BRIGHT GREEN LIES, WITH MAX WILBERT | HOW THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT LOST ITS WAY AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT
The movement that once focused on the protection of Wild Nature is now solely focused on technological "solutions" to global warming.
The following is a portion of my interview with Max Wilbert. For the entire interview, please click on the link.
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HART HAGAN: My guest is Max Wilbert who, along with co-authors Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen, wrote the book “Bright Green Lies, How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It.”
Max, how are you today?
MAX WILBERT: I'm doing good, Hart. Nice to be with you.
HART HAGAN: It's great to be with you. I'm a big fan of your effort to Protect Thacker Pass (Nevada), as well as your book and your movie. Max, what motivated you to write the book “Bright Green Lies, How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It.”
MAX WILBERT: Well, in a way, it was a very personal motivation. I started to become an environmentalist at a pretty young age, and I was taught from the very beginning that solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles were going to save us. I'm lucky that I grew up in an environment where I was surrounded by older activists--grassroots environmentalists--who hung on to the older values of the environmental movement, things like moderation, reducing consumption, critiquing consumption and critiquing capitalism and the role of advertising in shaping our so-called needs.
So I never fully bought into the idea that these technologies were going to save us.
At best--or at worst I should say--I only thought of them as stopgap measures to reduce harms as we transition to a sustainable way of life. But what I saw begin to happen very rapidly throughout the last 20 years, is a transition where the environmental movement--which had been once focused on protecting habitat and defending wild places and wild creatures--has shifted almost entirely to focus on global warming and specifically on addressing global warming through technology.
I see this as a huge problem, not because I support fossil fuels--or I believe global warming isn't a problem. It's the exact opposite. It's because I believe these are inadequate solutions to global warming and because I think they're ultimately destructive to the planet as a whole. They're counterproductive to the environmental movement's goals.
But of course, they’ve become very popular--these technological so-called solutions. And I think it's mainly because they're profitable industrial products that you can sell.
There's a lot of money involved. That money has gotten governments on board. It's gotten corporations on board. It's led to a lot of foundation funding and big philanthropy money for nonprofits that promote this type of thing. That has led to the entire environmental movement--the entire climate movement--being focused almost with blinders on this one single approach.
HART HAGAN: I bet the environmental movement has welcomed you with open arms and given you nothing but positive feedback. How has that gone?
MAX WILBERT: It's a mixed bag because I would say that at the grassroots level, there are a lot of environmentalists who understand these issues, and who have never lost sight of the fundamental values of this movement, a love and reverence for the planet and for other beings and creatures around us. There is a real criticism and mistrust--justified mistrust--of technological solutions and especially solutions that are led by corporations and major international institutions.
Those people I think understand somewhat intuitively that the technological solutions to global warming are a farce to some extent.
With that said, a lot of those people have been superficially convinced that that's the way forward. So in some ways it feels like when I talk to those people, I'm helping them to rediscover their own beliefs. I'm making it okay for them to say out loud what they really believe in their hearts, which is that this is a problem, this direction that we're seeing the movement go in.
Then, on the other side, you have the more mainstream environmentalists and especially the mainstream climate activists, the institutional organizations, the large NGOs and so on. And you have people in government and business who are very convinced that this is the path forward, that technology is going to save us.
Those people are hard to reach. And those people in my experience will often attack someone like me. They say that I'm a shill for the fossil fuel industry, that I must be getting paid by the oil companies to talk about these things, that I'm getting in the way of progress, or they will just completely ignore me and try to focus on the work that they're doing to promote these technologies.
HART HAGAN: Well, such people seem to really believe that these technological solutions are the way, and if we would just adopt them and fund them and subsidize them and get behind them, then we could be at this happy place in the future.
Or they think that things are so bad, that we have to pull out all the stops, which means “engineering solutions” (solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, carbon capture and storage). We have to do everything we can possibly do. So that includes generating our energy differently.
MAX WILBERT: Yeah. And I think a lot of that mindset emerges from an unwillingness to grapple with the reality of overshoot. I'm not sure if your audience is familiar with the term overshoot, but overshoot is about carrying capacity. A given habitat or a given planet can only sustain so many life forms, living a certain way of life.
Ecologists use a formula to calculate this. They talk about population, times affluence, times technology equals impact. It's not an exact formula. It's a thought experiment. It's a way of approaching these issues and understanding our impacts on the planet.
So, of course, that formula means that rich people have far greater impact on the planet on average than poor people do, and that people who are using highly advanced forms of modern technology have far more impact than those that are using more basic, more grassroots technologies, right?
So that formula helps us describe what has happened on our planet, which is that through the use of agriculture, through the use of fossil fuels, this culture has artificially expanded carrying capacity and allowed for the population to reach 8 billion.
People are consuming an obscene amount of products from fast fashion to smartphones and on down the line, to cars, and so on. And that is inherently a temporary situation because the soil is being drawn down. The fossil fuel resources, which are finite, are being drawn down.
In many ways I look at these green energy technologies as like an addict scrambling and scrounging and scraping to try and get some other source of energy, like an addict who sees their addiction being threatened--their addiction to energy consumption, speed and power being threatened--and is looking for some way to replace it, some way to keep the drugs flowing. That is--I think--an accurate way to look at this push for green energy, unfortunately.