainability. To believe that this disposition can be corralled to other ends is to believe that the logic of capital can be redirected without any substantive reconstruction of its supportive scaffolding. It can’t be: the axes of human chauvinism provide the essential materials of capital growth—the labor and the laborers. Other, then, than the terror that might accompany our growing recognition of impending climate disaster, it’s hard to see in what the impetus could consist to convince the CEOs of multinational corporations to give up not only their “growthmania,” but their privileged positions as mostly white, Western(ized) men. “Our,” moreover, doesn’t include the Sengwer. “We” don’t consult them. It may not be that assigning something as exotic as intrinsic value is necessary to save the Sengwer (or the penguins) from extinction if they don’t serve the steady-state economy; but, even setting aside considerations of who gets to count as “we,” if Daly’s sustainability can’t offer us more than survival in a world that remains dominated by the structural inequality that underwrite the markets he identifies as the “mechanism” of our salvation, it’s at least unclear in what his vision of a desirable future could consist. The Anthropocentric Optimum Versus the Bio (Eco)Centric Optimum No doubt clear by now, Daly’s argument for the steady-state economy is not ecocentric. Unlike either its original (Arne Naess) or its pop-cultural

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incarnations (Derrick Jensen), Daly is largely indifferent to notions like intrinsic value. He makes the point explicitly discussing the difference between what he calls “the anthropocentric optimum” and “the bio [eco] centric optimum”: • The anthropocentric optimum: “[t]he rule [via the first] is to expand scale (i.e., to grow) to the point at which the marginal benefit to human beings of additional man-made physical capital is just equal to the marginal cost to human beings of sacrificed natural capital. All nonhuman species and their habitats are valued only instrumentally . . . Their intrinsic value . . . is assumed to be zero.”86 • The biocentric optimum: “Other species and their habitats are preserved beyond the point necessary to avoid ecological collapse or cumulative decline, and beyond the point of maximum instrumental convenience, out of recognition that other species have intrinsic value.”87 Daly then goes on to point out that, “[t]he definition of sustainable development does not specify which concept of optimum scale to use. It is consistent with any scale that is not above the maximum. Sustainability is probably the characteristic of optimal scale on which there is the most consensus.”88 What’s important here is that Daly’s reference to “consensus” demonstrates that he’s not looking to preserve or advance the environment per se, its habitats, or its species diversity for their own sake, and he’s not interested in the ways in which human beings assign value to nonhuman entities. Daly’s is an economic argument directed explicitly to the future of exchange value. It would thus be mistaken to read his case for replacing quantitative exchange (capital accumulation) for qualitative improvement in terms other than those that would satisfy Homo Colossus—even if a Homo Colossus is convinced that no other course than a steady-state economy will insure a future to his progeny. It’s climate change, however, that makes this rendition of Daly’s sustainability argument the most convincing—at least for citizens of the global North. Reiterating the goals of a steady-state economy in a keynote speech to the American Meteorological Society in 2008, “Climate Policy: From “Know How” to “Do Now,” Daly articulates the urgency of sustainable development as a response to the potential environmental, economic, and social consequences of global warming. Described as “provocative,” Daly insists that the right questions aren’t limited to how many part per million (PPM) of CO2 the atmosphere can absorb, but whether “we [can] systematically continue to emit increasing amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere without eventually provoking unacceptable climate changes.”89 The answer for Daly, however, is not reserved merely to “no,” but that government and economic

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policy must avoid “dithering” around the uncertainty of predicting the precise trajectory of climate change, and “focus on” “first principles,” namely that the climate is changing, it will have destabilizing and momentous effects, and that we are as yet ill-equipped to address them. He strikes an almost plaintive tone in an analogy comparing a “crude parachute” to an “accurate altimeter”: I am afraid that once the evidence is really compelling then our response will also be compelled, and policy choice will be irrelevant. To make the point more simply, if you jump out of an airplane you need a crude parachute more than an accurate altimeter. And if you also take an altimeter with you, at least don’t become so bemused in tracking your descent that you forget to pull the ripcord on your parachute. We should be thinking in terms of a parachute, however crude.90

We must, in other words, act preemptively, worrying less about whether our response is a precise gauge of the particularities of climate change—and more about how we’re going to avoid a scenario where “policy choice will be irrelevant,” how, that is, we’re going to avoid Jensen’s proposition to blow up the dams, or McCarthy’s apocalypse. We must “overcome our growth idolatry,” argues Daly, and—in what can be read as a direct and blistering response to climate capitalists like Lovins and Cohen—simply becoming more efficient in the way we use up finite resources not only fails, but yields ultimately little more than a placating but false sense of achievement. “[S]ay” argues Daly, “we need to double efficiency in ten years and we actually do it”: We will then just do more of all the things that have become more efficient and therefore cheaper, and will then emit more wastes, including greenhouse gasses . . . A policy of “efficiency first” does not give us “frugality second”—it makes frugality less necessary . . . if we increase miles per gallon we are likely to travel more miles because it is cheaper. Or suppose instead of driving more we save the money. What then do we do with it? Travel by airplane? Buy a second house? Invest in nuclear power or ethanol production? Better to pay it to our psychiatrist for the low-energy service of listening while we confess our sins.91

As Daly recognizes, the challenge is not merely convincing the multinationals their days to cash out on vanishing fossil fuels are numbered; after all, the climate capitalists know that—they’re banking on it for their own profit ventures. The challenge isn’t simply to offer more efficient and less wasteful varieties of energy consumption; after all, “more efficient” doesn’t mean less consumption. Climate capitalists bank on that too. Indeed, in an especially prescient passage from Beyond Growth, Daly observes that [t]o avoid war, nations must both consume less and become more selfsufficient. But free traders say we should become less self-sufficient and more

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globally integrated as part of the overriding quest to consume even more. That is the worst advice I can think of.92 But “less self-sufficient” is precisely the goal of the Free Trade Triumvirate in a world where, if war is avoided, it won’t be because nations have become more frugal but because they’ve been more fully appropriated as labor pools, advertising logos, and consumption populations for multinational corporations. We’ve no reason to believe, then, that the expansion of free trade will thwart the emergence of terrorist organizations whose own economics (for example, the Islamic State’s argument for return to the gold standard),93 reiterate and reinforce a “global integration” whose human chauvinism, though more overtly violent, isn’t really different from the systems that benefit Rex Tillerson, Cameron Todd, or Hugh Grant. Setting legality aside, the Islamic State, the Mexican Drug Cartels, and the Malaysian slave trade are as much capital enterprises as ExxonMobil, U.S. Oil Sands, and Monsanto. The point remains the same: if free trade and its voracious appetite for global integration is the “worst advice” Daly can think of, it’s because it will lead precisely to the very eco-nihilism he laments in his trenchant critique of the myth of endless resources. This “worst advice” is the hallmark of the Capitalocene. Climate change is simply the most terrorizing consequence to date of the fully capitalized planet, and insofar as Daly conceives the prospect of a solution primarily in terms of ecological sustainability, and not environmental justice for human and nonhuman populations, he misses not only the Sengwer’s forest for the trees, but the most crucial reason to reject this “worst advice,” namely a future desirable beyond the armed lifeboats of conquest capitalists whose cynical confession of sin personifies the nihilism inherent to any capital venture.

SALVATION CAPITALISM TWO: DELUSIONS OF TECHNO-UTOPIAN GRANDEUR, THE 2015 PARIS CONFERENCE ON CLIMATE CHANGE, AND THE REPRODUCTION OF GLOBAL INEQUALITY The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference—Paris on Fire The twenty-first United Nations Climate Change Conference—COP (Conference of the Parties) 21—took place in Paris from November 30 to December 12, 2015. It comprised 185 nations, including the planet’s biggest greenhouse gas polluters, the United States and China, inspired at least 600,000 demonstrators demanding binding agreements toward reducing carbon emissions,

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and employed 30,000 French police officers to keep order in the wake of Islamic State terror attacks that killed 130 people just two weeks earlier.94 At the nearby Hotel California the Heartland Institute sponsored a thinly attended counter-conference of climate change deniers, including a video communique from Senator James Inhofe, chairperson of the Environment and Public Works Committee of the 113th U.S. Congress, who insisted that President Obama and “his” EPA had acted tyrannically, endeavoring to circumvent the legislative process, in order to foist an emissions reduction policy on an American public that, claims Inhofe, does not want it. He went on to characterize any such policy as founded on poor science destined to hobble U.S. industry’s capacity to compete with the growing economies of China and India. Calling it Obama’s “climate change charade,” Inhofe insisted that COP21 wasn’t “meant to produce anything substantive,” and wasn’t “legally binding.”95 On this latter claim, Inhofe’s right on the money—literally: COP21’s mission to reduce carbon emissions will not become binding on its member states until 55 parties who produce over 55 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas have ratified the Agreement,96 and there’s significant doubt about whether the United States will sign on. Inhofe’s address is no doubt designed to insure precisely that end, but truth is he has little reason to worry. The likelihood that COP21 will accomplish its stated mission is vanishingly small, and this isn’t merely because, according to the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), the U.S. ranks 61st out of 100 countries (as of 2010) with respect to progress made on protecting the environment97; it’s because however sincere and committed were many of its participants, COP21 wasn’t really about stemming the impacts of climate change—not, at least, in the first place. It was about the appearance of doing something about climate change, an opportunity for geopolitical posturing few nations can afford to ignore. But even that COP 21 was destined to failure for at least two reasons: first, as Jonathan Katz of The New Republic reports, although major players at COP 21, including the European Union “have said for a long time that it is crucial for the agreement to have binding legal force,” EU top negotiator and European Commissioner for Climate and Energy, Spain’s Miguel Arias Cañete, “signaled that it’s [Spain] giving up that fight.” When queried as to why, Cañete pointed specifically to U.S. Republicans—the GOP: “[y]ou cannot make an important agreement in climate change if the second-biggest emitter of the world is not on board.”98 Cañete’s admission is striking; it implies that while COP21 may have supplied a political forum within which to stake claims about whose world leaders care about their environment and people, the fact that its lead negotiators had preemptively forfeited their commitment to achieve anything substantive, much less binding, raises serious questions about what, or who, the conference was really for. Who are COP21’s most likely beneficiaries? To be clear, I’m not suggesting that a conspiracy to conceal some set of nefarious motives

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was afoot here, but rather that it may be instructive to examine the conference’s winners and losers. One thing seems clear from the outset: COP21’s beneficiaries are not Kenyan pastoralists, Pennsylvania farmers, Mexican fishermen, Syrian refugees, the Sengwer, or sinking islands like Kiribati; they’re not endangered species, fragile habitats, the borders of nation states, or exploited Nike workers.99 And while Cañete’s gift horse to climate change deniers doesn’t imply by itself that the conference amounts to no more than defending the (fiction of) the nation state in the geopolitics of environmental destruction—or salvation—it does help pave the road, as we’ll see, for a particular strain of salvation capitalists, the techno-utopians. Whatever (second), the objectives of its organizers, participants, and sponsors, the failure of COP21 to secure binding agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is a boon—and not merely to the industries that fund GOP climate change deniers like Inhofe (who accepted $750,000 in energy sector donations in 2015). Fact is, while the failure of COP21 may most obviously benefit the deniers who keep Cañete up at night, the escalated sense of crisis created by its failure also benefits climate change capitalists aiming to cashin on it—insurance companies, and private fire protection, for example. But even they’re not alone among the winners. The big winners will be those who promise we can have our cake, a sustainable planet, and eat it too: economic growth. These are the techno-utopians, for example, Martin Lewis. Author of Green Delusions (1992, GD),100 Lewis, claims that the road out of climate change apocalypse is paved by technological innovations that promise to liberate us from dependence on the earth’s finite resources either by making them replaceable (fossil fuels), recoverable (water), or more efficiently used.101 Given the expertise and hefty expense required to leverage this exodus, the best road, he argues, is one constructed, owned, and operated as a profit venture by the same corporations that brought us pollution, deforestation, desertification, species extinction, and climate change—but who now, facing the costs of “business as usual,” can be “guided” via state regulation to retool their enterprises to sustainable ends.102 For the techno-utopian, the future of capital investment belongs not to exhausted stores of carbons, and not only to the development of energy alternatives in conjunction with reducing consumption, but to a “postmodern” high-tech engineering that promises to liberate us from nature itself, all the while creating new “humanized” markets and opportunities for (in direct contrast with Daly) expanded consumption.103 For Lewis, the fully capitalized planet must be transformed into the fully capitalized “postmodern” “planet.” Engineering Our Way to Sustainability: Dreams of Techno-Utopia From the point of view of the techno-utopians, arguments for sustainability that rely on the hypothesis that a finite planetary ecology cannot support

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endless capital growth underestimate the power of technology not simply to lighten our environmental footprint but erase it by removing our footfall from the earth altogether. Lewis sees in high-tech innovation precisely the “endless” the planet cannot support. He doesn’t deny that fossil fuels, water, or arable land are limited, but insists that other sources of fully renewable and/or replacement energy can be developed, water cleaned, air made breathable, and food grown without having to significantly scale back our expectations about things like convenience, comfort, consumption, or profitability. Although Lewis and Daly agree that our current course of resource exploitation is unsustainable, Lewis is far more optimistic about articulating salvation capitalism in terms of engineering high-tech alternatives that retain corporate profitability. Indeed, according to Lewis, the techno-utopia’s collaborative relationships between governments and multinational corporations can achieve economic growth, environmental sustainability, and economic justice. For this variety of salvation capitalism, the steady-state economy offers too little, and COP21 participants like Cañete just aren’t visionary enough. In Supply Shock: Economic Growth at the Crossroads and the Steady State Solution, conservation biologist Brian Czech agrees with Lewis: “the possibility of reconciling economic growth with environmental protection via technological progress, at least temporarily, cannot be denied.”104 The word “temporarily” is, however, important. Czech takes a more optimistic view of such a reconciliation than Daly, but a more cautionary view that Lewis, arguing that “it is necessary to distinguish between types of innovation”: process and product, explorative, extractive, and end-use.105 Process innovation, explains Czech, “reconfigures” the production process; for example, using high volumes of chemically treated water in a drilling process called hydraulic fracturing,106 or improvements in the delivery of chemotherapy.107 “Product innovation,” however, “is synonymous with invention,” for example, the i-Pad, or “23andMe” that traces chromosomal genealogy. Czech defines the latter three forms of innovation, explorative, extractive, and end-use, expressly in terms of their “prospects for alleviating environmental impact”: “[e]xplorative innovation allows the user to locate stocks of natural capital that were not previously detectable,” for example, natural gas reserves in the Arctic. “Extractive innovation,” on the other hand, allows the user to extract known resources that were previously inaccessible,” for instance U.S. Oil Sands orange extract in bitumen or tar sands mining.108 Neither exploratory nor extractive, however, offer an especially good fit for Lewis’ view that our objective should be to decouple human activity from nonhuman nature since both are directly tethered to getting more of a natural resource, but using more energy to access it; implicitly, then, both also ascribe to the myth of endless resources as is often evidenced by the fact of greater expenditure of money and energy to access less and less of a commodity.

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Only, in fact, the third variety of innovation, “increasing productive efficiency,” or end-use, would seem even a modestly plausible fit for Lewis’ vision of the techno-utopia since more efficient use implies using less—but getting more. One immediate difficulty, however, is that although more efficient use could prevent needless waste, it’s unlikely, argues Czech, to generate both economic growth and environmentally sustainable practices. Fuel efficient fishing vessels, for example, may “may increase the amount of fish that may be caught per unit of fuel consumed,” but if less fuel is used to catch the same amount of fish, no economic growth occurs, and if the same amount of fuel is used to catch more fish, environmental protection isn’t achieved because “more fish are allocated from the economy of nature to the human economy.”109 “End-use” efficiencies are thus unlikely to result in liberation from nonhuman nature because they can’t guarantee the economic growth that drives innovation, and that delivers us to the larger point: aspiring technoutopians are keenly aware of what drives a profit venture to innovate—and it’s rarely if ever environmental protection.110 BP, for example, shelved its wind power plans for now, but dwindling oil and gas reserves combined with ever-increasing extraction costs will create incentive to build more, and more colossal, wind turbines.111 Chevron may be able to “squeeze a far greater return out of its current [oil and gas] operations” than it could through its Catchlight biofuel venture with wood producer Weyerhaeuser, but when the cost of drilling becomes unsustainable finding ways to convert wood fiber into renewable energy will likely return to the multinational’s portfolio.112 U.S. Oil Sands’ Unita Basin operation may be looking to cash out on the last gooey droplets of bitumen, but its CEO, Cameron Todd, is acutely aware of the importance of process innovation to his citrus solvent extraction process. Swapping orange peels for more toxic solvents is vital not only to the extremely expensive gambit of mining tar sands, but to maintaining U.S. Oil Sand’s public façade as an environmental leader. A second difficulty is that Lewis’ argument depends on the notion of a bordered nation state sufficiently empowered to be able to “guide” the technological innovations of multinationals to environmentally benign ends through enforceable regulation. As we’ve seen, however, the likelihood that the state can exercise meaningful regulatory authority over these enterprises, themselves empowered in a variety of ways not the least of which is via trade pacts like those of NAFTA and the Free Trade Triumverate, seems naïve at best, and possibly the stuff of dystopia. Indeed, we’d be rightly skeptical of the nation state whose leaders could exercise that kind of power since what would be required to “guide” multinationals like Chevron would also likely realize itself in laws, as Walter Benjamin argues, both violent and tyrannical. Lewis does seem to recognize, at least dimly, this potential when he laments the diminishing economic influence of the United States compared with the

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“anti-laissez-faire” policies of Japan.113 He argues that “if the example of Japan teaches us anything, it should be that economic success stems rather from ‘combining free markets and individual initiative with social organization,’” and that profitability, environmental protections, and social equity are “more easily realized by working through rather than fighting against the market system and the corporate structure of late 20th century capitalism.”114 The trouble, however, is that while Japan seems to offer a compelling example of “working through rather than fighting against the market system,” what the disaster at Fukushima shows is that the cost of “working through” can be very high—for everyone affected except for the responsible companies. As reported by Anupam Chander of the Los Angeles Times in 2011, Since the nuclear plant disaster in Fukushima in Japan, the stock of the company that designed the reactors, General Electric, has fluctuated less than $1 a share. Meanwhile, the operator of the facility, Tokyo Electric Power Co., has seen its share price plunge more than 70%. The explanation: Japanese law reportedly limits liability to the operator, not the designer, of a nuclear power plant. GE’s initial confidence that it may bear little liability for any design defect because of Japanese law may [however] be premature . . . The New York Times recently reported that experts have long criticized GE’s design, the Mark I, because it offered a relatively weak containment vessel. The containment system functions as the “last line of defense,” preventing radiation leaks in case of a cooling system failure in the nuclear reactor.115

Costs to the environment, society, and human health in the wake of the Fukushima catastrophe were huge, at least $105 billion U.S. dollars as reported by RT in 2014 for radiation clean up and compensation to residents.116 While Lewis can’t be held responsible for being unaware of an event occurring nine years after Green Delusions, the fact that “[t]hree GE scientists resigned 35 years ago in protest of the design of the Mark I containment system,” was certainly knowable, yet it doesn’t figure into his praise of Japan’s guided capitalism. The faulty containment system, and the fact that this had been well established, provides an apt example of the technological hegemony enjoyed by General Electric and the relative weakness of the nation state—even one as powerful as Japan. As reported at Zero Hedge in 2014, although GE is currently being sued by 1,415 people, including 38 Fukushima residents,117 the nuclear industry and its multinational partners are protected by the state through limited liability laws designed to promote technological innovation.118 Lewis’ pitch, in other words, to “combining free markets and individual initiative with social organization” relies on liberating companies from responsibility—not demanding more of it. Companies like GE are rewarded for innovation regardless whether its design is functional or faulty, like the

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Mark I containment system, and they’re protected from liability through government policies that make the public—including a harmed public—responsible for the cleanup. But if this is what “working through rather than fighting against the market system” means, it’s hard to see, first, in what decoupling from nature could actually consist and, second, how any techno-utopia is likely to be fostered through corporate sponsorship given, in addition to the potential harms, the grossly inequitable responsibilities shouldered by the public. As Kumi Naidoo, writing for The Guardian, put it in 2013: Hundreds of thousands of victims, who fled their homes to escape the release of radiation from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant still live in limbo, unable to return home or rebuild their lives elsewhere. It is heart wrenching to witness the social toll of this avoidable industrial accident, doubly when you see public compensation being subordinated to private profit . . . What’s worse, is that this protection system works even better for the companies that supply reactors and other equipment to nuclear operators: they don’t pay any of the costs of a disaster.119

If there’s a utopia here, it’s not for the citizens of Fukushima any more than COP21 is for West Kenyan pastoralists or Mexican fishermen. It’s also ironic, though not surprising, that GE features an entire page devoted to COP21’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on their website, noting specifically “the introduction of new technologies to increase energy efficiency in industry, construction and transportation,” but although the company includes coal in their report, the writers make no mention of nuclear energy.120 Multinational Corporations as Environmental Prometheans—Or Pirates Even amid allegations of labor abuses including exposure to mercury in a Chinese factory manufacturing compact fluorescent bulbs in which GE had a “significant stake,”121 the global North behemoth is able to advertise itself as an environmental Promethean. Why? The environmental footprint of compact fluorescent bulbs is lighter than its predecessor incandescent model. “[O]nce the government came around to GE’s way of thinking,” writes Jay Yarrow of Business Insider, the company closed its Winchester, Virginia plant, and laid off its workers, never to return So, GE gets environmentalist brownie points for selling “clean” light bulbs, and they also get to charge more for their bulbs. But there’s another advantage—they save on labor with fluorescents, because they make the fluorescents in China. Not only are wages lower there, but so are the regulatory burdens, both environmental and labor. The Times of London recently reported, [that] “[l]arge

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numbers of Chinese workers have been poisoned by mercury, which forms part of the compact fluorescent lightbulbs.”122

However committed, in other words, is Lewis—much like his COP21 analogues—to the promotion of environmental sustainability and economic justice, it’s nonetheless folly to offer the nation state as a broker to that relationship. If relatively powerful nation states like Japan cannot protect their own citizens from shouldering the cost of failed technological innovation, the prospect that less powerful nations like Kiribati Island will be able to protect their citizens’ homes from sinking should solicit only incredulity. In short, technological hegemony doesn’t depend on the production of good, safe, or even useful technologies; it depends on the economic and geopolitical power to leverage the innovation. Hence the idea that competing corporate interests will produce innovation consistent with Lewis’ aspirations for a technoutopia—as opposed to the dystopia of a Fukushima—seems, well, utopian. For global North multinationals like GE, technological hegemony is certainly not a new idea; it characterizes the relationship between the fossil fuel (and many other) industry and the capacity for extractive or explorative innovation to stave off resource limitations, thus preserving the myth of “endless.” That such innovation is expensive means that, as a practical matter, only the profitable multinationals are in a position to leverage its development. Moreover, as Czech notes, “[w]e might save a species here or solve an environmental problem there by spending enough money, but generating the money endangers other species and causes other environmental problems.”123 There is, in other words, no entirely nature-free innovation, and there are always costs. It’s thus no wonder that some of the world’s worst polluters want and get a seat at the COP21 table: citizens of the global North are more than willing to pay for industrial-scale wind and solar power, or compact fluorescent bulbs, if these innovations can promise a painless transition to a more efficient future without having to reduce consumption. Such promises are, moreover, the geopolitical cache that theorists like Lewis need to make the case that there’s no inherent conflict between conquest capital and economic justice; closing the gap between the wealthy global North and the exploited global South is a matter of liberating us all from nonhuman nature’s limits. The trouble is that Lewis does not account adequately for the costs to either nonhuman nature or human beings. Like many utopian dreams, Promethean environmentalism turns out to be disfigured by a number of exceptions and caveats, especially with respect to the often invisible economic and labor conditions of the global South. The sheer scale of manufacture necessary to make the shift to renewable energy sources attractive to multinationals like GE demands equally massive pools of cheap accessible labor, and we have no reason to think that “business as

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usual” won’t govern where and how this labor is achieved. “Liberation” from nonhuman nature for workers in the global South is thus likely to make no more sense than the current state of affairs animating the claims of protesters at COP21. In short, achieving the techno-utopia is inescapably accompanied by labor exploitation. Whether it’s achieved through the manufacture of industrial wind turbines, solar panels,124 compact fluorescent light bulbs, community-dislocating reforestation, or high-tech access to potable water, none can be achieved on any scale less than that which brings governments to the tables of multinationals who can be counted on to be looking for the lowest liability, minimal regulation, easy access to ports, lowest wage labor pools for their production processes.125 These are the winners of COP21, and they occupy the same privileged axes of human chauvinism as do the beneficiaries of the Free Trade Triumvirate. They head the same companies that, as Czech points out, brought us the BP oil spill, mercury poisoning in Chinese light-bulb factories, and the Fukushima meltdown.126 Lewis too hedges his bets on the question “for whom is the techno-utopia?” While he acknowledges that the “first world” exploits “in many real respects” the “Third World,” and that “[a]ffluent American consumers . . . benefit when they purchase clothing sewn by Bengali workers who are paid a bare survival wage,” he nonetheless insists that were we to cease, for example, “importing garments from Bangladesh,” it’s the Bengali workers who’d suffer.127 For Lewis, in other words, the conquest capital die, once cast, can only develop in one direction: economic growth; there’s no going back, and the only important questions are how to contain and “guide” that growth toward a fully capitalized and sustainable “planet.”128 The challenge for the Promethean, then, isn’t finding ways to protect the planet’s remaining ecologies for their own sakes; nor is it staging any real resistance to the gross economic inequities that characterize the relationship between the global North and South. The real challenge is to convince multinationals like GE, Chevron, BP, or U.S. Oil Sands to shift their production to high-tech renewables. That’s a tough sell since, although it doesn’t require any fundamental restructuring of, for example, a company’s view of labor, working conditions, pay scale, or benefits, it implicitly acknowledges natural resource limits, a potential death sentence for the “business as usual” model of endless. The Cost of Liberation from Nonhuman Nature—And Who Pays the Price It’s at just this juncture between the unyielding necessity of economic growth—the logic of capital—and the fact of resource limits that the technoutopian’s argument for liberation from nature becomes even less convincing, at least as liberating for those who’ll bear its environmental cost and its

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psychic toll, namely the workers of the global South. Indeed, despite Lewis’ claim to the contrary, the expense and risk borne by high-tech innovation at the scale he envisions make it imperative that other aspects of the circulatory system of conquest capital remain stable. Giving up one “endless” resource like carbons doesn’t mean giving up another—like laboring bodies. Solar panels, wind turbines, and compact fluorescent bulbs still have to be manufactured, and unless we imagine a future robotics that can perform all labor, we are compelled to conclude that liberation from nonhuman nature is not liberation from human and nonhuman labor—especially where there’s, for example, mercury or other heavy metal exposure endemic to the manufacturing process. It thus seems something close to derelict to argue that “guided capitalism,” “a corporate and market system in which the state mandates public goods, in which taxes are set both to level social disparities and to penalize environmental damage” can advance environmental and economic justice.129 While CEOs like Cameron Todd might be able to be convinced that there’s a limit to their tar sands mining operation yields, that shifting to a high-tech renewable is the best avenue for U.S. Oil Sands survival, it’s unlikely he’d accede to state mandates, much less taxation, that impede profits. And he doesn’t have much to worry about; trade pacts like TPP effectively preempt the state, making its regulatory mandates vulnerable to lawsuit in international courts that typically favor corporations. Firms like U.S. Oil Sands, BP, Chevron, GE, etc. can, in other words, happily embrace Lewis’ techno-utopia as a variety of cash-out or cashin salvation capitalism: whatever’s more profitable. They can tout the potential for technological innovation to address environmental problems. They can appeal to Regular Joe or environmentally thoughtful Josie with products like compact fluorescent light bulbs. “Technologies, not natural resources,” writes Lewis, “provide the essential motor of economic progress.”130 Well and good. The trouble is that the cost of the technological hegemony that defines progress in the global North is likely to only escalate the conditions of human suffering and ecological deterioration in the global South. For Lewis however, these risks pale in comparison to the sacrifices required to sustain either the current fossil fuel–dependent economy that ends in environmental collapse or a steady-state alternative that requires significantly reduced consumption—however inequitably these risks are borne. Sustainable development, writes Lewis, can accommodate resource use and economic growth so long as economic growth is not permitted to “undercut” the productivity of the planet’s ecosystems. Indeed, even rapid economic growth for the developing world is possible, he argues, so long as it’s accompanied by an equally rapid reduction in the use of energy and raw materials. The truly Promethean, in other words, makes of technological innovation the panacea of sustainability.

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Not only does that fast growth contribute to a widening gap between the wealthy and the poor in developing world countries like China and India, the only way to accomplish such rapid growth without undermining the restorative capacity of natural ecosystems is through institutionalizing replacement technologies, a mission, argues Lewis, that itself can only be secured through corporate cooperation. But that, as we’ve seen, is a frightening proposition for global South citizens unlucky enough to be dislocated from their lands, cultures, and livelihoods by corporations whose technological innovations seek manufacture and markets and whose relationship to the nation state well liberates them, if not from nature, at least from liability in its potential decimation. The fossil fuel empires of BP, Chevron, Shell, Pemex, Gazprom, Exxon, U.S. Oil Sands, etc., already enjoy the prerogative not to develop alternative energy sources, to keep us dependent on fossil fuels, hence dependent on industries whose beneficiaries remain primarily white, male, and/or Western(ized). The ten CEOs of the Paris Climate Change Conference Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI) are all white and all male.131 OGCI’s Promethean end-use slogan is “more energy, lower emissions” and it offers an excellent case in point. Signaled by their anemic commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, their COP21 attendance has only outwardly to do with their company’s ostensive commitment to develop, for example, carbon capture or fuel cell technologies,132 and more to do with reinforcing their economic hegemony ahead of more stringent demands. OGCI’s commitment “is for a 2C [degree Celsius increase] future,” even though it’s well established that “the 1.5 degree Celsius limit is a significantly safer defense line against the worst impacts of changing climate.”133 This comes as no surprise to United Nations Special Envoy for Human Rights and first female president of Ireland, Mary Robinson, who argues that COP21’s “male world” and “male priorities” is destined to exclude serious consideration of the world’s most vulnerable—women, nonwhite and/or Western(ized) men, indigenous peoples, nonhuman animals, and fragile ecologies—the laboring bodies of the present planet.134 Indeed, while the intersection of heteropatriarchal institutions and technological innovation offers an opportunity to argue for some notion of economic growth that resists the reproduction of oppression, both Lewis and Daly offer such prospects cursory recognition at best. In a brief section entitled “The Promethean Response to Population,” for example, Lewis does discuss the “global dismantling of patriarchy . . . as an essential precondition for reaching population stability.” He acknowledges “whereas racial apartheid has rightfully provoked global outrage, gender apartheid is all but ignored.”135 Yet his argument for Promethean environmentalism includes no analysis of the axes of human chauvinism that reproduce gender apartheid, and he doesn’t register

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disapproval of the extent to which the success of the very capital ventures he applauds depend on maintaining the endemic inequality that defines the global North and South. Like Daly, Lewis fails to see that the beneficiaries of conquest capitalism have a stake in retaining the human chauvinism that empowers them not only as corporate CEOs or as representatives to climate change conferences, but also as proponents for a Promethean future—at least for Homo Colossus. We’ve simple little reason to believe that the effort to decouple from nonhuman nature will help us gain traction with respect to the economic and social justice that makes any future desirable. The prospect that Lewis’ Promethean environmentalism could result in the techno-dystopia of repeated Fukushimas, catastrophic oil spills, mercury poisonings, and the like is at least as plausible as the technologically innovated world where we value nature for nature’s sake and human creativity for its sake. In fact, strategies for achieving this divorce are even more likely to result in the armed lifeboats of Christian Parenti’s Tropic of Chaos. Lewis’ vision of the techno-utopia commits us to the commodifying values of Homo Colossus just as much if not more than any of his predecessors, and under ever more apocalyptic environmental conditions.

SALVATION CAPITALISMS THREE AND FOUR: THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF DENIAL AND A PYRRHIC DELIVERANCE FROM ECOLOGICAL COLLAPSE The Denial of Denial For the techno-utopians, Herman Daly’s steady-state economy is an uninspired capital killjoy. For Daly, any salvation capitalism anchored to the myth of endless resources offers little more than Pyrrhic deliverance from ecological collapse. While Lewis insists that “endless” describes the human capacity for sustainable innovation, for Daly it tempts us to delusions of grandeur ignoring planetary facts in favor of a deeply rooted disposition to rationalize the quest for profit. Nonetheless, both insist capitalism can be salvaged. All it requires is regulation by the right kind of government, one powerful and visionary enough to guide the right kind of competition to the right kind of innovation among corporations to the right kind of future. This, of course, is a tall order: that multinational corporations routinely finesse their privileged access to government to pursue their own objectives is one thing. That they enjoy technological and economic domination and hence the geopolitical clout evinced in the resigned dispositions of whole countries (like Spain’s Miguel Arias Cañete) at heralded global events like

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the COP21, is another. But even this description of a hegemonic capitalism doesn’t go far enough: for that we need an imbricated layer of Lewis’ corporate/government “cooperation” supplied by a postmodern “broker.” What we need, in other words, are elected representatives like James Inhofe and Ted Cruz who, despite the responsibility to represent the legitimate interests of “the people,” are authorized to act as thinly veiled deal-makers between the nation state, the energy sector, and a version of “the people” who are in fact the well-established beneficiaries of the fully capitalized planet. COP21 thus mirrors a reality wherein Lewis’ “cooperation” is really just a slick advertising jingle for the corporate domination that transforms the nation state into an instrument of Homo Colossus and then positions it as a site of environmental conscience. Whether this rendition of Homo Colossus is the climate change denier, the climate capitalist, the steadystate capitalist, or the techno-utopian ultimately makes little difference; the deal-makers are available to them all—for a price. Nonetheless, as one form of denial becomes harder to defend, namely that human action is not responsible for global warming, and thus gives way to “new” forms of denial, for example, that technological innovation may not offer fully lucrative avenues to salvation capitalism, the deals to be made change to insure the beneficiaries remain the same. Sparse attendance at the Heartland Institute counter-conference compared to the substantial turnout at the main conference venue at COP21 (including the protesters outside) offers a clue to this change, especially in the form of The Breakthrough Energy Coalition’s very public emphasis on “partnering” with governments. The American GOP, in other words, may be able to commandeer one more election cycle for the climate change denial of cash-out capitalism, but the future of the fully capitalized planet belongs to the deal-makers of BEC’s version of the techno-utopia. The shift from the denial of climate change to the denial that technological innovation has any earthbound limitations indicates just how vulnerable we’ve become to what Dale Jamieson calls the “marketing of epistemologies,” the notion that the value of an idea lay not in its evidential support but in its “compatibility with other commitments,” for example the myth of endless resources, the viability of conquest capitalism, or the authority of the nation state,136 that “right,” in effect, means “profitable.” Jamieson argues, for example, that Americans have largely left cynicism behind in favor of an even more virulent form of denial, and that this is true not only with respect to climate change, but President Obama’s citizenship, the capacities of New Age spiritualities to offer healing, the reality of paranormal phenomena, and even as a means to repudiate well-established science, for example, evolution. Indeed, that science rejects these is for far too many, argues Jamieson, a reason to sign on.

