We Did Start the Fire: Climate Change & the Curse of Hope
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
But when we are gone
Will it still burn on, and on, and on, and on— Billy Joel, “We Didn’t Start the Fire”
Prologue
A couple of months ago, I went to see the premiere of the film, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch. It’s a visual exploration of the impact of industrial civilization on the earth. The movie opened on a scene of thousands of elephant tusks, recovered from African poachers, being gathered in huge piles. It looked like some kind of avant-garde art installation … or maybe an altar.
What followed was a series of vignettes, with very little exposition, of different places around the world that are home to massive industrial projects or their waste. One of the first was Norilsk, Russia, the world’s northernmost city and one of only three cities in the continuous permafrost zone of the Arctic circle. Norilsk is a company town, a heavy metal smelting company town, to be specific. Norilsk is the most polluted city in Russia. The topsoil has accumulated so much heavy metal from the industrial fallout, that the company can now mine it, essentially profiting from its own pollution. The film showed the residents, families with children, celebrating “Company Day,” also known as “Metallurgy Day.”
The film also showed an open lead mine in Germany occupied by incredibly large mobile strip miners, the largest land vehicles ever built—over 700 feet long and 300 feet tall—capable of digging a hole the size of a football field 100 feet deep in one day. A couple of the other images that stuck with me were the huge neon colored ponds of toxic lithium in Chile and a massive dump in Kenya, crawling with human and avian scavengers.
The point of the film seemed to be to impress the audience with the sheer scale of the human industrial project. I think it succeeded, because I walked away thinking, “There’s no way we can stop this.”
In the penultimate scene, a Hong Kong artist was shown creating beautiful and intricate works of art out of ivory. Some of these works, he said, are valued in the millions. He explained that, since the banning of trade in elephant ivory, he was now using mammoth tusks. Apparently, mammoth tusks are now being discovered in the Siberian Arctic, as the permafrost is melting due to our burning of fossil fuels and the resultant heating of the planet.
The film ended where it began, with the piles of elephant tusks. But now they were on fire. The Kenyan government was burning the ivory to prevent anyone from profiting from the poaching. The burning looked like nothing so much as a religious sacrifice.
I
We’ve all heard how Prometheus brought fire to humankind and was punished for it by Zeus. But the rest of the story is often left out. It actually all began with a sacrifice.
According to the poets, Prometheus was the creator of humankind. He made them out of mud (earth and water) and the winds (the breath of life). When Prometheus saw that humans were sacrificing entire animals to the gods, he convinced Zeus to allow humans to offer only a part of the animal. The question then became what part would be sacrificed to the gods and what part would be kept and consumed by humans.
So Prometheus killed an ox and put the parts in two piles. In one, he put all the meat, which he hid inside beneath the inedible organs. In the other pile, he put the bones, which he disguised with the fat. Zeus chose the more appealing looking pile, and thus humans were thereafter allowed to keep the edible parts from a sacrifice. It was the first separation of the sacred from the profane.
When Zeus realized he had been tricked, he was angry and took fire away from humans as punishment, but Prometheus stole it back, carrying it in a hollow stalk so it would not be extinguished. (Hesiod, Theogony 511 ff) [fn 1]
And with fire, Prometheus brought all the arts and sciences, which would never have been possible in the absence of fire. According to the 6th c. BCE poet, Aeschylus, Prometheus brought to humankind the building of houses, the knowledge of the seasons and the stars, mathematics, language, the domestication of animals, shipbuilding, and medicine. (Prometheus Bound 441 ff) In short, Prometheus brought the tools of civilization to humankind. Ever since, Prometheus has been a symbol of human progress.
Aeschylus also tells us that Prometheus gave to humankind the means of discerning the future from dreams, from the flight of birds … and from flames. (Prometheus Bound 482 ff)
II
It is common in the contemporary environmental discourse to identify a singular event in human history when it all went wrong. A time when we human beings separated ourselves from the rest of nature—at least in our own minds. A kind of ecological “Fall of Man.” A time when we began to see the rest of the world as consisting of resources to be used, rather than a community of persons with whom to relate.
