A Letter to the Peace Movement

I’m Max Wilbert, co-author of Bright Green Lies, founder of Protect Thacker Pass, and biocentric community organizer. I use this site to share strategies and explore topics such as sustainability, collapse, empire, resistance, activism, greenwashing, and justice. Thank you for reading.

Whatcom Peace and Justice Center, 2009. Photo by the author.

My grandfather was a conscientious objector to the Second World War, and he paid a price. Ostracized from work, community, and family, he nonetheless chose to follow his moral compass—a sense of direction that seems all too rare today.

As we enter a new era of existential crisis, I often wish he were still alive - despite his many flaws. I imagine debating strategy, morality, and ethics with him, hearing new perspectives from a face eerily like my own. In 1941, when he refused to go to war, global warming was an idea known only to a few. Ironically, it was the nuclear arms race unleashed a few years later that in many ways changed public perception about the power of technology. For the first time, it became clear that the planet was not infinite—that with the push a button, our world could be ended.

What is happening now is less abrupt holocaust and more slow march of ecocide. For thousands of years now, the dominant culture has been waging a war against the planet. There is an unbroken line stretching from the legend of Gilgamesh defeating Humbaba the forest guardian and cutting down the ancient cedar trees, through the Romans cutting their way through the old-growth forests of Italy (and eventually the entire Mediterranean Basin), to the modern culture of consumption chewing its way through the remaining forests of the planet.

The small farmer William Kötke calls this ecologically-destructive model a “culture of empire.” It’s an apt name, for these cultures don’t simply wage war against other human beings, they wage war against nature as well.

One of the most important insights about cultures of empire is that they combine oppression of human beings and destruction of the land. Imperialism and laying waste to watersheds have proceeded hand-in-hand. Patriarchy has been the partner of pollution. As colonial armies advance, forests fall.

Many people have drawn these links; among them, anthropologist Peggy-Reeves Sanday whose research showed that cultures which have experienced “ecological dislocation” in recent generations are likely to have higher rates of rape and sexual assault that those that live in place. Her survey of 95 tribal and band-organized societies found that 47 percent were nearly or completely rape-free, 17 percent were rape prone, and the remainder fell into the middle.

It’s easy to say that these problems are connected; it’s harder to pin down the underlying cause. The explanation that makes the most sense to me came from Renape/Lenape scholar and activist Jack D. Forbes, who believed that colonialism, exploitation of the land, sexual violence, and other forms of destructive behavior are the consequence of a profound spiritual trauma, and that this trauma is something that can be transmitted through generations, similar to cycles of child abuse.

It is, in a word, contagious.

Forbes writes in his book Columbus and Other Cannibals that “The disease that is overrunning the world is the disease of aggression against other living things and, more precisely, the disease of the consuming of other creatures’ lives and possessions.  It is cannibalism, a cannibal psychosis, and it is the greatest epidemic sickness known to humans.”

Forbes goes on to argue that Christopher Columbus and other heroes of colonial societies were “mentally ill or insane, the carrier[s] of a terribly contagious psychological disease, the wétiko psychosis,” contrasting this with “sane people with a healthy state of mind” which “involves a respect for other forms of life and other individuals.”

Jack D. Forbes points out an important point. Throughout the thousands-of-years cultures of empire have ruled the planet, they have been unable to control all regions. Isolated, rural, tribal, and nature-based peoples have always survived on the outskirts of civilization. Archeological evidence, historical records, and modern observations show us countless human cultures that have managed to live in balance with their non-human surroundings.

Not all cultures wage war on Earth.

Empires, from Russia to South Africa and from Japan to the USA, have made a point to deliberately destroy these peoples through wholesale genocide, gradual integration, or a combination of the two. This destruction has not been accidental; it’s been a matter of policy. And those policies have been, grimly, all too much successful. The ecological writer and laywer Will Falk has described this as a process where “refugees beget refugees.”

In the colonization of Nevada in the mid-1800s, Falk writes that “European settlers who physically performed the most destructive job were in many cases refugees from war and economic crisis in their homelands. My ancestors, the Irish, endured centuries of British domination and a wave of Irish fled starvation when the Great Famine struck Ireland a few years before the Great Basin was settled. Many Irish were involved in building railroads and in mining in Nevada. Richer European settlers – the mining bosses and ranch owners – possessed too much capital to be thought of as refugees in the traditional sense, but they demonstrated a certain spiritual disease produced by the belief that humans can safely take more from the land than the land freely gives.”

He continues: “These European refugees forced the Great Basin’s indigenous peoples in becoming refugees in their own homelands. [Biologist and author Ronald] Lanner describes the violence visited upon the Shoshone near Austin, Nevada. The mining and urban activities in the area quickly consumed huge tracts of pinyon-juniper forests which served as the Shoshones’ primary winter food source. With their food depleted, the Shoshones were forced to work for wages in the only two industries operating in Nevada: mining and ranching.”

This story is a signpost: peace between human beings first requires peace with the land; without peace with the land, conflict is almost inevitable. The same story can be illustrated backwards, by looking at what happens when we ignore the ecological, and focus on on human well-being. In my book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, my co-authors and I explore the story of Frederick Winslow Taylor, a Quaker who sought to better the world through production.

Born in 1856 into a Philadelphia-based Quaker family, Taylor was by his adolescence turning out to be unusual. His friends said of him that he would “endeavor to discover the step which would cover the greatest distance with the least expenditure of energy; or the easiest method of vaulting a fence; the right length and proportions of a walking staff.”

