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Thanks for sharing that! Dunlap's work is always worth reading, and Bojana Novaković is a great radical activist and one of the leaders in the Serbian movement to protect their land from lithium mining. I hadn't seen this yet.

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I'm sympathetic to your views, but there's a paradoxical danger in your framing of "civilization vs ecology", which plays into the hands of capitalist apologists and reactionaries, who can ruefully agree with you in one breath, but also dismiss all of it as merely describing some universal and eternal, ahistorical "human condition".

So while you are rightfully sceptical of, say, "socialism", correctly noting that we cannot point to any countries that are ecosocialist paradises, there's still something to be said for an historically grounded understanding of our predicament, which will inevitably point in the direction of collective social action, including control of the means of production by and for the majority of inhabitants of our planet (inhabitants who can, must, and will cultivate a very different kind of ethics towards the living world than currently prevails, if only as an urgent imperative of simple survival).

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I agree, Guy. I mainly add this critique of socialism because too many people think simplistically that such a system will automatically end ecological destruction. It won't, of course, but you're totally right that it does open doors to do so that would otherwise remain firmly closed. I should get better at articulating that. Thank you.

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Thanks for taking the time to put together such an informative and thoughtful provoking post. I can't even start to list all the things I found useful or inspiring in this.

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I'm glad Kollibri, thanks for sharing and the kind feedback!

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"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."

That kind of science is the original science .... observation and sharing of what is observed across generations...

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a world with (economically viable) nuclear fusion energy widely available would be hundreds of times better than the current fossil-fueled hellscape that is modern civilization.

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I disagree, because both are ecological disasters. I wrote about this extensively in my book, Bright Green Lies. Free and abundant energy would likely just deepen our overshoot crisis, which is the root cause of the global warming crisis as well as the overarching and far more complex and dangerous ecological crisis as a whole (which includes habitat destruction, species extinction and breakdown of the ecological web of life, plastic and chemical pollution, overuse of water and every other resource, overshoot and overpopulation, etc.).

I'm not the only one to have this perspective. “Take this warning from me: in my 50+ years of fighting these battles [for the planet], most of the damage has come from the mad dash for more energy, or the mad use of it once we get it. If we were to ever have energy too cheap to meter, you can bet we would do some very stupid things with it.”

- David Brower, First Executive Director of the Sierra Club and founder of the John Muir Institute for Environmental Studies, Friends of the Earth, Earth Island Institute, and the North Cascades Conservation Council

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You are free to have your opinion; I am free to have mine.

Thank you for the detailed reply.

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Definitely!

A few sources that might be of interest to you, or others reading this exchange:

"An inconvenient misconception: Climate change is not the principal driver of biodiversity loss"

https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.12868

"Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries"

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458

I've been thinking about posting an excerpt from my book here on Substack soon that also addresses this topic, albeit indirectly. If you're interested, keep an eye out for it. It's about miles per gallon (MPG) of cars.

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The world is horrifying 💔🇵🇸

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Proportional to population, the number of Palestinians killed by Israel since October 7th is the equivalent to more than 7,000 9/11 attacks on the U.S.

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