Max Wilbert & Lierre Keith: How the green movement lost its way and remembering our roles as caretakers of earth (ep305)
What if neither the Green New Deal nor the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals will help us address ecological breakdown? Why do frontline Earth activists say that the green movement has lost its way? We're joined here by Max Wilbert and Lierre Keith, co-authors of Bright Green Lies.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Joan Shelley
“Before the fossil fuel age, to have the amount of energy that the average American consumes on a daily basis, you’d have had to have something like one hundred slaves working for you 24 hours a day. That’s the level of opulence that we’re used to.”
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Transcript
Note: Green Dreamer is an independent, community-powered journal exploring our paths to collective healing, ecological regeneration, and true abundance and wellness for all. The values, views, and opinions of our diverse guests do not necessarily reflect those of Green Dreamer. Please do your own additional research on the information, resources, and statistics shared. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
KC: To set the stage for this conversation, I'd love to read a quote from your book, Bright Green Lies. You write, “In terms of stopping the destruction of our planet or at least stopping global warming, all the mainstream solutions are at best distractions. They're really responses to the recognition that a) world oil supply is finite, b) industrial energy demand will continue to rise and c) the demands of the economy are not negotiable, which means that d) these mainstream solutions are really about getting subsidies for new forms of industrial energy. None of them help the earth.”
I would assume that each of you had your own unlearning and learning journeys that led you to question a lot of the dominant environmental narratives, and that at certain points you were part of the mainstream movement and bought into some of these messages that you're now seeing as lies.
Can you briefly introduce yourselves and speak to the turning points that led you to challenge the ideas that a lot of environmentalists believe to be our solutions today?
LK: Even as a really young child, I was in deep mourning all the time about the destruction of the wild. Finding an environmental framework, even as a really young teenager, was incredibly helpful to me because I always wanted to understand why people were destroying everything. I grew up in a very urban-suburban environment, surrounded by concrete, but my longing for the wild was painful. It was so obvious to me that people were just covering everything in concrete, turning the living world into machines. I just didn't get it. So finding different environmental thinkers was just an incredible help to me to try to understand: What is the damage? Where did it come from? Why are people doing this? It can't always have been this bad. So I went through that whole search just to get a framework that would somehow explain what had gone wrong. And I never stopped asking that question.
I did eventually figure out my own answers. But it took many, many years of trying, investigating, reading, researching, doing all of this, and all my own experiments. I never really fell for the bright green technologies because I could see, during my early investigations into things like solar panels and small-scale wind, that these things are toxic. It seemed insane to me that anybody who was an environmentalist was going to put these forward as solutions.
The exact moment I hit the wall was the first time I got a solar catalog. I had been reading all this stuff and I had moved to a rural area and I was thinking, okay I can grow my own food. And I'm reading all these books about homesteading and I got Mother Earth News and all this fun stuff. It was all just so exciting and interesting. And then I got a solar catalog in the mail. I thought, all right, I better learn about this. I start to read through it and wonder, alright, what are solar panels? How does this work? So you need the panel and then you have to have a battery. You charge the battery, and then you pull the power from the battery to whatever, turn on your lights or use a washing machine or whatever you're going to do. Alright, I get the concept. First, you have to generate it, then you have to store it and then you can use it.
But what are these batteries? And I turn to the battery page, and it’s literally just this list of lead-acid batteries.
And that was when I thought, what are these people talking about? It's lead—there is no safe exposure to lead for any living creature. We know this. How can this possibly be a good thing? Instead of fighting wars over oil fields in the Middle East, we're going to be fighting wars over lead mines.
This stuff doesn't grow on trees. I can't make lead in my backyard. The whole thing just seemed insane. I was 24 at the time. So what year was that? Maybe 1990. And after that, it only got worse. It's now taken over the whole movement.
For me, there was never a moment of thinking this was good, and then having to realize that it wasn't. From the moment that I first read about it, I knew these were toxic substances. I knew they were rare substances. I knew what mines were and that they're universally resisted by the people who have to endure them. And I'm still just bewildered by why environmentalists have taken this up.
MW: I grew up in Seattle, and similar to Lierre, I had a family that valued the natural world. I was taught to love our pets – to love the dog and the cat and the chickens and I grew up playing under the western red cedar tree in the backyard. Like so many young people, when you're going through adolescence and becoming a teenager, it's so hard to navigate the human world. And in nature, you find something that will accept you no matter what. You find beings who will take you in, who will give you shade, who will provide you with beauty and shelter you in all these different ways. It's just part of the human experience to fall in love with the natural world, to respect the natural world and feel this deep sense of peace. And science is increasingly recognizing this with studies that look at the effects of being out in the natural world on our health and our well-being, our stress levels, blood pressure, all these different things.
I grew up in Seattle during the post-WTO era as well. I was becoming politically aware in the shadow of this massive protest against the World Trade Organization in 1999 that shook the entire city of Seattle. And what that did was it brought in an analysis from all these different parts of political movements that were active at the time in the WTO protests.
