#147 Bright Green Lies: Reclaiming the Environmental Movement
FiLiA volunteer Salonika interviews Lierre Keith and Julia Barnes about their book and documentary film, ‘Bright Green Lies’. Lierre and Julia explain how the environmental movement has now been highjacked by the ideas that harm the environment, and what we can do to reclaim the movement.
The discussion also highlights the relationship between the oppression of women and the destruction of the natural world and the parallel between the mainstream environmental movement and the mainstream feminist movement.
Listen Here (transcript below):
Lierre Keith is an author, an environmentalist, a food activist and a radical feminist. She is based in California. She is the co-founder of Deep Green Resistance and Women’s Liberation Front. Lierre has authored both fiction and nonfiction books, including the highly acclaimed “The Vegetarian Myth.” She is the co-author of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet and Bright Green Lies: How the environmental movement lost its way and what we can do about it. (http://www.lierrekeith.com/)
Julia Barnes is an award-winning filmmaker, an environmentalist and a feminist. Julia is based in Ontario. Her first film “Sea of Life,” which came out five years ago and won numerous awards, is about the mass extinction that is destroying the world’s oceans. Julia’s latest documentary “Bright Green Lies” was released on Mother Earth Day, 22nd of April 2021. It is based on the book Bright Green Lies.
Transcript:
Salonika from FiLiA in conversation with Julia Barnes and Lierre Keith.
S – Julia, how did you become involved in the environmental movement?
J – I grew up with a love of the natural world. I would go camping and go out in nature and see all the creatures we share the planet with. At the same time for much of my life I was unaware of the destruction that was happening. When I was 16 I watched a documentary called Revolution and learned for the first time that we’re in a mass extinction and the amount of life that is being lost and the devastation that is taking place because of this insane culture. That completely changed my life. I came out of the theatre and decided this is what I have to dedicate my life to. I’m going to work on this and do something about it. I started making documentaries about a week after that.
I got a camera and decided to make a film about the ocean. That’s how I got started.
S – Lierre can you tell us how you got involved in the movement?
L – My question is: I don’t know what is wrong with everybody else? How can you look at what’s happening to our planet and not feel a great deal of sorrow and fear and rage or some desire to want to protect something? That’s something I’ve always felt ever since I was a tiny child. It was obvious to me that humans were doing ghastly things to the web of life and I always felt the emergency of that and I never grew out of it.
I think a lot of children feel that natural love for the world, for the animals, to be outside in the wild of nature and to see the colour of the sunset and the wide open ocean and whatever it is they have access to. Children naturally gravitate to the wild, even when children are given free rein to designing playgrounds, it’s not always where they go. They will find a tiny bit of nature; it’s really what children want.
I think we forget, it’s so painful, what’s happening to our planet, a lot of people just learn to not feel it anymore and just go numb inside. But for whatever reason, I never did. It was just a natural progression to me when I became old enough to really start to try and understand what had really gone wrong on this planet. It was one of things I desperately wanted to get to the bottom of – why are doing this to our one and only planet? – and then, what can I do about it.
S – So you’re both part of the environmental movement. Why did you feel the necessity to write a book and make a documentary that criticises the movement?
L – Well it’s happened over the course of my lifetime. The environmental movement has completely changed its focus.
I was born in 1964 and we could say the environmental started about then. Rachel Carson, The Silent Spring and then The First Earth Day, that was all in the beginning years of my life. The environmental movement was so strongly about one thing, protecting wild places and wild beings from destruction. That changed.
Sometime in the late 80s and 90s there was a real shift in focus. That shift has got stronger and stronger. I feel like it has cannibalised what used to be the movement.
It’s no longer about saving those wild places and wild being, it’s become – we need another fuel source – so that we can continue to destroy wild beings and wild places, we don’t want to stop the destruction anymore, we just want to find a better way to fuel that destruction. There were a bunch of people who tried to bring in the emergency of climate change into the main stream. I certainly appreciate those efforts, that’s a really emergency, it’s not the only emergency and I don’t even think it’s the primary emergency. I think it’s a symptom of the other emergency, that bigger emergency, that life is being eaten.
By getting that into public consciousness, that was a positive thing but their demands were always – we need to switch fuel sources – instead of trying stop those industrial processes that are literally devouring our planet, they want to, instead, create a whole new set of technologies that are supposed to be clean and green so that we can continue to have industrialised civilisation.