One possible point of departure, the development of agriculture, is a popular culprit, especially among anarcho-primitivists. Eco-feminists also point to the invention of agriculture, which they link to the development of patriarchy. Other eco-feminists blame Roger Bacon and the Scientific Revolution, which turned nature (like women’s bodies) into an object to be studied and tortured. Lynn White and Arnold Toynbee blamed the conquest of pagan animism by Judeo-Christianity, with its scriptural imperative to subdue and dominate the earth and all living beings. Social ecologist, David Abram, blames the development of the alphabetic script which, he says, allowed us to retreat into an inner world of abstraction.
A different, but related, question is when to date the beginning of the Anthropocene, the so-called “Age of Man,” when human beings began to have a significant impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Some have proposed the detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945 as the start of the Anthropocene. This date coincides with what has been called the “Great Acceleration,” a period of dramatic acceleration of anthropogenic change. Another proposal is the European colonization of the Americas. [fn 2] Probably the most common start date for the beginning of the Anthropocene, though, is the Industrial Revolution, after which we started pumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
III
One possible beginning for the Anthropocene which has not received as much attention is the prehistoric domestication of fire by humans. As early as a million years ago, hominids began using fire in a controlled way. That’s actually before Neanderthals and modern humans diverged on the family tree. James Scott, author of Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, describes the revolutionary impact of the domestication of fire:
“The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape architect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by ‘precivilized’ peoples also known as ‘savages.’ In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects were momentous.”
— James Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
In addition to allowing the colonization of colder environments, like northern Europe and Asia, fire allowed humans to sculpt the landscape. With fire, humans could clear old vegetation, encourage the growth of plants bearing fruits and nuts, and stimulate the growth of plants which attracted grazing prey. Using fire, they could expose the burrows and nests of small game and drive larger game off precipices and into bogs for easier slaughter. By placing some foods within easier reach, writes Scott, the “radius of a meal” was reduced. This concentration of resources around human encampments presaged the first permanent settlements, towns, and cities, which would come much later.
With fire also came cooking, effectively externalizing much of the digestive process and rendering previously indigestible plants palatable and nutritious. This expanded exponentially the range of foods available to early humans. “The chemical disassembly of raw food, which in a chimpanzee requires a gut roughly three times the size of ours, allows Homo sapiens to eat far less food and expend far fewer calories extracting nutrition from it,” writes Scott. “The gains in nutritional efficiency … largely account for the fact that our brains are three times the size one would expect, judging by other mammals.” We therefore owe our relatively large brains to fire. In a very real sense, fire shaped human beings.
“Fire largely accounts for our reproductive success as the world’s most successful ‘invasive.’ Much like certain trees, plants, and fungi, we are a fire-adapted species: pyrophytes. We have adapted our habits, diet, and body to the characteristics of fire, and having done so, we are chained, as it were, to its care and feeding. If the litmus test of domestication for a plant or animal is that it cannot propagate itself without our assistance, then, by the same token, we have adapted so massively to fire that our species would have no future without it. Even overlooking entirely the fire-dependent crafts that developed later—potter, blacksmith, baker, brick maker, glassmaker, metalworker, gold- and silversmith, brewer, charcoal maker, food smoker, plaster maker—it is no exaggeration to say that we are utterly dependent on fire. It has in a real sense domesticated us.”
— James Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
IV
As surely as fire shaped humans, humans in turn used fire to shape their environment, at least to the same degree, if not more. This was true long before the Industrial Revolution. The Pleistocene was a geological period that stretched from about two and half million years ago to about twelve thousand years ago. It was roughly during this period that our distant ancestors, homo erectus, left Africa, domesticated fire, and began cooking food.
