Sustainability and the Bounty of Empire
Sustainability, as we conventionally call it, is not actually sustainable. Sustainability continues to use finite resources as if they were infinite. Sustainability leads to greater harm to all life, not greater friendship with all beings. The products of sustainability—solar panels and biofuels — require Empire.
From Nathan Kleban
The communal house I live in is nestled in the serene Quabbin watershed forests of Massachusetts and was built from these same trees. Together with a nearby straw bale house, my home is part of an intentional community, whose proclaimed beacons are sustainability and nonviolence — as evidenced by the solar panels that crown both houses. One might find similar idyllic, fantasy lifestyles in homesteading magazines or on sustainability websites. This is the future we supposedly need.
On a cold winter morning, I can comfortably slip out of bed thanks to the rising warm air from the wood stove, which lingers in my top floor room. Outside, the beauty of the thin, unadorned branches peeking out from under the sticky, wet snow makes me grateful to the limbs of the trees, which we cut, season, and burn in our wood stove to warm us through the winter months. I am grateful to the wider forest, who not only provide a home for the deer, chipmunks, and garter snakes, they also provided the timber skeleton and skin of our homes: the beams, the siding, the floors, the ceilings were all hewn from trees dragged out of the forest by teams of horses, all in an effort to be more sustainable.
Given the apparent health of the forest around us and our increasing press coverage on the importance of green energy, we might convince ourselves that we are doing a good job and that our community is living sustainably. I could easily believe, seeing the vibrant forests around me, that the wider world’s forests and mountains and streams are healthy as well, that maybe everything is alright. Both of these are false assumptions. This forest is a second growth forest — the original ecosystem of trees was clear-cut by European farmers to make fields, evidenced by the ruins of stone fences, which they later abandoned in pursuit of easier prairie soil further west. The land healed itself, this forest regenerated, but only accidentally. Not every place has had a chance to heal or to be protected. Sadly, pristine surroundings do not indicate sustainable living. The garbage has merely been taken elsewhere to be buried. The solar paneled fantasy lifestyle is just that: a fantasy.
In some ways my community lives simply: our garden, not grocery stores, nourishes a substantial portion of our diet; a compost toilet returns our “wastes” back to the land as fertilizer. We have several appliances and a few computers, as many American households do, but we also have two hybrid vehicles and an array of solar panels. Yet even this brand of simple living does not mean we are living sustainably because even if all American households consumed energy in this way, it would not be sustainable.
Sustainability, as we conventionally call it, is not actually sustainable. Sustainability continues to use finite resources as if they were infinite. Sustainability leads to greater harm to all life, not greater friendship with all beings. The products of sustainability—solar panels and biofuels — require Empire.
(And empires, like all empires that came before, fall.)
True sustainability — what would give sustenance — is the mutual flourishing of the human world and more-than-human world, which includes all life: humans, trees, insects, bacteria, rivers, mountains, and wind. The living beings that are part of the more-than-human world not only nourish and sustain human existence, but have value unto themselves, whether we utilize them or not. Conventional sustainability does not ask, “How can we nourish life?” Rather, it asks, “How can we keep doing business as usual? What can we get away with?”
At best, “business as usual” puts in the minimum effort to avoid the current projections of what the worst impacts might be in order to continue our current lifestyles. There is a part of me that would like nothing more than for these efforts to succeed so that everything will be okay, or rather the same. Using solar panels and maintaining my energy consumption habits would be familiar, but will we all — including the oceans, mountains, forests, squirrels, and hawks — be healthier for it? Is it just a matter of changing the batteries in the remote control, and then turning the TV back on?
Efforts like the Green New Deal and movements like Sunrise illustrate this line of questioning perfectly. They advocate exchanging existing fossil fuel-reliant energy infrastructure for solar panels and wind turbines, replacing fossil fuel-based cars, trains, trucks, ships, and buses with electric ones. The aim is to be “net zero,” to have emissions match what the planet can “absorb.” But beyond a certain point (which we are far past), asking, “How much carbon can the earth absorb?” is like asking, “How much poison can a body absorb?”