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The rejection of science, in other words, has not only become endemic to the epistemic situation of American culture—it’s become cool. “Hating on” science helps, for example, fuel the 2016 presidential campaigns of Republican evangelicals in the United States, including climate change denier Ted Cruz who denies, among other things, that climate change can ever be “proven.” He insists it’s therefore pseudoscience, and he garners applause for claims like “[t]he problem with climate change is there’s never been a day in the history of the world in which the climate is not changing.”137 But, as Guardian writer Graham Readfearn points out “[t]his is a little bit like saying you can’t disprove that there’s a small community of genetically modified clown people living on Uranus.” Indeed, you can’t. But what Cruz of course likely also knows is that denying that a scientific theory could ever be wrong isn’t the same thing as not having supporting evidence that it’s right. It’s just that his Evangelical supporters don’t care. “[W]hat would it take,” asks Readfearn, “to ‘disprove’ human-caused climate change?” “You’d have to first overturn the laws of atmospheric physics, and maybe then prove the atmosphere and oceans are not heating up, that the world’s plants and animals on the move across the world are reacting to something else (like, say, messages from Uranus), that the oceans are rising just because they fancy it and that all the recent record hot years could have just come along by chance.”138 Point being, of course, that Cruz is committed to a lot of denial, and it’s clearly about much more than climate change; it is, in fact, the epistemology of eco-nihilism. It’s not, however, just the climate change deniers—however high they’re riding on their perceived “Damn the science!” coolness—who are affected by the epistemology of denial. Utilizing denial as a criterion of judgment undermines Daly’s steady-state economy and Lewis’ techno-utopia just as effectively. Neither, after all, endorses the rejection of science as a credible premise. What’s also true, however, is that denial-epistemology requires more than “hating on” science to sustain its full-throttle embrace of the capitalism represented in trade pacts like the Free Trade Triumvirate. It requires an enemy against which it can position itself as moral, natural, and inevitable. If it’s going to keep Regular Joe coming to the Cruz for president rallies, it needs more than the fleeting celebrity of “coolness.” That some people, for example, embrace Brian Sussman’s theory that climate change is a Left-wing conspiracy designed to consolidate a diabolical one-world government indicates not only something about the kinds of theories we soak up as “cool,” but the lengths we’re willing to go to maintain an epistemology that, even more robustly than Lewis’ guided capitalism, is identified with freedom, patriotism, and American “exceptionalism.” Denial isn’t, in other words, as much about climate change (or evolution, 9/11, or President Obama’s birth certificate) as it is about retaining the prerogatives of Homo Colossus in the face of escalating threats to his authority from, quite literally, a planet whose capacity to

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absorb his rapacious consumption is running dry. Yet the denial of that fact has become so ingrained in our epistemic situation that “mere” cynicism, still rooted in respect for evidence, is readily displaced by whatever theory, however “bizarre,” that permits us to deny whatever gets in the way of realizing that objective. Denial, in other words, is cool precisely because it situates its authorized knowers in full conformity with expectation itself defined by the axes of human chauvinism; Regular Joe knows whose rallies to attend, what signs to wave, what jeans to wear, what truck to drive, and who to vote for. As Jamieson might put it, climate change denial is consistent with Joe’s other commitments. Denial-Epistemology and the Imbrications of Homo Colossus In short, there’s bountiful opportunity here for head-shaking incredulity. That the technological innovations upon which Homo Colossus depends are made possible by the science, the science-denier rejects may be the most obvious. But that just makes the point that denial-epistemology isn’t about science per se; it’s about retaining power in whatever that power consists for each and every imbrication of Homo Colossus—Regular Joe to Ted Cruz to James Inhoff to Cameron Todd. Ironic it is, then, that, while neither bizarre conspiracy theories, stalwart rejections of fact, or patriotic defenses of candidates for office are going to save the state from subjugation to the multinationals, nor will Daly’s steady-state economy or Lewis’ Promethean environmentalism. Fact is, no salvation capitalism is consistent with the nation state’s exercise of modest but real authority because, beyond the fact that “guided capitalism” is oxymoronic according to its own internal logic, competition over dwindling fossil fuel resources guarantees resistance to any form of regulation that could yield disadvantage. What Daly and Lewis have in common with the climate change deniers is that, however distasteful to the former, each is not only mired in the epistemology of denial, but is a product of it in that for all three the nation state functions as an entity it manifestly cannot be: a recognized and legitimate regulatory authority. Inhofe embraces the state’s authority, however obliquely, when he refers to “the American people,” yet simultaneously denies it by being party to the surrender of governments like Spain’s to the climate change deniers in the GOP. Inhofe can deny his denial of the power that deniers wielded at COP21—but it all comes to the same: making sure the circulation of capital through global markets dependent of hydrocarbons continues unimpeded. Though perhaps more colorful in the rhetoric of the climate change denier, this denial of denial characterizes just as well the arguments of the steady-state economists and the techno-utopians. That both endorse the science of climate change doesn’t alter the fact that they ignore the possibility there may be no

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sustainable future consistent with capitalism, much less a desirable one. That Daly, for example, rejects the myth of endless resources doesn’t make up for his failure to interrogate his own ideological presupposition that nature is best conceived as a “storehouse.” That Lewis swaps one endless resource (fossil fuels) for another (technological innovation) doesn’t reinvest the state with legitimate authority, but actually detracts from it weakening the state further by squarely locating the “Promethean” in the boardrooms of corporations. Even Brian Czech’s more nuanced understanding of the kinds of innovation that might contribute to mitigating climate change—the kind ostensibly represented by 190 flags waving over COP21—doesn’t really address the dimming powers of government to exercise substantive regulatory authority. The closest Czech gets to articulating some role for the state is when he argues that there’s a “basic conflict” between “economic growth and environmental protection in the absence of technological progress,”139 an absence whose significance becomes clear in Czech’s example of the U.S. Endangered Species Act: For example, in the first sentence of the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the 93rd Congress of the United States stated that ‘various species of fish, wildlife, and plants in the United States have been rendered extinct as a consequence of economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and conservation.’ However, the phrase “untempered . . .” left a theoretical door open for reconciling the basic conflict between economic growth and species conservation. The 93rd Congress was placing its hope in technological progress . . . What was overlooked by Congress, and continues to be overlooked by most of the green genre, is the tight linkage between technological progress and economic growth stemming from pre-existing, clearly brown levels of technology.140

The door left open by “untempered” rests on the hope that although previous economic growth has been “brown,” that is, directly responsible for ecological deterioration and species extinction, future technologically facilitated growth will be “green,” or at least, as Czech puts it, “less brown.”141 But if, as he shows, the Endangered Species Act (among other government sponsored acts and agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency) is an essentially reactive effort to regulate after the fact of “brown,” it seems cold comfort to hope that the future innovations of companies who gave us “brown” would reflect a “more tempered” view of environmental responsibility, at least any more so than “less brown.” In short, insofar as the state’s regulatory efforts remain reactive and not proactive, the keys to that “theoretical door” will remain securely in the pockets of the corporations. Czech laments these facts—without quite recognizing what they imply for the authority of the state—or the fully capitalized planet—when he notes that “[p]erhaps nothing stands in the way of sustainability as much as the

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notion that we can spend our way out of unsustainability,”142 nothing, that is, except for the idea that technological innovation can recuperate a world of endless resources. Yet, twenty-four years after Green Delusions, we find that the same notions inform the business models not merely of those looking to cash in or cash out on climate change, but of those who’d claim to be in the best position to innovate efficient (end-use) alternative energies, sparing us the anxiety of reduced consumption, resource conservation, and, above all, the dreaded demand that we must change the behavior that fuels denial-epistemology. Among these masters of the denial that we have to change is The Breakthrough Energy Coalition—BEC. Looking to usurp the “cool” from the climate change deniers, BEC’s techno-utopian mission statement epitomizes the “tight linkage between techno-progress and economic growth,” putting “ENERGY” directly in front of a “theoretical door” open to the reduction of carbon emissions: THE WORLD NEEDS WIDELY AVAILABLE ENERGY that is reliable, affordable and does not produce carbon. The only way to accomplish that goal is by developing new tools to power the world. That innovation will result from a dramatically scaled up public research pipeline linked to truly patient, flexible investments committed to developing the technologies that will create a new energy mix. The Breakthrough Energy Coalition is working together with a growing group of visionary countries who are significantly increasing their public research pipeline through the Mission Innovation initiative to make that future a reality. (Caps in original.)143

“New tools to power the world” describes, of course, the mantra of the techno-utopian corporate CEO who—despite the BP oil spill, the Fukushima meltdown, a deforested Ecuador, a dislocated Sengwer, desertified farmlands, climate change refugees, ongoing pollution, the escalation of virulent disease, species extinctions, and countless other “browns”—is empowered by COP21 to define the “linkage between technological progress and economic growth” in the age of climate change. Salvation Capitalism Four: The Breakthrough Energy Coalition Enter The Breakthrough Energy Coalition members: what Mukesh Ambani of the Indian petrochemical company, Reliance Industries, John Arnold, former American hedge fund manager/CEO of Centaurus Advisors, LLC, specializing in natural gas trades, or Aliko Dangote of the Nigerian drilling company, Dangote Industries, have in common is a conception of the nation state as a financier—a lending bank. What they count on are publicly financed “research pipelines,” as few regulatory obstacles for companies looking to

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innovate “breakthroughs” as possible, and a COP21 agreement that, reflected in Cañete’s preemptive concession, offers an opportunity to appear “green” without altering their business models or their polluting production activities. However apparently contrary to the denial-epistemology of folks like Ted Cruz and James Inhofe, embracing BEC will nonetheless involve denial— and lots of it. This isn’t to say that some BEC members aren’t sincerely committed to combating climate change, but we’ll see that there’s precious little reason to think so, and even less reason to think they’d be compelled by governments, public pressure, or international trade agreements to take environmental responsibility or human rights seriously. Consider for example the 2014 Council on Ethics for the Government Pension Fund Global explicit exclusion of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Limited on the grounds that the human rights of indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Amazon would be violated by the company’s oil exploration: There can be no doubt, in the Council’s opinion, that the exploration activity undertaken by Repsol and Reliance Industries in Block 39 increases the risk that any indigenous peoples who may be living in voluntary isolation within the block will come into contact with outsiders. The Council emphasizes that exploration activities in particular seem to involve an exceptionally high risk to these indigenous peoples because large numbers of workers relocate within large areas in the block. Repsol’s own impact assessments show that the company is aware that uncontacted indigenous peoples may be present in the area. Nevertheless, both companies consider this probability to be very small. Among other things, the companies make reference to a decision by the Supreme Court of Peru evaluating whether oil-exploration activities in block 39 and 67 may constitute an immediate threat to the basic rights of the indigenous peoples. The Court concluded that there was insufficient evidence of their existence and therefore no immediate threat, which would be a prerequisite in order to prohibit further activity in the area. The companies also claim that their contingency plan, which has been approved by the authorities, will prevent human rights violations. The Council nevertheless considers it unlikely that the contingency plans adopted by the joint venture will be sufficient to avoid contact, since the biggest threat to the uncontacted peoples is the very presence of the work crews. The contingency plan primarily covers what to do if contact occurs. In the Council’s view, it therefore seems virtually impossible to combine the concern for the uncontacted indigenous peoples’ right to life and health with exploration activities insofar as these take place within the indigenous peoples’ territories . . . If such contact does take place, the consequences will not be apparent until several years later. Since the damage by then may be considerable, the Council considers that continued ownership in Repsol and Reliance Industries constitutes an unacceptable risk of complicity in serious human rights violations. The Council therefore recommends that these companies be excluded from the Government Pension Fund Global.144

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Or, consider Aliko Dangote who, in addition to a petro-partnership with Chevron and ExxonMobil saturated by complaints of human rights violations including torture and summary execution in the effort to suppress protest over Niger Delta mining operations,145 also appears to exercise considerable authority utilizing his country’s military to repress dissent: “Villagers, who responded after the shooting by staging what several witnesses said was a peaceful demonstration to the Dangote factory, met a bloody pushback by the troops. Hours after the protest, the soldiers opened fire, killing seven of the protesters including a woman, who was shot in the head at close range. The 19 year-old woman, Doose Ornguze . . . survived the first shot at her, and was trying to crawl to safety before a soldier walked up close and fired into her skull.”146 Lastly, consider American billionaire John Arnold, former CEO of Centaurus Advisors, LLC, and former oil analyst promoted to trader for Enron. In an expose for Rolling Stone which discusses the award-winning documentary, The Smartest Guys in the Room, writer Matt Taibbi recounts how in the film [anyone who] remembers those tapes of Enron traders cackling about rigging energy prices on “Grandma Millie” and jamming electricity rates “right up her ass for fucking $250 a megawatt hour” will have a sense of exactly what Arnold’s work environment was like. . . . [T]he authors portray Arnold bragging about his minions manipulating energy prices, praising them for “learning how to use the Enron bat to push around the market.”. . . As Enron was imploding, Arnold played a footnote role, helping himself to an $8 million bonus while the company’s pension fund was vaporizing. He and other executives were later rebuked by a bankruptcy judge for looting their own company along with other executives. Public pension funds nationwide, reportedly, lost more than $1.5 billion thanks to their investments in Enron.147

Arnold’s behavior may not rise to the level of the human rights abuses committed on behalf of Reliance or Dangote Industries. But his involvement in the manipulation of energy pricing, its costs with respect to the implosion of Enron and the catastrophic loss to American public pensions doesn’t recommend him as the “visionary” BEC advertises. What’s even more troubling is that much the same could be said about Patrice Motsepe of African Rainbow Minerals, a uranium mining firm, accused of failing to live up to promises of village development in South Africa,148 or Bill Gates who, as of 2013, held more than 1.4 billion in “investments in the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies.”149 The BEC board of directors are nearly all male (4/29 are women; two are wives of BOD members), all Western(ized), all conquest capitalists with a stake in continuing the very fossil fuel activities that contribute to climate

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change. So, the real question is what—given its members, their histories, and their corporate interests—makes the techno-utopian carbon reduction vision of BEC seem even barely plausible? Why would we take seriously the coalition’s “Principles” page claim that “[t]he urgency of climate change and the energy needs in the poorest parts of the world require an aggressive global program for zero-emission energy innovation” that only government, public, and private investment can achieve”? Why shouldn’t we think that BEC members are simply exploiting the opportunities provided by COP21 to advance their own profit motives? Given the fact that we’ve been able to neither spend nor innovate our way out of climate change thus far—that not even COP21 could extract that commitment—why would we think BEC’s salvation capitalism is a viable option? What do some of the planet’s worst human rights violators have to offer? Who or what can they protect us from? Answer: “the right kind of enemy.” One, in fact, that Lewis, like Eco-Tyranny’s Brian Sussman, is all too eager to provide. SALVATION CAPITALISM FIVE: THE “GREEN EXTREMIST” AS THE RIGHT KIND OF ENEMY, THE NATURALLY UNNATURAL, AND THE RELIGION OF ECONOMIC GROWTH The Sacred Nature of Bourgeois Values and the “Green Extremist” To see what makes taking a chance on The Breakthrough Energy Coalition’s dicey cast of corporate characters worth it—at least for the techno-utopian’s salvation capitalism—we’ll need to return briefly to 1992 and the way Martin Lewis characterizes the nemesis of the Promethean environmentalist in Green Delusions: The Promethean perspective adopted here advocates a form of environmental protection that green extremists would consider utterly heretical. Where they seek to reconnect humanity with nature, I counter that human society should strive to separate itself as much as possible from the natural world, a notion that has aptly been labeled “decoupling”. . . To advocate decoupling is to reject both the instrumentalist claim—that nature should be used merely for human ends—and the green counterargument—that humanity is, or should be, just another species in nature.150

Despite his rejection of steady-state economics, Lewis’ nemeses aren’t (at least solely) theorists like Herman Daly. Instead (as we saw in Chapter 2), he pits the “heretical” techno-utopians against the “green extremists” or “eco-radicals,” and his choice of “heretical” is significant. In a tone similar

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to Brian Sussman’s Eco-Tyranny defense of the climate change denier-crusaders, “heretical” describes the techno-utopian challenge to what Lewis implicitly casts as green orthodoxy. In so doing, he creates a sense of urgency and righteousness. Green extremist orthodoxy must no more be permitted to decide what constitutes sustainability than the planet gets to determine what counts as endless. Lewis’ defense of techno-utopian heresy isn’t, however, about climate change, human rights, or the geopolitics of labor. It’s about preserving the system of exchange that keeps companies like DuPont in business: “[l]et us hope,” writes Lewis, that companies like DuPont can create artificial fibers sophisticated enough that we no longer need to deplete the earth’s aquifers, clear its tropical forests, drain its wetlands, and pour massive quantities of biocides on all of these environments in order to grow the cotton that affluent American consumers consider so wonderfully “natural.”151 What Lewis knows, in other words, is that defending a salvation capitalism whose mission is to transform the likes of Du Pont, Chevron, U.S. Oil Sands, Dankote, and their analogues into crusaders for the sustainable future is like turning polluted drilling run-off into a crisp white wine. Another, more cynical but precise way to put this point: making sustainability into “business as usual,” or making “business as usual” sustainable, or making “business as usual” appear sustainable demands nothing short of a breakthrough—a revolution not necessarily in energy production, but in the way we imagine the planet, its future, and its “resources” such that even if fossil fuels don’t turn out to be endless, as sure as the sun rises, technology will. This is Lewis’ “Promethean,” and what he needs every bit as much as Americans need their unnatural “natural” cotton is an inverse image of that future against which the multinational corporation can be cast as a the only savior big and powerful enough to protect the things we “need,” like microfiber cotton sheets, and sneakers, and gas. What he needs, in other words, is an “other” who can be reviled with religious fervor as the enemy of salvation capital. Cast as primitive, “back-to-nature,” chaotic, and menacing, the green extremist threatens not only the “breakthrough,” but the geopolitical order itself, imperiling its righteous claim to human chauvinism such that, despite its reproduction of raced, sexed, and gendered exploitation and injustice—despite human chauvinism’s role in hastening environmental apocalypse—any threat to its fundamental order can be cast as the enemy of progress. However deep the irony and nihilistic the consequences, in other words, “sustainability” simply cannot be made to come at the cost of change; bourgeois values are far too sacred. The key role played by the green extremist, then, is one of monstrous foe, an enemy against which the Promethean environmentalist can position himself as the righteously heretical. However tame compared, say, to Derrick Jensen, Lewis takes Arne Naess as his chief example.152 He argues that although

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the ecocentrist and the techno-utopian have a central goal in common—to prevent the further destruction of the planet’s ecologies—Naess insists this cannot be achieved except through the reconnection of human and nonhuman nature, through identifying with the planet, its ecologies, and its inhabitants, and through adopting an earth-centered ascription of value.153 But such an approach makes the commodification necessary to mass-produce microfiber cotton sheets, sneakers, and gas extremely difficult if not impossible. Indeed, any restriction on the conversion to exchange value poses a potentially lethal violation of the bourgeois—a desecration of the sacred. Our corporate fathers cannot be expected to continence this betrayal. The right course, the one that proffers the holy grail of sustainability, argues Lewis, is the one that entreats technological innovation to liberate humanity’s creative and transcendent nature from its corporeal earthbound substrate. Whereas the ecocentrist assumes that reconnection will encourage and affirm respect for nature, the techno-utopian appeals to Homo Colossus’ devotion to human supremacy to convince us that decoupling is the best course for planetary sustainability and human happiness. “In a Promethean environmental future,” Lewis writes, “humans would accentuate the gulf that sets us apart from the natural world . . . Our alternative is to continue to struggle within nature, and in so doing to distort its forms by our inescapably unnatural presence.”154 The alternative, in other words, is to commit sin against the church of bourgeois values—the religion of economic growth. Lewis’ reference to “inescapably unnatural presence” also intimates a palpable tension, if not a paradox, in his conception of human being. It implies that our natural state is one of disconnection, that we’re naturally unnatural beings. But, in that case, the green extremist would hardly seem to be able to pose much of a threat. Who, after all, would be attracted to reconnecting with nonhuman nature when it’s “unnatural”? How, in fact, could re-connection even be possible? Here lay the tension: it’s just this sense of “unnatural” to which Lewis implicitly appeals when, in a ridiculing tone, he argues that we must wonder whether, over the course of his “shamanistic ritual,” the deep ecologist will be able to supply the world with solar panel. Or will we realize that our best bet comes instead from high-tech corporations—even as they’re removed from “the intricate webs of the natural world.” Corporations, in other words, parallel our natural state of disconnection; it’s the ecocentrist who perversely insists that the unnatural is natural. They’re the extremist who, in (re) connecting us with nonhuman nature, condemns our microfiber sheets, swaps “shamanistic ritual” for the “sophisticated cottons” of our affluent lifestyles. The green extremist threatens to make us into precisely what we’re not: members of a species of creature, Homo Sapiens, who is as dependent on the planet’s resources as are cotton plants—who is as vulnerable to the biocides

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through which they are converted into commodities as they are. But we’re not Homo Sapiens; we’re Homo Colossus. Or, rather, some of us are Homo Colossus. More than merely paradoxical, because Lewis’ image of the “naturally unnatural human being” reflects his implicit commitment to preserving the conquest capitalism of multinational corporations as they now exist, he cannot fail to be equally committed to the axes of human chauvinism that privilege the male, white, affluent, and Western(ized), just like its predecessors. His caricature of the extremist whose “communion” with nonhuman nature threatens “us” affords him the fear-mongering leverage he needs to position the techno-utopian as the rational, sensible, and familiar, and companies like Du Pont as “breakthrough” Promethean environmentalists despite their troubling human rights records in developing world nations like India. That examples like these epitomize a global North and South rooted in raced, sexed, and gendered presuppositions about whose labor provides whose microfiber cottons is elided in Lewis’ utopian future by the prospect that technological innovation will provide opportunity for all to join in the prosperity of sustainable economic growth. But this, of course, cannot be the case since the very machinery of that utopia will be owned and operated by those who get to decide what counts as innovation—and for whom—all the while its labor will remain those who might see in ecocentrism a way out. The Intrinsic Versus the Exchange: Value up for Grabs Lewis’ argument sets the stage for The Breakthrough Energy Coalition, including its troubling board of directors who, in contrast with the ecocentrist who’d “make” us reconnect to a nature of which we were never really a part, can be made to appear not only arbiters of reason concerning climate change, but credible agents with respect to how we ought to value nonhuman nature. Indeed, Lewis makes it appear that all we need to do to get aboard the train for the techno-utopia is accept his argument that ecocentrism poses a substantive (if not existential) threat to human welfare and, given that, grant absolution to the corporate “excesses” of companies like Reliance Industries, Dankote, Chevron, U.S. Oil Sands, or Du Pont. Even here, however, Lewis’ argument suffers from a telling inconsistency—in this case concerning the two irreconcilable concepts of value we canvassed in Chapter 2: intrinsic and exchange. Lewis recognizes that the issue whether nonhuman nature has value independent of the capacity to be commodified, demanding respect as such, is distinct from the practical question about whether we should develop the technologies necessary to “decouple” from it. As he argues, the point of decoupling is to protect nature for its own sake—a tacit if vague appeal itself to some notion of intrinsic value, and one potentially accomplished via

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technological innovation. The trouble is that Lewis wants to have his cake—a “nature” worth protecting for its own sake—and eat it too—a “guided” capitalism dependent on the cooperation of corporate enterprise unlikely to accept any value inconsistent with the will to commodify. Lewis thus rejects ecocentrists like Naess not because the ecocentric “eight point plan” is antitechnological; it isn’t. Had Lewis made out his critique of green extremism here, his attempt to demonize the ecocentrists would break down very quickly. Instead, he attempts to discredit ecocentrism by making even the desire to reconnect appear childish, irresponsible—unnatural. He argues, for example that it’s the radical greens who actually threaten nature by advocating a return to it, by promoting the erection of ecologically enmeshed communities that, in virtue of their inability to accommodate the world’s current human population, pose a danger to both human life and ecological stability.156 Did the ecocentrist advocate this view of “return,” Lewis would surely be right; the results would be ecological devastation and human suffering. To cast ecocentrism in this fashion, however, betrays the extent to which he misrepresents not only what ecocentrists like Naess argue (even if Naess is wrong on other grounds), but what the central concept of value for the ecocentrist actually entails. The issue, in other words, is what intrinsic value might actually demand in terms of changing the way human beings connect to nonhuman nature. Naess offers direction in the Deep Ecology Platform: “[t]he well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves . . . These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.”155 That is, while intrinsic value is agnostic with respect to technology—it serves as criteria of moral judgment with respect to what the objectives of technological innovation ought to be, namely reconnection with nonhuman nature. A trail bike that gets me out onto the state park trails without causing ecological damage is a good use of technological innovation, a nuclear power plant liable to meltdown resulting in emergency evacuation isn’t. But the latter makes far more money—even in catastrophe. While embracing intrinsic value might demand substantial changes in the way I live that are contrary to the capitalist’s demand for endless consumption, this isn’t because I need to reject technology; it’s because the technology I embrace will be directed to using, wasting and doing with less—in direct violation of the bourgeois values Lewis advocates as sacred. It’s thus this meaning of “intrinsic” or even simply ecologically accountable that makes the green extremist into an existential threat to conquest capital— especially since this variety of value can be lived by those whose economic means are also less. As Naess recognized, embracing ecological accountability would necessitate a radical transformation of “policies [that] affect basic economic,

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technological, and ideological structures.” “The resulting state of affairs,” he insisted, “will be deeply different from the present.”156 It doesn’t really matter, moreover, whether there exists any such thing as intrinsic value per se; what matters is simply what a sufficiently large, ecologically devastated, displaced, and demoralized human population might come to believe about “value.” Lewis could, of course, defend his techno-utopian vision as the best (if not only) way to respect nonhuman nature, that whether or not we anchor the argument for decoupling to intrinsic value is irrelevant so long as we comprehend that such a course is good for human beings and the natural world. The trouble is that intrinsic value detracts from an essential premise of capital: that everything is commodifiable, and that all value is exchange value. No capitalist apologist, including the members of The Breakthrough Energy Coalition, can afford it. This brings us, then, full circle back to the pop-cultural ecocentrists, Derrick Jensen and George Draffen, who personify a reconnection with nonhuman nature that, unlike Naess, offers a stark repudiation of the technoutopian, and thus a real enemy to the Promethean environmentalist. In Welcome to the Machine, Jensen and Draffan deliver a stinging criticism of the machines, they argue, are responsible for alienating human beings from their essential existential conditions—nonhuman nature: The machine is a way of perceiving and being in the world. We may perceive that we are living inside of machines, but that is wrong. I do not live inside of a machine . . . The truth is that whether I acknowledge it or not, I am an animal member of a vibrant and living community composed of people—some with wings, some with leaves or needles, some with hearts of stone, some who flow to the sea—all conducting their lives according to their own desires, intents, and volition.”157

Far more than merely blowing up the dams, Jensen and Draffen advocate dismantling the “culture of control,”158 taking apart the “Panopticon” within which technologies afforded the highest value insure surveillance against any potential disruption of the flow of capital.159 “Surveillance,” write Jensen and Draffen, “require a watcher and a watched, a controller and a controlled.”160 “A few of the layers of modern society,” they write, “maintain some semblance of consent, but amidst all the high-tech communication and the waves of data, it is informed consent? Is it the consent of consumers who purchase the latest piece of technology wrapped in layers of disposable ancient forest paper?”161 On their view, the very social organization that Lewis and Daly rely on to engineer the conditions for ecological sustainability—capitalism and the nation state that functions as its cite of production, legitimation, and access to labor—is so diabolically corrupted in its destruction of the conditions of life

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as to be not merely unsalvageable, but rightly regarded as the enemy of the planet and its inhabitants. Only the wholesale destruction of that machine and the deliberate return to a life intimately connected to the ebbs and flows of the corporeal world can deliver us from ecological apocalypse. Rage Against the Machine: Derrick Jensen and George Draffen On the one hand, it’s hard to imagine a starker contrast to Lewis’ technoutopia. “The real issue,” write Jensen and Draffen, “is whether we should tolerate—or even if we can survive—a social organization . . . based on the machine, that is, one that converts all fuels—all life on the planet, including our own—into hierarchically organized power.”162 Yet, on the other, what a closer look reveals is that the real difference between the pop-cultural ecocentrists and the techno-utopians isn’t about whether technology has the power to alienate us from nonhuman nature (or whether technology is merely a reflection of unnatural human nature); it’s about what consequences follow from the divorce no matter how we see it. For Jensen and Draffen, these are worse than death—a techno-dystopia that solicits a society wherein all actions are effectively mechanized, controlled, and monitored, and in which “liberation” is reduced to the insight that there is no liberation. For Lewis, however, the effects of “decoupling” from nonhuman nature are independence from a finite planet’s dwindling resources—perhaps eventually even freedom from an “all too human” embodiment that weights us down with disease and infirmity. Both recognize that life on the planet is endangered by our current course, but while the radicalized ecocentrist prods us toward revaluing our material conditions, the techno-utopian charts a course that harnesses, as Lewis puts it, the creativity of human nature to a world unencumbered by limited resources. And that is effectively the advertising campaign of The Breakthrough Energy Coalition whose public/private “partnerships” require not only capital investment, but a “society” committed to the idea that technological innovation is the only road to the sustainable future. As a repository for its bourgeois values, this sustainable future demands the reinvention of a nation state whose authority derives from its partnership with those interests whose technological innovation makes possible a divorce from nonhuman nature “for nature’s own sake.” The society, in other words, that Jensen and Draffen condemn as authoritarian and tyrannical is precisely that which acts in concert with the Promethean project which “seeks to separate human activities from nature both in order to protect nature from humanity (for nature’s sake) and to allow continued technological progress (for humanity’s sake).”163 However natural Lewis tries to make it appear, embracing this vision of a transgenic relationship of the state to the corporation requires a radical shift in the way we conceive of nonhuman nature, one where we’d be

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encouraged (if not compelled) to embrace precisely the technologies Jensen and Draffen condemn—surveillance, military weaponry, automated working conditions—for the sake of achieving the divorce Lewis recommends. What makes techno-utopian “heresies” like Lewis’ vitally important to BEC and ultimately to global events like COP 21 is thus its wholly nonheretical relationship to capital, to a “capitalist ethos” that weds the state to the corporation via one seamless conception of “virtually sacred” value. Lewis blithely concedes, for example, that the development of photovoltaic solar energy won’t come from small innovative “upstarts,” but from “vast industrial concerns” like Hitachi, Sanyo or more recently China’s Suntech whose ventures, he argues, can be guided by government toward realizing a sustainable planet.164 On his view, an “environmentally benign economic order” demands not the abandonment of capitalism, but a return to its “ethos,” and a re-learning of its “virtually sacred” values like “saving for tomorrow” and deferred gratification. From Jensen’s and Draffen’s perspective, however, such “learning” is likely to require surveillance and control; “deferred gratification,” enforced conformity and, as Walter Benjamin might put it, the threat of violence codified as the law of preserving capital. SALVATION CAPITALISM SIX: THE GHOST DANCE OF THE NATION STATE AND THE NIHILISM OF CAPITAL Techno-Utopia as a Variety of Ecocentrism For the techno-utopian, “capital” is sacred precisely because it evinces a nearly magical capacity to emancipate human being from nonhuman nature, to create the post-human world out of innovations like atmospheric carbon dioxide mining, photovoltaic solar cells, “green” architecture, electric cars, Thorium-based nuclear fission, biomimicry, carbon capture, and artificial photosynthesis, among others. “Ecological salvation,” writes Lewis, requires we “disengage” from nature, through the kind of “technological progress” which can only be facilitated by capital, or rather, the capital of scale made possible only by those entities who can leverage the risk of its development: multinational corporations.165 It’s thus disheartening—though instructive— that Naess in his 1995 Trumpeter review of Green Delusions endorses Lewis: Question: how would supporters of the deep ecology movement react [to Lewis proposal that we decouple human life from nature]? Would they change their strategies and propose that the decoupling from nature should start in their own countries? Some would, I am sure, say something like this: “Obviously you would have needed a very strong deep ecology movement in State A. You needed a strong endorsement of the revolutionary . . . principle ‘nature for the

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sake of nature.’” Even if industry happened to find ways and means to disengage the US economy from nature, who would be personally interested in carrying it out? Practically only those who felt that natural communities have intrinsic value . . . In short, the great achievements in State A must have a deep ecology movement which persuaded a majority to vote for policies which are as radical as those suggested by Lewis.166

The extent to which Naess misses the point of Lewis argument for decoupling is truly striking: the trouble isn’t that there is no deep ecology movement likely to persuade, for example, the multinationals of the Free Trade Triumvirate to direct their technological development toward sustainability through decoupling. It’s not that elected officials like James Inhofe are unlikely to vote for such policies; it’s not even that COP 21 negotiators like Spain’s Cañete accede to the climate change deniers that significant greenhouse gas emissions reductions are unlikely. While all of these may be true, the real trouble is that the logic animating Lewis’ argument, namely that there exist resources that are endless— including technology—is itself an instantiation of the pathological drive to commodify that is conquest capitalism. It can provide no motive for “decoupling” human brings from nonhuman nature short of ecological apocalypse. And then it’s too late. Then we’re at The Road. The prospect of a techno-utopia achieved through “bourgeois values” reinforces the ecologically untenable presupposition that human beings can be made invulnerable to natural phenomena, and thus that our natural state is Homo Colossus—he whose footfall personifies ecological destruction. Put differently: Lewis’ argument for “decoupling” depends upon a moral value—nature for nature’s sake—that the logic of capital cannot recognize, and while we may find that sentiment laudable (as does Naess), it will hardly do to defend Promethean environmentalism since designations of “intrinsic” or “for the sake of” can proceed no further in the logic of exchange than as an advertising strategy. De Beer’s advertises diamonds as if they had intrinsic value borne of their uniqueness and rarity; that these claims are false doesn’t sell fewer diamonds, it just makes us dupes. Lewis thus presents us with a “new” version of the myth of endless resources: the marriage of “nature for nature’s sake” to corporate-sponsored technological innovation that can achieve environmental sustainability. While the techno-utopia may require a bit of deferred gratification, it also promises to stem ecological deterioration. Technology, claims the Promethean, is as endless as human creativity, and can be “guided” not only to a robust economy and a sustainable future—but to that divorce from nonhuman nature that can “allow adequate space for nature itself.”167 “[W]e can now safely conclude,” writes Lewis, “that the future of advanced technology does not ride on

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the continued availability of tungsten or tin,” and that the consumption of raw materials can be replaced via “miniaturization, partial dematerialization, and the breakdown of the very distinction between goods and services,” adding value without resource exhaustion.168 According to Lewis, technology harnessed to “state mandated social and environmental regulations can actually aid the capitalist system” by preventing its destruction of finite resources and labor,169 thus producing the conditions for economic expansion. Whatever “Promethean” means for Lewis, however, we have scant reason to believe that the multinational interests represented at, for example, COP 21 have “nature for nature’s sake” at the center of their agendas. In fact, we can show that although the techno-utopian informs some of the most lucrative enterprise to emerge from the conference, the likelihood that these will model Lewis’ vision of “guided capitalism” seems remote at best—even if pop-cultural ecocentrists like Jensen and Draffen would likely reject “guided” on the grounds that “state mandated social and environmental regulations” are code for surveillance and oppressive control. None of these concerns, however, inform the inauguration of BEC. As Wired reporter Issie Lapowsky recounts it: Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and pretty much every other crazy rich tech leader you can imagine have announced that they’re banding together to combat climate change with a new partnership called the Breakthrough Energy Coalition. Their timing couldn’t be better—or more telling. . . . [T]he group’s members have committed to use a substantial portion of their hundreds of billions of dollars in collective net worth to invest in early stage clean energy companies.170

As Lapowsky also points out, however, “the announcement smacks of a distinctly tech-centric belief, shared by so many in Silicon Valley, that there’s only so much that the government leaders gathered at COP21 will ever be able to accomplish without the private sector’s help.” BEC may as well have consulted Lewis. “The Principles” begins with Bill Gate’s claim that: Technology will help solve our energy issues. The urgency of climate change and the energy needs in the poorest parts of the world require an aggressive global program for zero-emission energy innovation. The new model will be a public-private partnership between governments, research institutions, and investors. Scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs can invent and scale the innovative technologies that will limit the impact of climate change while providing affordable and reliable energy to everyone. The existing system of basic research, clean energy investment, regulatory frameworks, and subsidies fails to sufficiently mobilize investment in truly transformative energy solutions for the future. We can’t wait for the system to change through normal cycles.171

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Little of Lewis’ philosophical argument for “decoupling” human beings from nonhuman nature is apparent in the BEC statement of principle—but it doesn’t matter and it never did. Betraying the Duty to Consume What does matter is that there’s a crisis to capitalize. Consider: from the point of view of the BEC techno-utopian, nation states who’ve committed their governments to work toward varieties of ecological reconnection and restoration—reforestation in Mexico and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) for example—hold what is now an antiquated view of what government can accomplish. Mexico and the DRC are not, however, alone. Consider Japan, Jordan, and Côte d’Ivoire who’ve made substantive progress toward developing renewable energy sources,172 or Iceland who, according to EPI, is a global leader with respect to enforcing environmental protections.173 To be clear, this isn’t because countries committed to greenhouse gas emission reductions aren’t technologically sophisticated or don’t see technological innovation as vital to their meeting their goals; it’s because they remain committed to the old-fashioned idea that sustainability demands less consumption. The techno-utopian, on the other hand, promises that we can have our cake—growing consumption—and eat it too—a sustainable planet. According to BEC, “[s]cientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs can invent and scale the innovative technologies that will limit the impact of climate change while providing affordable and reliable energy to everyone.” The techno-utopians, in other words, are climate capitalists. Both make avoiding the consequences of climate change the centerpiece of their advertising, and both depend utterly on the failure of nation states to act to mitigate these consequences independent of corporate involvement. Had COP 21 been successful in generating binding, enforceable, and accountable greenhouse gas reduction commitments from its represented countries, climate capitalism— in any of its incarnations—would be endangered. Nonetheless, the climate capitalist requires the fiction of the powerful nation state against which to articulate its narrative of the sustainable future. Whereas the climate change denier needs a powerful and tyrannical enemy of the free market, the technoutopian needs an inept buffoon-state incapable of the efficient execution of technological innovation. Each depends on the anti-regulatory neo-liberalism of Free Trade which disposes the nation state, including the 55 proposed signatories of the COP 21 Agreement, to act as advertising site, military protection, and negotiation portal for their multinational interests. But each also needs the charade of the nation state to orchestrate global events like COP 21. COP 21 must fail, and COP21 must appear to succeed. Katz makes the point this way:

