And do I have to mention that when they say “Science to the rescue,” they don’t actually mean the rescue of the planet: they mean rescuing this culture from the effects of “turning off”—sorry, reorganizing; oh fuck it, murdering—the world?
Of course they don’t mean the rescue of the planet. The machine über alles.
Early on, the article lays out what’s going on, “With the Earth warming at a rate 10 times faster than the heat-up after the last ice age, scientists are looking at anything they can use to stop climate change.”
The problem is that when someone in this culture says they’re looking at “anything they can use to stop climate change,” they really mean looking at “anything they can use” except the sense God gave a goose, and then using that God- or evolution- or nature-given sense to question authoritarian technics, to question human supremacism. That is, they really mean they’re looking at everything except the things that matter most.
You could—and frankly, a lot of human supremacists do—argue that questioning authoritarian technics—which means questioning everything civilization is based on, including agriculture, including human supremacism—is insane and monstrous.
I think that when what is at stake is life on this planet, and when it’s plain to see that from the beginning this way of life has been functionally destructive, that not questioning this way of life is what is insane and monstrous. What’s insane and monstrous is preferring this way of life over life on earth.
So, in the article, what is meant by scientists “looking at anything they can use to stop climate change”?
Well, some of the options actually make sense. The author states, “It’s not crazy to think humans could come up with ways to change the makeup of the planet; after all, humans have already reengineered the earth by accident [sic]. Across the planet we’ve torn down carbon-capturing forests to make room for farms, so we could feed our growing populations. And David Edwards, a professor of conservation science at the University of Sheffield, is starting to think that one of the best ways to geoengineer the planet is to figure out a way to bring those forests back.”
Actually, it’s really easy to bring the forests back: stop destroying them and let them come back. It’s what they want to do, and it’s what they do best.
But stopping deforestation and encouraging reforestation becomes a problem when you’re living in a culture with an extractive economy. When your economy requires and rewards deforestation, and you don’t want to destroy your economy—if, in fact, you can’t even question your economy—then it becomes necessary for you to try to “figure out a way to bring those forests back.” It also becomes, on the largest scale, impossible, for the reasons I laid out earlier; this is all just the environmental version of the anti-empire activists who still want the goodies of empire. These people still want the goodies that come with an economy based on drawdown, and hope to find a way to get them without, well, drawdown. It’s impossible to have overshoot without having the effects of overshoot.
Consider the dead zones in the oceans, which are primarily caused by agricultural runoff (high fertilizer concentrations cause algae populations to explode, then crash; their decomposition depletes oxygen in the water, and oxygen-breathing beings die). Just today I was talking with someone who works on issues associated with dead zones. He said that of the more than 400 of these dead zones across the world, only one has disappeared: the one in the Black Sea.
I asked him what’s different about that one.
“The dead zone went away because the collapse of the Soviet empire caused the collapse of the region’s economies, which caused chemical fertilizers to become too expensive to use.” He paused, then continued, “Now I’m not saying we need to end empires . . .”
I said, “I’ll say it.”
There’s a cause-and-effect relationship between destructive activities and the destruction they cause. There is a cause-and-effect relationship between not stopping destructive activities, and not stopping the destruction those destructive activities cause. So many people want the destruction to cease, but don’t want to stop the destructive activities. And that, of course, is the main point of geoengineering. That’s the main point of most of what passes for environmentalism as well.
I don’t understand why more people don’t understand this.
You wanna stop global warming? Well, stop industrial culture. And what happens then? The forests and grasslands and marshes start doing one of the many things they are good at: sequestering carbon.
But of course, the Newsweek article didn’t mention stopping industrial culture and just letting forests and prairies (and wetlands and coral reefs and seagrass beds) come back. When people in this culture say scientists are considering “everything” to stop global warming, that’s never what they mean.
They mean things like dumping iron into the ocean to stimulate blooms of phytoplankton, who will absorb carbon dioxide, then when they die sink to the bottom of the ocean, carrying the CO2 with them. If done over a great stretch of the Antarctic Ocean, where, if you recall, a reduction in sperm whale numbers already meant a reduction of available iron, this could theoretically sequester almost one-fourth of the carbon dioxide emitted each year by authoritarian technics (i.e., this culture).
Proponents tell us that nothing could go wrong.
That’s what they always tell us.
They are always wrong.
One reason they’re always wrong is that they lie.
Another is that they see what they want to see, and they don’t see what they don’t want to see.
Another is that so often they don’t particularly care about harm to others. They are socially rewarded for not caring about harm to others.
The most important is that the world is more complex than they’re capable of thinking, and more interrelated than they’re capable of thinking, and so actions will inevitably have far more consequences than the original actors are capable of conceptualizing, much less predicting.
