The Best Way to Contain Resistance is to Control It

What counterinsurgency doctrine can teach us about controlled opposition and co-opting resistance

My friend Bethany Sam on top of Sentinel Rock, “Peesah” in Paiute, one of many significant cultural sites at Thacker Pass, while participating in a prayer protest against a lithium mine in 2023. Photo by the author.

Welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, overshoot, greenwashing, and resistance. It’s written by me, Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass, and organizer with the Community Legal Environmental Defense Fund.

If you want to follow, you can subscribe for free. Paid subscribers, in return for supporting this publication and the activism you see here, receive access to private posts which contain behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts.

This piece was written for inclusion in a forthcoming French-language essay collection on non-profits assembled by my friends at the brilliant publishing house Editions Libre. It contains some material that was cut from a near-final draft of Bright Green Lies, and much that is brand new.

“[Liberal institutions have] collapsed under sustained assault during the last 40 years of corporate power. They exist now only in name. They are props in the democratic facade. Liberal non-profits, from MoveOn.org to The Sierra Club, are no better. They are feeble appendages to a corporatized Democratic Party. There are, as the political philosopher Sheldon Wollin reminds us, ‘no institutions left in America that can authentically be called democratic.’”

- Chris Hedges, "America: The Farewell Tour"

A steady bi-partisan march towards fascism has characterized the United States political system for my entire adult life. My awareness of this began to coalesce in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the ramifications: the ascendance of the Muslim bogeyman, the (further) militarization of American society, the rise of Guantanamo Bay and foreign CIA black sites, the rise of torture as state doctrine, the breakdown of basic democratic principles of divided powers (for example, the principle that only Congress can declare war), the normalization of targeted extrajudicial assassinations and clandestine military operations around the world, and the deployment of programs of mass surveillance more sophisticated than ever seen before.

Then, in 2001 and 2003, the United States launched illegal and unjustified invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The wars, which would ultimately kill 1 million people, most of them civilians, led, of course, to resistance. Mass protests erupted around the world, while in the Middle East, powerful insurgencies began to strike at U.S. military forces, ambushing patrols, sabotaging roads and bridges, and attacking supply trains.

For a time, the U.S. responded by bringing overwhelming force to bear. But as the costs of the war — in terms of money and both military and civilian causalities — began to mount, a new military philosophy began to take root: counterinsurgency.

The methods of counterinsurgency weren’t new. They’ve been honed by occupying forces, despots, and empires for centuries, and rest on simple principles. One main objective of counterinsurgency strategies is to separate hardline radicals and others who will resist from the bulk of the population, who, if exposed to the resistance, will almost certainly support it. As one U.S. military document states, “populations [are] the prize in war.”

Welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, overshoot, greenwashing, and resistance. It’s written by me, Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass, and organizer with the Community Legal Environmental Defense Fund.

If you want to follow, you can subscribe for free. Paid subscribers, in return for supporting this publication and the activism you see here, receive access to private posts which contain behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts.

Termed “population-centric counterinsurgency,” this goal is achieved in many ways: through divide and conquer methods, propaganda, something termed the clear-hold-build method, the imposition of physical barriers, and so on — all aimed at undermining support for resistance among the people.

One particularly important method is in counterinsurgency is various forms of bribery. In this approach, the occupying or oppressive regime gives funding, equipment, political power, infrastructure, and prestige to more moderate political formations in order to undermine and destabilize more radical elements.

We can see similar methods being used throughout history and around the world. In Palestine, for example, the occupying Israeli entity and the United States have worked to undermine the legitimacy of the democratically-elected Hamas government in Gaza while propping up the moderate Palestinian Authority, or PA. In the West Bank, where the PA governs, it is their police that maintain order, their prisons that hold dissidents; they serve as a buffer between the occupying entity and popular resistance to the occupation and genocide.

(It’s worth noting that this dynamic has shifted back and forth over time, with Israel alternately supporting different factions to undermine others).