A worldwide infrastructural transformation to “green energy” requires a massive amount of resources. Consider metals — many aren't found in significant quantities in the United States, and Americans aren't so willing (yet) to completely environmentally devastate their own idyllic woods and mountainsides to get them. The solar panels on my roof require cadmium, gallium, germanium, indium, selenium, tellurium, and silicon. The electric car battery plugged into an extension cord from my front porch requires lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, manganese, and aluminum. These metals do not grow on trees around me — if they did we'd have even more massive deforestation. The enormous resource extraction needed by green energy requires mining. Given the projected demands, what is needed to maintain current energy consumption (and projected increases) would require ramping up mining across the board many times. All of this requires more all the way down the supply chain: more mines, more refining, more manufacturing, more freight shipping and global transportation, and more of the associated costs and harms.
Mining destroys habitats, which fuels extinction of life. For those old enough, think back to the birdsong of your youth, the chirping of cicadas, or even the bug splatter on your windshield. One of a growing numbers of studies attests to changes, such as one that found that flying insect biomass had declined by more than 75 percent within a number of protected areas in Germany in about a quarter of a century. Due to habitat destruction, invasive species, over-fishing, pesticide use, and other factors, up to one million species are at risk of extinction according to a recent intergovernmental report.
A number of years back, I went home to where I grew up in Kentucky and swam in Barren River Lake. I jumped in the water alone because others were afraid of a hazardous algae bloom, which often results from the runoff of nutrients from agriculture, deforestation, and sewage. A few months ago I swam in my backyard pond in Massachusetts, which had a similar algae bloom. I was up all night vomiting with strained abdominal muscles, a ragged throat, and became extremely dehydrated. Mining — the literal gouging of the earth and bulldozing its surfaces — to obtain metals or agriculture that “mines” the soil not only sickens the air, the land, and the water, it entails the destruction of human communities, the exploitation of humans, and even enslavement.
People do not willingly agree to their landbase being destroyed, their water poisoned. People don’t want their homes turned into monoculture plantations for export. Palm oil plantations in Indonesia do not just appear in clearings of a rain forest. Cobalt mines don’t simply emerge along Congo’s lush hillsides, which people and more-than-human communities call home. There are complex causes and conditions that give rise to these realities that are strewn with blood and anguish. People do not line up to work in mines under incredibly exploitative conditions without violence or the threat of violence. Feeding our green new desires, our addiction to energy, requires the military.
I had the fantasy that if the United States government got rid of the military we could free up time, money, and energy for healthier pursuits. But whether we like it or not, the creation and maintenance of global infrastructure, whether it is “green” or dirty, is deeply wedded to militarism. Pressure towards “land reform” measures (privatizing land which disrupts and destroys existing communal structures), direct and indirect military intervention (e.g. weapons “aid,” military training, coup d’etats), and other interactions with the global powers are done through or backed by violence. We would not have bananas without banana republics. Coffee, computers, iPhones, and avocados would not make their way to the United States and other centers of power without military power. Human and more-than-human blood and suffering are necessary to prop up the global supply chain.
The story we tell ourselves is that people in developing countries decide to trade willingly on mutual self-interest, as if power dynamics and the threat of violence did not exist. History does not attest to this; instead war and genocide have been the rule. Empire creates colonies to facilitate the extraction of resources to serve empire. And so we clear-cut land, deaden ocean zones, break human communities, and create slums where people live once their previous ways of life were destroyed.
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I don’t know how to talk about this with others, especially those in communities such as the one I’m in. People work so hard and are so sincere in their efforts. For me to say, “We’re failing,” feels callous and forlorn. I fear bringing up these green heresies will negatively impact relationships. Sometimes the message that conventional sustainability is not actually sustainable is ignored, brushed off, or given glib acceptance. It is much more difficult when others take the message seriously.
“Then what are we supposed to do?” I am asked. I don’t have a comfortable response to that question. Perhaps this discomfort is an important part of the path and must be followed. I can say “stay with the pain” and have a sense of self-satisfaction, but is this a satisfying answer to the forests, trees, chipmunks, streams, and soil? I can only guess that they wouldn’t find this answer satisfactory (though they could be more patient than my projections of them). I feel embarrassed to limit my answer to that. But this isn’t about wallowing in guilt—it’s recognizing we’re in relationship with particular life in particular ways and are accountable for what we contribute to this relationship.
Life is not just about human needs but the needs of all living beings, from trees to rivers to soil. In order to act appropriately, we need to be in touch with the needs of those we relate to. Earlier I wrote about how the trees around me have provided homes for the more-than-human life in the forest as well as my own home and the fuel we need to warm us through the winter. The word “provides” is used in different ways here. The oak trees do not “provide” their acorns as food for squirrels, their fallen leaves to nourish the soil, and their bodies as hives for bees in the same way that they “provide” themselves to be cut and burned, especially to be clear-cut and harvested by the acre. These are very different ways of relating.