You had labor movements, you had food justice people, you had environmentalists, you had indigenous-led movements, you had racial justice movements, all collaborating on this one fight, recognizing that corporate power and corporate takeover of the world, led by big banks and major financial institutions, trade groups like the WTO – were facilitating the plundering of our planet for private profit at the expense of the majority of the people on the planet and certainly the living world itself.
I became an environmentalist in this environment. And I'll be honest, I was convinced. I thought solar panels were part of the solution for several years there. That's what I was being told. I was terrified reading about global warming, reading about the rainforests being cut down, as a teenager, as somebody growing up and really starting to grapple with what that means. It's terrifying. You think about your own future and it just seems like there is no future.
So I believed those things for a while, but even then, this was in the early 2000s; the environmental movement was so much more grassroots than it is now. There was so much more of an emphasis on using less, on scaling down, on reducing our consumption, on tackling these issues at a deeper level rather than simply changing the source of energy that we use while keeping everything else more or less the same. That helped put me on the path to looking at these “bright green lies” more closely.
I remember there was one day that I went to an environmental fair in the capital of Washington state, Olympia, and there were booths and different environment groups passing out pamphlets and talking to people. And somebody was there with a Hummer, which is kind of a symbol of conspicuous consumption. The Hummer almost stands for the American lifestyle and extravagance and wastefulness. But this was a biodiesel-powered Hummer. And, even at 15 years old, I started to recognize somewhere in the back of my mind that there was something profoundly wrong with this, that this was a perversion of the original spirit of the environmental movement, which was based on respect for the land, respect for the other beings with who we share this planet with. This just seemed sort of like a slap in the face.
That seems reflective of so much of the mainstream environmental movement. I don't even know if it deserves that name anymore, based on a lot of what it promotes today.
KC: In the book, you proceed chapter by chapter to debunk a lot of bright green lies, such as the solar lie, the wind lie, the lie of green energy storage, the green city lie, the green grid lie, the hydropower lie and various other lies as well. I’d love for each of you to share the lie that was most shocking or profound to you and what people should know about it.
LK: I think there's two. One is, and this is kind of a large-scale lie, that the environmental movement was supposed to be the movement that was going to protect wild creatures and wild places from destruction. And this goes back to Rachel Carson and really everybody before her.
The point was that the birds were disappearing. Why were they disappearing and what were we going to do about it? Were we going to care about these other creatures or not? And this was supposed to be a movement that was going to protect those beings and protect those places. And somewhere in the last 20 years, that changed completely. It's no longer about protecting them. Now it's about “how are we going to continue to consume them, except maybe with fewer greenhouse gases?”
That seems to be the goal: How can we keep industrial civilization, with all of its destruction, but just find a different fuel source? That's just a complete perversion of what the point of this was.
You have living communities being turned into dead commodities, and then all of that gets transformed into private wealth. And that to me seems to be the problem. Fueling that a different way doesn't change any of that problem.
It means that we are trying to have our planet and eat it, too. And I don't really understand how that happened to my movement. There's a little bit of relief, at least, in having a way to name it, a way to talk about it – that our basic values completely flipped over. And now we just want to keep doing it. We just want to fuel it a different way. That's, I think, the basic lie of the bright green future—nobody seems to care anymore that we're destroying all of these creatures that, at one time, we would have sacrificed our lives for. We just want a way to keep using them.
Some of the other lies that really got to me were these incredibly rare environments that are so fragile right now, where there are only tiny little scraps of them left, and still, the industrial machine comes for them, only now they're calling it “green”. It has just broken my heart in a way that I'm not sure it will ever come back together. You've got the desert tortoises in the very arid southwestern desert areas – there's so few of them left and these creatures can live to be 100 years old, they're absolutely massive. The burrows that they make provide habitat for well over a hundred other creatures. None of them can survive without those tortoises burrowing, and they're all being destroyed for these vast solar installations that are somehow supposed to make this better. It's just beyond me how anybody can call that green.
MW: The best example, I think, that we look at in our book is the chapter on efficiency. So many people think of efficiency as always being a positive good for the planet. And there is a sense in which that's true, right? It makes sense.
For example, the less water you use, maybe the less water will be taken from the river and the more that can remain for the fish and the snails and all the other creatures who live there. But the thing is, when you're living in a culture and economy that depend on growth, that's not necessarily true.
One example that I wrote about in the book is the suburbs and the sprawl around Las Vegas. Las Vegas relies on the Colorado River for its water supply. There's a finite amount of water. The Colorado River is already “over-allocated”, which means it doesn't reach the ocean anymore. The river just dries up in the middle of the desert. So where you once had this massive river delta in northern Mexico that was full of jaguars and dolphins and birds from all over the continent and just an incredible diversity and lushness of life, now you have bare sand and a desert quite literally. So in Las Vegas, water efficiency is being promoted very widely. And what we would hope would happen is that that efficiency is being used to allow the city to take less water from the river, to allow more water to remain for the non-human life that requires it.