The Pleistocene was broken up into a series of glacial cycles or “Ice Ages.” Before the end of the last Ice Age, around 12 thousand years ago, the world was a very different place. Human beings shared the land with giant mammals. According to Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction, North America had mastodons and mammoths, the ancient cousins of modern elephants. There were also beavers the size of modern grizzlies and ground sloths as big as elephants. South America had toxodons, with rhino-like bodies and hippo-shaped heads, and glyptodonts, relatives of the modern armadillo, who could grow to be as large as a car. Europe had aurochs, wild oxen who stood 6 feet tall at the shoulder, as well as giant elk and giant hyenas. Australia had 3-ton diprotodons, the largest marsupial to ever live, and giant kangaroos, which stood 10 feet tall. These are just a few examples.
They’re all gone now.
In a geological blink, the megafauna went extinct. Two reasons are commonly given for what is called the “megafauna extinction”: climate change and humans. In today’s world, that’s a distinction without a difference. But at the end of the last Ice Age, the climate was changing naturally and much more slowly than now. According to Kolbert, the most likely cause of the megafauna extinction was human beings. The timing of the extinctions and migrations of human settlements lines up almost exactly. Doubtless, the human use of fire was critical to this process. Kolbert concludes that the Sixth Great Extinction isn’t a modern phenomenon, but actually began in the middle of the last Ice Age. “Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature,” writes Kolbert, “it’s not clear that he ever really did.” [fn 3]
V
The megafauna extinction didn’t end with the last Ice Age. It’s still going on. And it’s been speeding up. The current extinction rate is currently estimated at anywhere from 100 to 1,000 times the “background rate” or what would be natural in the absence of human beings. We are causing the “sixth great extinction,” the last one being the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Since the rise of human civilization, 83% of wild mammals have been lost—most of them since 1970. Currently, domesticated livestock make up 60% of the biomass of all mammals on earth, followed by humans at 36%, with wild mammals trailing at 4%. It is estimated that a million living plant and animal species are now threatened with extinction.
Among those currently threatened with extinction are the African and Asian elephants, who are hunted for their ivory tusks. There are 400,000 African elephants in the wild. That may seem like a lot, but every year, around a tenth of the population is killed by poachers for their tusks. Asian elephants are in an even more dire situation. There are only around 50,000 left.
The elephant ivory trade was banned internationally in 1991, and enforcement of the ban has increased in recent years. As a result, ivory dealers have been on the hunt for new sources of ivory. And they found one … woolly mammoths.
Woolly mammoths were among those megafauna who were hunted to extinction in the Pleistocene. Today, Siberia is a massive mammoth graveyard. The remains of hundreds of thousands of mammoths lie buried in the permafrost, which has been frozen for thousands of years … until now.
The permafrost is melting, due to our burning of coal, oil, and gas, and the resulting planetary overheating. It is a bitter historical irony that humans hunted mammoths to extinction using fire, and now, because of our civilization’s dependence on the burning of fossil fuels (formed over millions of years), the remains of those mammoths are being exposed for humans to exploit once again. It turns out that, unlike elephants, mammoths are not covered by international agreements protecting endangered species. Since they’re extinct, they’re not technically endangered.
VI
It’s estimated that 80% of the world’s mammoth remains are located in a region of eastern Russia called Yakutia. The capital of Yukatia, Yakutsk, is the largest of only three cities which lie in the continuous permafrost region. (Norilsk, mentioned above, is the second.) Yakutsk can’t be reached by road and is only reliably accessible by air. Over half of the population of Yakutia is indigenous.
Climate change has come early to Yakutia. While the average temperature increase worldwide is currently 1°C above pre-industrial levels, Yakutia has already warmed by more than 3°C. As a result, the permafrost is melting and the land is flooding. This has devastated the way of life of many of the residents of Yakutia.
It has also made previously inaccessible mammoth tusks accessible. While some people hope the marketing of “ice ivory” will save elephants from poaching, in reality, what will actually happen is that elephant poachers will now just try to pass off illegal elephant tusks as legal mammoth tusks. This is the nature of capitalism: just when you think you’ve protected yourself from its predation, it circles around and starts to eat you from the other side. The fact is, you can’t un-commodify something by commodifying something else. And you can’t save living elephants by exploiting the remains of their dead ancestors.