So, that’s the main problem, the main principle of our movement has been hollowed out from the inside.
The 2nd problem is that fossil, the thing we’re all supposed to be against, which I am against, is functionally irreplaceable. The alternatives: solar, wind, biomass, hydropower will never scale up to power our industrial economy, they simply aren’t dense enough.
All the engineers agree with us, there seems to be a lot of people who want to believe in that as a kind of fairy tale but none of the numbers work out so it can’t really be done.
The 3rd problem is these new technologies are in their own right an assault on the living world. From beginning to end they require that same scale of devastation. Things like open pit mining, deforestation. These are some of the most toxic industrial processes that has even been invented by humans and the Earth is not going to heal from them in anything but a Geological time scale. They also require fossil fuel, they can’t be done without fossil fuel and that’s why we have 2 choices. Fossil fuel or alternative fossil fuel because it’s really the same thing. It all rests on the same industrial platform.
All 3 of those things is what the book was about.
The number 1 is really the primary one. The entire reason this movement exists has been hijacked into becoming a lobby arm for a sector of the industrial economy, instead of trying to stop that industrial economy.
J – I got involved in the environmental movement in 2013 and I was signing up for the mailing lists of all the major environmental organisations, going to the massive protests with hundreds and thousands of people marching in the street. It always struck me that there was such a disconnect between the understanding of the issues and the causes and the solutions that were being put forth by these main stream organisations.
It was so surface level like all we had to do was sort out the fuel source and everything would be ok. It didn’t make any sense.
When I found out about the book Bright Green Lies I thought this was an important thing to make a film about because we really need to understand that these technological fantasies are not solutions to the wrongs that we are facing.
S – I see you are not for fossil fuels; I see that one of the accusations against anyone who is against renewable energies is seen as for fossil fuels.
L – The problem is there are all solving the wrong variable. What they are taking as a given is industrial civilisation so that’s the thing we all have to defend and that’s a way of life that can never be questioned. If you take that as a thing you have to protect, then yes, you have to find a way to fuel it because it depends on a vast amount of energy.
If the amount of energy the average American uses had to be provided by human beings, we would each have to have 2000 slaves. It’s vast and no even the richest Pharaohs of ancient Egypt or the Roman emperors could have imagined that amount of energy at their disposal. Yet we’re supposed to just take this as our god given right or it’s the way things are.
The truth is, this was a one-time blow out. We’ve already used all of the easily accessible metals. Ones that were pretty deeply mined are also gone. We’re running out of all of this stuff but especially what we’re running out of is fossil fuel. The stuff around the surface we burned through pretty quickly and now the wells have to go deeper and deeper to get to it and the very last wild places are now under threat. Alaska, or wherever you go there’s one last fragment of something pristine and that’s where the last oil is, it is eventually going to be gone.
There are really only 3 generations of people who are going experience anything like this and even of those people it was a small slice of rich wealthy countries. No matter how poor you feel in a rich place like America you still have access to all the goodies that industrial civilisation produces. It never existed before and it’s not going to come again. But they don’t want to face that.
Instead there’s this constant effort to make us believe we can have this forever, that the problem is that it’s not being distributed equitably, so everybody should have this one way or another and we just need to figure out how to fuel it. The sun shines everyday so why don’t we just harvest the sun?
The reason we can’t harvest the sun is because the rest of the planet needs the sun. Plants need the sun, they’re the ones doing the primary production. They can photosynthesis, you and I can’t do that. If we take all the land and turn it into solar panels, there’s not going to be any life. The scale of what would be necessary to use something like solar to produce this kind of energy, you’d have to cover the whole planet in solar panels. It’s not feasible.
The number 46 is the energy density of diesel fuel so it’s 46 mega joules per kilogram. That same number for a lithium battery is 1. For an LED acid battery its 0.17 so it’s 46 times more dense than anything you’re going to come up with for solar or wind or any of the others. It just can’t be done.
Fossil fuels have been condensing for millions of years, that’s why it’s called fossil fuel, it’s really old. Pressure has been going on for millions of years to make it that dense. You can’t do that in 24 hours. You would need vast amounts of land. The amounts of land you’re talking about, as these predictions get more and more realistic, there’s not enough land on the planet to do this kind of stuff. It’s just not dense enough and they’re not really facing up to what would actually be required to achieve that order of energy consumption.