But the reality is that the more efficient each house gets in Las Vegas at using water, the more water is left over that's being used to build more housing developments in the suburbs and in the urban sprawl of Las Vegas. So the efficiency is not being done to protect and help the natural world; it's being done to allow for more development and urban sprawl, which just destroys these fragile desert habitats that Lierre just talked about.
There was an English economist back in the early years of the Industrial Revolution named William Stanley Jevons who wrote about this issue, and he was actually studying coal. During this period, coal was the most important resource—it powered the entire country of England and their booming economy. Coal was powering the trains, pumping out of the mines, moving goods all across the country. And Jevons was tasked by the government with looking into the issue of coal availability.
What he found was that as the efficiency of coal use increased, the overall use of coal went up, which is the opposite of what you'd expect. The increased efficiency made it so much more worthwhile economically for these companies to burn coal.
They can make so much more profit the more efficient they got. So they just invested all the money that they made into growing their businesses.
To use a car analogy, if you only get 10 miles per gallon, your road trip is going to be very expensive, and you might choose to just go to the beach a few miles down the road or something. But if you get 30 miles to the gallon, all of a sudden, a trip to the Grand Canyon starts to look a lot more affordable. Then, all of a sudden, everyone else wants a car that gets 30 miles to the gallon too. People who didn't have as much money can now afford a car that gets better gas mileage. So you see this growth in the overall use of cars and the overall use of gasoline goes up.
This is something that we see across the board with a lot of these efficiency technologies that are being brought on board right now. If they're not deliberately aimed at protecting and defending the natural world and sharing instead of taking everything for themselves, then the benefit will usually accrue to humans— usually to wealthy humans in industrialized nations.
That was a particularly fascinating one for me to research. And I think it points to the importance of investigating these things thoroughly before you say that something is a solution.
KC: What this makes me think of is how, because our “natural resources” have been cheapened due to mass production, it’s not really making things more affordable because people are just justifying buying even more products. So, for example, clothing nowadays is so cheap, because fast fashion just churns out clothes and exploits people’s labor in the process. So a piece of clothing could cost 10 bucks today compared to maybe over $100 if it were ethically and responsibly made. But because it's so much cheaper, people are also buying a lot more. So they may end up spending more money, which can make people feel that it's still not affordable.
In the prologue of Bright Green Lies, you write that a lot of the truths in this book are hard, but you will need them to defend your beloved planet. One of those truths that you say is that fossil fuel, especially oil, is functionally irreplaceable.
I'd love to unpack this further, because it implies that a world powered by 100% “renewable” energy is not possible. But when people think about how we should address the climate crisis, they often talk about our need to transition fully to renewable energy. Am I interpreting this correctly? And how would you expand upon this?
LK:
To put it simply, the only way to have an industrial society is to consume industrial levels of power, of energy. And the only fuel that's dense enough to provide that energy is fossil fuel that's had millions of years to condense under the surface of the earth.
How that compares to things like solar and wind, it's just a tiny little fraction.
I think the number for diesel fuel is forty-six kilojoules per... When you compare that to things like solar it's less than one. So you can see it's at least forty-six times denser. And what this means on the ground, let's say you have a truck that's one of those giant trucks that moves goods across the country and they usually have about sixty thousand pound payload on the back. Fifty-five thousand pounds have to go to just the batteries, whereas if it was diesel fuel would just be the tank.
But you need forty-six times more if it's going to be the batteries. So all that's left is five thousand pounds for the goods and which means it's not possible to do it. I mean nobody's going to waste their time for only five thousand pounds on the back of that truck. So there goes the industrial economy right there.
There's just physically no way to do that. It's the energy cannot be condensed to that to that extent. And that's why it's only fossil fuel that's ever going to do it. They're dreaming if they think anything else is going to match. It's just the math of it. And they don't seem to be willing to just do the basic arithmetic. It's all we did in the book was just look at the facts.
MW: Yeah, it's interesting that you bring up the issue of clothing. I want to jump back to that real quick, because we actually write in the book about how in 1901, the average household in this country spent 14% of their income on clothing. Basically, what that meant was you had a few shirts, maybe you had one jacket, maybe two pairs of pants, one nice pair of shoes, and you replaced maybe one item of clothing a year. And it took a major chunk of your income to do that because all of this was made with natural fibers. It was all leather or wool or cotton or linen. And it was all made by hand by small-scale skilled workers.
Nowadays, almost all of the clothing in the world is made in factories or by sweatshop laborers. And the number in the U.S. is about three percent. We spend three percent of our income, on average, on clothing. So we've seen this four- or five-fold decline in the amount of wealth that we spend on our clothing, and that reflects the energy glut of this society that we live in. We live in this world where it's become normal to have an amount of energy that's absolutely incredible.
