The Science of Conquest

An article, a video, and a news roundup

Mining equipment in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This photograph was sent to me from a friend who is from the area.

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 and co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass. If you want to follow, you can subscribe for free. In return for supporting my activism, paid subscribers receive access to occasional private posts containing behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts.

This post includes three parts: a news roundup, an article titled “The Science of Conquest,” and a new video on the same topic.

Roundup

1. REMINDER: Last month, I announced the new Biocentric Mentorship Program, a collaborative small-group training for grassroots activists. If you’d like to be part of it, contact me by September 22nd.

2. Rowena Dasig, a grassroots activist organizing opposition to a massive LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) power plant in the Philippines, is missing after being seized military police. She was supposedly released, but no one has seen her since. Add your name to a sign-on letter supporting her and calling for a full investigation. The Philippines is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for environmentalists. I visited in 2020, wrote about my visit here, and continue to collaborate with friends and allies on the ground.

3. Protests against lithium mining in Serbia are rapidly escalating after the government backtracked on their earlier cancellation of a massive Rio Tinto project. Hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets. Organizers are facing death threats and arrest, and Rio Tinto’s scientists are working to bury peer-reviewed research documenting the severe environmental harms the mine would cause. That research paper is a great example of how scientists can support grassroots activist movements, which is a question I was pondering and posing to you readers a month ago.

4. In April, I was invited to speak at a panel organized by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund as part of their “Truth, Reckoning, and Right Relationship with the Great Lakes” event along the shores of Lake Erie in Cleveland, OH. My presentation was inspired by two posts I wrote here on Substack: “How Journalism Protects Elites and Maintains the Status Quo,” and “16 Tips for Speaking to the Media.” The video of that panel, which included myself and CELDF’s Director of Community Resistance & Resilience Chad Nicholson, is now available here.

5. The Hualapai Tribe has filed a legal challenge to planned lithium mining which would impact a sacred spring in Northern Arizona, and in late August a judge ordered a temporary halt to preliminary drilling. Local organizers briefly erected a protest camp on-site several weeks ago, but it has since been taken down at the request of the Tribal Government. In 2021, a Hualapai Tribal Member and caretaker of the sacred springs they call Ha'kamwe' named Ivan Bender visited the land defense camp we established at Thacker Pass, and I got to spend a few days with him. He’s an amazing man, and I recorded this 20-minute interview with him introducing people to the threat to Ha'kamwe' at that time. It’s worth watching.

6. Protect Thacker Pass got a nice shoutout from German activists fighting to protect their forests from the expansion of a Tesla gigafactory. Their tagline is “blocking car capitalism — saving the planet.” I agree — but would also add that socialist nations have done no better at protecting the planet.

7. Opposition to offshore wind energy turbines planned for the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington is ramping up, as details of these massive projects emerge. The Federal Government Agency responsible for selling our oceans to corporations is called BOEM, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. BOEM just issued a “finding of no significant impact” for their planned leasing of large ocean areas off the Oregon Coast. The best available science disagrees. According to a 2022 paper in the journal Ocean Sustainability, “offshore wind may lead to significant environmental impacts.” Check out these two excellent videos to learn more about what these projects entail, how they will harm the oceans and nearby land areas, and why we are resisting: part 1 and part 2. I’ve written about this issue here before in two posts: “120 Questions About Offshore Wind Energy” and “Oregon is Facing Largest Energy Development Threat in Generations.”

8. President Biden bragged on Saturday that he has doubled U.S. energy production (mostly from fracked oil and gas) compared to Trump, writing: “On my watch, we’ve responsibly increased our oil production to meet our immediate needs – without delaying or deferring our transition to clean energy. We’re America. We can do both.” This is delusional. CNN (for once) nails the headline: Global carbon pollution hits record high even as renewables surge. As I have said over and over again: there is no substitute for stopping fossil fuels directly.