So, they are solving for the wrong variable, they want to keep this way of life, extend it to everybody, they just want to find another way to fuel it.
When we say, oil and coal and gas are running out, they’re destroying the climate. But none of these others can actually take its place, then we get accused of being shills for the fossil fuel industry.
That’s not the actual alternative, those aren’t our only 2 choices.
There is a 3rd choice here which is protecting life on Earth which is actually defending the wild and that means this way of life has to stop but that’s the thing nobody can say out loud.
Our politicians won’t say it out loud because they won’t get elected. The disappointment is when the environmental movement won’t say it out loud anymore. If we’re not going to be the defenders and the resisters, there’s nobody left to defend the wild.
S – You said we need to defend life on Earth and also in the book you say a lot of birds are killed by wind turbines, and others say a lot of birds get killed by cats. Do you have a comment?
L – For solar panels and wind turbines, they will say – other things are more destructive as if that’s somehow ok that we would add an additional destructive industry. Of course we should be working to reduce all things that are causing harm. Not, we’re causing harm already to let’s destroy everything. It makes no sense as an argument.
Solar panels and their massive fields if put into the desert, they destroy the desert tortoises. Wind doesn’t just kill birds and bats directly, even the pressure difference between the blades can cause their lungs to explode which is pretty horrific. That’s where they are installed but you see devastation at every stage of the production process. Mining, extraction, manufacturing, all sorts of toxic waste. With the rare earths involved with solar panels and wind turbines, it’s a disaster for the real world.
J – Also the claim is that these other types of technologies are climate neutral and nothing could be further from the truth. Just the production of solar panels is one of the leading sources of 3 of the most potent green house gases. They are Hexafloroethane, Nitrogen triflouride and sulphur hexafluoride. One reason why you’ve never heard of the first one is it’s 100% manufactured by humans. It does not exist in nature. We create it by the toxic industrialised processes and one of the main ways it’s produced is through making solar panels. It’s 12000 times more potent than Carbon Dioxide in terms of it’s damage to the atmosphere. The Nitrogen triflouride is 17,000 more virulent that Carbon Dioxide. So when they say this stuff is climate neutral, it’s just lies. These are horrible things, some of the most destructive processes we’ve ever invented. Everything about the large solar farms is that they actually change the climate just by their action. At night the Earth is supposed to cool off, there’s no sun anymore and its dark and all of the energy that’s been absorbed by the ground, the heat radiates back up so that part of the world can be cooled as night progresses and the planet turns. When you have these windmills going all night, it keeps the heat from escaping so the heat can’t rise back up. So what they found when they do these tests at these large wind farms is that it’s actually changing the climate, it’s making it hotter.
That’s called changing the climate, that’s the thing they’re supposed to be stopping and they’re changing the climate by doing it. So first the industrial process to make it and then the horrifying gasses that are so much more dreadful for the atmosphere. The heat from the turbines close to the ground, there’s nothing good that can be said about this.
We do a little survey around the globe of all the sand that is being mined, it’s a very specific kind of sand and it’s just horrifying, the number of endangered species being driven to extinction just to mine the sand for solar panels.
Anybody who lives near them, there’s always resistance to this. Arsenic is released from the manufacturing plant. There’s one in Iceland that we talk about, people had burns in their throats from living near the smelter. They couldn’t go outside. Their throats would ulcerate just from breathing. They were in this huge battle with the government to get this thing shut down and they feel like their being held hostage because they can’t go out and that’s horrible. But I want everybody to remember the animals because they have got nowhere else to go but outside.
So these are the kinds of industrial processes we are talking about. It’s not minor, we’re talking about really horrible chemicals.
S – You say the environmental movement has been hijacked. What should the environmental movement look like? What should we as environmental organisers focus on?
J – I think the environmental movement should be what it was set up to do which was to protect the natural world and should make its allegiance to life on the planet not to the system that is destroying life on the planet.
It’s not too complicated, we have to be bio centric again and take it away from the corporate interest who have taken over through funding and also it’s a message that’s easy and palatable for people to hear. We need to reclaim the environmental movement and make it once again about protecting life.