Before the fossil fuel age, to have the amount of energy that the average American consumes on a daily basis, you'd have had to have something like one hundred slaves working for you 24 hours a day. That's the level of opulence that we're used to.
And it's sort of like the air we breathe. We don't even think about it or recognize it. Most people in this country don't think about these things unless you go to a very poor community or you travel abroad to another country where people live in a different way and they consume much less energy and much less material goods. And then perhaps people start to recognize the opulence of this lifestyle.
We need to challenge that whole narrative. As Lierre said, it's only an industrial society that demands these industrial-sized amounts of electricity. So much of the energy that we use these days is incredibly wasteful. It's something like one or two percent of all the electricity on the planet now just goes to Bitcoin processing. That's not to mention online video games and Facebook and race cars and four-wheelers and ATVs and the amount of energy that just goes into these completely frivolous, completely unnecessary aspects of human life.
Sure, people are having a good time and sure, people enjoy these activities. But the reality is we're living in the sixth mass extinction event on this planet. This culture is undermining the ecological foundations of life itself. The oceans are collapsing, plankton populations have collapsed by 40 percent in just the last few decades. Plankton produce two-thirds of the oxygen on this planet.
So I don't think most people realize how bad things are, ecologically speaking. And that's the case even though you can open almost any newspaper today on any day of the week and you'll see a story: insect populations are collapsing, climate collapse is accelerating, the oceanic dead zones are growing larger and larger, soil erosion, species extinctions, all of these problems, they're almost impossible to ignore.
But one of the specialties of businesses in this culture that we live in is distracting people. And we do live in this sort of “society of the spectacle” where people are likely to spend their time on Netflix and browsing on Facebook and doing things like this rather than actually digesting the reality of the situations we find ourselves in and acting to solve them. That's the work that we've got to move towards – helping breakthrough that sense of powerlessness and sense of distraction that's so widespread in the world today—with good reason. People don't feel that their governments represent them or listen to them broadly in this culture. People don't feel that they have a say in the course of our society. People don't feel like we're headed in the right direction and yet they don't know how to change it.
I understand those feelings of powerlessness that so many people feel and that I think are a big part of the reason that as a culture, we spend so much time with our faces glued to screens and watching mindless television.
KC: It certainly feels like a lot of people are living in a false sense of reality, where dominant cultures believe that economic growth is a fact of life and is just the way that society has to function. We have to break that down as well because we’re living in an ecological world, not in this social construct of a world that has to be founded on economic growth. So there are many things that people really have to unlearn from what the dominant culture indoctrinates within us, starting from when we're really young.
And as you say, even a lot of the proposed “green” technologies like solar, wind, hydro and biomass, “are in their own right assaults against the living world. From beginning to end, they require industrial-scale devastation: open-pit mining, deforestation, soil toxification that’s permanent on anything but a geologic timescale, the extirpation and extinction of vulnerable species, and, oh yes, fossil fuels. These technologies will not save the earth. They will only hasten its demise.”
I think this is quite provocative because it suggests that solar and wind can't even really act as a stepping stone to buy us more time to address the climate crisis. So from what you've learned, does “renewable” energy even have a role to play in aiding us to move towards a more sustainable future as a short-term solution while we work on deeper transformations? Or do you think it's completely a distraction?
Lierre Keith: My answer is absolutely no. They are every bit as destructive as fossil fuel – some of them even release more greenhouse gases than fossil fuel. You might as well just burn the coal at that point.
We've already talked about Jevons Paradox, but another way to think about it is that every single time that humans have brought another form of energy online, we haven't dropped any off.
So originally we burned wood. That was the first one. Then all of a sudden we figured out coal. But we didn't stop burning wood. We just added coal. Oh, and then there was oil. We added oil. We didn't drop off coal or wood. We just added oil. Then there was natural gas. Those other three are still there. This is like the partridge in the pear tree – we just keep adding.
And the same has been true for the tiny slivers of this industrial project that are fueled by things like solar and wind. All we've done is add three more percent to that giant energy grid. It never stops the other ones from being used. So we're using more coal than we ever have. We're using more oil than we ever have. And we've got this tiny little bit of solar energy at the bottom of it, like two percent or whatever. But it doesn't stop the entire process. That only gives us a little bit more to use. So it's not going to help.
And then, as we said, a lot of these alternatives are even worse. Like the German miracle – the energy that has gone into that is essentially biomass. It's like 30 percent or something. It's just simply burning trees. And what that means is that they're clearcutting the last of the forests in the southeast United States and just shipping chipped trees wholesale across the ocean and then burning it in Germany. And they're calling that “green”. I don't know how anybody can call deforestation green, but even if you were going to attempt to do that, it actually releases more greenhouse gases than coal. So biomass is actually worse, 20 percent worse. And transportation also adds another 20 percent when comparing it to coal. So it's 40 percent worse. They might as well just burn the coal that's there rather than pretending they're doing something else.