At 17, Taylor went to work at Enterprise Hydraulic Works, a factory that made steam-powered pumps and machinery. He became obsessed with the contrast between the efficient precision of machinery and the wasteful fallibility of human beings. As one history notes, “The industrial revolution had ushered in a new era of technology [but] the management structures that held everything in place had not changed since the days of artisans, small shops, and guilds: knowledge was largely rule of thumb, acquired through tips and tricks that would trickle down to aspiring craftsmen over the course of long apprenticeships.” As Taylor wrote, this was highly inefficient; “It had no scientific basis.”

Before long, Taylor would be at the forefront of what came to be called “scientific management”—the principle of efficiency in business that would be best embodied on Henry Ford’s assembly lines. Efficiencies doubled, tripled, and quadrupled. Production soared, and with it profits. Historian Robert Kanigel wrote, “It could seem that all of modern society had [by the late 1920s] come under the sway of a single commanding idea: that waste was wrong and efficiency the highest good.” From Soviet Russia to Capitalist U.S.A., Taylorism ruled.

Throughout his rising fame, Taylor held to his Quaker roots, believing that all people were equal and that his efficiency programs would abolish class divisions by raising wages and enabling more efficient production of goods which could be distributed fairly and cheaply. And he was dead wrong.

Increases in productivity did not lead to increases in leisure, but rather profits. Laborers who had been trained in a more human workplace, where attitude and experience were valued more highly than raw productivity, went on strike. Managers fired them en masse, and the new standardized procedures meant they were easily replaced with cheaper unskilled laborers. Within a matter of decades, the power of labor was shattered, and more power and wealth than ever was concentrated in the hands of the ruling class.

Taylor did not integrate an ecological understanding of imperialism with his understanding of class division, and so he fell into a trap that Jack D. Forbes describes:

“The wétiko psychosis, and the problems it creates,” Forbes writes, “have inspired many resistance movements and efforts at reform or revolution. Unfortunately, most of these efforts have failed because they have never diagnosed the wétiko as an insane person whose disease is extremely contagious.”

The failure of Taylorism should help warn us away from similar “productivist” schemes that promise us the planet can be saved by a green economy that will reap vast reward for human beings as well. These visions of a shiny new world powered by wind turbines and solar panels are no different than Taylorism: utopian dreams that ignore the realities of resource extraction, supply chains, technological production, and corporate power.

So what can actually be done? Well, the peace movement has for centuries discussed more realistic solutions: a gradual scaling down of society, dismantling the war machine, degrowth, small-scale and local ecological food production, and the return to a sane economic system. The reality that we all know, of course, is that this transformation isn’t happening so far. Despite the growth in awareness of ecological issues and the overwhelming global opposition to imperialism, those in power maintain a stranglehold on the means of production. We can choose not to participate, to some degree, but when elites create and enforce a global system of war against humans and the planet, and systematically destroy or outlaw alternatives, our non-participation has limited power.

The alternative is to go on the offensive—something that can be done using nonviolent methods. Gene Sharp, the eminent theorist of non-violent strategy, wrote that whenever assessing an opponent, one should identify their “pillars of power,” the key foundations of their strength. Interestingly, this idea has parallels in military strategy; Clausewitz spoke of finding and destroying the “center of gravity” of opposing military forces.

The global elites, the “wétikos-in-chief,” are waging war on both planet and people, and their primary weapon is economic. Without the raw material extraction of oil, gas, coal, iron ore and other basic minerals, lumber, and other such commodities, and without the flow of trade and capital that facilitates globalized industrial capitalism, the power of these elite wétikos wanes significantly. While shutting down these systems isn’t enough to stamp out the wétiko sickness, it is a major step in the right direction.

Advocates of peace and justice have always known the importance of these systems of extraction, trade, and economics. That’s why worker strikes (especially in “critical” industries like longshoremen) and BDS campaigns have been a prime tactic of our movements.

But too often, we fall into the same trap that Taylor did by imagining that these systems somehow serve us in the long run. Perhaps, as Lewis Mumford wrote, middle-class workers have fallen under the spell of the “magnificent bribe” made possible by the industrialization of the war on the planet. It’s too easy to ignore the fact that by buying into the American model of development, and imagining that this system could be reformed into peacefulness and equality, many unions have simply become a means whereby the survival of life on this planet—future generations of humans included­—is sold for the bargain price of a better wage and good benefits.

In France in recent decades, striking workers and pensioners have shut down oil refineries and ports for weeks at a time, halting much of the national economy. That leverage has proven effective in forcing government concessions. But now, what we need is not just temporary shutdowns of these facilities: it is permanent. As the slogan on one of my t-shirts says: “defend, disrupt, dismantle.” Oil refineries, factories, mines, vast lumber mills, and international shipping ports must go if the planet is to survive.

This must be paired with the relocalization efforts I mentioned above. Without this, people will see no alternative and cling to the industrial system, which, after all, does provide some food, clothing, shelter, and medicine—to those who can afford it, and at great cost to the living world. As the other side of the aforementioned t-shirt says: “repair, restore, rejoin.”

What would my grandfather think of such a strategy? I would like to think that, after debate and consideration, he would see the wisdom in a path at least similar to this. The peace and justice movement has an important role to play in the transformation of society that is essential if we are to survive and leave a future for our grandchildren. We have spoken truths and stood against war for many years. It’s time to stand against both the war against humans and the war against the planet, because they are inseparable.