Choose a side or negotiate a peace.
Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash
Capital and science are waging war on nature. This is not a metaphorical war. It’s an actual, declared war to dominate and/or destroy.
Rich, powerful, educated men have striven to dominate nature for 400 years. If we don’t stop them, they won’t stop until everything is dead, including the human race.
The war started with science denying nature exists. In 1637, philosopher of science Rene Descartes declared human intelligence the only living thing in the universe. Even human bodies are machines, he said. Only our thinking brains have souls and intelligence.
According to scientist Rupert Sheldrake in his book Rebirth of Nature, Descartes believed and wrote that plants and animals can’t think, so they’re not truly alive. Denying that animals could feel pain, Descartes practiced vivisection, dissecting living animals, ignoring their screams and cries. This attitude is practiced today on industrial scale in huge factory farms where animals are squished in tiny cages, or in cosmetics laboratories that test their products on helpless animals’ eyes.
Notice how Descartes’ cruelty mirrors the Europeans’ treatment of the people they were colonizing at the time he wrote. I find it interesting that modern science developed along with colonialism and wonder how it influenced early scientists’ approach to nature.
The war on animal life went genocidal in the 19th Century, with species hunted to extinction by men killing for money. Historically, indigenous people or subsistence farmers killed animals for protein and fat, or to make clothing. They only needed so much, so they took a few and the population could grow back.
Commercial hunting has no such limits. Aided by lethal weapons and transportation methods provided by science, hunters could and did kill thousands of animals each day.
In her book Wild at Heart, farmer, engineer and author Alice Outwater describes how enormous flocks of passenger pigeons, so large they might take half a day to pass overhead, were systematically killed off between 1860 and 1900. Everyone in the big Eastern cities was eating pigeons until they couldn’t anymore. The pigeons were all dead.
Large mammals like the bison, the whales, and many others have gone from huge numbers to near-extinction through sustained, technological massacre. They weren’t just killed for food. Millions of bison were slaughtered for their hide; marine mammals and big cats for their fur, whales for the oil in their blubber, birds for their feathers. If people could wear you or eat you, you were condemned to death.
Hunting is obviously a form of warfare, but the battle against nature also uses subtler methods. Huge areas are cleansed of wild animals and plants through urban expansion. Large scale farms replace thousands of native species with a few edible ones favored by the market. Freeways and suburbs destroy habitats. Waterways are dammed and drained so fish can’t live there.
Outwater writes that around her farm in the American west, miners, farmers, and cities have rights to water, but the animals who live in the water do not.
Now, technology and money are waging climate war. While people of means can tolerate extreme heat, super storms and drought by going inside with air conditioning, packaged food and bottled water, animals and plants cannot. In the changing climate, they are left to die of heat, hunger, or thirst.
If this is not war, what is it?
Two camps, but only one is armed
Who are the sides in this war?
I am calling one side Nature, or Mother Earth. The meaning of these terms has changed over the years. Nature sometimes meant the life force, the power that makes everything go. Nature could also refer to all the living things the life force creates. Some people include mountains and rivers and the whole world in this category, which religious people refer to as ‘Creation.’
Once, all nature was considered feminine. The word nature comes from the root word for birth, as in nativity or prenatal. The word matter comes from mater, Latin for mother. The term Mother Earth wasn’t poetry; people actually believed Earth gave them life.
According to Sheldrake, in this view, Mother Earth gives birth to all things. It also kills them when their time comes and takes them back into Her womb. She pours out constant creative energy that drives evolution and growth. You and I are part of Her.
I’m calling the other side Mammon, after the Aramaic spirit of greed. Mammon now combines patriarchy, capitalism, and science. This dark alliance started when agriculture led to the rise of private property, which led to patriarchy, a system of male dominance, private wealth, and controlling others by force. Patriarchy was given religious approval by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with their one male God.
Patriarchs may have been cruel to slaves, women and children, but they didn’t declare war on Creation until the scientific and industrial revolutions of the 16th — 18th centuries. Until then, people couldn’t even dream of contending with the awesome forces of nature. When the Protestant Reformation freed science from the restraints of Catholic hierarchies and put it in service of rich people, the growing knowledge and power of science and technology inspired dreams of conquest.
Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England in the 1620s, credited as a father of the scientific method, had big ambitions for the potential of science. In The Advancement of Learning, he wrote, “We should establish the power and dominion of the human race over the universe.” In his 1624 book The New Atlantis, he wrote that scientific research “would enlarge the human empire, to the affecting of all things possible.”
For Bacon, the scientific project was explicitly patriarchal. Nature’s “holes and corners” should be penetrated. Nature was to be “bound into service,”“put into constraints,” and “made a slave.” He called science a “masculine birth.” According to Rupert Sheldrake, many of Bacon’s scientific colleagues used the adjective “masculine” to speak of science and its ability to “capture, dominate, and subdue” nature.
Science and technology in service of capital have brought us atomic weapons and thousands of chemical poisons killing all manner of life. They have also brought great increases in food production and medical care, leading to ever-growing human populations living longer lives.
Life has certainly gotten a lot easier for many humans. It’s good to be on the winning side, isn’t it? But we are also on the losing side.
Battle field status report
Science has attained amazing power. We could have used it to live better without destroying the natural basis of existence, but science instead joined with capitalism to consume more and more. Why?
Endless growth and maximum consumption are built into capitalism. Capitalist competition means that any limits on destruction of nature are bad business and won’t last. If your company won’t dig that mine or frack that well, someone else will. Their stock will rise and your will fall. [Note: most ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ countries embrace capitalist technology and human dominance, so from Earth’s point of view are not much better.]
As humans, we are on both sides in this war. We are the killers and the killed. But we cannot be neutral. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
And as Jesus of Nazareth said, “No man can serve both God and Mammon.” We can’t serve nature and capital. God and Mother Earth want the forest alive, while Mammon wants it dead and turned into products.
By choosing Mammon, we also choose our own destruction. As a Cree Indian philosopher said, “When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.”
Since modern technology visibly destroys nature, some rich people, especially techies, want to get rid of nature entirely. Some of these self-labeled “transhumanists,” talk of uploading human intelligence to computers and going on without the bodies that inconveniently require a natural world to live in.
Some envision a world where all the species that don’t directly feed or clothe us will go extinct, and people won’t care. We’ll be on our phones, in our cars, having a good time living in a concrete world.
We’re going that way now. A 2022 study from the World Wildlife Fund found that total wildlife of all kinds was down 69% since 1970. Studies from Europe have found insect populations have shrunk by 75% globally. According to the Smithsonian Institution, species are going extinct at hundreds or thousands of times the historical rate.
Negotiating Peace
This war could be stopped. A deal is possible. According to a group called Nature Needs Half, Earth could survive and people could thrive if half the Earth’s surface were left wild or returned to nature, while humans shared the other half.
Scientists and indigenous leaders have worked this out, in theory. There could be enough food, a stabilized climate, and more species could survive. That’s a nice theory, but the people who think they “own” the other 50%, and the corporations who profit from exploiting it, will violently disagree.
Ugly bastard, isn’t he?
Is there another way? If the billionaires won’t change their hearts, maybe the people who work for them will. Or maybe the people will make them. Maybe new, sustainable companies will spring up to drive the planet-killers out of business. In modern democracies, nearly all leaders serve Mammon, but what if we elected people who serve people and Earth?
As you read this, the European Union Parliament is debating whether to codify a 20% set aside for nature. The Natural Restoration Laws is highly controversial, and the 20% is leading in votes by a very thin margin. And 20% for nature is not enough, but it’s a start.
Standing for Mother Earth means standing for people: the poor, the indigenous, workers, and peasants and their class allies the animals and plants.
I think we can start by identifying more strongly with nature, spending time and attention on the life around us and within us. We can know we are part of something bigger and better than our individual selves. We can fight and live as if everything we love and everything we are depends on it. We can organize our communities and speak our truth. Stop Money’s war on Life!
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