[FRIAM] the Big (Bright) Green Lie

Sat Apr 24 03:05:40 EDT 2021

I understand the concerns of the supporters of Brightgreenlies but I don't
necessarily agree with their solutions.

Humanity has causes and is still causing huge destruction to other life on
Mother Earth. It is good to have activists for a Greener future. I support
seeking a win-win solution for all of us, from microbes to all
multicellular species, including humans.

On a personal level it's not always easy. For example, I'm morally
against eating meat. I just consider it wrong to raise animals in factories
where they don't seem to enjoy any happiness and then to kill them to eat
them. But when I was young I didn't think about it and became a good
carnivore. I was raised on a farm where we had meat on the table for three
meals every day. It's very difficult for me now in my old age to be a
vegetarian without cheating. My friends call me an undercover vegetarian.

For me the solutions are based on seeking ways to achieve both emotional
and material abundance and restoring natural eco systems. The first place
in this case is not to compromise. IMO there are plenty reasons for
optimism that:
a) With microble gene editing we can feed the world from relative very
small ponds,
b) have can have abundant cheap, clean and safe nuclear energy,
c) use this desalinate water to have abundant fresh water,
d) develop carbon based materials to make exotic stuff from extracting
carbon from the atmosphere and
e) restore the natural eco systems on earth
and so on and so on. My argument is to embrace technology for solutions.

My optimism could prove false, I'm not predicting the future, but I really
don't think there is a viable option to keep 7 billion humans from
starvation and saving the environment without turning to technology. We
have grown to 7 billion in non sustainable and harmful to the ecology ways.
Turning to non-technological sustainable ways will just not support 7
billion people on earth. But, I might be wrong, so my view is that provided
that it can support the current world population, I will be very happy to
live in a perma-culture based sustainable world. I can see that the quality
of life could be much higher on average for all than what it is now.

If we are doomed we are doomed, but I'd like to be part of the movement
that actively seeks and supports solutions for a better future for all Life
on Mother Earth.

On Fri, 23 Apr 2021 at 22:14, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:

> As far as meat eating goes, three solutions come to mind 1) make it too
> expensive, 2) find treatments that reprogram the appetite, and 3) come up
> with substitutes, e.g. impossible burger.  Catastrophes would help with
> #1.  They will surely come.  The general issue with hedonism can probably
> be addressed by #2 (e.g. pharmaceuticals).
>
> Gosh, people didn’t like masks, wait until you take their potato chips and
> porn away.   It just isn’t going to happen that people decide to stop going
> to work and tend to their organic garden instead.   I don’t at any level
> want to be a luddite.   No, anything else.  Let’s shoot for underground
> cities on Mars, reprogram the genes of children to be able to endure heat,
> etc.
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Steve Smith
> *Sent:* Friday, April 23, 2021 12:53 PM
> *To:* friam at redfish.com
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] the Big (Bright) Green Lie
>
>
>
> Merle -
>
> Thanks for commenting on the film-maker: A good background on Julia and
> the documentary:
>
>
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/adv/article-how-canadian-filmmaker-and-environmentalist-julia-barnes-decided-to/
>
> I didn't realize it just premiered on yesterEarthDay.
>
> The point of my anecdote about Jensen is that I don't think *he* carries
> the baggage, but it *does* follow him around!   Which is always the problem
> with popular movements, they are, well... Popular! in the best and worse
> sense of the term.
>
> I feel blessed to have found Jensen's works early (by some measure), it
> has helped keep me from falling into the TechnoUtopian basin of attraction
> entirely.   The complex (precessing figure-eights for the most part) orbits
> I *do* follow in this topic can be very unnerving (one day looking to Elon
> Musk or Bill Gates or the latest advancement in Solid State Battery Tech or
> the Stock Market's euphoria around Green Tech, etc. and the next day
> noticing the unintended (and un-tended-to) side effects of the last round
> of "technical fixes to non-technical problems").
>
> - Steve
>
> On 4/23/21 1:38 PM, Merle Lefkoff wrote:
>
> Thanks Steve.  I'm still processing and appreciate knowledgeable and
> thoughtful feedback.  I'm very interested in Julia and her efforts (I think
> she's 25), which seems to me to add authenticity to the quest for what the
> hell to do next.  And I agree that Derrick has a lot of baggage and is a
> drawback. Julia decided to make the movie after she read the book.
>
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 23, 2021 at 1:28 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
> Merle -
>
> I don't know how much traction you will get amongst this group of radical
> technophiles (self sometimes included).   Unfortunately I think that is one
> of the most effective modes of those promoting the Big (Green) Lie
> (appealing to technophilic/technoutopic sentiments for "full speed
> ahead").   Another is (also unfortunately) to recruit the conspiracy nut
> types to (ab)use this line of thinking to fuel their own anti-human
> agendas.   In the moment it looks like a narrow ridge to walk down. Maybe
> "the Donald" has done us a service with *his* Big Lie, to attune us to our
> susceptibility to "Big Lies"?
>
> I have followed Derrick Jensen from early on (when he published Language
> Older than Words
> <https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres109/BILLS-116hres109ih.pdf>) and
> have a strong sympathy for what he is oft accused of as
> "Anarcho-Primitivism".   This movie (and the book) Bright Green Lies is, in
> my estimation "not wrong" in most if not all of it's positions.  But that
> is not enough.
>
> I used to be part of a regular community centered around Jensen but I had
> to drop out, not because of Jensen's ideas or actions, but because the
> radical fringe that was drawn there couldn't hold two impossible thoughts
> in their heads/hearts at the same time.   There was (in my opinion) a
> strong draw to a sort of "revenge aesthetic" among the more radical who
> were indulging in the most extreme form of your own (you introduced us to
> it most of a year ago) *Cassandrafreude*.   They elevated Jensen to the
> prophet of a Cult of Personality, somewhat against his will...  I haven't
> tracked this lately but the centroids of these movements implied by the
> likes of Jensen, Paul Hawken, Bill McKibben have entered mainstream and may
> ultimately represent the current phase of the evolution of the *first
> world's* post-capitalist/climate-change aesthetic.
>
> So I believe that an important aspect of YOUR work is evolving to include
> not just exposing the Big (Green) Lies we tell ourselves, but healing the
> implicit rifts growing within the diverse coalition of
> progressive/humanist/environmentalists/pan-somethingists or helping them/us
> to build a healthy ecosystem of somewhat diverse and often competing
> *strategies* for achieving a common *stated* goal.
>
> The most critical aspect of BrightGreenLies' story for me is that it is
> self-contradictory to recruit (or rebuild) a hyper-capitalistic
> profit-centric mega-industrial framework to "rescue us" from the trajectory
> that is fundamentally part of their model of their mere existence.    That
> is not to say that I have a "better plan" really (nor do I endorse many of
> those implied by BrightGreenLies), but I definitely accept that if the
> likes of Elon Musk or (even) Bill Gates ends up "rescuing" us from the
> slow-moving disaster (aka "Jackpot
> <https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2020/02/william-gibson-apocalypse-it-s-been-happening-least-100-years>"
> in Bill Gibson's vernacular) we are in, it will only be a delay or
> divergence from the most obvious, most imminent of disasters we are bearing
> down on.   I believe (but cannot begin to prove) that we are at the
> beginning of a cascade of birfurcations and that whatever is on the "other
> side" of that is going to look *radically* different from what we live with
> now (from first to third world, inclusive).   I highly doubt *all* of the
> Utopian (and most of the Dystopian) visions we tend to dwell on with
> Gibson's particular version being only one zany example juxtaposed maybe
> with that of Miller's "A Canticle for Leibowitz
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz>".
>
> I believe it is critically hard to simultaneously optimize one's
> local/personal/individualistic circumstance while also trying to optimize a
> global measure as well.  I don't think we are particularly well wired for
> this... but it IS our ability to abstract and language and cognize which
> *might* allow us to evolve our *sociopoliticaleconomic* (nod to DaveW)
> selves off of the family of trajectories we have set ourselves upon (and
> double down with movements *like* the Big Green LIe).   There are folks
> with the intellectual/abstractional/synthetic capability here to
> participate in that IMO,   but finding the right perspective and a place to
> obtain traction to do so remains an unsolved problem.
>
> For better or worse, I believe movements like McKibben's
> <https://350.org/> and Hawkins' <https://www.drawdown.org/> and Gates
> <https://www.gatesfoundation.org/>' and Sanders'/AOC
> <https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres109/BILLS-116hres109ih.pdf> are
> perhaps necessary excursions from what to the "enlightened" might feel is a
> "shortest path".   I want to invoke another thread here with Stephen's
> "Least Action Path" conception, but in this arbitrarily high dimensional
> space of "human endeavor" convolved with the "biocryoatmogeospherical"
> space with which we are co-evolving (again nod to DaveW)
> sociopolitcaleconomicspiritually.
>
> I hope your attempt here (and elsewhere) to harness "the likes of us" or
> more importantly to get us to "harness ourselves" (there's an image,a
> corrolary to "hoisting oneself on one's own petard"?)
>
> Carry On (while I Rattle On)!
>
>  -Steve
>
>
>
> I'd like to start a new stream for those interested, but first you have to
> watch this film:
>
>
>
> https://www.brightgreenlies.com
>
>
>
> --
>
> Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
> Center for Emergent Diplomacy
> emergentdiplomacy.org
>
> Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
>
>
> mobile:  (303) 859-5609
> skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
>
> twitter: @merle110
>
>
>
>
>
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>
> --
>
> Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
> Center for Emergent Diplomacy
> emergentdiplomacy.org
>
> Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
>
>
> mobile:  (303) 859-5609
> skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
>
> twitter: @merle110
>
>
>
>
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