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[C]limate negotiators here know better than anyone that the Republican Congress will not approve any climate change deal President Barack Obama puts in front of them. They won’t approve a deal that requires the United States to cut its emissions. They won’t approve a deal that legally binds the United States to pay anyone else money. So far, they haven’t approved a penny of the $3 billion the U.S. has already pledged to the Green Climate Fund, the core financial mechanism that is supposed to help countries prepare and respond to climate change.174

The key point here is neither about Barack Obama nor is it about an obstructionist Republican congress, per se. It’s not even that the planet’s second-biggest carbon emitter won’t commit itself to carbon reductions— whether or not its climate change deniers have the power Inhofe implies when he “gloated . . . [that] the Paris talks would fail,” and that denial was “the Lord’s work.”175 The key point is ideological, as is well illustrated by Bonner Cohen of the neo-liberal, climate change denial blog, CFact when he writes against TPP and against COP 21 that: Release of the TPP just over three weeks before the opening of the UN-sponsored Conference of the Parties (COP 21) in Paris was, as the old Bolsheviks were want to say, “no coincidence.” Like the launch of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in late September, the TPP is intimately related to the climate change talks in Paris. Those talks culminated in the adoption of an agreement—enthusiastically backed by the Obama White House—that will see the U.S. commit to steep reductions of its carbon emissions, mostly CO2, below 2005 levels over the next few years. China, on the other hand, refused to fast-track its emissions, even though it is a larger emitter than the U.S. . . . the Paris treaty “will set up its own governing body, its own court system, and its own tax collecting system. The treaty will also include annual reparations to be paid by the developed countries to the underdeveloped countries of the world. The amount of the reparations will be negotiated in Paris.” This is where the TPP enters the picture as an auxiliary enforcement mechanism for the Paris treaty. Chapter 20 of the TPP requires compliance with all previous multilateral environmental agreements. That mandate can, and likely will, be extended to include the Paris climate change treaty. The TPP’s all-powerful Commission can incorporate the Paris deal into the trade pact once the global climate agreement has been adopted.176

The mutually reinforcing (if not diabolical) relationship Cohen stipulates between COP 21 and TPP provides a foil against which to advocate unregulated and unfettered free trade. Cohen certainly knows that if the United States doesn’t sign on to COP 21, there’s no deal—at least not one “meant to produce anything substantive” such as mitigate against global warming induced food insecurity,177 offer refugee status to Pacific islanders like the

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citizens of Kiribati whose country is threatened by rising oceans,178 or deal with the fact that drought in the Fertile Crescent is at least partly responsible for the flight of Syrians—insuring that even after Islamic State terrorism ends, there will be little to encourage the farmers of that failed state to return to their homeland.179 Such tragedies are simply beside the point for the committed climate change denier looking to arm the neo-liberal lifeboats of the twenty-first century’s free traders. For ideologues like Cohen, the point is to connect trade deals like the TPP to the COP 21 “agreement” as key “mechanisms” in a global conspiracy to erect “commissions” whose regulatory power will strangle free trade. But Cohen is wrong on at least three counts: • First, as we’ve seen, the environmental language in TPP is vague and without enforcement. • Second, the likelihood that the United States will sign onto COP 21 is negligible thanks, as Katz makes clear, to climate change denial particularly among U.S. Republicans. • Third, what COP 21 and BEC vividly illustrate is that the nation state is not a significant player with respect to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In short, while nation states provide the stage upon which multinational corporations, environmental organizations, and other geopolitical and/or moneyed interests jockey for status as star actors, it no longer writes the play governing what the actors can and cannot do. That governments, corporations, environmental organizations, grassroots groups, climate change deniers, climate capitalists, steady state advocates, and techno-utopians all behave as if the nation state is still a player in this global crisis can be chalked up in part to history—there used to be geographically significant geopolitically empowered entities called “states”—to ordinary experience—I still live somewhere called “Pennsylvania”—and to the fact that human, animal, and plant bodies are still located in specific configurations of space and time—the Islamic State bombings were directed to particular places in Paris, and 130 people died. But that the consequences of terrorism, climate change, labor exploitation, factory farming have very real addresses does not by itself imply that the nation state is empowered to address them. And that is the lie of COP 21. The important point, the one that makes the fraudulent character of COP 21 that much plainer, is that even if Inhofe’s right about the “Agreement’s” lack of substance or enforcement, he’s very wrong when he says “[n]othing’s going to happen.” Indeed, even if Cohen were right that the timing of TPP and COP 21 wasn’t coincidence, and that the ultimate objective is a variety of one-world government, a great deal is going to happen, virtually all of it driven by the same pathological market logic that underwrites the climate

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change denial of cash-out crusaders like Inhofe, the mercenary cash-in gambits of the climate capitalists, the justice-anemic alternatives offered by steady-state sustainability theorists like Herman Daly, or, turning now to one more reason COP 21 must fail if not by design, certainly by presumption: the fantasy that technological innovation can alleviate our fossil fuel dependence or even replace it altogether, that it can reduce the carbon footprints of polluters big and small or mitigate against the consequences of climate change, that technology will permit us (including developing world citizens) to continue to consume at an ever-accelerating pace, and in all that save capitalism and the planet is nihilistic insanity. Perhaps the statement issued by the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner in June, 2015 captures the insanity best: While trade and investment agreements can create new economic opportunities, we draw attention to the potential detrimental impact these treaties and agreements may have on the enjoyment of human rights as enshrined in legally binding instruments, whether civil, cultural, economic, political or social. Our concerns relate to the rights to life, food, water and sanitation, health, housing, education, science and culture, improved labour standards, an independent judiciary, a clean environment and the right not to be subjected to forced resettlement.180

TPP threatens precisely those existential necessities fulfillment of which conditions the exercise of this glittering idea of a right. It’s hard to imagine the techno-utopia that can rise to this occasion. But it’s nearly as hard to picture any salvation capitalism, including Daly’s steady-state sustainability, Naess’ reconnection and intrinsic value, or Jensen and Draffen’s revolt against the machine as adequately committed to a planet desirable to all those disenfranchised by the chauvinism that scaffolds the naturalized pathologies of capital. However much the idea of social justice may be enshrined in the legally binding instruments of the state, its decline in the face of multinational corporate hegemony portends only more suffering and terror. In the face of that reality, the ecological apocalypse created by climate change might be better conceived as a beginning—though of what perhaps only some future story-teller can tell. NOTES 1. Brady McCombs, “First U.S. tar Sands Mine Set to Open for Business in Utah,” MSN Money, August 22, 2016. http://www.msn.com/en-us/ money/companies/first-us-tar-sands-mine-set-to-open-for-business-in-utah/ ar-BBlYk4r?ocid=ansmsnmoney11.

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2. David Biello, “How Much Will Tar Sands Oil Add to Global Warming?” Scientific American, January 23, 2013. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ tar-sands-and-keystone-xl-pipeline-impact-on-global-warming/. 3. Canyon Country Rising Tide, “The Tar Sands Triangle,” https://canyoncountryrisingtide.org/2013/04/10/the-tar-sands-triangle/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Utah_oil_sands. 4. David Hasemyer, “Nation’s First tar Sands Mine Stirs Water, Environmental fears Out West,” Inside Climate News, August 16, 2012. http://insideclimatenews. org/news/20120816/utah-oil-tar-sands-mining-bitumen-water-pr-spring-limonenealberta-oil-sands-groundwater-pollution-drought. 5. Scott Parkin, “Direct Action Vs. Climate Change,” Counterpunch, August 19, 2015, my emphasis. 6. Robin Cooley, Meghan Mueller, Michael Saul, and Tony Frates, “Lawsuit Filed to Protect Rare Colorado, Utah Wildflowers Threatened by Oil Shale Mining,” Center for Biological Diversity, March 26, 2015. http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/ news/press_releases/2015/beardtongues-03-26-2015.html. 7. Hasemyer, “Nation’s First tar Sands Mine Stirs Water, Environmental fears Out West.” 8. Jonathan Weisman, “Trans-Pacific Partnership Seen as Door for Foreign Suits Against the U.S.,” New York Times, March 25, 2015. http://www.nytimes. com/2015/03/26/business/trans-pacific-partnership-seen-as-door-for-foreign-suitsagainst-us.html?ref=business&_r=2. 9. Jack Healy, “Heavyweight Response to Local Fracking Bans,” New York Times, January 3, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/us/heavyweightresponse-to-local-fracking-bans.html, my emphsis. 10. Paul Rogers, “Fracking: Oil Company Sues to Overturn San Benito Fracking Ban; Could Affect Other Counties,” The Mercury News, March 3, 2015. http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_27626990/fracking-oil-company-suesoverturn-san-benito-county. 11. John Savage and Forrest Wilder, “House Stampedes to Overturn Fracking Bans,” Texas Observer, April 17, 2015. http://www.texasobserver.org/ house-stampedes-to-overturn-fracking-bans/. 12. Reuters Staff, “Oil and Gas Industries Sue Over U.S. Fracking Rules,” Fortune, March 20, 2015. http://fortune.com/2015/03/20/fracking-lawsuit-obama/. 13. Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, “Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear,” Vanity Fair Hive, April 2, 2008. modified soybeans,” http://www.vanityfair.com/ news/2008/05/monsanto200805. 14. Barlett and Steele, “Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear.” 15. Karl Mathiesen, “Shell Gets Final Clearance to begin Drillling for Oil in the Arctic,” The Guardian, August 18, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/aug/18/shell-gets-final-clearance-to-begin-drilling-for-oil-in-the-arctic. 16. Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—And What it Means for Our Futrure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 103. 17. Russell Gold, The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).

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18. Gold, The Boom, 215–16. 19. Gold, The Boom, 220. 20. Gold, The Boom, 5, 4. 21. Gold, The Boom, 5. 22. Gold, The Boom, 303. 23. Gold, The Boom, 303–4. 24. Gold, The Boom, 36. 25. Gold, The Boom, 303. 26. Herman Daly, Beyond Growth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 34. 27. Daly, Beyond Growth, 1–2, 11. 28. Daly, Beyond Growth, 1. 29. Daly, Beyond Growth, 13. 30. Daly, Beyond Growth, 33. 31. Daly, Beyond Growth, 220. 32. Daly, Beyond Growth, 37. 33. Daly, Beyond Growth, 33–5. 34. Daly, Beyond Growth, 35–7. 35. Daly, Beyond Growth, 73. 36. William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Eff to Aid the Rese Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin, 2006). 37. Easterly, The White Man’s Burden, 193–9. 38. Daly, Beyond Growth, 69. 39. Daly, Beyond Growth, 82. 40. Daly, Beyond Growth, 82. 41. Daly, Beyond Growth, 35. 42. Daly, Beyond Growth, 45. 43. Easterly, The White Man’s Burden, 210–37. 44. Daly, Beyond Growth, 17. 45. Nnimmo Bassey and Anabela Lemos, “Kenya Evicts Indigenous People for Forest Offset Scam,” Climate and Capitalism, March 16, 2014. http://climateandcapitalism.com/2014/03/16/kenya-evicts-indigenous-people-for-forest-offset-scam/. 46. Nnimmo Bassey and Anabela Lemos, “Kenya Evicts Indigenous People for Forest Offset Scam.” 47. Daly, Beyond Growth, 65. 48. Daly, Beyond Growth, 28–9. 49. Daly, Beyond Growth, 34. 50. Daly, Beyond Growth, 17. 51. Daly, Beyond Growth, 74–87. 52. Daly, Beyond Growth, 31–2. 53. Daly, Beyond Growth, 55. 54. Daly, Beyond Growth, 83. 55. Daly, Beyond Growth, 83. 56. Daly, Beyond Growth, 83. 57. Greta Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Climate Change,” Women’s Studies International Forum 49 (2015), 16. 58. Daly, Beyond Growth, 122–6.

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59. Daly, Beyond Growth, 126–8. 60. Daly, Beyond Growth, 120. 61. Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Climate Change,” 16. 62. Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Climate Change,” 16. 63. Daly, Beyond Growth, 122–4. 64. Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Climate Change,” 24. 65. Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Climate Change,” 24. 66. Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Climate Change,” 24, italics in original. 67. Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Climate Change,” 15. 68. Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Climate Change,” 15. 69. Daly, Beyond Growth, 120. 70. Daly, Beyond Growth, 120. 71. Daly, Beyond Growth, 82, my emphasis. 72. Daly, Beyond Growth, 52–3. 73. Scientific American, “Use It and Lose It: The Outsize Effect of U.S. Consumption on the Environment,” September 14, 2012. http://www.scientificamerican. com/article/american-consumption-habits/. 74. Scientific American, “Use It and Lose It.” 75. Daly, Beyond Growth, 28. 76. Daly, Beyond Growth, 32. 77. Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Climate Change,” 18. 78. Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Climate Change,” 18. 79. WorldWatch Institute, “The State of Consumption Today,” http://www.worldwatch.org/node/810. 80. Daly, Beyond Growth, 36. 81. Daly, Beyond Growth, 35–7. 82. Daly, Beyond Growth, 35. 83. Daly, Beyond Growth, 36. 84. Daly, Beyond Growth, 36–7. 85. Daly, Beyond Growth, 37. 86. Daly, Beyond Growth, 51–2. 87. Daly, Beyond Growth, 52. 88. Daly, Beyond Growth, 52, my emphasis. 89. Herman Daly, “Climate Policy: From ‘Know How’ to ‘Do Now,’” Climate Policy: A Project of the American Meteorological Society, September 4, 2008. http:// www.climatepolicy.org/?p=65. 90. Daly, “Climate Policy: From ‘Know How’ to ‘Do Now.’” 91. Daly, “Climate Policy: From ‘Know How’ to ‘Do Now.’” 92. Daly, Beyond Growth, 157. 93. The Economist, “Why Islamic State’s Gold Coins Won’t Replace the Global Banking System,” The Economist, September 3, 2015. http://www.economist.com/ blogs/economist-explains/2015/09/economist-explains-1. 94. Adam Nossiter and Rick Gladstone, “Paris Attacks Kill more than 100, Police Say; Border Controls Tightened,” New York Times, November 13, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/14/world/europe/paris-shooting-attacks. html?_r=0.

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95. Jim Inhofe, “Sen Jim Inhofe Addresses the Heartland Institute/CFACT/CEI at COP-21,” Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8jWeHvg-mY. 96. Nick Mabey, Tom Burke, and Liz Gallagher, “Judging the COP21 Outcome and What’s Next for Climate Action,” E3G, https://www.e3g.org/library/ judging-cop21-outcome-and-whats-next-for-climate-action. 97. Remy Melina, “What Country Is the best at Protecting the Environment?” Live Science, April 21, 2010. http://www.livescience.com/9866-country-protectingenvironment.html. 98. Jonathan Katz, “Climate Change Deniers Try to Derail the Paris Talks,” The New Republic, December 7, 2015. 99. Katherine Purvis, “Sinking States: The Islands Facing the Effects of Climate Change,” The Guardian, February 15, 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/gallery/2016/feb/15/ pacific-islands-sinking-states-climate-change. 100. Martin W. Lewis, Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992)101. Lewis, Green Delusions, 15–19. 102. Lewis, Green Delusions, 19–23. 103. Lewis, Green Delusions, 23–6. 104. Brian Czech, Supply Shock: Economic Growth at the Crossroads and the Steady State Solution (New Society Publishers), 2013, 208. 105. Czech, Supply Shock, 206. 106. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Natural Gas Extraction: Hydraulic Fracturing,” https://www.epa.gov/hydraulicfracturing. 107. Science Daily, “Improving the Delivery of Chemotherapy with Grapevine,” June 2, 2015. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150602130009.htm. 108. Czech, Supply Shock, 206. 109. Czech, Supply Shock, 207. 110. Czech, Supply Shock, 207. 111. Arjun Sreekumar, “Is BP Changing its Mind About Renewable Energy?” The Motley Fool (AOL News), September 14, 2013. 112. Tina Casey, “Why Chevron Won’t Make Bio-Gasoline for $2.18 Any Time Soon,” The Nature Conservancy, April 23, 2013. http://cleantechnica.com/2013/04/23/ the-catchlight-chevron-biofuel-project-stalls-out/. 113. Lewis, Green Delusions, 19. 114. Lewis, Green Delusions, 19, italics in original. 115. Anupam Chander, “Who’s to Blame for Fukushima?” Los Angeles Times, April 1, 2011. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/apr/01/opinion/la-oe-chander-geliability-20110401. 116. Steven Starr, “Costs and Consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi Disaster,” Physicians for Social Responsibility: Environmental Health Policy Institute. http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental-health-policy-institute/ responses/costs-and-consequences-of-fukushima.html. 117. “George Washington,” “1400 Sue General Electric, Toshiba, and Hitachi for Fukushima Disaster,” Zero Hedge, January 31, 2014. http://www.zerohedge.com/

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contributed/2014-01-31/1400-sue-general-electric-toshiba-and-hitachi-fukushimadisaster. 118. Chander, “Who’s to Blame for Fukushima?” 119. Kumi Naidoo, “Fukushima Disaster: Holding the Nuclear Industry Liable,” The Guardian, March 11, 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/ fukushima-nuclear-industry-disaster-liable, my emphasis. 120. Brandon Owens and Thibault Desciee, “Beyond Policy: The Future of Renewable Energy,” GE Reports—COP21. General Electric, feed://www.gereports. com/tag/cop21/feed/. 121. Jonathan Tasini, “General Electric: Killing Chinese Workers for a Cleaner Environment,” Huffington Post, April 1, 2008. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ jonathan-tasini/general-electric-killing_b_94420.html. 122. Jay Yarrow, “GE Ships Light Bulb Jobs to China so It Can Make Greener Bulbs,” Business Insider, August 29, 2009. http://www.businessinsider.com.au/ ge-ships-light-bulb-jobs-to-china-so-it-can-make-greener-bulbs-2009-8. 123. Czech, Supply Shock, 205. 124. Brian Lombardozzi, “The True Cost of Chinese Solar Panels,” Alliance of American Manufacturing, September 24, 2014. 125. Elliot Curry, “Water Scarcity and the Recognition of the Human Right to Safe Freshwater,” Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights, 9.1, article 5. http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1109& context=njihr. 126. Czech, Supply Shock, 220. 127. Lewis, Green Delusions, 210. 128. Lewis, Green Delusions, 19. 129. Lewis, Green Delusions, 20. 130. Lewis, Green Delusions, 131. 131. Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, “Oil and Gas CEOS Jointly Declare Action on Climate Change,” http://www.oilandgasclimateinitiative.com/news/oil-and-gasceos-jointly-declare-action-on-climate-change. 132. Jessica Lyons Hardcastle, “Will COP21 Spur Big Oil to Invest in LowCarbon Technology?” Environmental Leader Conference, 2016, March 3, 2016. https://www.environmentalleader.com/2016/03/03/will-cop21-spur-big-oil-toinvest-in-low-carbon-technology/. 133. U.N. Climate Change Newsroom, “Historic Paris Agreement on Climate Change,” December 12, 2015. http://newsroom.unfccc.int/unfccc-newsroom/finalecop21/. 134. Fiona Harvey, “COP21 is Too Male Dominated and has Male Priorities, Says UN Special Envoy,” The Guardian, December 8, 2015. http://www. theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/08/cop21-is-too-male-dominated-and-hasmale-priorities-says-un-special-envoy. 135. Lewis, Green Delusions, 233. 136. Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—And What it Means for Our Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 92.

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137. Ben Schreckinger, “Ted Cruz’s Most Provocative Quotes,” Politico, March 23, 2015. http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/ted-cruz-provocative-quotes-116304. 138. Graham Readfern, “Checking Ted Cruz’s Climater Science Denial Howlers,” The Guardian, February 10, 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ planet-oz/2016/feb/11/checking-ted-cruzs-climate-science-denial-clangers. 139. Czech, Supply Shock, 197. 140. Czech, Supply Shock, 197-8. 141. Czech, Supply Shock, 196. 142. Czech, Supply Shock, 195. 143. Breakthrough Energy Coalition, “Introducing the Breakthrough Energy Coalition,” http://www.breakthroughenergycoalition.com/en/index.html. 144. Council on Ethics for the Government Pension Fund Global, Annual Report, 2014, 44. 145. Tarabinah Wilfred McBarry, United States Alien Torts Claim Act (ATCA), Oil Corporations and Militarized Commerce in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, Doctoral Thesis, 2010, 183–206. 146. Ibanga Isine, “Nigeria’s Human Rights Body to Hold Special Hearing on Dangote, El Zakzaky Killings,” Premium Times, October 3, 2014. 147. Matt Taibbi, “Looting the Pension Funds,” Rolling Stone, September 26, 2013. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/looting-the-pension-funds-20130926. 148. Franz Wild, Mike Cohen, “Waiting for the Rainbow: Villagers Lament Motsepe’s Empty Promises,” Mail and Guardian, July 24, 2013. http://mg.co.za/ article/2013-07-24-african-rainbow-minerals-and-patrice-motsepes-un-met-promises. 149. Damian Carrington and Karl Matthiesen, “Revealed: Gates Foundation $1.4bn in Fossil Fuel Investments,” The Guardian, March 19, 2015. https://www. theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/19/gates-foundation-has-14bn-in-fossilfuels-investments-guardian-analysis. 150. Lewis, Green Delusions, 16. 151. Lewis, Green Delusions, 17. 152. Lewis, Green Delusions, 29. 153. Lewis, Green Delusions, 233. 154. Lewis, Green Delusions, 18, emphasis in original. 155. Foundation for Deep Ecology, “The Deep Ecology Platform,” http://www. deepecology.org/platform.htm. 156. Foundation for Deep Ecology, “The Deep Ecology Platform.” 157. Derrick Jensen and George Draffen. Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance and the Culture of Control (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004), 145. 158. Jensen and Draffen, Welcome to the Machine, 28, 109. 159. Jensen and Draffen, Welcome to the Machine, 131. 160. Jensen and Draffen, Welcome to the Machine, 26. 161. Jensen and Draffen, Welcome to the Machine, 197. 162. Jensen and Draffen, Welcome to the Machine, 213. 163. Lewis, Green Delusions, 18.

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164. Clint Ouma, “Top Solar Energy Companies,” Exploring Green Technology, http://exploringgreentechnology.com/solar-energy/top-solar-energy-companies/. 165. Lewis, Green Delusions, 251. 166. Arne Naess, “Deep Ecology in the Line of Fire,” The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, 12 (3) (1995), http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/ view/307/460. 167. Lewis, Green Delusions, 16. 168. Lewis, Green Delusions, 185. 169. Lewis, Green Delusions, 174. 170. Issie Lapowsky, “Tech Billionaires Team Up to Take on Climate Challenge,” Wired, November 30, 2015. http://www.wired.com/2015/11/ zuckerberg-gates-climate-change-breakthrough-energy-coalition/. 171. Breakthrough Energy Coalition. http://www.breakthroughenergycoalition. com/en/index.html. 172. UN Climate Change Conference, Paris 2015 (COP21), “188 Countries Have Committed to Reducing Their Greenhouse gas Emissions,” http://www.cop21.gouv. fr/en/185-countries-have-committed-to-reducing-their-greenhouse-gas-emissions/. 173. Melina, “What Country Is the best at Protecting the Environment?” 174. Katz, “Climate Change Deniers Try to Derail the Paris Talks.” 175. Katz, “Climate Change Deniers Try to Derail the Paris Talks.” 176. Bonner Cohen, “Trans-Pacific Partnership: A Trojan Horse for Obama’s Climate Change Agenda,” CFact, December 31, 2015. http://www.cfact. org/2015/12/31/trans-pacific-partnership-a-trojan-horse-for-obamas-climate-changeagenda/#sthash.1dYWAdYS.dpuf, my emphasis. 177. David Hasemyer, Climate Change Raises a Troubling Question: Who Gets To Eat? Inside Climate News, January 21, 2016. https://insideclimatenews.org/ news/20012016/climate-change-raises-troubling-question-who-gets-eat-food-supply-agriculture. 178. Nora Kaplan-Bricker, “Climate Change Will Force Pacific Islanders to Flee. Should the U.S. be Forced to Take them In?” The New Republic, December 2, 2013. https://newrepublic.com/article/115777/climate-change-sinking-pacificislands-should-us-take-migrants. 179. Colin P. Kelley, Shahrzad Mohtadi, Mark A. Cane, Richard Seager, and Yochanan Kushnir, “Climate Change in the Fertile Cresent and Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 30, 2015. http://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3241.full.pdf. 180. United Nations: Human Rights, Office of the High Comissioner, “U.S. Experts Voice Concern over Adverse Impacts of Free Trade and Investment Agreements on Human Rights,” http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=16031&LangID=E@.

Chapter 6

The Reclamation of HumanCenteredness and an Ecofeminist Systems Approach to the Desirable Future THE RECLAMATION OF HUMAN-CENTEREDNESS: THE AESTHETIC IN EXPERIENCE, THE VALUE OF SCIENCE, AND THE DESIRABLE FUTURE John Dewey, the Aesthetic in Experience, and the Desirable Future Appealing to John Dewey’s notion of “an experience,” I’ve argued that the only future worth the colossal struggle to realize it is the one that takes the aesthetic in experience to be of such priceless value that doing damage to the world that makes that experience possible becomes not merely foreign to conscience or incomprehensibly ludicrous—but suicidal, or more precisely, eco-cidal. I’ve argued that there’s no desirable future compatible with any incarnation of capitalism, and that in its addiction to the myth of endless resources, its taking hostage of reason to rationalize infinite growth, and its capacity to metastasize in whatever fashion will prolong its survival regardless the consequences, capital conquest is constitutively and irretrievably nihilistic. It doesn’t merely undermine the desirable future; it renders it impossible, especially for those whose assigned status along the axes of human chauvinism exposes them to systemic exploitation, oppression, and commodification. Though some, like the peoples of the Kiribati Islands, Syrian drought refugees, or at least 1400 animal species directly and/or critically endangered by a warming planet, are likely to experience ecological deterioration more immediately and violently than others, none are immune.1 Promises of reform such as those promoted in the capitalist rhetoric of “sustainability” are just as likely to fail, however momentarily masked or decelerated by technological intervention, as are ventures dependent on the myth of endless resources or 337

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the cynical cash-in exploitation of climate change. The desolate world of The Road illustrates a future sustainable, but plainly not desirable to any but the most hardened survivalist. The post-apocalyptic Anthropocene can offer us that much, perhaps, but insofar as it’s otherwise bereft of those qualities that lend to experience the textures, smells, tastes, colors, and emotion we associate with a genuinely good life, it’s hard to imagine many willing to go to bat for it over the long haul. Indeed, the sustainable world just is the fully capitalized planet greenwashed to make it appear desirable; and that we fail to see beyond this marketing ploy spells our absolute peril. To buy (quite literally) “sustainability” is to commit our children and all others, human and nonhuman, to the planetary train-wreck of 500 parts per billion. To be sure, this isn’t because the planet itself is in any jeopardy, but because living things, habitats, and communities can sustain (ironically) only so much pollution, flood, fire, drought, loss of shoreline, toxic soil, invasive species, species extinctions, untreatable viral and bacterial infection, radiation, labor exploitation, terrorism, and war. Fought now over hydrocarbons abetted by religious fanaticism, future wars may take on an even more “biblical” scale over the one thing more precious—water. “Sustainability” is the new myth of endless resources. Like its predecessor, it necessitates a scale of self-deception so corrosive to our moral and civic sensibilities, so deadening of our faculty for aesthetic wonder, the only wonder is that we still evince shock at mounting incidents of terrorism, the mass migration of 65.3 million human beings in 2015, the likely extinction of the Amur leopard, the Javan rhinoceros, the leatherback turtle, the Western lowland gorilla, and the Sumatran elephant—and at least nine other known endangered species—due to loss of habitat, loss of food plant biodiversity, the collapse of bee colonies, and, the increasing scarcity of potable water. “Sustainability” is naught but the cadaver cosmetics of the Capitalocene— often sold to us as a techno-utopia by the very “environmental” organizations whose leaders claim to be working valiantly to “save” the planet. But, as we’ll see, they’re as much beholden to the logic of capital as their fossil fuel and animal agriculture nemeses. The time for debate and denial is over: whatever façade it takes on, capitalism is the metastasis of the planet, the Anthropocene its psychotic persona, “sustainability” its greenwash marketing fairytale. The genuinely desirable future is borne, however, not only in the repudiation of the Anthropocene, but in recognizing that at the heart of moral and civic agency beats the desire to live in a world that makes the aesthetic in experience possible—that what climate change means is that we’re teetering on the precipice of losing that world. Preserving the aesthetic in experience isn’t about adding a “spice” called “the aesthetic” to experience in order to enhance or improve it; rather, it’s an essential condition of a life worth living.

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The aesthetic in experience provides the feel of substance to our pursuits, the sense that the scientific, artistic, literary, cultural, or athletic has value beyond the momentary; it’s what makes experience meaningful, exciting, worth hard work and real risk. It’s what lends that sensibility to experience we call satisfaction. It is, to be sure, no easy thing to define, but this is a virtue—not a deficit—since it’s precisely in what that experience consists that must remain open to review, critical evaluation, revision—even real conflict. To insist that ecological stability and biodiversity form necessary if not sufficient conditions for the aesthetic in experience is simply to acknowledge that the conditions of that experience are the same as those necessary to moral action and judgment—that what’s worth the exertion is a world worth fighting for. What this implies as a matter of praxis is that the work to realize the desirable future takes as its basic premise is respect for ecological integrity, human rights, and nonhuman animal species—collectively and individually. Such a future is neither easy to realize nor effortless to live; but, as Aristotle saw long ago, eudaimonia—happiness or well-being—is a concept we apply to a good life, not only to a good moment.2 An experience reflects not merely this moment, but the life that makes it possible, and the prospect that such possibilities are shared by others, human an nonhuman alike. The aesthetic in experience is not, of course, precluded under any circumstance but the most miserable—itself an important moral clue concerning the character of the desirable world. This only world we have, endangered and beautiful all at once, offers plentiful opportunity, especially in the sciences. Due both to the aesthetic value intrinsic to empirical exploration, and to the sheer urgency of the climate crisis, exploring in just what the anthropogenic causes of global warming consist (or its wealth of associated dilemmas— acidification, coral bleaching, bee colony collapse, species extinction, ozone depletion, deforestation, or emergent disease vectors such as Ebola and the Zika virus), realizes values crucial to the desirable world like imagination, innovation, humility, and above all wonder. And, by providing objects of comparison, science offers perhaps stark but illuminating insight into the cancerous circulatory systems of the Capitalocene. In an interview with Bill Moyers, for example, physicist Michael Mann explains that what drew him to climate science was the exhilarating prospect of getting to work on a problem of tremendous interdisciplinary magnitude on a very complex cornucopia of issues: I was captivated by the fact that there were scientists who were using physics and math to model this amazingly complicated system that we call the earth’s climate. I realized that there was an opportunity to work on this incredibly interdisciplinary problem that involves the physics of the atmosphere and the ocean and the ice sheets and the way they all interact with each other, and their interaction with incoming sunlight and the outgoing heat energy from the surface.3

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Mann’s observation captures not only the aesthetic in experience, but the intimacy of the relationship between doing science and this “amazingly complicated system that we call the earth’s climate.” He’s captivated by the earth’s many complex, interactive phenomena—oceanic, atmospheric, physical— and by the elegance of the application of mathematical equations to modeling the climate of a warming planet. He’s attracted to climate science not only because it provides an opportunity to create new knowledge, but because the creating of that knowledge is itself an experience. Science, however, isn’t the only lens through which the Anthropocene can be evaluated. Consider a very different example, this time from Gothic literary studies. In “Zombies, Gender, and World Ecology,” Kerstin Oloff explores the figure of the zombie. Especially in its white female incarnation, she argues, the zombie offers an opportunity to explore capitalism as a form of institutionalized violence: If we read zombies as figures that speak to the nature-society relations through which capitalism unfolds, then the vacant-eyed female zombie enables us to think through the role of patriarchal exploitation within this. In its various incarnations, one might therefore say that the figure of the zombie sits at the fault line of racial, class, gender, and environmental violence.4

For Oloff, the zombie personifies the consequences of conquest capitalism. It “speaks powerfully,” she argues, “to the anxieties produced by the commodification of labor,”5 and it captures the extent to which “humans are reduced to being bodily vessels for the production of specifically capitalist value.” In its unconscious terrifying vacancy the zombie personifies the insight that “commodification is also fundamentally an ecological process.”6 Oloff’s attraction to the zombie trope isn’t, however, merely instructive; it’s also aesthetic: she doesn’t just tell us that the zombie figure “animates” anxieties associated with commodification. She also shows us via her exploration of the literary work of writers Ana Lydia Vega and Mayra Montero, pointing to texts that “encourage us to think patriarchy and racism alongside deforestation”: [W]hile Vega addresses capitalism’s drive towards unsustainable plunder and exhaustion of resources within a nineteenth century Puerto Rican context, Montero takes us to the present day with her emphasis on concerns about frog extinctions and Haiti’s socio-environmental disaster.7

And of course, Eco-Nihilism opens with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a post-apocalyptic tale that, while it invites us to the aesthetic made possible in the experience of story-telling, also forewarns us, as do Mann and Oloff, of worlds in which opportunities for an experience will be disrupted by the

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exigencies of survival. To be clear, comparisons of the desirable future with the eco-cidal post-apocalypse aren’t intended necessarily to suggest that the aesthetic in experience plays no role in the latter. There are moments of striking beauty in The Road, for example, when the father opens a can of peaches savoring the sweet taste, or the boy joins a new family after the father’s death. Such comparisons are to suggest, however, that the nihilistic forces driving us to ecological apocalypse are also those driving us to extinction, that is, to a world that is futureless at least for human beings. The desirable future affords no fewer opportunities for moral deliberation as to what ought to count as “richness,” “worthwhile,” or “beautiful” than the Anthropocene, certainly more than the Capitalocene, especially for the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants. The difference is that in the latter, this is already decided by the progenitors of capital; it’s simply what we can be convinced to consume. In this respect, the desirable world is more demanding; where exchange value no longer determines all value, it’s left to the hard work of deliberation, consensus—democracy—to make these calls, revisit them, revise them. There can thus be no desirable future that’s not at once striving to end the injustice of human chauvinism, and this isn’t merely because chauvinism authorizes a false view of the world and its inhabitants. It’s because the aesthetic in experience is bound to be preempted by expectation conforming to exchange value, diminished by lost opportunity, and marred by unnecessary suffering. We’re not creatures who want, in other words, to have access to things like truth simply because there may exist such things. We want to know because knowing has its own specific kind of satisfaction. It feels good; it’s worth remembering; it evinces beauty; it prods us to know more—it’s made better when it’s possible for others. Indeed, it’s just this desire for satisfaction that’s so skillfully exploited by conquest capitalism—that makes us vulnerable to the promise of the sexy and the cool in advertising. But it also offers us a clue to a feature of human nature often overlooked—but vitally important to the desirable future: human-centeredness; or better: a facet of human-centeredness capable of reclamation and rehabilitation. Or, short even of reclamation: reinvention. Recuperating/Reinventing Human-Centeredness: Whatever Works Will Do However initially counterintuitive, a radical revaluation of the aesthetic in experience must be conceived as human-centered. Or more specifically: “human-centered” must be wrested from Homo Colossus and then re/decentered in light of articulating a world consistent with those ecological, social, and geopolitical conditions most conducive to the aesthetic in experience. For in fostering these conditions, reason and momentum is given to

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articulating the ethical and civic foundation necessary to distinguishing the merely sustainable from the truly desirable, a future worth real struggle as opposed to one that’s destined to drive its chauvinism to its natural, if nihilistic, conclusions. This expressly ecological view of “human-centered” has its roots not in narrow self-interest, but rather in the critical self-reflection and ensuing humility inspired by the insight that “centered” does not proscribe any particular license, entitlement or social order, but rather simply describes a set of capacities and limitations accruing to a specific species of organism, Homo Sapiens. It understands, in other words, that human chauvinism is not destiny, but civilizational pathology, that other futures are possible, and that the geography, animal life, and atmosphere of the planet need not continue as fodder for the violent geopolitics of the “world” commandeered by capital. Rehabilitated in light of this understanding, “centered” implies first and foremost acknowledging that our present state of ecological deterioration, social injustice, and geopolitical disorder are the mutually reinforcing instantiations not of a capitalism inadequately regulated, but of the logic of capital itself advancing to its inherently nihilistic conclusions. Indeed, however much we may resist it, coming to comprehend the full scale of responsibility for damage to the planet’s ecosystems, nonhuman animal species, and human communities is the first crucial step toward grasping the work necessary to revalue our collective conscience. The second step is to face squarely the fact that this responsibility falls far more heavily on some than on others entitled by the axes of human chauvinism. The third is to see that the present configuration of the nation state subserves not the welfare of human communities or the ecosystems upon which they depend, but the logic of capital. This is a lot to ask, and were the alternative not unthinkable perhaps too much to ask. But the alternative is not merely more of the same; it’s a future without drinkable water. It is death. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the revaluation of human-centeredness precludes other species from the domain of conscience, or that only human moral sensibilities matter; far from it. When Chimpanzees risk drowning in zoo moats trying to rescue their mates, or when Rhesus monkeys refuse food because accepting it delivers a shock to their companions, we must conclude along with our own fellows in the sciences, that “these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality.” We’ve no reason, in other words, to think we’re the lone proprietors of morality.8 What I am suggesting is that because we and we alone are accountable for the ecological and existential apocalypse manufactured by conquest capitalism, only we can articulate the revolution that can alter that course. Or perhaps even more pointedly: “revolution” does not begin in action; it begins in the reclamation of reason against its pathological corruption to ends demanding the existence not of a planet but an endless vault.