But governments have decided for political reasons to call it carbon neutral when it's not. And a lot of the other greenhouse gas emissions reductions that they’ve made are because they're using natural gas. But when you actually look at it, in fact, there are all these other gases that are released when they burn natural gas, particularly methane. And methane, of course, is dramatically worse than CO2. It lasts a shorter time in the atmosphere, but it has a way higher global warming potential while it's up there. They're just releasing gigantic amounts of methane by using natural gas. So even when they're swapping out coal for natural gas, which is supposed to be better, it's not actually “green”, they just legally declared it so. In the physical world, it's actually worse. So by switching over to natural gas and all of this biomass, not only are they destroying the forests, which nobody seems to care about anymore, but even that aside, they're actually adding way more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. So the entire thing is a lie from beginning to end. I don't know how it could possibly help. It's not a stepping stone. It's the same industrial platform. It's the same problem of destroying the climate and it's the same consumption of what's left of the living world.
Kamea Chayne: So the fixation on carbon emissions, it sounds like, is really problematic because it masks a lot of the other issues that have arisen from doing whatever we can to reduce carbon emissions, but then there are all these new sets of problems that are created that are going to cause a lot of ecological degradation as well.
LK:
Well, they're solving for the wrong variable. They want to take industrial civilization as the thing that has to be saved no matter what. And that's the wrong variable. What has to be saved is the planet.
But if you solve for industrial civilization, you're going to come up with these crazy schemes to keep the power flowing because that's what it takes to convert the living planet into dead commodities – you need vast amounts of energy. So they're going to keep scrambling to find other ways to do that rather than just admit that this was the problem from the beginning, that civilization itself is not sustainable, that it requires this constant use of things that are either not renewable or are renewable on a really small scale. And you completely overshoot that at the moment you have a city. You've already used up your stuff if you're living in a city. There are no trees, there's no clean water, there’s no food – it all has to come from somewhere else. So you've overshot your land base’s carrying capacity, which means you have to go out and get those.
It's not a plan with a future. It never was. But that's what nobody wants to face.
Max Wilbert: And we actually know how to do all these things in a sustainable way. There's not really a big mystery here. Human beings from all kinds of different societies have lived sustainably on this planet for thousands of years. And it's not like they've kept all their methods secret. We know how to do this, but we're not seeing that. It would be one thing if society as a whole was having that conversation and was saying, okay, we're going to stop burning oil and gas and coal. We're going to use a little bit of solar panels and wind turbines for the next 20-30 years as we gradually transition our society out of this growth-obsessed mindset and towards a much more localized way of living. And we're going to use wind and solar on a really small scale to provide for people's most basic medical needs while we do that.
But that's not the conversation that's happening.
What we're seeing is President Biden and his administration, Angela Merkel and Germany, Greenpeace and 350.org, and the Sierra Club, all these groups are essentially just promoting that we change the energy source that fuels business as usual and then leave everything else pretty much exactly the same. And under Obama, this was even more clear because his energy policy was literally called “all of the above”. There’s no clearer illustration of what Lierre was saying earlier, that these energy sources are just added on top of one another.
If you are the leader of an empire like the United States that relies on military force and economic force to dominate the world and extract resources from both real physical colonies and economic colonies all over the planet, the more energy you have at your disposal, the better. And it doesn't really matter whether that's energy from solar, nuclear, coal or what have you.
They'll use it for some nefarious purposes. They'll use it to grow this earth-destroying economy that's killing everything. So, I think that we need to move towards having those conversations as a nation and as a world about what does a real environmental solution look like, what does real sustainability look like? And as Lierre said, it fundamentally comes down to the fact that it's not about sustaining this modern, wasteful, consumptive lifestyle that we've become so accustomed to. It's about sustaining life on the planet because life on the planet is collapsing. And if we can't turn that around, then there's going to be no future.
KC: Yeah, I mean, this conversation certainly exposes a lot of organizations and people who are driving the dominant environmental discourses. And a lot of people today point to things like the Green New Deal as the answer or on a similar note, a lot of people look at the United Nations’ 17 SDGs or “Sustainable Development Goals” as guiding principles for how we can progress our society while addressing our social injustices and ecological breakdown. Just looking at the overview of the SDGs, I see that, as goals, they say “affordable and clean energy” – we know that's false. “Sustained and sustainable economic growth” – we challenge that too. “An inclusive and sustainable industrialization” – we kind of picked that apart here, too.
It seems like a lot of these goals are just too good to be true, and a lot of them kind of work against each other because I don't know how we can address our inequalities while preserving life on land and in the water while sustaining everything else, like economic growth and industrialization and so forth.
So with all this in mind, I'm curious to hear how the environmental movement got so derailed and co-opted. I think a lot of people in the movement have genuine hearts and they want to do what they can to help. But a lot of the dominant messages that people are getting are coming from the wrong places, or these narratives are being influenced by powers that really don't have our collective wellbeing at heart.
LK: I don't really know how it happened. It happened before our eyes, so I should have some way to explain what went wrong. But I just don't know. Suddenly, other environmentalists were identifying a completely different problem than I was identifying, and then that just grew and grew and grew.