Controlled Opposition

The PA is a form of “controlled opposition” — a group which has been set up and supported by that which it is nominally opposed to, and which will only take moderate and ineffective actions. Similar puppet regimes and comprador political formations were established in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Controlled opposition harnesses righteous and heartfelt outrage or fear — or any form of energy, really — felt by the community; dampens that outrage and fear, dilutes it, degrades it, and channels what’s left away from the true perpetrators before finally transforming it into unrealistic “hope” and phony “agency” which can now be safely pointed back toward ends that still, in fact, serve empire — all while attending to the original atrocities just enough to convince as many people as possible that the problem is under control, or can be made to be under control so long as you, the public, remain steadfast in your support.

Most non-profit organizations and NGOs — especially in the environmental field which I am most familiar with — function as a form of controlled opposition. I’m not trying to be conspiratorial, although, as I will explain in a moment, there is concrete evidence of conspiracies. No; controlled opposition works because it builds upon our sincere hopes for peaceful, democratic, and participatory changes in society. Naïve false hope in the promise of change within democratic institutions which have repeatedly shown themselves to be organs of the ruling class make well-meaning people perfect targets for the controlled opposition strategy.

On top of this, the funding model of non-profit organizations makes them uniquely vulnerable to soft forms of bribery — especially through foundation funding, a process whereby money flows to organizations and individuals who respect the status quo and focus their campaigning on minor reforms.

These groups — given enough funding to dominate the activist world, but little enough so they’re relatively ineffective, and can still call themselves “grassroots” — can then channel volunteers, donations, and popular discourse into moderate solutions, taking away energy from true revolutionary movements. Moderate progressives thrive, while radicals are systematically starved of resources and relegated to the fringes. Revolutionary potential is transformed into what essentially amounts, in the modern environmental movement, to a green technology lobbying group.

By means of funding, a form of un-natural selection operates on activist groups, one of the million ways in which capitalism protects itself. The self-interest of wealthy foundation funders coincides perfectly with that of non-profit organizations seeking to build middle-class careers while changing our political and economic system only superficially, if at all.

It’s simple and brilliant. Mainstream and “bright green” environmentalism serves those in power in two ways: by mobilizing support for profitable extractive industries, and by functioning as a relief valve for popular anger. There is revolutionary potential in the chaos already being caused by global warming and the consequent mass migration, water shortages, pollution, resource conflicts, and so on. Left unchecked, popular resistance could come to threaten the ruling class.

Controlled, the opposition flounders.

STRATFOR’s Divide and Conquer Strategy

We actually have concrete evidence that this is happening. In 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing a trove of hacked emails from Texas-based private intelligence and security corporation STRATFOR, which has worked for clients such as Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Coca-Cola, as well as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Defense Intelligence Agency, and Marine Corps.

The emails included detailed recommendations for corporate partners facing oppositional protest movements. To neutralize these movements, STRATFOR tells partners to analyze this opposition and categorize individuals and groups in four categories: radicals, idealists, realists, and opportunists.

Ronald Duchin, founder of one of STRATFOR’s precursors, explained these categories and the genesis of this strategy in a 1991 presentation to industry leaders. Radicals “want to change the system,” he told the assembled businessmen. “[They] have underlying socio/political motives’ and see multinational corporations as ‘inherently evil.’ These organizations do not trust the … federal, state and local governments to protect them and to safeguard the environment. They believe, rather, that individuals and local groups should have direct power over industry … I would categorize their principal aims … as social justice and political empowerment.”

“Idealists,” Duchin continued, “…want a perfect world… [but] because of their intrinsic altruism, … [they] have a vulnerable point. If they can be shown that their position is in opposition to an industry … and cannot be ethically justified, they [will] change their position.” Opportunists are much easier to deal with, in Duchin’s view, since they are only involved for “visibility, power [and] followers.”

And finally, the realists, according to Duchin, are the most important part of the puzzle. “[Realists are able to] live with trade-offs,” he said. “[They’re] willing to work within the system; not interested in radical change; pragmatic. The realists should always receive the highest priority in any strategy dealing with a public policy issue.”

STRATFOR’s strategic recommendations essentially mirror a counterinsurgency strategy: "First, isolate the radicals. Second, 'cultivate' the idealists and 'educate' them into becoming realists. And finally, co-opt the realists into agreeing with industry." Opportunists don’t merit a mention, since they’re so easy to win over.

Case Study: The Nature Conservancy

Here’s a real-world example of this strategy in action.

