Between Earth and Empire: From the Necrocene to the Beloved Community - Softcover

Clark, John P.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1629636487 ISBN 13: 9781629636481

Publisher: PM Press, 2019

Synopsis

Between Earth and Empire focuses on the crucial position of humanity at the present moment in Earth History. We have left the Cenozoic, the “new period of life,” and are now in the midst of the Necrocene, a period of mass extinction and reversal. It is argued that an effective response to global crisis requires attention to all major spheres of social determination, including the social institutional structure, the social ideology, the social imaginary, and the social ethos. In this wide-ranging and ruthlessly compassionate critique, John P. Clark explores examples of significant progress in this direction, including the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, the Democratic Autonomy Movement in Rojava, indigenous movements in defense of the commons, the solidarity economy movement, and efforts to create liberated base communities and affinity groups within anarchism and other radical social movements. In the end, the book presents a vision of hope for social and ecological regeneration through the rebirth of a libertarian and communitarian social imaginary, and the flourishing of a free cooperative community globally.

About this title

About the Author

John P. Clark is a philosopher, activist, and educator. He is Director of La Terre Institute for Community and Ecology, and he is the author or editor of many books, including The Anarchist Moment; Anarchy, Geography, Modernity; and The Impossible Community. Peter Marshall is a historian, philosopher, travel writer, and poet. He has written 16 books, including Demanding the Impossible, William Godwin, and The Philosopher’s Stone.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Between Earth and Empire

From the Necrocene to the Beloved Community

By John P. Clark

PM Press

Copyright © 2019 PM Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-62963-648-1

Contents

FOREWORD By Peter Marshall, 
PREFACE Some Basic Concepts, 
INTRODUCTION Lessons from the School of Radical Change (Notes of a Slow Learner), 
PART I EMPIRE VERSUS EARTH IN THE NECROCENE, 
1 Ecological Thinking and the Crisis of the Earth, 
2 How an Anarchist Discovered the Earth, 
3 Education for the Earth or Education for Empire?, 
4 The Summit of Ambition: The Paris Climate Spectacle and the Politics of the Gesture, 
5 Against Resilence: Hurricane Katrina and the Politics of Disavowal, 
PART II ANOTHER WORLD IS ACTUAL, 
6 Homage to Lacandonia: The Politics of Heart and Spirit in Chiapas, 
7 Lessons of the Rojavan Revolution, 
8 Papua Merdeka: The Indigenous Struggle against State and Corporate Domination, 
9 Power to the Community: The Black Panthers' Living Legacy of Grassroots Organization, 
10 From the Movement of Occupation to the Community of Liberation, 
PART III THE AWAKENING OF CONSCIOUSNESS, 
11 Another Sun Is Possible: Thoughts for the Solstice, 
12 Do You Know What It Means? Reflections on Suffering, Disaster, and Awakening, 
13 Buddhism, Radical Critique, and Revolutionary Praxis, 
14 Rumi and the Fall of the Spectacular Commodity Economy, 
15 Regionalism and the Politics of Experience, 
PART IV POWER TO THE IMAGINATION (FIFTY YEARS LATER), 
16 In Search of the Radical Imagination: Two Concepts of the Social Imaginary, 
17 The Spectacle Looks Back into You: The Situationists and the Aporias of the Left, 
18 Happy Birthday, Utopia! (You Deserve a Present), 
19 Carnival at the Edge of the Abyss: New Orleans and the Apocalyptic Imagination, 
POSTSCRIPT Oikos and Poesis: On Earth and Rebirth, 
APPENDIX Emergency Heart Sutra, 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
INDEX, 
ABOUT THE AUTHORS, 

CHAPTER 1

Ecological Thinking and the Crisis of the Earth

"The earth died screaming while I lay dreaming." — Tom Waits

Facing the Crisis

As was mentioned above, any competent extraterrestrial reporter sent to cover the news from Earth would certainly report that our planet is going through one of the six periods of mass extinction in its entire four-and-a-half-billion-year history and that other major disruptions in the biosphere are interacting to cause a major crisis for terrestrial life. In short, the big story from Planet Earth is that we have entered a period of massive planetary death. Thus, among the various competing terms that have been suggested for the emerging geological era, the most precisely appropriate is the Necrocene, the "new era of death." Strangely, this rather shocking news is met with either denial or disavowal among the members of our own species, who are living in the very midst of this crisis. The deniers among us simply reject the clear evidence of global ecological crisis. The disavowers, on the other hand, accept the truth of the evidence but fail to undertake actions that are even vaguely proportional to the gravity of our predicament.