9. More on the global warming front: new research shows that deadly temperatures are actually far lower than previously expected. So-called “wet bulb” temperature measures both humidity and temperature, since the combination of the two determines survivable conditions. Previous research estimated that humans could survive wet bulb temperatures up to 35℃ / 95℉, unlikely to occur widely before 2100 at the earliest. But the new data shows that the limit is more like 25.8℃ / 78.4℉ for young, healthy people, and as low as 21.9℃ / 71.4℉ for older people. Australian National University professor of climate science Sarah Perkins Kirkpatrick says “by the end of the century, [we’ll] be seeing these conditions somewhat regularly during summer seasons” in places like London, Beijing, Johannesburg, Los Angeles, and New York City. Heat waves are already causing mass-death events around the world.

10. I stumbled across this 2011 research paper showing that forest thinning releases far more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than is released by wildfire — even by high-intensity, stand-replacing fires. This research may be outdated now, as fire frequency and behavior is changing significantly with global warming. Nonetheless, this is intesting research and relates closely to my previous essay I shared here on Substack, “Thinning and Logging Aren't a ‘Solution’ to Wildfires.”

11. A new study found that Congressmembers whose ancestors held significant numbers of slaves are five times wealthier than those whose ancestors didn't own slaves. Research like this shows why we cannot ignore the past. Racial capitalism has shaped the economic structure of the country today in profound ways. And of course, so-called “new money” is usually just as dirty as old (here’s one very straightforward example).

12. Chris Ketchum writes: “A British court last month issued extraordinarily harsh prison sentences to five climate activists convicted of helping to plan a series of road blockades in London. One of the activists, Roger Hallam, 58, a co-founder of the direct action groups Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, got five years.” I interviewed Roger Hallam a few months ago, and shared that conversation here.

This article was first published in September 2020. This version has been heavily edited.

The Science of Conquest

Science and technology in service of power. From left: industrial solar mirrors at Crescent Dunes, NV; cows being milked at an industrial farm in Whatcom County, WA; a Shell Oil drilling rig being prepared for transit to the Arctic.

“The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”

  – Frank Herbert

Empire began with wood and blood, trees and muscle power, with the fire and with the slave.

These built the first megacities on Earth. The first civilizations grew in Mesopotamia, along the Yangtze River and the Ganges, in the Andes, in Egypt, and elsewhere. As they grew, they displaced other societies, tribes and nations who had existed for eons. By war, trade, marriage, assimilation, and extermination, they grew. And as they grew, forests shrunk.

The limits of muscle and fire soon became apparent. By cutting down the forests, plowing the earth, and turning soil carbon into human carbon, these societies eroded the soil, salinized the land, and turned what was a Fertile Crescent into sand and dust. But these societies had created an ideology based on “more,” and were not content. The result was more war and a feverish search for new sources of energy and power that would allow the pattern to continue.

So they dug deeper, soon finding new sources of power. Coal and oil unleashed a revolution in energy. Suddenly mine shafts could be sunk deeper and goods moved more quickly than ever before. Nations had the power to move mountains, and they did. Factories and war machines belched great clouds of smoke into the air, and logging became industrialized. Vast networks of hydroelectric dams were built, turning wild rivers into sedate, domesticated, and lifeless reservoirs. Before long, the next boundary was breached: that of the atom itself. The nuclear era created weapons capable of rendering the entire planet uninhabitable. The power of empire grew, and as it did, these societies converted more and more of the living planet into dead products.

Progress as God

Some beliefs are unquestionable in modern civilized societies: that “progress” in technological development is an inherent good. That any harm is overshadowed by this good. That the pursuit of technological development and the power that results should be one of the primary goals of human society. These premises underlies not just capitalism, but civilization itself, and much of modern science.

This article is third in a series of essays responding to a scientific study published in the journal Scientific Reports in May 2020. That study modeled the future of global civilization, tracking population growth and deforestation, and concluded that there is a 90 percent chance of civilization collapsing within the next 20-40 years. I discussed their collapse prediction in the first essay in this series (please note, I am no longer part of Deep Green Resistance).

