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A review by mkesten
Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do about It by Lierre Keith, Derrick Jensen, Max Wilbert
5.0
Oh, Lord. Once I was blind and now I see.
This polemic on society’s addiction to growth and its implications for the natural world reads like revelation.
The authors take us on a whirlwind tour of green solutions to climate change and why they won’t work, and they won’t work because their objectives are to keep the economy humming along while the planet sags under the weight of resource extraction, the eradication of habitat, the continued domination of monoculture, and the greed of our cities.
It’s hard not to agree with the authors on their premise.
Whether it’s on bird-bashing wind turbines, the damming of the rivers’ effects on fish habitat, the scraping of the ocean floors, the impact of mining deadly minerals for solar panels and our infernal smartphones, strip-mining our landscapes for ever increasing mountains of coal to burn and lithium salts to refine, or dredging up the liquid hydrocarbons from the depths, it’s all bad news.
We think our cities can be green, but that’s only if we ignore the outsourcing of the pollution our cities create. We send our garbage and our recycling thousands of miles to poorer and more desperate jurisdictions. Less obvious, our cities demand and consume minerals, food, chemicals, and electricity that are only being harvested far away in ways that would make us pause if it happened in front of our eyes. That includes the materials needed for green solutions.
Do we reduce, reuse, recycle? At the end of the day we don’t reduce, we reuse, but recycling is never enough to satisfy demand.
The authors prefer us to start with reflection on the endgame of unmitigated growth, then advise that we refuse to go along with the paradigm, resist continued intrusion on the world’s biological bounty, and restore what we have broken.
I have read elsewhere what it would actually mean to the planet to build out all those electric cars, and develop the electrical grid to feed the electricity for those cars.
For one thing it would mean heavy mining of the seas and its attendant risks to the ocean habitat. Then there’s all the cement we’d need to build out wind turbines. Increased cement manufacturing would mean dredging up a lot of sand and dramatically increasing CO2 emissions to make the stuff.
Then there’s the question of how likely is it that the public and ultimately, politicians globally will stop the destruction?
The authors conclude the planet would be much better served if we reigned in our consumption, replaced asphalt with grasslands, and freeze any plans to mine the oceans. Nature has many ways to capture carbon but we have to stop interfering.
Now.
This polemic on society’s addiction to growth and its implications for the natural world reads like revelation.
The authors take us on a whirlwind tour of green solutions to climate change and why they won’t work, and they won’t work because their objectives are to keep the economy humming along while the planet sags under the weight of resource extraction, the eradication of habitat, the continued domination of monoculture, and the greed of our cities.
It’s hard not to agree with the authors on their premise.
Whether it’s on bird-bashing wind turbines, the damming of the rivers’ effects on fish habitat, the scraping of the ocean floors, the impact of mining deadly minerals for solar panels and our infernal smartphones, strip-mining our landscapes for ever increasing mountains of coal to burn and lithium salts to refine, or dredging up the liquid hydrocarbons from the depths, it’s all bad news.
We think our cities can be green, but that’s only if we ignore the outsourcing of the pollution our cities create. We send our garbage and our recycling thousands of miles to poorer and more desperate jurisdictions. Less obvious, our cities demand and consume minerals, food, chemicals, and electricity that are only being harvested far away in ways that would make us pause if it happened in front of our eyes. That includes the materials needed for green solutions.
Do we reduce, reuse, recycle? At the end of the day we don’t reduce, we reuse, but recycling is never enough to satisfy demand.
The authors prefer us to start with reflection on the endgame of unmitigated growth, then advise that we refuse to go along with the paradigm, resist continued intrusion on the world’s biological bounty, and restore what we have broken.
I have read elsewhere what it would actually mean to the planet to build out all those electric cars, and develop the electrical grid to feed the electricity for those cars.
For one thing it would mean heavy mining of the seas and its attendant risks to the ocean habitat. Then there’s all the cement we’d need to build out wind turbines. Increased cement manufacturing would mean dredging up a lot of sand and dramatically increasing CO2 emissions to make the stuff.
Then there’s the question of how likely is it that the public and ultimately, politicians globally will stop the destruction?
The authors conclude the planet would be much better served if we reigned in our consumption, replaced asphalt with grasslands, and freeze any plans to mine the oceans. Nature has many ways to capture carbon but we have to stop interfering.
Now.