An Anthropocene Worth Having

John Michael Greer

For more than two years now I’ve been trying to figure out how to introduce a way of thinking about humanity’s relationship to nature that cuts straight across nearly all of the conventional thinking on that subject. It’s been a challenge. I’m glad to say, though, that a project now being lauded by the corporate-enabler end of the environmental movement offers a very good way to talk about the way of thinking I have in mind. That’s not because the project in question embodies that way of thinking. It’s because the project goes so far in the other direction that it offers the perfect contrast to the way of approaching nature I want to discuss.

Nature, as envisioned by the 30 by 30 Project.

The project in question is called “30 by 30.” Its ostensible goal is to have 30 per cent of the Earth’s surface defined as protected areas by 2030. What that label “protected areas” means is very hard to figure out from the websites and press releases; some  talk about “sustainable use consistent with conservation outcomes,” others propose a ban on all extractive uses (that is to say, farming, herding, fishing, etc.), while the great majority dodge the issue and brandish words such as “conserve” and “protect” without ever saying what these mean in practice.

That is to say, it’s the kind of thing that sounds wonderful as long as you don’t ask the obvious questions. We’ve seen a lot of ideas like that in environmental circles in recent years, and those have contributed mightily both to the total failure of environmental activism to accomplish much of anything and to the bitter taste that environmentalism leaves in so many mouths these days. The practical difficulties with the 30 by 30 project deserve discussion in their own right, but those difficulties will also help frame certain broader problems with modern environmentalism.  This, in turn, will make it easy to talk about what might be done instead.

Let’s start with a dose of cold realism.  The most likely result of this whole project is that 30 per cent of the Earth’s surface will be formally designated as protected areas, but nothing will be done to protect most of it—the same result, in other words, that we got from all those agreements to stop greenhouse gas emissions that never got around to doing anything to stop greenhouse gas emissions. For the sake of argument, though, let’s assume that 30 by 30 isn’t just an exercise in virtue signaling, and its advocates actually get what they say they want.  Let’s assume along the same lines that half of the new protected areas have tightly managed sustainable-use systems set up to control what people can do with nature there, while the other half are set aside entirely, with no extractive uses allowed. What happens then?

Because regulations are always effective.

To begin with, the vast majority of people in the no-extractive-use areas will be forced to leave, because extractive uses—farming, herding, and so forth—are how they make a living. Most of them have no other job skills, and it’s not as though any significant number of jobs for former farmers, herders, and so on will be available in these areas. So we’re talking about expelling nearly all the inhabitants from 15% of the Earth’s land surface. How many people?  It’s impossible to know until the areas are specified, but even if the protected areas are chosen wholly from less thickly populated regions, it’ll involve hundreds of millions of people, and it could well amount to a billion or more.

A great many of the press releases about the project insist airily that the rights of indigenous peoples and local residents will be respected. Indigenous peoples, who’ve seen this same song and dance so many times they can recite all the verses by heart, are having none of it. Indigenous communities in the Amazon and western Canada have already denounced the entire 30 by 30 project as “green colonialism,” and of course they’re right on target. You know as well as I do, dear readers, which 30 per cent of the Earth’s land surface is going to be affected by this, and it won’t include the places where rich people like to live.  Barack and Michelle Obama aren’t going to have to hand over their beachfront property on Martha’s Vineyard to be turned back into salt marsh, even though that might actually do some good.  As always, it’ll be the rural poor, including those who belong to indigenous communities, that will bear the brunt of it.

The Obamas could easily afford to have this taken from them and turned into a nature refuge — but don’t hold your breath.

Many of them, indigenous or otherwise, will not leave voluntarily.  They don’t care about the angst of privileged people in the rich part of the world; they want to stay on the land that they and their ancestors have inhabited, and live the way they’ve always lived.  So they’ll have to be forced off their land at gunpoint by soldiers, in a reenactment of the Trail of Tears on an almost unimaginably larger scale. Some will fight back, and there will be deaths.  No doubt there’ll be promises of compensation; if you believe those, dear reader, you might talk to some American Indians, or simply look up how much of the federal aid set aside for small businesses during the Covid lockdowns got slurped up by big corporations that didn’t need a cent.

