On the show today, Chris Hedges discusses the lies and fantasies told by the mainstream environmental movement about how to solve the climate crisis with authors and activists Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith.
A new book shows how technology will not solve our environmental crisis. We will not extract ourselves from the death march toward extinction by recycling, building wind turbines, relying on solar panels or driving electric cars. This is a fantasy sold to us by an environmental movement that promises we can continue to indulge in orgies of consumption and maintain the levels of waste and perpetual growth that define the industrial age. The fact is our time is up. The forests are dying. Water is polluted, and in many places poisoned. Industrial farming is depleting the soil. The coral reefs are crumbling under the acid assault of carbon. Species are going extinct. Temperatures are soaring. Each of the last four decades have been hotter than the last. Soaring temperature rises – we are already at 1.2 °C (2.16 ° F) above pre-industrial levels – are already baked into the system, meaning that even if we stopped all carbon emissions today, we still face catastrophe. Anything above a temperature rise of 1.5 ° C will render the Earth uninhabitable. The Arctic ice along with the Greenland ice sheet are now expected to melt regardless of how much we reduce carbon emissions. A seven-meter (23-foot) rise in sea level, which is what will happen once the ice is gone, means every town and city on a coast at sea level will have to be evacuated. We must radically reconfigure how we live, and this means largely dismantling industrial society, or the human species, and most other species, will vanish, joining the long list of species that once roamed the Earth and are no more.
Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert’s new book is ‘Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost its Way and What We Can Do About It’.