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Reaching beyond “mere” justice, a radically revalued human-centeredness takes as its point of departure not the interests of the privileged, but instead the experience of those whose relationship to vital things like water, air, soil, and nonhuman life embody the intimate interdependencies of human and biotic communities, and thus provide a path not backward to romanticized primitivism—but forward to a world in which the ethical and the civic are complemented by the aesthetic. The desirable future, in other words, need not—as Derrick Jensen might have it—return us to the “primitive,” at least not in the sense that suffering or want of necessities is the trade-off for survival (at least for those who can’t afford to be survivalists). Instead, a repudiation of market logic opens the door to rethinking what counts as “necessity”; it prods us to replace quantitative measures with qualitative criteria grounded in values like richness, variety, complexity, repeatability, novelty—the stuff of an experience. It urges us to listen to those for whom “necessity” means necessity. As Suzana Sawyer observes with respect to the indigenous peoples of Ecuador in their struggle against the fossil fuel companies, “one cannot simultaneously be both Indian and Ecuadorian.”9 But this isn’t merely because the Indians seek to preserve their traditional ways of life; it’s because “to join the processes of modernization they must renounce their identities as Indians . . . their existence [thus] vanishes from our nation,”10 and thus their future. What’s endangered in making the transition to “modernization,” in other words, is not merely loss of ways of life, but the acquiescence to conditions that make identity as experiencing, living, agents enmeshed in specific cultural and environmental contexts impossible. A way of life is more than a “way of life”; it’s the aesthetic in the experience of performing those traditions and practices in that place for purposes directly relevant to living and acting that lend meaning and substance. But it’s also precisely this aesthetic, cultural, and ecological sensibility that’s threatened with extinction insofar as the ecosystem upon which it depends is leased, parceled, drilled, polluted, and likely to be abandoned as waste by the fossil fuel companies—right along with the people and animals who live there. For the Yasuni the desirable future cannot be Ecuadorian because “Ecuadorian” represents annihilation and death; it is their traditional ways of life that offer greater promise of life, and it’s precisely in that sense that they act in the name of the desirable future—not the romanticized past. The Aesthetic in Experience and the Incongruities of Capital One objection to the view I’m developing here is that since we cannot know precisely in what an experience consists, we cannot know whether, for example, the indigenous peoples of the Amazon—once adapted to the

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presence of Chevron—won’t decide to be “Ecuadorian” after all. This is a legitimate point. We must acknowledge that defining in what an experience consists is made difficult via considerations of species, culture, geography, and history. But that’s in fact a strength of a revalued human-centeredness, not a weakness since it can serve to remind us that contested meanings invite us to revisit and review our assumptions, to resist allowing ends determine means without critical reflection. This latter, of course, is precisely the human chauvinism we see to overcome, and it’s with that goal in sight that the value of the aesthetic in experience—especially in its capacity to solicit reflection— comes into clear view. Consider: what would likely create an experience for me canoeing down Ecuador’s Curaray River may count as unremarkably ordinary for the Yasuni fisherman; or perhaps the intimacy of his communion with the river water, its flora and fauna, may spiritualize his experience in a way I can’t fully appreciate. Both possibilities, however, make the same point: what a recuperated human-centeredness requires is that our governing principle be to err on the side of caution—to take it as given that a world rich in biotic diversity, complexity, and the capacity for evolutionary development is more likely to offer opportunities for an experience than the one left to us by a concept of value denuded by commodification. A rehabilitated human-centeredness functions not as a narrow conduit of self-aggrandizing interest, but as a locus of epistemic responsibility that, in recognizing the permeable boundaries of its own skin, implicitly acknowledges its vulnerability to and reliance on others. It proceeds on the premise that no desirable future is possible save for acknowledging biotic diversity and interdependency; it thus must refuse as a matter of principle to treat other living things as commodities, consumables, or disposables. Such a perspective enjoins us to reject the dichotomizing of individual versus species, embracing instead the view that because the effects of environmental destruction are borne by both, criteria justifying human action must include both. The possibility of an experience, moreover, not only draws no such arbitrary distinction, but actively agitates against it as a distraction from appreciating the aesthetic in experience. A critique, for example, of animal agriculture’s staggering greenhouse gas footprint that ignores the cruel treatment of nonhuman animals in factory farms is, from this point of view, not merely distorted, misleading, and incomplete; it re-inscribes the speciesism at fault for our current spiral toward species extinction, contributing directly to the erosion of biotic diversity, and with it opportunities for an experience. Consider, for example, the remarks of an environmental activist sitting behind me at a recent hearing over a proposed natural gas pipeline. Chatting with her fellows, she suggested that the company, Williams, should colocate the pipeline along the right-of-way of a nearby factory farm because, were

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there an explosion, “we’d roast the pigs not the kids.” She then laughed, along with her fellows. Someone mentioned hotdogs. But think about the incident from the perspective of a desirable future: while ostensibly speaking out for the protection of human children, the activist’s comments in fact personify Homo Colossus. “Roast pigs, not kids” reinforces a naturalized hierarchy in which pigs are taken for granted as commodities—but not children (or not all children). However well-versed about the dangers of high-pressure pipelines, her comment reflects lack of awareness about where hotdogs come from; ironic since the production of both emit colossal amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. What excuses this level of epistemic opacity? A capitalist consumer culture for which hotdogs have become so detached from the sentient animals slaughtered to make them that even committed environmental activists don’t make the connection? The activist’s comment makes it seem as if the centeredness of our somatic, cognitive, psychological, affective, and epistemic situation as Homo Sapiens (and not flycatchers, blue-nosed dolphins, or factory farm pigs) destines us to the chauvinism that privileges human children over pigs—that there’s no need to reflect on whether this is true. But is it true? Or does it make more sense to think that an enculturation pervasively saturated by the domination of exchange value over all others simply normalizes that assessment, freeing us from the work of giving reasons? One thing’s clear: we can’t consistently hold that the value of the pig is rightly assessed as a commodity for human consumption and at the same time hold that the desirable future can accommodate neither the factory farm that emits greenhouse gases nor the cruelty that embodies commitment to value beyond exchange. In short, we can’t afford that chauvinism without condemning the very children the activist would seek to protect to ecological apocalypse. What matters then to articulating a desirable future isn’t as much about in what human nature actually consists as it is about the moral and epistemic wherewithal to alter the course of our current trajectory—whatever the case. We must believe that we have that wherewithal, and what makes this possible are four necessary conditions: • A thoroughgoing analysis of the practices and institutions that have produced the conditions responsible for human and nonhuman suffering and oppression, as well as environmental deterioration. Accounts like the one I’ve offered here show how the axes of human chauvinism have been naturalized, normalized, and exploited by conquest capital in the interest of maintaining authority and power in the hands of mostly white, Western(ized) men. It also shows how climate change denial, climate change capitalism, salvation capitalism, and techno-utopian “Promethean” capitalism all reaffirm this hegemony.

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• A critique of instrumental reason as a metastasis of human-centeredness. In its pathological obsession to convert all value to exchange value, capitalism relies on the myth of endless resources; it commodifies every aspect of life and labor, takes advantage of the axes of human chauvinism to empower its beneficiaries, expropriates the nation state to its own mercenary utility, and metastasizes in whatever ways will insure its growth, including the denial of climate change, capitalizing on its catastrophic potential, and expropriating the vocabulary of “sustainability” to “green” its ecologically harmful consequences. • The recognition that a sustainable future is not necessarily a desirable one, and that it doesn’t necessarily support the biotic diversity and interdependency most likely to sustain the conditions for the aesthetic in experience— no matter how broadly conceived. That the vocabulary of sustainability has been co-opted by climate change capitalists, salvation capitalists, technoutopians, and Big Green environmental groups will only further corrode our confidence in the notion, especially since it amounts to greening the armed lifeboats of its beneficiaries. • The insight that the same capacity for reason pathologized by capital can be put to its critical evaluation and, given this, reclaimed and recuperated to ends more consistent with the environmental, moral, and social justice conditions for the desirable future. Realizing these ends necessitates nothing short of a collective global revolution of conscience and action, and with it the end of capitalism. That this is an understatement only goes to reiterate how high are the stakes. Though necessary to ignite it, there’s no guarantee that understanding these conditions will be sufficient to inspire the right kind of revolution, especially on a global scale, that avoiding apocalypse requires. However deeply committed to that ecosystemically grounded, globally democratic future we may be, the odds are against it. The “right kind” of revolution is, of course key: any global revolution in human ways of life not explicitly premised on the aesthetic, moral, and civic values it aims to realize will very likely fail, reproduce the conditions of even more violent forms of conquest capitalism, accelerate the conditions of ecological apocalypse—or all three. There is no easy road; there’s simply either revolution or The Road. The desirable future cannot be realized through merely blowing up dams, filing for divorce from nonhuman nature, or building techno-utopian analogues aimed at replacing exhausted resources. And it must be understood as inalterably incompatible with the instrumental reason of those whose “insulated existence,” as Dewey puts it, destines them to conceive the world as “mere means” to “mere ends.”11 There’s no going back. There’s no staying here. So if forward is the only way to proceed, the questions are only about how—not if.

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The “Worlds” of an Experience and the Value of Epistemic Humility To be sure, it isn’t necessarily the case that only a world of diversity, complexity, and change can supply the conditions for an experience. An experience is not about, for example, beauty, comfort, security, or ease per se, but rather an arguably deeper sense of satisfaction, that more kinesthetic, psychological, or intellectual experience of “good,” though not necessarily formulable as such, and not necessarily articulable in a language. Depending on what we take to be encompassed by what is itself a contested term— “experience”—and to what kinds of organisms it applies, many worlds might make an experience possible, and it most likely is so for some creatures if not others. For Dewey, however, what describes experience per se, and thus defines the minimum necessary conditions for a desirable world, is that experience embodies and corroborates the relationship between an organism and its world; it encapsulates the fundamentally interactive character of living systems, and therefore provides the ground for the aesthetic in experience: [e]xperience occurs continuously, because the interaction of live creature and environing conditions is involved in the very process of living. Under conditions of resistance and conflict, aspects and elements of the self and the world that are implicated in this interaction qualify experience with emotions and ideas so that conscious intent emerges.12

What more is required for an experience, for “conscious intent” to be able to emerge, is of course, imprecise. Science can offer direction, but because future discovery is likely to illuminate the cognitive capacities of an everexpanding list of nonhuman animals, here too caution must govern action. Despite, for example, Rene Descartes insistence that nonhuman animals are not conscious and therefore cannot feel pain, recent work in cognitive science suggests that such capacities may extend not only beyond human beings, but beyond mammals. Consider an experiment in which toadfish were delivered electrical shock: “[i]t was found that the toadfish would ‘grunt’ whenever they were shocked. After some time, the toadfish began to grunt at the sight of an electrode, without yet being shocked.”13 The author then continues with an implicit appeal to the precautionary principle: “[w]hile these findings in themselves do not conclusively prove that fish feel pain, they do show that fish exhibit similar pain-response and pain-association behaviors seen in us and other animals.”14 There no doubt exists a wide cognitive gulf between the capacity to feel pain and that of being able to have an experience—much less formulate conscious intent. But that’s not the point; the point is that the possible capacity

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for experience per se opens a door such that the difference between the toadfish and, say, bottlenose dolphins, purple pig-nosed frogs, Sumatran elephants, lowland gorillas, human beings, or factory farm clone pigs is a matter of cognitive degree—not kind. It’s a matter of the particularities that govern the intimate relationship between a species and the environment that supports it. The grunting of the toadfish serves to remind us that our capacity to feel pain evolved for largely the same reasons as did that of other species of creature—to warn us of danger and to inform us of injury. It raises that morally fraught set of issues concerning the use of nonhuman animals in medical (or product) experimentation. The point, then, is this: if we’re committed to valuing the diverse and stable ecological conditions that make an experience possible for us, we must as a matter of consistency value the conditions that may make an experience possible for other species of creature—even if we do not know precisely in what the aesthetic in experience necessarily consists for them. This conception of human-centeredness takes epistemic humility as its point of departure in the attempt to articulate the desirable future: insofar as we’re in a position to know that we do not (necessarily) know in what the aesthetic in experience might consist for other species of creature, we become epistemically responsible to err on the side of a caution that directs us to preserve maximal ecological diversity and stability across every ecosystem that can potentially support an experience. That many species of nonhuman animal appear to be able to experience pain only adds to the possibility that there exist conditions that either contribute or detract from their experience. That only some species turn out to be capable of having an experience isn’t then about species membership; it’s simply about cognitive wherewithal. While Dewey is likely thinking in terms of human agents, nothing necessitates that reservation. He writes for example that [a]n experience has a unity that gives it its name, that meal, that storm, that rupture of a friendship. The existence of that unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts. This unity is neither emotional, practical, nor intellectual, for these terms name distinctions that reflection can make within it.15

What makes that critical “single quality” possible is a context capable of soliciting not merely a perceptual power or an affective response, but rather that array of perceptual, kinesthetic, affective, epistemic, and psychological capacities in whose interaction a world emerges. “Conscious intent” captures just that notion—a world as opposed to a mere stream of consciousness. Perhaps the same complexity, diversity, and change that solicits the stunned attention of the tourist peering over the rim of the Grand Canyon can be felt

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by the flycatcher swooping down over the park; perhaps not. We can still know this much: the merely sustainable world needn’t accommodate for the flycatcher at all; we can survive a world with no flycatchers—or lowland gorillas or Sumatran elephants. The cognitive wherewithal that premises the possibility of an experience needn’t ever actually produce it—even for creatures as cognitively competent as human beings. The desirable world, however, demands something qualitatively different: as a condition of its desirability it must accommodate not only for the existence of the flycatcher—but for the possibility of an experience for such birds as well. That the flycatcher exists makes it possible for us to watch her swoop down over the Grand Canyon, and thus contributes to an experience for us; a Grand Canyon spared the degrading erosion of its ecologies by natural gas drilling makes possible at least one condition of an experience for the flycatcher—an intact ecosystem. Here’s then another way to miss the point—and thus be prodded to radically rethink the meaning of humancenteredness: it is a difference of some magnitude to be able to reflect on an experience, to digest and evaluate it, to take responsibility and understand it. On the one hand, the tourist can snap pictures, call her friends, read about the Grand Canyon’s history; the flycatcher can’t. On the other, the flycatcher can fly. What “conscious intent” means ascribed to the flycatcher is perhaps contentious, or anthropomorphizing, or merely metaphorical. But that’s not what matters from the point of view of the desirable future. What does matter is that insofar as human beings are epistemically empowered to make judgments about whose experience counts, we’re all the more responsible to exercise the same caution as does Dewey when he writes that “[f]or life is no uniform uninterrupted march or flow. It is a thing of histories, each with its own plot, its own inception, and movement towards its close, each having its own particular rhythmic movement; each with its own unrepeated quality throughout.”16 Dewey, of course, was not confronted by climate change, or for that matter even the possibility that the planet’s resources are not endless. But these facts only make his argument all the more poignant; as “a thing of histories” the lives of one species of animal is no more or less dependent on the conditions that make possible its “plot” than any other. If, in other words, we’re to take the idea of an experience seriously—as experience we cannot imagine going without—then we must take the ecological conditions for the “plots” of others equally seriously. For these exigencies are what condition their experiences just as well as our own, wherever experience is possible for them (or us). Hence it can make no difference to our commitment to the desirable future whether we can distinguish the capacity for reflection from mere reaction, wonder from simple anticipation. The conditions are all the same in every way that matters toward achieving that future.

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There are thus only two objectives whereby the distinction between having an experience and the capacity to reflect upon it really matter, neither of which detract from our commitment to the revolution toward the desirable future—both of which contribute to it: the scientific knowledge that can enrich our respect for the complexity, diversity, and change that is the planet’s ecosystems, and with that the responsibility to protect the conditions that make an experience possible. The fact that we know many species of animal are capable of some version of an experience, that science regularly expands the ranks of these species, makes us responsible to the moral consideration of them all; the planet that supports the experience of wonder for the tourist at the Grand Canyon is the same planet that supports the swooping flycatcher. One objection to this view, of course, is that it offers no precise characterization of “aesthetic,” or that a term traditionally reserved to the arts has no appropriate place in an argument grounded in environmental commitments. Dewey, however, explicitly seeks to rescue the aesthetic from such suffocating formalism, arguing that while much of ordinary experience may be “inchoate,” fleeting, or unremarkable, all of it has the potential to inform an experience—to become the aesthetic in experience: “[e]xperience in this vital sense is defined by those situations and episodes that we spontaneously refer to as being “real experiences”; those things of which we say in recalling them, “that was an experience.”17 As Dewey’s examples make clear, moreover, “aesthetic” doesn’t necessarily imply “beautiful,” but rather having qualities such as novelty, surprise, intensity, emotional depth, color and sound, expansiveness, sensibility, and connection to others, human and nonhuman alike. Ironically, if what qualifies some experience as an experience consists in the desirability of its being repeatable, and yet also in its irreplaceable uniqueness, then it seems that it’s likely to be substantially enhanced, if not defined, by the ability to remember, return to, and reflect upon its content. As such it seems that an experience is likely to be possible for human subjects in ways unavailable, or at least unavailable to the same extent, to most (if not all) nonhuman animals. But while this may be true, it misses the central point: if we’re to avoid repeating a history of commodification, we must, as a matter of epistemic humility, assume that the capacity for an experience isn’t necessarily reserved to human agents alone. Indeed, to err on that side of caution isn’t anthropomorphizing; we needn’t superimpose human traits and characteristics on nonhuman beings to gain an idea, for example, of what may be going on in the mind of Morgan, the Orca who beached herself at Loro Parque, the Canary Island version of Sea World in 2016. We know that Morgan’s behavior is abnormal for her species of Orca. We know that such behavior indicates extreme stress; we know it poses a serious health risk to the animal. Hence, to embrace the concept of an experience evinces humility consistent with embracing a concept of human-centeredness whose first ethical commitment

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is to epistemic responsibility.18 As I made this point in “Sustainable Wasteland: Ecological Humanism, Cadaver Cosmetics, and the Desirable Future,” intellectual wherewithal implies not merely “power,” but responsibility for the future that its exercise entails. It’s easy to imagine a future merely sustainable, but only a future desirable to the creatures who can imagine it and know the difference can elicit the creative labor or praxis required to realize it as an ethic worth the effort. It’s one thing, for example, to act to mitigate climate change within the systems responsible for its anthropogenic contribution; from this point of view, sustainability is just a fashionable term for “reform.” It’s another thing, however, to reimagine a future beyond mere reform, one in which notions like “restoration,” “reclamation,” and the fostering of genuine biodiversity are meaningful because . . . they solicit the possibility of aesthetic experience. From this perspective, human centeredness implies not the short-sighted and exploitive chauvinism of the “human, all too human” past, but responsibility taken for the future by the only creatures (at least on this planet) whose epistemic situation makes this possible: Homo sapiens.19

Morgan the Orca will not, in other words, be saved, much less liberated from captivity at Sea World by “sustainability.” The sustainable world is perfectly consistent with the commodification of creatures who, from the point of view of the desirable future, must be included in the aesthetic not merely as objects of experience but as subjects. To take responsibility for Morgan’s suffering—to alter the world to prevent the “human, all to human” cause of that suffering—is one step back from the pathologies of capital. The alternative world of the armed lifeboats will not, moreover, simply smolder to a close like the dimming light of a dying campfire, but rather burn down in the furious violence of disease, war, and terror. In one sense, an Orca who beaches herself epitomizes that end; she kills herself before it goes down. As many now predict, the last battles of that world won’t be fought over hydrocarbons, but over the one thing even more precious: water. As Christian Parenti intimates, the armed lifeboats commandeered by the last of the most privileged will confront not only the high seas of a warming planet, but the thirsty desperation of its remaining subjugates. Science, Pseudo-science, an Experience, and the Pseudo-Aesthetic Science, argues Dewey, is “an instrumentality of the arts.” Hence if we’re serious about recuperating the aesthetic in experience we must include it as an avenue of imagination, theorizing, and discovery.20 Science, of course, is vital to our understanding of climate change, and thus forms an essential component not just with respect to the technology of the desirable future, but of the ethos of its truth-seeking worldview. Dewey, however, goes even

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further: an experience is as much a feature of scientific practice as of painting or sculpture. “It would then be seen,” writes Dewey, “that science is an art, that art is practice, and that the only distinction worth drawing is not between practice and theory, but between those modes of practice that are not intelligent, not inherently and immediately enjoyable, and those which are full of enjoyed meanings.”21 For Dewey, then, science is a variety of creative labor, a form of praxis requiring imagination in addition to knowledge, experimental rigor, and appeal to principles like falsifiability or the principle of elegance. Each of its disciplines offers a unique way of interacting with the natural world, of coming to appreciate its interdependencies; each occasions opportunities for even deeper forms of experiential satisfaction.22 In short, science encourages development of an aesthetic sensibility grounded in a keen appreciation for truth—even (or especially) when it’s unexpected: Thought, intelligence, science is the intentional direction of natural events to meanings capable of immediate possession and enjoyment; this direction— which is operative art—is itself a natural event in which nature otherwise partial and incomplete comes fully to itself; so that objects of conscious experience when reflectively chosen, form the “end” of nature.23

Science includes the aesthetic in experience because as “the intentional direction of natural events,” it is itself a “natural event,” knowing—an “operative art” corresponding to the capacity for reflection. The experience of science is thus as epistemically situated in the contexts that inform human-centeredness as any other human activity, making vigilance against human chauvinism in this form of praxis a paramount form of erring on the side of caution. That science, in other words, constitutes an art of truth-telling not only distinguishes its “ends,” Dewey notes, as able to induce a unique “enjoyment,” an experience “reflectively chosen” for its qualitative correspondence to the natural world, but defines its means as sincere commitment to epistemic integrity—following the evidence wherever the evidence leads regardless whether it supports a preferred, or profitable, view of the world. In short, science not only tells us about the kinds of complex and diverse worlds in which aesthetic experience is made possible; it also, by contrast, tells us about the kinds of worlds where it’s not: There are two sorts of worlds in which aesthetic experience would not occur. In a world of mere flux, change would not be cumulative; it would not move towards a close. Stability and rest would have no being. Equally it is true, however, that a world that is finished, ended, would have no traits of suspense and crisis, and would offer no opportunity for resolution . . . Because the actual world, that in

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which we live, is a combination of movement and culmination, of breaks and re-unions, the experience of a living creature is capable of aesthetic quality.24

There are two ways, both illuminating, that we can read the passage. First, in light of empirical observation: the world that makes a place for the aesthetic in experience is precisely that within which the natural processes and events that animate relationships among living things create the conditions for formulating value. Neither the world of flux nor that “finished” make possible conditions for experience of any kind since, in the world of flux exists no opportunity for reflection or anticipation, and in the “finished” world nothing transpires to be the “stuff” of experience at all. No sense can be made of either as desirable; while little about them solicits anxiety, nothing occasions wonder. Second (and with a bit of literary license), we can read the passage as a kind of cautionary parable: insofar as the actual world demands truth-tellers committed to revealing the world in all of its “combination of movement and culmination,” it cannot afford to elect ends over means. That is, it can’t afford to deploy reason to ends already given since to do so not only ignores a quality vital to the aesthetic in the experience of doing science, namely the “immediate possession and enjoyment” accruing to surprise; it also effectively reduces the natural world science purports to discover to the “worlds” of flux or finish. Such, of course, is precisely the “world” of instrumental reason—the “world” reverse-engineered to ends given by commodification and exchange value. In the capitalist “world” of flux ends determine means in that they govern what has value for exchange—what gets distilled from the flux as marketable (hydrocarbons, labor, sugars, factory farm animal bodies). Nothing true about the actual world can matter to the capitalist’s disposition to it other than insofar as it subserves that “world’s” given ends; things “exist” for exchange. The actual world’s resources thus must be conceived as endless, it’s capacity to absorb pollutants infinite, its hierarchical social order, a mirror of nature. Such, however, is also the world of the denier/truther who, regardless the object—climate change, the Holocaust, President Obama’s country of origin, cigarettes as a major cause of cancer, the planetary limits of hydrocarbon reserves, or nonhuman animal’s ability to feel pain—is bound not by any truth that could be the product of open-ended empirical investigation as Dewey describes it, but rather by the necessity to maintain a status quo from which the denier benefits (or, like Regular Joe and Josie, believes he/she benefits). This status quo, however, also describes the finished world, the “world” in which the reduction of all things—animate and inanimate—to a lowest common denominator, exchange value, renders the world not only inert, but more unsettling: a storehouse of resources whose value is determined by the

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capacity to be commodified. Whatever a thing may be—water, air, soil, plant, animal, human being—it is “finished,” done, destined to disposal. It is “fixed” by a single operation: exchange. The value of water isn’t water, but rather a substrate for chemical solvents for hydraulic fracturing or an opportunity to cash in on bottling its last clear drops; air a repository for volatile organic compounds; soil a distribution medium for fertilizer; vegetation a substrate for high-fructose corn syrup; animal bodies for deep-fat friars; human beings for labor and consumption. All begin in the same static place, generic material awaiting an assignment of value to be determined by the ends of capital. Because the capitalist’s “world” is effectively a superimposition upon the “actual” world, and because the incongruous facts of the actual world destine the capitalist’s to constant threat of exposure, it becomes of paramount import that its “superimposition” be attractive and convincing—a kind of Truman Show. The appearance, if not the reality, of abundance, prosperity, strength, and peace is vital to sustaining the chauvinism responsible for this current geopolitical regime. Keeping up the appearances has also, however, become a laborious and incongruity producing venture, like terror-bombing to attain peace, smoking to maintain weight, chemotherapy to regain health, or “Brexit” to improve international trade relations. Ironically, science not only must remain an “instrumentality” for capitalism, it must continue to be associated with the aesthetic—though to ends aimed not at the aesthetic in experience, but debauched as experience technologically facilitated or manufactured as “aesthetic.” Let’s call this the pseudo-aesthetic, “experience” whose vital role is to help maintain the superimposition of the capitalist worldview and at the same time help deflate its incongruities no matter how palpably, like climate change, they threaten to disrupt its increasingly brittle façade. Science has then two jobs—both incongruous as scientific. First, its job is to supply capitalist enterprise with technology. Whether bigger drill bits, fire-resistant foam, LNG tanker vessels, Frankenseeds, industrial solar panels, or a future of plastics; whether aimed at cashing out on the last gasp of the myth of endless hydrocarbons, or cashing in on the equally pernicious techno-utopian myth of complete replacement, science is for making money. A second mission of science or, in this case, the appearance of science—the pseudoscientific—is, as we’ve seen, to expropriate scientific (or “sciencey”-sounding) language to the denial of “inconvenient truths” like those laid out by Merchant of Doubt authors, Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway, those hawked by Climate Depot, or those that supply the campaign donations of elected representatives like Ted Cruz or Donald Trump. Both missions have as their goal the maintenance of the circulatory system of capital, and, despite the obvious contradictions between, for example, a science that shows climate change is anthropogenic and a pseudoscience that exists to deny these

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facts, both exemplify the ways in which capitalism is able to metastasize to insure its own survival. The climate capitalist can agree to climate change as “anthropogenic,” he/she just doesn’t have to care about the causes; the denier relies on science in every other aspect of her/his life—and simply ignores the facts of climate change. That few seem to notice may be the most formidable obstacle to realizing the desirable future we could imagine facing. The sheen of the scientific pervades even the most ordinary aspects of human life. In fact, that’s precisely where conquest capitalism deploys the pseudo-aesthetic to its most profitable and perverse effect. Consider, for example, bottled water. On the one hand, it’s marketed as if shapely plastic bottles were water’s natural condition (rather like pink was the natural color of animal flesh). Its companies compete for consumers via the “aesthetic” presentation of their packaging. Fiji Water, for example, advertises itself as “artisan” and includes a bright pink dewy flower on the plastic wraps of its twelve packs. Voss, on the other hand, goes for a more “euro-sheik” look on tall narrow bottles with sleek silver caps. Both capitalize on an increasingly scarce existential necessity by treating it as scarce and abundant; that is, scarce enough to be priced like gold or diamonds, and abundant enough that polluting it via the processes necessary to make plastic bottles poses no significant hazard (PET plastic and materials transport from China notwithstanding).25 This latter, of course, is as false as it is presupposed by the switch to bottled water in the first place. After all, if we believed tap water were safe to drink, who’d spend the money to buy Fiji? It’s at just this juncture, however, that the pseudo or counterfeit-aesthetic plays a key role: bottled water is advertised as “clean” or “pure.” But this isn’t because Fiji or Voss have any interest in what consumers think about their tap water. After all, it may contain less arsenic in it than Fiji.26 “Clean,” moreover, needn’t mean clean (even if that’s true); it means “cool”—as in what can be afforded by the affluent as water (or “water”) engineered and certified. Were the point simply “clean,” dewy pink flowers or shiny sleek cylinders would be unnecessary, and the advertising wouldn’t promote “science-y” sounding promises like Fiji’s reassurance that their water conforms to U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) specifications as well as testing protocol.27 Nope; the point isn’t about water per se; it’s about how the sciences are utilized in the circulatory system of capital to engineer its products, provide a vocabulary to its pseudo-aesthetic promises of “coolness,” to elide its destruction of resources—or all three. The story of water is simply the most perverse variation on this theme because it’s an existential necessity. Extorted by bottled water’s “aesthetic” appeal to “clean,” we’re effectively invited to ignore what the sciences—chemistry, biology, epidemiology, neurology, bacteriology—tell us, namely that clean water for those who can’t afford Fiji has become increasingly scarce due, first, to its irremediable contamination via

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the disposal of industrial waste or drilling processes like hydraulic fracturing and second, due to the privatization and corporatization by companies like Fiji, Voss, and perhaps thirstiest of all, Nestlé, of what’s left.28 Among the confounding ironies of the ways in which the logic of capital hijacks the aesthetic in experience, expropriating it as an instrument for marketing not merely goods but “lifestyles,” “coolness,” and “wealth,” is that it’s demonstrably false that the capitalist worldview can offer any substitute for the deep satisfaction Dewey describes as intrinsic to an experience—not, in any case, without cradle to grave immersion in a “world” where capitalism encompasses not merely the economy, but everything; where the logic of capital creates and permeates, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno put it, the industry of making culture. More precisely: no “world” within which potentially everything counts first and foremost as a commodity can offer the conditions necessary to the aesthetic in experience—not only because its environmental deterioration and oppressive social structures aren’t conducive, but because the value of things as things has been debauched and nullified as exchange. The superimposition that is the “world” of capital is, quite literally, a kind of counterfeit whose operational presupposition is that the world itself is a commodity, that as such it is endless, and as endless, everything is substitutable, disposable, and replaceable. Experiential “satisfaction” is anathema to such a “world,” inconsistent with its very conditions, and if not entirely incomprehensible to its subjugates, as vulnerable to extinction as are Sumatran elephants, polar bears, and leatherback turtles. To believe, in fact, that the good life consists in endless consumption is to believe precisely that nothing is satisfactory; or, as comes to the same, that “satisfactory” is a temporary state in need of replacement. Satisfaction is therefore the enemy of capital. But therein lay the insight key to articulating the desirable world: the decision, individual, collective, and global, that a world without the possibility of the aesthetic in experience—without the hope of experience which can afford satisfaction can offer—is nihilistic by definition, sustainable of nothing that can matter. Such a world would seem ripe for revolution. If only we could decide before it’s too late. The Pseudo-Aesthetic Rhetoric of Free Trade The pseudo-aesthetic is by no means an instrument reserved exclusively to advertising; the culture of consumption it helps to institutionalize is as engrained into the affluent global North and the “developing” South as is the myth of endless resources necessary to the logic of capital that dominates them both. Indeed, maintaining the myth comes with its own “aesthetic” of superimposition. Consider once more, for example, the glittering fiction of “Free

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Trade,” “American values,” and “level playing fields,” to which President Obama appeals in his campaign to convince displaced workers and small businesses that they’ll be benefited by the Transpacific Partnership (TPP): Beaverton, Oregon—Nike Headquarters: small businesses are the backbone of our economy. Eventually, like Nike, they grow sometimes into really, really big companies. They’re the ones who make Made in Oregon and Made in the USA mean something . . . they represent something essential about this country—the notion that if you’ve got a good idea and you’re willing to work at it, you can turn that idea into a business, you can grow that business, and eventually, who knows what might happen. You can give other people a chance to earn a living even as you do well. That’s America’s promise. And it’s up to us to keep that promise alive.29

Our response to a speech invoking traditional American values to promote a company whose record of outsourcing, wage slavery, child-labor abuse, and abysmal working conditions is legendary would perhaps include incredulity and sardonic laughter—did President Obama not intend it to be taken entirely seriously. Or: to be taken entirely seriously with respect to the tone, that is, the pseudo-aesthetics of his rhetoric, if not the mostly vacuous content of his speech. Let’s pan this out: that “Made in Oregon” and “Made in the USA” are flatly false—Nike sneakers are made in Vietnam where the hourly wage is about 56 cents—was no doubt the impetus behind protesters outside the Beaverton, Oregon event venue.30 That Nike will profit from even more liberalized agreements governing labor and environment protections made possible by trade pacts like TPP is not news. The perplexing question is how, in light of what we know about international sweatshops, their human rights and environmental abuses can leaders of any nation state, especially wealthy ones, advocate on behalf of trade deals certain to violate the very principles they applaud? Principles they exploit to promote the very deals that undermine them? To answer this question, we need to turn to the rhetoric, or, more precisely, the pseudo-aesthetic animating speeches like President Obama’s. What does it take to convince an audience of skeptical—displaced—American workers that more of what has harmed them is not only good for them—but good? The answer, in short, is story-telling. Obama opens his speech with sporty quips about Whitehouse basketball courts and self-effacing jokes about golf. “It’s so great,” he remarks, “to be at the world headquarters of such an iconic company—a company that helps athletes succeed from the individual to the world stage.” He sachet’s smoothly from Nike’s iconic image to “talk a little bit about trade” in the space of a sentence, making it clear—at least in light of the logic of Free Trade—that not only is the media the message, but that