L – The analysis we are asking people to undertake can feel very harsh. It seems almost impossible emotionally. It’s a lot easier to go with the narrative that all of this can go on for ever and all we need to do is swap our fossil fuels and it will be fine. Everything we are used to having can just go on into infinity. It’s like having to tell somebody Santa Claus isn’t real. It’s a bad moment when you’re 8 or 9 years old and you realise it’s not real. You have to put that away. It’s not that you can’t find magic in the world, it is still magic out there but some of the stuff doesn’t stand the test of time as you grow up, you mature. This is one of those moments, as a culture we just have to face the facts.
James Howard has this great line – our planet needs us to reality based adults – and that’s really all I’m asking. This way of life cannot continue. We used to know that infinite growth on a finite planet was literally insane and somehow we lost track of that.
So it does mean questioning industrialised civilisation and beyond that it means questioning civilisation itself.
One specific pattern of human life, it’s not universal, we didn’t live that way for 99.9% of our time on this planet. It’s only in recent history that we have become monsters and destroyers.
Everybody asks us – what’s the alternative? –
Every place you go there are probably people still there who remember what the alternative is, older and better ways, where humans are integrated into living communities, who don’t impose themselves across the living world.
I don’t think it’s hard, we know how to do it, millions of people know how to do it, thousands of cultures knew how to do it. Most of them are under attack right now, many people have been driven extinct, that’s part of the history of civilisation, groups of people who live in cities, going out and conquering their more sustainable wild neighbours who knew how to live inside the forest and to live with the river. They get conquered, they’re stuff gets taken back to the city, the city uses it all, they conquer the region and eventually it collapses. That is the pattern of civilisation. It’s about draw down and over-shoot.
We are on the biggest draw down and overshoot that could ever have been imagined, the entire thing has gone global.
We still have to face facts though, there’s just not that much time left. We are reaching so many tipping points of what the Earth can sustain and past a certain point it’s going to be a very bad spiral down. I don’t think we’re out of time but we are running out of time.
I guess my plea is we have to face reality. This was not a way of life that was ever going to last. The end was written into the beginning. We have to face that.
It means we have de-industrialise, let the Earth repair and the best way to do that is to stop the destruction.
You and I cannot build a forest but the trees and the animals and the bacteria know how to do that. We just have to let them do it.
That word civilisation just means people living in cities. That means those people need more than the land can give. A city is basically concrete, stone and buildings, there’s not anything wild there. The food, water and energy have to come from somewhere else. From that point forward it doesn’t matter what peaceful values hold in their hearts, that society is dependent on imperialism and genocide because no-one willingly gives up their land, water, trees, soil, fish but since the people in the city have used up their own they have to go out and get them from somewhere else.
That’s always the pattern. You have this bloated power centre, it’s the city and it’s surrounded by concrete colonies. So the city goes out, it takes everything that it can, you have to have an army to do that. The army is made possible by agriculture and agriculture also makes that army inevitable because every time you do agriculture, you’re destroying your soil, so you’re going to run out of food eventually. There’s a moment when you have a surplus and the human population grows in response to that surplus.
Year by year and generation by generation, the health of the soil declines. It essentially turns into desert at the end of it all and the civilisation collapses. You can only get so big. You run out of people to conquer, you’ve taken all their stuff too and it just collapses.
Then somewhere else in the region it will spring up again. You can follow it around the Mediterranean for instance. The Egyptians, the Greeks the Romans, eventually it’s just over.
It’s the same pattern everywhere. Everywhere there’s been civilisation you see the same thing.
There’s been 34 civilisations and they’ve all ended in collapse. It’s grim. The archaeological evidence is always grim. The final proteins in the cooking pot are human. People starve and they do what starving people do. It’s horrible to contemplate and people don’t want to contemplate it. It’s not fun to notice the historical pattern.
We’ve been doing the same thing for 8000 years and it’s not going to end any differently. You can’t keep drawing down and expect it to last forever.
That’s it. It’s draw down and overshoot, it’s conquering your neighbours, militarism. It’s not just destroyed the planet, it’s destroyed human society as well. It’s not really pleasant to live in a society that’s hierarchical and militarised and where’s there all this domination. People aren’t happy in those situations. But that’s what it is.
That’s the problem that nobody wants to face. It’s a very long standing problem and there’s not really a solution except to stop doing it.