A single tusk can be sold for tens of thousands of dollars, a windfall to people living in a region where the average monthly income is $500. Most of the tusks end up on Chinese markets where they are turned into art that can be sold for over $1 million. The market in mammoth tusks has been a boon to some indigenous people, but it has also attracted larger scale operations which use powerful pumps to blast away at the permafrost, accelerating the melting process already underway.
VII
The melting of the permafrost is not just a symptom of global heating; it is also a driver of it. The permafrost contains vast amounts of carbon in the form of dead plant matter, which is locked away so long as it remains frozen. When the permafrost melts, the microbes break down the organic matter and release carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. It is estimated that there is twice as much carbon stored in the permafrost as is already in the atmosphere.
We were actually due for another Ice Age. [fn 4] The Earth has been alternating between long Ice Ages and shorter “interglacial periods” for about two and half million years. For the last million years, the Ice Ages have lasted around 90,000 years, followed by warm periods of about 10,000 years. And our 10,000 years are up.
But it looks like the next Ice Age is on hold, because we’re now headed in the opposite direction, thanks to burning fossil fuels and forests. It took around 100 million years for the sunlight trapped in dead plants to form coal, oil, and natural gas. And we’ve burned through half of it in under 200 years, most of it in the last 30!
At the same time, we’re burning forests, most notably the Amazon, primarily for cattle grazing. Not only does the deforestation itself produce a significant amount of CO2 by itself (around 10% of global emissions), but it eliminates the trees which would have absorbed much of the carbon released by our burning of fossil fuels. About half of the world’s tropical forests have been destroyed, and it’s expected that 80% will be gone by 2030.
Until last year, we believed that 2°C of heating was the “safe” upper limit for global heating. That was until the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) moved the target down to 1.5°C. That’s very bad news, considering that many people already thought that keeping heating within 2° was impossible. Even now, the IPCC says that “there is no historical precedent” for the scale and rate of change needed to limit the heating to 1.5°C. In fact, we're on track for 4°C of heating by the end of the century. For a frame of reference, 4°C is the temperature difference between the last Ice Age and the world now. So we can expect the world of the near future to be as different from today as today is from the last Ice Age (albeit in the opposite direction).
Steven Pyne, author of Fire: A Brief History, traces the history of humankind’s relationship with fire, from the first use of fire by hominids through the invention of agriculture and the Industrial Revolution to the contemporary climate crisis, which he sees as “a subtheme of fire history.” This age which human beings are creating, says Pyne, is on par with the previous epochs, but instead of an Age of Ice, we are creating an Age of Fire, a “Pyrocene.”
VIII
When Zeus learned that Prometheus had stolen the fire, he laughed and cursed both Prometheus and mankind. Prometheus, whose name means “forethought,” he chained to a rock. As for mankind, he said, “I will give men as the price for fire an evil thing in which they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction.” (Hesiod, Works & Days 42 ff) He then created woman, the first of whom was called “Pandora,” whose name means the “all-gifted.” Pandora, was given as a bride to the brother of Prometheus, Epimetheus, whose name means “afterthought.”
Epimetheus ignored his brother’s advice not to accept any gifts from Zeus. As a wedding gift, Zeus gave Pandora a jar (in later retellings, it became a box). According to Homer, in Zeus’ palace, there were two jars, one filled with evil gifts and the other with good ones. (Iliad 24:527ff) We all know how, when Pandora opened the jar (in some later versions, it was Epithemeus who opened Pandora’s jar—probably a sexual allusion): all the ills and sorrows of life were freed … but hope remained.
I’ve been thinking about hope a lot lately. What was hope doing in the jar with all the curses?
Zeus said that the gift of fire came with a price. According to Aeschylus, when Prometheus brought the gift of fire to mortals, they lost the ability to “foresee their doom.” In its place, “blind hopes dwelled within their breasts.” (Prometheus Bound 249 ff) The key to understanding this is to remember that Prometheus’ name means “foresight.” Though it’s not stated explicitly, it seems that Zeus took the gift of foresight from humankind when he bound Prometheus to the rock. By taking Prometheus from them, humankind was left with Prometheus’ brother, Epimetheus, whose name means “hindsight,” and the ambiguously named Pandora (“all gifts”).
