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Chris Hedges: Mainstream Environmental Movement Lies

No planet B | Climate emergency - Melbourne #MarchforScience on #Earthday April 22, 2017

Image by John Englart via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

with Chris Hedges

Originally on RT America on Aug 28, 2021

The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel on Jul 5, 2022

On the show today, Chris Hedges discusses the lies and fantasies told by the mainstream environmental movement about how to solve the climate crisis with authors and activists Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith.

A new book shows how technology will not solve our environmental crisis. We will not extract ourselves from the death march towards extinction by recycling, building wind turbines, relying on solar panels or driving electric cars. This is a fantasy, sold to us by an environmental movement that promises we can continue to indulge in orgies of consumption and maintain the levels of waste and perpetual growth that define the industrial age.

The fact is our time is up. The forests are dying. Water is polluted, and in many places poisoned. Industrial farming is depleting the soil. The coral reefs are crumbling under the acid assault of carbon. Species are going extinct. Temperatures are soaring. Each of the last four decades have been hotter than the last. Soaring temperature rises — we are already at a 1.2°C (2.16° F) above pre-industrial levels — are already baked into the system, meaning that even if we stopped all carbon emission today, we still face catastrophe. Anything above a temperature rise of 1.5° C will render the earth unhabitable.

The Arctic ice along with the Greenland ice sheet are now expected to melt regardless of how much we reduce carbon emissions. A seven-meter (23-foot) rise in sea level, which is what will take place once the ice is gone, means every town and city on a coast at sea level will have to be evacuated. We must radically reconfigure how we live, and this means largely dismantling industrial society, or the human species, and most other species, will vanish, joining the long list of species that once roamed the earth and are no more.

Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert’s new book is Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost its Way and What we Can do About It.

Watch the video and/or read the transcript

From the archives:

Earth Burns and the Capitalist World Talks, by Pete Dolack

No Solutions Under Capitalism: Revolution is Required, by Paul Street

There Will Be No Ferries Coming To Save Us, by Kenn Orphan

Turning Up The Heat, by Rivera Sun

The Phoenix Moment, by Rivera Sun

David Swanson: We Can’t Save the Climate Without Ending War

Peter Carter: Are “Net-Zero” Emissions a Smoke Screen?

Those Least Responsible For Global Warming Will Pay The Highest Price For It, by Pete Dolack

The Ravages of Lithium Extraction in Chile, by Yanis Iqbal

Chris Hedges and Jeff Gibbs: Criticism and Censorship of Michael Moore’s Film “Planet of the Humans”

Planet of the Humans

8 thoughts on “Chris Hedges: Mainstream Environmental Movement Lies”

  1. Spot on! Excellent heads-up. It’s an ecological emergency, this terminal orgy of consumption ~ a radically emergent exponential crisis.

    Of course, the general attitude is invariably ‘let’s keep our cake but eat it.’ Self-delusion born of a susceptibility to believe one’s own prejudices and the psycho-political propaganda that engenders and supports those conditioned tendencies, that is the rule not the exception. So what must we do &/or, abstain from doing?

    I’d propose two premises, as generic principles to ground this exponential ‘fuel’ and ecosystem crisis that is acutely affecting the Ocean and (directly through forced deforestation, extraction indifference and vulgar plantation logic) our vital atmosphere and food ‘chain.’ If we allow further species loss, we shall be the species to suffer the most.

    The initial rapid-reactionary option might be to coordinate, trim, mutate, adapt and streamline our gargantuan (international) war machinery into an ‘ecological’ humanitarian planetary agency ~ a system that can effectively respond to disastrous events (anywhere;) as these are bound to occur with increasing regularity, eg imminent Hurricane Ida. The ‘force and fire’ of ecosystemic climate change is far more powerful than any ordnance or destructive artifice humans can muster.

    If we want to do this successfully, we must swiftly downsize and ‘naturalise’ the obscene cult of consumer capital accumulation and waste, for its own sake; that is to say, do everything humanly possible to adapt to a more realistic and sustainable approach to the natural biodynamics of real life, in all its staggering diversity. China needs to be at the heart of this sea-change.

    It is an existential crisis that must be faced by all sentient adults, competent enough to understand the reality and determined to grasp the nettle…

  2. Please air an interview where the authors go over the ‘what we can do about it’ section of the book, even if it raises false hopes. At this point, false hopes are better than none. Of course, we live in a country where people are prepared to kidnap and murder a governor because they can’t get a haircut, their nails done, or drink at their favorite bar, but…..

  3. Excellent interview. Mainstream environmental movement has been lying. What this interview doesn’t emphasize enough is that lies are motivated by profit. To see the truth on this and all other issues, and to survive, we must end capitalism.

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