Two years ago, I was invited to participate in a private discussion meeting with The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the largest environmental non-profit organization in North America.

The attendees were split into two camps: on one side were Native American activists, elders, cultural resource specialists, and allies like me. On the other were TNC employees and their partners from several major research universities, including the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania.

TNC’s employee began the meeting by explaining their organization’s perspective on the unpleasant necessity of mining for lithium and other so-called “critical minerals” in Nevada. They explained that their organization had been producing reports about lithium mining across the United States to “analyze potential environmental and economic impacts of lithium extraction and offer recommendations for policymakers to be ‘Smart from the Start’ as the United States ramps up systems that depend on lithium.”

Since many of the people in the room had just spent several years unsuccessfully fighting to protect the sacred and biodiverse place known as Peehee Mu’huh, or Thacker Pass in English, from an open-pit lithium mine to provide materials for electric car batteries to General Motors Corporation, the tension in the room began to rise.

As we stewed, researchers and professors from Pennsylvania State University gave a technical presentation about carbon pipelines and the potential for siting carbon capture and storage projects near geothermal sites across Nevada. The native people in the room, most of whom regard hot springs and geothermally active areas as being sacred, were not pleased.

It was a clash of worldviews. For TNC employees and the University of Pennsylvania, the ideology of modernization and technological progress that underlies so-called “renewable energy projects” is so deeply ingrained that it cannot be questioned. They are “realists” who have been co-opted into agreeing with industry. Meanwhile, the rest of us were fuming. For several hours we lambasted them, explaining patiently the destructiveness of mining and the fact that there should be no sacrifice zones anywhere on Mother Earth.

We explained that lithium mining is unsustainable no matter where it takes place, and that their efforts to identify areas with less conflict is a form of collaboration with the mining industry and the government, both of which are seeking to further monetize, extract from, and profit from traditional native lands. Finally, we asked them to be courageous and actually stand up against the mining industry and so-called “development” projects, rather than compromising from the start. Responding to our challenges, TNC’s Nevada Conservation Director explained, “we felt our only option was to steer capitalism in a better direction.”

This is loyal opposition. This is a realist.

That’s bullshit, we told him. When you accept capitalism as an unchangeable fact, you concede the entire struggle. He shrugged, the meeting ended, and both TNC’s employees and the University of Pennsylvania researchers went back to work.

Money plays a big role in all of this. In the words of Upton Sinclair, “It is hard to make a man understand something, when his job depends on him not understanding it.” The man in question has worked for TNC for 20 years now, and the average salary for people in his position is $106,000. Professor salaries at the University of Pennsylvania average around $270,000.

Meanwhile, land defenders on our side are living in poverty.

I’m reminded of Arundhati Roy, who, writing about the militant resistance (both violent and non-violent) of Adivasi and low-caste communities against mega-projects across India, reflection that “Real political resistance offers no such short cuts. The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary.”

The Nature Conservancy has salaries. Big ones. So, to pay the bills, they partner with many of the largest and most destructive corporations and governments on the planet, who launder their reputations and get access to green credentials — often prominently using the TNC logo on their products and marketing — through TNC partnerships. They are also able gain access to carbon credits, wetland credits, and other types of regulatory schemes which claim to offset pollution and habitat destruction.

As I write, their website lists Amazon, mining giant BHP, Bank of America, Coca-Cola, General Mills, J.P. MorganChase, Lowe’s Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, UPS, Walmart, and Walt Disney. Prior partnerships, or perhaps ones deemed too controversial to be posted on the website, include Dow Chemical, Monsanto, General Motors (the biggest investor in the Thacker Pass lithium mine, and beneficiary of the lithium ripped from the ground there), Georgia-Pacific, International Paper, American Electric, PG&E, Centex Corp., Enron, and oil companies BP, Exxon Mobil, and Shell.

It's no accident that many of these businesses have also worked closely with STRATFOR. The Nature Conservancy has been identified by corporate partners as an essential organization in their process of undermining opposition to their destructive projects, cultivated by means of major financial contributions, and turned into an ally of corporate power.

