Strategy to Save The Planet

Ecological overshoot, greenwashing, and a response that is proportional to crisis

Welcome! I’m Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It and co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass. This newsletter focuses on sustainability, greenwashing, and resistance. You can subscribe for free. Paying for a subscription supports my writing and organizing work, and gets you access to behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts.

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Last week, I participated in a speaker series on the topic of ecological overshoot.

I discussed a topic that will be familiar to readers: the new frontiers of resource extraction driven by growth in renewable energy, electric vehicles, and energy storage, and the resulting increase in demand for raw materials like lithium and nickel.

But since this talk was building on the foundational work done by two previous speakers (Dr. William Rees, creator of the “ecological footprint” concept, who gave a presentation entitled Ecological Overshoot: Economic Growth, Energy, and the Population Conundrum, and Dr. Jeremy Jimenez, whose talk was titled Trees Can’t Sequester Mercury: Why Climate is the Wrong Focus — both well worth watching), I wanted to offer something more than a simple articulation of the problems we face.

Thus, my talk focused mainly on my study of resistance movements: how they function, when they are effective vs. ineffective, and what lessons can be learned for this new era in which greenwashing and false solutions proliferate while our problems worsen.

The talk is also followed by a Q&A.

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A few quick notes.

First: on December 5th, I participated in the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony’s press conference about their Thacker Pass lawsuit. The video of that press conference, including my comments, can be viewed on Facebook here. I may share the text of my comments as a separate post in the future.

Second, I was recently interviewed by Malcolm Burns on his podcast, The Long Way Around. Interestingly, Malcolm’s producer, Liz Hill, asked me to send in a playlist of 8 songs to play during the show. So if you want a narrow snapshot of some of my music taste (I went with a hip-hop theme this time around, although I love lots of genres), you can find that interview on your podcast app, or on YouTube here.