Information on the severity of the ecological crisis has hardly been a well-kept secret. For example, researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and their colleagues have in recent years formulated a conception of "planetary boundaries," seeking to define the limits in various areas beyond which there is likelihood of ecological disaster. They summarize their findings in three concise articles that are readily available to the public. The authors conclude that "transgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be deleterious or even catastrophic due to the risk of crossing thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt environmental change within continental- to planetary-scale systems." The boundaries are identified as lying in the areas of climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, biogeochemical nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, global freshwater use, rate of biodiversity loss, land-system change, chemical pollution, and atmospheric aerosol loading. They find that at least three boundaries had already been passed and that most others are in danger of being transgressed soon. In the most recent article, the authors conclude that "two core boundaries — climate change and biosphere integrity — have been identified, each of which has the potential on its own to drive the Earth system into a new state should they be substantially and persistently transgressed."

The dire implications of the term "a new state" should not be underestimated. Science writer Peter Forbes notes that the November 2017 COP23 Climate Summit in Bonn acknowledged the likelihood that by 2100 global warming will reach a disastrous three degrees centigrade, since there will be a doubling of preindustrial CO2 levels from 280 to 560 parts per million by 2050, and another doubling by 2100. Such conditions will not only be unprecedented in the history of our species, they will mean a return of the planet to the climate of the Cretaceous period of 145–65.95 million years ago. Forbes observes that "in a Cretaceous rerun, there would very likely be no ice at the poles once again, and sea levels would be about 216 feet (66 meters) above current levels."

While ecologists and eco-activists usually stress the biological basis of global crisis it is important not to neglect the physics of extinction and collapse, which conveys a powerful message. Schramskia, Gattiea, and Brow in "Human Domination of the Biosphere: Rapid Discharge of the Earth-Space Battery Foretells the Future of Humankind," show that it is illuminating to conceive of the biosphere as a massive chemical battery that has been charged over the history of life on the planet.

Over the course of three and a half billion years of evolution, "billions of tons of living biomass were stored in forests and other ecosystems and in vast reserves of fossil fuels." This process has been reversed in the brief and rapidly concluding chapter of human history that we call "civilization." The authors point out that the "rapid discharge of the earth's store of organic energy fuels the human domination of the biosphere" and that because of "the rapid depletion of this chemical energy, the earth is shifting back toward the inhospitable equilibrium of outer space."

The evidence is staggering to anyone capable of taking a geological or Earth-historical perspective. At the beginning of the current era, the Earth "contained ~1,000 billion tons of carbon in living biomass," which existed primarily "in the form of trees in forests." Over the past two millennia "humans have reduced this by about 45 percent to ~550 billion tons of carbon in biomass." This news seems dire enough, but the authors find another even more striking way of representing our planetary predicament.

They introduce "a new sustainability metric O," which represents (on extremely conservative assumptions) "the number of years at current rates of consumption that the global phytomass storage could feed the human race." They note that in the past 2000 years humanity has reduced this metric O by 98.5 percent. Furthermore, the rate of depletion has been rapidly accelerating since industrialization. Their graph of this process shows the level of "sustainability," and thus human survivability, rapidly plummeting toward zero.

In considering the fateful implications of their analysis, the authors describe the biosphere's tendency toward catastrophe with a degree of understatement befitting their technical and scientific audience. "There is," they say, "considerable uncertainty in how the biosphere will function as [ohm] decreases from the present [ohm] = ~1,029 y[ears] into an uncharted thermodynamic operating region." Yet the message is clear. What the authors correctly call the project of "domination of the biosphere" is threatening us with imminent planetary death, that "inhospitable equilibrium of outer space." This is the threat, the ultimate threat of the Necrocene, that we must face.

