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The Eco-Modernist Manifesto: a Program of Genocide and Ecocide
3rd January 2016
By Derrick Jensen BSc.
Guest Writer for Wake Up World
The idea that anthropocene — the human alteration of natural ecosystems — can be good or even great, as promised in the recently released Ecomodernist Manifesto, is purely delusional. Worse, it underlies a narrative in which the wholesale destruction of nature and of sustainable indigenous societies is repackaged as a noble mission — one whose ultimate purpose is the complete alienation of humans from the planet that spawned us.
Robert Jay Lifton noted that before you can commit any mass atrocity, you must convince yourself and others that what you’re doing is not atrocious, but rather beneficial. You must have what he called a “claim to virtue”. Thus the Nazis weren’t, from their perspective, committing mass murder and genocide, but were ‘purifying the Aryan Race’. They weren’t waging aggressive war but gaining necessary Lebensraum (territory). The United States has never committed genocide, but rather has fulfilled its Manifest Destiny. It has never waged aggressive war, but rather has ‘defended its national interest’ and ‘promoted freedom and democracy’.
Today, the dominant culture isn’t killing the planet, but rather ‘developing natural resources’.
This is to say that any culture foolish and insane enough to murder the planet that is our only home would of coursebe foolish and insane enough to attempt to provide justifications for this murder.
That brings us to An Ecomodernist Manifesto, the same sort of claim to virtue we’ve come to expect from this culture’s several thousand year tradition of nature-hating.
And the Earth is Remade by Human Hands
Heck, the first written myth of this culture is of the hero Gilgamesh deforesting what is now Iraq to build a city and make a name for himself. Fast forward a few thousand years, and that’s the same nature-hating and empire-building story being told in An Ecomodernist Manifesto (and that has been told in myriad ways in between).
The narcissism, entitlement, and gaslighting starts at the beginning:
“To say that the Earth is a human planet becomes truer every day. Humans are made from the Earth, and the Earth is remade by human hands.
“Many earth scientists express this by stating that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. As scholars, scientists, campaigners, and citizens, we write with the conviction that knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, or even great, Anthropocene.”
“The Earth is remade by human hands” … ‘Remade’ is such a nice word, isn’t it? Much better than ‘destroyed, murdered, ravaged, grievously harmed’, don’t you think? Gilgamesh and those who came after didn’t deforest and desertify what was once called the Fertile Crescent, they ‘remade’ it from cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touched the ground, into cities and deserts.
Previous articles by Derrick Jensen:
- Why “Sustainable Development” is a Lie
- Forget Shorter Showers – Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Social Change
- We Must Reclaim True Environmentalism!
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