The authors of the study theorize, as Salonika pointed out in the second essay, that the only way to avoid collapse is via expansion, especially expansion in energy generation, which they suppose would allow industrial civilization to surpass ecological limits and spread through the solar system. They write, “if the trajectory [of civilization’s technological development] has reached the Dyson limit we count it as a success [in our model], otherwise as failure.”

They are referring to a “Dyson Sphere” or “Dyson swarm,” a theoretical megamachine which would encompass a star and capture a large portion of its solar power output, which could then be used by a civilization.

The idea of a Dyson sphere has been around since the 1930’s, and has a rich life in science fiction. But it is not entirely fiction. Scientists have been working on the theoretical and technical foundation for space-based solar energy harvesting for decades. It is an idea that is deeply reflective of the ideology of civilization, which demands power in unlimited quantities and says that expansion is the highest good.

Art depicting a futuristic space colony, via the NASA Ames Research Center.

Exploitation as a Proxy for “Development”

In his 1964 book Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations, Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev coined the eponymous Kardashev scale, “a method of measuring a civilization’s level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy they are able to use.”

The Kardashev scale ranks civilizations as Type I (a planetary civilization, which can use all the energy available on its planet of origin), Type II (which can use all the energy within a given star system), or Type III (galactic civilizations). In this scale, a Dyson sphere corresponds to a Type II civilization. Global civilization today, using Carl Sagan’s extrapolations, is approximately at Type 0.73.

According to Kardashev, the more energy a society can appropriate, the more advanced they are. This highly rational but ultimately insane mindset both leads to and emerges from a profoundly disturbing, utilitarian culture. If one believes this, the conclusions are simple. Cutting down forests to burn them to drive steam engines is good, while protecting forests is bad. Building nuclear power stations is good. Extracting and burning coal, oil, and gas is good. Power is god, and the more the better.

Perhaps the most striking example of the domination of nature to appropriate energy is agriculture. Agriculture depends on primary productivity, or photosynthesis. This process is the basis of terrestrial ecology—the basis of all life on land. Sunlight falls on the Earth, and plants use it to grow. Plants take carbon from the atmosphere, storing it in their bodies, transpire water vapor into the sky, and release oxygen.

In natural ecosystems, plants feed an incredible array of life. Insects, birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fungi, and bacteria — millions and millions of organisms, living and dying in complex dynamic communities that result in carbon sequestration, clean air and water, rich soil, healthy water and nutrient cycles, and support for a beautiful array of life — including us.

Agriculture (which I distinguish from gardening, permaculture, and other forms of diverse and small-scale cultivation) turns this upside down. On average, in agricultural areas, 83% of primary productivity is extracted by humans, leaving 17% for the non-humans who remain. Those numbers contain a raw horror that belies their banality. The definition of agriculture might as well be “to destroy the natural ecosystem on a piece of land, convert it to purely human use by maintaining it at an early stage of ecological succession and planting a tiny selection of plants, and preventing non-human animals, insects, and microorganisms from eating these plants through the use of poisons, weapons, and the destruction of nearby habitat.”

Striving for higher levels on the Kardashev scale is the unwritten, unspoken goal of most people in power. From the beginning, civilization has been underpinned by a philosophy that the more human beings can control nature, the better. From Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance thinkers to Francis Bacon and the Royal Society, scientists have willingly hitched themselves to tyrants and democracies alike to fund their unending curiosity, and in return they have delivered weapons, energy, and economic development.

Control and expand: this is the ideology of conquest.

The Columbia River is the most-dammed watershed in the world. The river flows past the Hanford Site, the most contaminated location in the United States, where highly radioactive nuclear fuel leaks into the groundwater. Rail lines alongside the river are major corridors for fossil fuel transport. Photo by the author.