It’s the simplest thing in the world and also really hard. We actually have to do it if we’re going to save our planet.
S – We are facing opposition from the basic psychologies of the people and they will do anything to protect their lives, starting from denial. Maybe also thinking that even though other civilisations ended in collapse, that’s not going to happen to us.
L – One word I have heard for it is Techno-narcissism. Which I think sums it up. We’ve got to break that loyalty to the system and find that Biofillic urge that I honestly believe we are all born with.
It’s hard because when your food comes from the store and your water comes from the tap and your livelihood comes from a cheque that’s deposited into the bank, you’re going to defend those things. if you don’t know another way, that’s all you’ve got so you’re going to think those are the most important things.
We’re going to have to remember there are better ways and there are people still here who can help us. We’re going to have to learn to listen to them and approach this with a lot more humility.
S – Julie, how do we do it?
J – I don’t know how you change that for people, I think you just have to point out the fact that there is that divide. A lot of people have this idea that the environmental movement is one thing and don’t realise there’s the Bio-centric side and the techno-centric side.
I think if people really understood that the techno industry is destroying life on the planet, the only logical option is to side with life on the planet and want to protect that.
That is the solution to everything, it’s bringing life back to this planet.
We can sequester enormous amounts of carbon. 99% of the prairies are gone and they can sequester carbon really quickly. 90% of the fish in ocean are gone. They sequester carbon in their bodies. So many different bio communities that have been decimated that could really restore the balance of carbon in the atmosphere if we let them come back and protect them with our allegiance to life on the planet. We would also have thriving natural communities.
It makes a lot of sense. WE need to understand that side of it.
S – Now I’m going to shift our focus to women. You’re both radical feminists. Do you see the role of feminism in your vision of the environmental movement?
L – In 1978 Mary Daly wrote - Patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet and that it’s basic value was necrophilia and that what it was after was dead objects on a dead planet.
When you look into things like necrophilia, you find definitions like obsessions with machines and with turning human beings into mechanical objects. There’s a real cross over with sadism which is all about controlling living beings and denying them which provides the sexual thrill for the sadists.
I don’t know if there’s a better description of civilisation because that’s what happens to the entire planet. Every last life form is under the thrall of this patriarchal machine. Living creatures aren’t seen as having any moral standing, there’s not even a sense that they exist. The difference between a machine and a living being is so basic. You can take a machine to pieces and put it back together. You can’t do that with a living creature. All of us a self-willed, whether it’s a bacteria or a redwood tree or a silver fox, whatever it is, we all have that capacity to love our loves and a right to exist.
The biophillic impulse to live to me is the basis of feminism and exactly the opposite of the patriarchal impulse which is all about domination and trying to make us all subordinate.
Riane Eisler talks about this, there are 2 kinds of societies. There’s the dominator mode, the patriarchal mode which thinks in terms of hierarchies, rich people over poor people, men over women, white people over people of colour, you see all of this everywhere.
Then there’s the partnership model where you understand we’re all in a relationship with each other and the relationship is important and it’s about care and concern for other humans, we all should have basic human rights and extending all of that to all the creatures of this incredible planet.
We all need each other, we are a web and all connected. None of us exist without the other. It’s a very different kind of awareness to live with the awe that life inspires and the love we should feel.
I think this analysis has been going on for a long time, that feminists have come with insights and put together environmental movement and the feminist movement and put all that together for a more global picture. I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere if we don’t do that. I don’t think you can understand part of it without the whole.
S – One thing I noticed about the main stream feminist movement in relation to the environmental movement and how the mainstream environmental movement is now standing up for activities that are destroying the natural world. I guess the same thing can be said about the main stream feminist movement, like standing up for activities like sex work and the sex industry that inherently oppresses women. What are your views on this?
L – I completely agree with you, it’s the same process and I think for the same reasons. Capitalism knows how to vaporise every single threat that there might be and is able to gut whatever resistance there is and flip it around so it’s doing the bidding of the masters. This happens to movements all the time. At least if we can name it, that’s a helpful thing.
You’re right, in my lifetime the same thing has happened to the feminist movement. Some of the worst things that are happening to women on this planet are now re-cast as something that is called empowering. So you have torture of women in pornography, prostitution and the industrialised sex industry, they will defend it as if it is a way to freedom. They would never suggest that brutal, body punishing, permanently damaging activities would be liberating for anyone else but somehow for women this is supposed to be the road to liberation.
