That era is over! This is our reality!

A comment on the first part of the debate “Ecological Catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy
and Socialism”

By Max Wilbert

Editorial note

The following commentary was written by eco radical leader and organizer of the Deep Green
Resistance (DGR) movement Max Wilbert on the first part of the debate “Ecological
Catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy and Socialism” between the renowned American
intellectual Noam Chomsky, the Chilean exponent of the new ideology of Collapsist Marxism
Miguel Fuentes and climate scientist Guy McPherson. Wilbert’s comment is notable both for
the use of some of the interpretative concepts of the so-called deep ecology (a theoretical trend
to which he ascribes) and the political principles of his own political organization (DGR).

Marxism and Collapse

August 15, 2022

*The debate “Ecological Catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy and Socialism” can be read at the website
of Marxism and Collapse: https://www.marxismoycolapso.com/post/noam-chomsky-versus-
collapsist-marxism-and-extinctionism-debate-english-version-i-upcoming
 Max Wilbert

1. In a recent discussion between ecosocialist stances and collapsist approaches

represented by Michael Lowy (France), Miguel Fuentes (Chile) and Antonio Turiel
(Spain), Lowy constantly denied the possibility of a self-induced capitalist collapse and
criticized the idea of the impossibility of stopping climate change before it reaches the
catastrophic level of 1.5 centigrade degrees of global warming1. Do you think that the
current historical course is heading to a social global downfall comparable, for example,
to previous processes of civilization collapse or maybe to something even worse than those
seen in ancient Rome or other ancient civilizations? Is a catastrophic climate change
nowadays unavoidable? Is a near process of human extinction as a result of the
overlapping of the current climate, energetic, economic, social and political crisis and the
suicidal path of capitalist destruction, conceivable? (Marxism and Collapse)

Throughout history, all civilizations undermine their own ecological foundations, face disease,
war, political instability, and the breakdown of basic supply chains, and eventually collapse2.
Modern technology and scientific knowledge does not make us immune from this pattern. On
the contrary, as our global civilization has harnessed more energy, expanded, and grown a
larger population than ever before in history, the fall is certain to be correspondingly worse.
What goes up must come down. This is a law of nature. The only question is, when?

Modern Industrial Civilization

Professor Chomsky’s argument that collapse of civilization can be averted at a relatively minor
cost by diverting 2-3% of global GDP to transition to renewable energy and fund a “Global
Green New Deal” does not contend with the physical constraints civilization faces today. The
global energy system, which powers the entire economy, is the largest machine in existence
and was built over more than a century during a period of abundant fossil fuels and easy-to-
access minerals and raw materials. It was powered by the last remnants of ancient sunlight,

1
This debate can be found at this link: https://www.marxismoycolapso.com/post/ecosocialism-degrowth-and-
collapsist-marxism-a-discussion-with-michael-lowy-reading.
2
Check here to read the material “Definition of civilization” on the website of Deep Green Resistance:
https://dgrnewsservice.org/civilization/repression/civilization-definition.
fossil fuels condensed into an extremely dense form of energy that is fungible and easily
transportable.

That era is over. Accessible reserves of minerals, oil, and gas are gone, and we are long since
into the era of extreme energy extraction (fracking, deepwater drilling, arctic drilling, tar
sands, etc.). Simply replacing fossil fuels with solar and wind energy and phasing out all liquid
and solid fuel (which still makes up roughly 80% of energy use) in favor of electrification of
transportation, heating, etc. is not a simple task in an era of declining energy availability,
increasing costs, extreme weather, political and financial instability, and resource scarcity.
And these so-called “renewable” technologies still have major environmental impacts (for
example, see solar impacts on desert tortoise, wind energy impacts on bat populations, and
lithium mining impacts on sage-grouse), even if they do reduce carbon, which is not yet proven
outside of models3.

The collapse of industrial production (The Limits to Growth)

In practice, renewable energy technologies seem to be largely serving as a profitable

investment for the wealthy, a way to funnel public money into private hands, and a distraction
from the scale of the ecological problems we face (of which global warming is far from the
worst) and the scale of solutions which are needed. This is, as Miguel Fuentes points out, a
rather timid cosmetic restructuring of the dominant political and economic order.

In our book “Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What
We Can Do About It”, my co-authors and I call this “solving for the wrong variable”. We
write: “Our way of life (industrial modernity) does not need to be saved. The planet needs to
be saved from our way of life (...) we are not saving civilization; we are trying to save the
3
See here these articles on these topics: (1)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214629618312246, (2)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5321750.
world”. Scientists like Tim Garrett at the University of Utah model civilization as a “heat
engine”, a simple thermodynamic model that will consume energy and materials until it can
no longer do so, then collapse. Joseph Tainter, the scholar of collapse, writes that “in the
evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields
a declining marginal return.” This is our reality.