The Nature Conservancy’s position, well-articulated by a now-former friend of mine who works as a land steward at one of the organization’s nature preserves, is that acres saved are acres saved; that compromise is worthwhile if it changes the attitudes and perceptions within corporations, and if their money can be used to do good.

The danger with this approach, as Felipe Coronel once said, is that “when you try to change the system from within, it’s not you that changes the system, it is the system that will eventually change you.”

The Co-Opting of the Environmental Movement

As the example of the Nature Conservancy helps show, the environmental movement is almost completely ineffective at protecting the natural world. Obviously this is true, or we would not be living in an age of catastrophic climate destabilization, the 6^th mass extinction of life on Earth, massive and unchecked chemical pollution, dangerous technological escalation, breakdowns in the nitrogen and phosphorous cycle, unsustainable water use, and the progressive destruction of life on earth.

At the same time, and not coincidentally, the environmental movement is more mainstream and well-funded than ever.

Instead of a movement to save the planet, the environmental movement has become a movement to save civilization. This turning away from the natural world is explicit in the language and messaging of bright green and eco-modernist activists, mainstream environmentalists, and climate change movements.

Often this trickles down to the front lines. As one grassroots forest activist in Oregon said to me, “All the groups are focused on climate; no one is working on protecting forests.” Around the world, frontline activists are fighting not only big corporations but also climate change activists who work with corporations to cram big solar and wind and transmission lines and battery storage projects and gigafactories and lithium mines and geothermal projects and biomass plants and hydroelectric dams down their throats.

Just as global warming is destroying the planet, climate change NGOs are helping to destroy what’s left of the environmental movement.

It shouldn’t surprise us that this degradation of the environmental movement has accelerated so much in the last thirty years. As one report states, “the average young American now spends practically every minute—except for time in school—using a smartphone, computer, television or electronic device.” A recent poll in Britain found that the average eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-old rated an internet connection as more important than daylight.

All this makes the co-opting of the movement that much easier. Today, people are courted from infancy by a range of corporations and foundation-funded NGOs with a united message: green capitalism and green technology will save the world. And it’s been effective. Here’s a tweet from Bill McKibben, a leader in the climate movement: “Spunky little upstart automaker called General Motors seems to be betting on an electric future.”

The absurd has become normal in the environmental movement. A leader of a movement supposedly dedicated to saving the planet applauds a Fortune 500 automobile manufacturing corporation. We hear that green technology will stop global warming (or that it exists at all). We hear that bulldozing the desert to put in solar panels is good for the planet. We hear that recycling will save the world. We hear that capitalism can be sustainable. The lies are relentless.

The environmental movement is in shambles. But as controlled opposition, it functions perfectly.

Sustaining Capitalism, Not the Planet

At the 2013 Ceres Sustainable Business Conference, Bill McKibben was part of a panel with David Blood, an investment banker who works with Al Gore (Blood and Gore, promoting capitalism together. You can’t make this stuff up).

During the panel, Blood says that green investing “was never about trading value for values. It was actually what we thought would be a smart way to invest... It’s quite smart to reduce your environmental footprint, as Wal-Mart has shown… [green] businesses can develop significant competitive advantage, significant revenue sources, and ultimately profitability which is a good thing from a shareholder perspective.”

Bill McKibben nods in agreement.

A global growth rate of 3 percent, which is considered the minimum for a functional capitalism, means the world economy doubles every twenty-four years. This is, of course, madness. If we can’t even name capitalism as a problem—and more importantly, actually do the work of dismantling it—how are we going to have a chance in hell of saving the planet?

Later in the recording, Bill McKibben talks about businesses self-correcting when it comes to abuse of workers in their supply chain. “If we have a problem with Apple,” he says, “and they’re not paying their Chinese laborers enough, that doesn’t mean we have to hate iPhones. It just means we have to pass some shareholder resolutions, put some pressure on them, and they’ll stop paying bad wages, and the price of an iPhone will go up a buck, and the world will go on, i.e., there is a small flaw in their business plan that we can deal with. The problem with the fossil fuel industry is, the flaw is the business plan.”

He’s so close to getting it. Change a couple of words, and we have, “The problem with industrial civilization is, the flaw is the business plan.” Or, “The problem with capitalism is, the flaw is the business plan.” Or even, hell, “The problem with globalization is, the flaw is the business plan.”

