What Lessons Can the Environmental Movement Learn from the Social Justice Movement?

Max Wilbert is on the Board of Directors of Fertile Ground and is a graduate of Huxley College of the Environment. He has worked against police brutality, militarism, and environmental destruction for nearly a decade. In June 2010 he traveled to the Russian Arctic with a team of scientists studying climate change.

Part 2

What Lessons Can the Environmental Movement Learn from the Social Justice Movement?

If the environmental movement (and the broader movement for justice) is going to be successful, we are going to need to learn what we can from the struggles of our ancestors. In the first part of this series, I claimed that the environmental justice movement, to this point, has failed. A large part of that is due to the fact that we are largely ignorant of the history of social struggles. This is not an accident. It has been said that a long memory is the biggest threat to the powerful.

Let us begin by journeying back, as far back as we can remember and further still. If one looks at the sweep of history and prehistory, we see - through oral traditions, written histories, and the sciences – a vast variety of human cultures. Some destroyed their landbases, and some did not.

The Destructive Side of Civilization

So we can ask: what is the defining characteristic of societies that destroyed their landbase?

There is one overwhelming distinction. When people transitioned to agriculture(monocropping fields), it required land clearance. The arrival of agricultural societies, which arose independently in several areas between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, corresponds overwhelmingly with skyrocketing rates of erosion, deforestation, and habitat loss.

As these societies became more and more reliant on a few species, they became more vulnerable to crop failure and famine. The reaction was to store grain, and this surplus food led to huge population growth. As these societies expanded around the world, they left behind lowered water tables, saline fields, the ruins of grasslands, and vast clearcuts – most of the old forests of South Asia and Europe were cleared before the industrial age, and there is some convincing scientific evidence that climate change began with the spread of agriculture (not with the advent of industrialism, as is widely believed).

Agricultural societies that are organized around cities are called civilizations. As the industrial age has been the era of burning fossil fuels, the age of civilization has been the era of burning through fossil soil. Peak soil passed in the 1980’s – until then, the area of land under cultivation had been growing for 10,000 years. Now it has begun to decline.

Hierarchical Power Structures

Civilization is nearly always accompanied by hierarchical power structures, large militaries, complex social and religious institutions, and widespread slavery maintained by violence or threat of violence. All of these serve to maintain the status quo.

In the modern world, there are more slaves than existed at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The gap between the richest and the poorest is astronomical. The United States spends more than 50% of its discretionary budget on the military and maintains over 1000 military bases worldwide. The average American sees about 3000 advertisements per day. We are the most propagandized society in human history.

Needless to say, there are very few examples of people willingly transitioning from hunter-gather, horticultural, or pastoral ways of life to civilization. There are thousands of examples of people leaving civilization for the greater quality of life found in more egalitarian, land-based cultures.

Globalizing Ecological Collapse

The facts are clear: civilization is killing the planet, and the Industrial Revolution only served to speed up the process. Industrial civilization has spread across the entire planet – now instead of a local collapse, we are facing a global collapse of the community of life. Biodiversity is plummeting. Original forests are nearly all gone. 99 percent of wolves are gone. Lion populations are down 95 percent.

In order to return to a way of life based on sustainability and justice, we must dismantle industrial civilization and return to more inherently egalitarian land-based ways of life. This is why Fertile Ground is part of the anti-civilization movement. We have no illusions that this will be an easy or fast transition. That is why we are working to build a multi-generational grassroots movement that will engage civilization on many levels.

Part of this movement is people working to re-localize food systems, water supplies, housing, clothing, and government. Part of it is people working through the legal system, through protest and civil disobedience, and through community organizing, to reclaim the law. And part of it is those people who are engaging in more militant direct action, or other underground action to actively disable and dismantle the infrastructure of fossil fuels and other destructive activities.

What Tactics Bring Change?

We have a rich historical record of thousands of different movements that have arisen to confront injustices ranging from colonization to sex discrimination, occupation, unjust laws, tyrannies, slavery, and everything in between. This is a treasure trove of lessons regarding political strategy, tactical planning, and revolutionary character. Unfortunately, those lessons are not being taught in schools. We have to find them ourselves.

From the resistance to Apartheid, we can learn about the effectiveness of international solidarity actions, and of boycotts and industrial sabotage. From the suffrage movement, we can learn about the importance of intergenerational struggle. From resistance to Nazi occupation in Europe, we can learn about when nonviolent resistance fails. From the Xhosa people, we can learn of the danger in solely relying on religious or spiritual salvation. From the struggle for Indian independence, we can learn the importance of a diversity of tactics. From the American Indian Movement and The Black Panthers, we can learn a healthy hatred and fear of government repression.

I urge anyone who cares about justice to study these struggles, analyze the current political situation, and come to their own conclusions about the path they must take with the gifts they have been given.

Next Month

The third and final article will explain the vision of Fertile Ground.

For More Information

For a more comprehensive discussion of Civilization, including suggested reading, see What is Civilization? Aric McBay. http://www.sodahead.com/living/what-is-civilization-by-aric-mcbay/blog-282673