The Fermi Paradox and The Great Filter

We cannot speak of civilization, Dyson spheres, and ecology without discussing the Drake equation and the Fermi Paradox. Astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake created the Drake equation in 1961 at the first scientific meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. The equation estimates the probability that there are other intelligent life forms in the galaxy with whom we might communicate.

(It's a rough tool: more thought experiment than precise scientific measurement, and plugging in different variables can give wildly different results. After all, it’s all conjecture; life has only ever been observed on one planet.)

The Drake Equation, however, does suggest that there could be as many as 15 million planets with intelligent life in the Milky Way alone. This is where the Fermi Paradox comes in. Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi asked: given that huge number, why have we found no evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence? A 2015 study, for example, concluded that Kardashev Type-III civilizations are “either very rare or do not exist in the local Universe.”

So why has SETI failed? Why do we appear, as far as we know, to be alone in the universe? Why are there no highly advanced technological alien societies traveling the cosmos, broadcasting powerful radio signals or otherwise sending out signals of their existance?

Astronomers have theorized many possible explanations. It’s possible that the formation of complex life-forms is actually extremely rare, and that life on Earth has passed through some sort of “Great Filter” to develop rich, biodiverse, and complex life. In other words, it’s possible that life like we have on Earth is an abberation — an impossibly rare outlier in a universe of planets which are either lifeless or only home to very simple microorganisms.

An alternative explanation — one that seems correct to me — is that societies that develop complex machine technologies such as the ability to transmit radio waves and travel into space tend to destroy their own ecological foundations, and collapse. This is the path our society is on.

Rockets used in spaceflight destroy the ozone layer, release as much carbon dioxide in two minutes as a car would produce in two centuries, and are changing the composition of the upper atmosphere, releasing gases and particles in areas they have never before naturally existed. And this process is accelerating as corporations such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic begin to colonize near-Earth orbit with thousands of satellites and increasing numbers of commercial craft. In 2014, a total of 241 space launches took place; last year, there were 2,664. This number is expected to continue to rise.

The Study of Consequences

Science fiction author Frank Herbert wrote in his classic book Dune that “ecology is the study of consequences.” The term is appropriate, then, to study of the consequences of technological civilizations. It often seems that science, technology, and “progress” are the only possibility—the only option that is thinkable. But is this true?

The science of conquest is not the only type of science. There is another; a science that is based on observation, thesis, and evidence, that is based on a peer-review that does not take place in university buildings, but rather in forests, in grasslands, along rivers, in the oceans.

This is the science of the Polynesian sailors, who set out across ten thousand miles of ocean on boats made of sustainably-harvested wood, who navigated the seas and found islands like a needle in the oceanic haystack without compasses, GPS satellites, or maps.

It is the science of the Kalapuya, who practiced a scientific ecology through prescribed burning of their land, cultivating species beneficial to biodiversity and abundance not just for humans, but for all life, and thus gardened portions of their landscape and created one of the most diverse habitats on Earth. And of the Klamath people, who use fire to geoengineer climate on a micro-scale by setting their hillsides alight when inversions would cause the smoke to gather in their river valley, cooling the river and triggering the salmon runs, and who have finally freed their river.

It is the science of those who remain, keeping these traditions alive, who often don’t use the term science, because it is too small a word for what they do. There are other ways to live, ways that are no less complex or rewarding, no less respectful of human intellect, but which are build on relationship.

What future do we want? The dystopian future of science fiction? A world of control? A world of Dyson spheres, fracking, AI, nuclear fusion, a mechanized ocean, and continental solar arrays? A world “red in tooth and claw,” where survival of the fittest means those who will extract more ruthlessly will gain power? Or do we want a world of connection and participation, a world of mutual aid, where we give back as much or more than we take?

I dream of a world where we practice a different kind of science — not the science of conquest, but the science of cooperation.

This video is an addendum to the article above.