Even if the money is forthcoming, though, how much good will that do? Whole armies of people will be driven from their land and their livelihoods, and most of them will wind up in urban slums—in an overcrowded world, where else can they go?  It’s not as though there’s plenty of unused farmland, ranchland, and so on waiting for them.  Any money they get won’t last long, and most of them have no job skills that matter in their new setting. So they’ll be crammed into slums, impoverished, bitter, resentful, seething, a happy hunting ground for terrorist groups and charismatic demagogues. We saw last October what kind of violent blowback can come from people in that situation.  Now imagine hundreds of Gaza Strips around the world, with hundreds of millions of people crowded into them. Think for a moment about the potential consequences.

Driven off their land by force — it’s an old story.

Nor will the acreage handed over to sustainable use yield much better outcomes. One of the things that’s been shown beyond a shadow of a doubt over the last century is that the more bureaucracy you load on any economic activity, the more of that activity ends up in the hands of multinational corporations. That’s partly a matter of sheer corruption—only a big corporation has the money to bribe an entire bureaucracy—and even more a matter of the way that  economies of scale apply to regulation, but the regulatory state is also one of the things that keeps big firms from being outcompeted by small businesses that can be more nimble and responsive to public wants. Here again, family farmers, small proprietors, and indigenous people will be on the losing end, squeezed out so some wretched Misfortune 500 firm can add a tenth of a percent to its return on investment. They’ll add their substantial share to the raw material for terrorism and political turmoil.

Now ask yourself how long the international consensus behind the 30 by 30 program will last, and what will happen once it starts to fray. Ask yourself how many charismatic demagogues will rise to power  by promising to let people return to their homes and their land.  Ask yourself what will happen a few generations down the road when environmentalism has fallen out of fashion, as of course it will; all moral crusades run their course and fade away. (Not much more than a century ago, for example, one of the biggest moral crusades in the English-speaking world, backed by big organizations such as the White Cross League, was dedicated to stamping out masturbation. When’s the last time that cause got big corporate donations?)  Ask yourself just what all this will look like from the perspective of a thousand years in the future.

Victorian anti-masturbation appliances, as popular then as electric cars are now.

All in all, the 30 by 30 project is a fine example of a “solution” that solves nothing and creates more and worse problems than the ones it claims to address.  We have a lot of pseudosolutions like that just now.  They share certain traits in common.  First, they’re imposed from above by a managerial elite, rather than rising from beneath out of the lived experience and knowledge of people on the scene. Second, they load all the costs of the project onto people at the grassroots while the benefits inevitably flow uphill—you’ll notice, for example, that nobody’s talking about making the areas set aside for the 30 by 30 program off limits for ecotourism and other high-end recreational uses. Third, they rely on abstract notions, round numbers, and vague generalizations rather than the sensitive attention to specifics that generate real solutions. Fourth, they pay no attention to the realities of history or to the prospects of long-term political and social change.  Fifth, they never challenge the modes of thinking that caused the problem in the first place; quite the contrary, they nearly always embrace and reinforce those problematic mindsets.

It’s this last point that I want to develop in more detail here, because the core presupposition of the 30 by 30 project is the same attitude that’s at the heart of our ecological crisis:  the delusion that human beings are not part of nature and therefore can only harm the biosphere.

That wasn’t always part of environmental thinking.  Many years ago, before it sold out to corporate enablers, the Sierra Club published a fine book addressing this very issue titled Not Man Apart—the phrase is a snippet from a Robinson Jeffers poem, something else you won’t see referenced in today’s fashionable environmentalism. (Some other time we’ll talk about why.)  At the heart of the older environmental vision was the recognition that human beings are part of the natural world, and not just in the sense that we depend moment by moment on nature for our survival, although of course this is true.  It’s also crucial to understand that human flourishing depends on a close, healthy, and mutually beneficial relationship with nonhuman nature.