The meaning of the myth has been the subject of much debate. According to one interpretation, hope belonged in the jar, because it wasn’t a blessing, but another one of Zeus’ curses. [fn 5] But unlike the other curses, human beings embraced this one. In this view, it was not womankind which was Zeus’ curse, but hope. Derrick Jensen, founder of Deep Green Resistance, agrees:
“I’m sure you remember the story of Pandora. She was given a tightly sealed box and was told never to open it. But, being curious, she did, and out flew plagues, sorrow, and mischief, probably not in that order. Too late she clamped down the lid. Only one thing remained in the box: hope. Hope, the story goes, was the only good the casket held among many evils, and it remains to this day mankind’s sole comfort in misfortune. …
“The more I understand hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven …
“Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane.”
— Derrick Jensen, “Beyond Hope”
For Jensen and others, human civilization is incompatible with life on Earth … and hope … “Hope is what keeps us chained to the system,” writes Jensen, “the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.” Hope, like its twin, despair, is a product of our belief in the foundational myth of civilization: the myth of progress. Progress is the myth that history is a straight line, going ever onward and upward. Hope is what keeps us chasing after progress. It is what keeps mainstream environmentalists chasing after the fantasy that is “sustainability." [fn 6] Hope, in short, is what is keeping us from foreseeing our doom. Hope is what keeps us chained to cycle of destruction that is human civilization, as surely as Prometheus was chained to that rock.
Climate change is the fulfillment of Zeus’ curse. We traded foresight for hope and embraced our own destruction.
IX
The first time Kenya burned elephant tusks was in 1989. The Kenyan government had confiscated 12 tons of ivory. In spite of being urged to sell the ivory to fund conservation efforts, the head of Kenya’s wildlife conservation department and the Kenyan president, Daniel arap Moi, decided to burn it. Kenya has held multiple burns since then, as have other countries.
The most recent ivory burn was in 2016. It was images from that fire which opened and closed the Anthropocene film. It was the largest ivory burn in history. Over 100 tons of ivory were burned—about 5% of the global stock—the remains of 8,000 elephants. The Kenyan Wildlife Service constructed 12 towers of tusks, each of them 10 feet high and 20 feet wide. It took 10 days to build. And because ivory does not really burn—it disintegrates at very high temperatures—it took a week to destroy the towers. Not to mention literal tons of wood and thousands of gallons of jet fuel.
From a capitalist mindset, the burning made no sense. Estimates for the total market value of the destroyed ivory ranged from $150 million to $220 million. That's more than Kenya spends on conservation efforts in a year. And, as critics pointed out, destroying the tusks only caused the price for ivory to go up, thereby profiting the poachers.
The burning also made no sense from the perspective of orthodox environmentalism. Burning the tusks did nothing to actually discourage poachers and ivory traders. And, in an age of anthropogenic climate change, burning tons of wood and thousands of gallons of jet fuel might be seen as “off message,” at best, and dangerously counterproductive, at worst.
But I think there was something else going on there. I think the burning of the tusks only makes sense as a sacrifice.
X
The word “sacrifice” comes from sacra, meaning “sacred,” and facere, meaning “to make, to do." When we sacrifice something, we make it sacred or holy. Or we restore to it that sacred or holy character which it previously had, but was somehow lost.
Capitalism, as another G&R author, Kadmus, has explained, is the rejection “of any re-emergence of the sacred through an insistence that all is profane and everything has its price.” Even life has a price under capitalism: the lives of elephants, the lives of humans, even the life of the planet. So thoroughly indoctrinated are we by capitalism that it is difficult, if not impossible, to see the burning of the tusks as anything but a “waste.”
But, according to the Kenyans, the ivory was not valuable, it was worthless. “The only value of the ivory is tusks on a live elephant,” said the Kenyan Wildlife Service Director General in response to criticisms of the burning as “wasteful.” By burning the tusks, the Kenyans were removing them forever from the grasp of capitalism, and thereby restoring their sacred nature.
