‘The Oil Machine’: How environmental grand narratives obstruct ‘real’ change
We need a new, more radical paradigm, which exposes the modern technological lifestyle as an ‘economic suicide cult’.
We need a new, more radical paradigm, which exposes the modern technological lifestyle as an ‘economic suicide cult’.
This article is an attempt to seriously engage with socialist ecomodernism in a way the interview failed to do with degrowth: on its own terms.
Overall the plan of action should be the same: empowering localized economies and grassroots organizations as a way to mitigate resource overuse and move toward an ecological civilization. Any model that begins from the proposition that consumption patterns can remain unchanged is a nonstarter.
We don’t need re-genesis, but a de-urbanizing re-exodus to places where we can create such food cultures. The real lesson from George Monbiot’s grandmother, I’d submit, is not the narrowness of her diet but the breadth of her knowledge.
Asking himself how deep the reconstruction of the project of Enlightenment has to go, McCarraher’s answer is an emphatically italicized “all the way down” I think he’s right.
Self-possession implies property in some sense – being able to claim a personal right to generate wellbeing from the world we share with other people and organisms.
I apologise for my part in a civilization that made Apocalypse Never a bestseller. I hope that you will have both the capacity inherited from my generation and a fortitude of your own to learn from my failings, and to build a better civilization over the ashes of mine.
But I do have a Plan B if George’s vision succeeds. In that eventuality, I’m going to slip the fence of his urban dystopia with my sheep, find a pleasant grassy spot somewhere, and make my living as a mammal and a farmer, surrounded by other wild creatures.
But nothing other than dramatic societal transformation will be sufficient to avoid catastrophic climate change for the vast majority of the world’s population – and eventually, everyone. It may sound daunting, but rejecting the ecologically harmful assumptions on which our culture is currently built offers us a unique chance to build a healthier and fairer world.
The left urgently needs to get over its long-term fascination with “productivism”, to realise that the best line of attack against capitalism is to focus on limits and sustainability, and to plunge into Transition Towns and related initiatives.
It’s as if, as environmental humanities scholar Anthony Galluzzo posted recently, humanity, not tech is—ha—the engine of history. Again, it’ll be people, not science alone, environmental scientist Erle Ellis wrote in another Times op-ed, who’ll save us from ecological collapse.
Game of Thrones was arguably about climate change, but the HBO series turned this narrative around by presenting a last-minute technological solution as magically saving the day, the planet, and existence.