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marketing the “world” of conquest capital isn’t confined to pretty plastic water bottles, billboards, or Internet pop-ups. In fact, the primary media of capital is language. Superimposed upon a reality that contradicts it, the lexicon of “free trade,” “fairness,” “growth,” “level playing field,” and “jobs” creates an “aesthetic” experience Regular Joe can embrace as a loyal citizen. That it contains not one once of satisfaction is a virtue for the “world” of capital since what that means is that the past needn’t be any predictor of the future. Just because, thanks to NAFTA, Regular Joe’s Nike job was outsourced to Vietnam needn’t mean Regular Josie’s job won’t meet the same fate under TPP—except, of course, that it will. Just because Joe’s current unstable economic reality is likely to be made all the more so by the future of Free Trade needn’t mean that his opportunities for an experience will be compromised; except for that it does. But this is just what “story-telling” is for: by appeal to an interlocking narrative of “hard work,” “American values,” “small business,” “keeping the promise alive,” and some sport analogies, President Obama supplies exactly the ingredients necessary to maintain the high level of self-deception and denial necessary to sustain the counterfeit “world” of capital. His infectious stories of sporty triumph create a mood that feels vindicating, patriotic, flagwaving—cool; his implied suggestion that supporting Free Trade is what the good American ought to do cinches the deal. To be clear, while the right name for the state’s deployment of the pseudoaesthetic is propaganda, this isn’t because some nefarious conspiracy or cabal is afoot to impose dictatorship. That too, in fact, presupposes the antiquated machinery of the nation state—even if, as one-world conspiracy theorists would have it, the “state” is the planet. And while, thanks to the Wikileaks and whistle blowers of the world, we know that loads of shady transactions transpire between governments, even here the primary drivers are multinationally economic: access to ports, hydrocarbons, labor, land, corn starch, animal bodies, water. What the president’s glib and pithy delivery reflects isn’t, in other words, a cover story to conceal a plot to make U.S. wage slaves. No—despite the reality of outsourcing, NAFTA, the Great Recession, the collapse of U.S. manufacturing, etc., Obama’s story really is about how capitalist enterprise is good for democracy, global equality, and the planet. It really is, in other words, what citizens of the global North must believe if the corporations that fly our flags—that fill the shelves of our Walmarts and the tanks of our Jeep Cherokees—are going to continue to produce the “world” “we” take for granted as endless. In their pseudo-aesthetic inflection and effect the president’s words mirror not content but rather the seamless ideological union of capital and the state. I suggest, “not content” because there’s no content; there’s feeling and atmosphere, jingoistic phrases and sporty anecdotes—but no content. And this too clarifies the vital import of words. While patriotic images certainly

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have an important role to play sustaining the capitalist worldview, the reddest blood cells of its circulatory system consist in words—or, rather, in the tone conveyed, and the debauched and extorted version of an experience made possible through words. Language, as Ludwig Wittgenstein observed long ago, forms the bone marrow of experience; it is the substrate of reality—or superimposed by the logic of capital, the “reality” of the flux or finished of exchange value. Regular Josie may not have voted for Obama, but in her bones she feels the vibe when the president says “the White House is cool” because it has a basketball court. The era of Free Trade won’t make Regular Joe’s job reappear, but that fact has no bearing on the extent to which he resonates with words like “free.” A point reiterated by his critics, content is precisely what the president can’t afford; it invites critical reflection and righteous indignation about the real winners and losers of Free Trade.31 As the protesters outside made clear, however, driving home a convincing alternative narrative so wholly incongruous with the reality of previous trade agreements is no easy task. As spokesman for Free Trade, Obama’s aim was to create a mood conducive not only to marketing Nike to American workers whose jobs had been outsourced to Vietnam, but to make Vietnam’s slave wage, anti-union sweatshops invisible (or palatable) to American workers. But that’s just the job for which the pseudo-aesthetic is ideally outfitted. The creation of patriotic experience—however attenuated—is not for use only in the circulatory system of capital. It also provides an effective instrument for the nation state in its important work of appearing to be the nation state, and thereby elide its role as advertising venue, branding tool, labor pool, and trade negotiator for multinationals. This point could not be made clearer than in Arno Maierbrugger’s, assessment of the actual goals of TPP in Gulf Times: The goals of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) . . . are increasingly becoming clearer after ongoing talks reveal some of the intentions Washington is pursuing with this pact. One policy of the TPP could directly affect oil and gas trade of the Middle East with East Asian countries, which are currently heavily dependent on hydrocarbon imports especially from the Gulf . . . US President Barack Obama could push through oil and natural gas export contingents to potential TPP member states (probably also including China), thus disrupting the petroleum flow from the likes of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and Iran . . . With oil extraction from shale rock formation in the US soaring due to new sophisticated technologies, the US this year overtook Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest oil producer. It has been the world’s biggest natural gas producer since 2010 . . . but did not sell much of it abroad . . . the US is now increasingly seeking to export hydrocarbons worldwide as it is playing the cards against established oil and gas producing nations.32

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This far less glib account, aimed not at Regular Joe or Josie, but at a very different audience of international investors, seems to offer some solace to those who insist that the nation state as the nation state still has some important “cards” to play in the global politics of energy production—that geography still matters. Unfortunately or not, this isn’t the whole truth. Did actual turf matter as sacrosanct to a country, the product of domestic drilling, for example, would be directed to domestic markets. Did we take property rights seriously as essential to the exercise of other rights, we’d not see the abuse of eminent domain laws whose original intent is to make possible public goods like roads and bridges—utilized by private companies to construct natural gas pipelines whose destinations are LNG export depots. Indeed, were independence the real goal, the environment itself would take first billing. Just as holds true for the uses of “enhanced interrogation” or torture, a country weakened by the destruction of its “turf”—moral or ecological—is a country made only more vulnerable to terrorism, not less. Insofar, then, as geography takes a clear back seat to the exigencies of profit, it puts an almost laughable lie to the patriotic slogan “energy independence.” Maierbrugger’s assessment thus illustrates a contradiction at the core of Obama’s promotion of TPP: the rhetoric of “energy independence” serves to conceal the fact that among the primary objectives of the trade pact is to position the United States as a major exporter of oil and natural gas—or rather to so position U.S. companies like Chesapeake, Exco, Anadarko, Marathon, ExxonMobil, and Chevron. And yet that “energy independence” is no more about energy independence than Nikes are made in Oregon is still not the whole story. That story—the one that makes corporate shills of presidents— must include what “energy independence” is about. As I argued in Chapter 4, central to Free Trade as an all-encompassing worldview is that the nation state must appear sovereign. Or, rather “sovereign.” A brand for competing multinationals, its salesarsenal stocked with a patriot-selection of pseudo-aesthetic memes like “energy independence,” or “keeping the promise,” “sovereignty” includes a sporty assortment of team spirit and perseverance analogies as well as a “fear-mongering” variety of racist epithets and religious bigotries. When the United States plays its global-trade pact cards, it does so not for the sake of equal playing fields, living wages, democracy, or the environment, but for the sake of U.S. beneficiaries of deals like NAFTA—and now TPP. Things like sneakers and solar panels, Frankenseeds and Fiji Water are, however, really just metaphors—placeholders—for the common lifeblood without which there’d be no Free Trade, namely hydrocarbons. For all the hoopla about “sustainability,” what every one of these companies knows is that there is no substitute that can accommodate growth at the massive scale envisioned by the architects of Free Trade. Ever greater pressure to utilize the power of the

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“sovereign” to extort consent in the interest of cashing out the last barrel of oil against the tipping point of climate change will mean ever more menacing appeals to nationalism, racism, and religious bigotry to “justify” that power.

REFORM ENVIRONMENTALISM AS A “NEW” METASTASIS OF CAPITAL: 350.ORG, THE SIERRA CLUB, AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND The Pseudo-Aesthetic of 350.org and the Sierra Club When we imagine protesters decrying Obama’s support of the Transpacific Partnership outside Nike Headquarters in Oregon, we think of young folks bucking a system they’ve figured out is corrupt and older people fed up with a system responsible for shipping their jobs overseas. They see their communities deteriorating and the opportunities for their children dwindling. They suspect the rules are rigged against them and they’re right; they are. As we’ll see shortly via the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF),33 a good case can be made that the “system” isn’t just broken—thus fixable—but constitutively fraudulent in the sense while it appears to empower citizens, it in fact privileges property; while it appears to recognize the rights of at least human individuals and communities, it works to the consistent advantage of capital. The evidence for this argument is compelling, though I think we can and must go much further. Indeed, however well-intended, organizations whose aims are to limit the power of corporations through constitutional reform like CELDF and Move to Amend,34 but whose focus remains the geographically bounded community (county, state, or nation), fail to comprehend the essentially global nature of multinational capitalism, and therefore are able to offer little more than temporary respite against the prevailing winds of the geopolitical catastrophe heralded by climate change. This is true for at least four intimately connected reasons: • First, insofar as the logic of capital remains operative, corporations will seek out avenues for regaining power. To whatever extent, in other words, that “we, the people” remain “we, the consumers,” exchange value will continue to dominate our relationships; capital will remain hegemonic. • Second, an amendment to the constitution of one nation state limiting the power of corporations can have relatively little positive geopolitical effect against multinational corporations not obligated to restrain their business activities to that country. No such amendment to the U.S. Constitution will, for example, have any substantive effect in preventing lawsuits on behalf

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of corporations operating under free trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. A revolution to empower “we, the people” must therefore encompass the globe, not merely the antiquated geographically defined nation state. • Third, insofar as conquest capitalism takes advantage of whatever relationships are available to it to supply resources to its circulatory system, any quest to empower “we, the people” must begin in the radical interrogation of human chauvinism. Where “we, the people” operates consistently to the advantage of racist, heteropatriarchal, and speciesist relationships that favor mostly white, Western(ized) men, not only are essentially unjust institutions like the commodification of sexuality and slavery likely to be maintained, but so too the economic status of their beneficiaries, and therefore the system itself. • Fourth, amendments to constitutions to empower “we, the people” aren’t strategies for mitigating the effects of climate change. Indeed, precisely the opposite is as likely to transpire. Insofar as Regular Joe and Josie remain uneducated about the effects of global warming, susceptible to denial, and bound to valuing their identities in terms of property, they could become members of CELDF or Move to Amend, and undertake no other change in their patterns of consumption. If, in other words, Regular Joe and Josie don’t undertake a radical transformation in what they value, it doesn’t really matter what their constitution valorizes. Climate change no more respects boundaries of geopolitical institution than it does shorelines or border walls. In short, if you keep capitalism in the mix, it’s going to metastasize. Perhaps the best evidence for this is conquest capital’s penetration of organizations that profess not only democratic decision-making structures, but commitment to social justice and environmental integrity. It would seem, in other words, that were we to look for models of the kinds of communities organizations like CELDF and Move to Amend would promote as consistent with their vision of “we, the people,” it would be, for example, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), of 350.org, each of which have substantial memberships and who claim to be on the side of communities and the environment. But, as we’ve seen, this is not the case. Indeed, far too often the environmental, animal welfare, and human rights commitments of folks like Resistance Josie are squandered, exploited, or even demonized as “radical” by the very organizations that purport to share their values—organizations who promise to buck the system, defend the planet, and seek justice for its most vulnerable inhabitants. My aim here is to return to that critique one more time to show how the Big Greens not only model the profit-driven

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behaviors of corporations, but do so in ways that expose a level of cognitive dissonance and denial enviable even to the most mercenary corporate CEO. The Big Greens epitomize the culture industry’s capacity not only to make everything into a commodity—including empathy and genuine commitment—but how the denial central to the logic of capital can corrupt moral and aesthetic valuation. The Big Greens, in other words, make the case not merely, as Naomi Klein puts it, that we have a “capitalist problem,” but for why no desirable future is consistent with any form of capitalism. Appealing to Klein’s This Changes Everything, I argued in Chapter 3 that whatever their original intentions, many (if not all) of the Big Green environmentals operate as ventures whose central priority is their own survival and growth—not the environment or nonhuman animals—not the protesters. Big Greens like the Sierra Club are, in effect, the small businesses who, like Nike, may have begun in a basement (or in the High Sierras), but whose growth owes as much to the logic of capital as does any multinational corporation. When the Audubon Society accepts over $2 million from Monsanto, the Sierra Club secretly cashes a check for $26 million from Chesapeake Energy,35 and eco-hero Bill McKibbon of 350.org insists that we shouldn’t make animal agriculture the focus of environmental activism because meat-eating is newly popular in the developing world,36 it’s clear that Big Green doesn’t necessarily refer to the environment. Even, as McKibbon would doubtless insist, 350.org doesn’t take money directly from the fossil fuel industry or animal agriculture (the group doesn’t disclose its donors,)37 the logic of capital still dictates the “impotence” of activists to confront the factory farms.38 If it’s between keeping donors and the lethal combination of factory farm methane emissions (37 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, 20 times the CO2 potency) and nonhuman animal suffering, the donors always win.39 In his interview with Cowspiracy40 filmmakers Keegan Kuhn and Kip Anderson, Chris Hedges asks why the Big Greens meticulously avoid animal agriculture even though their raison d’être is the reduction of greenhouse gases. The answer is telling: “So many more people have a connection to animal agriculture, both in society and government, than have a direct connection to the oil industry,” Kuhn said. “The oil industry employs, relatively speaking, a very small percentage of people and is controlled by a very small percentage of people. The agricultural industry, both animal agriculture and commodity grains fed to those animals, involves a much bigger demographic. Politically it is a lot more challenging. Corporations such as Cargill, one the largest commodity food corporations in the world, is able to create U.S. policy. The government says it needs to have affordable food, which means giving massive subsidies to these corporations. The belief is that we have to eat animal products to survive. It is not something that is even questioned.

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The fossil fuel industry is more easily challenged with the argument that there are alternatives. People do not feel there is an alternative to eating animals.”41 The Big Greens don’t avoid taking on animal agriculture because they aren’t aware that the industry is a major contributor to greenhouse gases; it’s not because Cargill secretly shunts money to their coffers. It’s because the appearance of the organization is at risk of losing its donor base if it looks like they’re going after food. However erroneous is the claim that there are no alternatives to consuming animal bodies, Big Greens like 350.org can’t afford potential damage to its image—its façade of warriors combating climate change. They can’t afford the distraction, and it is a façade. Bill McKibbon can’t not know that we could convert every automobile and airplane to electric, solar panel every roof top, shutter every coal-fired power plant, shut down every frack pad, tar sands, or petroleum mining operations—but if we don’t stop consuming animal bodies, climate change will proceed unabated. Hence the Big Greens have crafted an effective non-aggression pact with multinationals like Cargill in the interest of their mutual survival and their growthmania—at the direct expense of the planet. This pact, moreover, is rightly characterized as pseudo-aesthetic not simply because it regulates 350. org’s messaging, but because it permits the organization to craft that messaging in whatever fashion will attract supporters and donors so long as the omission of animal agriculture remains one of its architectural features; that is, so long as sentient creatures capable of suffering and fear get to remain “food.” There thus exist three flavors of Big Green environmental—all of which live and thrive because they play, each in their own way, according to the logic of capital, even when it means misrepresenting and thus compromising their mission to combat climate change—even when it means contributing to climate change. Each, in effect, exchanges that mission for the carefully crafted appearance, the aesthetics, that will insure their survival. And that means that high cost in terms of distorted substance is a price worth paying. What the Big Greens know as well as any corporate CEO is that issues like climate change are products that must be packaged and sold to generate the highest possible volume of revenue/donations/membership—especially in a United States dominated by climate change denial. Each must thus assign premium value to making sure that this appearance is effective not only with respect to what an organization wants their members to see—but what they don’t want them to see. What distinguishes each is not so much the extent to which Big Green leaders are willing to compromise the moral integrity of their organizations to keep their donors and legions of activists; this is a dilemma, and few can escape it. Rather it’s the pseudo-aesthetic packaging they develop to sell prospective members on the claim that they’re climate change fighters. Make no mistake: however frequently the Big Greens refer to their work as “educational,” their

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strategies reasoned argument, they know as well as BP after Hurricane Katrina that getting folks to “buy climate change” is more about making activism cool than it’s about 500 PPB to the tipping point. First, then, there’s organizations like 350.org who tacitly agree to non-aggression pacts with companies like Cargill for the sake of retaining the support of a public that’s not about to give up their bacon burgers—but might be persuaded to solar panels. Theirs’ is an “aesthetic” of omission: represent fossil fuels as the enemy of the planet in a fashion that’s so convincing folks won’t look anywhere else. Do it with images of the “shiny blue marble” planet, catchy phrases like “We’re building a global climate movement!” and “Break free from Fossil Fuels!” Sell cool T-shirts and bumper-stickers, and other more disturbing images, say, charts depicting methane emissions, or snapshots of piles of slaughtered male baby chicks, just won’t occur to us. 350.org boasts 35,000 members, and even after public criticism in the documentary Cowspiracy makes no mention of animal agriculture on their website page devoted to the science of climate change.42 They don’t have to; they’re growing. As Climate Change News reporter Alan Lockwood remarks, even Naomi Klein, who sits on the 350.org board of directors, suffers a kind of “moral schizophrenia” concerning animal agriculture’s greenhouse gas footprint, a “lacuna,” as he puts it, “at the heart of This Changes Everything.”43 Yet, Klein remains as popular as ever, her book a best seller. Here’s why: very much like President Obama who, appealing to the patriotic lexicon of Free Trade, avoids having to confront the facts of global labor abuse, Klein appeals to the language of “love will save this place” and “you and what army” to craft an inspiring narrative of the resilience and commitment of activists engaged in protest against the fossil fuel behemoths. And like Obama, Klein avoids taking on industries that her readers, and many of these same activists, regard as sacrosanct by providing an alternative experience of “activism” that feels meaningful and cool however factually misguided concerning the major causes of climate change. Whether what’s avoided is sneakers or burgers, Nike or McDonald’s is irrelevant. The experience is manipulated to feel good and extorted to insure adherence to “the cause.” In short, what the logic of capital requires is that its pathological superimposition of “reality” be respected, that even apparent disruptions to its circulation of commodities pose no real danger to it. And that’s exactly what capital gets every time a protest action ends at a local burger haunt. The pseudo-aesthetic isn’t just for protecting disingenuous representations of fact, it replicates the “world” authorized by the very global North beneficiaries the Big Greens pretend to eschew. That not only aligns them with their corporate analogues—it aligns them with the logic of capital. Second, there’s organizations like the Sierra Club that, reaching well beyond the pseudo-aesthetics of omission, accepted millions from Chesapeake

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in a deal to advance their mutual interest in moving “Beyond Coal,” in the gas company’s case to one of the most environmentally destructive drilling technologies ever devised—slickwater high-volume hydrofracking; in the Sierra Club’s to finance slick, high-volume club advertising and membership drives.44 The Sierra Club got caught, and for a bit faced some “gas cash fallout.”45 What’s astounding, however, is that the club not only survived the ruckus, but actually grew its membership to 555,000 advertising itself as a warrior in the battle to defeat global warming,46 garnering donations despite its unspoken policy of quashing dissent.47 How does an organization that dances with the devil, betraying the trust of its activist members, manage to grow its ranks? By hitching its wagon to President Obama’s Climate Action Plan,48 or more generally, by identifying itself with the powerful machinery of the nation state to effect the “good.” Just as President Obama strategically avoids reference to the wage slavery of Nike’s Vietnamese workers, displacing it with the sparkly rhetoric of Free Trade and fair playing fields, so too the Sierra Club evades its own complicity in the planet’s deterioration by displacing it with praise for Obama’s apparent commitment to mitigating global warming. Both, however, ignore entirely the contribution of animal agriculture to rising temperatures and both ignore the fact that the main product of natural gas production, methane, is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. President Obama cheerleads for natural gas as “clean-burning,” and Sierra Club director, Michael Brune, utilizes the same pseudo-aesthetic lexicon to evade the club’s hypocrisy with respect to its public opposition to the oil and gas industry—all the while applauding a president who actively promotes natural gas as a “bridge fuel to a sustainable future.” We rightly call this moral schizophrenia; or more precisely: a reeking blend of flagrant opportunism and mutual parasitism. Indeed, President Obama’s remarks concerning natural gas production bear a strikingly similar resemblance to his defense of TPP at Nike’s Oregon headquarters: The bottom line is natural gas is creating jobs . . . “It’s lowering many families’ heat and power bills. And it’s the transition fuel that can power our economy with less carbon pollution even as our businesses work to develop and then deploy more of the technology required for the even cleaner energy economy of the future.”49

Appealing to the perennial “jobs,” “families,” “our businesses,” and a “cleaner energy economy,” Obama paints a picture that, very much like that of his TPP speech, reaffirms a worldview within which nothing, especially global North lifestyles and consumption, has to change. So too, Brune who, apparently undaunted by the endorsement of the president’s “climate” speech by pro-industry groups like the American Electric Power and the Marcellus Shale Coalition, had this to say:

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This afternoon, I had a short meeting with President Obama that left me more convinced than ever that he’s serious about tackling the climate crisis. Sure enough, later under a sweltering sun at Georgetown University, I watched him calmly and forcefully restate the case for taking action on the climate crisis in one of the most important speeches of his presidency. He also outlined a Climate Action Plan that will help curb carbon pollution, develop clean energy sources, promote energy efficiency, and assert American global leadership on climate issues.50

“Clean energy” is double-speak for “frack gas,” and as 2015’s Paris Climate Conference made clear, “American global leadership” has little to do with signing an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and more to do with the geopolitics of trade, ports, technology access—and power. Such pervasive disingenuousness, however, epitomizes the logic of capital demonstrating the extent to which its superimposition governs what can be said, what must be said, and what must not be said, to preserve its hegemony. Hence, we see ever more of the pseudo-aesthetic narratives making bigger promises of “sustainability” in order to paper over an ever-widening gap between a “reality” becoming less-convincing by the day and the reality of climate change. Like its analogue on an Arctic Tundra no longer able to support its wildlife, the “sea ice” of campaigns like “Beyond Coal” is thinning. The Fraud that Is the Environmental Defense Fund If the second variety of Big Green hypocrisy is more like the typical politician who says one thing and does another, the third is like the Donald Trump who appears to actually believe what he says is true—even if it’s groundless, self-contradictory, and requires a extraordinary level of cognitive dissonance to maintain it. Such are Big Greens like the Environmental Defense Fund— EDF.51 In its enthusiastic pursuit of “partnerships” with multinationals EDF presages Martin Lewis’ Promethean environmentalism, especially its vision of a technologically facilitated sustainability achieved through profit-oriented strategies. Senior Vice President for Strategy and Communications, Eric Pooley defends EDF’s convivial if “controversial” relationships with Walmart, FedEx, DuPont, Massey Energy (mountain top strip-mining), McDonald’s, the Tenaska Coal-fired power plant, the Carlyle Group’s Synagro (sewage sludge), General Electric, and Smithfield Foods (animal agriculture), among others, arguing that EDF “believes in working with all kinds of people,” including corporate persons, “as long as doing so will help protect human health and the natural world.”52 The twenty-five year reign of EDF president Fred Krupp personifies precisely this worldview, and he’s described as “one of the most important power brokers in the environmental arena” by the Stanford Social

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Innovation Review. Indeed, it’s telling that when SSIR writer Eric Nee asked Krupp about the “instrumental role” EDF played in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership—and it’s contentious reception among environmentalists—the latter quotes one of the Big Green’s partners, General Electric (GE) in response: “Give me the rules, and we’ll figure out how to profit from them.”53 And profit the company has—in spades. Inaugurated in Bouchain France in 2016, GE’s natural gas combined cycle turbine power plant boasts ones of the globe’s most efficient gas turbines including a 55 percent reduction in CO2 emissions.54 The company’s high-tech “digital turbine” project promises to insure against any reduction in the power consumption of French citizens, and illustrates, as Pooley puts it, why the “environmental movement needs a bigger tent,” even if it includes some unlikely allies like Big Energy, Big Chemical, Big Agribusiness, Big Animal Agriculture, Big Box, and Big Pharmaceutical. According to EDF, in fact, corporate partnerships are critical to sustainability. Queried on this point, Pooley replies that When a reporter asked the great safecracker Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, Sutton supposedly replied, “because that’s where the money is.” EDF works with multinational corporations because that’s where the pollution is—if you want to drive energy and emissions reductions through supply chains that are bigger than most nations, you need to work with big companies such as Wal-Mart.55

Setting aside a telling analogy that, in comparing money to pollution, likely reveals something true, if unflattering, about the role played by pollution in EDF’s business model, the problems for the EDF/GE alliance as a climate change mitigation strategy are legion. For example, measuring CO2 emissions, but ignoring “fugitive” methane leaks along the length of the supply chain, paints a profoundly distorted picture of natural gas contribution to climate change. As EDF itself reports: While it is true natural gas burns cleaner than other fossil fuels, methane leaking during the production, delivery, and use of natural gas has the potential to undo much of the greenhouse gas benefits we think we’re getting when natural gas is substituted for other fuels. Methane, the primary component of natural gas, is a powerful, short-lived greenhouse gas. It is more than 100 times more potent at trapping energy than carbon dioxide (CO2) . . . When considering its conversion to carbon dioxide over time its impact on an integrated weight basis is 84 times more potent after 20 years and 28 times more potent after 100 years.56

One problem then is that EDF has allied itself with a multinational whose commitment to natural gas production contradicts the Big Green’s own stated position on methane emissions, exposing EDF as at least disingenuous is not simply opportunistic.

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To be fair, EDF could counter that while gambling on mammoth natural gas projects is sticky for an environmental organization, it fails to account for the fact that GE has also made a substantial commitment to develop solar and wind power. To some extent, that’s true; GE does invest in solar panels and wind turbines, for example, the GE Energy Financial Services/USB International Infrastructure Fund 161 megawatt Spinning Spur II wind project in Texas—lauded by EDF as just the sort of partnership that protects human health and the environment.57 Trouble is, however, that GE’s first commitment remains company growth and profitability, and when that means “pulling away from the solar table,” GE can count on EDF to provide greenwash cover.58 Perhaps even here Krupp might respond that in going the distance with companies like GE, EDF stands a greater chance of moving them in the right direction. But this is so unlikely as to raise again the prospect of disingenuousness: insofar as none of these projects include any substantive commitment to conservation, they effectively endorse the myth of endless resources, that is, the central ideological tenet of the fully capitalized planet. Another problem for EDF is that in partnering with some of the planet’s biggest polluters the Big Green makes itself vulnerable to accusations of collusion or even fraud with respect to collaborating on research that could negatively impact the profitability of their partner companies. On this point, the evidence speaks for itself: an EDF study published in 2013/2014 and used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate methane emissions from natural gas extraction operations was shown to have underreported methane leaks. The climate and energy justice organization NCWarn arrived at this conclusion, based on efforts by whistle-blower Touché Howard, an engineer who invented the technology used to measure methane leaks. Howard identified a flaw in the technology that showed Allen’s studies could be underreporting emissions as much as 100-fold. “In the extreme, that kind of failure could lead to catastrophic explosions,” Howard said in an interview.59 Even more disturbing is NCWarn’s June 2016, sixty-eight page complaint, reported by Sharon Kelly of DeSmogBlog laying out evidence that David Allen, a professor of engineering at the University of Texas who served as the chairman of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board from 2012 to 2015, disregarded red flags that his methane measuring equipment malfunctioned when collecting data from fracked well sites, a problem that caused his University of Texas study to lowball leak rates. “We used the terms scientific fraud and cover-up because we believe there’s possible criminal violations involved,” said NCWARN executive director Jim Warren. “The consequence is that for the past 3 years the industry has been arguing, based largely on the 2013 study, that emissions are low enough that we shouldn’t regulate them.” Dr. Allen’s research is a part of a high-profile but controversial research series sponsored

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by the Environmental Defense Fund that received one-third of its funding from the oil and gas industry.60

It’s not surprising that “the study’s findings have been used by the natural gas industry to argue that methane leaks are low,” and thus little regulation needed. The problem is that it’s also not surprising—though it should be— that when skepticism began to be expressed as early as the 2013 release of the first study, EDF spun it as “disagreement” and “progressive politics”: “I’ve been around progressive politics and environmental activists long enough to know,” writes EDF’s Sam Parry, that there are always disagreements—about strategy, about policies, about when and with whom to cut deals, about the best ways or organize and build movements. It’s par for the course . . . [Y]es, we also worked with natural gas companies on this study. And, yes, I understand that for some that fact alone casts a shadow over the results of this scientific study. But there is a very good reason we did so—it was the only way to get access to the wells to collect direct data. Without the participation and cooperation from these companies, getting the data would have been impossible.61

What’s important to see here isn’t about whether the methane emission studies were flawed; they may well have been, or not—but that’s not what mattered to EDF. What did matter to EDF was preserving their reputation against the criticism that their first priority isn’t the environment or communities affected by natural gas drilling but rather maintaining the corporate partnerships that grow EDF. Instead, then, of responding to specific claims about whether or not the methane emissions study was flawed, the Big Green took a paternalistic dismissive tone toward other environmental groups like NCWarn. By casting the evidence against the study as “disagreement” among “progressives,” and implying that EDF’s reputation would insure that their “cooperation” with the gas companies would yield reliable data, Parry glosses over questions about EDF’s role in the methane study—and thus its implicit support of the gas industry. Parry positions EDF as the hero of curbing methane emissions against “progressives” cast as unrealistic, while at the same time implying that we’re all in this together—even if EDF is the environmental group that gets things done. As he spins this truly surreal pseudo-aesthetic narrative: We at EDF realize how sensitive the natural gas issue is for millions of Americans . . . This isn’t some academic exercise for us. Protecting communities and our shared environment is the singular reason EDF has been working so hard to get the rules right on natural gas extraction and to hold the industry

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accountable. . . . that’s why we are engaged in these studies—to build the data and science and to inform the debate and guide policymakers.62

Parry ignores entirely the argument that the only way to get natural gas extraction right is not to do it, substituting any such line of argument with an appeal to incredulity: of course we’re the good guys. It’s Parry’s last line, however, that’s the most telling. In a tone that suggests a bit of “protest too much,” he insists that that telling the truth about methane emissions and protecting communities “is our only motive in this work.” But this seems hollow in face of the fact that the environmental regulations EDF supports—regulations that affect community health and quality of life—are those premised on the faulty data of the EDF methane studies.63 Perhaps it’s merely adding insult to injury that EDF also accepted a grant of six million from Bloomberg Philanthropies to advocate for the regulations.64 Winona Hauter of Food and Water Watch may, however, get closer to the truth: EDF “claim[s] to represent environmentalists while they promote regulation that is so weak even the gas industry can live with it,”65 and it’s, of course, communities who’ll pay the price. Parry’s defense of EDF reads a bit like Donald Trump’s stump speech refrain that he’s going to “make America great—again.” Inspiring, but without substance; patriotic, but whose “beautiful for spacious skies” functions as a cover story for an atmospheric toilet, and whose “amber waves of grain” have already given way to the barren concrete parking lots, well-pads, and waste pits of the natural gas industry. As pathologically disingenuous as is required by the logic of capital wherever the alternative risks profitability, the EDF business model provides lucrative greenwash to multinationals like GE who, by appeal to EDF, advertise themselves as sustainable. What GE buys from EDF is a counterfeit-aesthetic experience radiating in the techno-utopian vocabulary of “efficiencies,” “clean-burning,” “bridge fuels,” and the like, a narrative that papers over the fact that operations at power plants like Bouchain rely for their public support on a distorted picture of their greenhouse gas footprints bolstered, among other things, by the EDF methane study. Given the stakes for its reputation, then, it’s not surprising that EDF’s Eric Pooley would rise to the occasion to defend the organization against Naomi Klein, whom he smugly describes as “high profile enough” that though her “assertions” will “fall apart of [their] own weight,” they can’t be entirely ignored. Pooley then proceeds to ignore the argument from This Changes Everything that lays out the case against the hypocrisy of Big Greens like EDF, dismissing it with a straw appeal to Klein’s distaste for capitalism. “[S]he sees climate action,” writes Pooley, “as a way to reform or replace capitalism itself.” But just as EDF has no environmental interest in the question whether methane leakage from natural gas operations ought to result

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in banning hydrofracking, so too they’ve no moral interest in the question whether capitalism is defensible. Instead Pooley recites the EDF mantra that “[f]inding a solution to climate change will require a broad circle of allies calling for action, and that most certainly must include businesses small and large.” As the beneficiaries of capital, in other words, EDF and its partners have no more interest in rocking their well-armed lifeboat than do their allies in Big Energy. As Mother Jones reporter, Suzanne Goldenberg, puts it, “[t]he very top of ‘Big Green’ is as white and male as a Tea Party meet-up.” Although that’s not entirely true—the EDF “leadership team” does include some women (though no persons of color), it’s “Trump-like” strategies to remain at the top look more like their conservative ally’s than concern for the planet.66 Pooley solicits a counterfeit-aesthetic narrative that converts a reciprocally lucrative relationship of environmental impostors into “climate change allies,” capitalizes on global crisis by calling that relationship “finding a solution,” and dismisses critics by insisting that while they’re busy “waging ideological warfare,” EDF is doing the real work of, for example, passing regulations to protect communities against hydrofracking. To look, then, to organizations like EDF for the desirable future is not merely delusional, but willfully ignorant. The Pseudo-Aesthetic of Selling False Hope: The EDF Polar Bear Bribe Like many of its fellow Big Greens, EDF is complicit in the escalation of greenhouse gas emissions because its partnerships provide a greenwash patina to some of the planet’s biggest polluters. Still, unlike the Sierra Club whose leaders apparently understood their membership would disapprove their deal with Chesapeake well enough to keep it secret, EDF actively pursues relationships with companies whose operations help to accelerate climate change and have long histories of environmental damage. GE, for instance, has spent decades working to avoid the expense of having to “remove massive amounts of toxic chemicals from the Housatonic River, which the company polluted for nearly 50 years,” arguing “[i]n a letter to the US Environmental Protection Agency . . . [that] it should be exempt from [New York] state hazardous waste regulations and other environmental rules.”67 Were we tempted to think, however, that EDF partnerships were confined to the energy sector, we need look no further than EDF Climate Corps Fellowships that “pairs graduate students” with companies like Nestlé,68 whose recent gambit to privatize and corporatize fresh water resources in some of the most water-insecure regions of the developing world is premised on the stated view of its CEO, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe that access to water is neither a public nor a human right.69 A mercenary take on the Anthropocene,

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Nestle seeks to capitalize both on water scarcity hastened by the contribution of climate change to drought, and the increasing demand for animal bodies whose manufacture is water intensive.70 EDF applauds Nestlé’s dedication to what its CEO calls the “mechanized environment,” a techno-utopian vision that, as EDF Managing Director, Victoria Mills puts it, is “elevating energy management to a strategic business priority.” What Mills doesn’t say is that the cost of Nestlé’s priorities to Pakistani villagers forced to buy bottled water from the company responsible for draining their wells is prohibitive as well as life-threatening,71 or that the company’s reputation as “one of the most hated companies in the world” rests on a history child-labor, price-fixing, mislabeling—and the manipulation of uneducated developing world mothers in the interest of selling baby formula.72 Here’s the central point: these stories are legion among the ranks of EDF alliances, and raise the obvious question, “Who won’t this Big Green partner with?” Apparently no multinational is too polluting, callous, mercenary, or too human rights violating to count themselves out. And that raises the million-member question; it’s not “How does EDF manages to achieve so phenomenal a level of self-aggrandizing self-delusion?” It’s “How on earth do they attract members?” What experience can EDF offer them? How is it that folks are bamboozled enough to think the EDF business model is consistent with any version of the desirable future? What makes membership in the Environmental Defense Fund cool besides sexy words like “defense”? The answer to this question comes in several flavors—all of which instantiate the pathologies of capital in perhaps the most disquieting ways we can imagine. First, EDF seeks to instill the illusion that their corporate partnerships aren’t about money, encouraging a confidence-building experience for their donors that EDF is truthful and cares about their communities and their ecologies. Such epitomizes the counterfeit-aesthetic—an experience emotionally extorted to abet EDF’s fundraising objectives: “[b]ecause we accept no funding from our corporate partners, we’re free to set aggressive goals and influence entire industries,” says Tom Murray, vice president of corporate partnerships.73 This is true in the narrow sense that the Big Green doesn’t accept explicit monetary donations from corporations. Nonetheless, their partnerships are clearly intended to green EDF’s bottom line by greenwashing their corporate partner’s images. Fred Krupp insists its partnerships are good for the environment with the same fervor that Donald Trump claims that climate change is a dastardly plot of the Chinese. But the remarkable thing isn’t that both claims are demonstrably false and ethically reprobate; it’s that these facts make no difference to EDF’s capacity to grow membership, sell its image, and generate new partnerships. Consider, for example, Walmart; EDF has accepted $66 million since 2005 from the Walton Family Foundation (Walmart). It actively promotes the