The Insistent Question of Technique

Our era is a new era of death in more senses than one. While we are faced with the threat of the death of the biosphere as the result of ecological crisis, we are also faced with the death of the humanisphere as we have known it over the course of human history. This is in large part the result of growth of the megamachine and the forces of technological domination, in dialectical interaction with other forms of domination. The decisive role of technics in the unfolding of the Necrocene must not be underestimated, as it is in many accounts of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. Crucial in understanding the history of domination and the possibilities for an escape from that history is the question of technique.

The radical critique of technological rationality and technological domination has been highly developed for at least three quarters of a century. Nevertheless, this critique hardly occupies the central place in contemporary philosophy and social theory that it deserves, despite a few notable exceptions. It is important to return to the groundbreaking critiques of Jacques Ellul, the Frankfurt School, Lewis Mumford, and others and develop them further in relation to the emergence of deeply transformative new information technologies and biotechnologies. These recent developments reflect a postmodern logic of technological domination that demands the most urgent attention and action.

The reconsideration of the history of critique of technology will not be undertaken here. However, it will be useful to reflect briefly on the currently unfolding course of technological domination as presented strikingly in the analysis of visionary megahistorian Yuval Noah Harari. Harari argues that developing information technologies and biotechnologies will "create unprecedented upheavals in human society, eroding human agency and, possibly, subverting human desires." It will, he says, produce a world in which the dominant social institutions, including "liberal democracy and free-market economics might become obsolete." These technologies will triumph while at the same time marginalizing a large segment of the global population and creating a new class of the "useless." Harari's speculations (or rather, extrapolations) seem well grounded in a world in which we already see the emergence of whole marginalized regions and countries in which a large percentage of the population has been rendered "useless" according to the demands of the global capitalist economy and the technological megamachine.

Harari observes that the prevailing liberal order based its hegemony on "promising everybody a larger slice of the pie" but that this legitimation process no longer works. In the future, the economic growth that underwrote the promise of material abundance will no longer depend on the functioning of so-called liberal democracy and so-called free markets, but will rely instead on "the invention of more and more disruptive technologies." Harari predicts that technology will for a certain period continue to create jobs that require "high levels of expertise and ingenuity" while at the same time generating a growing class of "unemployed unskilled laborers, or workers employable only at extremely low wages." However, the silver lining that this disaster offers to the erstwhile elite is seriously at risk. As AI continues to improve, "even jobs that demand high intelligence and creativity might gradually disappear."

Harari takes the story of the recent triumph of technology and the technical intelligentsia in the field of chess as a paradigm for future developments. He speculates that the definitive proof of the superiority in chess of "human-AI teams" may well be replicated in "policing, medicine, banking, and many other fields." The crucial qualities that give AI its clear superiority over human beings are "connectivity and updatability." Harari observes that AI "might make centralized systems far more efficient than diffuse systems" since the system operates more effectively the greater the pool of data available for analysis. The technical advantages of centralized data for studies in genetics and for medical research are obvious. This is also true in the case of the projected system of autonomous or self-driving vehicles, which "will know all the traffic regulations," will "never disobey them on purpose," and "could all be connected to one another." Thus, individual cars will not function as "separate entities," but rather as "part of a single algorithm." In short, the technological system will become a "system" in a much stronger sense than ever before.

One implication of this systemization is that the same technologies that increasingly relegate much of the population to a condition of uselessness will also make the population "easier to monitor and control." Such a neo-Panopticonist system will take the Baconian precept that "knowledge is power" to a new totalitarian level. In fact, the corporate state is already well advanced in this project of technological domination. Harari notes that "Israel is a leader in the field of surveillance technology and has created in the occupied West Bank a working prototype for a total-surveillance regime." He suggests that the anonymity of the technical system will give it an unprecedented power to control dissent, since it is more difficult for the "useless" to organize against mysterious marginalizing forces than for the oppressed to organize against the exploitation and injustices of an identifiable ruling class.