Leaving that aside: systematic exploitation of poor people who have been forced by economic necessity into factory jobs doesn’t qualify as a “small flaw.” Exploitation of labor is integral to capitalism. Underpaying and overworking laborers who have been removed from common lands enclosed for resource extraction is what makes products like iPhones possible, let alone profitable.

It’s no accident that Bill McKibben’s statement was given to the Ceres Conference. Originally founded in the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989, Ceres (then an acronym standing for The Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies) was funded by Joan Bavaria, a pioneer in the field of “Socially Responsible Investing.”

Bringing together a coalition of high-profile environmentalists including the Sierra Club, National Audubon Society, and National Wildlife Federation, the first Ceres project was the creation of the Valdez Principles, a set of model shareholder resolutions which would compel corporations to “curtail air and water pollution, conserve energy, market safe products, pay for damage caused to the environment, and make regular reports on environmental matters to the shareholders.”

As a New York Times story noted in the days after their release, “The Valdez Principles are . . . sweeping in their scope and objectives . . . [and] have been drafted without input from any companies, including those the coalition hopes will become its first signatories.” That translated into immediate reluctance for companies to sign on. “It’s an idea we are sympathetic to but it needs further discussion,”' said one corporate representative.

Soon after, the Valdez Principles became the Ceres Principles, a watered-down version more acceptable to corporate America. It was a win-win-lose. Companies won by gaining sustainability credentials by collaborating with environmentalists, while maintaining strict limits on oversight and accountability. Non-profit organizations won by gaining access to wealthy investors and executives and the prestige of being part of a major new initiative. And nature lost, as nothing was done to challenge industrial capitalism.

Thirty years later, the Ceres Company Network (a group of “Fortune 500 firms and other major companies setting the highest bar for sustainability leadership”) includes Ford, Coca-Cola, Dell, CVS, Exelon, Gap, General Motors, Apple, JPMorgan Chase, Nike, NRG, PG&E, National Grid, US Bank, Well Fargo, Target, and Disney.

Needless the say, the group is well-funded.

Ceres is one of the earliest examples of collaboration between co-opted, corporate-friendly environmental organizations and corporations. The results have been devastating, as over the intervening decades radical voices in the environmental movement have been increasingly sidelined, greenwashing has become rampant, and a new highly profitable and high destructive industrial sector — the green economy — has been born.

The Green Shock Doctrine

Browsing the Ceres website, I found a news story about business and financial leaders urging California to pass a bill mandating 100 percent renewable electricity. The article excerpts a note from “11 institutional investors with combined assets-under-management of $196 billion” who write that “Tackling climate change is one of America’s greatest economic opportunities of the 21st century.”

And that’s the point, isn’t it?

One of Naomi Klein’s contributions to discourse is her articulation of the “shock doctrine,” which she defines as “how America’s ‘free market’ policies have come to dominate the world—through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.” In her 2008 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, she explains brilliantly how the same principles used to disorient and extract concessions from victims of torture can be leveraged to extract political concessions from entire nations in the wake of major disasters.

She gives many examples, including the wave of austerity and privatization in Chile following the Pinochet coup in 1973, the massive expansion of industrialism and silencing of dissidents following the Tiananmen Square massacre in China in 1989, and the dismantling of low-income housing and replacement of public education with for-profit schools in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

As a dyed-in-the-wool bright green, Klein wouldn’t appreciate this analysis, but the shock doctrine perfectly describes the entire bright green movement: because of a terrible and very real disaster (in this case, climate change), you need to hand over huge subsidies to a sector of the industrial economy, and you need to let us destroy far more of the natural world (from Baotou to the Mojave Desert to Thacker Pass to the bottom of the ocean). If you don’t give us lots of money and let us destroy far more of the natural world, you will lose the luxuries that are evidently more important to you than life on the planet.

Once you start looking for this trend, it’s really clear.