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world’s largest discount retailer as a “sustainability leader.”74 But as the Sierra Club points out, from their “Beyond Oil” campaign (while neither criticizing nor naming EDF), Walmart ranks as one of the biggest and fastest growing climate polluters in the country. If it were included in the Greenhouse 100 Polluters Index, a list that is limited to heavy industrial firms, such as oil companies and power plants, Walmart would take the 33rd spot, just a hair behind Chevron, America’s second largest oil company . . . Since 2005, Walmart’s reported greenhouse gas emissions have risen 14 percent, reaching 21 million metric tons per year, according to data the company has filed with CDP, formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project . . . [T]his figure only accounts for a fraction of the company’s total emissions, as Walmart does not include large segments of its greenhouse gas pollution in these disclosures.75

To put it bluntly, this makes EDF potentially the greatest greenwashing manipulator of environmental sentiment of all time, and one of environmentalism’s most profitable frauds.76 How do they do it? The short answer is “the pseudo-aesthetic of polar bears.” Consider, for example, popular images of polar bears on melting ice sheets EDF uses to market itself as a warrior in the battle against global warming. No environmental organization has likely expropriated the plight of this endangered species in more mercenary fashion (except for possibly the National Wildlife Federation).77 Images of white fluffy-looking bruins grace EDF’s “Triple Your Impact!” 2016 fundraising campaign, water bottles, and their organizational logo. Indeed, you can request a plush polar bear with your donation to EDF to combat climate change—despite the fact that the toys themselves are made out of petrochemicals. “It’s a bit like selling cigarettes to fund the war on cancer,” remarks a writer for the Fur Commission, USA.78 Moreover, the likelihood that the toys are made in Chinese sweatshops, right along with their Disney analogues, is very high.79 But the facts make no difference. EDF chugs along growing their membership, greenwashing their “partners” and the consciences of their donors. Here’s how: polar bears are charismatic megafauna. They’re big snugglylooking huggables—just like their near-extinction Chinese cousins, the Pandas. To experience a polar bear; even to just get to imagine a polar bear; or just to get to make a donation to EDF and hug your stuffed polar bear doll comes with the charisma, charm, and undisputed coolness of polar bears. Though Fred Krupp would not likely appeal to Dewey for inspiration, charismatic megafauna offer the possibility of an awesome pseudo-aesthetic counterfeit of an experience, one that’s as convincing as any Big Green could want or hope—and Krupp knows it. EDF sells polar bears as effectively and profitably as Coke sells soda or Exxon sells gas. The difference is that while

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Coke may be silent about the fact that soda’s bad for you—they can’t deny it; while Exxon works feverishly to cover up the fact that they knew about climate change impacts decades ago—they can’t advertise themselves as anything other than a fossil fuel company.80 But EDF can and does. EDF advertises itself as environmental, a term that, like “sustainability,” has become so completely co-opted by conquest capitalism, so fully integrated into the circulatory system of commodification, its members get to feel nothing but good about joining EDF to fight climate change by buying a stuffed polar bear. That is the culture industry. In “Climate Change, Environmental Aesthetics, and Global Environmental Justice Cultural Studies,” Michael Ziser and Julie Sze offer a particularly astute analysis of why the polar bear works so well as a marketing vehicle: As many have noted, the polar bear photo works in environmental terms because of its associations with past animal-welfare campaigns, particularly the public outcry against the clubbing of fur seals in the Canadian arctic regions and the harpooning of whales in the northern Pacific Ocean and the Arctic Sea. The power of so-called charismatic megafauna as a marketing vehicle has long been exploited (if also bemoaned) by environmental groups: pound for pound, polar bear plush toys are probably as effective at persuading carbon users to change their ways as are copies of the comprehensive report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Indeed, shortly after the polar bear images circulated, nonprofit group Environmental Defense offered a small stuffed bear in return for a monetary donation. Likewise capitalizing on the pathos of the scene, the National Resource Defense Council commissioned a computer-animated fund-raising ad in which a polar bear stands on an iceberg as it crumbles into the international distress call, SOS. And Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth featured a computer-animated polar bear swimming through a vast sea toward a tiny and fragile sliver of melting ice.81

For a committed environmentalist or animal rights proponent, even just imagining the polar bear gliding through a vast sea might be sufficient to generate the conditions for Dewey’s an experience. However, while nothing necessarily precludes that occurrence in a context whose objectives are otherwise, to recognize, as Ziser and Sze argue, that EDF’s chief use of polar bears is as a marketing strategy—at the end of which appears a solicitation for money—certainly detracts from the experience itself. EDF simply counts on it that its members won’t figure this out. But to make sure, they invite members to celebrate “International Polar Bear Day,” plaster pictures of fluffy bruins strategically throughout the EDF website, and hire young hipsters like Dan Upham to write catchy polar bear blogs: Polar bears must have great publicists: Despite being the largest of all bears and the largest predators on land they are overwhelmingly cherished by the public at

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large, Stephen Colbert notwithstanding . . . They’re rugged, beautiful creatures, if not quite so cuddly or cola-loving as depicted in some advertisements. By way of generalization, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) members like most animals but go particularly nuts for polar bears. Hypothesis: People like an underdog, and polar bears in 2014 fit the bill.82

“People like an underdog, and polar bears in 2014 fit the bill.” These “rugged beautiful creatures,” in other words, sell EDF to its membership. They “fit the bill” because their vulnerability to extinction can be exploited to commodify them as an effective tool for generating not only donations and membership, but the cover narrative without which EDF risks exposure as the mercenary accomplice to polluting multinationals that it is. While the lives of polar bears, in other words, are very real and their species critically endangered, the “life” of “polar bears” is that of just another endless resource for a “world” as rich in experiential satisfaction as it’s fickle with respect to what counts as the next cool thing—that is, a world as capable of getting over the extinction of real polar bears as easily as it got through Y2K or waiting for the next I-Phone—a bit of angst followed by adaptation. Once we no longer expect to experience any substantive satisfaction, say in knowing that we’ve actually acted to preserve the conditions of polar bear survival, we move on. Indeed, we move on as swiftly as hitting send on a donation button, or signing a petition, or writing a check. That’s “activism” in the “world” of EDF; we’re not expected to save anything, just to pretend long enough to do what’s easy. And it’s for precisely these reasons that, for all its faux hand-wringing, EDF will neither have any effect “saving” polar bears from extinction, nor do we expect it to. After all, polar bears don’t exist for EDF; its sustainability requires nothing more than “polar bears” and “activists.” From Endangered Species to Manufactured Animal Bodies The only tangible significance for Big Greens like the Environmental Defense Fund of designations like “endangered” is that the emotional charge they solicit can be put to work as a highly effective marketing device. That’s no small thing; but it’s also no more than the value of any commodity—until it falls out of favor or isn’t perceived as cool anymore. While it might then appear to be rank hypocrisy that EDF simultaneously “defends” polar bears all the while advocating for factory farms, such judgment fails to comprehend the real perversity of EDF’s place in the superimposed “world” of capital. Appealing to the unquestioned mantra of “food security” in an essay titled “How Animal Agriculture Can Help Meet the Paris Climate Agreement Goals,” EDF’s Suzy Friedman applauds Smithfield Foods, parent company to

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Tyson, Pilgrim’s Pride, and Smithfield’s Chicken-n-Bar-B-Q, for their commitment to SUSTAIN, a program to make animal grain-feed programs more “sustainable.” She writes that: no matter our food preferences, the reality is that beef and poultry consumption are growing 1.3 and 1.2 percent each year, respectively. As incomes rise and urbanization increases, diets are shifting to more consumption of meat, poultry and dairy, not less. While the carbon intensity of livestock production has been decreasing over the last several decades, the absolute emissions are increasing. The bottom line is that we need to make animal agriculture much more sustainable than it is now, and to do so at a very large scale.83

To be very clear, SUSTAIN is a program focused not on animal agriculture per se, but on the massive scale grain and feed production necessary to support it. The program promises growers will benefit “from practices and technologies that improve efficiency, protect soil health, save money, and maintain high yields,” and that this, in turn, will increase the “market appeal” of their products, improve their reputation for responsible land management, and offer opportunities to “participate in the carbon credit market.”84 SUSTAIN, in other words, sounds sustainable. The problem is that however we understand the many purposes of high-yield grain production, EDF’s applause is for the contribution of SUSTAIN to animal agriculture. In other words, just as EDF recognizes no argument for leaving natural gas deposits in the ground, it also recognizes no other diet besides the one for EDF is to craft a narrative invulnerable to the criticism that their support of animal agriculture contains unexamined assumptions that, once made explicit, threaten to discredit the practices their narrative supports. EDF cannot risk, in other words, disclosure of the possibility that such practices are either unsustainable or ethically suspect on some other grounds. SUSTAIN fulfills just that mission; it greens industrial-scale grain production, and it actively endorses in its own rhetoric the presupposition that pigs, cows, and chickens exist to be food. SUSTAIN is essential to the EDF narrative because it helps to guarantee that animal agriculture won’t be threatened by the call to act aggressively to mitigate climate change. In so doing it simply bypasses questions about animal cruelty, and thus legitimates EDF’s partnership with Smithfield Foods. EDF’s appeal to SUSTAIN provides a counterfeit-aesthetic experience for consuming animal bodies: by feeling good about “sustainable animal agriculture,” we can enjoy steaks and pork chops; if we can manufacture them without doing harm to the planet, we can continue to see nonhuman animals as “food preferences,” as opposed to sentient creatures. Another incarnation of the myth of endless resources, Friedman’s argument is that we can have our burgers and eat them too, indefinitely. Commodified

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as “food” for human consumers, manufactured animals are objectified as “beef,” “livestock,” “dairy,” “poultry,” as “food preference.” Their status as living entities capable of experiencing pain is buried in euphemism. But it’s at just this juncture that the moral schizophrenia constitutive to EDF reaches its zenith: at the very same time the Big Green exploits the cuddly cool vulnerability of polar bears to generate membership—at the same time it anthropomorphizes one species of animal to market itself—EDF treats cows, chickens, and pigs fated to short miserable lives on factory farms as merely a problem of “carbon intensity,” welcoming Smithfield into the “big tent” of EDF partnership. The appeal to food security, moreover, is especially perverse in light of the fact, as Friedman points out, that The livestock, dairy, poultry, and pork sectors consume 40 percent of U.S. corn, which has significant environmental impacts because grain production relies heavily on fertilizer. But, in a given year only 40 percent of nutrients applied are taken up by crops. The unused fertilizer is at significant risk of being lost as nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more powerful than CO2, or as nitrates that can pollute drinking water or create toxic algal blooms.85

What Friedman makes clear, however unwittingly, is that animal agriculture is not about food security. If that were the case 40 percent of U.S. corn wouldn’t be going to feed “livestock,” and SUSTAIN would not be the province of Smithfield Foods. It is, to be sure, about food—the food preferences of EDF members and partners. It’s also not about greenhouse gas emissions. If that were the case, nitrous oxide emissions would become a major focus of Big Green environmentalism—and it hardly appears on the radar. EDF’s partnership with Smithfield Foods, “the world’s largest pork producer,” illustrates a truly breathless level of self-delusion requiring an equally all-encompassing narrative to conceal its contribution to the fully capitalized planet and the climate apocalypse of which it’s a fully enfranchised participant. EDF puts lipstick on a pig—literally; Smithfield is the GE of animal agriculture, SUSTAIN its “sustainability” cover story.86 Not only does the company’s operations in North Carolina alone include at least 2000 Concentrated Animal Feed Operations, each with a waste lake the size of four football fields,87 Smithfield slaughters thirty million pigs a year. In an award-winning documentary, the U.S. Humane Society exposes, for example, the “extraordinary cruelty” endured by female sows subjected to gestation crates.88 But let’s be very clear: polar bears are not any the less objectified by EDF than are the pigs, cows, or chickens of the Big Green’s partnerships. Both are simply part and parcel of a pathology that infects “environmentalism” as pervasively as it infects notions like “development” and “free trade,” namely a logic whereby everything—including the lives of creatures produced for no other purpose than consumption—are potential commodities, and where every decision,

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strategy, and policy reflects the prerogatives of those who benefit most from the maintenance of this especially callous form of human chauvinism. Although neither Smithfield Foods nor EDF are his specific targets, the moral schizophrenia that distills and naturalizes their partnership is beautifully captured by the performance artist, Banksy, in a piece called The Sirens of the Lambs.89 In this piece, a “farm fresh meat” truck chugs up and down city streets. It’s filled with cuddly stuffed animatronic lambs, pigs, chickens, and cows—baa-ing, moo-ing, and cheeping from between jagged cargo slats. The truck pauses in front of a butcher shop. Adorable pink and yellow, spotted and snuggly critters peer out at us—seeming to call to us for help, creating an experience at one jarring and perplexing. Onlookers look confused; children cry. The meat-shop workers gaze out a window hung with leg-oflamb. “Sirens” repudiates wholesale the idea that some animals are worth saving while others exist to be food, that polar bears can be our spirit animals, but pigs are just bacon. It offers us an opportunity to see through the moral bankruptcy of human chauvinism. Banksy’s incarnation of the aesthetic in experience is neither comfortable nor cheery; it’s not pretty. It’s an experience pierced with anxiety and embarrassment. It invites what Big Greens like EDF and their armed lifeboat analogues cannot brook: the capacity to see beyond their own narrow self-interest. We know instantly and viscerally what Banksy is saying. We know that the hypocrisy of “Sirens of the Lambs” is ours, that no truly desirable world can be hung with leg-of lamb or roasted with pork loins—not and escape being broiled by climate change or, worse—failing the most fundamental principle of the desirable world: erring on the side of caution when and wherever living things are at stake. The entire civilizational pathology that is conquest capital is that truck, its living prisoners, and our passive witness.

THE COMMUNITIES OF THE FUTURE AND THE FUTURE OF COMMUNITIES: NO SOCIAL JUSTICE = NO ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE Bird’s Eye View of an Ethos for the Desirable Future Among my key objectives has been to foreclose on every possible iteration of capitalism as inconsistent with the desirable future, especially with respect to what I’ve argued forms a vital element of that future, namely the aesthetic in experience. No foray into reform will be sufficient, and no worldview which takes for granted a planet of endless resources can adequately protect the biotic diversity and ecological stability necessary to ground the kind of experiential satisfaction which informs the desirable world’s moral paradigm: err

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on the side of caution in the interest of preserving opportunities for aesthetic experience for whomever this is possible; all other morally defensible principle and criteria follow from this. As I have stressed, the desirable is neither easy nor won without sacrifice, but as opposed to the merely sustainable, it offers a world whose rich ecological diversity provides equally rich substance to the responsibility that defines human-centeredness, rejecting every axis of human chauvinism as incongruous with its guiding ethos. Such a future world is thus not only inconsistent with every variety of capitalism but also with at least the current incarnation of that community called the nation state insofar as the latter functions as an instrument of corporatist hegemony. To whatever extent, moreover, corporatist hegemony depends on the geographical borders that help to support human chauvinism, a future no longer beholden to the latter has only modest and negotiable need for the former. Basic goods intellectual, literary, scientific, medical, artistic, and athletic have no borders in the desirable future, at least no more so than ingenuity and imagination dictate. While technology is neither deified nor demonized, its invention is tethered explicitly to achieving these basic goods, and undertaken in a fashion that knowingly violates neither human rights nor the rights of nonhuman animals to live out natural lives under conditions unmolested by human chauvinism. Such a future is not immune to wrenching issues concerning, for example, the treatment of pathogens, the occurrence of cancers, the prevention of violence, the resurgence of bigotry, the reigniting of territorial disputes, and the like. But unlike the present world where such issues must be confronted under the additional burden of climate change and its excess of attendant dilemmas, especially poverty and terrorism, the desirable future can offer the ecological stability and moral ligature that makes solution to these perennial issues tractable, possible, and worth the effort. Ecological integrity is the desirable future’s guiding ethos—its moral compass. But unlike the premium the ecocentrist assigns to environmental preservation over human rights and welfare, the advocate for the desirable future sees that within the aesthetic in experience consists the essential ingredients of a human-centeredness whose identity can no more be divorced from his or her identity as a human being, a member of a human community, a locus of interests, feelings, and the possibility of that deep-going satisfaction described in John Dewey’s an experience, than from respect for biotic diversity and ecological integrity. The desirable future is thus utterly anathema to any version of shallow environmentalism—especially that as devoted to crafting itself in the image of conquest capitalism as are the Big Greens. Whatever their stated commitment to sustainability, Big Green environmental organizations are as beholden to the logic of capital as their supposed nemeses; they’re also as much the beneficiaries of human chauvinism and, in virtue of their capacity to greenwash the public images of fossil fuel corporations, Big Box retailers,

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agribusiness, and factory farms, as culpable for our eco-nihilistic trajectory as is Exxon or Chevron, Walmart, GE, DuPont, or Smithfield Foods. Sadly, the Big Greens are as much the nemesis of the desirable future and its commitment to global social justice as is conquest capitalism. Insofar, moreover, as they make their comfortable beds with the multinationals, they not only fail to offer solace to addressing the issues confronted in any but a dead world, they abet the poverty, terrorism, animal suffering, species loss, and disease vectors for which climate change acts as the most combustible accelerant we have ever known. Indeed, even inspiring proposals like E.O. Wilson’s Half Earth, where the renowned entomologist argues for sequestering large swaths of the planet for preservation and restoration, fail at just that juncture where he invokes the kinds of corporate partnerships reminiscent of Lewis’ techno-utopia or EDF’s business model—and thereby invokes the very market logic responsible for the current clime crisis. A Greenish Appeal to Rights: The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund There remains, however, one other variety of green argument, one less ensnared by the logic of capital—at least on its surface—and more willing to undertake substantive risk to see its way to the sustainable, if not yet the desirable world. There are many shades of this deeper green—ecocentric, anarchist, primitivist, feminist. Each include at least some express recognition of the vital relationship between environmental integrity and social justice, though in what key concepts such as “justice,” “nature,” “community,” or “rights” consist varies widely particularly with respect to what defines an ecosystem or the moral considerability of nonhuman animals. Some, for example, Derrick Jensen’s pop-cultural ecocentrism or its incarnation as “deep green resistance” insist that what’s required to move us to take responsibility for the effects of our actions on the planet and its inhabitants is the wholesale rejection of human-centeredness. Others, like the climate capitalists and techno-utopians argue that we can have our consumption cake and eat it too with the right high-tech. Yet others, like E.O. Wilson, offer us a profoundly moving image of, as he puts it, “the planet’s fight for life,” yet treat capitalism as given and therefore the only model available for determining what ecosystems and species deserve preservation.90 Still others argue that only the radical reform of the concept “community,” one that appeals to notions like “the rights of nature” in its challenge to existing social or legal institutions, a “community” that can mobilize its members to defend those rights, can achieve a society less vulnerable to the exploitation of its resources. Such is the approach of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund—CELDF, whose founder, Thomas Linzey, makes a

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defense of community rights popular across a spectrum of left-leaning environmentalists and right-leaning libertarians on the view that corporations are not people, and that only people—community members—have the right to self-determination: CELDF’s Community Rights work is a paradigm shift, a move away from unsustainable practices that harm communities, and a move towards local selfgovernment. Community Rights include environmental rights, such as the right to clean air, pure water, and healthy soil; worker rights, such as the right to living wages and equal pay for equal work; rights of nature, such as the right of ecosystems to flourish and evolve; and democratic rights, such as the right of local community self-government, and the right to free and fair elections. We work with communities that are unwilling to be oppressed by an unjust structure of law that is created by, and favors, the largest economic powers. Together, we are creating a new movement—one that recognizes, secures, and protects the rights of all those living within a community.91

On the one hand, few would oppose the idea that some notion of “community” must be included in any credible view of the future; what constitutes it, what defines its borders geographical, cultural, and/or virtual, and in what its membership consists are essential to achieving even survivable future conditions. On the other, developing criteria for any of these turns out to be very difficult. What if, for example, the “local self-government” wants to engage in activities that are unsustainable? What if the activities of one community pose a genuine danger to another downstream? What if the ecosystem that CELDF claims has the right to “flourish and evolve” includes an invasive species that endangers indigenous species of plant or animal? What counts as “living within a community”? These are not trivial questions, especially in light of the fact that some issues—climate change, terrorism, communicable disease—are not only trans-communal, but are not likely to be solved (or necessarily understood) at the level of local government. Fact is, however obvious it seems that “community” ought to count as a central locus of value, what the CELDF approach shows is precisely in what the limits of this concept consist—at least as a model for the desirable future. To be clear, this is not to say that there’s no place for communities in the desirable future; it’s to say that although the CELDF model looks like a radical re-conceptualization of this important idea, it’s actually as vulnerable to reproducing the structural inequalities and systemic oppression characteristic of the axes of human chauvinism as are its nemeses in corporations and government. To see why this is the case, let’s briefly examine CELDF’s governing arguments. A comparatively small but growing organization, CELDF offers a

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compelling critique of foundational U.S. documents, including the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The aim is to spell out the extent to which the property rights of corporate “persons” are systemically privileged at the expense of the rights of persons and/or communities throughout American history.92 Linzey argues that as long as property remains foundational to the formulation and execution of legal statute, communities will remain disenfranchised, their basic right to self-determination preemptively cauterized, their capacity to act “in the name of sustainability” abridged.93 Linzey’s critique is both persuasive and perplexing; persuasive because he shows that, however controversial, Citizens United is merely the latest U.S. Supreme Court decision that favors property rights over civil rights.94 But it’s also perplexing in that Linzey doesn’t take the obvious next step toward an analysis of capitalism or the axes of human chauvinism upon which its criteria of exploitation and commodification depend. This latter, as we’ll see, proves not only to be an Achille’s heal for CELDF, but offers instructive insight toward articulating why a future truly desirable, and not merely sustainable, can sacrifice neither environmental integrity nor social justice. The Daniel Pennock Democracy School, CELDF’s “flagship education program,” offers community members opportunity to examine a rich set of historical documents which establish the laws routinely utilized by corporations to, for example, gain access to land, subsurface resources such as hydrocarbons, and water, often at the cost of environmental damage, community self-determination, and community member health.95 Its mission, however, is not simply education, but rather form a “key piece of our community organizing”: Democracy School explores the limits of conventional regulatory organizing and offers a new organizing model that helps citizens confront the usurpation by corporations of the rights of communities, people, and earth. Lectures cover the history of people’s movements and corporate power, and the dramatic organizing over the last decade . . . by communities confronting agribusiness, the oil and gas industry, corporate hegemony over worker rights, and others.96

The trouble, however, is that while Democracy School may equip its students with a deeper understanding of their disempowered status under hegemonic federal and state statutes, this doesn’t necessarily imply that communities are thereby better-equipped to win lawsuits against corporate incursion. It’s one thing, in other words, to know you have cancer, but it’s another altogether to be able to combat the proliferation of its deadly cells. It’s also one thing to become an oncologist because you want to make people well; it’s another to provide tutoring as to the nature of the patient’s disease, but then encourage a course of action that will not likely benefit

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them—and may in fact induce harm—toward ends laudable in themselves (like the cure for cancer), but improbable. It’s also no better part of valor for such an oncologist to protest that the patient was duly warned that the course of treatment is unlikely to pan out. A patient in dire need of a remedy, any remedy, will embrace the thinnest of reeds. Yet such is the story of CELDF. While Linzey represents the metastasis that is corporate incursion accurately, the treatment CELDF recommends—community ordinances codifying the right to self-determination—are as destined to fail as the oncologist who prescribes aspirin to treat cancerous tumors, knowing it will have little positive effect. No principled oncologist would pursue such a course, and we’d rightly call it malpractice if she did. Indeed, we’d think it either crazy or wonder if there were other motives at work, say forcing the patient to some more risky treatment—perhaps one promoted as “revolutionary.” But while this latter may ultimately result in a cure for cancer, none would take the sacrifice of the patient to this end as morally defensible, and few would likely believe that, given the fear and anxiety accruing to the patient’s situation, it could be fair or just to ask them to pin their hopes on aspirin, wait for the cancer to spread, and then join other dying patients in a quest for a “revolutionary” treatment that will cure them all. Yet, swapping “patient” for “community” and “treatment” for “Constitution,” that’s CELDF. Here’s why: in most states, the legal odds are so stacked against communities that efforts to codify self-determination qua community rights ordinances trigger a virtually autonomic response in the form of corporate lawsuit. Corporations sue on the grounds that resistance to the unwanted industrial activity constitutes discrimination against the corporation in their pursuit as persons of the same economic objectives as those pursued by private persons. Incurring lawsuit, however, is precisely the point for CELDF. The threat of lawsuit provides the Defense Fund precisely the crucial leverage it needs to persuade communities to the argument that what they must do is ban together to force a Constitutional Convention to redraft the country’s governing documents to reflect the value of people over property. However we assess the laudability of these ends, CELDF’s strategy is effective specifically because such lawsuits generally succeed: community rights ordinances are preempted by state and federal statute. Hence, they’re unenforceable wherever there occurs conflict. Because the state, in other words, can be counted on to intercede on behalf of corporate personhood, communities stand at a profound disadvantage in the attempt to enforce any ordinance that would interrupt corporate plans. Community members can, of course, resort to acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, but there’s no guarantee this strategy will result in anything more than arrest, and it can offer no assurance that the community won’t still face both corporate lawsuit and the harm the industrial activity would likely cause. The prospect, moreover, is palpable that, bankrupted by lawsuits for which

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corporations are far better-prepared, “harm” may mean enduring economic hardship especially for the rural communities corporations typically seek out to build waste incinerators, deep-injection wells for toxic gas-drilling waste, and animal agriculture operations. To return to the cancer metaphor: imagine an oncologist who informs you you’re about to be stricken by a potentially fatal cancer, offers you aspirin, tells you that likely won’t cure it, and that although you’ll probably die from the illness, you should draw comfort from the fact that your case will be taken up, added to a compendium of like cases, and that—eventually—this will lead to the recognition across all of medicine that aspirin does not cure cancer—that a whole new treatment program must be devised. Do you feel better? CELDF thinks you should. “Community” as the New Commodity: CELDF and Human Chauvinism What’s absolutely crucial to realize here is that the scenario where the community loses to the corporation, endures the loss of its assets, its bank account, the future commitments of its children, and its morale is the bestcase scenario for CELDF’s long-game objectives. It’s the scenario that imagines a community unified concerning the value of its own continuing existence, committed to the health of at least its human members, and sufficiently dedicated to environmental integrity that, upon losing, its members will be ready to cast their lot with others in the more revolutionary struggle to alter at least the United State’s Constitution to prioritize the value of persons over property. But while it’s certainly possible that some communities will embody these values, there’s no guarantee. Indeed, we don’t have to look very far to see that even in rural communities where folks live closer to the land, this is often just not the case. Consider, for example, Dimock Pennsylvania, the home of documentary filmmaker Josh Fox’ Gasland.97 As reported by Pennsylvania State Impact’s Susan Phillips, 2012, Dimock is in the news because of claims that gas drilling has contaminated residential drinking water wells. Some in the town are furious and are suing the drilling company, Cabot Oil and Gas. Others are angry that the publicity has the potential of driving down home values, and insist the water damage is overblown and limited to a few households.98

Or, consider a Cumberland County, Pennsylvania proposal for a 2400 head additional “hog barn” on a factory farm already under fire for the smell. “The current facility,” argues one neighbor, “smells and it smells bad, so if the new facility is going to employ the same technology, then we’re going to have some problems.” Another insists: “Do you want to grow pigs, trash, warehouses, factories,

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or you want to go to a complete residential neighborhood?” . . . “Agriculture is changing just like everything else and agriculture will go forward.”99 Such cases are, of course, not unique to Pennsylvania. Where community opinion is divided, there exist underlying tensions, where there’s a substantial gap between its wealthy and its poor, where it includes a mix of urban, suburban, and/or rural, where there’s a history of racial or religious bigotry—all potential weapons in the hands of the corporation—the consequences can be far worse than the bankruptcy of the township coffers, and they can endure long after the CELDF team of lawyers and activists have walked away. Moreover, there’s virtually no recognition of these issues—much less criteria for dealing with them—in any of CELDF’s literature, including On Community Civil Disobedience. To be sure, OCCD does include The Chambersburg Declaration,100 The Mora County [New Mexico] Declaration,101 and The Spokane Declaration.102 All refer to “the people,” make persuasive cases for the systemic corruption and oppression of current state and federal government, decry the hegemony of the “corporate minority,” and call for creating networks “committed to securing the right to local, community selfgovernment.”103 Precisely none provide criteria for determining who count as “the people,” “the community,” or what’s meant by references to “rights of nature.” And surely it goes without saying that building an enduring unity, one that doesn’t simply replicate the authority of the township’s loudest voices (or “knowing fathers”), will be difficult if not impossible without pursuing this task. Or worse: to assume without evidence that there exists “unity” within a community assumes a homogeneity that lends itself too easily to racism and heterosexism, especially in communities where the loudest voices are likely white, well entrenched, and male. To be fair, I’m not suggesting that CELDF could or couldn’t address these issues. What I’m arguing is that it can’t afford to address them, and will not want to despite protestation to the contrary for at least two reasons: • Practically: neither community nor environmental rights constitute CELDF’s first priority, namely amassing communities who’ve drafted rights-based ordinances, sought to defend them, been sued, lost, and are thereby incentivized by their defeat to join with other communities in networks to foment a revolution to reclaim the right to self-determination itself realized as constitutional change at the federal level of government. CELDF can’t afford to get into the weeds of intra-community strife or struggle because this not only detracts from its first priority, but could undermine community cohesion toward the goal of revolutionary change—however much that cohesion may itself be a cover story for an unjust status quo. To join the revolution, communities must act with a single objective thereby acceding the right to self-determination both for itself and its members for

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the sake of joining in the universal struggle for self-determination—irony notwithstanding. We’ve therefore little reason to believe that existing conditions within communities won’t remain in place or be reinforced by the necessities of “unity.” • Philosophically: were community rights CELDF’s priority, they’d have to define and justify their use of a suite of central concepts including at least “community,” “community rights,” “community member,” “nature,” “selfdetermination,” and “rights of nature.” But CELDF cannot in fact undertake this project without undermining their raison d’être for at least three reasons: {{

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To define these concepts more precisely will likely bring to the surface the very conflicts submerged by the language of “the people” and “unity,” many or all of which have to do with status qua race, sex, gender, and species, and all of which potentially undermine at least superficial appeals to the CELDF vocabulary. Such concepts have no non-contentious, one-size-fits-all meanings. Hence a community committed to the equal treatment of its human members may be divided about the status of nonhuman animals, and many if not all but the most affluent and racially homogenous communities will likely remain divided by class. Lastly, among the incongruities of the CELDF approach is the conflict between “self-determination” and the need for “constitutional change.” A constitution that recognizes communities as “self-determining” isn’t a constitution; it’s a formalized charter for a dissolvable confederation. Even a constitution that explicitly prioritizes persons over property can be hijacked to tyrannical ends because while revaluing persons may be a necessary condition for ending social injustice, it’s certainly not sufficient. Capitalism takes advantage of the racist, heterosexist, and specieisist axes of human chauvinism to commodify persons as property; it didn’t invent them. Charters presumably replacing the current constitution are even more liable to abuse since where “community rights” acts as the final arbiter in disputes, adjudicating injustice within or between communities will likely remain tethered to little more than already well-entrenched patterns of decision-making. Even more ironic given CELDF’s claim to “environmental defense,” a confederation of communities is particularly ill-suited to combating crises global by their very nature. Indeed, without the conceptual precision CELDF eschews to avoid substantive criticism, their approach has no non-arbitrary way to determine what counts as a crisis or how to prioritize it among others.

These are, of course, substantial criticisms that need further development, but the upshot’s this: CELDF cannot offer a viable model of the desirable future because its priority isn’t the success of community environmental rights

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ordinances for townships or counties, and its vision of a revolution is poorly grounded both with respect to ecological integrity and social justice. In effect, CELDF justifies its existence on the same pathological “ends justify the means” logic of any capital enterprise. It commodifies communities reducing their value to exchange in the quest for an accumulation that, reaching critical mass, can spark a revolution. Perhaps the comparison ends here; perhaps not. But this much is true: CELDF is benefited with respect to their ultimate goals when a community loses to corporate incursion because loss provides the driver to join with other communities. A self-sufficient community—one in which community rights and the rights of nature have found a balance—does not advance CELDF’s agenda to turn “the resources of the aggressor against itself,”104 “frontally challenging long-settled legal doctrines as denials of the right to community self-government, and using eventual rulings as proofs of how the structure really operates.”105 Maybe that sounds great; but if we scratch beneath the surface in hopes of discovering what these “proofs” will mean for community members—especially those who stand the greatest chance of being harmed by corporate incursion—what we find is that CELDF is largely silent with respect to what replacing the “structure” means—or even prevents. Could such “self-determining” communities, for example, reintroduce slavery or revalue the subordination of women? Could they disallow a natural gas operation, but embrace a factory farm? That depends on how the community defines “member.” CELDF might respond that “community rights” must be read consistent with “the rights of nature.” But this is no help; even the most environmentally damaging enterprises could be counted as persons, and thus have “rights” as community members. Without, moreover, a working definition of “ecosystem,” “nature,” or even “rights,” CELDF has no principled means by which to parse the difference between outlawing a deep-injection well, but embracing a factory farm, banning discrimination, but permitting businesses to refuse service on religious grounds to gay couples.106 During the question and answer at the April 1, 2016, “Time for a Pennsylvania Revolt” presentation in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, Linzey was pressed to answer the question “What, exactly, is an ecosystem?” To what, in other words, do we assign rights when we refer to things like the rights of nature? Linzey responded that an ecosystem was “whatever a community says it is.” “Really?” responded audience member Kevin Heatley. “Really,” indeed. If an ecosystem is “whatever a community says it is,” the devotion of available farmland to growing Monsanto “Frankencorn” can be counted as no more morally suspect than a commitment to organics; objections made by the latter are undercut by Linzey’s arbitrary definition.107 “Whatever the community says” opens a Pandora’s box of possibilities wholly consistent with ecosystems degraded by industrial activity. After all, even the most

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desiccated ecosystem is an ecosystem, including the dozens we’ve surveyed here. They’re simply ecosystems within which the prospect of an experience is truncated, and where no one wants to live. If an ecosystem is “whatever a community says,” then while one township may decide to take up aggressive nonviolent protest to protect itself from a deep-injection well, another may decide that what benefits its ecosystem most is the cash flow made available through welcoming the next round of natural gas extraction or a tire burner, a Walmart or Sea World. If ecosystems are whatever communities say, anything goes. CAFOs, Walmarts, Chevron, Monsanto, and the Islamic State all count as ecosystems right along with trees, decaying bodies, Ebola, the river that defines the edge of your town and the hillside that defines mine. Upshot: CELDF can talk a good game about clean air and water, but if their leaders cannot define an ecosystem in accord with some realistic principle and the science to defend it, then its claim to defend the “rights of nature” is vacuous. Actually, it’s worse: “whatever the community says” is an open invitation to the reinforcement of a human chauvinism that, freed from the restrictions of a federal government, is as likely to devolve to a game of thrones as it is to engender a reinvigorated democracy. If ecosystems can be so arbitrarily defined, so can persons, rights, and communities. And that’s a future fit only for armed lifeboats and survivalist bunkers.