Part of it, I think, is that the climate emergency is quite real and it is terrifying. I'm fifty-six, so I don't know whether I'm going to see the worst of this. I might be dead before, but it's coming. I mean, it's already started. We're already in this sort of climate chaos that keeps getting worse. And I'm sure if I was 20 years old, the panic would just be, you know, off the charts most days because it's horrifying.
So that's true. But to my mind, if we don't have the correct analysis, the correct diagnosis, we're not going to be able to suggest solutions that match the problem. And they've completely misdiagnosed the problem as just “how will we continue to have this way of life with a different fuel source?” And so that's the story. That's the kind of fairy tale that everybody is stuck in. But that was never the goal of the environmental movement. The goal was to protect the living world and not to protect our capacity to destroy it. And that's what's happened. So I don't get it.
That's why we wrote the book – we really want everybody to come back to basics. Do you care about the world? Do you care about the Scottish Wildcats? Do you care about the desert tortoises? Do you care about the bison? Do you care about the plankton? Is there any creature that you care about? I don't even care if it's a pet dog. Whatever you love, it is under assault right now and we have to feel that emergency. And from there, the question is what is destroying all of these things? And it's way bigger than fossil fuel. I mean, it's this entire way of life that is just based on consumption. And so part of that problem is going to be capitalism. But it's also bigger than capitalism. I mean, yeah, if you have an economic system that's based on infinite growth, which is what capitalism is, you can't have that on a finite planet. And capitalism has to grow about three percent every year or the economy will collapse.
And that is part of the problem, that you're never going to elect a politician who knows that. We're already at a disadvantage because you can't tell people the truth and expect to get elected. So our entire political system is never going to get onside. And I don't know how to get through that. I don't think anybody has an idea about how we're going to get past that. That's a structural problem in our political system. You cannot tell the truth about capitalism.
That's number one. But it, of course, is bigger than capitalism because the destruction of our planet has been going on for seven or eight thousand years now. It was way before capitalism. Entire sections of the world had already been deforested, turned into desert, turned into dead zones. Capitalism is absolutely an accelerant, but it's bigger than that. And to tell those kinds of truths means you're not electable.
So I don't know how to get from here to there. It can be done. There are actually solutions.
“We” know how to sequester carbon and it's not “we” meaning people. It's “we” meaning grasslands and ruminants know how to do it, forests know how to do it, the ocean knows how to do it. We just need to let them do it.
Really, what we need to do as humans is to stop the destruction and life will come back because it does and it does it really quickly because life wants to live.
And it's been a miraculous thing to watch, even in a small scale – like when they take down a dam and two months later, there's already fish that have come back. These kinds of things fill us with joy and they’re true. Life really will come back. And in the projects that I've seen where people let the wild come back to land that's been destroyed, especially by agriculture, it can happen so quickly. And we have all kinds of studies and facts and figures now that talk about how much carbon can be sequestered when you let grasses and ruminants do their thing. So it's not too late. I don't think it's too late. As Allan Savory says, we're not out of time, but we are running out of time. So it's going to have to happen pretty quickly.
The problem is that there are no institutions that are headed in the right direction. Everybody is still in the wrong story, on the wrong path. And I don't know how to get them back. That's why we wrote the book. I don't know how to explain to people that every single thing they love is at risk, and they're in the wrong story. These are not solutions.
MW: I would just add that I think part of the cooptation of the environmental movement has been very deliberate, and if you look at the history of this over the last, say, three decades, you can trace these trends growing and becoming larger and larger. I'm looking right now at a quote from CNN Money in February 1990. This was in the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. And the quote is “Eager to work with business, many environmentalists are moving from confrontation to the best kind of collaboration.” Here's another quote from David Jones, who's the CEO of an advertising company called Havas. He says, “Consumers will actively buy from companies who are good so they feel that they themselves don't have to personally undertake social projects, as they have done well by making their purchase with you. Good brands provide a moral alibi for buying.” So I think if you look at the history of the environmental movement over the last few decades, you can trace this increasing corporate and business involvement in the movement. In the original days of the environmental movement, it was based on confrontation with the nuclear industry, with the pesticide industry, with these multinational corporations and governments that have just been laying waste to our planet. And over the years, you can see this increasing collaboration.
And you can understand the rationale. You can understand why people feel the need to do that – because they feel like they can get inside the system and somehow make it less destructive. I can understand that impulse, but it hasn't actually worked. Everything is getting worse. Every indicator of ecological health is headed in the wrong direction. And so if there was ever a time to sort of draw a firm line of morality and say, we can't do this “green” consumerism thing, we can't try to “green” capitalism, we can't try to “green” this industrial society that's laying waste to life on this planet and destroying any chance of a livable future for our children or grandchildren. We can't reason with a system that has shown itself incapable of making morally righteous decisions. And there are many reasons for this.