Whether sanity prevails and we succeed in building a new politics and new societies organized
around rapidly scaling down the human enterprise to sustainable levels, or we continue down
the business-as-usual path we are on, the future looks either grim or far more dire. Global
warming will continue to worsen for decades even if, by some miracle, we are able to dismantle
the fossil fuel industry and restore the ecology of this planet. The 6th mass extinction event and
ecological collapse are not a distant future. We are in the depths of these events, and they have
been getting worse for centuries. The question is not “can we avoid catastrophe?” It is too late
for that. The question is, “how much of the world will be destroyed?” Will elephants survive?
Coral reefs? Tigers? The Amazon rainforest? Will humans? What will we leave behind?

I want to leave behind as much biodiversity and ecological integrity as possible. Human
extinction seems unlikely, at least in coming decades, unless runaway global warming
accelerates faster than predicted. “Unlikely” is not “impossible”, but there are 8 billion of us,
and we are profoundly adaptable. I am far less worried about human extinction than about the
extinction of countless other species (100 per day). I am far more worried about the collapse
of insect populations or phytoplankton populations (which provide 40% of all oxygen on the
planet and are the base of the oceanic food web). The fabric of life itself is fraying, and we are
condemning unborn human generations to a hellish future and countless non-humans to the
extinction. Extinction will come for humans, at some point. But at this point, I am not concerned
for our species, but rather for the lives of my nephews and their children, and the salmon on
the brink of extermination, and the last remaining old-growth forests.

2. Have the human species become a plague for the planet? If so, how can we still
conciliate the survival of life on Earth with the promotion of traditional modern values
associated with the defence of human and social rights (which require the use of vast
amounts of planetary resources) in a context of a potential increase of world’s population
that could reach over twelve billion people this century? The latter in a context in which
(according to several studies) the maximum number of humans that Earth could have
sustained without a catastrophic alteration of ecosystems should have never exceeded the
billion. Can the modern concept of liberal (or even socialist) democracy and its
supposedly related principles of individual, identity, gender, or cultural freedom survive
our apparent terminal geological situation, or it will be necessary to find new models of
social organization, for example, in those present in several indigenous or native societies?
Can the rights of survival of living species on Earth, human rights, and the concept of
modern individual freedom be harmoniously conciliated in the context of an impending
global ecosocial disaster? (Marxism and Collapse)

Human population is a hockey-stick graph that corresponds almost exactly with rising energy
use. Most of the nitrogen in our diet comes from fossil fuel-based fertilizers. Norman Borlaug,
the plant breeder who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the Green Revolution, said
in his acceptance speech that “we are dealing with two opposing forces, the scientific power
of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction (...) There can be no
permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food
production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort”.
Ideally, this situation could be dealt with humanely by education and making family planning
and women’s health services available. The best example of this actually comes from Iran,
where under a religious theocracy in the wake of the Iran-Iraq war, birth rates were reduced
from around 7 children per woman to less than replacement in little more than a decade (the
policy was since reversed, and Iran's land and water is paying the price). Technically, it is
quite easy to solve overpopulation humanely; reduce birth rates to less than replacement levels,
then wait. Politically, it is much harder. As we have seen with the recent fall of abortion rights
in the US, the political battle for control of women’s reproduction is alive and well, and basic
ecology is anathema to many political leaders and populations.

Unless we take action to reduce our population willingly, it will happen unwillingly as the
planet’s ecology fails to be able to support us. That will be harsh. Any species that exceeds the
carrying capacity of the environment it lives in will experience a population crash, usually due
to starvation, disease, and predation. That’s our choice. Either we make the right decisions, or
we pay the price.

Human overpopulation

The difference between our situation today and the Indus Valley civilization or the Roman
Empire is that today civilization is globalized. The collapse of global industrial civilization, as
I wrote above, is coming. I do not believe it can be stopped at this point; in fact, I believe it is
already in progress. But collapse is also not simply an overnight chaotic breakdown of all
social order. We can define collapse as a rapid simplification of a complex society
characterized by breakdown of political and social institutions, a return to localized, low
energy ways of life, and usually a significant reduction in population (which is a nice way of
saying, a lot of people die).

Collapse should be looked at as having good and bad elements. Good elements, from my
perspective, include reducing consumption and energy use, localizing our lives, and having
certain destructive institutions (for example, the fossil fuel industry) fade away. Bad elements
might include breakdown of basic safety and rising violence, mass starvation, disease, and, for
example, the destruction of local forests for firewood if electricity is no longer available for
heating. Some aspects of collapse have elements of both. For example, the collapse of
industrial agriculture would be incredibly beneficial for the planet but would lead to mass
human die offs.

If collapse is coming regardless of what we want, it is our moral and ecological responsibility
to make the best of the situation by assisting and accelerating the positive aspects of collapse
(for example, by working to reduce consumption and dismantle oil infrastructure) and help
prevent or mitigate the negative aspects (for example, by working to reduce population growth
and build localized sustainable food systems).

As I write this (…) I am looking into a meadow between 80-year-old oak trees. A deer and her
fawn are walking through the grass. Birds are singing in the trees. A passenger jet roars
overhead, and the hum of traffic floats over the hills. (…) There is a fundamental contradiction
between industrial civilization and ecology, and the organic tensions created by this
contradiction are rising. These are dire and revolutionary times… and it is our responsibility
to navigate them!

Max Wilbert
August 1, 2022