THE VALUE OF THE AESTHETIC IN EXPERIENCE AND THE LIGATURE OF GLOBAL SOLIDARITY: AN ECOFEMINIST SYSTEMS APPROACH TO THE DESIRABLE FUTURE Climate Change Is the Stolid Face of Subjugation In a 2005 essay, “The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature, Scientific Objectivity, and the Standpoint of the Subjugated: Anthropocentrism Re-imagined,” I argued that while human action is responsible for our current state of environmental deterioration, appeals to traditional moral principles “have failed to hold us adequately accountable.”108 “[G]iven the egoism, androcentrism, ethnocentrism, and heterocentrism of many of our current institutions and practices,” I argued, “it seems no wonder that principles whose application appears so limited with respect to other human beings would have little to offer toward the moral consideration of nonhuman animals and ecological systems”109 Might the aesthetic in experience have something to offer? Could “aesthetic appreciation . . . bolster moral valuation”? The answer, I argued, was a carefully qualified “yes,” equipped with the right theory “linking moral evaluation to aesthetic experience of natural objects, and to defensible criteria

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[namely, active respect for biotic diversity and ecological integrity] for their appreciation.”110 Building on John Dewey’s view of an experience, I argued it’s “precisely because aesthetic experience entreats us as centered creatures” that it can provide elements invaluable to articulating a human-centered standpoint “distinguished not by the self-destruction of our current course, but by the ecological responsibility prerequisite to our survival.”111 Taking responsibility for the kinds of experience we want to be able to have, in other words, implies taking responsibility for the conditions under which it’s possible to have them. Because, moreover, those conditions include us not merely as spectators of “nature,” but as agents in complex webs of interdependency, the distinctions we’re tempted to draw between social and environmental justice turn out to be little more than a matter of perspective. This is not to concede to the ecocentrist who insists we must privilege the ecosystemic over human interests, but that at the heart of a radically recuperated human-centeredness beats the precautionary principle. Whether any such line of reasoning can gain a foothold under the deteriorating environmental conditions we now face is, of course, dicey—especially in its appeal to the aesthetic. But the evidence that our current course, dependent as it is on the myth of endless resources and the ravenous logic of capital, is calamitous could not be plainer: anthropogenic climate change. Hence, I’ve sought to expand on this argument here, to flesh it out as a critique of capitalism, and deploy it against its many Hydra-headed incarnations: climate change denial, the Free Trade Triumvirate, the many forms of salvation capitalism including efforts to cash in on its capacity to create fear and the technoutopian dream of a nature-free future. I’ve also tried to show that at the end of the day the same pathologies of capital infect many of the organizations ostensibly on the side of the environment, including the Big Green appeal to the pseudo-aesthetic and CELDF’s romanticized appeal to community rights. Nonetheless, there remains a last objection—what we might call the “Regular Joe argument”: [P]lausible as the adoption of this standpoint may be for those already disposed toward environmental activism, it hardly describes the attitudes of many, including those who, even as they tear up earth “off-roading” their Hummers, claim to experience the beauty of nature. Even as a radically revised anthropocentrism [human-centeredness] retains its focus on human valuing and action, argues this critic, its wedding of aesthetic experience to moral responsibility may not convince those for whom the environment just is a resource for human use, or those for whom human-centered can only mean human-privilege [human chauvinism].112

Put simply, all the prognosticating in the world about the apocalyptic potential of climate change and its myriad associated crises can’t make people care.

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Denial is our most endless resource, and conquering it is the tallest order humanity has likely ever confronted. For the global North it provides a phalanx against the disruption of our comforts and conveniences; for the global South, it creates the incongruous conditions for the production of both solar panels and climate refugees. Our capacity for denial trounces any doubt that referring to our current course as eco-nihilistic is hyperbole or exaggeration; we may not be on the path to destroy the planet, but we’re certainly well on the way to hobbling beyond repair the conditions necessary to biotic diversity and ecological stability. A warming planet may not render humanity extinct, but the wars and other forms of violence it encourages don’t portend a future anyone would want to leave for their kids. We ignore these facts at our peril. Denial underpins free trade agreements like the Transpacific Partnership and fuels the perverse geopolitics of “development” and “progress.” It tints the greenwash of Big Green environmental organizations whose corporate partnerships undermine their credibility, necessitating pseudo-aesthetic cover stories about “saving” the very animals endangered by their profit-driven partners. Indeed, even CELDF’s muddled argument that community selfdetermination will encourage environmental sustainability ignores the fact that some problems cannot be solved at the level of the community. Crises such as sex-trafficking, poverty, terrorism, war, pollution, the capitalist exploitation of labor, cyber-espionage, widening disease vectors, and climate change are global by their very nature. Hence, to insist that the community remain the central locus of value not only evokes an antiquated notion of the significance of geographical borders (much like the nation state), its capacity to create territorial conflicts actually detracts from developing response strategies that must themselves be global, involving intensive international cooperation. The trouble is that Regular Joe and Josie are just not moved by moral arguments—especially moral arguments that have an inherent geopolitical aspect, and that require radical alterations of behavior. It’s just easier to consign events like the Paris Climate Conference to derision as “one world government” conspiracies to “take away” their rights (or their guns), or to nod complacently to the fear-mongering proclamations of a Donald Trump, or to defend off-roading and burger barbeques as “the American way.” Were Regular Joe and Josie, their neighbors, and their communities concerned about a warming planet, the compelling claim that we must act individually and collectively right now to alter the very tenor of “civilization” would be neither contentious nor subject to caveat. They’d scoff at sustainability as not remotely good enough for their kids, and they’d not see the kinds of arguments I’ve made out here as “revolutionary,” but simply as common sense in the interest of a future worth wanting. In short, they’d see human-centeredness as a call to action—not an excuse to go shopping.

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But I’m not holding my breath that Regular Joe or Josie will come around. Indeed, even Regular Josie’s liberal feminism embraces little more than an equality that makes sure she has a seat at the table of consumption. It’s one thing, after all, to demand equal treatment; it’s another to see beyond an “equality” whose primary measure is access to the circulatory system of exchange value. Perhaps Josie can be persuaded by the Mother Earth imagery evoked by Sandra Steingraber to “concede” to climate change. But, as I’ve argued, evoking the feminine effectively re-inscribes it as the naturalized opposite of a masculinity for whom possession and domination mean the same whether its object is the planet, its species life, or women’s bodies. Hence, it’s not clear whether such images encourage insurgency to protect the planet or submission to a nonviolence that consigns “activism” to signing petitions, holding vigils, and posting outrage to Facebook and Twitter. There’s little doubt that denial of the facts about hydrocarbon extraction and animal agriculture will keep Regular Joe in his 4X4 at the drive-through window at Burger King for a while yet to come. But there’s equally little reason to think Josie will come to see that the personal is not merely the political, but that a “personal” reserved to recycling, reuse, and riding her bicycle to work will neither keep the gas company landman from her door nor shutter the factory farms, much less give rise to the global response demanded by the geopolitics of climate change. So, while I’ve obviously not abandoned moral arguments, I have sought a different route to soliciting our moral sensibilities, one that makes of the future a responsibility we cannot easily shirk, but that grounds the hard work to realize it less along the well-trod but muddied road to moral duty, and more along the less-traveled if riskier path of recuperating vital elements of experience, namely the aesthetic in experience. In short, I’ve aspired to offer a carrot as well as a stick. What I’m banking on is that folks can be made to see that a future bereft of the textures, colors, smells, sounds, and feels—the emotional and phenomenal richness made possible only by biotically diverse and intact ecosystems—is simply too gut-wrenching to contemplate, too irreplaceably valuable to risk losing for their children. My hope is that even though Regular Joe and Josie may reject the philosophical and moral arguments against capitalism, they’ll nonetheless opt to err on the side of caution—just in case the climate science turns out to be right. This too, of course, may be a thin reed. But settling for mere sustainability is an even thinner one—baking in the sun. Put more urgently: we must hope there are others “more likely to be responsive to the intimate relationship between aesthetic experience and existential condition.” To capitulate to anything less settles for a human chauvinism gluttonous, myopic, and suicidal; “rejoice today for tomorrow we may all die!” describes little more than a last party on an armed lifeboat. All the denial in the world will not keep it from

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sinking. The task, then, is to discover who and where these others might be, to listen closely to what they have to say, find a way to theorize their insight into the kind of action that foresees a desirable future at the end of conquest capitalism—and then seek to find the crucial elements of their experience within ourselves, individually and collectively. This is an incredibly tall order. But the alternative is unthinkable, and the aesthetic in experience plays a vital role even here. If no such “others” exist, we can turn to fiction, poetry, music, photography, or art. But, I don’t think we have to. For the majority of human agents on the planet, the denial of changing ecological conditions is as irrational as giving up food, water, and shelter; it signals a nonsensical alienation, as Marx puts it, from “species being,” that is, from the myriad interdependent relationships that instantiate us as Homo Sapiens—as specific vulnerable embodiments of perception, emotion, sensation, intellect, imagination, and will. For most, in other words, the death that follows life is not a mirage put off by layers of products, but a heady reminder that the meaning of a sophisticated term like “interdependency” boils down to the thinness of our skin, the growling in our bellies, and the passage of time. Among the most important insights I think we can have about climate change is that “anthropogenic” means “human-caused” only in the most anemic sense. Climate change is not simply a by-product of human activity; it is the metastasis of a planet whose ecosystems, their inhabitants, and their capacities have become the commodified subjugates of capital. Instantiated as resource and labor, soil and bodies, water and sweat, “subjugate” picks out the specific axes along which human chauvinism delivers sustenance to the circulatory system of capital. Human chauvinism is oppressive; capitalism subjugates. The difference is that although oppressive institutions like heteropatriarchy, racism, and speciesism are, as Walter Benjamin might put it, premised essentially on the threat of violence, capitalism commodifies. While marriage, slavery, and animal agriculture objectify and inferiorize their objects, capital takes advantage of this institutionalized vulnerability converting the value of progeny, servitude, and flesh into exchange value. Human chauvinism has wrought immense damage to the planet’s ecosystems and biota, but it’s the lethal union of the myth of endless resources and the logic of capital that fuels nihilism. Much like “carcinogenic,” “anthropogenic” indicts its beneficiaries not merely as reckless, but as cloaked in willful ignorance and systemic selfdelusion. These heads of multinationals, governments, and Big Greens alike behave like smokers who deny their addiction, deny their own subjugation to the anthropogenic, opting instead for whatever pseudo-aesthetic rhetoric will maintain their position along the axes of human chauvinism. Naturalized as “development,” “progress,” “right to work,” “liberal,” “free trade,” and even “sustainable,” the misery of the subjugates of capital remains largely disguised

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by benign-sounding euphemisms like “worker,” “associate,” “meat,” “free range,” “seafood.” But make no mistake, the comfortable subjugation of the few who can afford better products for their self-deceptions is still subjugation. A wealthy oil and gas CEO can participate in the pseudo-aesthetic of an EDF more effectively than a Mexican fisherman; his donations can be bigger. But this in no way entails his exemption from the facts of climate change; he can’t escape the planet or buy a new one. Subjugation is an existential condition of the Capitalocene and a necessary correlate of exchange value. It’s thus not simply anthropogenic, but eco-nihilistic—rendering living things not merely vulnerable, but existentially vulnerable. Yet, it’s precisely at this juncture, where we face a crisis of not merely calamitous but existential proportion, that we have a last opportunity to foster the conditions for an experience that, as an experience, evinces courage, the rejection of denial, and the repudiation of the pseudo-aesthetic in favor not merely of survival, but of a standpoint squarely premised on the belief that a future desirable to human beings must be so to any creature capable of the aesthetic in experience. While a revolution to end the subjugation of capital is a risky and fearsome venture, the very vulnerability it discloses engenders the possibility for an experience intimating a future whose desirability is grounded in respect for interdependency social, global, and ecological. The lesson of climate change is that all human relationships, practices, and institutions are fundamentally ecological not simply because they’re anthropogenic, but because in each lay the potential to either help sustain, valorize, and recuperate a world within which an experience remains possible—or to betray it and be party to eco-cide. The difference lay in recognizing interdependency as the best prospect for the kind of experience we hope the future can offer, and that denial is eco-cidal. Confronting this lesson situates us as epistemically vulnerable; it’s akin to what Thomas Kuhn describes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1963) as the conditions for a paradigm shift.113 Denial insists the world is flat, smokes in the face of lung cancer, holds the planet to be limitless, and takes itself to be invulnerable. Vulnerability is a point of departure from which we take on the work of substantive civilizational change in light of the knowledge that the planet is spherical, cancer can kill, resources are limited, and denial conscripts us to subjugation. Vulnerability can remind us of both death and life. Put differently: the aesthetic in experience needn’t wait for the desirable future; it’s right here, right now—if we can be brave enough to see just how profoundly revolutionary is choosing to err on the side of caution; that is, if we can recognize that the vulnerability climate change makes inescapable in unprecedented ways is at the same time the opportunity to re-embrace as beautiful and good the interdependency of our epistemic and existential condition, individually and collectively.

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The Standpoint of the Subjugated Following John Dewey and feminist philosopher Donna Haraway, the standpoint of the subjugated, instantiates a concept of responsibility which recognizes that, however indigenous a feature of human being, epistemic centeredness does not imply that knowing is merely relative to context, but is rather open to reflection and revision across many axes, epistemological and axiological. If the standpoint of the subjugated offers the possibility of more “savvy” accounts, as Haraway suggests, it is because the conditions for self-reflection are built into the knower’s experience (individually and collectively), and because so much more is at stake in the aspiration to transform the world through the accounts emerging from this reflection. Such a standpoint . . . vests responsibility squarely in the human capacity to comprehend ecological interdependence with respect to the consequences of human action.114

To suggest that the conditions for self-reflection are built into the knower’s experience, into her or his epistemic situation, and that for some the consequences of acting on that self-reflection are greater than for others, is to suggest that there exist epistemic conditions that require as a matter of necessity or even survival a greater and more intimate knowledge of those relationships whose interdependencies are not only, for example, cultural or social—but fundamentally ecological: The woman whose family’s survival depends upon the success of her subsistence farm labor occupies a radically different position with respect to this relationship [to nonhuman nature] than, say, the Hummer owner’s. Both her position and the Hummer owner’s are constituted by environmental, economic, social, cultural, ethnic, and gendered factors; the difference is that the Hummer owner can ignore these largely without consequence . . . but the farmer ignores these factors only at her and her family’s peril . . . The farmer’s savvyness about, for example, clean water, what counts as arable soil, or the disposition of the rains will not necessarily move her to care more about nature as beautiful (though it might), and we can certainly quibble about whether her knowledge counts as scientific. One thing, however, seems quite clear: Nature does not present itself to her as virginal, alien, or obscure, but rather as the world, that is, as that whole of which she is a part, and of which she cannot afford to not be a part. This world forms . . . an essential feature of her epistemic conditions: after all, a nature conceived as alien offers little hope of survival (except for those who need not worry this matter); hence whatever its occasional hostility, the farmer must conceive nature as possible, as open to her.115

No doubt, the subsistence farmer conceives her world in many ways, the substance of which she’ll attend to, as her conditions require.116 But that “substance,” I suggest, has value not only practically or morally, but also

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aesthetically insofar as a world which sometimes confronts her as threatening or even overwhelming can also present itself to her as benign, magnanimous, and beautiful. Her savvyness, moreover, need not distinguish in any hard and fast way between a nature conceived as giving and one conceived as beautiful: an emergent harvest after a taxing planting can surely be experienced as both.117

The farmer reflects and revises in light not only of the practical aspects of her experience, but also the aesthetic in it. It contains the seeds of an experience in virtue of the particularities of her epistemic situation—particularities underwritten by “that whole of which she is a part, and of which she cannot afford to not be a part.” It’s not that the farmer is more dependent on the planetary ecosystem than others; it’s not that her relationship to her existential conditions are “primitive,” “pure,” or “natural.” Indeed, we want to steer clear of romanticizing her situation. It’s that the experience of an emergent harvest as both fulfilling an existential necessity and as beautiful contains the potential for the kind of enduring satisfaction Dewey describes as the aesthetic in experience. In its direct physical and emotional intimacy with water, soil, plants, wind, temperature, and rain, it contains the seeds of precisely that human-centeredness which eschews narrow self-interest as irrational—as inconsistent with the experiential warp and woof of life. Indeed, part of what deepens the satisfaction of reaping a harvest under subsistence conditions—what differentiates it fundamentally from the experience of agribusiness growers in their air-conditioned industrial tractors, is that for the subsistence farmer resources are not only not endless, they’re tenuous, potentially scarce, precious; they’re reminders of vulnerability. Insofar, moreover, as the farmer plants and harvests for her family’s survival, not for the surplus value of an agribusiness commodity, her disposition to land, water, space and time, necessity, living and dying— farming—reflect not exchange value, but that array of values accruing to life. The farmer personifies vulnerability not just as responsibility to herself, but to others in an interdependent web of relationships. She can’t afford denial because she can’t afford recklessness. Her family’s life depends on the epistemic responsibility she assumes in understanding whatever’s necessary to insuring that harvest. Her family depends not merely on her work ethic, but her aesthetic appreciation of what counts as good seed, clean water, healthy soil. The very pleasure she takes in eating derives not merely from the provision of sustenance, but in avoiding the miseries of going hungry, or worse, watching her children go hungry. While the farmer’s responsibility is a heavy one, it’s for just that reason that the satisfaction she’s surely entitled to take in it is that much deeper, more vibrant, and more enduring. But most important of all is this: the intimacy of the relationship between the farmer and the land creates interdependency, but not subjugation.

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Subjugation isn’t a natural condition; it’s the product of human chauvinism that, exploited by capital, generates conditions not “merely” oppressive, but existentially hazardous. It signifies a specific dimension of oppression, namely that which seeks not only to dominate—but to commodify; not merely to maintain hegemony rooted in race, sex, or gender—but to objectify as consumable, exchangeable, disposable. However daunting environmental conditions may be for the farmer, they do not by themselves subjugate her; natural disaster may be disastrous—but it’s neither the product of institutionalized domination nor the expropriation of land and water to the ends of capital accumulation. While the farmer’s social circumstance may well be ruled by heteropatriarchal household relationships, her labor governed by gender role, her reproductive capacities the property of husband and family; while she may endure racist repression with respect to her identity as “indigenous;” indeed, even if she is murdered for “failing” to produce a son, neither heteropatriarchy nor racism can produce the “civilizational crisis” that belongs to capital alone because none have the power to fundamentally transform the conditions of the planet’s capacity to sustain life. Indeed, heteropatriarchy may be in many of its incarnations misogynous, but this only serves to highlight the fact that “anthropogenic” under-describes its effects. Misogyny is human-caused, but it’s also a very specific form of institutionalized violence. Climate change is human-caused, but it’s also a form of misanthropy once we comprehend its direction—but continue to bury our heads in the sand. It is, in fact, the most depraved form of misanthropy imaginable since, unlike even the most vicious forms of woman-hating, bigotry, or nonhuman animal cruelty, it consigns living things not merely to death but to senseless extinction. However otherwise derelict, human chauvinism by itself doesn’t and can’t threaten environmental collapse. The capitalist exploitation of human chauvinism can and does. Insofar as “business as usual” depends on the myth of endless resources, insofar as its offspring must grow to survive, the menace it poses to the environment doesn’t merely exceed heteropatriarchy and racism; it raises a wholly different kind of threat, namely that kind of self-immolating violence we rightly call nihilism. Capital needs hydrocarbons, water, sugars, and animal bodies, the consequence of which, among other things, is climate change. Moreover, capital needs denial in a fashion not merely irrational and contrary to fact—but pathological. The critic might respond, of course, that heteropatriarchy needs women’s bodies and racism needs inferiorized “others.” Absolutely; but however otherwise oppressive, neither threaten ecological apocalypse. While both may be the drivers of many a suicide, neither can alter the planet’s atmosphere and its capacity to support life. While both, moreover, are subject to plenty of denial, they’re also routinely challenged and rejected. We can retreat from the brink of bigotry, but we have no way to recover the shoreline once it’s gone, the Arctic ice sheets once they’ve melted, polar bears

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and Sumatran elephants once they’ve become extinct. The critic rightly points out, of course, that capitalism needs human chauvinism to supply not only its raw materials but also its labor. Also true; but while this furnishes us with an explanation for the durability of heteropatriarchy and racism, it doesn’t tell us in what subjugation to climate change consists, or the extent to which that world’s “regime” dwarfs all previous incarnations of the vulnerable. Subjugation thus signifies not “merely” oppression, but that form of specifically environmental oppression from which there’s no escape—from which no quantity of labor or quality of technological innovation can offer respite. That the beneficiaries of capitalism are also those of the human chauvinism makes it no wonder that the human beings, nonhuman animals, and ecosystems most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change are those whose existential conditions are, like the farmer’s, already made tenuous by, as Benjamin might put it, laws whose underbellies are scarred by violence, blood, and death. Subjugation imperils the farmer in at least two ways beyond what heteropatriarchy and racism already exact from her: • Directly—via the destruction of the ecosystems upon which she and her family depend. • Indirectly—via the consequences of climate change and the social, economic, and environmental crises which accompany it. Reimagine’s Clayton Thomas-Muller offers an example of the first: The link between unsustainable energy consumption in the Americas and the destruction and desecration of Indigenous homelands and culture is undeniable. As Indigenous peoples, we reject the proposition that our traditional lands should be sacrificed at the altar of irresponsible energy policies . . . Oil and gas developments have consistently violated our human rights and caused unconscionable damage to traditional territories that have sustained us since time immemorial . . . For the Indigenous peoples historically traumatized by colonial conquest and subsequent treaty violations, an energy policy dependent upon fossil fuels creates yet another cycle of destruction characterized by the devastation of sacred sites, the drying up of aquifers, micro-climate changes, and the poisoning of our air and soil with toxins.118

As reported March, 2015, by Henry Fountain of the New York Times, the Syrian refugee crisis offers a compelling example of the second: Drawing one of the strongest links yet between global warming and human conflict, researchers said Monday that an extreme drought in Syria between 2006 and 2009 was most likely due to climate change, and that the drought was a factor in the violent uprising that began there in 2011. The drought was the worst

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in the country in modern times, and in a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists laid the blame for it on a century-long trend toward warmer and drier conditions in the Eastern Mediterranean, rather than on natural climate variability . . . [T]his trend matched computer simulations of how the region responds to increases in greenhouse-gas emissions, and appeared to be due to two factors: a weakening of winds that bring moisture-laden air from the Mediterranean and hotter temperatures that cause more evaporation . . . [W]hile Syria and the rest of the region known as the Fertile Crescent were normally subject to periodic dry periods, “a drought this severe was two to three times more likely” because of the increasing aridity in the region.119

In both cases, people are driven from their indigenous lands by environmental damage caused by the quest for profit. Whether the causes are direct such as the fossil fuel colonizing of Native American lands, or the indirect drought-producing consequences of climate change is important, of course, to understanding the facts about our eco-cidal trajectory, but largely irrelevant from the point of view of articulating the standpoint of the subjugated as an approach to the desirable future. The Face of That “Other” Is My Own What each of these examples illustrates is that some human and nonhuman beings, social and biotic systems, are impacted by environmental deterioration in profoundly disproportionate ways destined to encourage terrorism, the flight of environmental refugees, religious extremism borne of desperation, and other forms of violence—especially against women and girls. While many and complex factors, for example, tribal rivalries, population, and land use issues, inform the emergence of terrorist groups like Boko Haram, there’s little doubt that climate change will help to ignite future conflicts and worsen old ones in regions of the globe where poverty and drought already have long and violent histories.120 The gap between those, mostly in the global North, who are able to escape rising temperatures and eroding shorelines (at least for now) and those in the global South who bear the labor and resource burden of that escape is widening, and it’s likely to widen further as the planet becomes ever more subjugate to free trade agreements—themselves a reflection of the urgency with which climate capitalists seek to cash in on the last hydrocarbons, monopolize food-crop seeds, and privatize access to clean water. That it’s the bodies and labor of the most vulnerable of developing world citizens, women, girls, indigenous peoples, and nonhuman animals, which subsidize free trade is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the speed with

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which “development” produces more and more vicious acts of violence. According to ILO—the International Labor Organization121: • Almost 21 million people are victims of forced labor—11.4 million women and girls and 9.5 million men and boys. • Almost 19 million victims are exploited by private individuals or enterprises and over 2 million by the state or rebel groups. • Of those exploited by individuals or enterprises, 4.5 million are victims of forced sexual exploitation. • Forced labor in the private economy generates US$ 150 billion in illegal profits per year. • Domestic work, agriculture, construction, manufacturing and entertainment are among the sectors most concerned. • Migrant workers and indigenous people are particularly vulnerable to forced labor. Even these statistics, however, tell only part of the story. Add to these facts the failure of nation states like Myanmar and Thailand to police labor and sex-traffickers, the persistent violation of women’s human rights in the name of heteropatriarchal religion,122 and the survival pressures created by changing environmental conditions and what you have is an intersection of volatile issues that, among other things, make for increasing refugeeism, particularly for women and girls. A typical story comes from a refugee camp on the Greek Island of Lesbos: Maha is a 28-year-old doctor from Raqqa with a bright smile and a dark story of life in Syria. Travelling on her own to escape her home city, which is now socalled Islamic State’s (IS) capital, she crawled through mud along the Turkish border to make it to safety. “Death was my companion at every step,” she told me at the Kara Tepe camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. Her heart pounded at each of the 46 checkpoints she had to cross to get out: “They don’t want doctors to leave and they could have prevented me.” She sewed her papers into her clothes so they wouldn’t be found. But she wanted to bring them with her—the precious qualifications with which she hopes to start a new life and find work. She wants to join her brothers and sisters who have already made it to Germany. Maha is also a statistic. When the migration crisis began, most of those on the move were men. But since the start of the year, women and children have made up the bulk of the refugees and migrants. Many are trying to join their husbands and children who went ahead with the money the family had at the time, leaving them to come afterwards. Others have lost husbands and brothers to Syria’s five-year war. And aid agencies say the risks the women face are not over now that they have reached Europe’s shores.123

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“Without the protection of family and community,” these risks include “sexual violence, unintended pregnancies, trafficking and even child marriage,” all of which affect women and girls disproportionately. Such examples are legion, are in no way reserved to the global South, and are likely to escalate in virtue of the worsening conditions produced not only by climate change, but by the ancillary forms of violence environmental crises make more possible. As I argued in Contemporary Feminist Theory and Activism: Six Global Issues, matters traditionally reserved for “feminist” analysis—the role of sex, gender, sexual identity, and sexual orientation in, for example, pay equity, reproductive rights, military service, marriage, etc.—can no longer adequate define feminist activism.124 Part of the reason for this is because such issues reflect primarily the concerns of comparatively privileged global North women, and part of the reason is because even these important matters pale in comparison to the crises faced by women like Maha who’s confronted by a potentially lethal combination of drought, civil war, and terrorism in addition to the prospect of disease, beating, rape, cold, lack of shelter, lack of sanitation, and hunger over the course of her flight. As Naomi Klein rightly observes, climate change changes everything, but, for women like Maha it changes everything. And it’s for just this reason, that terms like “activism” no longer suffice to describe what must happen if we’re to end not merely oppression, but subjugation. For while it might seem that Maha’s story has little connection to the machinations of capital, it in fact has everything to do with its pathology: drought spawns a civil war. It creates conditions for failed crops and dried up water wells. This drives families to cities like Raqqa and Allepo. It makes young men vulnerable to recruitment to organizations like the Islamic State who offer salaries, some benefits, and the promise of heaven. Acts of terrorism, in turn, galvanize state militarism in “the war on terror.” The weapons of that “war” require hydrocarbons. This generates demand for more oil and gas. The attempt to escape a war that’s now taken the lives of at least 191,000 Syrians is precisely what compels Maha to crawl through the mud to get to a camp for refugees on a Greek island.125 Such stories tell us about something more than oppression, namely a form of subjugation accountable not to any single institution, practice, or religion, but rather to a logic—a pathology—whose anthropogenic origins connect water, land, and labor to the commodification of everything. Could the Syrian drought have been caused by factors, meteorological, agricultural, social, other than climate change? Sure. But “compiled statistics showing that water shortages in the Fertile Crescent in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey killed livestock, drove up food prices, sickened children, and forced 1.5 million rural residents to the outskirts of Syria’s jam-packed cities—just as that country was

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exploding with immigrants from the Iraq war . . . natural variability alone was unlikely to account for the trends in wind, rain, and heat that led to the massive drought. All these factors, combined with high unemployment and bad government, helped tip Syria into violence.”126 These are the stories that render polite dinner chat about “activism” and “sustainability” insipid and, as we’ve seen, self-serving for the corporations who’d exploit that bland vocabulary to greenwash their business plans. Both are terms so co-opted by the Big Greens and their analogues among nongovernmental organizations that, if anything, they serve as little more than trite cover for the bad policies that perpetuate the “war” on terror instead of addressing its causes. And while these take us beyond our scope here, suffice it to say that our current course is a prescription for avoiding the effects of climate change only because war will displace environmental apocalypse in the race to extinguish the species. To adopt the standpoint of the subjugated is to try to see the ligature—the logic—which links drought to population to migration to hunger to civil war to terrorism to more fossil fuel drilling to more barren water wells to sick children to rape to desperation. It is the attempt to comprehend the extent to which capitalism is the metastasis of not only the planet, but its most intimate relationships—mother to child, husband to wife, brother to sister. It’s the effort to see that climate change isn’t simply human-caused, but rather a mirror in which is reflected the image of Homo Colossus. The standpoint of the subjugated is only a starting point, yet one that, because its specific aim is to understand the systemic nature of the role played by capitalism in environmental destruction provides an avenue for beginning that project called the reclamation of human-centeredness. The adoption of such a standpoint is an act of specifically ecofeminist insurgency because its quest to emancipate those most vulnerable to subjugation is simultaneously an effort to articulate in what a genuinely just and desirable future might look like for those who’ve borne the brunt of capitalist exploitation. The standpoint of the subjugated is feminist because it takes its first responsibility to listen to the farmer, the refugee, the fisherman, the pastoralist, Regular Joe and Josie; it listens for the aesthetic in their experience. Taking up the standpoint of the subjugated is a feminist project in virtue of the latter’s long history seeking to understand structural or systemic injustice. It’s feminist because reclaiming the future as desirable means rescuing it from the beneficiaries of capital, mostly white, global North, Western(ized) men. A revolution that fails to confront that fact will dwindle and die. And while much more needs to be said about why this is the case, suffice it for now this much is true: insofar as capitalism benefits by taking advantage of the axes of human chauvinism, any revolution seeking to revalue human-centeredness as a locus of epistemic and moral responsibility must come to terms with the fact

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that the success of its project must mean an end to heteropatriarchy, racism, sexism, and speciesism. While the feminist movement has had some success with the first two of these, it has a long way yet to go in addressing the third. But a human-centeredness that fails to end speciesism fails its entire project. Revaluation must not only include biotic diversity as a necessary if not sufficient condition for that experience that makes the future worth wanting, it must seek to err on the side of caution in preventing the unnecessary suffering of all those subjugated by capital; all. Nothing can guarantee that we’ll not continue on the road of McCarthy’s apocalyptic fiction. But if the desirable future is to be more than a fiction, it will take more than hard work, commitment, and courage; it will take the kind of vulnerability that permeates every crevice of our lives. It will require standing up to the bullets of those who’d protect Free Trade. But at the end of the day, I think what realizing the desirable future requires most is getting it in our very bone marrow that the epistemic humility that prods us to the precautionary principle is what makes an experience possible. It’s what makes science possible. To forfeit that is not merely nihilism; it’s the forfeiture of hope. But to embrace a human-centeredness anchored in the responsibility to a future where social and environmental justice make their homes in respect for biotic diversity and ecological stability—that’s not just a planet; it’s a world. So, I offer in place of conquest capitalism neither a politics nor an economics, but rather an aesthetic and a moral sensibility that can follow from it—if we’re paying attention. NOTES 1. Amelia Rosch, “Over 1400 Endangered Species are Threatened climate Change, Says New Red List” Think Progress, November 18, 2014. http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/11/18/3592914/endangered-species-list-climate/. 2. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Trans Terrence Irwin (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999), 1095a, 15–22. 3. Joshua Holland, “Six Things Michael Mann Wants You to Know About Global Warming,” Moyers and Company, June 12, 2014. http://billmoyers.com/2014/06/12/ six-things-michael-mann-wants-you-to-know-about-the-science-of-global-warming/. 4. Kerstin Oloff, “Zombies, Gender, and World Ecology: Gothic Narratives in the Work of Ana Lydia and Mayra Montero” (forthcoming conference), The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World Ecology, Politics, ed. Michael Niblett and Chris Campbell. https://www.academia.edu/25452160/Zombies_Gender_and_World_Ecology_2016_, p. 3. 5. Oloff, “Zombies, Gender, and World Ecology,” 2. 6. Oloff, “Zombies, Gender, and World Ecology,” 2. 7. Oloff, “Zombies, Gender, and World Ecology,” 3.

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8. Nicholas Wade, “Scientist Finds the Beginning of Morality in Primate Behavior,” New York Times, March 20, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/ science/20moral.html?_r=0. 9. Suzanna Sawyer, Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005), 35. 10. Sawyer, Crude Chronicles, 35. 11. John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), 386. 12. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1934), 205. 13. Animal Cognition. “Do Fish Feel Pain?” http://www.animalcognition. org/2015/04/22/do-fish-feel-pain/. 14. Animal Cognition. “Do Fish Feel Pain?” 15. Dewey, Art as Experience, 6. 16. Dewey, Art as Experience, 205. 17. Dewey, Art as Experience, 205. 18. Ameena Schelling, “Orca Who was Once Free Beaches Herself After Performing,” The Dodo, June 3, 2013. https://www.thedodo.com/morgan-orcabeaches-herself-1839101767.html?utm_source=huffingtonpost.com&utm_ medium=referral&utm_campaign=pubexchange. 19. Wendy Lynne Lee, “Sustainable Wasteland: Ecological Humanism, Cadaver Cosmetics, and the Desirable Future” (Berlin: Springer International, 2015), 2–3. 20. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 367–8. 21. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 358. 22. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 367. 23. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 358. 24. Dewey, Art as Experience, 16–17. 25. A. Choodum, P. Thavarungkul and P. Kanatharana, “Acetaldehyde reside in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles.” Journal of Environmental Science and Health, Part B, 42 (2007), 577–83. 26. Maz Ali, “See What researchers Found When They Tested a Bottle of Fiji Water Against a Glass of Tap Water,” Upworthy, May 7, 2015. http://www.upworthy. com/see-what-researchers-found-when-they-tested-a-bottle-of-fiji-water-against-aglass-of-tap-water. 27. Fiji Water, “Bottled Water Quality report,” June 2105. https://www.fijiwater. com/content/dam/fijiwater/base/CA_Water_Quality_Report_June15_Eng.pdf. 28. Kevin Samson, “The Privatization of Water: Nestle Denies That Water Is a Fundamental Human Right,” Global Research, March 22, 2015. https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/problems/corporate-control-water. 29. Michelle Brence, “Obama’s Speech at Nike: Full Text,” The Oregonian, May 8, 2015. http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/05/read_obamas_ speech_at_nike_ful.html. 30. Luke Hammill, “Obama in Portland: Anti TPP Protesters Outside Nike Condemn ‘Corporate Greed,’” The Oregonian, May 8, 2015.

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31. Jeff Mason, “Obama to Democrats on Asian Trade Pact: Like Nike, ‘Just Do It’,” Reuters, May 8, 2015. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-trade-obama-nikeidUSKBN0NT0ZO20150508. 32. Arno Maierbrugger, “TPP Aims at Disrupting Mideast E-Asia Oil Trade,” Gulf Times, Novermber 11, 2014. http://www.gulf-times.com/story/415964/TPP-aims-atdisrupting-Mideast-E-Asia-oil-trade. 33. Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), http://celdf.org/. 34. Move to Amend, https://movetoamend.org/. 35. Felicity Barringer, “After Disclosure of Sierra Club’s Gifts from Gas Driller, a Roiling Debate,” New York Times, Feburary 14, 2012. http://www.nytimes. com/2012/02/14/science/earth/after-disclosure-of-sierra-clubs-gifts-from-gas-drillera-roiling-debate.html?_r=0. 36. Leslie Goldberg, “Is Animal Ag Buying off Environmental Groups?” Vicious Vegan, August 20, 2014. http://www.viciousvegan.com/is-animal-ag-buyingoff-environmental-groups/. 37. Open Secrets.org. “350.org: This Group Does NOT Disclose its Donors to the FEC,” https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/contrib. php?cycle=2016&cmte=C90014580. 38. Chris Hedges, “Saving the Planet, One Meal at a Time,” TruthDig, November 9, 2014. http://www.truthdig.com/report/page3/saving_the_planet_one_meal_ at_a_time_20141109. 39. Humane Society of the United States, “Fact Sheet: Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Animal Agriculture,” http://www.humanesociety.org/assets/pdfs/farm/ hsus-fact-sheet-greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-animal-agriculture.pdf. 40. Keegan Kuhn and Kip Anderson, Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, http://www.cowspiracy.com/. 41. Hedges, “Saving the Planet, One Meal at a Time.” 42. 350.org, “The Science,” http://350.org/about/science/. 43. Alan Lockwood, “Why Does the Meat Industry Escape Climate Scrutiny?” Climate Change News, August 24, 2015. http://www.climatechangenews. com/2015/08/24/why-does-the-meat-industry-escape-climate-scrutiny/. 44. Ron Arnold, “Chesapeake Takes Shareholder Heat for Giving Sierra Club $26 Million to Attack Coal,” Washington Examiner, June 14, 2012. http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/chesapeake-takes-shareholder-heat-for-giving-sierra-club-26million-to-attack-coal/article/731361. 45. Bob King, “Sierra Club Faces Gas-Cash Fallout,” Politico, July 2, 2012. http:// www.politico.com/story/2012/02/sierra-club-wrestles-with-gas-cash-aftermath072581. 46. Lena Moffett, “A Growing and Winning Climate Movement,” Sierra Club: Lay of the Land, May 2, 2016. http://www.sierraclub.org/lay-of-the-land/2016/05/ growing-and-winning-climate-movement. 47. Wendy Lynne Lee, “When Sierra Club Means ‘Silence the Critic,’” The Wrench, January 15, 2015. http://thewrenchphilosleft.blogspot.com/2015/01/whensierra-club-means-silence-critic.html.