I see a kind of surrender of hope in the burning of the tusks. They didn’t burn the tusks in the hope that doing so would end poaching. And it certainly wouldn’t bring back the elephants. The burning was an expression of the belief that there is no way, within a capitalist system, to redeem the deaths of those 8,000 elephants. It is only through wholesale destruction, through purifying fire, that the sacred can be restored under such a system. It was also a kind of return to the practice of “holocaust,” the sacrificial burning of the whole animal (from holos, meaning “whole," and kaustos, meaning “to burn"), before Prometheus came with his gifts and humans struck their ill-fated bargain with the gods.
Human civilization is a fire. It’s been burning since we’ve been human. And the human story is not a straight line, but a circle, a great ring of fire. It began during the last Ice Age with the domestication of fire and the hunting of mammoths. It burned through the life and death of villages, cities, and empires. Slowly at first, and then rapidly as we began extracting coal, oil, and gas from the earth and burning forests to fuel what we call “progress.” It has circled back around on itself now, with global heating, the melting of the permafrost, and the marketing of mammoth tusks. And the fire won’t stop burning until it consumes the consumers, until it consumes itself.
What is our role then? Those familiar with rites of initiation—many indigenous people and initiates into the more esoteric branches of the world’s religions—know the answer: the price of renewal is to let ourselves be consumed.
I fell into a burnin' ring of fire
I went down, down, down
And the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns
The ring of fire, the ring of fire— Johnny Cash, “Ring of Fire”
Epilogue
In 1969, a National Geographic photographer named Loren McIntyre became lost in the remote Javari Valley in Brazil. His encounter with indigenous Mayoruna people is the subject of the book, Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu, and the play, “The Encounter” by Simon McBurney. [fn 7]
The book describes the lifeways of a people who had very little contact with industrial civilization, but whose world was being encroached upon by that civilization. When they were attacked, the Mayoruna people gathered together all of their tools and sacred objects … and burned them. And then they set off on a hard journey through the forest. When McIntyre asked the Mayoruna headman where they are going, he said, “the beginning.”
“‘We’re returning,’ he says, ‘over. These things die here, so we can return.’ … ‘You mean you’re going back in time?’ I ask the question without any sense of ridicule. He responds, no, not going back. Returning, over. He makes a circular gesture with his arm …”
Much of what follows is McIntyre’s attempt to understand the meaning of the headman’s words. The “beginning,” he learns, is simultaneously a place and an event, both a specific place and also somehow everywhere, both a specific time and also always already. It is a place-time of death and a place-time of birth. The journey there is a kind of cultural reset. And it begins with fire.
As McIntyre watches the fire, he imagines the same thing happening in our world:
“I pictured bonfires like this one on some affluent American street. Everyone dragging out paid-for belongings, furniture, appliances, toys, and feeding them to a purifying fire. All of a culture, the most materialistic and leisure-minded in the world, onto the fire. Spraying gasoline, dropping matches, watching it all burst in flames. In my mind, I saw flames spring up in a front yard, and another, and another. All along the street, all through the neighborhood and the next neighborhood. I pictured the town to be Washington. All of Foggy Bottom, on fire. Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House, on fire. All freeing itself, taking off, soaring, carried by the vehicle of sacrificial purifying flames. Carried where?”
To the beginning.
Notes
1 Commentators have noted that humans already had fire when Zeus took it away, and Prometheus stole it back. This tracks the likely history of the domestication of fire, which probably began with human’s noticing the fire caused by lightning strikes. Lighting was a manifestation of Zeus, so fire was his to give and to take away. Prometheus’ gift, then, was the knowledge of how to keep fire alive, specifically how to transport embers from one place to another without extinguishing them.