There it is, aboard the Valley Forge.

That was the logic behind the Conservation Pledge, one of the core statements of the older environmentalism. Fans of 1970s ecological science fiction will remember a copy taped to the wall of Bruce Dern’s cabin in the classic film Silent Running. Here’s how it reads:  “I give my pledge as an American to save and faithfully to defend from waste the natural resources of my country—its soil and minerals, its forests, waters, and wildlife.”

Suggest that at a meeting of today’s privileged environmentalists and you can count on being shouted down in a hurry. Its sins, according to the current way of thinking, are twofold. First, of course, it makes reference to a specific national community, the United States, to which those taking the pledge belong—“my country,” the pledge specifies—rather than profferng a universal dogma to be rammed down the throats of everyone in the world. Second, it refers to natural resources—that is to say, things that human beings can at least potentially use.

It’s quite fashionable to insist that this anthropocentric approach to nature is unacceptable, that nature ought to be valued for itself rather than seen as a set of resources belonging to a given community or political entity. It bears remembering, though, that the attitudes enshrined in the Conservation Pledge were responsible for the great triumphs of late nineteenth and twentieth century conservation, from the birth of the national parks system to the Clean Water Act, while the attitudes that replaced them have accomplished very little by comparison. The reason’s easy enough to grasp: the Conservation Pledge helps ordinary people understand that they have a personal stake in the environment.  These are their resources we’re talking about, after all!

They’re mining cobalt for your electric car.

There’s an ugly subtext behind the insistence that local communities and independent nations shouldn’t treat the local manifestations of nature as their own patrimony. The nations of the industrial West have spent the last half century stripping the rest of the planet of natural resources.  The last thing those same Western nations wanted was to encourage other countries to start thinking of their own natural resources as something to conserve and defend from waste! So planetary environmentalism marches in lockstep with the global economy, and environmentalists in Western countries pretend not to notice that their favorite green technologies depend on minerals from hugely polluting open pit mines worked by child labor across the global south.

Let’s go deeper, though. If human flourishing depends on a close, healthy, and mutually beneficial relationship with nature, that suggests a way of approaching the future worlds apart from the separation from nature envisioned by the promoters of the 30 by 30 campaign. Oddly enough, it’s a way set out in some detail in two of the works of imaginative fiction that were at the peak of their popularity when Silent Running hit the screen:  The Lord of the Rings and Dune.

I mentioned two weeks ago how odd it was that these two works of fiction, both wildly popular on the left in the 1960s and 1970s, were both written by rock-ribbed political conservatives. Both have been praised, and deservedly, for the deep sense of ecology that pervades and shapes them. In both cases, though, it’s the older approach to the environment that takes center stage.

Hobbiton, painted by Tolkien. Notice the trees, hedgerows, and small fields planted in many different crops.

In Tolkien’s trilogy, in fact, you can measure the moral goodness of the nations and races by how thoroughly their lives are interwoven with nature. On one end of the spectrum, you’ve got elves living in treehouses in the forest, and hobbits in earth-sheltered homes in a green landscape; on the other, you’ve got orcs, who live in barren mines in the moutains or the industrial wasteland of Mordor. You know that the people of Gondor are decadent because so many of them live in a big stone city with too few trees!  No elf or hobbit would ever have needed the Conservation Pledge, since that type of thinking is second nature to them; no orc would abide by it for a moment.

Then there’s Dune. Frank Herbert’s one great novel is among many other things a triumph of ecological science fiction. Most of the attempts to import ecology into SF are frankly not very good, largely because the authors didn’t take the time to understand ecology before they wrote about it; Dune is the supreme exception.  Herbert was thoroughly conversant with the principles of ecological science.  He worked out the ecology of the desert planet Arrakis with quite a bit of attention to real dryland environments, and the grand project to turn the desert green pursued by Herbert’s Fremen is just as well thought out.