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Index

350.org., 55, 361, 363–65, 405n37, 405n42 Adams, Carol, 23, 63n49 aesthetic in experience/an experience, vii–xii, 8, 11, 19, 60–61, 128, 166, 272, 277, 379–80; affective diversity, 350–57; desirable future in, 31–37; biotic diversity key component, 41–52; ligature of global solidarity, 389–96; priceless value of, 337–48; pseudo-aesthetic and, 363–65, 371; standpoint of the subjugated and, 402; sustainability and, 65n87. See also Dewey, John American Natural Gas Association, 149, 213, 264n30, 227 animal agriculture, 112, 146, 159, 167, 170, 202–3, 227, 276, 338, 344, 385, 405n36, 405n39, 408n83, 408n85; Big Greens and, 363–68; greenhouse gas emissions and, 186–87; polar bears and, 376–78; subjugate of speciesism and, 392–93

animal rights, 16, 63n40, 63n49, 213, 375; Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund and, 387; ecological integrity and, 380–81; rights-bearers as, 25; species preservation and habitat of, 276–77 Anthropocene, 196n102, 210, 202, 249; Capitalocene as, 155–59, 235–36, 338–41; Big Greens and, 372 anthropocentrism, 76, 119n18; eco-autoritarianism and, 103–4; ethical scope, 389–90 anthropomorphizing, 23; aesthetic experience an, 349–50 apocalypse, 1–2, 8, 40, 47, 58, 201, 209–10, 243, 271, 328, 341–42, 345–46, 402; aesthetic experience and, 31–35; civilizational crisis and, 21; climate change denial, 141; eco-nihilism and, 397; end of civilization, Derrick Jensen, 83, 89, 117–18; environmental, 13–19, 25; globalized system of exchange value, 104; 441

442 Index

interference narratives, 184–87; resistance and, 152–55; rhetoric of human chauvinism, 91, 97–101 Arctic, 128, 133–35, 143–46, 168, 173, 187, 194n38–45, 367, 397; Big Greens and, 375; climate change capitalism, 243, 256–57, 261; Free Trade and, 209–12; myth of endless resources and, 181; oil and gas extraction and, 154–57, 276; Steady State Economy, 283–85, 299 Aristotle, 339 armed lifeboats, 71, 76, 83, 100–3, 108–9, 188, 209, 223, 279, 296, 307, 351, 389; Derrick Jensen and, 88; “exclusionary tribalism,” 77, 91; “neo-fascist islands,” 68; over climate stability, 181, 210; post dams blown, 117; privilege protecting, 71, 346, 351 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), 212, 221–23, 236 “bad adaptation,” 109; capitalism and, 67–70; Marcellus Shale Operators Crime Committee (MSOCC), 72; violent history and, 73 Banksy, 379 Barbon, Nicholas, 234–37, 242 Bassey, Nnimmo, 2–3, 285 Beder, Sharon, 38 Bekoff, Marc, 48–49 Bender, Fred, 62n32, 120n61, 195n79; anthropogenic impact, 13; Homo Colossus and human chauvinism, 8, 17, 21, 102–4; “sanctity of capitalism,” 142–44 Benjamin, Walter, xi, 121n69–71, 153, 300, 393, 398; Critique of Violence, 115–17;

law-making and law preserving applied to free trade, 217, 322 biotic diversity: aesthetic in experience, an experience, 41–43, 166; desirable future, 379–80, 403; human-centeredness and, 344–46, 390–91 Black, William, 208 Boko Haram, 96, 125, 129, 399 BP, 4, 7, 26, 42, 63n39–41, 66n106, 128, 135–43, 149, 155, 188–89, 194n54–55, 214, 304, 312, 365; Beyond Petroleum campaign, 153; co-opting “green,” 163; Deep Water Horizon disaster and, 16–17, 50–59, 304; Myth of endless resources, 181–82; oil and gas production, 305–6 Breakthrough Energy Coalition (BEC), 312, 315, 318, 320–21, 324, 334n143, 335n171; COP21 and, 308 BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), 202, 218 Bruckner, Till, 151–52, 174, 189 Brune, Michael, 55, 366 Cabot Oil and Gas, 228–30, 385 cadaver cosmetics, 39, 44–45, 64n79, 65n87, 338, 351, 404n19 Cairn, 15, 54 Capitalocene, xi, 158–59, 233, 235, 254, 296, 394; Anthropocene is, 202, 210; cadaver cosmetics and, 338–39; consumption and, 341; “no nature independent,” 154–55; steady state economy and, 281 Chevron, 55, 58, 61n7, 63n52–3, 125, 132, 140, 143, 149, 155, 181, 189–91, 247, 332n112, 360, 374, 381, 389; Cambodia and Vietnam, 206;

Index 443

Catchlight biofuel and corporate structure, 300–6; Chihuahua and, 174; “death match with every other big energy company,” 7–9; environmental destruction, 40–45; Ecuador, Lago Agrio, 25–27, 29–31, 344; human rights violations, Dangote, 314–18; Niger Delta and Congo, 2–4, 69; patriotism and, 231 Chihuahua Desert, 155, 169, 174, 187, 193n18, 283; drilling and, 128–29 clean (potable) water, 1, 3, 38, 203, 275–76, 328, 389, 395–96, 399; climate change capitalism, 245, 257; climate change denial and, 139, 149; community rights, 382; corporate control; privatization of, 223–26; corporate profitability and, 239–40, 299; drought, Syria, 399; Fiji Water, 355–56; fracking and, 215, 231, 371; Gulf of Mexico and, 6, 56; myth of endless resources and, 182–85; polluted by Chevron, Lago Agrio, 25; tar sands mining, 272; Tropic of Chaos and, 67–70 climate change, x–xiii, 2–5, 45–49, 91, 192n2, 194n48, 194n57–58, 195n64, 195n68–70, 195n77, 195n 80–81, 196n83–87, 196n95– 100, 267n83, 267n93, 267n95, 268n99, 268n104–14, 269n133– 36, 270n139, 270n143–45, 270n151–54, 335n170–79; Big Green exploitation, 361–72; capitalism and, 8–15; carbon emissions, 210;

Chihuahua Desert, 128–33; climate change capitalism, 153–57, 258–62, 338; COP21 and, 306–7; Denial (denialism/Trutherism), 139– 41, 148–51; feminist issue as, 15–19; “Five Reasons,” 141–48; fracking and, 54–60; Free Trade, 211–13, 216; human chauvinism, 18–25, 29–31, 67–69, 70–81, 165–67; pop-cultural ecocentrism, 97–109; Planet Daly and, 289–93; progressive reform and, 167–70; pseudo-aesthetic and, 372–76; race, sex, gender, species and, 151–53; refugeeism, 209; salvation capitalism, logic of and, 276–80; science and, 351; subjugation and, 389–95; sustainability and, 157–65 civil disobedience, 72, 115, 171–77, 277, 386, 408n92–93 civilizational crisis, xi, 19, 21, 27–29, 93, 138, 246, 394–97 Climate Depot, 354 Cochrane, Regina, xi, 12, 16, 20–24, 29, 62n29–30, 63n46, 138, 194n57 Competitive Enterprise Institute, 148 Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), 361–62, 382–91, 408n91–96 COP21 (Conference of the Parties, Paris, 2015), 278, 302–4, 324, 333n120, 332n96, 333n132–34; Breakthrough Energy Coalition (BEC), 312–15; Inhofe, James, and, 297–99; Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), 306 corporatist fascism, 79

444 Index

Counterfeit-aesthetic. See pseudoaesthetic Cowspiracy, 363–65 Cruz, Ted, 161–63, 242–45, 308–10, 313, 354 Culture Industry, 12n2, 52, 93, 142, 211, 236, 356; Big Greens and, 363, 375; climate trutherism and, 170, 187; culture’s premier value as, viii; environmental apocalypse and, 13; global hegemony and, 225, 236; human chauvinism and, 22; naturalizing the Anthropocene, 158–60; TPP and, 211 Czech, Brian, 300–4, 332n104–10, 333n123, 333n126, 334n19–42; endangered species and, 311; technological progress, 299 Dangote, Aliko, 312–14, 334n146 Daly, Herman, xi, 133, 222, 278, 320, 328, 330n26–35, 330n37–42, 330n44, 330n47–56, 330n58, 331n59–60, 331n63, 331n69–72, 331n75–76, 331n80–92; carbon sequestration, failure of steady state, 286–88; climate change denial and, 309–10; intrinsic value and, 294; population control, heterosexism and, 289, 306–7; salvation capitalism as, 280–81; steady state economy, 184, 281–83; sustainability, 288–89; techno-utopia and, 299 Dayen, David, 217–19, 264n23 deep ecology (ecocentrism), 102–4, 319, 322–23, 334n155–56 Deepwater Horizon, 4, 7, 16–18, 42, 63n39, 63n41, 137 deforestation, viii, 10, 41, 54, 59, 78, 140, 187, 199n161, 259, 262, 298; REDD and, 284–85;

zombies and, 339–40; desirable future, x–xii, 1, 6, 11, 39, 95–97, 109, 143, 163–66, 251, 272, 345, 399–403; aesthetic in experience, an experience and, 31–34, 337–41; Banksy and, 379; cadaver cosmetics, 351; denial of denial and, 307; ethos as, 379–81; inconsistent with capitalism, 380–81; human-centeredness and, 27–31; sustainability and, 341; systems approach, 40–44, 60 DeSmog Blog, 369, 406n53 Dewey, John, xi–xii, 46, 50, 64n71–72, 64n80–82, 65n89, 272, 346–53, 404n11–12, 404n20–24; aesthetic in experience, an experience and, 36–39, 166, 277, 347–50, 356, 374–75, 380, 390; desirable future and, 41–42, 346, 272; Donna Haraway, the standpoint of the subjugated, and, 395–96; human-centeredness and, 337; science and, 351–52 dolphins, 28, 113, 146, 345; Bataria Bay, 17; bottlenose, 141, 157–59, 169, 345, 348 drug cartels, 128–131, 156, 192n8, 193n11, 193n13, 235–37, 296; runners, 125–26 DuPont, (Thapar-DuPont), 245, 367, 381, 268n100, 268n115–16, 269n19, 269n121; climate capitalism and, 251–54; deforestation and, 259; demand for liability exemption, 253; Enbridge and, 256–57; Techno-utopia and, 316 Easterly, William, 282, 330n36–37, 330n43

Index 445

eco-authoritarianism, 103 eco-centrism, 33–36, 74–78, 109–13, 174, 322–25, 381 armed lifeboats and, 78; Arne Naess, the deep and the shallow, 102–5; authoritarianism and, 98–100; climate change denial and, 191–92; ecocentric nihilism, 100–2; ending civilization and, 91–93; human chauvinism and, 80–82, 105–6; philosophical disposition of, 96–98; pop-cultural as, 96; techno-utopia, in conflict, 318–22 eco-cide, xii, 12, 13, 394 eco-feminism, 27, 52, 58–60, 62n36–38, 63n57, 78–81, 169–70, 330n57, 331n61–62, 331n64–68, 331n77– 78, 389, 402; climate change and, 14, 289–90; race, sex, gender, species, 80–81; standpont of the subjugated and, 400–2 eco-nihilism, 309, 340; climate change and, 145; myth of endless resources and, 296; pathology of capitalism and, 157 elephant, ix, 50–52, 338, 348–49, 356, 398 Elgin Duane, 76, 119n19 Enbridge, 164, 174, 198n128–30, 254–57 Energy Transfer Partners, 154, 168 Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), 362, 406n51–52 406n54, 406n56– 57, 406n61–62, 406n64, 407n68, 407n73–74, 407n76; big oil and gas and, 367–72; Climate Action Partnership and, 368; condemned as “communist” by climate change deniers, 190–91; greenwash and, 372–76; manufactured animal bodies and, 376–79;

methane emission study and, 370–72; Nestle and, 373; polar bear bribe and, 372–76 environmental justice, 18, 79, 103, 178, 282, 408n81; free trade and, 201; “guided capitalism,” and, 303–7; masculinization of, 57; Michael Ziser and Julie Sze, 375; race, sex, gender, species injustice and, 316; Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, CELDF and, 387–88 Ethical Electric, 30–31, 164, 183–84, 190, 199n158 Exxon-Mobil, 3–4, 7, 76, 119n22, 125, 128, 132, 135, 149, 154, 155, 160, 183, 189, 196n90, 197n104, 197n112, 240, 263n14–15, 264n40, 270n152–54, 291–93, 360, 381, 407n80; climate change denial, 138–40, 157, 179–81, 256–57, 374–75; drilling in the Arctic, 173; fossil fuel fathers, 159; free trade and, 214–16, 231, 279, 206–7; development of alternative energy sources and, 306; human rights violations, 314; Malaysia, operating in, 216, 296; Petro-Vietnam, 206; Rex Tillerson, CEO and, 76, 179, 183, 261 extinctions, viii–ix, 8, 25, 50–52, 78, 103, 114, 135–36, 156–57, 185, 201, 207, 216, 249, 262, 274, 281, 292–93, 298, 311–12, 338–44, 356, 374–76, 397; zombies and, 340 factory farms. See animal agriculture Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), 231

446 Index

Federman, Adam, 71, 119n12 “ferocious love,” 156, 167, 188–90; “Blockadia” and, 173–76; Crestwood protest, applied to, 175–78; depoliticizing as, 178–81 Fiji Water, 355–56, 360, 404n26–27 flag-waving, 129, 213, 239, 273; free trade and, 231; Homo Colossus and 183 nationalism and, 225 fossil fuel fascism, 69–73, 136, 225, 275 Fox, Josh, 30; Gasland and, 385 fracking (hydraulic fracturing), 8, 66n103–4, 85, 118n5–6, 119n22, 127, 145, 193n11, 193n16–18, 195n65, 196n90, 196n92, 198n148, 264n35, 265n60, 266n62, 266n73–74, 267n3–84, 274, 277, 329n 1–12, 329n17, 406n61; anti-fracking movement, Pennsylvania, 115, 163–66; ban, New York, 170, 238–41; calculable expectation and, 228–30; Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and, 372; free trade, 239; Klein, Naomi and, 187–89; patriotism and, 149; Sandra Steingraber and, 175–77; sexism in environmentalism and, 55; Sierra Club and, 366; Ted Cruz and “miracle of America,” 243–45 Free Trade Triumverite, 201–10, 213– 22, 225, 230–37, 242–45, 250–51, 271, 296, 357–58, 309, 390 Friedman, Suzy, 376–78, 40883, 408n85 Friends of the Earth, 2, 140, 242, 190, 199n166, 285, Fukushima, 2, 17, 61n3, 301–4, 307, 312, 332n116–17, 333n118–19

fully capitalized planet, 4, 201, 213, 225, 233, 245, 275–79, 286, 296– 98, 304, 308–11, 338, 369, 378 Funk, McKenzie, xi, 153–54, 245, 257– 58, 269n127–32, 196n98, 267n94 Gaard, Greta, xi, 14–16, 26, 62n36–38, 63n57, 289–92, 331n61–62, 330n57, 331n64–68, 331n77–78 Galtung, Johan, 102–4, 120n55, 120n59–60 General Electric (GE), 259–60, 301, 332n117, 333n120–21, 270n142 globalization, 5, 58, 63n56, 91, 152, 162, 214, 235–36, 249–51, 264n31, 264n33, 264n41–42 Global North, viii, 18, 34, 78, 83, 124, 138, 178, 287–91, 294, 318, 356–58; bad adaptation and, 68–69; carbon emission reductions and, 156; divisions, Global South, 13, 38–39, 68–69, 163–65, 169, 183, 283–84, 307, 391, 399–402; “growthmania” and, 283–86; Homo Colossus and 143; multinational hegemony and, 152– 53, 302–4; myth of endless resources and, 4–6, 365–66; nationalist narratives and, 131 Global South. See Global North global warming. See climate change God, 5, 29, 160–61, 243–44, 409n106 Gold, Russell, 276–78, 329n17 330n18– 25 Greenpeace, 134, 137, 140, 168, 194n40, 194n54, 251; Climate change denial and, 147 Hamm, Harold, 187, 199n162 Hamsher, Jane, 56–57, 86n105–6 Harambe, xiin5, 48–49, 65n91–92, 65n94 Haraway, Donna, 395

Index 447

Heartland Institute, 146–49, 170, 183– 85, 297, 199n156, 332n95 Heatley, Kevin, xiii, 44, 388 Hedges, Chris, 363, 4–5n38, 405n41 Heilsuk, 174, 180 Heritage Foundation, 145–48 Homo Colossus, x, 6–8, 103, 114–18, 129, 143, 234–35, 248, 280, 317–18, 323, 402; armed lifeboat and, 226; denial epistemology (climate change denial) and, 133, 157, 308–12; ecological destruction, ecocentrism, and, 103–5; free trade and, 203, 220; Herman Daly and, 282, 286–88, 293–94; heteropatriarchal footprint and, 12–15, 176; Homo Colossus Mercenary, 250–51, 254–56, 260; Homo Ecologicus, 250–51; Homo Climaticus, 250–51, 254, 265, 260; human-centeredness and, 19–22, 49–52, 277, 341–45; paradoxical character of, 145–46; patriotism and, 150, 183–84; Promethean future, techno-utopia and, 307; Rex Tillerson and, 110; “Twenty Premises” and, 111; voluntary simplicity and, 106–8 Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno, viii, 12, 12n2, 62n28, 356 human-centeredness, 10–11, 282, 292, 390; desirable future and, 27–34; epistemic responsibility and, 47–48, 272, 390; instrumental reason and, 346; human chauvinism and, 19–22, 24, 74, 80–81, 109–11, 277, 380–81; (re)invented, recuperated, 19, 23, 25–27, 36, 40–43, 58, 166, 341– 46, 390;

science and, 351–52; “six fundamental premises,” the systems approach, 60–61; speciesism and, 402–3 human chauvinism, viii; adaptive set of systems as, 56; aesthetic in experience, an experience and, 36–40, 344, 351; axes of, 9–12, 43, 47, 52–53, 58, 68, 84, 125–26, 131, 169, 172–74, 216, 223, 279, 288, 304–6, 310, 337, 382, 387, 402; binarisms of, 39; capitalist roots in, 6–9, 202, 207, 354, 398; Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and, 385–89; civilizational crisis and, 21; climate change denial and, 66, 133, 149, 151–52, 219; Daly, Herman and, 282, 290; desirable future and, 31–34; developing world, 39; disorienting pathology as, 22, 69, 138, 342, 346, 392, 397; ecocentrism and, 77–79, 82, 88, 93–96, 99–103, 103–5; “green extremist” and, 316; God’s providence and, 243; feature of human nature as, 34–36, 71, 74, 107, 155, 158, 236–37, 347; feminist issue and, 15–19, 55, 90; free trade and, 293–96; heteropatriarchal/masculinist institutions and, 24, 57–60, 171, 179–80, 184, 276, 362 Homo Colossus and, 12–15, 110, 116, 145, 183, 186, 226, 233–37, 260, 271, 307, 318; human-centeredness and, viii, 19–22, 27–30, 73, 80–81, 166, 380, 390; nonhuman animals and, 50, 378–79; voluntary simplicity and, 104;

448 Index

science and, 352; subjugation, injustice and, 33, 153, 328, 284, 341, 393 Humane Society of the United States, 378, 405n39, 408n88 Inhofe, James, 192n1–3, 192n5, 195n71, 195n74, 332n95; armed lifeboat in, 151; climate change denial, 123–24, 126, 133, 137–40, 143–46, 148, 153, 160, 186, 227, 242, 297–98; COP21, 308, 323, 313, 326–28; denial epistemology and, 310; ecological apocalypse, 141–42; fossil fuel industry, 129; human chauvinism and, 138; illegal immigration, 124–29, 130–31, 147, 190, 245; science and, 146; sustainability, 157 instrumental reason, 5–15, 32, 147, 202–4, 212, 228, 237, 353; body of global capitalism and, 19; Eight Point Platform and, 107–9, 111; ecological conditions and, 19–22; end of civilization, 88; exchange value and, 59; human nature and, 22; intrinsic value and, 109, 117; metastasis of human centeredness, pathology of, 212, 346; nihilism of, 181; surveillance and, 72 International Labor Organization, 400 The Islamic State, viii, 59, 68, 96, 144, 296–97, 327, 331n93, 389, 400–1 IPCC, 144–45, 375 Jaggar, Alison, xi, 20 Jameson, Fredric, 20 Jamieson, Dale, xi, 329n16, 333n136, 195n77–78, 196n88–89, 197n116–17;

climate change as “middle sized object”, 163, 166, 276; climate change denial, 142–44, 147– 48, 160, 310; evolution and, 148; “market epistemologies,” 160–62, 308–10 Jensen, Derrick, xi, 2, 33–35, 64n66–69, 102–3, 119n14–17, 119n26–32, 119n36, 120n38–41, 120n44, 120n47–49, 187–92, 208, 294, 320–21, 334n157–62; authoritarianism and, 98–100; axes of human chauvinism and, 95–96; book club, forum and, 94–95; end of civilization, 81–83, 98; Endgame, 74–77; George Draffen and, 321–22; intrinsic value, 77–80; pop-cultural ecocentrism and, 96–98, 320, 381; primativism, 343; relationship to nonhuman nature and, 79; Twenty Premises and, 83–88, 93, 100–2, 191 Kara Sea, 154 Katz, Jonathan, 297, 325, 327, 335n174–75 Keith, Lierre, 89–93, 112–13, 120n40– 46, 120n63–66, 177 Kelly, Sharon, 369, 406n60, 406n63 Kiribati Islands, vii–ix, 226, 298, 303, 327, 337 Klare, Michael, 17, 63n42–43, 127–28, 155, 193n14, 193n19, 197n106 Klein, Naomi, xi, 1, 9–10, 21, 26, 61n1, 62n26, 62n33–34, 138, 148, 194n58, 196n83, 196n95, 196n97, 197n120–23, 198n125, 198n127, 198n133–35, 198n143, 199n63–65, 199n67, 199n169–71, 371, 401;

Index 449

Big Greens and, 167–70, 188–92, 363; “Blockadia” and, 175–78; “capitalist problem” and, 165–67; climate change denial and, 148, 150–53; depoliticizing climate change, 161, 178–81; “ferocious love” and, 156, 167–70, 365; grassroots activism and, 162–65, 170–72; market epistemologies and, 13, 162; “Marshall Plan for the Earth” and 187; “Mother Earth” and, 172–75 Koch Enterprises, 9, 138, 146, 170, 198n139 Kolbert, Elizabeth, xi, 216, 237, 263n23–25; Holocene to the Capitalocene, 209–10 Krupp, Fred, 55, 367–69, 373–74, 406n53 Kuhn, Keegan, and Kip Anderson, 363, 405n40 Lauer, David, 127, 193n16 Leopold, Aldo, 27, 63n58, 76 Lewis, Martin, xi, 40, 133, 184, 332n100–3, 332n113–14, 333n127–30, 333n135, 334n150– 54, 334n163, 335n165, 335n167– 69, 409n120; corporate partnerships, “guided capitalism,” and, 34–35, 278, 317–19; denial epistemologies and, 307–10; environmental Prometheans, 74–77, 302–4; liberation from nonhuman nature and, 79, 304–7; “sacred nature of the bourgeois” and, 315–18, 319; techno-utopia, 74, 298–99, 322–25

Linzey, Thomas, xi, 383–84, 388, Loomis, Erik, 203, 246–47, 256, 262n2– 5, 269n126 Lovins, L. Hunter and Boyd Cohen, 268n104–7, 268n110–14, 270n139, 270n143, 270n145, 270n154, 295; climate capitalism, “Natural Capitalism,” and, 248–54, 295; Enbridge and, 254–58; General Electric, 258–59 Lowland gorillas, ix, 48–49, 65n95, 348–49 MacGregor, Sherilyn, 63n44–45, 66n107–8, 145, 178, 196n82, 199n152–53; “feminist ecological citizenship” and, 18–19; masculinized environmentalism, 57–58 Manhattan Institute, 148 Mann, Michael, 339, 403n3 Marcellus Shale, 44–45, 59, 64n85, 119n12, 176, 195n64, 199n150, 265n59, 266n63, 366; calculable expectation and, 228–31 Marcellus Shale Operators Crime Committee (MSOCC), 71–73 market epistemology (market logic), 19, 161–63, 166, 182 market patriot, 150, 179, 181–83, 232, 240, 250, 358–60; consumption and, 231–33 Marx, Karl (Marxism), viiii–x, 8, 162, 233; climate change denial and, 132–36, 139, 148–50, 162; Naomi Klein and, 168; “species being” and 393 McCarthy, Cormac, vii, xiin1, 4, 12, 25, 36, 62n27, 295, 340, 403 McDonald’s, 189–90, 261 Metastasis (of capital), x, 129; capitalism of, 6–9, 187, 383–84;

450 Index

climate change denial and, 181–88; human-centeredness of, 346; planet of, 6, 201, 338, 361–62, 393, 402 Michaelson, Jay, 146, 96n83, 196n87 Monsanto, 53, 231, 268n98, 269n134– 38, 288, 291–93, 329n13–14, 409n107; climate capitalism (Climate Basic) and, 253–54, 257–59; free trade, 296; genetically modified seeds, “Frankencorn,” and, 179, 222–23, 245, 275–76, 388–89 Moore, Jason, 159, 197n103; Capitalocene, xi, 154–56, 235 Move to Amend, 361–62, 405n34 Nader, Ralph, 220–21, 264n45 Naess, Arne, xi, 70, 120n55–57, 120n59–60, 120n62, 293, 328, 335n166; ecocentrism and, 102–3, 105–8, 319–20; Eight Point Platform and, 103–5, 108–11; human-centeredness and, 75; liberation from nonhuman nature and, 323; pest explosion and, 114–16; pop-cultural ecocentrism and, 74–75 NASA, 134, 194n39, 249 Nestle, 224, 366, 404n27, 407n71–72; Bottled water and, 356–57, 372–73 Nike, 209, 217, 232, 262n8, 263n11, 263n13, 268n103, 275, 288, 298, 361, 404n29, 405n31; President Obama and, 205, 247–48, 357–59, 366 Obama, Barack. See Nike Ocean Conservancy, 16, 50, 63n41 Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, 306, 333n131 Oloff, Kirsten, 340, 403n4–7

Oreskes, Naomi and Eric M. Conway, xi, 195n75–76, 196n86, 199n159, 256; climate change denial and, 354–55; poverty of science education and, 141–42; tobacco industry and, 185–87 panda bears, ix, 65n95–96, 374 Panitch, Leo and Doug Henwood, 214– 19, 264n31, 264n33, 264n41–42 Parenti, Christian, x, 78, 102–3, 118n1– 4, 120n54, 120n58, 123n21–29, 130–32, 192n6, 194n56; armed lifeboat, 73, 305–7, 351; “bad adaptation” to climate change and, 67–69, 72–74, 109–10, 117–18, 132; capitalism as international system, 70–71; Jose Ramirez, climate change migration and, 125–27, 130–31; law-making and law-preserving, 117–18 Parr, Adrian, 136–38, 156, 168, 190, 194n48–53 Parry, Sam, 370–71, 406n61–62, 407n76 Passenger Pigeon, ix, xiin4 pathologies of capital, 1, 12, 19, 25, 49, 141, 184, 328, 351, 373, 390, Pemex, 127–28, 306 Pooley, Eric, 189–90, 367–72, 406n52, 406n55 Pop-cultural Ecocentrism. See Derrick Jensen Promethean Environmentalism, 34, 79–80, 302–7, 345; advertising strategy as, 323; sacred nature of bourgeois values, 315–18; pop-cultural ecocentrism versus, 74–77; techno-utopia and, 324, 367 pseudo-aesthetic, 351–70, 374, 390–94

Index 451

Purple Pig-Nosed Frog, 50–51, 141, 146, 157, 348 Quijones, Don, 202, 208–9, 262n1, 263n18 recuperation, 28, 33, 46–47; aesthetic in experience and, 60; desirable future and, 156; ecofeminist, 58; human-centeredness and, 57, 166; place of, 42 REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), 284 Refugee(ism), climate change, 68, 123–29, 132–36, 147, 166–69, 184, 190, 209, 225, 245, 257–60, 287–89, 312, 399; COP21 and, 326; Syria, vii, 337, 398–99; women and girls and, 398–402 resistance, 69, 95–98, 151–52, 180, 219, 247, 256, 304, 310, 347, 362; antibiotic to, viii; deep green and, 73–75, 89, 97–100, 120n40–41, 120n 52–53, 151, 158–60, 191, 381–84; ecocentrism and, 95; ecofeminist, 169; Endgame, Vol II, and, 119n15–17; reform, versus, 167–72 Responsible Drilling Alliance, 164, 198n131 Revkin Andrew, 48, 65n91 The Road, vii Rosneft, 154, 197n104, 197n112 Rothchild, Richard, 148, 151–53 Sawyer, Suzanna, 3, 61n9, 343, 404n9–10 Schumer, Charles, 219–21 Secrett, Charles, 190, 199n166 Seed, John, 76

Seneca Lake Defenders, 69, 118n9, 175–79, 198n146 Sengwer, vii, 284–89, 293–97, 312 Shell Oil (Dutch Royal), 2, 4, 7, 61n8, 61n15, 128–30, 187–90, 194n38, 194n41–42, 198n46, , 222–23, 306, 329n15 Drilling in the Arctic and, 133–35, 143–46, 151–55, 207–10, 276, 285 Shiva, Vandana, 39, 52–53, 64n76 Sierra Club, 55–57, 105, 140–43, 150, 188, 230, 361–65, 366, 372–74, 405n35, 405n44–47 Smithfield Farms, 367, 376–79, 381, 407n87–88 Soon, Willie, 147 speciesism, 32, 59–60, 79, 93, 100, 184, 202, 289, 393, 403, 408n87 Standing Rock Sioux, 118n7, 168 Steady State Sustainability, 256, 280– 83, 299; carbon sequestration and, 286; climate policy and, 294; COP21 and, 278; nonhuman animals, 292; human population and, 290; salvation capitalism, failed as, 184, 291, 328; market mechanisms, 285–88, 293; reduced consumption, 305 Steingraber, Sandra, 171, 190, 198n147–48, 199n150, 392; depoliticizing the geopolitical terrain of climate change, 178–81; mother image and, xi, 175–81 Strait of Malacca, 212, 216, 222 subjugation, vii, 95, 171–72, 176, 207, 211, 222, 237, 288, 310, 389, 393–98, 401–2 Sussman, Brian, 193n30–35, 194n36– 38, 194n59–61, 195n66–67, 195n72–73, 196n93, 199n160, 199n172, 200n173–75; armed lifeboat, 151;

452 Index

climate change denial and, 132–36, 140, 147, 150–53, 157, 157–60, 168, 185–90, 316; conquest capitalism and, 136–39, 141, 181; deregulated capitalism and, 160–62; ecocentrism and, 190–91; “eco-tyranny” and, 132–36, 138, 139–41, 146, 187, 244, 309; entitled consumption and, 142–44; myth of endless resources and, 143 sustainability, 45, 64n77, 65n87, 120n63, 212, 275–76, 402, 405n40, 408n92–93, 409n104–5; aesthetic in experience, an experience and, 337–41, 347–51; climate capitalism and, 248–51, 254–58, 286; Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and, 380–83, 391–92; Daly, Herman and, xi, 184,–87, 280– 83, 283–86, 286–89, 292–96, 328; ecocentrism and, 83; “eco-radicals” and, 35, 316; human chauvinism and, 60, 165–67; minimum condition of desirability and, 58, 276–77; myth of endless resources and, 254, 337–38; settling for, 36–40, 40–43, 57; rhetoric of, 6, 36, 39, 157–60, 162–65, 250, 259, 283–86, 289, 346, 367–68, 374–78; techno-utopia and, 34, 298–302, 316–17, 323–25; unsustainability and, 311–12 Syngenta, 245, 268n98 Syria, vii–ix, 9, 62n25, 127–29, 298, 327, 337, 398–402, 409n119, 410n123, 410n125–26 Systems Approach (Ecofeminist), 32, 52–57, 389–95; nonhuman life and, 43–52

tar sands, 7–10, 145, 164, 226, 269n124, 328n1, 329n2–4, 329n7, 364; U.S. Oil Sands, CEO Cameron Todd and, 271–74, 276, 280, 299–300, 305 Tea Party, 183, 199n156, 233, 237–45, 266n72, 266n76, 267n80, 372 techno-utopia, 6, 36–40, 74, 133, 184, 271, 296–303, 307–12, 315–18, 322–24, 338, 345–46, 354, 371, 381; Big Greens and, 373; consumption and, 325; “guided capital,” 278; intrinsic value, contrast, 75; labor exploitation and, 304; myth of endless resources and, 279; nation state and, 327; nonhuman nature and, 79–80, 320– 21, 390; TPP and, 328 terrorism, viii–x, xiin3, 2, 9, 39, 62n18, 140, 207, 216, 272, 360, 380–82, 391, 399–402; anti-terrorism and, 278–79; eco-terrorism, climate change and, 129–32, 132–36, 140, 144; human migration and, 129–31 279, 287, 338; myth of endless resources and, 143–45; state-sponsored and, 327; war on, xi, 123–24, 124–29, 130 Todd, Cameron. See tar sands Trade Adjustment Assistance, (TAA), 220, 236 Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), 202, 207–9, 211, 213, 215–20, 223–24, 235–36, 262n1, 263n20– 22, 264n27, 264n38, 271 Trade Promotion Agreement (TPA), 217–20, 236, 241, 258, Transpacific Partnership (TPP), 262n1, 262n6, 263n9, 263n12, 263n26, 264n28–29, 264n45, 266n62,

Index 453

266n65–68, 266n70–71, 267n81, 269n137, 278–80, 326–28, 404n30, 405n32; climate capitalism and, 213–17, 225–28, 248, 251, 258–59, 274; “economic grand enclosure” and, 201–4; environmental clauses, 237–42, 250, 254–58, 278; function of the nation state and, 207–9, 215, 305; Obama and, 357, 366; opposition to, 217–21; Vietnam and Cambodia, implications for, 204–7, 235 tribalism, exclusionary, 68, 71–73, 77–79, 89–94, 118 Trump Donald, 40, 62n19–21, 135, 159, 194n47, 265n58, 367; “America First!” nationalism and, 8, 225–27; Big Greens and, 367, 371–73; climate change denial, 227, 354, 373, 391; “deepwater capitalism” and, 8–9; ecocentrism and, 93

Tuvel, Rebecca, 171–73, 176, 198n140– 42, 199n149 The Walking Dead, 114, 130 Wal-Mart, 207, 211, 215, 231, 247, 256–57, 264n37, 264n39 270n144, 270n146–47, 270n149– 51, 275, 358, 406n52, 407n74–75; Big Greens and, 190–91, 367–68, 373–74, 381; climate capitalism and, 259–61; sustainability and, 261 Warren, Elizabeth, 219–21, 265n56 Wilks Brothers, 243–44 The Wilson Center, 55, 154, 196n101 Wilson, E.O., 381 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 359 World Wildlife Federation, 51, 65n95, 269n124, 374 Worstall, Tim, 232–36, 266n67–68 Wuerthner, George, 158, 196n102, 197n113 Zizer, Michael, and Julie Sze, 375, 408n81 zoos, ix, xi, 2, 10, 48–51, 65n91 202, 342

About the Author

Wendy Lynne Lee is professor of philosophy at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania where she has taught for twenty-five years. She’s the author of two earlier books, On Marx (Wadsworth, 2001), and Contemporary Feminist Theory and Activism: Six Global Issues (Broadview, 2010). She’s published more than 35 scholarly essays in journals such as Hypatia, Feminist Theory, Environmental Philosophy, Feminist Studies, Ethics and the Environment, Diametros, Ethics, Place, and Environment, or as contributions to collections such as I Ink, Therefore I am (Blackwell), The Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Sex, What Philosophy Can Tell Us About Our Dogs (Blackwell), and the Norton Critical Edition of the Communist Manifesto. She also writes a take-no-prisoners blog, The Wrench, whose focus is the fraught intersection of the geopolitical, the environmental, and the feminist. She’s an amateur photographer whose primary documentary work has been the eroding landscape of the Pennsylvania shalefields.

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