2 To get an idea of the ability of human beings’ ability to shape their natural environment, even in pre-industrial times, consider the impact of European colonization of the Americas on the climate:
“The volume of such landscaping in North America was such that when it stopped abruptly, due to the devastating epidemics that came with the European, the newly unchecked growth of forest cover created the illusion among white settlers that North America was a virtually untouched, primeval forest. According to some climatologists, the cold spell known as the Little Ice Age, from roughly 1500 to 1850, may well have been due to the reduction of CO2—a greenhouse gas—brought about by the die-off of North America’s indigenous fire farmers.”
— James Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
3 While there have certainly been indigenous cultures which have managed to live more sustainably or more ecologically than modern Western industrial culture, there are good reasons to question the myth of the “ecologically Noble Other.” As Arne Kalland has explained:
“Many skeptics have pointed out that traditional practices are not necessarily benign to the environment. Historical ecology has indicated that indigenous peoples both in Polynesia, Europe and North America may have hunted a number of endemic species to extinction. Native North Americans have been reported to kill indiscriminately, although their environmental values are based on humanistic notions and morality toward nature where animals have intrinsic value. And early agrarian civilizations in,for example, China and Japan experienced serious deforestation and erosion long before industrialization, despite allegedly ‘environmental-friendly’ religions such as Daoism, Buddhism and Shinto. The Chinese and Japanese managed to correct the situation, whereas the prehistoric Maya and Indus civilizations seem to have been unable to halt depletion of their forests.”
See also Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, which demonstrated that human-caused environmental destruction occurs at all levels of social complexity.
4 The regular occurrence of Ice Ages should not be confused with the “global cooling” scare of the 1970s, which some of my readers may remember. Some press reports at the time speculated about the possibility of imminent cooling of the Earth, culminating in a new Ice Age. These reports did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was overwhelmingly more concerned with heating from greenhouse gasses.
5 This interpretation is supported by Hesiod’s dim view of hope elsewhere in the text: “The idle man who waits on empty hope, lacking a livelihood, lays to heart mischief-making; it is not a wholesome hope that accompanies a needy man who lolls at ease while he has no sure livelihood.” (Works & Days 498-500)
6 Paul Kingsnorth* does a good job explaining the pipe-dream that is sustainability, in his essay, “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist":
“Today’s environmentalism is as much a victim of the contemporary cult of utility as every other aspect of our lives, from science to education. We are not environmentalists now because we have an emotional reaction to the wild world. Most of us wouldn’t even know where to find it. We are environmentalists now in order to promote something called ‘sustainability.’ What does this curious, plastic word mean? It does not mean defending the nonhuman world from the ever-expanding empire of Homo sapiens sapiens, though some of its adherents like to pretend it does, even to themselves. It means sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world’s rich people—us—feel is their right, without destroying the ‘natural capital’ or the ‘resource base’ that is needed to do so.”
*Update: Over a period of a few years, Paul Kingsnorth’s political orientation has shifted from Green anarchism to proto-fascism. While it is impossible to draw a bright line marking when this occurred, I do not endorse Kingsnorth’s writing after the spring of 2020. COVID and his conversion to orthodox Christianity appear to have accelerated his slide to the right. See here for more on this. (Jan. 1, 2023)
7 I’m grateful to Dougald Hine for bringing this story to my attention in his recent interview with Patrick Farnsworth on Last Born in the Wilderness.
JOHN HALSTEAD
John Halstead is the author of Another End of the World is Possible, in which he explores what it would really mean for our relationship with the natural world if we were to admit that we are doomed. John is a native of the southern Laurentian bioregion and lives in Northwest Indiana, near Chicago. He is a co-founder of 350 Indiana-Calumet, which (until recently) worked to organize resistance to the fossil fuel industry in the Region. John was the principal facilitator of “A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment.” He strives to live up to the challenge posed by the Statement through his writing and activism. John has written for numerous online platforms, including Patheos, Huffington Post, PrayWithYourFeet.org, and Gods & Radicals. He is Editor-at-Large of HumanisticPaganism.com. John also edited the anthology, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans and authored Neo-Paganism: Historical Inspiration & Contemporary Creativity. He is also a Shaper of the Earthseed community, more about which can be found at GodisChange.org.