How do we enter into relationship with the oak trees in the same way that squirrels, soil, and insects do? How do we relate to the trees in a way that is based on mutual flourishing rather than domination? Conventional ways of understanding — scientific study, for example — have value, but so far our record has been one of subordinating the needs of others (both human and more-than-human) to our own. Our conventional ways of knowing are not enough. In the same way that we might ask a human being we are in intimate relationship with what they need, we need to find ways to ask those who don’t speak with a human voice what their needs are. I would suggest asking a particular tree, a particular squirrel, or a particular pond what they need. Then listen.
This form of asking and listening — and being open to whatever may arise however anthropomorphizing, projection-prone the answers might be — can be one form of approaching life closer to its own terms than from the basis of human needs. When I asked a tree what it needed, one response I received (or maybe these were my own thoughts, since it’s quite reflective of the introvert in me) is something along the lines of: “I appreciate your attention and thoughtfulness, though for the most part please leave me be to lead my own life.” While this can feel like a silly exercise (perhaps in a similar way to awkwardly dancing and singing when unpracticed), we need to experiment with different forms of perceiving and being with one another.
Naming a plan of action so we can be hopeful, feel good about ourselves, and believe we are part of the solution is what is expected in these kinds of essays. While I’ve offered a few suggestions pointing towards possible shifts in perception, I’m not sure how useful this is. What I’ve written here is a puzzle piece in a larger picture that I hope we can wonder about together. I hope you don’t simply accept what I say because we do not need to wait on any so-called “experts” to swoop in and tell us what to do, but instead to get in touch with our own power and experience and go from there. We need to listen to one another without surrendering our agency.
Are there more answers to the environmental mess we are in beyond staying with the discomfort, beyond asking others what they need and then listening deeply? Probably. Does that not knowing disqualify the ideas themselves? Can the relationship between what’s called sustainability and empire be dismissed? I don’t think so.
I read books and essays from decades ago which share much the same ideas on the perils of our current path. There is not much new being said here. While with this knowledge there’s been significant environmental activism and organization over the years, global emissions continue to increase and the United States has recently become the world’s biggest extractor of fossil fuels. Though it isn’t so much that we’re addicted to fossil fuels, but to energy itself. Our current way of living is so irreconcilable with what needs to change it’s hard to know what to do. We know the consequences, but we just can’t stop.
When I sit with all this, my chest feels tight. I don’t know the answer, I don’t have a vision, and I am uncertain what to do. I feel detached and apathetic. I have a list of feelings on a handout next to me now that helps me to identify what is going on internally for me in all this — the feelings can be difficult to name. It’s easy in some ways to only approach this intellectually, but in my heart I know that approach is fragmented and incomplete. The answer sits in my throat and feels almost unspeakable. My gut says we have to stop our current way of living, to stop what we’re doing to the earth and to each other, but I don’t know how.
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Living at the center of empire, we can crown our homes with solar panels, which gleam under the sun, and worship at this altar of sustainability and feel peaceful. For now, the destruction is elsewhere. Elsewheres are in decline whether they be forests, wetlands, or unpolluted water and air. I fear that when all of these elsewheres turn into polluted wastelands, as is the trend, consumption addictions will steer industry towards this neck of the woods again. On society’s current course, the Quabbin watershed can remain forested so long as the Amazon Rainforest is chopped and burned and put to agricultural use, the water clean so long as water is contaminated by the mines elsewhere, our electric cars running so long as the lithium supply from Bolivia keeps flowing, and the air breathable so long as air in China, the source of much of our consumption, is poisoned. It’s not about stopping this culture before the violence reaches my home — the violence needs to stop now because it is destroying human life and the more-than-human life around the world. Current efforts towards so-called sustainability only serve to sustain our addiction to energy and consumption of goods. Even “green” energy cannot be had without violence, empire, and further ecocide.
Nathan Kleban
Nathan wanders between various intentional communities such as Catholic Worker service communities and Zen Buddhist monasteries. His favorite thing to do is going into prisons to help facilitate intensive, experiential workshops on conflict transformation with the Alternatives to Violence Project.