Focusing exclusively on global warming makes it easier for climate change activists to avoid inconvenient truths about capitalism. This in turn makes strategic alliances with the business community logical. But when we focus only on carbon, we ignore the root of the problem. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, but that’s only the endpoint of a process that includes drilling or mining the raw fuel, refining it, and building the infrastructure and machinery to burn and use that fuel. Similarly, logging and agriculture both release carbon dioxide, but the problems with these practices go much deeper than carbon. In each of these cases, greenhouse gas emissions are only the final link in a long chain of Earth-destroying practices. The carbon is the symptom, not the disease—and one of many, many symptoms plaguing the world.

When you focus on only one of these — carbon — above all others, then you get an incorrect diagnosis, which in turn leads to incorrect treatments.

In this culture, we are taught that our primary loyalty should be to this way of life — and frankly to the promotion of machines and the artificial — not to the natural world. This changes the way we perceive the world. When people look at a meadow and see a beautiful natural community, they treat that meadow differently than if they see it as a potential site for a solar power generation facility.

Bright green environmentalism teaches people to exaggerate or focus on threats that harm industrial civilization, and to downplay or ignore those that harm the real world (for example by saying that “the world doesn’t need saving. . . .”). This is why many people see global warming as an existential threat, but don’t look at toxification or mass extinction or the murder of the oceans in the same way — despite the fact that agriculture, logging, urban development, habitat destruction and fragmentation, pollution, and overhunting are all leading to greater rates of species extinction than is climate change, at least for the time being.

There’s no doubt that global warming is apocalyptic. I’ve stood on thawing permafrost above the Arctic Circle and seen entire forests collapsing as the soils lose all integrity under their roots. This culture is changing the composition of the planet’s climate.

But this is not the only crisis the world is facing, and to pretend otherwise ignores the true roots of the problem. And it ignores that these crises are all consequences of industrial civilization, capitalism, empire, the imperial mode of living, modernity, whatever phrase you prefer to describe this way of life.

This culture functions by converting wild land into commodity production zones. Over the past twenty years, about ten percent of the world’s remaining true wilderness has been lost. According to a recent study published in the journal PLOS One, between now and 2050, solar and wind “development” threaten to destroy as much land as expansion of urban sprawl, oil and gas, coal, and mining combined. Solar development outranks agricultural expansion and wind (tied for second place) as the single largest threat considered in the study.

Nonetheless, so-called “environmentalists” continue to push solar, wind, and other bright green lies as solutions.

Case Study: The Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign

Another example of co-opted foundation-funded environmentalism is the climate movement’s divestment campaign, led by 350.org and many other mainstream environmental organizations.

The campaign aims to remove financial support for the coal, oil, and gas industries by pressuring institutions such as churches, cities, and universities to remove their investments. It’s modeled on the three-pronged divestment, boycott, and sanctions (BDS) resistance to South African apartheid (a model used today against the occupying Israeli entity). The “Fossil Free” campaign has thus far pressured more than 1600 institutions and 58,000 individuals to divest more than $40 trillion.

Anyone fighting to stop coal, oil, and gas is doing a good thing. But given how little time we have, and how badly we’re losing the fight for the planet, we must ask if divestment is an effective strategy.

The answer, unfortunately, is no. Jay Taber of Intercontinental Cry writes that “All this divestment does is make once publicly-held shares available on Wall Street, which allows trading houses like Goldman Sachs to further consolidate their control of the industry. BDS, when applied against apartheid states by other states and international institutions, includes cutting off access to finance, as well as penalties for crimes against humanity. What makes 350 so devious, is that they hijack public emotions (and ignorance) using phony ‘divestment’ as a disorganizing tool to redirect activism away from effective work.”

If it occurs on a wide enough scale, divestment drops stock prices, making it easier for less ethical investors to buy. This not only consolidates the industry, it makes fossil fuel stocks more profitable for those who snatch them up. As Christian Parenti writes, “So how will dumping Exxon stock hurt its income, that is, its bottom line? It might, in fact, improve the company’s price to earnings ratio thus making the stock more attractive to immoral buyers. Or it could allow the firm to more easily buy back stock (which it has been doing at a massive scale for the last 5 years) and thus retain more of its earnings for use to develop more oil fields.”

To be fair, it’s unlikely that any divestment campaigner believes divestment alone will stop global warming. The Fossil Free website recognizes this, writing that “the campaign began in an effort to stigmatize the Fossil Fuel industry — the financial impact was secondary to the socio-political impact.”