Given the (essentially zero percent) success rate of human supremacists when they say that nothing will go wrong when they try to manage the world, do you want to gamble life on earth on their say-so?
But the primary point is never really to solve the stated problem anyway, no matter what the human supremacists say. The point is to exert control. The point is to be God. As the geoengineering proponent Richard Odingo said, “If we could experiment with the atmosphere and literally play God, it’s very tempting to a scientist.”159
Actually, that’s not a temptation: that’s the point. From the very beginning the point has been to destroy the wild nature they fear and hate, and replace it with what they can attempt to control.
So if playing God over an entire ocean isn’t good enough for you, we could also, as the Newsweek article discusses, send “a fleet of planes into the sky” to spray “the atmosphere with sulfate-based aerosols” that would block sunlight from reaching the earth.
Gosh, what could possibly go wrong?
At least Newsweek didn’t support some of the craziest ideas, like changing the earth’s orbit or putting up thousands of mirrors in space.
The Newsweek article ends by turning the focus inward. It states, “Most climate scientists still argue that instead of relying on untested attempts to remake the natural world we’ve unmade, humans might want to take a look at themselves.” Uh, yeah. And especially take a look at our addiction to authoritarian technics. But oops, that’s not what the writer meant when she said we should look at ourselves.
Because stopping the murder of the planet would take “a seismic shift in what has become a global value system,” instead, she and the scientists suggest “a reimagining of what it means to be human. In a paper released in 2012, S. Matthew Liao, a philosopher and ethicist at New York University, and some colleagues proposed a series of human-engineering projects that could make our very
existence less damaging to the Earth. Among the proposals were a patch you can put on your skin that would make you averse to the flavor of meat (cattle farms are a notorious producer of the greenhouse gas methane) [how about a patch to make men averse to rape; or a patch making us averse to all agricultural products; or a patch making us averse to thinking we are the only sentient beings on the planet], genetic engineering in utero to make humans grow shorter (smaller people means fewer resources used) [Yes! That’s the ticket! I’ve always thought the biggest problem with 10,000-ton draglines used in open pit mining is that the operator’s cabin is built to hold a six foot human; if we make the human only three feet tall, that will solve the whole problem!], technological reengineering of our eyeballs to make us better at seeing at night (better night vision means lower energy consumption) [Jesus Christ, do you realize what a tiny percentage of industrial electricity is used for lightbulbs so we can read at night?], and the extremely simple plan of educating more women (the higher a woman’s education the fewer children she is likely to have, and fewer children means less human impact on the globe). [Finally, one I can agree with, but wouldn’t it also be good to educate the men to make it so they don’t want to control the women? Actually, skip that: let’s just make a fucking patch for the men.]”
The article concludes: “It might be uncomfortable for humans to imagine intentionally getting smaller over generations or changing their physiology to become averse to meat, but why should seeding the sky with aerosols be any more acceptable?160 In the end, these are all actions we would enact only in worst-case scenarios. And when we’re facing the possible devastation of all mankind [sic], perhaps a little humanity-wide night vision won’t seem so dramatic.”161
When faced with the “possible devastation of all mankind [sic],” Newsweek proposes everything from manipulating oceans to manipulating the atmosphere to manipulating humans (as one critic of the article put it, turning us into hobbits). But as always, what is left off the table is our addiction to—our enslavement to—authoritarian technics. What is left off the table is any questioning of our human supremacism. What is left off the table is humility.
In this perspective, it is more feasible to engineer the entire planet (or to engineer human physicality) than it is to change this culture’s “value system.”
Think about that.
This is why human supremacists keep trying to manage the planet, even though each time they do they destroy the biome they are trying to manage: it doesn’t really matter to them whom or what they destroy, so long as they keep their way of life going, so long as they get to maintain the illusion of their own superiority, and so long as they get to maintain their “value system.” Their “value system” is more important to them than the life of the planet upon whom even their own lives depend. And they call themselves smart?
Unquestioned beliefs are the real authorities of any culture.
And here’s the real problem: it’s not only mainstream journalists and scientists whose responses to global warming are made absurd by their refusal to question human supremacism and an enslavement to authoritarian technics. Even the writer who complained about turning humans into hobbits responded to the article, “We are already facing the devastation of all mankind [sic]. And science has already provided the means of our ‘rescue,’ the means of reducing ‘the burden humans put on the planet’—the myriad carbon-free energy technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Perhaps LED lighting would make a slightly more practical strategy than reengineering our eyeballs, though perhaps not one dramatic enough to inspire one of your cover stories.”162
What?
I honestly don’t know which I find more disturbing and surreal: the fact that Newsweek seems to think turning us into hobbits is some sort of solution; or the fact that the climate activist critic thinks LED lighting will solve the problem.