Walter Benjamin stated famously that "the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology." In reality, very little of reality is "immediate"; however, there are many forms and levels of mediation. So in place of Benjamin's "immediate" we might substitute "reality free from certain forms of mediation," specifically those associated with forms of social domination. These include mediation by technical rationality and the technological imaginary, mediation by statist and bureaucratic rationality and the statist imaginary, mediation by patriarchal instrumental rationality and the patriarchal imaginary, and mediation by economic rationality and the economistic imaginary (in both their productionist and their consumptionist forms).

What has become in the land of technology an "orchid," with all its connotations of rarity and fragility, is not "immediate reality," but rather singularity. It is the singular that possesses something like what Benjamin described as the "aura" of the thing, and what has also been called the "sacred" within the thing, and the "spirit" of the thing, or within the thing. Ironically, just as this rare and fragile singularity is threatened, so is its converse, universality. Just as there is no orchid without its rainforest (or other suitable ecosystem — perhaps a swamp) there is no gap between the singular and the universal, and both are subject to the same forms of predation.

In the land of technology, the singular is the orchid, and the universal is the rainforest in which the orchid flourishes. In the Necrocene, both are threatened with death. Technical rationality and the technological imaginary are destroying the metaphorical orchids and rainforests at the same time as they are destroying the literal orchids and rainforests. And they are doing so, ultimately, for the same reasons. Thus, reflection on the question of technique helps us understand the ways in which the murder of the biosphere and the withering away of humanity, the Necrocene and the Age of Nihilism, are inseparably interconnected.

In a sense, technical rationality is the most "environmental" form of thinking that is possible. Under the reign of technique everything becomes "environment." As technical reason invades all aspects of reality, even the being that supposedly had an environment becomes part of the environment. At the nihilistic end of civilization, even the absurd illusion of a sovereign ego at the center of reality dissolves. What remains at the "center" is only a sovereign lack, an imperious death drive, a destructive nothingness, surrounded by a field of objects of consumption and domination. We finally discover the true horror of "nihil unbound."

The Limits of Environmental Thinking

It is not only scientists and science writers who have sounded the alarm about ecological crisis in rather clear and not uncertain terms. Recently, the Guardian, a major British newspaper, announced the gravity of the biodiversity crisis in almost alarmist language, saying that the "'biological annihilation' of wildlife in recent decades means a sixth mass extinction in Earth's history is under way" and that "it threatens the survival of human civilization, with just a short window of time in which to act." Yet this seemingly inflammatory article was not at the top of the stories for the day, and if one reads the numerous readers' replies to it, one finds very little sense of direction about how to respond to this developing global catastrophe. Furthermore, such news somehow quickly fades from the popular consciousness. We might therefore conclude that there is simply not enough good "environmental thinking" going on in today's world. It may seem that the public is just not prepared to understand adequately the meaning of global ecological crisis and that it is therefore incapable of facing it with full seriousness. Thus, there are injunctions that we need to work harder on creating good environmental education, so that the public can engage in more effective environmental thinking.

Granted, this would be a very good thing. However, one of the problems with conventional ideas of "environmental thinking" or even "ecological thinking" is that they assume that correct thinking will in itself have a significant transformative effect or, more to the point, the kind of effect that will be necessary in order to avoid disaster. For example, it is thought to be crucial that climate deniers be convinced that anthropogenic climate change really exists. This is not at all a bad idea, but it almost inevitably ignores the fact that the vast majority of nondeniers are in a state of disavowal and that reformed deniers are highly likely to join the ranks of these disavowers. The disavowers are willing to admit that a problem exists, and they may get certain satisfactions out of being on the right side of history, and perhaps even from engaging in various beneficial activities that reduce greenhouse gasses. Yet they are not willing to consider, and then actually work diligently for, the kind of deep, fundamental changes in society that will be necessary to change the ecocidal course of history. A basic problem for the problematic of "better environmental thinking" is that the needed transformation cannot result from abstract thought and the understanding of concepts. It can only come from engaged thinking that is an integral part of an engaged participation in transformative social ecological processes. We need therefore to consider how such engagement might begin to take place. But first, we might consider further the implications of our conventional language, concepts, and modes of thinking.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Between Earth and Empire by John P. Clark. Copyright © 2019 PM Press. Excerpted by permission of PM Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: PM Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1629636487
• ISBN 13: 9781629636481
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384