But as the amount of money being divested continues to grow, reinvestment is becoming a more central part of the fossil fuel divestment campaign. The website continues: “We have a responsibility and an opportunity to ask ourselves how moving the money itself . . . can help us usher forth our vision.”

Okay, so climate change organizations lobby for increased subsidies for the wind and solar sectors of the capitalist industrial economy. And now we learn they argue for institutions to invest their money in these same sectors. Do you see why I’m troubled that they’ve converted a mass movement to save the planet into a lobbying arm of a specific sector of the capitalist industrial economy?

In their vision, these investments will fund a just transition to renewable energy — a laudable goal if you ignore the effects of renewable energy on the natural world and on the communities most impact by these industrial projects. The reinvestment principles put forth by 350 even include considerations like workplace fairness, racial justice, and so on — clauses meant to curb the worst excesses of capitalism.

But in the process, they’ve slipped a premise by us: the idea that divestment and reinvestment can work as a means to a better world. It’s an extraordinary claim, and not supported by evidence. As Anne Petermann of the Global Justice Ecology Project writes, “Can the very markets that have led us to the brink of the abyss now provide our parachute? McKibben points out that under this system, those with the money have all the power. Then why are we trying to reform this system? Why are we not transforming it?”

Activist Keith Brunner critiques this approach as well, writing that “Yes, the fossil fuel corporations are the big bad wolf, but just as problematic is the system of investment and returns which necessitates a growth economy (it’s called capitalism). That Harvard University endowment fund manager [who divested the University’s funds from coal, oil, and gas] has a ‘fiduciary responsibility’ to get a certain annual return, which means they have to put their money into growing, profitable funds or firms or states . . . which grow through exploiting people and dismantling ecosystems.”

His conclusion: “We aren’t going to invest our way to a livable planet.”

Make no mistake, divestment is making money for investors, too. As Scott Wallace of the Wallace Global Fund told Democracy Now, “We got out five years ago, completely divested from fossil fuels and invested in clean energy solutions, and we’re ahead of where we would have been… [we’re] investing in solar, wind, biomass [read, industrial agriculture and deforestation]. You can buy shares in Tesla Corporation... You can make a lot of nice money off the clean energy solutions.”

There, again, is the point. The real goal is to get money into so-called green technology.

As a recent article notes, “climate solutions need cold, hard cash . . . about a trillion a year.”

Subverting the Controlled Opposition

I’ll concede that the Nature Conservancy does some good things — but so does the oil corporation which sponsors the local library or pays for scholarships to send kids to school. So does the U.S. Military, offering free medical clinics or helping build schools. This all fits well into a counterinsurgency model.

Meanwhile, controlled opposition groups like The Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace play-act at resistance just enough to produce the occasional “victory” to encourage more donations and engagement.

In short, non-profits have shepherded us into the apocalypse.

Imagine what could be done if 10 percent of the labor, funding, and thought that went into ineffective non-profits was devoted towards systemic transformation, revolution, and other forms of organizing outside of and against established systems of government.

There is only one solution to the interwoven complex of controlled opposition non-profits and the corporate and state power they augment: the development of determined, principled, and strategic revolutionary environmental movements which incorporate both an integral biocentrism and robust critiques of the human cost of industrial civilization.

At that meeting with The Nature Conservancy in Nevada, I didn’t pull my punches. I told them directly why their organizations position, funding sources, and campaigns were morally bankrupt. This is the only reasonable response to controlled opposition, which thrives on a mindset of “it’s better than nothing” and “some compromises must be made.” We must tell the truth, unequivocally, relentlessly. We must delegitimize these organizations, expose them for the frauds that they are, and work to build genuinely confrontational social movements in their place.

Is it better to fight for “achievable, realistic” goals through reform, or to address the fundamental issues at their root? Usually, I’m in favor of both. If we wait for the revolution and don’t do any reform work (which we could also call defensive work), by the time the revolution comes, it may be too late. Too much damage may already have been done. And, if we only do defensive work and don’t address the causes of the problems, we’ll simply extend the duration of our defeat. But in this time, even our reforms must be revolutionary is character. Anything else is a dereliction of our sacred responsibilities in this time of crisis.

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