The Premise

Broadly speaking I subscribe to Derrick Jensen’s 20 premises as laid out in his two volume book, Endgame.

The premises in order can be found here.

A somewhat naieve, and perfectly ‘normal’, commentary can be found here.

Why is this a normal and naieve commentary? Basically it does what so many people do when confronted by the fact that a system which is designed to grow (cultures based on agriculture, or ‘civilisation’) isn’t sustainable. It says “you can’t prove that” and “we could transform this system into a sustainable one”.

Economic models such as we use need growth. Without growth our version of economics, the civilised person’s economics, fails. This has been true ever since we developed the concept to describe what was happening within our agricultural societies. A system that needs growth isn’t sustainable.

If you read Endgame, which I highly recommend you do, he lays out a very workable definition of civilisation. Jensen defines civilisation as “a way of life characterised by the growth of cities.”^[1] As he points out, civilisation is often directly linked to the appearence of cities. With this definition and with the subsequent definition of cities, it is impossible to argue that civilisation is redeemable. If you change the fundamental nature of either cities (impossible realistically at current densities, thus impossible without making them not be cities as we would have any chance of recognising) then civilisation might be redeemable, but by changing the nature of what a city is you stop it being a city and thus you’re no longer in a civilisation. You might be in a tribe or a small community, but you aren’t in a civilisation.

The end may not come in my life time. I think it will. However, this is an area I would love to be wrong about. I think what Ran Prieur says in this short clip is actually spot on. As a blob of people, we like disaster movies because they give us the escapism that we would do something if there was a massive disaster and our way of life were threatened. The truth is that we will sit in our air-conditioned, centrally-heated houses complaining about the cost of petrol^[2] or gas^[3] and demanding that the very ‘free market’ system we were lauding just a mere month or so ago should not charge us what it can for goods we have to buy^[4]. If we wanted to control the cost of petrol, gas, whatever, we should have kept nationalised industries in those areas. We didn’t. We invited the devil of free market economics to supper and got pissed that he actually burnt us. I’m not suggesting that we re-nationalise those industries (well, I wouldn’t ‘nationalise’ them so much as ‘localise’ them), but I am questioning the sense of giving those areas to private, profit seeking companies and then being shocked and dismayed when those same companies turn out to be seeking profit for private individuals rather than the good of the community.

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[1] http://www.kewego.co.uk/video/iLyROoafYKjY.html
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7527679.stm
[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7533389.stm
[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7534421.stm