Maybe you've read or seen the movie, “The Corporation”. Joel Bakan did this classic sociological analysis of a corporation and said that, you know, they're treated as persons under the law. So let's psychoanalyze them like they are people. And what he found was that they're sociopaths. If you actually look at typical corporate behavior in the world today and you think of them as a person, they're sociopathic. They have no conscience. They make decisions that harm other people repeatedly. They have no sense of remorse for their actions. They lie repeatedly. And so on. These are the actions of a sociopath. And these are the institutions that are in charge of our culture, that are running the show.
And we all know as well that the individuals within these corporations are largely replaceable. So even if you get a CEO who has an epiphany and says, I don't want to be a part of destroying the planet anymore, they're going to get fired and the board of directors is going to put somebody in their place who will run the machine, who will keep the death machine moving forward. So, these are really challenging realizations. It's not easy, but I think we need to grapple with these things. We need to get through that reality in order to actually come to grips with these problems and start moving towards real solutions. So many people get hung up on these earlier stages and don't really have the courage or the analysis to challenge these things. And, you know, that's one of the hopes with the book, it’s to let people know, hey, you're not crazy, you're not alone. This is all madness. Our society is driving life itself off a cliff.
If you recognize that, then you recognize that those in power: the corporations, most of the politicians, almost all of them around the world, are literally insane in terms of being out of touch with that reality. They're insane. They're living in a bubble world that has no relationship to the physical reality of life on this planet. And the sooner we recognize that the sooner we can kind of push that whole world aside and get back to the grassroots world of political organizing, of stopping the destruction, of building real alternatives, of restoring the living planet, and of making an actual future. I don't think we're going to get any solutions or traction through that mainstream world. And that's why we thought it was so important to write this book – because a lot of people actually agree with this analysis. And like we said, those people aren't getting elected. Those people aren't the CEOs of businesses. They're not working for the U.N. They're not in these prominent positions because it's not acceptable to believe these things if you are in those positions.
LK: And I think a lot of the grassroots activists feel incredibly betrayed because they live in, say, Vermont, and they love their mountains, and now here comes the “environmentalists” bringing wind power that's just going to lay waste to those mountains where their families have lived for generations. They have defended the mountains over and over again. And now coming from inside the house is the call to one more time, engage in the vast industrial destruction of a beloved place. And now it's coming in the form of wind farms.
And it's like how can you do this? I thought we were all supposed to be fighting on the same side? We were supposed to love these mountains, and yet you want to destroy them. And these projects are universally fought around the globe whenever they try to come in because it's just devastation to the place that you loved and you thought you could live. They’re not livable when this is over and all the creatures that you loved are gone. They're either all killed or one by one, they're sent into extinction.
And these are the last wild places. Let's be very clear. These are the last wild places. And solar and wind are coming for those last wild places. So whatever tiny little scraps are left, it's going to be over. So that's going to be the end.
KC: It definitely sounds like the mainstream environmental movement has a lot to unlearn and I really hope that everyone listening to this show goes to check out your book, Bright Green Lies, because you expose a lot of things that we just discussed. And there are hard truths, but if we really care about protecting our planet and regenerating life and protecting our collective health, then we do have to go that far and we have to sit with the weighty reality of everything. And the final thing I want to touch on is a current direct action that you're both engaged in, which is Nevada's Thacker Pass. So what is this all about and what has your activism entailed?
MW: Yes, I originally became aware of the Thacker Pass lithium mine proposal back when I was researching for Bright Green. It was around 2015 and I spent some time living in Salt Lake City. When I was out there, I started to visit the Great Basin and really fell in love with these wide-open spaces in northern Nevada and southeast Oregon. The Great Basin has been called the sagebrush ocean. It's one of the least densely populated parts of the entire United States. And I've heard it compared to Tibet. You'll find these high mountain ranges, eight, nine thousand feet mountain ranges with these broad open valleys in between them. And sometimes in the Great Basin, you might be the only human being for 10 miles in any direction. It's absolutely incredible. And so when I read about this proposed lithium mine at Thacker Pass in northern Nevada near the Oregon border, I felt a connection to that place immediately. I felt a real worry for it.
So I followed the project and about a year ago, I learned that they were nearing the final permitting stages for this mine. So I went to visit the site. I learned that this mining company called Lithium Americas is planning to blow open two square miles of this mountainside. It’s old-growth sagebrush habitat. It might not be quite as towering as the redwoods, but these sagebrushes can be over one hundred years old. It's a pronghorn antelope migration corridor. It's a critical habitat for the greater sage grouse who dance their mating dances on these meadows every spring. It's just coming up in a couple of weeks here that they'll be doing their mating dances. Thacker Pass is just this incredibly beautiful, wild place. And because of the demand for electric vehicles and for energy storage that's being promoted by so many environmental groups, this incredibly wild, fecund place is being threatened with being blown up, with being bulldozed, with being turned into an industrial extraction zone, complete with a sulfuric acid plant that would be powered by 75 semi truckloads of sulfur coming from an oil refinery every day.