Ah, yes, that’s right: the problem with draglines isn’t that the operator’s cabin needs to be smaller! It’s that the headlights need to be LED! How silly of me!
For crying out loud, lighting for residential and commercial uses accounts for only about 12 percent of US consumption. Heck, it only accounts for 14 percent of residential use.
Further, every time this culture invents some way to become more energy efficient, the culture doesn’t use less energy, but uses that energy efficiency to further ramp up the economy, to produce more saleable stuff; in other words, to convert more of the living to the dead.163
It’s all insane.
We will go to any length, promote any absurd solution—change the planet, change what it means to be human—in order to avoid looking at the real problem.
This is the power of unquestioned beliefs.
•••
Of course we have long since “reorganized” the planet, just as we have long since “reorganized” what it means to be human.
Or more precisely, we have in the service of authoritarian technics “reorganized” the planet, and “reorganized” humanity.
We need to restore them both.
To do so we need to reject authoritarian technics, and we need to reject what “humanity” has become, and we need to reject human supremacism. We need to reject supremacism altogether.
•••
In addition to this being a book about human supremacism, it’s a book about supremacism in general. And ultimately, it’s a book about an ideological and physical war that has been going on for ten thousand years between those who hold supremacist and non-supremacist worldviews. The winner of this war determines whether the planet survives. And of course, right now the supremacist side is winning.
The supremacist side in this war believes that members of “our” category—whatever that category may be—are superior to all others, and that this superiority entitles us to exploit them. In fact, our exploitation of these others is ultimately the primary way we know we’re superior. This side believes that difference leads to hierarchy. Men over women. Whites over non-whites. Civilized over indigenous. Humans over nonhumans. Animals over plants. Plants over rocks. Mind over matter. Those higher on the Great Chain of Being over those lower. This side in this war believes all life is war, and that the point of life is to defeat others in this war, to scratch and claw and bite, and then to stab and shoot and bomb and poison your way to the top of the hierarchy you’ve set up (the hierarchy where you already see yourself at the top); and then from the top to exploit all those below you, not merely so you gain the benefits from being so marvelous, but to maintain your position “at the top of the food chain.” You and your SUV.
The non-supremacist side in this war believes that difference leads to complexity and community. A forest wouldn’t be a forest without the contributions of everyone who lives there. It recognizes that the exploitation of some other is no validation of superiority, but merely the exploitation of some other. It believes that life is not a war, but rather simply life, and the point of life is to live and die, and to do so in such a way that you contribute to the overall health of the community.
The worldviews are simply that: worldviews. They’re not reality. Reality is more complex than any worldview. These worldviews have consequences for reality, of course. But they are worldviews nonetheless.
And these worldviews are based on premises. Ultimately, I cannot convince a human supremacist that stones are sentient, any more than he could convince me they’re not. I cannot convince him that bears or frogs or caterpillars are sentient, and he cannot convince me they are not. Because we can never know the experience of another.
And because believing is seeing—by which I mean that preexisting prejudice is often more important to us than physical evidence—no matter what evidence I provide for the sentience of nonhumans, a human supremacist can always, as we’ve seen so many times in this book (and more broadly in the culture) simply ignore the evidence or define or describe away their behavior mechanistically,
and continue on his lonely, hierarchical way. Likewise, he could tell me that rocks don’t move, and I could respond, “Movement is necessary for sentience? That’s awfully anthropomorphic.” He could tell me that rocks have no neurons, and I could respond, “Neurons are necessary for sentience? That’s awfully anthropomorphic.” There is no evidence he could give that would convince me, in part because it is impossible to prove a negative. We could both keep playing our respective games all day, till each wanders away muttering, him that I’m an unscientific idiot and me that he’s a bigoted moron.
Or he could say, “Let’s put aside our prejudices and really look at evidence.”
I say, “Great!”
He says, “You have to admit it’s pretty smart to be able to design a rocket that will take us to Mars.”
I say, “Good point. And you have to admit there’s nothing any creature could do that would be more stupid than to kill the planet.”
He says, “Good point. But we invented automobiles.”
I say, “Good point. But we’re killing the planet.”
He says, “We invented modern medicine.”
“Killing the planet.”
“Computers.”
“Killing the planet.”
“Nanotechnology.”
“Killing the planet.”
He says the creation of these technologies trumps everything.
I say killing the planet trumps everything. It doesn’t matter what goodies we create if we destroy life on earth. And it certainly doesn’t make us smart. Killing the planet is the stupidest thing any creature could do. It trumps every other action.
So then we walk away, him still muttering, “Unscientific idiot,” and me still muttering, “Bigoted moron.”
•••
The Myth of Human Supremacy Page 37