It’s exactly the same thing. At any previous point, nobody would have thought industrial processes that are 17,000 times more harmful to the climate would be a good idea for the environmental movement to defend. Yet here were are, this is supposed to be the solution. They are paving the road to hell with it.
We need to take all of our movements back.
Our analysis is correct. Starting from first principles, we are seeing that sadism and necrophilia are the problem and the power relationships that inevitably come from that, are the problem. We’re not going to save the planet or human rights until we name it and figure out how to fight it.
J – I find it mind blowing how movements can get co-opted. It’s really insane. I don’t fully understand how it happens. It does seem really obvious that in both of those cases that what is being promoted is not a good thing.
S – As radical feminists when we say anything against ‘sex worker’s rights’ we get called swerfs (sex worker exclusionary radical feminists)
L – There’s some people who can’t be argued with. I don’t know how to get to anyone who is that far into having bought into it. It’s complete opposite of everything we know about what humans are psychologically and what they need to lead full and good lives and what trauma does to people and how rape is the worst form of torture in the world. That’s what Amnesty International says. It’s the hardest kind of torture to recover from. And it’s ubiquitous, across the culture. It’s absolutely what prostitution is.
We know this, some of the founders of radical feminism, we’re the survivors of the worst of these harm. That’s how they knew what they knew. They had experienced it themselves. They all got together and talked about it. That was the basic model of consciousness raising.
What you come out of that with is: It wasn’t just me, it wasn’t my fault, it really had nothing to do with me and what I wanted and who I was as a person. This is what happens to women. To some proportion of women, men are going to do these things and it’s because we’re women. It’s not a personal insult in any way, it’s done by the class of men to the class of women and that’s what they figured out.
Andrea Dworkin talked about the barricade of sexual terrorism, it’s rape, incest, battering, pornography, prostitution, sexualised murder in various forms from culture to culture.
In our culture we have things like anorexia in others you might have FGM. It’s always the same, the sadism, the control. How do you get through to someone who thinks it’s some kind of sexy game to play? How are women not human beings?
The best we can do is 2 things: somebody has to be through the door first. If you’re the first one to tell them something different, you’re not going to get through, so you take the hit and move on. The 10th time, the 20th time somebody hears it, there might be enough of a crack wherever the resistance is to see women as human, it falls apart and then they remember and suddenly it makes sense. Then they’re on the path to do more analysis, to read more books, to talk to more people. Eventually they might land with us. We have to keep trying. If we don’t have our analysis in the public domain, young people are never going to find it. The analysis we have is hard to find.
We’re against all the powers, the powers are never going to give us a platform.
What we do have on our side is truth and that speaks to people especially if you’ve been through those abuses. When you finally hear the truth told about what happened to you and you realise it’s not your shame, you didn’t do it, this was done to you and it was done for a reason then you suddenly have a language and all of that painful chaos snaps into focus. Now there’s a language and we can give that to other women.
It means we have to be out there a lot and taking the hit from people who are hostile to us.
A friend of mine said – you have to meet a woman where she is but you don’t leave her there – often I think that’s my goal. Fighting is not easy but there is a joy in resistance and at least you get your self-respect back.
That’s honestly the best we can do.
S – Julia do you see any links between saving the planet and saving women?
J – There’s so many links. The root cause of both of these problems is the same. The culture of supremacy and domination and violation of both women and the natural world, so changing that culture is a big part of it and also giving women reproductive freedom is huge. It would have an impact of the number of humans the planet could sustain.
L – when we talk about overshoot, people get anxious because they think you are referencing population control. That has been tried and there’s a reason people recoil from it. It’s involved a lot of human rights horrors especially against women and women of colour so I understand why people recoil.
That’s not what I’m talking about. Those methods don’t really work anyway.
The thing we do know about how to reduce the population. The number 1 thing that works around the world is teaching a girl to read, that means that when women and girls have that much power over their lives and their futures, they choose to have fewer children. Half the children born each year are either unplanned or unwanted. All we have to do is give complete reproductive power to women and this problem will solve itself in time.
