A Desert of the Soul

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The Sahara, a favorite target to be covered with one huge electricity factory

 

 

At first glance the natural desert may not look as lavish as a rain forest. But the natural desert is full of diverse life, efflorescent, and very fragile.

 

“During my weeks in the field, the paleontologists leading the expedition repeatedly warned us not to “bust the crust,” a reference to the paper-thin desert “glue” that covers much of the ground in the desert southwest.

 

This unprepossessing knobby black varnish is actually Cryptobiotic soil, a biologically active film that takes decades to form yet has big effects on everything from storing spring runoff to allowing plants to fix nitrogen in sandy ground. This in turn supports a healthy habitat for herbivores and predators, like the large rattlesnake I encountered one afternoon sporting a suspiciously mouse-sized lump in its midsection.

 

The soil is so fragile that some dig sites require that even theropod bones, which can weigh hundreds of pounds, be carried out on foot, since wheeled vehicles of any kind cause too much damage to the landscape.

 

If something as small as a single wheelbarrow can do years of damage to the desert, imagine how destructive uranium mining will be.”

 

A careful dinosaur dig must take such precautions. As she says, imagine the destruction to be wrought by uranium mining (remember that next time you hear a shill touting nukes on “climate” grounds, and know how much he really cares about the Earth). Imagine the destruction wrought by oil and gas drilling.

 

In the same way, imagine the destruction wrought by vast CSP industrial electricity-generation factories such as the one which destroyed a large swath of the Mojave Desert, with near-full support from California’s “environmental movement”, so that Los Angeles industry could continue to burn cheap electricity.

 

The Big Green climate-industrial complex spits on the desert ecology for the sake of their industrial fetish. As I wrote earlier, the corporate environmental movement has perfect consensus with the corporate destroyers of the Earth on total commitment to the production-consumption economy. Therefore all prescriptions touted by the establishment climate movement really have zero to do with the climate or with any other ecological crisis but have everything to do with saving the cancer economy (the metastatic “growth” economy) from its own death wish.

 

As Derrick Jensen put it, “The desert is being sacrificed not, as the article states, to save the earth, but to generate electricity—primarily for industry. The earth doesn’t need this electricity: industry does. But then again, from this narcissistic perspective, industry is the earth. There is and can be nothing except for industry.”

 

 

Corporations, the government, NGOs, the Democrat Party, all work to co-opt and hijack every social and ecological movement.

 

The climate movement was pre-co-opted. Before most of the people became aware of the crisis the “movement” already had coalesced on a technocratic basis, a basis of UN conferences, international accords, Big NGO marketing campaigns, “sustainability” initiatives at Walmart, top-down (usually wonkish) prescriptions and policy.

 

The purpose of this pre-fabricated establishment-led movement was never real climate action but the fake facade of it. That’s why the movement’s been active for over thirty years (the IPCC was established in 1988) and over that entire time emissions have continued to increase, at an accelerating rate, and sinks continue to be destroyed at an escalating rate. And now we have the Paris accord whose primary purpose is to accelerate the destruction of what’s left of Earth’s forests (the most important carbon sinks) in the name of “the climate” (the “biomass” scam and assault). Arbeit Macht Frei.

 

You don’t like what Bolsonaro threatens to do to the Amazon? He’s just following the Paris playbook.

 

Here’s the real purposes of the mainstream technocratic climate movement.

 

1. This faction among the technocrats believes that climate chaos and peak oil will destroy the existing fossil-based economy, and they’re looking for a way to preserve industrial cancer (“growth”), productionism-consumerism, capitalism, elite power, and extreme material luxury for the elites.

 

2. This faction includes many corporate sectors which can profit from an industrial “climate” program, especially something on the scale and subsidy level of the Manhattan Project or Apollo program, to name two of the favored militarist metaphors of the climate mandarins. These sectors include industrial renewables, finance (“offsets”, carbon taxes, “cap-and-trade” etc.), Big NGOs (nominally non-profit, effectively profiteering), along with new subsidized markets for industrial agriculture (“climate-smart agriculture”, Monsanto’s “Climate Corporation”), automakers (electric vehicles as loss-leaders, the upscale hybrid market, all to mask the real goal of increasing SUV sales), logging and coal (the biomass scam), and yet more subsidies for Big Oil, nukes, and other hoary destroyer sectors.

 

3. The climate movement is a happy hunting ground for the scientism wingnuts who now have political space to propagate such deranged notions as geoengineering, biofuels from genetically engineered algae, or ramping up the space program since Homo domesticus soon will need a new planet to destroy. These psychopaths gain legitimacy when they cloak their planetary serial-killer fantasies in “climate” garb.

 

4. And then we have the standard, inescapable liberal hypocrisy. If you shed crocodile tears for the climate, donate to a Big Green corporate front group like the World Wildlife Fund or Nature Conservancy, sign some online petitions and vote Democrat, then you can go about your extreme high-carbon, high-impact, Earth-destroying Western lifestyle in perfect serenity of conscience.

 

 

No doubt this technocratic cultural wave is part of the reason there’s so many de jure denialists among the 99% who can’t benefit from climate denial and can only be harmed by climate chaos itself. But like creationism, and fundamentalism among the three Abrahamic religions as such (a purely modern phenomenon, in spite of moronic epithets like how it’s a “medieval” mentality), bottom-up climate denial (which is different from but tutored and exploited by astroturfed top-down denial led by Big Oil – the flip side of the top-down climate-industrial complex) is a reaction against technocracy and scientism.

 

 

For the moment, for as long as fossil fuels remain cheap and plentiful (so-called “renewable” industrial energy is completely dependent upon fossil fuels for parts, transportation, much of its own fuel, and the vast majority of the fuel for the productionist economy which industrial renewables are intended to help prop up for a little while longer), the electricity is cheap and plentiful. The electricity as well as the coal, oil, and gas are cheap since the Earth pays almost all of the cost. That’s the essence of the parasite and vandal civilization.

 

It’s clear that any movement true to the ecological heart, faithful to the Earth cannot proceed in any such way. The production-consumption-technocratic Extreme Energy Civilization itself is destroying the Earth including natural humanity, the human soul. Wherever this civilization goes, on the Earth and into our minds and souls, it leaves nothing but desert.

 

This desert has nothing in common with the natural diverse flowering desert. It’s the desert of wasteland, a dead zone.

 

The industrial climate movement, like the corporate industrial environmental movement as a whole, offers nothing to Gaia or her human element. Like all that’s industrial, all that’s productionist, all that’s corporate, all that’s mass-produced, commodified and consumed, it offers nothing but destruction.

 

Gaia hovers at the brink of the great Kinesis, the great phase change. The cancer civilization will not survive it. Homo domesticus will be the keystone victim of its own onslaught of mass extinction. Humanity itself will survive only if we start heading home to Earth right now. The only idea sufficient to the crisis, the only movement, the only culture, the only politics, is the Gaian movement. This is the only way home. All else is the politics of parasite squatters and vandals.