Notice, though, that the Fremen weren’t trying to preserve the deserts of Arrakis in their current desolate state. Quite the contrary, their attitude might as well be taken from the Conservation Pledge. To them Arrakis was rich with resources, if only enough water could be freed up and directed into greenbelts at the planet’s poles. They planned on leaving the equatorial regions as a vast desert belt full of sandworms, but since the worms are part of the ecological cycle that produces Arrakis’s number one export crop, that’s also resource-oriented thinking.

By Fremen standards, it’s a verdant landscape.

Like hobbits, in other words, Fremen favor a well-tended countryside.  Their idea of what a well-tended countryside looks like is different from the Shire, of course, but that’s a reflection of the ecological realities that frame their lives. Notice also that the green Arrakis the Fremen hope to create is better by all the usual ecological metrics than an Arrakis with no human beings at all: its resource cycles are more stable, its ecosystems are richer in biomass, its number of wild species is considerably larger, and so on. That’s where that phrase “mutually beneficial” comes into play: intelligent human action can actively benefit the biosphere.

The same thing is true of the hobbits’ approach to nature. One thing everybody in the older environmental scene knew but nobody in the current scene seems to remember is that an old-fashioned agricultural landscape, the kind that’s full of hedgerows, coppices, intercropping, polyculture, and animal husbandry, is ecologically richer than most wild environments in the temperate zone. What ecologists call the “edge effect”—the fact that biomass, wild species count, and other measures of ecological health go up sharply on the ecotone, the transition zone between one ecosystem and another—goes into overdrive in a traditional agricultural landscape, where every hedgerow, coppice edge, and field boundary functions as an ecotone.

That doesn’t happen in the gargantuan moncultures favored by modern corporate agribusiness, of course. Yet you won’t see the people who back the 30 by 30 project suggesting that 30 per cent of world farmland ought to be handed over to small family farms and local communities to raise crops and livestock using traditional methods. The unspoken assumption is that the only alternative to unfettered corporate exploitation is untouched wilderness. That assumption’s very convenient to corporations that want to squeeze out small farms, which is why it’s so heavily pushed by those environmental groups that get all their funding from big corporations.

Ecologically speaking, this is a desert. There are better ways.

Mind you, there are other ways to weave human life and nature together, and indigenous peoples used a huge number of them. Here in northeastern North America, for example, the native people had a clever, effective, and ecologically sound alternative to livestock raising. They used controlled burning and other methods to increase the habitat and forage for deer and other tasty animals, so that the population of these animals boomed.  They then planted luscious gardens near the forest. Of course a great many deer came to raid the gardens—and of course somebody was waiting for them with a nocked arrow. Garden hunting, as it’s called, was an elegant adaptation that allowed human beings and wild animals to live in harmony with each other; the human population benefited from a richer food supply, while the deer and other game animals benefited from improved habitat and steady but not excessive predation.

That specific approach may or may not be appropriate to any given ecosystem, and of course that’s just the point. Each ecosystem and each bioregion requires solutions relevant to its own needs and possibilities. Combine the knowledge gathered by ecologists over the last two centuries or so with the traditional lore and know-how of local people and indigenous communities, and nations and communities can reshape their relationship to nature in ways that provide stability to nature and human societies alike over the very long term.

This idea is starting to spread in the populist counterculture. It may be the most revolutionary notion of our time.

Does this seem wildly unrealistic?  I’d point out that it’s much more realistic than the global land seizures and mass deportations of the 30 by 30 plan. The changes I have in mind lend themselves well to local projects and individual experimentation—a case can be made that they are are best launched voluntarily at the grassroots level, rather than being imposed by out-of-touch experts empowered by a fragile and impermanent consensus of the world’s governments. Since the current US-centric world system pushing top-down projects of the 30 by 30 variety is looking remarkably brittle these days, for that matter, it may not be a good idea to pin hopes for the future on its indefinite survival.

Some scientists suggest that we’ve entered into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, which is shaped by humanity’s impact on natural systems. If that turns out to be true from the perspective of geological time, it’s the approach I’ve sketched out here that gives us some shot at an Anthropocene worth having. What that might look like will be the subject of several upcoming posts.

Source: Ecosophia