All things being equal most couples only want 2 children. There’s always going to be people who want more or don’t want any but it averages out to about 2. What’s interesting about that is that it’s replacement levels. Most people understand, there’s a level of fulfilment you get with 2 but when you add more, it’s more than they want to do. It starts to have a negative effect on their future and their emotional capacity. They know they’re going to get overwhelmed and they know they won’t be able to provide the future they want for their kids so 2 is the number most couples settle on.
So all we have to do is give women complete control over their reproductive lives and their sexual lives. Which goes against almost every religion in the world particularly the fundamental ones. They have an enormous amount of power.
It’s not a hard concept. It’s not violating the laws of the universe, it’s purely political. Humans made them, humans can change them. We have to get on it pretty quickly. There’s too many people and there’s no way the planet can sustain it.
If you test the bodies of all the people in the world they will contain nitrogen and the source of that nitrogen is fossil fuel. What that means is we’re eating oil. When you point that out you get accused of wanting to kill. I don’t want to kill anybody; I’m just pointing out the truth of the situation we are in. We are literally eating oil. That’s why the population has grown to the numbers that it has. Nobody could think this is a plan for the future. We are going to have to face this as adults. The best way forward is to support the rights of women and girls.
S – The world treats women in the same way it treats the natural world; as something to extract things from.
J – Yes, totally.
L – That’s the basis of patriarchy. Once men invent private property, and then they want to hand it down the male lineage, they have to control women. Every woman knows whether she has had a baby or not. We know who the mother is. There’s no way you cannot know. It’s not true for men. Paternity is a much more sketchy prospect.
Up until very recently with genetic testing, you can’t be really sure in the way women can be sure that the child is theirs. It means that women have to be controlled and to control her fertility you have to control her entire life.
She can’t go outside without a chaperone, she can never be alone with another man, she can’t leave the house. All these things have to be done to keep women constrained and all that is done so men know for sure who the father is so they can pass down their private property. Right there you’re owning people and you’re no longer human, you’re a thing that he can do whatever he wants to.
We see that in all the laws going back thousands of years. Once you’re married, that’s it. You belong to your husband, you take his name and he can do whatever he wants to you.
In my lifetime it was still legal to rape your wife. Those laws weren’t overturned until the 1980s. It’s bad and still true around the globe. Around the globe we don’t have that much control over abuses to which men do to our bodies so all that’s going to have to change and it’s again similar to the natural world.
There’s 2 ways to look at the universe, one is that every single thing is another being with whom we can enter into a relationship with. When I look at paintings from the very first art works that were ever made, that’s what I see. I see an attempt to express what that life was like. We painted 2 things, the Megafauna and the mega females who literally gave us life. We painted the animals we were eating and women who gave birth to us.
So to me, it’s the moment our brains got to that level of consciousness, the first thing we did was say thank you. All of that art is a celebration of our existence here and a way to think about it and try to express it.
Then it all changes.
Then you have this other way which is: The universe is filled with objects, objects exist to be used, they don’t have a will of their own, they don’t have desires of their own, or any moral standing as real beings. They are just things and you can take them if you want and do whatever you want with them because there is nobody there. Whether it’s trees or entire oceans or salmon or women or whatever it is. They are not people, they’re not creatures, they’re not anybody that you can communicate with. So our capacity to be in a relationship gets broken by living in this very hierarchical, dominating societies and it closes us off to ourselves even.
We’re going to have to find a way to feel that again like the Buddhists talk about being as one with all. If you have those spiritual experiences where you do feel that, you can’t feel that for every minute of every day, it’s hard to function when you do but I think most people have had a few of those in their lives and they transform you so.
It’s like the North Star, it’s what guides us: Everything is alive, everything is conscious, everything will speak to you if you come with an open heart to it and some form of respect, it will try to talk back because we all knew how to do that once. Every ancient culture will give you a way to do that, we just have to get it back.
S – How can listeners support this movement?
J – We need to stop the destruction that is happening, there’s a lithium mine that people are stopping. Wherever you are, find out what’s going on and get involved with directly opposing it. We need to work to reclaim the movement on a large scale and change the culture.
L – I would say we need to stop wasting time we don’t have on solutions that will not work. We need a resistance movement. Every last one of us descends from a line of people who did that resistance because civilisation is universally resisted. You may have to go back a thousand years but you will find those people and they are your people.
Our choices are stark. We stand with the living or we go down with the dead.