So that's what's behind this so-called “green energy” electric vehicle revolution from top to bottom. This mine would also burn 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel every day to operate. There's nothing green about it. It's more of the same. It's the destruction of the natural world to rip out these raw materials, to produce what really amounts to a luxury good. We don't need cars to survive. They're not necessary for us. We may really want them. And we may have set up our societies in a way that causes some people to need them, but we don't require them. They're not necessary for our life on this planet. They're a luxury good. And the vast majority of people on this planet don't own a car today. You go back a couple of generations and our ancestors didn't have cars and they got along just fine.
So, this project really struck me powerfully. I fell in love with the land there and I felt a need to protect it. So on January 15th, we launched a protest camp on the site of the proposed mine. And we've been camping directly inside what might become an open pit unless we're able to defeat this project.
We've been getting a lot of support from the local and regional community. A lot of the indigenous community out there, northern Paiute and Western Shoshone folks are really mad and upset about this mine. There are burial grounds out there. There are all kinds of cultural sites. There are stories that we've heard around the fire from the elders who are, you know, saying this is their traditional territory.
And this is no different from the story that they've been facing for two hundred years: people coming and stealing their land and blowing up their mountains and poisoning their water and taking as much money as they can and leaving a wasteland behind. They're worried about man camps and workers coming in and the missing and murdered indigenous women that tend to result from these types of industrial projects.
The local community of ranchers is generally very conservative, but they're really opposed to this mine because really, when it comes down to it, nobody wants their water to be poisoned.
It's not just a “not in my backyard” project either. This mining company is doing the exact same thing in Argentina where indigenous people are saying that they're being completely steamrolled, their concerns are being ignored, the company’s lying to them. And this is the case with mining all over the world. So the idea that this type of project is “green” is something that we really need to expose as a lie. This is a profit-driven enterprise that's designed to extract as many resources as possible and make as much profit as possible to produce unnecessary luxury products. And if environmental groups can't get on board with fighting that type of thing, then we have a major problem.
Some of the grassroots environmental groups have been on our side, have been supportive of what we're doing, and fighting back against this project. But a lot of the big national environmental groups are afraid to do it because they've put all their eggs in this basket of renewable energy as the solution that’s going to save the world. And even when it comes to this – of seeing the real consequences of renewable energy development on the ground, they can't seem to get it in their heads that electricity is a luxury. Lierre was part of an event I organized years ago with Chief Caleen Sisk of the Winnemem Wintu. She grew up without electricity in Northern California. She said, “electricity is a luxury”. It's not necessary for human life. And we forget that. We are so used to having what we want at the snap of our fingers, Amazon Prime, instant delivery of anything you can need to your door. We live with an amount of luxury that would be unthinkable for emperors and kings in past generations. You can get anything you want at the drop of a hat. And that's not a sustainable way to live. It's not a plan with a future.
So we're trying to stop this mine. The protest camp has been in place for two months now and counting. There are a couple of lawsuits filed against the project. There are still a few outstanding permits. I don't personally have much trust in the courts to do the right thing. So it might come down to direct action. We're not sure, but we're going to try and protect this place not only because we think it's so important, but because we think that this is a fight for the soul of the entire environmental movement.
KC: Is there anything our listeners can do to support from afar if they can't show up in person? And more broadly speaking, what are both of your calls to action for our listeners as we're closing out?
MW: Yeah, folks can go to our website, which is protectthackerrpass.org. We need people to come out to camp and spend time there. That's the most important thing to be part of our movement. But you can also sign up for our email list. People can help spread the word about this. Reach out to media outlets. Have conversations with your friends and family. We really think that change on these types of issues is going to come from the grassroots, not from mainstream media or politicians.
And, I guess my call to action would be that we're living at this critical time of the world, you know, for our species and for life on this planet as a whole. And we can choose to balk at these crises. They're extremely serious. They're extremely distressing and depressing. Or we can choose to rise to the moment that we find ourselves in and become the people who are needed to make the changes that are necessary. We can choose to become those future ancestors who got things back on track. And I really think that that's our mission as a generation. And we've got a lot of work to do.
KC: And what final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
MW: This work is really hard sometimes, and when I’m worn out, one of the quotes that always comes back to me is from a man named Shozo Tanaka. He was a Japanese environmentalist in the Meiji era when Japan was industrializing very rapidly and there was destruction all over the countryside from mining and so on. And his quote was “To care for the mountains, your heart must be as the mountains. To care for the rivers, your heart must be as the rivers.” And I think that when we have that direct connection to the land that we have an almost bottomless well of strength and resolve and courage and determination and love to draw upon. And we're going to need it.
LK: If there's anybody left alive 100 years from now, they're going to wonder what was wrong with us – that we didn't fight like hell when this planet was going down. If you love something, you have to know it's under assault right now, it's all at risk. But love is a verb. We have to let that love call us to action.
