Last
Tuesday, I read the headline of a USA Today article entitled, “Bird deaths soar
at wind farms” (Sep. 22, 2009). The
article describes how wind farms are “slaughtering thousands of birds” as the
birds are “sliced up by the blades of roughly 5,400 turbines” or “electrocuted
by the wind farm’s power lines.” For one
wind farm, roughly 10,000 birds are being killed every year.
What
is the response? Interior Secretary Ken
Salazar just writes it off saying that, “the fact is that some birds will be
killed is a reality.” This is
typical. An absolute acceptance in the
way things are and the willingness to sacrifice life on the altar of
civilization.
Industrial civilization is killing the
planet.
Attempts to reform industrial civilization
are still killing the planet.
I
can already hear the opposition. Denial
is the loudest voice. “No, industrial
civilization is not killing the planet.”
Dead zones in the ocean.
Deforestation and the destruction of the native wilderness. Factory farms. Climate change. The rapid extinction of species. Oil spills.
Overpopulation. Toxins in every
source of water on the planet.
Escalating numbers of cancer victims.
Soil depletion. Acid rain. Urban
sprawl. Ten thousand birds being
electrocuted and sliced up by “clean” energy sources.
Then
there are those who downplay the situation and suggest we can fix it without
attacking civilization. We just need to
be stewards of the Earth and live more eco-friendly lives. These people are advocating wind farms,
Toyota Priuses, LEED-certified buildings, and going green. But honest reflection shows that wind farms
murder birds. Cars need roads and metals
mined from somewhere, transported somehow, to be manufactured in factories
running off some energy source.
LEED-certified buildings are still structures made of things taken from
a finite planet, built with the same destructive machines producing everything
else. And going green is just what we
the consumers want to satisfy our guilt from living within a culture this
destructive.
Or
there are people using Ken Salazar’s defense that the fact is the Earth taking
damage is a reality if we want to sustain microwaves, televisions, laptops,
treadmills, dishwashers and material affluence in a techno-culture.
All
these ways of thinking are pathological and constitute a collective failure of
civilized humans respect for life and ourselves.
Anarcho-primitivist
author, John Zerzan offers another way, “the voluntary abandonment of the
industrial mode of existence is not self-renunciation, but a healing return.”
Anarcho-primitivism? Abandoning the industrial mode of
existence? Yes.
Our
existence on this planet has not always been characterized this way, and in
fact, humans have lived longer and more sustainably as gatherer-hunters than as
civilized humans within industrialization.
Pre-civilized life was not “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” but
according to the American anthropologist, Marshal Sahlins, the gatherer-hunter
existence was “the original affluent society.”
Let’s start dialoguing about everything we
have known our whole lives because it’s liberating and necessary. People have already started. And Christ-followers are speaking resistance
too. In October, I will be joining the
Psalters and Theillalogical Spoon among others in Philadelphia for some
“biblical explorations of nature, civilization, and feral faith” at the
Gathering Around the Unhewn Stone conference.
We
know that we cannot sustain this mode of existence forever, and the 50 Simple
Things You Can do to Stay in Denial with fluorescent light bulbs and blood-splattered
windmills are not a solution. Let’s
start somewhere and rethink existence.
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